Fire and Rain

  The drive from the market to Sugarbush along the winding narrow road hadn’t yet lost its enchantment for her, even though sections of the chaparral and the earth beneath it had been blackened, even though the plume of smoke still rose in the distance, and cottony-gray ashes fell like snowflakes on her windshield. The road reached a dizzying height above Cinnamon Canyon, and the enormous granite boulders scattered below took on a neon-yellow glow from the falling sun. Just before the final twist in the road, the Valle Rosa Reservoir came into view, a crater cut deeply into the earth with a shallow pool of vivid blue at its core. Once she’d seen two coyotes drinking at it, and she’d nearly flown off the road and out into space as they stole her attention from her driving.

  It was that natural, almost primitive feeling of Valle Rosa she loved best. She’d selected the town from a map. The tiny, black, inviting pinprick appeared to be little more than an hour from San Diego and the medical community on which she was still dependent, but worlds away in terms of peace and isolation. And she had been right in her assessment.

  She arrived at Sugarbush as she always did, close to seven, when the sun was quickening its decline in the sky, and the sparse vegetation—the stubby, leathery chaparral, the red-barked manzanita trees and the dry and dying scrub oaks—sent crisp black shadows across the warm earth. A black Saab with Ohio plates was parked where she usually parked, at the edge of the packed dirt by Carmen’s adobe. Jeff Cabrio’s car, no doubt. He would be in the middle cottage, Chris had told her, the cottage between hers and his. She wasn’t to disturb him. “Leave him and his bone structure alone, Mia,” Chris had said, with that glint in his eye that let her know he was, at least in part, teasing. “He’s an eccentric,” he’d added. “We’re going to have to play by his rules.”

  The cottage she had chosen for herself was the farthest from the adobe. She’d intentionally sought the seclusion it offered, the sense of having all eight of Sugarbush’s dusty acres practically to herself, although at first the nights had been difficult. The relentless darkness surrounding her cottage had unnerved her, and the late night howling of the coyotes had sent her flying, breathless, from her bed. Now, though, she welcomed the darkness. The coyotes still awakened her, but she could lie in bed, listening to them until the howling faded away.

  She had to walk past the other two cottages to get to her own. Chris’s was empty, as she knew it would be. She’d left him on the phone, a stack of paperwork on the desk in front of him.

  She gave the second cottage wide berth, but as she rounded its far corner, she saw Jeff standing by the back steps above the canyon. He was staring at something on the ground, a black glove perhaps, or a rag. He called her over with a wave of his hand.

  Clutching the bag of groceries to her chest, she walked toward him, realizing as she did so that the thing on the ground wasn’t a glove at all but a tarantula. She stopped in her tracks.

  “Good,” he said. “By your reaction I assume this isn’t an everyday occurrence.”

  She shook her head. “The first I’ve seen out here.”

  Jeff looked back at the enormous furred black spider. “I know they’re not dangerous, but I still wouldn’t want to share my house with a family of them.”

  “No.”

  He raised his eyebrows toward her. The slant of the sun turned his face into a vivid array of light and shadow, the angles sharp and clear. “Mia, right?” he asked.

  She nodded. “And you’re Jeff.” She stared at him a moment longer, trying to commit the play of light on his face to memory. Then she lowered her gaze into the bag she was holding as though it might offer her a clue as to what to say next. “I’ve been ordered not to talk to you,” she said, returning her eyes to his, “other than ‘hello, have a nice day.’”

  “Ah.” He stood up straighter, slipping his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “That’s probably wise.”

  “Chris said you’d want to know they found the little boy.”

  “And…?”

  “And he’s fine. Apparently he was in his yard when he saw the fire coming, and he got scared and ran off into the canyon. One of the dogs found him, safe and sound.”

  He nearly smiled. “That’s good. That’s really good. It’s been bothering me.”

  She shifted her bag of groceries to her other hip, glanced inside it again at the broccoli. “Well, Jeff.” She shrugged. “Have a nice day.”

  “You do the same, Mia.”

