Juliett grew up a country girl. She couldn’t ride a horse or plant corn or anything like that—she wasn’t that country—but she’d spent more time running through the woods than she had running on concrete and her voice had a pleasingly disarming twang. She shot a gun for the first and last time when she was eight. Her grandfather set up a dozen glass bottles in his backyard, set in front of a tall stack of chopped wood, handed Juliett a tiny snubnose, and told her to go wild, but be careful.
The first shot winged a bottle, shattering it, but the noise and shock made her eyes water. Not a lot, or for a long time, but just enough. Her grandfather laughed, and she stopped. “Well, well, Miss Julie-T, look at you! We might have to call you Dirty Harriet!” he said. His nickname for her was dumb, and she didn’t get the joke, but his laughter made her laugh, too. She went through the next five shots with increasing ease, only managing to hit two more bottles, and the following six weren’t much better. Still, it was exhilarating. Juliett made the mistake of telling her mother, April, how much fun she’d had playing with her grandfather. Her mother pitched a fit, called her own father, and that was the end of that nascent hobby. Bill, Juliett’s father, laughed and laughed from his recliner until a wicked glare from April made him stop.
Juliett’s family moved to the city from down south a couple years ago. There was money in the city and there was no future but the status quo in their little town. April had grown up in the city as a kid, but moved south before high school thanks to rising costs. Now, it was time to move back.
They found an affordable place on the southside and tried to set down roots. Bill worked construction, which was easy to find in a city bent on changing its image, and April worked nights as a nurse at Southside General Hospital. It wasn’t a comfortable living, not yet, but they were getting there.
They kept Juliett on a tight leash. They knew that it was all too easy to fall into trouble, and sometimes Juliett acted like she didn’t have the good sense God gave her. Bill called her “her mother’s daughter.” She was a scrapper in elementary school, more than willing to battle whichever little boy or girl looked at her and saw an easy target. After a few talks from her mother and father, Juliett channeled that energy toward basketball in middle school. Juliett excelled up to and until the point that her height topped out at 5’3″ while her teammates shot skyward. When she moved to the city, she shifted gears and ran track as a freshman in high school.
Her parents knew that trouble was right around the corner, but didn’t expect the form it took. Juliett started staying out late. Her parents made the mistake of getting her a bike for her fourteenth birthday, and she’d go for long rides during the day and not return until night. She’d make up excuses about late trains or losing track of time, promise never to be late again, and then do it again later that same week.
After a few weeks of this and endless broken promises and disobeyed directives, enough was enough. Her parents were tired of “I was just walking around.” Bill heard her sneaking out one night. He knew it was drugs or boys, one of the two and hopefully not both, so he slipped quietly out of bed, grabbing the pistol he kept locked in his nightstand along the way, threw on a light hooded jacket, and followed her.
It was barely ten, and plenty of people were still out and about, looking for a good time or a way home. He kept his distance, hanging back at least a block or so, and kept up with her as she walked a winding route around the south side. She never checked behind her, never stopped to listen. She was going somewhere. She must’ve walked fifteen or twenty blocks before she finally stopped, looked around, and slipped over a fence and into a closed playground.
The sign on the fence explained the park’s hours of operation, that all children must be accompanied by an adult, and that adults without children were not welcome. Bill pulled the hood up over his head and walked past slowly, searching for his daughter out of the corner of his eye. Juliett was sitting on the swings, idly rocking back and forth, with her head leaning against the chain. Bill wondered if she was waiting for someone.
After walking past her, he crossed the street and posted up on a stranger’s stoop catty-corner to the park. He could see her from here without being seen by her, not unless she looked for him. He watched for an hour, his eyes working their way up and down the street to see who was coming to see his baby girl, but no one ever showed. She just swung.
As the night drew on and midnight approached, he realized that she wasn’t going to do anything. Maybe she’d seen him following her and was just waiting him out. She cycled from swings to jungle jim to laying flat on the seesaw. She wasn’t playing, not exactly. It was more like she was simply moving just to move. More than anything else, she looked like was listening. Listening to what?
