Sebastian Stuart - The Mentor

“Where’s my focaccia?” Justin asks.

Anne digs into one of the bags and finds a thick slice of focaccia baked with mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes.

Anne kneels down beside the boy. “Here you go, buckeroo.”

“That’s a silly name. Are you a silly lady?”

Anne looks up at Nikki.

“I guess I am a silly lady sometimes.” Anne laughs.

“Silly like a fox,” Nikki says.

After waking from a deep nap, Emma walks to the corner bodega. She loves the smells in the cramped store: something fried and spicy, the dirt on root vegetables she never seen before, city cats. She gathers up two apples, two oranges, a can of spaghetti, tea bags, milk, a box of Fig Newtons.

On her way home she passes a botanica. She stops and looks at the plaster figures in the window: Jesus, the Virgin Mary, an array of heroic saints in heroic poses. Gaudily painted, they remind her of what you can win at the county fair ball-toss on a dusty August night if you have a boyfriend. At the fair, the plaster figures aren’t religious; they’re dogs and cats and Elvis Presley and all around the lights of love swirl and there are pink puffs of cotton candy and whirligig music and farm folks strolling and show animals lazy in the night air. Emma hates the county fair.

As she walks into the botanica the fat proprietress-in a thin red dress stretched so tight across her front that her bosom is mashed down and indistinguishable from the other rolls of flesh narrows her eyes.

“You have trouble,” the woman states, certain as a judge. She lights an unfiltered cigarette.

“What kind of trouble?” Emma asks.

“Bad trouble,” the woman says. She taps her temple and exhales by opening her mouth and letting the smoke billow out.

The store is heavy with smells, a thousand perfumes and incense sticks, the fresh layered over the stale in a dense mix that suddenly makes Emma dizzy. More plaster figures, their deadpan faces betraying no religious ecstasy, fill the shelves. And candles, hundreds of candles in glasses covered with saints and Jesus again. Jesus is everywhere in the botanica.

“I have magic for trouble,” the woman says, holding out a small glass vial.

Emma takes the vial and stares at the light brown liquid it holds. “What will it do?”

“Make you safe.”

“How much?”

“Twenty dollars.”

Emma starts to unscrew the cap.

“No!” the woman warns. “On your door make a cross with it and sprinkle it all around your bed.”

Emma hands the woman twenty dollars. Suddenly she wants to get out of the suffocating store. The plaster figures look evil-passive spectators to the world’s unspeakable acts. What do they care? They’re saints; they’ve cashed in their chips. As she closes the door on her way out of the store, Emma hears the woman mutter something unintelligible, in Spanish, something that sounds to her like a curse.

Before she unlocks her door Emma opens the vial-the liquid has a sharp fusty odor-wets her fingertip and makes a cross on the door. Inside, she unloads the food. She loves the bare cabinets, their corners home to crumbly spots of rust, and the noisy refrigerator with the cracked handle. She wants her apartment to be a refuge replete with books and teas and at least two different kinds of cookies. A safe place.

She moves the chair close to the window and eats the apple and then four Fig Newtons, savoring every grainy bite, as she watches the street life below. Across the street an old man sits in a lawn chair in front of his building; couples out for dinner stroll by; clutches of hip young people in black, long-limbed and laughing, ramble down the block. Emma finds the passing parade hypnotic, and a sweet fatigue comes over her. She sprinkles the rest of the magic water around her bed, crawls in, and reads Heart of Darkness until her eyes begin to hurt. She turns off the bedside lamp. Red light filters in from the neon sign and plays against the far wall. She can hear the distant muttering of a thousand voices, a thousand beautiful anonymous voices. Emma lies still for a long time, looking at the light and listening to the voices. She has always imagined her father living in a room like this.

It was a winter-weary day in March, filled with dirty snow and bare trees, and nine-year-old Emma was in no hurry to get home from school. Home to the creaky apartment over the hardware store. She was chilly in her too big parka and slightly soggy boots, but that didn’t keep her from walking slowly, kicking her way down the small-town streets. The first thing she noticed as she climbed the stairs was that it was quiet; there was no music-no Janis, no Billie, no Piaf. Her mother always played music in the afternoon, singing along as she drifted from room to room getting higher and higher, changing her outfits, touching up her makeup, staring at the long-untouched painting on her easel.

The front door to the apartment was ajar. Emma pushed it open. Her mother was on the living-room floor wearing a hot pink top and her souvenir-of-Hawaii skirt, a panorama of paradise, her eye shadow smeared. She was staring into space-her skinny gaudy glamorous mother, her going-mad mother, sitting there splaylegged on some crazy mixture of Seconol and Vivarin and Valium, some crazy chemical cocktail concocted to dull her dreams. Emma knew immediately that he was gone, her sad-eyed father with his longing for golden California. Strangely enough, she was relieved. At least it was over. The screaming, the hitting, that awful dead feeling that permeated an apartment shared by two people who blamed each other for everything, whose every waking moment was an unspoken shout of “If only I hadn’t met you.”

Emma said nothing to her mother, but walked slowly into her bedroom and crawled under her bed. She pulled a towel over her and imagined her father making his way west, her pot-smoking, underground-comics-reading, incense-burning, bitterly unhappy father who loved Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and the Grateful Dead, off to seek his long-haired dream far from the dreary dying towns of western Pennsylvania. She imagined him in motels and rented rooms as he made his way across the country, she imagined him forgetting about his mistake, about his wife, his life, about Emma. She understood. And yet secretly, every time the phone rang, every time the mail came, she felt it-that strange sad tingle of hope.

Emma curls up into the fetal position on her bed. Fuck her father. He better not come around after she’s famous, like one of those movie-star stories you read in the tabloids. His sorry ass won’t get a dime out of her. Emma blows off that loser’s memory and turns her thoughts to Charles Davis and his piney smell. She’s seen men looking at her on the subway; she knows she’s no dog. Her breasts are as pretty as Winona Ryder’s. She lets her hands go up and explore them, running her fingertips in gentle circles. She a goddamn survivor.

Charles is ravenous and he can feel the beginnings of a headache taunting him from behind his eyes. It isn’t going well, the new book. Through the closed door, he hears Emma enter the outer office. With lunch, he hopes. She’s a strange girl; he can’t quite get a bead on her. Definitely not at home in her own body-today is the first day she’s worn a skirt above her knees. Her figure is decent, small but well proportioned.

“Charles?” she says softly, tentatively, from behind the door.

“Come in.”

Emma pokes her head into the office. “I’ve got your veggie burger and carrot juice.”

Charles gets up and joins her in the outer office. The crisp autumn air has brought up a touch of color on her pale skin and her eyes look especially bright. She smells faintly of peppermint soap. She hands him a tray loaded down with two hot dogs and a huge serving of french fries slathered with mayonnaise.