Page 66 of The Hundred Loves of Juliet
My entire body aches—from the car accident, from sitting huddled on the library floor half the night, from…life.
Maybe a shower would help.
As soon as the hot water hits my body, my muscles begin to unclench a little. I spend an entire half hour in the shower, partially to relax and partially to procrastinate, to avoid having to think about what comes next. When I finally make myself get out, I ignore my pile of wrinkled, tear- and snot-stained clothes on the floor and just put on my dad’s watch and wrap myself in the robe hanging on the hook on the bathroom door.
Then I eat three bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch as my lunch.
Outside, the blizzard has calmed to a mere flurry, but from the looks of the snow piled up six feet high outside my window, I’m not going anywhere soon. It’ll take the plows a couple of days to get out here.
Which means I’m stuck in a house with a man who might be my soulmate, who tastes like memories and honey when I kiss him, but who could very well be the reason I die.
No longer willing to procrastinate, my mind begins to flip through the list of past Juliets’ horrific deaths like a morbid Rolodex: knife wound, drowning, crushed by wine barrels, stampede of horses, political revolution and war (more than once), burned at the stake, dehydration in the desert, illnesses like tuberculosis and brain hemorrhage…A fresh sob wracks my body, and it takes all my energy to keep it from devolving into tears.
Don’t cry,I try to tell myself firmly.You chose to stop kissing Sebastien last night. You’re not going to be the next victim of the curse. You’re not going to die.
The face of my dad’s watch glints in the kitchenette’s light, and for a moment I feel like such a wimp. He got sick young, and he didn’t get hysterical about it. He was so brave, always pointing out what a great life he’d had, always with a ready smile for Katy and me, a long hug and tender kiss for Mom.
But was he that brave at the outset, right when he got his diagnosis?a voice in the back of my head asks.
I don’t know, because I was just a kid then. But maybe he wasn’t brave. Maybe he collapsed and cried behind closed doors. Maybe it took him a while to become brave.
I look down at Dad’s watch and stroke its broken face. I bet he’d wished he could stop time then, to stay with Mom and Katy and me a little longer.
Then again, his last words to us were,I sure am lucky that I crammed a whole lotta life into thirty-eight years. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
“But you’re still with me, aren’t you, Daddy?” I whisper as I clutch the watch against my wrist. I can feel him watching over me right now, giving me permission to be scared. Telling me that being strong doesn’t mean not being overwhelmed or terrified. It means letting yourself feel those things, and then getting up and carrying on anyway.
All right, then. Here’s the bare truth: I don’t know if I believe that I’m Juliet. But there’s an awful lot of evidence in Sebastien’s library, and what if I really am? I’m nowhere near ready to die. I wasted too many years on Merrick and I let him suffocate my dreams of a career and a family. Now it’s just becomemyturn, and I want to use it. To think about that all fading to black when I’m only getting started…
A chill shivers through me, and I wrap the robe around myself tighter.
“I have no intention of dying,” I say out loud, as if that will fend off the possibility.
And maybe it’s in my control. Even if I give in to the belief that I’m Juliet, Sebastien said he left the previous version of me alone, right? And she lived “a significant life.” If I can find out about her, then maybe I can feel better about my own prospects when I walk away from him.
So who was she?
My reporter training kicks in. I think back to the journals in the library, and because this is now for the sake of research, it doesn’t make me shaky to remember them.
The last notebook was from 1941. That leaves a stretch of more than eighty years between Rachel Wilcox at Pearl Harbor and me. And based on the dates of all the other journals, it seems like Juliet’s spirit reincarnates immediately after she dies.
So if the attack on Pearl Harbor was in December 1941, that means the Juliet before me would have been born in 1942. And she would have been an adult in the sixties, so Sebastien could have met her anytime from then onward.
But how do I find a single woman in all of the 1960s through the early ’90s, when I was born?
Do I know anything else about her?
Think, Helene, think.
Oh!
The photographs on Sebastien’s bedroom walls. When I’d asked who took them, he’d said it was a woman he loved. I can’t remember if he told me her name, but the photos were high enough quality that theymustbe from the last Juliet. Especially because before World War II, I was Kitri in 1920s Shanghai…
I catch the fact that I used “I” in that thought.Iwas Kitri.
I think I believe I’m Juliet more than I’d admitted to myself.
But I shove that aside for now, because I’m on a roll. The previous Juliethadto have been the wildlife photographer, because color film like in Sebastien’s framed pictures wasn’t around before 1901, when Kitri Wagner was born.
