My Juliet Read Free

She almost forgot how shitty the weather can be in southern Louisiana. By the time she pulls in front of the mansion the sky has cleared and the sun is shining. And it comes to her that this is yet another item her memory has obscured: one minute you can be in a giant toilet bowl getting sloshed around and the next in a natural paradise too glorious for words.
    Juliet comes home happy. Just the day before, the family maid phoned her in California with news that her mother was eaten up with cancer and close to death, and so she comes home believing that a large inheritance will soon be hers.
    She is thinking about this fortune when she steps out of the rental car. And she thinks about it as she walks up the macadam path to the front door and lets herself in with a key she’s kept all these years.
    Money is on her mind, in fact, all the way until she sees her mother come charging down the hall.
    Her mother isn’t dying. Her mother is the picture of health. Nobody who moves like that has cancer or any other disease. The damned cleaning woman has tricked her. The tearful story on the phone was nothing but a ruse to get her to come home.
    â€œWhy aren’t you dying?” Juliet says.
    â€œI’m too much a woman to die,” her mother replies.
    Juliet’s eyes seek out the maid on the other side of the room. “Anna Huey, you lied to me.”
    â€œOh, sugar, we’re all dying.”

    The house is haunted, or so Juliet often told Sonny. Some time in the 1920s it appeared on a widely circulated picture postcard depicting New Orleans as an exotic, unexpected paradise, and in the image one seemed able to make out the silhouette of a man hanging by a rope in a window upstairs, the noose tight on his neck. In all likelihood the silhouette was just a part in the curtains, but Juliet, who first showed Sonny the postcard, claimed that one of her ancestors had lynched a rival there. “What kind of rival?” Sonny said. “And how’d he get in the house?”
    â€œWhat do you mean, what kind of rival?” She obviously was stalling for time.
    â€œWhy were they rivals, Julie? What were they at odds about?”
    He knew she was having fun at his expense; he could see the mischief in her eyes as she tried to come up with a response. “How serious you are,” she said. “That’s very appealing, you know? When you’re serious your temples throb and your eyebrows bunch together. They’re like a caterpillar, those eyebrows, and just as fuzzy. Do you believe everything I tell you, Sonny?”
    â€œI just want to know about this rival.”
    â€œOh, you. Shut up and kiss me.”
    During the Civil War the house served as a hospital for Union soldiers wounded in battle, and this was how Juliet explained the many apparitions that allegedly resided there. They were Yankee boys who died on the grounds and whose spirits had not returned home. They showed up suddenly in doorways, then as suddenly vanished. At night they cried in empty rooms, and their wanderings were loud on the wood floors and stairway. One night Juliet woke to find a being in her room. (That, Sonny recalled, was how she referred to the ghosts, as “beings.”) His uniform was stained with blood and his saber dragged the floor as he moved toward her in the bed. He didn’t want sex, she explained. He was pleading to be set free.
    â€œFree from what? Free from you?”
    She didn’t answer and Sonny said, “You’re trying to tell me that you dream about other boys.”
    â€œOh, but he wasn’t that kind of ghost,” she protested. When she raised her mouth up to his face he could see past the top of her blouse and her breasts loosely bound in a thin white brassiere.
    â€œI don’t believe in ghosts anyway,” he murmured, staring.
    â€œTell me that when I’m gone and return to haunt you,” she whispered, then kissed him so softly that it was a long time