but rules are meant to be broken, and this little girl was waiting for him.
“We will go and visit my good friend Ernesto,” Juerta says, guiding Trace toward the intersection. “You know Ernesto?”
Trace doesn’t.
“Then you will have an adventure.” His arm droops from her shoulder, and they canter across the busy street. Trace wonders if Ernesto is a famous guitarist who lives in Montreal. This city is pandemonium compared to her quiet island village — horns toot, tires squeal, everyone trying to run you down. She peers into open doorways and sees the press of people and cigarette smoke, hears throaty laughter and thudding bass beats. Trace tells herself she’ll find a way to move here or to some other big city. Not a chance she’ll turn into one of those island women growing organic vegetables, selling handcrafted yoga mat sleeves at the fall fair.
Juerta flags a taxi, they jump into the back seat, and Trace thinks, I have no idea where we’re going. The idea excites her. As the cab darts in and out of traffic, Juerta touches her cheek with the back of his hand.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” she lies.
Ninety minutes later Trace yawns, glances at the wall clock, and yawns again. There’s no water left in the cooler — she checked — and she’s studied the framed anatomy chart a dozen times and flipped through copies of Body Mind Magazine with its weird articles on animals as healers and liquid fasts. She gets up, bottom sucking away from the vinyl chair, and walks over yet again to the closed door and listens, ear pressed to the wood. She hears a soft moaning inside followed by a whimper, then another moan. In the background shimmers a soundtrack of fake rain forest, electronic howler monkeys, and digital squawking parrots. She wonders if she should leave, that maybe it’s what he expects. Could be he’s forgotten all about her as he sinks into his treatment.
A burst of laughter erupts from the room, and she pulls back from the door, stuffing hands in her pockets. Should she call him Manuel or Mr. Juerta or even Señor Juerta? Some of the other competitors call him Maestro, a term that thrills her, but she can’t imagine uttering the word.
Are they going to head out to dinner once this is over? Will he pay? She checks her wallet — twenty bucks and it has to last through tomorrow. Maybe he expects her to pony up, he being from a third world country. Don’t think too hard about the naked man on the other side of the door getting his puffy ass kneaded by the muscular Ernesto. What if something creepier is going on in there? Maybe this clinical setting is a front, part of an international operation where they pull in naive girls and it’s the last you hear of them. Trace paces the waiting room pausing only to gaze out the window, fourteen floors above busy St. Catherine Street. This office building must be empty so late in the day. Even if she let out a scream, would anyone hear above the street noise? What if they drop a black hood over her head? She’d hate that.
By the time Juerta pushes open the door, patting his bits of hair down and buttoning his shirt, Trace is in a full-blown panic.
“Señorita,” he says, ignoring her nervous state, “the mighty Ernesto has rearranged my anatomy and now we must eat. Have you had supper?”
How could she have? She’s been hanging out here all this time. Without waiting for a reply, he picks up his briefcase and leads the way down the gloomy corridor toward the elevator. Once inside, he rests his cheek against her shoulder.
“We have survived another day,” he says, and she feels the weight of his head as the elevator lurches down to the lobby.
Dinner is in a Mexican restaurant run by a woman from Durango who keeps bringing on courses of spicy food. No one asks what Trace might like. Juerta helps himself, then urges her to do the same. “In my country it is not easy to eat this well.”
All she knows about Cuba is that Castro is on the brink of death. Maybe he’s dead already. She’d like to ask but doesn’t want to appear stupid. Don’t they drive old cars down there while ancient men sing on street corners and play marimbas?
Manuel seems to be having the time of his life chattering in Spanish to the waitress. The decor of the tiny restaurant consists of a three-dimensional scorpion gripping the stucco wall, its deadly tail pronged upward.
“Do you know what we are talking about?” Manuel asks suddenly.
She reddens. “Not a clue.”
“We are discussing how Lucia, my wife, who is perhaps no longer my wife, says I should stay in this country. Defect.”
“Well you should,” says Trace.
He laughs too heartily, the way people do when something is the opposite of funny.
“Only if you want to,” Trace adds quickly.
The laughter stops, and he leans forward, seizing her hands. “Tell me, young Canadian friend, why I should eliminate my life, my friends, my family, in order to wash onto these shores like a piece of driftwood.”
“You wouldn’t be driftwood,” she protests. “Just about anyone here would hire you to play concerts or teach or —”
He squeezes her hands once, still holding on. “This is very interesting. Tell me more.”
Is he making fun of her? “You could write your own ticket.”
Abruptly he lets go. “A one-way ticket.”
The waitress hovers, lowering a basket of hot tortillas wrapped in a checkered napkin. Manuel says something, and the waitress replies in a way that sounds as if she’s reciting from a poem or a song.
Trace picks at the tube of squash filled with some kind of white cheese. When is he going to say something about her playing? She knows she’s good. She won the Kiwanis Festival, regional division, last year and played at the lieutenant governor’s New Year’s levee. Certain people understand music from first breath; she could sing before she could talk.
The waitress reappears to set down jumbo-sized margaritas on the table, and no one asks if Trace is old enough. After running her finger around the rim of the glass and licking her salty fingertip, she takes a generous sip. Tart lime and tequila pucker her mouth into a gasp of pleasure: her first cocktail. Back home it’s straight rye or gin, stolen from some parent’s stash.
“If I don’t return on the date of my visa, maybe I can never go home again,” Manuel says. “Tell me what I should do.”
Trace says, “It would be amazing if you moved here.”
He waits a beat, hops off his chair, and slips in beside her on the banquette, then starts stroking her fuzzy scalp. He’s wanted to do this all evening.
“I could do this all night,” he says.
Staring straight ahead, Trace says, “Prove it.”
The hand stops moving, and he tips her chin to study her face. “You mean this?”
For a moment she wavers, then says, “Sure.”
Trace slouches on the bed in Manuel’s room at the fancy hotel where he insists on being put up, disdaining the cheaper B and Bs where other judges stay. He moves about the space restlessly and pours Trace a glass of water, then one for himself.
“Are
