Fire and Rain

“The can,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  Rick returned his attention to the keyboard, and Mia sat still, listening to the soft clicking of the keys against the background of humming fans.

  “Oh no!” Rick said suddenly. “Oh shit” He grabbed his head with his hands, and looked up at Mia. “I went to save the data and I pushed the wrong key,” he was nearly whispering. “I lost everything he was working on this afternoon. He’ll kill me.”

  “With one key?” She leaned toward him, whispering too. “Is there any way to get it back?”

  He shook his head and stared at the screen. “It’s totally gone. I don’t believe I did that. Oh, shit, man. I’m going to leave and you can tell him,” he said, and she hoped he was joking.

  They heard Jeff’s footsteps returning across the concrete floor, and Rick looked at her with a resigned sort of panic in his eyes. Mia tensed as Jeff sat down on the table again.

  “Jeff,” Rick shook his head. “I’m sorry, man, I really blew it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I, like, created a catastrophe. I lost the sub-area data.”

  Jeff’s eyes widened. She needed a shot of his eyes like that, but was too paralyzed to snap a picture. “All of it?” he asked.

  Rick threw up his hands. “I just… I hit the wrong key.”

  Jeff walked around behind Rick to study the computer screen. He rested his hands on the younger man’s shoulders.

  “This is not a catastrophe,” he said, studying the screen with narrowed eyes. “Catastrophes are when farmers lose everything they’ve worked for all their lives because there’s no rain, or when little kids die in fires nobody can put out.”

  Mia thought she saw tears in Rick’s eyes, and she lowered her own eyes to her camera.

  “Let me sit here,” Jeff said.

  Rick moved, and Jeff quickly took his seat, pressing a few keys on the keyboard. When he paused to study the screen, lips pursed together, Mia lifted her camera to get a shot of his eyes. Through her lens, they looked very tired.

  “You’ll have to create it all over again,” Rick said.

  “There are worse things I’ve had to do in my life.” Jeff frowned at the screen. There was a crease between his eyebrows, a few lines at the corner of each eye. Mia snapped her shutter. She would never be able to settle on one expression for him.

  Jeff pressed another key and sat back, smiling. “Look.” He pointed to the screen and Rick broke into a grin.

  “You got it back! I don’t believe it. How the hell did you do that?”

  “The data was still in there. It only needed some coaxing. I’ll write down what I did so if it ever happens again you can take care of it yourself.”

  Rick sank into the other chair. “I’m drained, man. I was about to find a bridge to jump off.”

  “Hey.” Jeff turned to grasp Rick’s arm and give it a shake. “Don’t talk like that,” he said, with a seriousness that left Rick speechless. “Don’t even joke about it, okay? Nothing in your life is ever going to be that bad.”

  THE CLOSEST ONE-HOUR developing service was thirty miles away, but Mia didn’t think twice about making the drive. She ate dinner at a sterile, family-style restaurant next door to the shop while she waited for the prints.

  She barely managed to make it to her car before ripping open the packages and pulling out the photographs. Studying them in the overhead light of her car, she tore through them with what she refused to admit to herself was more than an artist’s zeal. In an instant she knew the pose she wanted. He was standing up, his blue shirt open a few inches, a stack of papers in his hand. His eyes were raised upward to look at the map, and a few lines were carved deeply into his forehead. He looked tired. Troubled. He looked afraid. She hadn’t noticed that before, but it was unmistakable. Afraid of what? That he would fail in this? She would leave out the stack of papers. Open the shirt wider. And she would give him a background, a context. A bas-relief of a window. He would look out the window, one hand on the sill, troubled by whatever it was he saw out there.

  The photographs she had of him without the shirt were excellent. Perfect. No reason—or excuse—to make a nuisance of herself at the warehouse again. Fine. She would get started on this the following night.

  MIA PULLED INTO SUGARBUSH at nine-thirty. Carmen’s Volvo was there, and Chris’s Oldsmobile, but Jeff wasn’t yet home. She pictured him and Rick still hunched over their endless sheets of numbers, and wondered if Carmen had said anything about him on the news that evening.