Bill texted April the details of his confusion, just to keep her informed and to see what she thought. Not forty-five seconds later, Juliett’s cell phone rang. Juliett’s whole demeanor changed, her body language stiffening. Bill slapped his forehead, muttered “I shoulda known,” and crossed into the park. He waved to Juliett with a sad smile, watching her bottom lip quiver, and sat on the swings.
When Juliett finally got a chance to hang up the phone three minutes later, she came and sat by him on the swings. She was quiet for a full minute before saying, “Sorry, Daddy.”
He said, “I’m sorry I told your mom.” They were both quiet for a while. “What are you doing out here?” he asked.
She sighed. “The city sounds different,” she began. “You know how back home, when it’s real dark, you can hear all the bugs and stuff? How it’s never really quiet?” Bill nodded in the darkness. “Sometimes there’s dogs I guess. But out here, when it’s really dark, it’s really quiet, but not. All the sounds are coming from far away and you can hear everything. It sounds nice. I just like listening to it. And it’s really cool out, but never that cold, either.”
Bill didn’t completely buy it at first. He asked her about boys (she sighed and shook her head), drugs (“No! Of course not!”), and who she was supposed to meet tonight (“No one? Why?”). He thought about it some more. Juliett would often sit on their stoop, her chin in her hands, and just stare off into space. Her second-floor window stayed open because she claimed she couldn’t sleep with it closed. It was murder on the power bill, even if they kept her door closed, but her parents relented when they saw how adamant she was. Maybe it was true. He sat back in the swing and closed his eyes, trying to figure out how to explain this new situation to April.
With her father’s permission, Juliett kept going out to listen to the city, though now she had to check in when she got to one of three approved areas and agreed to return when called. April didn’t like the idea at all, and Bill didn’t either, really, so they bought her a canister of pepper spray and attached it to her keychain. They could learn to deal with if they knew she was safe and where she was lurking, maybe. It was clear that she wasn’t going to stop, but as long as her grades stayed up and she kept her place on the track team, they could learn to cope. They could teach her to be careful, to protect herself, to be aware of her surroundings. Better this than anything else, really.
Eventually, April had to admit that Juliett had a point. She and Bill would alternate staying up to wait for her, usually by an open window. (There was an unspoken logic behind the choice of location. April had a gut feeling that if there was trouble, she’d be able to hear the patter of running feet or screams, no matter how far away Juliett was at the time.) The city really did sound different, and it really did sound nice. It was comforting.
During the day, the city was a roiling mess of loud motorcycles, honking taxis, and squealing wheels. At night, all those sounds faded into the distance and became different—not pale, never pale—imitations of themselves. It was a special kind of quiet, the type where snatches of conversation and the sound of a revving engine half a mile away were as welcome as a song. The streets emptied out after a while and everything seemed heightened. It felt like the world receded, leaving just you and a bubble around you. Occasionally things would manage to penetrate that bubble, but that only made the eerie silence better when those things were absent. April didn’t like that her daughter was out at all hours of the night, but she could see why that was such an attractive idea.
It took a month for April and Bill to realize their lunacy and pull the plug. Bill saw an particularly disturbing report about a shooting in their neighborhood, a rarity at the time, and the first thing he did was call Juliett downstairs and cut her off. April concurred. Juliett stamped her feet and breathed through her nose, but they didn’t budge. April had a brainwave—they had rooftop access if they wanted it. If she wanted to stay out late, she could do it on the roof. There was no danger up there, so she could stay out as late as she wanted to. They went up to the roof together, crawling out through a bedroom window and up a skinny metal ladder onto their shared roof.
It was just two stories, but they felt like they were looking at a completely new city up there. The noise of traffic took on a different tenor as it echoed up and down the city’s streets. Once you got above the acid orange of the street lights, the city just looked different. The lights reflected off the streets was subdued by the moonlight, leaving the city looking cleaner and greyer.
Juliett liked the freedom of being out and away from home, but couldn’t deny that the roof had its own appeal. She could see more of the city from the roof, and the sounds were even clearer. It was like being alone in public, and Juliett got into it. It was a compromise, and she kept on pretending that it sucked right up until she snuck a blanket onto the roof and spent the night up there.