Fire and Rain (31 page)

“Mia,” he said, and she heard the amusement in his voice. “You’re hanging on for dear life down there. Can you relax?”

She shook her head.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve seen your chest, and I’m still here.”

“Glen said it was okay, too. I only realized he was repulsed when I overheard him talking to my sister about it.”

“I’m not Glen.” Jeff gently withdrew her hand from his jeans and stood to take off his jeans,. He motioned her to stand up, and she clung to his shoulders as he lowered her dress over her hips.

“We… I used to use a diaphragm,” she said, “but I didn’t bring it with me to Valle Rosa.”

“I’ve had a vasectomy. Which is something I regretted until right this minute, because I really wouldn’t want to have to put this off until tomorrow.” He bent low to kiss her, to hold her tightly, and she thought she would never be able to get close enough to him.

“No one’s held me in so long,” she said.

He drew away and she saw concern in his eyes. “I need your guidance,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know if I should ignore your right breast or not.”

“Oh.” She closed her eyes, her breast nearly aching for his touch. “Please don’t ignore any part of me.”

He pulled her onto the bed again, and she lost herself once more to the gifts he offered, offering some of her own in return. He was above her; inside her, when they heard a sudden rapping on the front door. Jeff raised his head, the look in his face nothing short of terror. The knock came again, and he pulled out of her swiftly, reaching for his jeans as he got off the bed. She caught his terror although she didn’t understand it. She pulled her dress over her head, forgetting her bra and her underpants, and followed him out to the living room. He motioned her to move back into the hallway, then seemed to brace himself before opening the door.

Chris stood on the porch, holding the kitten in his arms. “I found him in the crawl space under my cottage,” he said, stepping into the living room.

Jeff started to laugh, the relief in his face, in the entire room, nearly palpable. Chris looked from him to Mia, where she stood in the hallway, and back again, and his expression showed instant understanding of what she was doing there. Mia’s feet were bare, and she’d managed to button only three of the buttons on her dress; Jeff wore no shirt and, in his rush, had forgotten to snap his jeans.

Jeff reached for the cat, who squawked hoarsely as he nestled into a dark ball against his owner’s bare chest. “I thought he was a goner,” he said. “You want to come in?”

“Uh, no.” Chris grinned. “I get the distinct feeling I’m intruding.”

Jeff didn’t argue with him. He held the cat up in the air. “Thanks for bringing him home,” he said.

Jeff closed the door on Chris, hit the lock, then turned to face Mia, still smiling. “Could you look a little guiltier, please? I don’t think he got the picture.”

“
Me
.” She laughed. “You answered the door with your pants falling off.”

“Well.” He put his arm around her and began walking her back toward the bedroom. “As long as Chris thinks we’ve already completed the dirty deed, we might as well go through with it.”

“YOU KNOW WHAT YOU
are, Mia?” he asked later, when they lay in his bed, tired and full of each other and, as far as Mia could discern, content.

“What?”

“You are a wood sprite who’s gotten herself trapped in a jar.”

“Oh,” she said, sadly. “I think maybe I can come out every once in a while now.”

Jeff drew in a long breath, squeezing her tightly as he let it out. “Listen to me Mia,” he said. “I’ve… you’ve been good for me. I didn’t expect to find a friend here. And I find that I need you in a way I never expected to need anyone ever again. I need you in a way I haven’t wanted to need anyone, because it complicates things.”

He was quiet for a moment, and Mia said nothing, breathing in the soap-and-sweat smell of his chest.

“But you have to understand something,” he said finally. “I can’t offer you anything. I can’t stay here much longer, and I can’t even answer your questions about why I have to go. I know it’s unfair to you. Completely unfair.”

She listened to his words without believing them. “I want to be with you as long as you’re here.” She heard the lack of conviction in her voice. He wouldn’t leave now. He couldn’t.

“And you understand that the fact that you’ve lost your breast will have nothing to do with me going, right?”

She nodded against his chest.

“Tell me about it,” he said. “Tell me about the cancer.”

She spoke softly. She had avoided thinking about cancer, she told him, despite her mother’s experience and the statistical probability that she too would contract the disease. She had decided she would begin worrying about it when she was thirty-five.

