Fire and Rain

  Carmen looked back at the crowd. Her eyes moved in his direction, and he knew she could see him now. Maybe she’d been able to see him all along. He allowed himself to stare back at her, allowed their gazes to lock. If anyone should understand how he felt to lose Dustin’s pictures, it would be Carmen. After all, she was Dustin’s mother.

  2

  DAMAGE.

  Mia typed the word, black and sharp, at the top of the page. Chris had asked her if she minded typing this list, this recitation of what had been done to his home, what he had lost, and she, of course, had agreed. But no matter what she typed below it, the word at the top of the page taunted her.

  She was a halting, two-fingered typist, although she had improved greatly during her month and a half as Chris’s office manager. He didn’t complain, but then, he could hardly fault her; she’d been completely honest with him about her lack of secretarial skills. She’d told him she was twenty-eight years old and an artist, and that the only other skills she possessed were those she’d picked up over the years of caring for her invalid mother.

  He’d hired her as easily as if she’d said she’d graduated at the top of her class in secretarial school. Mia learned quickly that he did most things that way—easily, unhurried. Not much seemed to shake him, as though he expected little out of life, as though when she’d shown up to apply for the job, he’d fully expected her to be unqualified.

  She had been the one to find the file. While cleaning out the previous mayor’s rickety oak file cabinet, her fingers caught on a folder tucked beneath the rest. It was unmarked, and something about it—the way it had been hidden, perhaps, or the way it was held closed by three paper clips along its open end—made her take it to Chris without looking at it herself.

  Chris sat on the corner of his desk, plucking the clips from the file and laying it open on his knee, and she remembered seeing the color drain from his face as he read its contents.

  “Jesus.” He looked up at her, a flash of uncharacteristic anger in his pale blue eyes. “Heath sold our water,” he said. “He sold our water to a development on the other side of Cinnamon Canyon. Do you believe it? We’re in the middle of a drought! Everybody’s got plastic dams in their toilet tanks to save a couple of gallons a day, and he sells our water to a bunch of money-hungry vultures. No wonder the reservoir’s nearly dry.”

  Mia knew Chris had grown up here, during a time when Valle Rosa was even smaller and sleepier, and that he took every infraction against the town as a personal affront. He had wondered aloud to her how George Heath had afforded his Mercedes, his sailboat. Or the private plane he’d chartered to fly him to Sacramento, where he was supposed to have met with other government officials to discuss the drought. Ironic that he’d used the profits from his water deal on the plane that had taken him to his death.

  Mia was typing the last item on Chris’s inventory of his damaged possessions when the outside door opened. A man stepped into the office, a stranger, accompanied by a gust of hot, dry, Santa Ana wind that rustled the papers on her desk. One paper rose from the blotter, floating in the air for a second before slipping to the floor, and the stranger bent to pick it up.

  “Sorry.” He placed the paper on her desk. He didn’t quite smile. He wore a brown-and-red Hawaiian print shirt, tan chinos. Tennis shoes without socks. He looked freshly showered, scrubbed clean. She could smell soap.

  His eyes ran over the cheap walnut-colored paneling, the worn brown carpet. “Is this Chris Garrett’s office?” He looked down at her—through her—and she was struck by the symmetry in his face, by the angles of his jaw, his nose, his cheekbones. His eyes were a dark, opaque blue, but there was a light in them— something burning there.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Is it possible for me to see him?” The near-smile again. He had to work at producing it. He was holding a map in his hand, and he waved it in the direction of Chris’s office. “My name is Jeff Cabrio. He doesn’t know me.”

  She was staring, imagining how the angles of his face would transfer to her clay, and she dropped her gaze to the intercom on her desk. Punching the button, she called Chris. He sounded surprised to hear there was someone to see him. Since she’d been working for him, only a few people had come to the office—including a few of the kids Chris had coached in baseball who tried to convince him to “chuck this lame job and come back to Valle Rosa High School.” Chris had said there was nothing he would like better, but that right now his first responsibility was to all of Valle Rosa, not only the high school’s fledgling baseball team.