  Like the other cottages, hers stood on the edge of the canyon, nestled between two boulders nearly as large as the structure itself. Once inside, she dropped the bag on the kitchen counter and grabbed her pad and charcoal to quickly sketch Jeff’s face as it had looked moments earlier. She rested the rough drawing against the backsplash, glancing at it from time to time as she cut the vegetables and put them on to steam.

  She was scooping cooked rice into a bowl when she looked out the kitchen window to see her new neighbor crouching in the dust, watching the tarantula walk off into the scrubby growth behind his cottage. Then he stood again to study the dying leaves of the sugarbush tree at the rim of the canyon.

  By the time Mia returned her attention to the stove, the green of the broccoli had faded and the slices of carrots broke apart when she pierced them with a fork. She spooned them onto the rice, then looked outside again to see that Jeff had disappeared.

  She carried her bowl of rice and vegetables into the small living room where she sat on the sofa. It, and the coffee table on which she kept her clay and supplies, were the only pieces of furniture she hadn’t moved into the dining room, already cramped with its old wicker table and chairs, in order to give her more work space in the living room. The aging color television that had come with the cottage rested in the corner of the room. Mia liked to watch the news while she ate, before settling down with her clay for the evening. It was Wednesday, and Carmen would be on with her North County Report.

  Carmen was wonderful to look at, and each time Mia saw her she thought of how challenging it would be to sculpt her, to capture the exact blend of strength and softness that marked her features. Carmen intimidated her, though. Mia felt young around her. Young and plain and unsophisticated. She could never ask her to pose.

  The day that Mia had come to look at the cottage, she’d asked Carmen if they had met before; the older woman looked very familiar, but Mia couldn’t place her. Carmen told her about San Diego Sunrise, and Mia immediately remembered her as the acerbic host of that early morning show. She had often wondered why people agreed to appear on Sunrise. Carmen had been a woman in total control, like a champion prizefighter taking on challenger after challenger and thrashing each of them in turn. Her guests never stood a chance.

  Carmen seemed like a different woman that day, though, as she showed Mia the cottage and the grounds. The snappy, daring, feisty side of her didn’t exist, and she seemed intent on Mia’s comfort. She told her about the rules governing their water usage, and about covering her food to protect it from the mice. She told her about the illegal aliens—’undocumented workers,’ she called them—who lived in makeshift camps in the canyon. “You’ll see them on the streets of town in the morning, looking for work, but in the evening they disappear back into the canyons. You should know that they’re there, but they won’t bother you.”

  Mia had asked many questions to keep her talking about Sugarbush or Valle Rosa or the drought, not wanting to give her new landlady a chance to ask her anything about herself.

  When Carmen appeared on the television screen, Mia turned up the volume. Carmen sat next to the anchor, Bill Jackson, whose hair always looked as if it had been painted onto his scalp with black shoe polish. Once Carmen was on, though, the camera was hers, and Mia couldn’t help breaking into a smile of admiration at seeing that confident, almost regal, bearing. Behind Carmen, footage of the Cinnamon Canyon fire ran while she spoke.

  “Today,” Carmen said, “Valle Rosa’s acting mayor, former Padre pitching ace, Christopher Garrett, who has
spent his first two months in office battling Valle Rosa’s serious water problems, announced he is hiring an environmental engineer, Jeff Cabrio. Cabrio claims he can make rain fall over Valle Rosa.” Carmen’s voice, marked by a delicate, almost imperceptible, Spanish accent, had taken on a slight cynical edge. A smile played at the corners of her lips, an almost conspiratorial smile, as though she wanted her viewers to know she thought Chris was as crazy as they did.

  “In response to questions as to how he intends to pay for Cabrio’s service, Mayor Garrett said he would be shifting funds earmarked for road improvement into the fund for water resources, saying that ‘water is a more pressing issue right now.’ There’s been no word as of yet on how the transportation board in Valle Rosa is reacting to this news. On Monday, Mayor Garrett lost his own home to the Cinnamon Canyon fire.”