  Under the good light in her kitchen, she studied the prints again, pulling out those she would use to guide her in the sculpture, piling the others separately. Jeff still hadn’t gotten home by the time she went to bed. She opened her shade so that if she lay close to the edge of her bed, she could see his cottage. She didn’t close her eyes. One lone coyote started his imploring howl, and she pulled her blanket tighter around her in the darkness, remembering Glen’s phone call. For the first time since moving to Valle Rosa, she felt alone. Lonely. Ironic that having two people living closer to her only seemed to make her loneliness more apparent.

  Was Jeff lonely? Was he married? Did he have a lover somewhere?

  What if he came over when he got home? Maybe she should leave a light on in the living room to let him know she was still up. Do you know how good you are? They could talk about her sculpting. She could make him a cup of tea. He’d looked so tired at seven. By now he’d be exhausted. She could rub his shoulders.

  The fantasy was unexpected, unsolicited. Completely unwanted, and yet tenacious. She pushed it from her mind, only to have it sneak in again when she let her thoughts wander.

  All right, so he’d stop over. He’d walk into her living room, lean wearily against the wall. He wouldn’t talk much. He’d just be a walking need. “I’m sick of being alone,” he’d say, “And you looked pretty good to me tonight in the warehouse.”

  No. He didn’t talk that way. And he hadn’t really looked at her at all in the warehouse. He’d more or less simply tolerated her presence. She might as well have been snapping pictures of the furniture for all he’d responded to her.

  So he wouldn’t say much. Perhaps he would say nothing at all. He’d reach for her, hold her. A long embrace fed by exhaustion and the need to touch another human being.

  That thought alone brought tears to Mia’s eyes. Just to hold someone. To have someone hold her. It had been so long.

  The coyote bayed again, miserably, and was answered by no one. Mia brushed tears from her cheeks with her fingertips.

  He would hold her, and then, not thinking, he’d kiss her. The kiss would be a little hard, a little desperate. She would feel the day’s growth of beard on her cheeks and chin. She would open her mouth for him—she wouldn’t be able to stop herself. And then…

  And then what? There was no place for the fantasy to go but up in smoke.

  She climbed out of bed, cursing herself, cursing her crazy imagination. She pulled the shades, blocking out Jeff’s cottage, and stomped into the living room, where she sat on the floor and began slapping clay onto the board she would use for the bas-relief of the window. She kneaded the red clay, crammed her fingers into it, pounded it, and then, suddenly, stilled her hands to listen.

  He was walking across Sugarbush. She heard him take a step onto the porch of his cottage. Then the footsteps started again, this time approaching her own cottage. She froze, her fingers in the clay.

  He knocked at her door. “Mia?”

  She was in her yellow cotton nightshirt, and her hands were caked with clay. She wiped them quickly on a rag and opened the door.

  There were gray circles under his eyes. “It’s after midnight and I saw your light was still on,” he said. “Just wanted to be sure you’re okay.” He noticed the clay stains on her hands and shook his head with his tired half-smile. “You’re driven, aren’t you? When do you sleep?”

  “You’re a fine one to talk.”

  “Mmm,” he
said. “Right. Your neck’s bothering you, huh?”

  She started to shake her head no, but then realized she was holding her neck with her left hand as a way to keep her arm strategically placed over her the flat left plane of her chest. “A little,” she said.

  “Shouldn’t work down there on the floor.”

  “You’re probably right.” She thought about the cup of tea, the desperate embrace, the kiss that would leave her nowhere to go.

  “Well, ‘night,” he said, turning.

  “Thanks for stopping by,” she said.

  She closed the door softly, then walked into her bedroom and sat down on the floor by the window to watch him walk back to his own cottage. The coyote struck up his howling again, this time joined by a host of his friends, and Jeff looked out to the canyon before opening his cottage door and closing himself inside for the night. The lights flicked on in his cottage, and he walked past one of the windows. She raised her right hand to her lips. Her fingers smelled of clay, of earth. Closing her eyes, she let her hand trace a line over her cheeks, her chin, her throat, let it drift to her right breast, cupping its light weight in her palm.

