Fire and Rain (26 page)

Mia grazed her fingertips over her mother’s foot. “One day, when I was a teenager, I was rummaging around in the attic and found some charcoal drawings my father had made before he died. They were of my mother, mostly, and they were extraordinary. For the first time, I understood how I came to be the way I am.” She had felt complete that day, validated by a father she had never really known. Her life would have been very different if he’d lived; she would have had him in her corner.

“Your mother’s name was Elizabeth?” Jeff asked, as they walked into the next room.

“Yes.” This room was crowded with people milling through a maze of sculptures. Mia recognized the work of some of her colleagues.

“Mine, too,” he said.

“How did she die?” Mia glanced up at him. Carmen had said only that his mother had died when he was in his early teens.

Jeff sighed as he leaned over to read a plaque on a delicate bronze school of fish. “She died from a combination of failed technology and human ignorance.” He straightened up and moved on to the next sculpture without looking at her. She didn’t understand his answer, but knew better than to press him for more.

They moved around the gallery separately for a while, Mia looking for the works of her friends while furtively checking the crowd for the friends themselves. She didn’t want to see anyone she knew. She didn’t want to have to explain her absence from San Diego, or to answer their questions about her health or to introduce them to Jeff.

After a few minutes, she spotted Jeff in the third room and began walking toward him, stopping short when she noticed the sculpture he was studying so intently: Glen’s nude of her. He wouldn’t know, though. Her hair was longer. She looked entirely different.

She started walking toward him again as he leaned over to read the plaque, and she knew what it would say:
Sunny: Terra cotta cast in bronze. Glen Jesperson
.

He straightened up when she neared him. “Well, Sunny.” He gestured toward the plaque, smiling. “I suddenly feel as though I know you rather intimately.”

She wrinkled her nose, tugging the brim of her cap lower over her eyes. “Would you have recognized me without the plaque?”

“Well.” Jeff crossed his arms in front of him and cocked his head at the statue. “Your hair’s different, and you had a little more meat on your bones. But yes, I think I would have.”

Her conical breasts seemed like two beacons. Glen might as well have named the sculpture
Sunny’s Breasts
. She wondered how Jeff could see anything else.

“You look happy, Mia,” he said.

“I was.” She observed the cocky smile, the sly look in her eyes. Everything had been new then, with no history to get in the way of the future.

“There’s a playfulness to you here that I don’t see in you now.”

She lifted her hand to cover his eyes. “I think you’ve dissected this sculpture quite enough,” she said. “Can we move on?”

“Sure.” He laughed and turned toward the door leading to the next room, but Mia froze. Glen stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, talking with a red-haired woman dressed in a short, tight black dress. Glen looked tall and blond and handsome in a caramel-colored suit Mia had never seen before. He seemed full of laughter and completely absorbed in his conversation with the woman.

Mia spun around to face Jeff. “Glen’s here,” she said quietly. “Can we go, please?”

Jeff looked past her toward the doorway, but she was already carving her way through the crowd toward the entrance. She was outside, leaning breathlessly against his car by the time he caught up to her.

“You look as though you’ve had a near-death experience,” he said, unlocking the door for her.

She got into the car and stared out the window at the buildings, the people, trying to erase from her mind the image of Glen, laughing and handsome and looking perfectly content with his life.

Jeff said nothing more until they’d turned onto the freeway.

“Okay,” he said then, as if he were continuing a conversation they’d been having for minutes. “My best guess is that Glen ran off with another guy.”

She couldn’t suppress a laugh.

“How close did I come?” he asked.

Mia sighed and looked out the window toward the skyline. “Actually, he ran off with my sister,” she said.

“Oh. Nasty.”

He had no idea how nasty.

“We were engaged to be married,” she said. “Then Laura came home after living in Santa Barbara for several years. She’d broken up with her boyfriend, and she was very depressed. Glen was really nice about it, including her in almost everything we did. I’d always been jealous of her when we were growing up. She was beautiful, and I was plain. She got the guys, and I got my mother to take care of. Then, what do you know, she got Glen, too.” She bit her lip, surprised by the hostility in her voice. She had never said any of this out loud.