  Mia hung up the phone and told Jeff Cabrio to have a seat, that Chris would be out shortly. He sat down, spreading the map open on his knees. As he traced routes with the tip of his finger, Mia slipped a piece of typing paper onto her desk top and began sketching him. Surreptitiously. Looking up, down. Growing more brazen as she realized he was absorbed in his map and unaware of her.

  He was what Glen would have called an artist’s lure—someone an artist couldn’t resist, someone born to be painted, photographed, sculpted. Mia had been Glen’s student long before she was his lover, and he had taught her how to pick a lure from a crowd. “Not a classic beauty, necessarily,” he had said in his clipped London accent, “but someone whose features will transfer to the clay with an element of drama.”

  Mia wished Glen could see Jeff Cabrio. Glen would have to exercise enormous self-control not to approach him, not to ask him if the planes of his face and arms and hands were reflected in the rest of his body. He would be too well-mannered to do that, of course, but not too polite to stare. Blatantly. More than once Glen had been propositioned by other men who had caught him staring unabashedly at their biceps, thighs, or buttocks.

  Glen had told Mia she had the body of a lure, but not the face. “Your cheeks are too full,” he had said. “Your lips are too pouty.” At the time, she had been so convinced of his love for her that she hadn’t thought to take his words as an insult. “But your body, Sunny. Your body is a lure, pure and simple.”

  She’d been twenty-four then, a born and bred southern California girl who didn’t fit the mold. She wasn’t tan. Her dishwater blond hair bore no sun streaks. She was slender, so slender in fact that every muscle, every tendon, was visible beneath her skin. The muscles hadn’t come from surfing or skating or a health club. They’d been earned over the years from lifting her mother, turning her, helping her into the bathtub.

  It was the way her calf muscle shifted just below the skin that had intrigued Glen, the way her long, delicate fingers slipped over the clay that had made her a lure in his eyes. He had asked her into his office early that school year, where he told her that she was extraordinarily talented—”It’s frightening, really,” he’d said—and that when he watched her, when he saw the smile grow on her face as she lost herself in her work, he felt something “very deep” inside himself.

  But Glen was ten years her senior and ever the gentleman. He would never have wanted to suggest impropriety. “You’re my student,” he had said, disappointing her, “and as long as you are, I won’t act on my feelings.”

  After her graduation ceremony, he approached her, took her hands, leaned down to whisper in her ear. “I want to take you someplace wonderful for dinner,” he said. “I want to sculpt you. And I want to make love to you.”

  “In that order?” she asked.

  “In that order.”

  She was only mildly taken aback by his desire to sculpt her, although she knew that he meant to sculpt her in the nude. She was accustomed to working with nude models in the classroom.

  She had never, however, thought of being on the other side of the clay.

  She undressed for him beneath the wash of sun pouring through the skylights of his studio. Although she had never before undressed in front of a man, she so completely trusted his integrity that her fingers hadn’t trembled, and she didn’t once lose her smile. Sunny, he’d called her, because her smile was constant, her cheeriness unflappable, despite a
ll she was dealing with at home. He’d walked around her while she unbuttoned her blouse, while she unwrapped her long skirt from her hips and let it fall into the pool of light on the floor. She’d removed her underwear, her watch, the silver chain that had belonged to her grandmother, and her body glowed lean and hard as the sunlight shifted and swam in the air around her. She’d felt very brave.

  “You’re exactly as I imagined,” Glen had said, circling her, the sun glittering on his own pale gold hair. “Exactly as I’d hoped. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  She nodded. He had trained her well.

  “So sensuous, in an innocent sort of way. Ingenuous. You’re quite perfect, Mia.”

  He paid her, and although she was uncomfortable with that part of the arrangement, she took the money. She needed it too desperately to refuse. For nearly two weeks, she sat amidst a pile of pillows on the dumpy sofa in his studio, wearing the wide- brimmed felt hat he’d perched on her head and the long narrow scarf he’d draped around her neck. She sat at an angle among the pillows, one knee drawn up, one end of the scarf held in her hand, the other falling between her breasts.

