Page 62 of The Hundred Loves of Juliet
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After a while, I getahold of myself again, and I pick up another journal. But unlike the others, this journal is written in what looks like an old Slavic language, and I can’t read it.
I don’t know the story either, because I’ve never written one set in Eastern Europe.
But there are only two entries in the notebook, and I can understand the dates because they’re just numbers:10-7-1604and11-7-1604.
July 10 and 11, 1604.
No…
The sum total of this relationship is contained in two mere pages. The rest of the journal is entirely empty.
I choke back a sob, but it only comes back with the next breath, and I start crying again, but harder. Two days? That’s all they had together?
Two days?
How does Sebastien bear it?
I squeeze my eyes and fists tight, as if that will push back the surge of sadness. I remember how grief feels, how after my dad died, life was an absolute vacuum of nothingness combined with a shrieking banshee ripping my soul apart. It’s an agonizing, lonely torment. And Sebastien has to go through it over and over.
Of course, then there’s the other part of the curse, that Juliet never lives for long once she and Romeo find each other again.
And if I really am Juliet, that means I could die soon, too.
But I don’t want to think about that right now. Ican’t.I have survived this day because I haven’t let my mind go down that line of inquiry.
I shove those thoughts into a dusty corner of my mind for now. I want to keep reading the journals, even though it’s gut-wrenching to wade through Sebastien’s pain. Other than the one notebook in Cyrillic, the others all seem to be written in Italian, which I’ll be able to read. Maybe the two-day life was so traumatic that Romeo never wrote in another language again.
I reach for what looks like the oldest journal. It belongs to Lucciano the shoemaker and Isabella, who he thought was literally the same Juliet. It’s penned in an antiquated Italian that I ought to have trouble with, yet the words click as easily in my mind as if they were modern Italian. I absolutely donotwant to think about why that might be. Instead, I throw myself headlong into Lucciano and Isabella’s love story and cry as she rejects him, then drowns, all during their honeymoon.
The next journal I read belongs to Albrecht Montague, who worked with Gutenberg on the printing press, and his wife Brigitta, a dairymaid. I know the beginning of their story, because I wrote a similar vignette, but I didn’t know Albrecht and Brigitta had only a year together. Then I remember that a year is probably good, compared to two days (or even five, for the original Romeo and Juliet), and with that realization, I’m submerged in melancholy again for them. I read all of Albrecht’s detailed notes about how much they want a child and how Brigitta grows smaller andsmaller each day as she blames herself for their failure to conceive. In the end, she died of despair.
Simão the sailor married Ines, the port-maker’s daughter, but she was crushed in the winery when several racks of barrels collapsed.
Marius leaped into a bonfire to try to save Cosmina, who was burned at the stake because the townspeople thought she was a witch.
There’s a trek across the Sahara in search of a mystical land of gold. It ends with the expedition lost in a terrible, violent sandstorm. For months afterward, Nolan Montague, the sole survivor, lay in the sand with his beloved, Mary Jo Phoenix, until she was only bone, and he a shell of a man.
And there is more. Sadness upon sadness, death after death after death.
My body quivers as I keep reading, tears splashing onto old pages too fragile to take them. I thought I knew these stories; I’d written many of them in my own notebooks. But Idon’tknow the stories, not the true span and depth of these histories.
Ourhistories. If the curse is real.
Hours later, it suddenly becomes too much. There’s too much suffering, too much loss and pain.
I curl up in my soggy nest of blankets, weeping, the journals strewn all around me.
I am nothing but deep, jagged sorrow.
SEBASTIEN
When I retreat to mybedroom, I do what I should have done ages ago: I look up what happened to the Juliet before Helene.
Of course, I’d inadvertently caught snippets of Avery Drake’s success now and then, on magazine covers and whatnot. But other than that, I’d willfully made myself blind to her existence, in order for her tohavean existence. I didn’t even keep a journal to record our single meeting. I thought if I could pretend she wasn’t there,the curse would leave her be. I didn’t buy any of Avery’s photographs until after she’d passed.
In fact, I didn’t know she’d died until I came across Helene at Pomona College a decade ago. For all I knew before that moment, Avery Drake was still alive and well into her seventies. When I saw Helene, though, some quick backward math proved that Helene must have been born in the early 1990s, which means Avery lived a little past age fifty. Still quite a lifespan for a Juliet, who generally got only two or three decades on earth.
