Fire and Rain (6 page)

Jeff took the umbrella from him and walked into the kitchen, while Chris, Rick, the two waitresses and the chef watched from the doorway, and the hushed diners held their breath.

“It’s over there.” The young waitress pointed toward the floor near the broad refrigerator.

A small gray mouse scurried a couple of feet along the baseboard, then stopped. Jeff took a step toward it, then slowly opened the umbrella and held it on the floor; curved edge toward the mouse. “Chase it into the umbrella, Rick,” he said.

“What? How the hell am I supposed to do that?” Rick asked, but before he had even finished his sentence, the mouse! darted of its own accord into the umbrella, which Jeff snapped shut.

“Done,” he said, handing the umbrella to Chris.

Chris took the umbrella from him, dumbfounded. Some of the diners broke into applause, which he encouraged by raising the umbrella in the air like a trophy.

Jeff, though, wasn’t smiling. “I’m getting out of here,” he said quietly. Heads turned to follow him as, with a few long strides, he walked out of the restaurant.

Chris watched him go. Jeff was crazy to think he could keep a low profile in Valle Rosa. The town was far too small to absorb him unnoticed. The people in this restaurant would be talking about him over dinner tonight.

He left enough money with Rick to cover their bill and then went out to the parking lot. Jeff was still there, sitting in his black Saab. Chris walked over and set a hand on the open window.

“You’re on, Jeff,” he said. “But this is a very close community. I’m not sure how long you’ll be able to remain anonymous.”

Jeff squinted in the direction of the smoke. “Have they found that kid yet?” he asked. “The one who was missing after the fire last night?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

Jeff glanced down at the umbrella. Chris was leaning on it like a cane. “Mice are attracted to black,” he said.

“What?” Chris looked down at the umbrella himself. “Oh.”

“You can free him over there.” Jeff pointed to the chaparral at the side of the parking lot. “And then you’d better wash out the umbrella. It’ll have mouse excrement in it.”

Chris shrugged. “It’s not worth the bother. I never use it.”

Jeff turned the key in the ignition, then smiled up at him, a full-blown smile. “You will,” he said. “You will.”

THE SCENT OF FIRE
was always in the air. Even in the little Valle Rosa market that Mia frequented after work, the acrid smell hung above the produce and nothing looked very appealing. She selected broccoli, a handful of snow peas, mushrooms and a bag of carrots, all the while hearing Dr. Bella’s words as clearly as if he stood behind her: “The best thing you can do is cut back on fat. Even so, your genes will have the final say.”

This was a form of mental illness, she thought, a compulsion of sorts, that she could no longer shop without hearing his voice. She’d thought it would be hard to give up the burgers, ice cream, and tortilla chips, but it hadn’t been difficult at all. She had simply lost interest in food. When she’d awaken in the mornings, her hip bones formed little hills beneath the sheet. At first, she’d studied the hollows in her cheeks in the bathroom mirror with fascination, but on the one occasion when she’d closed her eyes and run her fingers over her skin, she’d jerked her hands away, horrified to realize her cheeks felt like her mother’s in that year before she’d died. The body that Glen had called an artist’s lure no longer existed.

The drive from the market to Sugarbush along the winding narrow road hadn’t yet lost its enchantment for her, even though sections of the chaparral and the earth beneath it had been blackened, even though the plume of smoke still rose in the distance, and cottony-gray ashes fell like snowflakes on her windshield. The road reached a dizzying height above Cinnamon Canyon, and the enormous granite boulders scattered below took on a neon-yellow glow from the falling sun. Just before the final twist in the road, the Valle Rosa Reservoir came into view, a crater cut deeply into the earth with a shallow pool of vivid blue at its core. Once she’d seen two coyotes drinking at it, and she’d nearly flown off the road and out into space as they stole her attention from her driving.

It was that natural, almost primitive feeling of Valle Rosa she loved best. She’d selected the town from a map. The tiny, black, inviting pinprick appeared to be little more than an hour from San Diego and the medical community on which she was still dependent, but worlds away in terms of peace and isolation. And she had been right in her assessment.