  The resulting pose was cocky, coquettish. She shuddered now to think of how easily she had taken her body for granted. She’d had a couple of cocky years. There would never be another period in her life like it.

  Not the first day of her posing, or the second, but perhaps by the third, she’d felt a change in herself as she sat there on the sofa. A warmth in her groin, a feeling so alien and inappropriate to the moment that she was annoyed with herself. You’re an artist; he’s an artist. When he touched her, when he shifted the pillows—slipping one beneath her knee, pressing her shoulder against another—she cursed herself for the traitorous tightening of her nipples.

  By the end of the first week, she was deliberately mispositioning herself so that he would have to approach her, have to touch her with his warm and practiced hands.

  Despite her slender build, leaning on her side made her belly droop just a little. She would self-consciously pull it in, and he’d scold her, laughing.

  “No, no, Sunny. It’s perfect. Your body looks so strong, that little bit of softness there gives you just the tenderness you need. Can’t you see it? I’m trying to express those different parts of you—the strength, the sensuality, the joy, the gentleness.”

  And he’d touch her there—”Hold it in. Look at it. See? Quite unnatural. Now let it out. There that’s right. Oh, that’s splendid.” He’d stroke his fingers over her belly as though it were the clay he was touching, and she would feel the quick involuntary warming between her legs.

  In the end, he made the nipples of her small, firm breasts slightly raised, just enough to “suggest alertness.” The sculpture was fifteen inches high, made in terra cotta, later to be cast in bronze. Eventually, it won Glen three awards.

  She had always been a dreamer, always lived her life partly in fantasy. So it was no surprise to her that, during the two weeks of her posing, she had thought constantly of Glen, of his touch, of what might happen between them.

  She began to wonder though, if after coming to know her body so intimately from his professional stance, he no longer felt the urge to possess her in any other way. He hadn’t touched her other than to shape her for the clay. He had never kissed her. He had given her no indication at all that he was drawn to her, as he had claimed weeks earlier. She felt of no more personal importance to him than the paid models in class.

  When she was dressing in his studio for the last time, he said, “I think you’ve understood, Sunny, that I wanted what goes on here, at the studio, and what goes on in here”—he rested his hand on his chest, over his heart—”to be completely separate. But now that the sculpture is finished, I can finally ask you to come home with me tonight.”

  She let out her breath in grateful relief. “I want to, Glen,” she said, “but I can’t tonight. My mother.”

  He scowled. “You’re bloody chained to her.”

  “Come home with me,” she suggested. “She wants to meet you, and I’ll make you dinner. Then you can spend the night.” She hesitated, guiltily. “She won’t have to know.”

  He helped her cook in the small, cozy kitchen of the house in which she’d grown up, and she found herself talking non-stop. She’d had so few people to talk with over the past few years. She had to slow herself down, not wanting to overwhelm him.

  She told him about her father’s death in Viet Nam when she was five, about the few foggy memories she had of him. She told him about Laura, how beautiful she was, how she had already started college when their mother was first struck by cancer, how it had made more sense for Mia to take care of her than for Laura to come home. (“So where is she now?” Glen had asked, with the first hint of anger she had ever seen in him. “Where’s the beautiful sister while you’re stuck at home year after year?”) She brushed aside his questions, having long ago adjusted to life’s inequities.

  They had dinner with her mother, who managed to sit at the table with them for a good hour before returning to the sofa with a fresh fit of coughing that obviously alarmed Glen. But he was drawn to her mother, the way most men were, despite the fact that Liz Tanner had grown reed thin and frail, that her once beautiful blond hair had been replaced by a blue paisley turban. Still, her smile was animated. She regaled them with several stories from her years as an elementary school teacher, and Mia was delighted to see Glen laugh.

