The Mentor

by Sebastian Stuart

  Accompanying the story is a photograph of Emma’s bedroom. Helen Bowles’s body is covered with a blood-soaked sheet. There’s an old iron bed, a cardboard dresser with a goldfish bowl on top, unruly piles of books everywhere, and a poster of Edward Hicks’s The Peaceable Kingdom on the wall. The walls are splattered with blood, sperm-shaped streaks, as if someone holding a sopping paintbrush had whirled around and around in the middle of the room.

  Charles feels a sense of disbelief, as if the story and picture aren’t real, exist only on the screen. He sits stock-still, suspended, his breathing shallow, the library silent. Finally he resumes scrolling.

  DAUGHTER CLEARED OF MURDER CHARGE

  Jury Rules Teen Not Guilty in Killing of Mother

  A Washington County jury has found Emma Bowles, 15, not guilty by reason of insanity in the March 12 murder of her mother, Helen Bowles. The deciding factor, according to one member of the jury, was the testimony of a psychiatrist who examined Miss Bowles and reported that she was the victim of chronic abuse. A medical examination offered in evidence documented broken bones, contusions, and sexual trauma suffered by Miss Bowles at her mother’s hands.

  Accompanying this article is a photo of Emma, wearing a jail-issue smock, being led out of the county courthouse. She looks passive, tranquilized, her hair tangled, her eyes vacant.

  “Closing time,” the librarian calls to Charles.

  “Five minutes,” Charles says, his eyes avid on the screen as he scrolls forward, pulse pounding. The librarian lets out a weary theatrical sigh, which Charles ignores.

  EMMA BOWLES ATTEMPTS SUICIDE

  Officials at Keystone State Psychiatric Hospital in Randall reported that Emma Bowles attempted suicide last night. She was discovered hanging from a ceiling pipe in the women’s lavatory. Rushed to the infirmary, Miss Bowles was resuscitated and is now listed in fair condition. Miss Bowles has been at Keystone State for seven months, since being found not guilty by reason of insanity in the murder of her mother. She was committed to the hospital by Judge Leo Holder-man when found to be a danger to herself. Dr. Alton Waters, the head of the hospital’s juvenile ward, stated, “The staff at Keystone is saddened by Emma’s setback. She seemed to be making progress. However, she is consumed by guilt and recently complained of aural hallucinations. We may be seeing incipient schizophrenia.”

  As dusk descends, Charles walks down Main Street. The neon glow from the bars and pizza parlors softens the forlorn street. A little girl appears at the open door of one of the bars, looking around for someone to play with; a melancholy Country Western song drifts out from the jukebox.

  Charles turns onto West Bridge Street, which has no comforting lights, just a row of vacant brick buildings that give way to scruffy fields and the sky beyond. He comes to number 12. Under the For Sale sign over the doorway, he can make out faded lettering: Oversby Hardware. The windows of the apartment above are blocked by yellow shades. Charles tries the door that leads up to the apartment-locked. He walks down the narrow alley that runs alongside the building. At the far end is a wooden staircase leading to the second floor.

  Charles looks around: no one. He climbs the stairs. At the top is a door with a square of small windows in it. Again, locked. He tries to force it; it rattles but holds. He jabs his elbow through one of the windows; the glass shatters. Charles freezes, waiting. The faint wail of the jukebox is all he hears. He reaches in through the window and releases the lock.

  Charles finds himself in a dark, dusty hallway. The building is too quiet, as if someone is hiding in it. At the end of the hallway is a door. He gives it a little push and it swings open.

  Charles moves slowly into the apartment. Dim light struggles in through the cracked shades. He stands still while his eyes adjust. He takes out the pocket flashlight he keeps in his car and runs its beam over the scene. The living room is piled with crates, window screens, rakes-remnants of the dead hardware store. Water stains bloom on the floral wallpaper. He walks into the bathroom; the sink, tub, and toilet are dry and rust-stained. The linoleum is curled up at the corners, the air dense with dust motes.