Jeff kept his eyes on the road. “You loved him a lot?” he asked.

“Yes. I’d been sick for awhile and was feeling better and looking for a job to support my sculpting habit. I finally found one through a temporary agency, but when I showed up for work the first day, they said they didn’t need me and sent me home. When I walked into the house, there were Glen and Laura, together on the living room floor.”

“You mean”—he glanced at her—”making love?”

“No,” she said. “Fucking.”

Jeff stared at the road again, the lines of a frown creasing his forehead. “What cruelty,” he said. “What a betrayal.”

Mia sighed in agreement.

“Are they still together?”

“Oh, yes. Laura and Glen. Glen and Laura.”

“Pond scum.”

She laughed. “So you ran away to Valle Rosa and became a hermit.”

“Right.”

“And how long do you plan to keep running?”

She shrugged.

“Mia,” he said. “This is not a good reason to run away, and certainly not to some little hamlet like Valle Rosa. You need to live somewhere where you can meet other people, people who’ll let you know you’re a worthwhile person who didn’t deserve to be treated like shit.”

“Look, Jeff.” She wanted him to stop talking about this. “I’m not badgering
you
about running away, so please don’t badger me, okay? And I’m hungry.”

Jeff smiled and swerved the car into the right lane to exit the freeway. “The lady’s hungry,” he said, pulling onto the off-ramp, “and suddenly feisty. Unpredictable. Timid one minute, brassy the next. She allows men to sculpt her in the nude, but turns to ice when you touch her. She—”

“Please don’t,” she said. If he uttered one more word, she thought she might explode.

He had pulled up at a stop sign, and he didn’t cross the intersection until she looked at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, when she met his eyes.

“It’s okay.” She regretted her sudden bitchiness, but at least it had put an end to his teasing.

They stopped at a delicatessen and picked up subs—vegetarian for Mia, turkey for Jeff. When Jeff took a bottle of wine from the shelf, Mia grabbed another. She wanted to get drunk tonight.

They picked up the cat at Jeff’s cottage, then walked over to hers. She rolled up the sheet of plastic from the carpet, and they sat on the floor, their backs against the sofa, while they ate. And drank. Mia was on her second glass of wine when Jeff dared speak to her of anything substantive again.

“So,” he said, “did Glen make that sculpture from pictures of you or did you pose? Or would you rather not talk about it?”

“I posed.” She rewrapped the remaining half of her sandwich and set it on the coffee table.

“Was it awkward?”

She shook her head and took a long drink of wine. “It seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do at the time. But I was a lot younger then.”

He laughed. “You’re only twenty-eight now.” He poured more wine into his own glass. “Though I have to admit it surprises me that you would do that.”

“Why?”

He swallowed a bite of his sandwich before speaking again. “Because you’re a very closed person, physically,” he said. “You keep this enormous personal space between you and other people. I don’t think it’s just me, is it?”

She shook her head and stared at her bare feet. They looked pale against the nut-brown carpet. How long since she’d been out in the sun? “I didn’t use to be that way,” she said. “At the time I posed for Glen, I wasn’t that way at all.”

“Did losing him to Laura do that to you?”

She shrugged, non-committal.

Jeff finished his sandwich and rested his head against the cushions on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t think you’re plain,” he said.

Mia leaned her head back, too. The room had a little spin to it. “Well,” she said, “it’s just that Laura is extremely beautiful.”

“You said she got all the boys and that you took care of your mother.” Jeff tipped his head forward again to take a sip of wine. “Does that mean Glen was your first?”

She turned her head on the cushion, looking at him from under a lock of blond hair. “Are we talking first boyfriend or first lover?”

He shrugged. “Your choice.”

“He was both, actually.” She nearly giggled, and she took another swallow of wine before resting her head on the cushion again. “I was a late bloomer.”

“So he was very significant. Very important in your life.”

“Mmm.” There was a brown water stain on the ceiling from some long-ago rain. “How about you?” she asked. “Who was your first?”

“I was very young.”

“How young?”

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen!” Her head shot up, and she winced at the sudden vertigo. “How old was the girl?”

