Fire and Rain (42 page)

He said nothing, but held her closer, tighter.

“Chris? Would you show me the pictures of him?”

“Of Dustin?”

“Yes.”

For a moment he said nothing, and she buried her head more snugly into the crook of his neck.

“Maybe now isn’t the best time,” he said. “You’re already upset. You’re—”

“Now.” She pulled back, lifting her face to look into the pale, shining eyes of the man who had never stopped being her friend. “I want to see them now.”

MIA SAT ON THE
chair in front of the sculpture. Above her head, the rain beat its steady—
unnaturally
steady—rhythm, and outside her windows Sugarbush slept in darkness. If she leaned back far enough, though, she could see the lights on in the adobe. Jeff was there. She had seen him drive in an hour ago, but he hadn’t come to his cottage—or to hers. Certainly he’d seen Carmen on the news tonight. Mia had felt the intrusion into his life as deeply as if it had been into her own. She knew him very well. If he cut his arm, she would feel the pain.

She had listened to Carmen’s short, passionate recitation of her meeting with the old man in prison. This was the father Jeff hadn’t felt able to talk to her about. This was the childhood he couldn’t share with her. And his father was ill. Had Jeff known that?

She picked up the modeling knife she was using on the sculpture. She was working on the fine details now: the folds of Jeff’s shirt; the veins in the backs of his hands; the delicate disks of his fingernails. And, of course, the details of his face. She had finally settled on an expression for him—or rather, it had settled on her. The day before, she had looked at the piece and there it was—an overriding sense of fear, tempered by resignation. She saw it in the lined brow, the widened eyes, the tight jaw. What will come, will come, he seemed to be thinking. He would fight it, yes, but with a certain acceptance of his limitations, his humanness. He seemed God-like to the citizens of Valle Rosa. Yet in the final analysis, he was only a man, and he looked like nothing more than that in the sculpture.

The sound of his screen door slamming shut was faint behind the patter of the rain, but she had grown sensitive to any sound from his cottage. She covered the clay and left her own cottage, stopping only to pick up the umbrella from its place on the porch. She knocked on his door twice before he called to her to come in.

He was in the bedroom and he was packing. His suitcase was spread open on the bed, most of his clothes already in it, a few pieces still scattered in the open dresser drawers. Mia felt her heart stop, and she pulled in a breath to start it again.

“
No
,” she wailed.

He raised his eyes to hers. In his hand was the black ring box. “She’s too close, Mia.” He slipped the box deep into a back corner of the suitcase.

“Not tonight,” she said. “Please, Jeff, not yet.”

“I’m not leaving tonight.” He folded a pair of jeans and placed them on top of a stack of T-shirts in the suitcase. “But I have to be ready. I need to have everything in order, because when I go, I’ll have to go quickly. All right?” He was asking not for her approval but her understanding.

She folded her arms tightly across her chest. “All right.” She felt herself pouting, child-like. “But after you’re done packing, will you come over to my cottage? Will you spend the night there?”

He shook his head. “I won’t be able to sit still tonight. I need to see Rick. I need to be absolutely certain he knows how to run the equipment.”

“I’ll go with you.”

He paused in the middle of folding a shirt and looked at her. “I’ll probably be up all night.”

“I don’t care.”

He zipped the suitcase closed. “Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They spoke little on the drive to the house Rick shared with two other men and one of their girlfriends. It was the first time Mia had seen the small, stucco house, and as a bolt of lightning brightened the sky, she saw the array of surfboards littering the tiny front yard.

“His window’s on the side,” Jeff said as they got out of the car.

She followed him around the side of the house, jumping when something—Eureka, most likely—swept past her legs in the darkness. They skirted a gnarled old scrub oak, and the wet leaves brushed her cheek. Jeff walked to the open, screenless third window and rapped on the pane. His easy familiarity with the process told Mia this wasn’t the first time he had awakened his young colleague in the middle of the night.

A moment later, a light flicked on in the room and Rick appeared at the window. He pulled back the flimsy curtain, and Mia got a whiff of stale marijuana.

Rick was bare-chested, bleary-eyed. “Oh, no, dude,” he said. “You’re not leaving now, are you?”