  She hadn’t counted on him. She hadn’t counted on her neediness. And she hadn’t counted on the traitorous stirrings of a body she had tried to put in cold storage.

  11

  CHRIS STOOD ON THE rim of the canyon, two miles from Sugarbush, looking down at what was left of the small neighborhood in which he’d grown up. The five houses had been leveled, except for their chimneys, which rose Stonehenge-like from the charred rubble, and the refrigerators and stoves, hulking and black. The manzanita trees which had graced this little valley were nothing more than eerie black skeletons against the red sky. The air hurt to breathe, and he tied his handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

  It had been a freak set of circumstances, the fire chief had told him, that set off this newest fire and allowed it to jump the wall of the canyon to the pocket of five homes nestled together on the other side.

  “First, you had the extremely high temperature,” the fire chief had said, as he stood on Chris’s cottage porch that morning. Behind him, the sun had been rising, filling the air with the terrible red glow of a recent, too-close fire. Puffs of ash had floated in the air around the fire chief’s shoulders and littered Chris’s cottage porch, and the chief’s face had been black with soot and grime. “Then you had the low humidity,” he’d continued, “and the gusty winds.” He’d described how the wind had carried embers from fires miles away, how once the chaparral around the houses was ignited, the wild blasts of wind fanned the flames into an inferno. “An electrical fire knocked out the pumping station around midnight,” he’d added, “so the hydrants were dry. We just had to let the houses burn. It was a miracle no one was killed.”

  Chris tried to listen, tried to nod at the appropriate places in the fire chief’s monologue, but he was thinking only of getting out to the little valley and seeing for himself what had become of his childhood home.

  The house in which he’d grown up was the one closest to where he now stood. His father had built it, and Chris had always thought of the small ranch-style house—of this entire little tract of homes—as a tribute to Augie Garrett’s pioneering spirit. Both of Chris’s parents had grown up in the Midwest. When they married—very young—they headed for California, egging each other on with fantasies of adventure. They found San Francisco and Los Angeles, and even San Diego, too cosmopolitan for their tastes, however, and headed into the more rural areas until they reached Valle Rosa, where they encountered a network of similarly disillusioned city-dwellers. Augie came up with the idea of creating their own community outside the town. He found this little valley, and he and four other families worked together to build the small, functional houses that had rested there for forty-five years. The original families were long gone. As a matter of fact, Chris and Sam Braga were the only people from the neighborhood still living in Valle Rosa.

  Beyond the remains of the houses, Chris could see the horse pasture. From where he stood, it looked as though the fire hadn’t touched it, although it was gray with a coating of ash. Why it was called the horse pasture, Chris didn’t know. He had never seen a horse in it, and when he looked at that stretch of ash-covered earth, all he could see was himself out there as a boy, Augie coaching him in his pitching.

  Frail little Sam Braga had practiced with them for a while. By the time Chris was eleven years old, though, his fast ball was so dangerous that Mrs. Braga forbade her son to play with him any longer. Sam’s own father was a writer, erudite and serious and not much fun for a growing boy. Even at that age, Chris knew Sam was jealous of the relationship he had with Augie.

  Mrs. Braga had many complaints about Chris and Augie. “A son should not call his father by his first name,” she’d tell Augie in her attempts to reform him. “Chris should study more. Baseball is not the only thing in life. He’s turning into a wild boy in a household without a woman’s touch.”

  It had been a household without a woman’s touch. Chris’s parents had been married only three years when his mother died, and she hadn’t had the chance to leave a lasting mark on the house. It became a male haven. Not dirty—Augie had too much pride in the house he’d built to let it go to seed—but he and Chris ate whatever they felt like eating whenever they felt like eating it, and they talked baseball day and night, Augie grilling his son on statistics the way other parents grilled their children on the times tables. Sometimes Augie would let Chris skip school so they could practice out in the horse pasture, and in the spring he’d pull him completely out of his classes for a week so they could go to Arizona to watch the Padres at training camp.