She arrived at Sugarbush as she always did, close to seven, when the sun was quickening its decline in the sky, and the sparse vegetation—the stubby, leathery chaparral, the red-barked manzanita trees and the dry and dying scrub oaks—sent crisp black shadows across the warm earth. A black Saab with Ohio plates was parked where she usually parked, at the edge of the packed dirt by Carmen’s adobe. Jeff Cabrio’s car, no doubt. He would be in the middle cottage, Chris had told her, the cottage between hers and his. She wasn’t to disturb him. “Leave him and his bone structure alone, Mia,” Chris had said, with that glint in his eye that let her know he was, at least in part, teasing. “He’s an eccentric,” he’d added. “We’re going to have to play by his rules.”

The cottage she had chosen for herself was the farthest from the adobe. She’d intentionally sought the seclusion it offered, the sense of having all eight of Sugarbush’s dusty acres practically to herself, although at first the nights had been difficult. The relentless darkness surrounding her cottage had unnerved her, and the late night howling of the coyotes had sent her flying, breathless, from her bed. Now, though, she welcomed the darkness. The coyotes still awakened her, but she could lie in bed, listening to them until the howling faded away.

She had to walk past the other two cottages to get to her own. Chris’s was empty, as she knew it would be. She’d left him on the phone, a stack of paperwork on the desk in front of him.

She gave the second cottage wide berth, but as she rounded its far corner, she saw Jeff standing by the back steps above the canyon. He was staring at something on the ground, a black glove perhaps, or a rag. He called her over with a wave of his hand.

Clutching the bag of groceries to her chest, she walked toward him, realizing as she did so that the thing on the ground wasn’t a glove at all but a tarantula. She stopped in her tracks.

“Good,” he said. “By your reaction I assume this isn’t an everyday occurrence.”

She shook her head. “The first I’ve seen out here.”

Jeff looked back at the enormous furred black spider. “I know they’re not dangerous, but I still wouldn’t want to share my house with a family of them.”

“No.”

He raised his eyebrows toward her. The slant of the sun turned his face into a vivid array of light and shadow, the angles sharp and clear. “Mia, right?” he asked.

She nodded. “And you’re Jeff.” She stared at him a moment longer, trying to commit the play of light on his face to memory. Then she lowered her gaze into the bag she was holding as though it might offer her a clue as to what to say next. “I’ve been ordered not to talk to you,” she said, returning her eyes to his, “other than ‘hello, have a nice day.’”

“Ah.” He stood up straighter, slipping his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “That’s probably wise.”

“Chris said you’d want to know they found the little boy.”

“And…?”

“And he’s fine. Apparently he was in his yard when he saw the fire coming, and he got scared and ran off into the canyon. One of the dogs found him, safe and sound.”

He nearly smiled. “That’s good. That’s really good. It’s been bothering me.”

She shifted her bag of groceries to her other hip, glanced inside it again at the broccoli. “Well, Jeff.” She shrugged. “Have a nice day.”

“You do the same, Mia.”

Like the other cottages, hers stood on the edge of the canyon, nestled between two boulders nearly as large as the structure itself. Once inside, she dropped the bag on the kitchen counter and grabbed her pad and charcoal to quickly sketch Jeff’s face as it had looked moments earlier. She rested the rough drawing against the backsplash, glancing at it from time to time as she cut the vegetables and put them on to steam.

She was scooping cooked rice into a bowl when she looked out the kitchen window to see her new neighbor crouching in the dust, watching the tarantula walk off into the scrubby growth behind his cottage. Then he stood again to study the dying leaves of the sugarbush tree at the rim of the canyon.

By the time Mia returned her attention to the stove, the green of the broccoli had faded and the slices of carrots broke apart when she pierced them with a fork. She spooned them onto the rice, then looked outside again to see that Jeff had disappeared.

She carried her bowl of rice and vegetables into the small living room where she sat on the sofa. It, and the coffee table on which she kept her clay and supplies, were the only pieces of furniture she hadn’t moved into the dining room, already cramped with its old wicker table and chairs, in order to give her more work space in the living room. The aging color television that had come with the cottage rested in the corner of the room. Mia liked to watch the news while she ate, before settling down with her clay for the evening. It was Wednesday, and Carmen would be on with her
North County Report
.