“I never checked myself. I closed my eyes to the entire possibility. I found the lump when I was showering one day, and even then I tried to ignore it.”

“You don’t strike me as that irrational.”

“Only when it comes to breast cancer. They did a lumpectomy, but couldn’t get clean margins, and because of the type of cancer it was, they decided they’d better take the entire breast. I worry now that I’ll get it in my other breast.”

“I think I’d want to have my other breast removed, too, so I wouldn’t have to think about it.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you were a woman.”

“Maybe not.” He leaned up on an elbow to look at her, resting one warm hand on the flat plane of her chest. “You’ve put your life on hold until you can have the reconstruction surgery, but you’ve survived, Mia. You’re alive
now
. You shouldn’t waste this time.”

She looked up at him for a moment. “Okay,” she said finally, reaching for him, wrapping her leg over his hip and pulling him close to her. “Let’s not waste a minute.’’

THEY WERE LYING EXHAUSTED
in each other’s arms an hour later when they heard the faint strains of Chris’s guitar. Mia lifted her head to listen.

“
Fire and Rain
,” Jeff said. His voice was muffled against her chest.

“What?” she asked.

“The song he’s singing.”

“Oh.” She let her head fall to the pillow again as he stroked her hair. The muscles in her arms and thighs were weak and tremulous. She’d given them more of a workout in the past few hours than they’d had in a year.

“Jeff?” She stroked the tips of her fingers across his chest. “How come the hair on your chest and arms is so much lighter than the hair on your head?”

He chuckled. “That’s none of your business.” His tone was light, but she knew he was serious, and she swallowed the hurt. He would trust her only so far.

He sat up and stretched. “Let’s get a bottle of wine from the fridge and join Chris on his porch,” he said.

“Okay.” She got to her knees and began searching at the foot of the moonlit bed for her dress, but he caught her hand, and when she looked down at him she saw the fear in his face, the damage.

“Hold me again,” he said. “Please.”

She wrapped her arms around him, feeling a strength inside her she had forgotten she possessed. After a few long minutes, Jeff pulled away.

“Thanks,” he said. His smile was almost sheepish. “And Mia?”

“Hmm?” She stroked her fingers across his knee.

“The hair on my head is actually a few shades darker than yours.”

CARMEN WAS UNDRESSING IN
her bedroom when she heard the music. She turned off the light and knelt by the window. All three of them sat on Chris’s porch—Chris and Mia on the rough-hewn chairs and Jeff on the top porch step, leaning against the post. Chris was playing the guitar, and Jeff hit something against his knee. At first she thought it was a tambourine, but then realized he was playing spoons. The three of them were singing, stumbling over the words to
Puff the Magic Dragon
. Mia was laughing so hard she was nearly doubled over.

Carmen folded her arms across her chest to comfort herself. She could put on her jeans, go over and join them, but she knew what would happen then. The easy-going rapport between the three of them would dissolve, and they would resent her more than they already did.

She stayed by the window for a long time, as long as she could stand it. Then, when the loneliness seemed too much to bear, she closed the window on the music and went to bed.

THE HOUSE WAS TINY
—a diminutive, white, Spanish-style stucco on a postage-stamp lot one block from the Santa Monica beach. Carmen checked the address in her notebook. This was it. Janet Safer. The woman Jeff had dated during his years at MIT.

Carmen had used her yearbook ruse with one of the librarians at MIT, but this particular librarian’s husband had attended the school during the same period as Jeff. He had been friends with Janet Safer and knew her current address in Santa Monica. Carmen had been delighted. As a Californian, though, Janet Safer was quite likely to have heard of the Valle Rosa rainmaker, and Carmen had been extremely discreet in describing the reason for her interest in Robert Blackwell. Having a referral from an old friend of Janet’s had given her an edge.

Sure enough, Janet had greeted Carmen’s request for an interview with enthusiasm.

“Rob Blackwell!” she’d exclaimed. “I always wondered what happened to him.”