“Not tonight, but soon,” Jeff said. “We need to go to the warehouse. It’s time for your final exam.”

Rick groaned, but he was smiling. “Right. Be with you in a minute.”

Shortly, they were headed to the warehouse, Rick and Jeff in the front of the car, Mia stretched out on the back seat, listening to them conversing softly above the swish of the windshield wipers.

“I saw the dragon lady mouthing off about your old man tonight,” Rick said. “Quite a story. Did you know about his past when you were growing up?”

Mia reached up to touch Jeff’s shoulder, and he took his hand from the steering wheel to briefly squeeze her fingers. She wasn’t surprised when he completely ignored Rick’s question.

“What if one of the trans-hydrators fails?” Jeff asked.

“Shift to the other two and increase the power and—”

“Increase the power to what?”

“Five hundred, at least. Keep an eye on the display. Maybe it would need a bit more, but I’d take it slow. Right?” He seemed unsure of his answer, but Jeff nodded.

“You know where the forms are to reorder parts?”

“In the black file.”

The conversation continued, the questions and answers, and Mia dozed a little. When they reached the warehouse, Jeff turned to rest his hand on her arm.

“Why don’t you stay here and sleep?” he asked.

She shook her head and sat up. “I’m coming in.”

Inside the warehouse, Jeff spoke in Spanish to the two guards, telling them they could go home for the night. Then he and Mia and Rick climbed the stairs to the roof.

They had erected a sort of tent on the roof since the last time Mia had been up there. An enormous black tarpaulin was stretched above the equipment, attached in a few places to heavy, free-standing metal poles, and dotted with battery operated lanterns. Mia curled up in a dry, dark spot between a couple of wooden crates, and Jeff took off his windbreaker for her to use as a pillow. She watched through half-closed eyes as they examined some of the machinery. The gentle slapping of the rain on the tarpaulin and the shafts of light slicing through the darkness gave her an eerie, dreamlike feeling.

She’d expected Jeff to spend the night engrossed in the equipment. She’d expected to be ignored and was resigned to that. But after an hour or so, he sat down on the roof next to her in her dark little burrow and held her hand with both of his as he continued questioning Rick. He stroked his fingers over her palm, up her wrist. One shaft of light played on his face, across his eyes one moment—lighting them so brilliantly she could see the reflection of his lashes in the dark blue irises—and across his mouth the next, or his chin, or the lobe of his ear.

Rick sat down on a crate near the main piece of machinery, the console covered with knobs and dials and meters, and one of the lanterns caught him fully in its flare. His blond hair literally glittered.

The questions were coming faster than Rick could answer them.

“Where do you need to keep the most vigilant watch for erosion ?”

“The south side of the canyon, especially near the reservoir, where the—”

“And where else?”

“The avocado grove east of the gully.”

“And?…”

“And over by that string of houses that runs along Jacaranda.”

“Good. I don’t think it will be a problem there, but if it did develop, it would be serious.” Jeff slipped one hand to Mia’s jeans where they covered her belly, surprising her, and she was glad she had picked this dark patch of roof in which to lie down. “What’s the maximum distance you should ever have between the catalysts?” Jeff kneaded the denim slowly, and she arched her back to press against his hand.

“Two K.”

“And the minimum?”

“Point-four-K.”

“Unless you feed them more juice.” Jeff looked down at her, the light slipping over his eyes. There was love in them, mingled with desire. He curled the tips of his fingers under the waistband of her jeans.

“Right.” Rick smiled patiently. “I know that.”

Jeff suddenly removed his hand from her and leaned forward, out of the shaft of light. “Rick?” She heard the new tone in his voice, the genuine curiosity. “Do you understand why all of this works?”

Rick laughed. “No, man, I don’t have the vaguest notion!”

Jeff leaned back into the light once more, smiling. “Good,” he said. “That’s just what I wanted to hear.”

He took her hand again, and she shifted forward to nestle her head against his thigh. “And what do you do if Mia’s not working right?” Jeff asked. “What do you do if she walks around moping all the time after I’m gone?”

“Hey.” Rick grinned. “Sorry, but that’s one thing I don’t know how to fix.”