  The camera pulled back from Carmen to add Bill Jackson and his patent leather hair to the picture. “Sounds like that’s not all he lost,” Jackson said with a chuckle, and Mia winced at the implication. Until this moment it hadn’t struck her as unreasonable that Chris would hire Jeff Cabrio to make it rain. Like a true charismatic, Jeff had walked into the office and had them believing. Listening to the turn of events from Carmen’s mouth, though, Chris’s decision seemed ludicrous. Mia glanced out the window toward Jeff’s cottage, wondering if he was watching the news himself.

  When she had finished eating, she turned off the television, changed into shorts and a baggy T-shirt, and settled down on the floor in front of the piece on which she was working. It was the head of a man, and it rested on an old orange crate. Leaning against the coffee table was a large bulletin board covered with photographs, mostly five-by-sevens, of a smiling but bedraggled middle-aged man. As she carefully unwrapped the plastic from the bust, she glanced back and forth between it and the pictures, her smile growing. Henry was perfect. Nearly finished. She was taking a ridiculous length of time with this piece, and she couldn’t have said why. She’d destroyed and rebuilt his perfectly fine left ear a half dozen times.

  She’d been walking in downtown San Diego with Glen, both of them ready for their next project, both of them searching for a lure. They’d spotted Henry at the same moment, plucking him from the crowd with their eyes, catching their breath in the recognition that he was perfect.

  “He’s mine!” Mia called it first. Glen relented after a few hostile minutes there on the sidewalk, while Mia kept her eye on their scruffy find to make sure he didn’t disappear. They were often drawn to the same subjects. “The price I pay for having taught you all I know,” Glen had said, more than once.

  She knew Glen saw exactly what she saw when she looked at Henry Jared Cash—the bounty of spheres that formed his face. The high round cheeks, the bulb of a nose, the ruddy orb of his chin. His face was a study in circles, the way Jeff Cabrio’s was a study in planes. His hair was straggly, wispy, the color a graying blond. His eyebrows were wondrously thick and fair. He was perhaps fifty, and even standing alone and still on the corner, he wore a small smile on his face. It was impossible to imagine him frowning, or weeping. Mia knew that Glen felt the same hunger that she felt, that his hands nearly ached to transfer what he was seeing here, on Broadway, to his clay.

  She was certain the man was homeless. He carried a ratty-looking bedroll, and she could see the shape of a flask in the pocket of his light, army green jacket.

  “I want him clothed,” she whispered to Glen as they approached him. “I want the bedroll in it.”

  Glen nodded, and she knew without telling him any more that he understood. She wanted the contrast between his sad and shabby packaging and the immutable joy in his face.

  “Excuse me, sir,” she began, resting her hand on his arm. “I’m an artist and I’d like to take some pictures of you that I can use as a model for sculpting. It would take about an hour, and I’ll pay you.”

  Henry laughed, a tinkling laugh, the sort you’d expect to hear from Santa Claus, and she realized that was who he reminded her of. A robust, cherry-cheeked, streetwise California Santa.

  She and Glen walked with Henry over to Horton Plaza, where they posed him in the sunlight, as Mia circled around him, snapping pictures, zooming in on the shape of his ear with its fat round lobe, and the stubble of blond whiskers on his chin.

  In addition to the thirty dollars she paid him, they bought him lunch. He told them he had lived in Paris and Athens and Istanbul. He had taught philosophy in Boston, he said, and trained race horses in Kentucky. Mia listened, fascinated, and it wasn’t until that night, after she and Glen had made love, that she could entertain the notion that Henry’s tales had been mere fabrication. “You are so gullible, Sunny,” Glen had said, “so thoroughly guileless.”

  It was one week to the day after she’d taken those pictures that her doctor called with the news. She had just bought the clay to begin working on her sculpture of Henry, and she deliberately unwrapped it and ignored it, letting it harden to a dry, wasted brick on her work table. She had done nothing with Henry’s pictures, nothing with her clay at all, until moving to Valle Rosa. All her energy had gone into simple survival during those months between that phone call and the move. She’d watched Glen create two stunning pieces; she’d watched him grow apart from her, and when she moved, the only pictures she’d brought with her had been of Henry. None of Glen. None of her mother. None of her sister, Laura, although she had called Laura twice from the phone in Chris’s office to let her know she was all right.