  He did the dishes while Mia got her mother into bed. Liz Tanner squeezed her hand. “He’s wonderful,” she said. “And you’re a grown woman. Don’t make him go home if you don’t want him to.” So Mia, astounded by her mother’s invitation, took Glen openly and guiltlessly into her bedroom, but not before she had told him she was a virgin. It seemed to be something he should know, something she doubted he would guess of a twenty-four-year-old woman. But he wasn’t surprised.

  “I quite expected that, Sunny,” he said. “When have you had the freedom to be anything but?”

  He undressed her as though he wasn’t already intimate with her body, as though every inch of her skin was a new discovery. She was so hungry for him, so eager, that he asked her, “Are you certain you’re a virgin? You have absolutely no inhibitions whatsoever.” Glen’s lovemaking was so exquisite that she thought, this is it, this is forever, this is all I’ll ever need. Only somehow, it hadn’t been enough for Glen. Not enough to let him overlook the damage.

  Damage. Mia cast a glance at the word on the piece of paper in her typewriter, then at the drawing she had made of Jeff Cabrio. She had sketched as much of him as she could manage without asking him to turn his head, lift his chin. She had done a good job, but it wouldn’t be good enough. Maybe she would get another chance.

  “Do you live around here?” she asked.

  He looked up from his map, blankly at first, then shook his head just as Chris appeared at the door to the reception area.

  Chris looked a little beaten this morning. Mia knew he’d spent the night on the couch in his office. He had on the same blue shirt and faded jeans he’d worn the day before, and as usual, his Birkenstock sandals.

  He held out his hand. “Mr. Cabrio, is it?”

  The stranger stood up, his smile finally breaking free. “The Christopher Garrett,” he said, and it took Mia a second to realize he was referring to Chris’s defunct baseball career. “It’s an honor to shake your hand. May I have a word with you?”

  Mia watched the two men walk back to Chris’s office, realizing only then that the air had been charged with Jeff Cabrio in it and now seemed flat and still. She looked down at her drawing and immediately saw it—the damage. It was there in his downcast eyes, in the taut line of his jaw. She wondered what he had seen, what he had done, to put that pain and fear in his face.

  JEFF CABRIO WAS UNQUESTIONABLY good-looking, the kind of man who always made Chris feel disheveled, short, and paunchy, although he was none of those things. He cleared a pile of folders from his office couch a
nd offered a seat to his visitor, asking, “What can I do for you?”

  “I saw the news last night,” Jeff answered as he sat down. “I was sorry to hear about your house. I didn’t know about all this”—his gaze swept the cluttered office—”about you being in politics. Though I knew a lot about you back when you were pitching. You were incredible.”

  “Thanks. You’re a Padres fan?”

  “Well, no. Not really. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Phillies. But it doesn’t matter when it comes to admiring a pitcher. Must have been hard to walk away from it.”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly walk away. I was pushed, if you’ll remember.” Chris smiled, though a splinter of pain lodged in his chest. “As for the politics, I’m here by accident, really. Just trying to hold down the fort until the election in November when we can get someone in here who knows what they’re doing.” He grimaced, annoyed with himself for his self-deprecation. “Valle Rosa has some frightening problems.”

  “The drought seems worse here,” Jeff agreed.

  Chris was tempted to go into the reasons why that was true, but held his tongue.

  Jeff continued, a hint of an apology in his voice. “That’s why I’m here,” he said, “and I know this is going to sound bizarre, but please hear me out.”

  Chris waited.

  “I’m just passing through the area. I’m in a hotel in San Diego right now, where the water pressure’s so low you can barely get the shampoo out of your hair. I knew you folks were in the middle of a drought, but I never guessed how bad it was. Anyhow, last night I was packing so I could get an early start out of town this morning when I saw the news coverage of that canyon fire, and your house, and those kids who died.” He shuddered. “I wish I hadn’t seen it, but I did, and I can’t ignore it. I couldn’t sleep afterward. I kept seeing those body bags. And the face of that terrified little girl hanging onto her mother’s leg, while that bitch of a reporter stuck the microphone in the woman’s face.”