The Juliet Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

book about a boy detective named Encyclopedia Brown and has nearly completed a third, set in the Arctic, in which two boys become lost and build their own log cabin to survive a long winter. She wishes the Canadian not-quite-acquaintances had girls instead of boys.
    “Can we go to the library today?” she asks, already knowing the answer.
    “Don’t scratch it.” Gloria’s hands wearily fold the corners of Emmanuel’s diaper and she talks around a pin held between her teeth.
    “Mo-o-om,” calls Keith.
    “Coming!” Gloria cries and the pin falls out. “Juliet, see what your brother wants.”
    “But what about my pock?”
    “Juliet!” Gloria’s forehead shines with beads of sweat. She pushes a hank of damp hair behind one ear. “Go, now!”
    Juliet stands in the doorway of the room she shares with Keith. “What do you want?” Their room is several steps closer to the flat zinc roof, several steps closer to the sun, and the sun just won’t stop staring.
    “I want Mom.” Keith scratches his chest with socked fists, teeth gritted.
    “Mom’s changing Emmanuel.”
    “I’m thirsty.” Without glasses, Keith’s eyes look shrunken in his tanned brown face.
    Juliet comes closer. She picks up Keith’s arm.
    “What are you doing?” he says.
    Silently, Juliet rubs Keith’s arm against her own. It isn’t fair. She wants the pox too.
    “Mo-o-o-om,” Keith hollers. “Juliet’s touching me!”
    Dust settles on every surface. Juliet drops Keith’s arm. They look at each other in a silence that is neither hostile nor challenging but worn out. After a while, they hear their mother calling hoarsely, “Juliet?”
    Juliet finds Gloria lying slumped on the bed. Her slender body looks even smaller curled around Emmanuel’s plump baby flesh, brushing his dimpled thighs.
    “It’s so hot. Pull the curtains,” whispers Gloria. But there are no curtains in the little bedroom.
    Juliet touches her mother’s wet forehead. It burns. Juliet’s heart pounds hard.
    “I never got the chicken pox.” Gloria opens her eyes and gazes despairingly at Juliet. “As a child. When you’re supposed to.”
    They hear Keith crying, “I’m thirsty.”
    Gloria lets her eyelids fall. Emmanuel sucks crankily at one exposed breast. Juliet conjures her dad. He’s in Jalapa by now, far gone, way up north near the Honduran border (Keith has looked it up in his travel-sized atlas). He’s in Jalapa, where there are no telephones, even if Juliet knew how to find one on which to call. He’s in Jalapa, where they are fighting the war. He’s where the Contra fighters attack villages and farms, running out of the trees to shoot and to burn. The roads are mined with bombs. Helicopters fly overhead. Soldiers launch rockets at green and black planes sent by the Americans.
    Juliet pours clean water from the container in the fridge, boiled by her mother and set there to cool.
    She carries the cup to Keith. “Mom’s sick too,” she says.
    She picks at the pock on her wrist and knows, sinkingly, It’s just a mosquito bite .
    The maid clucks her tongue to discover Juliet alone, crouched at the table with her book.
    Juliet looks at the maid but doesn’t see, just as she looks at the page but cannot process the words; inside her skull is a muddle. She tracks a thought towards possibility but disaster swoops, tricks her, traps her, sends her scurrying behind a rock where she huddles, waiting to be devoured. The boys in the book have survived wolves and polar bears, but Juliet, ramrod straight with paralysis, sits in a sheltered room, in a large city populated by people who seem to be friendly, with a cafeteria one floor below, and contemplates dying of starvation.
    Then it comes again: low, nonsensical words rising in a crescendo behind the beaded curtain.
    Panic weaves invisible threads, ties Juliet to her chair.
    The maid, muttering like an untuned radio, pauses to listen, turns, eyes Juliet.
    Bianca . Juliet mouths the maid’s name.
    “