Carmen walked cautiously on the crumbling sidewalk leading up to the house. The yard had a neat, cared-for appearance, but the house itself looked as though it had been through one too many earthquakes. The stucco was cracked; the roof was missing a few of its red clay tiles. Still, this close to the beach the house was probably worth a good deal of money.

A woman opened the door before Carmen had a chance to ring the bell.

“Carmen Perez?” Janet Safer was tall and attractive, her dark hair pulled back in a pony tail. Deep dimples appeared in her cheeks when she smiled.

“Yes. And you’re Janet Safer?”

“Sure am.” The woman stepped back into the room to let her in, and Carmen nearly stumbled over the little girl hanging onto Janet’s leg. Carmen cupped the child’s head in her palm as she passed her and was startled to look down into the face of a child with unmistakable Down’s syndrome. Something froze in her heart. She should not have come here. She should have conducted this interview by phone.

“This is Kelly,” Janet said.

“Hi.” Kelly grinned up at her.

“Hi, Kelly.” Carmen smiled at the little girl, her heart pounding. Kelly was no more than four or five, with the telltale square build and almond eyes of a Down’s child. Carmen couldn’t look at her long. She felt a sick fear, the kind of fear another person might experience when told they would have to cross a raging river in a fragile canoe. In the past few years, she had turned away from damaged children—
all
children, really—when she passed them on the street and blocked the memory of their image from her mind. Still, they would find their way into her dreams.

Janet led Carmen into the small kitchen where she settled Kelly at the table with a coloring book and a box of fat crayons. Carmen wished the child didn’t have to sit with them. She would have liked it if Kelly could be safely locked away in another room for the next hour.

Carmen took a seat at the battered, drop-leaf oak table. The kitchen looked like a hundred others she had seen in these small, aging, California homes. Old cabinets sported what was probably their tenth coat of paint, this one a cobalt blue. Chipped white tile covered the counter tops.

“Perrier?” Janet asked, producing the bottle from the harvest gold refrigerator.

“That would be great.” Carmen watched Kelly page through her coloring book until she settled on the line drawing of a bird in a tree.

“Rob Blackwell,” Janet said again, shaking her head as she poured. “Flash from the past.” She set Carmen’s glass in front of her and took a seat on the other side of the table, next to her daughter. The pony tail made her look very young. She wore triangular-shaped silver earrings in both ears, and three small silver hoops through the upper lobe of her left ear. There was color in her cheeks that hadn’t been there a moment ago, and Carmen thought it must be the memory of Jeff that put it there.

“Here, darlin’.” Janet helped Kelly open the box of crayons, as Carmen set her tape recorder in the center of the table and turned it on.

“So,” Janet said, scooting her daughter’s chair closer to the table. “What would you like to know about him?”

“Tell me anything you remember. Tell me about your relationship with him.”

“Well.” Janet pulled her bare feet up onto her chair and hugged her knees. “Rob wasn’t your regular sort of guy, if you know what I mean.”

Carmen took a sip from her glass and nodded. “I’ve gotten that impression from other people I’ve spoken to.” She didn’t want to admit to her own personal knowledge of him.

“He was exceptional in just about every way,” Janet said. “Though the one place he really was a little screwed up was in relationships. He was one of those people who was afraid to get close. He’d sabotage closeness. I mean, things would be going well, and then he’d go out with some other girl and make sure I knew about it. I didn’t understand at first. Was he trying to make me jealous or what?” She smiled into her glass. “Eventually I caught on. He was afraid when things started getting serious. He really liked me, and it scared him. He’d lost his mother. Then he lost the man he thought of as his father. So naturally he was afraid he’d lose anybody else he loved.”

Carmen frowned. Jeff had lost his stepfather?

Kelly tried to push one of the buttons on the tape recorder, but her mother caught her hand and returned it to the coloring book without a word.

“You said he lost his father,” Carmen said. “Do you mean he died, or just that he was still in prison when you and Rob were dating?”

“He was in jail. You know all about that?”

“A bit.”

“What was his name?” Janet asked. “Jefferson?”

“Jefferson Watts.”

Janet shook her head. “Rob had a lot of admiration for him. Somehow he managed to reconcile himself to the fact that Jefferson had broken the law—big time—and had even killed a couple of people.”