Fire and Rain (7 page)

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 the 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.

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.

Dennis Ketchum, the general manager of
News Nine
, had initially been reluctant to take her back in any capacity. That had hurt and surprised her, because over the past five miserable years, he and the
News Nine
producers had talked about wanting her back, missing her skills. Every card she received from her former colleagues said something like ‘It’s just not the same without you here,’ and Carmen had come to believe their words. But her colleagues were only being kind—she could see that now. They were only encouraging her to get well.

She had foolishly thought they would give her
San Diego Sunrise
again. No one had said as much, but everyone knew that
Sunrise
was her show, her creation. She’d figured they’d have her co-anchor the news for awhile to let her get her bearings, and then they’d dump Terrell Gates and reinstate her as anchor for
Sunrise
. Instead they’d given her the “light” portion of the
North County Report
, three times a week, the smallest assignment they could come up with that would still place her in front of the camera. She’d covered a library opening, a protest over a mural painted on the side of a bakery, and the ten-year anniversary celebration of a playground. She’d had to beg to be allowed to cover the fire, and now the fire was under control and she would have nothing of significance left to say.

Carmen’s greatest fear was that they were right about her, although she would never, never let them know it. She had lost something these past few years, lost her ability to distance herself from her work. That weak, ineffectual interview she’d conducted with the mother of the children who died in the fire still haunted her. In the past she could have finished that interview and gone out for a drink with the rest of the crew. She wouldn’t have let the magnitude of what had happened hit her until she got home, where she would talk it out with Chris. Now the very memory of that night could bring on a fresh bout of nausea.

Late that afternoon, she had gone into the lunchroom at the studio to heat a cup of coffee in the microwave. Bill Jackson and Terrell Gates were sitting at one of the tables. Terrell with her innocent blue eyes and creamy young skin and the short blond hair San Diego Magazine had described as “tame enough for the traditionalists, yet savvy enough to draw the younger, new-age sophisticates to
Sunrise
.” Carmen had spoken with Terrell only a few times, and the younger woman never mentioned their connection, never even let on that she knew Carmen had once hosted
Sunrise
—that, in fact, the damn show wouldn’t exist if it were not for her.

Carmen nodded a greeting to Terrell and Bill, and the three of them were quiet while she waited out the minute it took to heat the coffee. After leaving the room, she heard their soft burst of laughter, then Bill’s muffled words—something about the “Carmen Perez fire report”—followed by Terrell saying, quite clearly, “I can’t believe she’s only thirty-nine. She’s pushing fifty, if she’s a day.”

Carmen had no office of her own, no dressing room, and so she locked herself and her coffee in one of the stalls of the ladies’ room and cried, vowing that this would be the last time she’d allow herself the weakness of tears, all the while knowing it wouldn’t be.

ABOVE THE BED IN
her bedroom, the enormous skylight Chris had built let in the moonlight and the crisp, white glitter of stars. Carmen didn’t bother with the overhead light. She turned off the air conditioner and opened one of the windows to let in the cool night air. And she heard something. Music. She could see the cottages from here. Mia’s was dark, as was Jeff Cabrio’s, but a light burned on Chris’s front porch. He was sitting on one of the porch chairs, playing the guitar, singing. How long since she’d heard him sing? She strained her ears to catch a phrase, to place the song.
Catch the Wind
. He used to sing that one with Augie. She could picture them, father and son, sitting on the patio, their guitars and Augie’s mournful harmonica filling the stillness of the Sugarbush night.

She opened the other windows in the room and sat down on the floor, leaning her head against the windowsill. Once, years ago, she had been helping Chris unpack after a long road trip. He was putting his toiletries away in the bathroom when she found, tucked into a side pocket of his suitcase, a small black notebook. The proverbial Little Black Book. Her fear was so sudden she couldn’t protect herself against it or against the quick tears that came with it. She wasn’t naive; she knew what life was like on the road for baseball players. She knew there were women waiting for them in every town. And she knew Chris had lived life on the edge before he met her. But she had been so certain he’d grown above that.

She stood frozen, the book in her hand. Finally she opened it, and as she leafed through it she felt profound relief. At the top of each page, he’d written the name of a city, but instead of listing names of women beneath it, he had written the names and addresses of coffee houses and taverns where folk music was the norm, where he could take his guitar and make an impromptu appearance. While other players were reputed to drink, party, and womanize, Chris was known for showing up at clubs, guitar in hand, ready to play for a welcoming crowd. He wasn’t a first-rate musician, but that hardly mattered. He was good with an audience. Relaxed and funny.

Carmen remembered how she’d walked to the open bathroom door, leaned against the jamb. Chris’s back was to her; he was putting his toothpaste in the medicine cabinet.

“I found your little black book,” she said.

He turned around, bewildered for a moment, then laughed when he saw the book in her hand. “Not very exciting, is it?” he asked.

She tried to laugh too, but found she couldn’t. “For a minute there, I thought it was the real thing.”

His smile faded. “Carmen.”

She felt the tears again, this time spilling over, hot on her cheeks, and in two quick steps he was with her, his arms around her. The only place she’d ever felt safe enough to cry was in his arms.

“I miss you when you’re on the road,” she said. “I try not to let you know how much because I know you have no choice. I try to pretend I’m strong, but I’m not.”

He stroked her hair. “You’re very strong,” he said.

“When I saw that book, I thought I’d lost you.”

He’d leaned away from her then to look hard into her eyes, and she could see the hurt in his. “How could you even think I would do something like that?”