Fire and Rain (3 page)

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 all 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 and 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.”

Chris held up his hand, smiling. “That ‘bitch’ is my ex-wife.”

Jeff sat back in his chair, a look of surprise on his face. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

Chris thought briefly of defending Carmen, but it would take so many words, so much explaining, and the man was a stranger. “No problem,” he said.

“Anyway, I’m certain I can help you. Help Valle Rosa. Like I said, I’m only passing through, but I can’t walk away from a situation when I know I can make a difference.”

Chris looked at him skeptically. “What can you possibly do?”

An instant of silence passed before Jeff answered. “I can make rain fall over Valle Rosa.”

Chris felt the flame of hope the stranger had ignited in him disintegrate. “Right,” he said. “And someday I’ll pitch another no-hitter.”

“My background’s in environmental engineering, and I consult for a number of companies,” Jeff said. “They tell me their problems, and I come up with solutions. I’ve been working on a way to modify weather patterns, and I think I’ve finally perfected it. But I haven’t had a chance yet to try it out in the field. My work was interrupted.” He looked down at his hands for a full thirty seconds, long enough to raise the hair on the back of Chris’s neck, then lifted his gaze once more. “The children,” he said, referring again to the victims of the fire, or maybe to those children the fire would take today or tomorrow, and something rolled over in the pit of Chris’s stomach. “You’d be doing me a favor,” Jeff continued, “letting me help. All I ask for is a place to stay and grocery money, and the cost of the equipment I’ll need.”

Chris cleared his throat. “Are you talking about cloud seeding?”

The stranger shook his head. He began describing the technology he would use—something about altering sound waves to change the atmospheric pressure—and Chris was quickly lost, although he continued to listen with a skeptical smile. The man was a charlatan, no doubt, and yet something about him was convincing. The intensity of his eyes, the sincerity in his voice. He didn’t seem crazy. He didn’t seem delusional.

“How about some references?” Chris asked.

Jeff shook his head. “Can’t help you with that. There are certainly plenty of folks who could tell you how good my work is, but I’m afraid I’m in a position where I can’t contact them right now.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and leaned over Chris’s desk, writing his name and the name of his hotel on a notepad. “I can help you,” he said, straightening up again. “I don’t blame you for your doubts. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to stay in this area any longer than I have to. But when I see something like that fire…” He shook his head. “So, I’ve made my offer. I’ll be around another day or so. That’s it.”

Chris stood up as well and walked him to the door of his office. “Thanks for stopping in,” he said. “I’ll give it some thought.”

He watched Jeff walk down the hall toward the front door. Clearly, this was a man in trouble. With the law perhaps. Definitely with his own demons.

Jeff nodded at Mia as he walked past her desk, and Chris was surprised by the flush in Mia’s cheeks, by the way she followed the stranger with her eyes. He had come to think of Mia as quiet, bookish, sexless. Instantly, though, he knew he’d been wrong. Her response to Jeff Cabrio seemed nothing less than visceral.

“Oh,” she said, noticing Chris in the doorway. “Carmen Perez called while you were meeting with Mr. Cabrio.”

“Thanks,” he said, surprised.

He returned Carmen’s call from his office phone.

“I was thinking, Chris,” she said. “Two of the cottages are vacant. You’re welcome to stay in one of them while your house is unlivable.”