  Charles looks at himself in the medicine chest mirror. His face looks gray, sunken, cadaverous. He opens the medicine chest, its rusty insides hold the shriveled carcass of a bar of soap, one curled and crumbling Band-Aid, a rusted lilac powder tin-Lady Lovely. Charles twists the top, lines up the tiny holes, and shakes a little of the pallid powder into his hand. It smells stale and sickly floral, like something you’d put on an ancient stroke victim on her birthday.

  Somewhere in the distance an ambulance speeds down a country road, its siren shrieking into the deaf, descending night. Charles walks down a short hallway and into Emma’s bedroom. The old iron bed is still there, the faint bloodstains are still on the walls, the sadness is still in the air, the thick air, in the last gasp of twilight. Sitting in a corner is the empty goldfish bowl, thick with dust. Charles imagines Emma in this room, abused and alone.

  “She killed her here.”

  Charles swings around and the flashlight’s beam lands on a woman standing in the doorway. For a second he thinks he’s hallucinating. She’s somewhere just this side of old, bone-skinny, in tight jeans pegged at the ankles and a sweatshirt pushed up at the elbows. Her face is bloated and shiny-is it bruised?

  “You got a cigarette?” Her voice is cagey, conspiratorial.

  Charles stares at her for a long moment before handing her his pack of Marlboros.

  “Keep it,” he says.

  She shakes out a cigarette and searches for a match. Charles hands her his book. She lights up and inhales deeply. “You’re not going to tell them I’m up here?”

  “No,” Charles says softly.

  “No one’ll rent it anyway. Bunch of superstitious yokels.” She gives Charles a wily, assessing head-to-toe, opens her mouth and runs the tip of her tongue along her upper lip. Then she throws him a pitying, dismissive look, turns, and walks out of the room. Charles listens as her footfalls fade, swallowed up by the silence, by the building, by the town.

  Charles stops at the diner by the turnpike entrance and gets a cup of coffee to go and a pack of cigarettes. He heads for the pay phone back by the rest rooms and dials Emma’s number. She answers on the second ring.

  “Emma? What are you doing?”

  “Just going over your notes.”

  He imagines her in her nightgown, sitting up in bed, a pad propped up on her knees.

  “Good girl. Listen, I’m trapped in an incredibly dull dinner meeting with some legal types. I’m not going to get down there tonight. But I’ll see you in the morning. And, Emma?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  He hears her breath catch.

  “I love you, Charles.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Charles hangs up the phone and walks out into the night.

  33

  Everything is different today-the light through her window, the way it feels to cross the room. Emma washes her hair and leaves it down; she puts on a new black wool skirt and a cream linen blouse and a pair of black Italian flats for which she paid the unheard-of price of sixty dollars.

  As she walks to the subway, Emma passes a woman rummaging through a trash can for returnable bottles. She’s middle-aged and her clothes are dirty, but she has on a beret and the clunky black shoes popular with downtown hipsters. Emma stops and opens her purse to give the woman a dollar-on the bottom sits her little painted tin. She lifts out the tin and looks at it for a moment, before opening it, unfolding the velvet, taking out the razor blade, and dropping it down the storm drain.

  “Would you like this?” she asks the woman.

  “I’ll take money too.”

  Emma laughs and gives the woman the tin and a dollar.

  She arrives at work and is surprised to find Charles, in a bathrobe, sitting at the kitchen table. He’s drinking a cup of coffee and reading pages from her manuscript. Without saying a word, he sta
nds up and puts his hands on her shoulders and looks at her in a peculiar, probing way. She opens her mouth to say something and he puts a finger to her lips. Then he kisses her. Outside, the day is gray, the sky low, the city closed in, the apartment a world apart. She meets his kiss with her own.

  Charles begins to unbutton her blouse and she reaches into his robe and feels his chest; the robe falls open, he has nothing on underneath, his muscular body is naked, and Emma wants to look at it, right there in the kitchen. She breaks their kiss and pushes the robe off his shoulders and he stands there in front of her, naked. Emma lets her eyes roam down his body. It’s her turn. And maybe someday soon this will be her kitchen.