“And I’d just as soon you wouldn’t try.” Jeff looked down at her again. She saw him swallow hard, and he squeezed her fingers, gently—so gently, it brought tears to her eyes.

CARMEN COULDN’T SLEEP
. THE rain fell softly onto the skylight above her bed, but it wasn’t the drumming of the rain that kept her awake. She was accustomed to that sound now—it had become something of a lullaby this past week.

Resting next to her, on the blanket, were the photograph albums. She and Chris had sat in the living room for two hours after Jeff left, paging through the books and their evocative pictures. The one album was familiar to her, the one with their wedding pictures and the dozens of snapshots chronicling their early years—their happy years—together. But she had never seen the other pictures, save the one newborn shot of Dustin taken by the hospital. All wrinkled brow and dark hair. All promise and potential. She was astonished by the care Chris had taken in putting the album together, at how carefully he had organized the photographs, had dated and labeled each one. At how he was still, more than four years after Dustin’s birth, adding to the collection.

At first, she had looked at the pictures objectively, with a certain clinical detachment:
My, Chris, what a good job you’ve done with this. Look at how beautifully you’ve arranged four photographs to a page, look at how neatly you’ve written the date below each one, when your handwriting is normally so indecipherable.

It wasn’t until they had looked at the last picture—a shot of a four-year-old boy in a bean bag chair—and Chris had turned back to the first page and said “Let’s start over,” that she realized how tightly she was hanging onto the slim thread of her composure.

“No,” she’d responded, starting to get off the sofa. “Let’s make some coffee.”

But he’d held her down, one hand snug on her shoulder. “We’re looking through it again, Carmen.”

She studied Chris’s face, and it was as though she hadn’t seen him, hadn’t really noticed him, in over four years. He had aged. When he didn’t smile—and he wasn’t smiling now—there was no boyishness left in his face at all.

“I can’t,” she said, her voice husky. “It was too hard the first time.”

“You didn’t even see these pictures the first time,” he said, softly. “This time, I want you to look at them. Look at Dusty.”

She lowered her eyes reluctantly to the picture of the baby she had carried with such hope, such terror, after losing his two siblings. Next to that picture was one of her sitting in their bed here at Sugarbush, Dustin on her lap. She could almost remember the moment Chris had snapped the shutter on that photograph. She had just nursed Dustin. Her robe was still open, one full breast partly exposed. Her gaze was focused entirely on the baby snuggled in her arms, her beautiful dark-haired son, and she felt again that aching in her breasts, that oddly pleasurable pulling in her belly.

She began to tremble. “I can’t,” she said to Chris. “It hurts too much.”

“I know it does. Believe me, I know how much it hurts.”

At first, she was frightened by her tears. She didn’t want to lose control, afraid she might never find it again. But there was safety in Chris’s arm around her shoulders, and the tears gradually began to feel welcome. Cleansing. She no longer struggled to hold them in. She no longer bothered to wipe at them with the back of her hand. They fell like raindrops on the plastic-covered photographs of the album as Chris turned the pages.

Her child’s eyes were ruined. If he were ever to be out on the street, out in public, people would stare at him. Children would be frightened by him. They would ask their parents what had happened to that little boy. They would have nightmares that they themselves might wake up one morning with their own blue or green or brown eyes turned the sightless color of an overcast sky.

And yet there was such beauty in him. By the third or fourth page, she no longer noticed the milky eyes, but rather the thick dark lashes, the perfect, pouting mouth. “I’ve missed out on so much,” she said.

“I’m sorry.” The terrible wrenching tone of his voice told her that he misunderstood. He thought she was referring to what she’d missed out on by not having a healthy child.

“No,” she said. “I’ve missed
him
. Dustin. I had him for just a few hours. A few days. They seemed so… magical. But then I turned my back on him. Jeff was right. I—”

“You were sick,” Chris interrupted her.

She shook her head, a sense of conviction growing inside her. “I’m not sick anymore,” she said. “Can we go see him?”

He didn’t bother to mask his look of surprise. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“Now?”

He smiled. “It’s a little late. How about tomorrow?”