  At Laura’s insistence, she’d finally given her the number at the office, but Laura hadn’t felt that was enough. She’d cried on the phone, calling Mia ‘Mimi,’ as she had when they were children, reminding Mia of the early bond they’d once shared. She begged Mia to tell her where she was, but Mia couldn’t take the chance of having Laura show up on her doorstep. She wouldn’t let Laura and Glen into her life again. She truly felt apart from them here in Valle Rosa. Laura’s shadow didn’t extend this far north.

  Mia knew before she began working on the sculpture of Henry that she would sculpt only his head. Bodies had suddenly become insignificant, cumbersome. She wasn’t interested in them. From now on, she would focus only on faces, and she had proven to herself with Henry that she could convey all she needed to convey through his face alone.

  For the first time since moving to Sugarbush, Mia pulled the shades before undressing for the night. Her isolation was no longer absolute. She took off her shorts and T-shirt, throwing them, clay-stained, into the laundry basket on the floor next to the dresser, then stepped out of her underpants and added them to the pile. She unhooked her bra and laid it on the dresser to open the pocket of the left cup, to remove the gel form. She had moved the mirror above the dresser a few inches higher on the wall, so that she could see only her face and her shoulders in it, nothing more. Carmen had offered to move a full-length mirror into Mia’s cottage from one of the others, but Mia had told her not to bother.

  She hadn’t taken a good look at her body in the month and a half she’d been in Valle Rosa, and she didn’t plan to do so in the four months she had left before the surgery that would give her back her breast. Four more months and the waiting would be over. Four more months and she could rejoin the world. She was holding herself in suspended animation until she could begin to live again, whole and healthy. Until then, sculpting was her salvation, her balm.

  She had read somewhere that when the artist throws herself into her work, when her work becomes the reason for her existence, that she is using her art to protect herself from ‘unrequited sexual feelings.’ Was that what she was doing? When she woke up in the middle of the night with that unwelcome yearning, she’d fling off the sheet and go out to the living room where she’d pull the plastic from Henry, wet her hands in the pan of precious water, and run them over the slick clay until the feeling passed. Yes, she supposed that was exactly what she was doing.

  She pulled her night shirt over her head and turned out her bedroom light. Then she lifted t
he shade again to look outside. A light burned on Chris’s porch, and he sat on a chair of rough- hewn wood, strumming a guitar. Through her open window, Mia heard snatches of music—enough to know he was singing as well as playing—but she couldn’t place the song. Jeff Cabrio’s cottage was dark, save for one dimly lit rear window. She pictured him inside in the darkness. He was mysterious. He was a lure. And he was going to make it rain.

  Once in bed, she thought about the sculpture of Henry. She could have finished it any night this past week, perhaps even the week before, and suddenly she knew why she had been dragging her feet: she hadn’t known what she would do next, what she could throw herself into to ward off unwelcome thoughts, unwelcome feelings. She hadn’t known who her next subject would be. But now she knew. And he lived next door.

  6

  THE FOURTH CAR IN her driveway had Ohio plates. Jeff Cabrio’s. The alleged rainmaker. Carmen got out of her own car and walked around his, trying to peer inside it in the faint moonlight, but she could see nothing. The black Saab looked a bit battered, the right front fender dented. Who was this man who had conned Chris so easily? She didn’t even know what he looked like. He could be a raving lunatic for all she knew. Maybe she shouldn’t have agreed to let him live on her property.

  Inside the adobe, the kitchen was cool and dark, and Carmen left the lights off, not certain which of her windows could be seen by the middle cottage. She locked the doors and checked the windows before going upstairs. She didn’t usually bother to lock up the house at night, but then she’d never had a strange man living at Sugarbush before.

  Her legs were tired as she climbed the stairs, and the smell of smoke seemed to emanate from her skin. The fires were dying, though. Sometime this afternoon, the army of fire fighters had managed to contain the last pocket of flame in one small section of the canyon, where they would leave it to burn itself out. Fine. She was sick of talking about demolished houses and dying children. Yet, what would she talk about when the fires were gone? They had given her the air time she needed, the exposure. For the first time since she’d been back at News Nine, her colleagues had treated her as something other than superfluous.