  She feels Charles’s hands on her shoulders, applying a growing pressure. Emma sinks to her knees and the room falls away.

  “You’re mine,” he states.

  Emma looks up at him, but he grips her hair and forces her gaze down, down.

  “I’m yours,” she whispers.

  Their sweat and juices mingle until their bodies share the same dense smell. Emma steps through the looking glass into a realm of pure sex, moving openly, naked, from room to room, making love in the guest bedroom, on the rug in the library, until the day becomes a blur, a hazy blue high, a languid dream of love and desire. Now they’re dancing naked in the shuttered living room to the music of Billie Holiday and Emma wishes her father could see her, could see how she’s grown up into a woman, a woman who dances naked to Billie Holiday in the middle of a gray New York afternoon.

  The day slips by like a vapor and Emma finds herself on the living room floor wrapped in the softest blanket she has ever felt, her body aching with the sweetest fatigue. Charles, wearing his robe, is sitting in the chaise longue reading to her from The Sound and the Fury.

  Charles closes the book and looks down at her. Emma lets the blanket slip from her shoulders and she’s naked in front of him on the floor. She leans back and opens up her body to him, an offering, and he looks and she loves his looking. Then she drapes her arm around his ankle and kisses his foot.

  Charles is holding her down on the bed, gazing at her with something hard and frightening in his eyes. Emma pleads with her eyes; she needs him, needs him inside her. She starts to whimper, and still he just looks down at her.

  “Please…” Emma moans.

  A tiny smile plays at the corners of his mouth and he moves his hips closer so that he brushes against her, hard and hot.

  “Please…”

  And she arches her hips up and he moves out of her reach and her breath comes shallow and she knows if she can have him she will never want anything else.

  “I beg you… Charles…”

  “Say it,” he orders quietly, staring down into her eyes.

  “I beg you… Please, Charles, I need it, I beg you I beg you I beg you…”

  And then she starts thrashing on the bed, her body sweeping her up in its need. And he enters her, and feeling him, she stops and is still-and as he slides in, slowly, slowly, she remains still, biting her lower lip, looking into his eyes, knowing she has found that place where love lives.

  When Emma wakes she’s alone in the guest room, and outside the window it’s dusk and she wonders where Charles is. The apartment is silent and empty, and suddenly she’s scared, gripped by fear in the huge room with its empty corners. She sits up, sweating. What’s she doing here? Naked. She’s in danger. She must get out, get home-home. Where is her home? Panic rises in waves up her body.

  And then she hears footfalls coming down the hall. She’s still. Charles walks into the room, dressed, with his coat on, and he smiles at her. He switches on a bedside lamp and a soft amber glow suffuses the room. Her panic recedes, but it’s quickly replaced by a terrible vulnerability, being naked on the bed, as if the party’s over and no one has told her. And then Charles leans down and kisses her and she wraps her arms around his neck and everything is all right again. She has simply taken a nap, a nap after a long day of lovemaking. Grown-ups do that.

  “Hungry?” Charles asks.

  “Mmmmm.” She realizes she’s ravenous.

  “Thai?”

  Emma nods.

  “Back in twenty minutes.”

  And then he’s gone and Emma is alone in the apartment. She stretches. Her body feels heavy and warm and satisfied. She catches her reflection in the mirror over the dresser. Lit by the soft yellow light she looks almost beautiful, like an actress in a sexy French film, glamorous and languid, alone in her lover’s apartment in the evening.

  Emma has a sudden urge to explore, and she slips out of bed and into her shirt. She loves walking down the long hallway in nothing but her shirt-she is in a sophisticated French film.

  Emma walks into the master bedroom and stops. The vast sleigh bed stands dead center in the room like a surly watchdog. Emma gives it the finger. Poor rich bitch, Charles has never taken her to the places he took Emma today, no way. On the dresser sits a tiny kingdom of beautiful glass bottles. Emma opens one and holds it under her nose-it smells fresh and clean and full of hope. She dips the stopper and runs it along her neck and down into her shirt, between her breasts, around a nipple.