“Seventeen. It was a dare. She was very sexy and very… carefree, shall we say. It sounds better than ‘loose.’ Some of my friends bet me ten bucks to do it with her.”

“That’s disgusting.” Mia poured more wine into her glass.

“Do you think you need that?” Jeff pointed toward the glass, and she nodded.

“Yup,” she said stubbornly. “I certainly do.”

“Well, you’re right.” Jeff returned to the conversation. “I guess it was disgusting, in retrospect. It backfired on me anyway. They demanded a report from her before they’d pay up, and she told them I was the lousiest lay she’d ever had. She said, and this is one quote I’ll never forget, ‘He doesn’t know his dick from a doorknob.’”

Jeff shuddered, and Mia laughed. The wine was definitely taking hold of her, the giddiness warm and inviting.

“So, that was ego-deflating enough to make me wait a few long years before I tried again.” He smiled at her as he wadded up the wrapper from his sandwich. Then he reached behind him to take her sketch pad from the sofa. Resting it on his knees, he began drawing a crude-looking version of the two-tiered fountain. “I was wondering if you could make this part wider.” He pointed to the upper tier. “What do you think?”

He held the sketch toward her, and she laughed again.

“Finally, something you’re no good at,” she said. “You can’t draw at all.”

He pulled the drawing away from her, an insulted look on his face, and tossed the balled wrapper at her cheek. Then he propped the sketch pad against the coffee table and leaned his arms on his knees. “Well, Mia,” he said, “do you think I’m going to make it rain?”

She giggled. “No.”

“How come you bought all that stuff for the fountain then?”

“I thought I should humor you.”

“Carmen probably had her spies following us all over San Diego. You’ll be on the news tonight.” He began speaking with a Spanish accent, far stronger than Carmen’s. “Valle Rosa’s mystery man, the elusive Jeff Cabrio, was spotted today in San Diego with Mayor Chris Garrett’s winsome secretary, Mia Tanner. The alleged rainmaker, Mr. Cabrio, seems to have engaged Ms. Tanner in his delusion that he can make it rain.”

“Oh, God, I don’t want to be on the news,” Mia said. There was real alarm in the thought, but she couldn’t quite grasp the source of it.

“Mr. Cabrio was seen contemplating a nude sculpture of Ms. Tanner,” Jeff continued. Then he laughed. “I can see the headlines in tomorrow’s paper:
Secretary Poses in Nothing but Scarf and Fedora while Rainmaker Looks On
.”

“Oh, no,” she groaned.

“Carmen’s spies are probably right outside your window as we speak.” Jeff gestured toward the evening sky, a splash of orange at the living room window. “And I think we should give them something to take back to the dragon lady.”

He leaned over to pull her to him, softly, by her shoulders. Mia felt herself stiffen, felt the urge to slip her arms protectively between their bodies. But he was already too close to her for that, and his mouth was on hers, pressing and eager. When she felt his tongue slip between her lips, the battle inside her began in earnest, the hunger in her own body fighting the impossibility of letting this go any further.

She pulled away from him, pressing her hands lightly but firmly against his chest. A wave of nausea washed over her, and she tasted the wine in the back of her throat. “Please don’t,” she said. “Please go.”

After a moment, he stood up, but only to move to the sofa. He reached for her hand. “Come here, friend,” he said, pulling her up from the floor and gently onto his lap.

She felt too weak and sick to fight him and she let herself lean against him, her arms held close to her body, wrists crossed above her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut as he rubbed her back.

“Holding you is like holding a giant prickly pear,” he said, softly. “Was he abusive to you? Glen?”

She shook her head. His hand was warm on her back.

“Do you really want me to go?” he asked.

She bit her lip. “Could we just sit like this for another few minutes?”

“No,” he said, “not like this, we can’t. Loosen up a little, Mia. I won’t kiss you. That’s better.”

She felt her body begin to relax, and with the thawing of her muscles came her tears. He held her, rubbing her arms, smoothing his fingers over the skin of her hands, while she cried quietly against his chest.

“Oh, Mia,” he whispered. “There’s a pain in you as big as the world, isn’t there?” He pressed his lips against her shoulder, and she felt their warmth through her shirt. “There’s a pain in you as big as my own.”