Carmen was wonderful to look at, and each time Mia saw her she thought of how challenging it would be to sculpt her, to capture the exact blend of strength and softness that marked her features. Carmen intimidated her, though. Mia felt young around her. Young and plain and unsophisticated. She could never ask her to pose.

The day that Mia had come to look at the cottage, she’d asked Carmen if they had met before; the older woman looked very familiar, but Mia couldn’t place her. Carmen told her about
San Diego Sunrise,
and Mia immediately remembered her as the acerbic host of that early morning show. She had often wondered why people agreed to appear on
Sunrise
. Carmen had been a woman in total control, like a champion prizefighter taking on challenger after challenger and thrashing each of them in turn. Her guests never stood a chance.

Carmen seemed like a different woman that day, though, as she showed Mia the cottage and the grounds. The snappy, daring, feisty side of her didn’t exist, and she seemed intent on Mia’s comfort. She told her about the rules governing their water usage, and about covering her food to protect it from the mice. She told her about the illegal aliens—’undocumented workers,’ she called them—who lived in makeshift camps in the canyon. “You’ll see them on the streets of town in the morning, looking for work, but in the evening they disappear back into the canyons. You should know that they’re there, but they won’t bother you.”

Mia had asked many questions to keep her talking about Sugarbush or Valle Rosa or the drought, not wanting to give her new landlady a chance to ask her anything about herself.

When Carmen appeared on the television screen, Mia turned up the volume. Carmen sat next to the anchor, Bill Jackson, whose hair always looked as if it had been painted onto his scalp with black shoe polish. Once Carmen was on, though, the camera was hers, and Mia couldn’t help breaking into a smile of admiration at seeing that confident, almost regal, bearing. Behind Carmen, footage of the Cinnamon Canyon fire ran while she spoke.

“Today,” Carmen said, “Valle Rosa’s acting mayor, former Padre pitching ace, Christopher Garrett, who has spent his first two months in office battling Valle Rosa’s serious water problems, announced he is hiring an environmental engineer, Jeff Cabrio. Cabrio claims he can make rain fall over Valle Rosa.” Carmen’s voice, marked by a delicate, almost imperceptible, Spanish accent, had taken on a slight cynical edge. A smile played at the corners of her lips, an almost conspiratorial smile, as though she wanted her viewers to know she thought Chris was as crazy as they did.

“In response to questions as to how he intends to pay for Cabrio’s service, Mayor Garrett said he would be shifting funds earmarked for road improvement into the fund for water resources, saying that ‘water is a more pressing issue right now.’ There’s been no word as of yet on how the transportation board in Valle Rosa is reacting to this news. On Monday, Mayor Garrett lost his own home to the Cinnamon Canyon fire.”

The camera pulled back from Carmen to add Bill Jackson and his patent leather hair to the picture. “Sounds like that’s not all he lost,” Jackson said with a chuckle, and Mia winced at the implication. Until this moment it hadn’t struck her as unreasonable that Chris would hire Jeff Cabrio to make it rain. Like a true charismatic, Jeff had walked into the office and had them believing. Listening to the turn of events from Carmen’s mouth, though, Chris’s decision seemed ludicrous. Mia glanced out the window toward Jeff’s cottage, wondering if he was watching the news himself.

When she had finished eating, she turned off the television, changed into shorts and a baggy T-shirt, and settled down on the floor in front of the piece on which she was working. It was the head of a man, and it rested on an old orange crate. Leaning against the coffee table was a large bulletin board covered with photographs, mostly five-by-sevens, of a smiling but bedraggled middle-aged man. As she carefully unwrapped the plastic from the bust, she glanced back and forth between it and the pictures, her smile growing. Henry was perfect. Nearly finished. She was taking a ridiculous length of time with this piece, and she couldn’t have said why. She’d destroyed and rebuilt his perfectly fine left ear a half dozen times.

She’d been walking in downtown San Diego with Glen, both of them ready for their next project, both of them searching for a lure. They’d spotted Henry at the same moment, plucking him from the crowd with their eyes, catching their breath in the recognition that he was perfect.

“He’s mine!” Mia called it first. Glen relented after a few hostile minutes there on the sidewalk, while Mia kept her eye on their scruffy find to make sure he didn’t disappear. They were often drawn to the same subjects. “The price I pay for having taught you all I know,” Glen had said, more than once.