  In the bathroom Emma looks at herself in the mirror wall. Her skin is glowing, her face infused with a confidence she’s never seen before. Slowly, defiantly, she begins to unbutton her shirt. It falls off her body and she stands there naked. She’s never looked at herself like this before. She’s a woman now and her body shows it: her bony, boyish angles have softened, her hips and breasts have filled out and, yes, they do have a lovely shape, graceful and smooth. She’s a woman and a writer and she has a lover and a book-a life.

  Emma steps into the shower, the huge shower with its brushed-steel bench and shelf filled with expensive soaps and shampoos, everything glistening, and she turns on the faucet and the water sprays out, steaming, soothing, and she lets it beat down on her body, her strong beautiful body.

  Wrapped in a thick towel and drying her hair, Emma walks across the bedroom and into rich bitch’s dressing room. It looks like a department store. One dress catches her eye, a plain black dress made of some material that seems to float as she takes it down. Emma turns to the full-length mirror, and holds the dress up in front of her. It has thin shoulder straps, and ends halfway down the thigh. It’s such a simple dress, and yet the cut, the cloth, and the feel are sublime. Emma imagines wearing it out to dinner with Charles in the summer, sitting at an outdoor cafe, elegant and famous and in love, watching the city go by. She hangs up the black dress and takes down a pale green one, full-length, silk, elegant, tight, with a mandarin collar and a row of tiny buttons running diagonally across the chest. She turns to the mirror-how wonderful! Like something you’d wear to the White House or to an opening night, on Charles’s arm, secure, serene, and beautiful.

  “Green’s not your color.”

  Emma gasps and whirls around. Anne Turner is standing in the doorway.

  “I’m… I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was doing.”

  Emma, her hands shaking, hangs the dress up and makes a move to leave. Anne blocks her way.

  The point is, Emma, I do know what you’re doing.”

  Rich bitch has her face all haughty and righteous. As if she were so perfect.

  “You said you were going to give me some of your clothes, didn’t you? Remember-a few weeks ago, in the kitchen? Right after that phone call?”

  Anne is stunned. Emma thinks she looks like a fucking cow, standing there with her mouth gaping open.

  “Well, didn’t you?”

  Anne takes a step backward. “I didn’t think you’d come and help yourself,” she says crisply.

  “I’m just checking them out,” Emma says. She turns and runs a hand along the dresses.

  “Anne, you’re home,” Charles says, walking into the room, shooting Emma a glance that says “I’ll handle this.”

  “I’m home.”

  “I thought your flight got in at midnight.”

  Anne pu
rses her lips and spits out, “We had favorable tailwinds.”

  “I told Emma she could take a shower.”

  “Did you also tell her to slip into something comfortable while she was at it?”

  “Emma, the food is up front. I’ll be right there.”

  Anne is alone with the bastard and there isn’t a lot of room to maneuver in the small space.

  “Does she fuck as well as she types?”

  “Don’t be vulgar, Anne.”

  “You’re screwing your secretary in our apartment and you accuse me of being vulgar?”

  Charles lowers his voice. “Anne, there’s something about Emma I haven’t told you.”

  “I think I just figured it out on my own.”

  “I’m using her, for the new book. I’m studying her, the way she talks, the way she thinks.”

  “The way she makes love?”

  “I let it go too far. Boundaries got blurred. I’m sorry.”

  Anne looks at him, at that face, telling her that his work is more important than their marriage. Or is he just using that as an excuse to get his rocks off? She slaps him hard, so hard her palm burns. She stands there for a moment, not quite believing what’s happening. It’s all so wrong-that their marriage has come to this. And tomorrow she’s going to kill her baby.

  “We had everything, Charles, everything. Why… why?”

  He puts a hand on her shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me! Don’t you dare touch me!”

  Charles looks her right in the eye. “I won’t touch her again, that’s over. I promise you that. But try to understand. The last book was hell, and the truth is I’m afraid to let her go. I’ve grown dependent on her for this new book, in some way I don’t really understand. This is for our future.”