  As Chris got older, he began to make his own rules for when he should skip school, and he was in trouble with his teachers more often than not.

  “You come by your wildness naturally,” Augie once told him. “Even your mother was a crazy lady. We were both drunk off our asses the night of the accident. At least I can tell myself she felt no pain.”

  Augie had been pitching in the minor leagues at the time of the accident, and his leg was destroyed, shattered, leaving him with a permanent limp. He’d been a promising pitcher, and he rued his missed opportunities. He tried to make up for them through his son, doing everything he could to build Chris’s confidence in himself as a ball player. When he’d stop in Chris’s bedroom at night, he’d tell him, “You’re going to be the best there is, son,” and out in the horse pasture, he’d jump up and down and whistle and yell every time Chris pitched something so fast and so smooth that Augie couldn’t even see it whisk past him.

  By the time Chris was seventeen, though, Augie Garrett had changed his tune. Chris was playing baseball both in high school and in a local league, and he told Augie he no longer felt nervous before a game, that he knew he was the best there was.

  “There’s such a thing as being too confident,” Augie warned him, but by that time nothing could hurt Chris’s image of himself.

  The press picked up on it later, painting him not as conceited exactly, but as very sure of himself. “The fans relax whenever Garrett takes to the mound,” one sportscaster said of him. “He is simply nerveless out there.” The fans loved being able to depend on him. They loved him. The problem was, the more they loved a ballplayer, the more they invested in him, the more bitter their disappointment when he let them down.

  Did anyone remember him as confident? He had forgotten the feeling himself. It had been replaced by guilt. He’d failed the people in his life. Not only his fans, but Carmen and his father and his son. And now he was the scapegoat for all that was wrong with Valle Rosa. Somehow, that didn’t seem unreasonable. It felt like a perfectly logical role for him to play these days.

  Chris had been standing on the rim of the canyon for several minutes before he realized that someone was down there, digging in the rubble of the house farthest from him. It was a woman, her dark hair and black shorts and sooty T-shirt blending into the ch
arred remains of the house. Only the white mask over her nose and mouth had caught his eye.

  He walked toward her through the burned chaparral.

  “Hello!” he called when he reached what would have been the outside wall of the house. It seemed rude to step inside without an invitation.

  She was kneeling near the center of the house, a cardboard box at her side, and she turned to look at him. “Do I know you?” she asked, her voice muffled by the mask.

  “No.” He stepped over the burned wall into what had once been the kitchen, skirting the blackened refrigerator that lay on its side in front of him. “I was up on the ridge there and spotted you. Can you use some help?”

  She laughed a low bitter laugh. “I need more help than you can give me.” She wore blackened gardening gloves, and she dug carefully through a pile of ashes. In the box, he could see sooty, knobby disks of some sort. He bent down and ran his fingers over one of them to discover a cut glass plate.

  “Fostoria,” she said. “They’ve been in my family a long time—belonged to my grandparents—and I’ve found exactly three unbroken plates so far out of a set of sixteen.”

  “Let me help.” He tightened the handkerchief over his face and knelt next to her.

  “There are cups and bowls and saucers, too.” She held up a charred glass cup and sighed. “Gary’s in the hospital for smoke inhalation, and my husband broke his collarbone trying to help the fire fighters. We don’t have insurance, and now we don’t have a house, either.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And I’m not the sort of person who cares a lot about material things, you know? But these dishes…” She shook her head. “They were always really special to me. They were all I had of my grandparents.”

  They worked together quietly, Chris’s bare hands blackening quickly with soot. “I lived in one of these houses when I was a boy,” he said after a while.

  She wasn’t impressed. “Back when there was water, right? Back when Valle Rosa wasn’t hell on earth.” She shook her head again, a flurry of ash falling from her hair. “We’re going to move away from here as soon as my boy’s out of the hospital. I used to love this place. I came here when I was sixteen and I thought it was paradise. But now I’m going to get as far from Valle Rosa as I can.” Tears glistened in her dark eyes.