Fire and Rain

by Diane Chamberlain

  Dennis was grinning at her by the time she finished her report.

  “You’re leading up to something, aren’t you?” he asked, walking with her toward the exit of the building.

  She shrugged as though she knew the answer but planned to keep it to herself a while longer.

  “What is it?” Dennis pressed her. “What’s the old man in the slammer for? Organized crime? Murder? Rape? Drugs? And what’s Cabrio’s game? He’s dealing, right? Probably the ringleader of a—”

  “You know everything I know,” Carmen interrupted him, loving her sudden power. If only she hadn’t had to stoop so low to get it.

  IT WAS DARK AS she drove along the narrow road above the canyon on her way to Sugarbush after leaving News Nine. An occasional flash of lightning split the sky, and she remembered Kent Reed telling her that Jeff might give Valle Rosa a few bolts of lightning, but no rain.

  “Well, Mr. Reed,” she said out loud, turning up the speed on her windshield wipers, “you were wrong.”

  She was tired, but satisfied. As she drove past the reservoir, she tried to see how much it had filled in the last couple of days. But in the darkness it was nothing more than a black gaping hole in the earth, and she quickly returned her eyes to the road.

  Pulling into the driveway at Sugarbush, she noticed lights burning in the second story of the adobe—in the bedroom and bathroom. Chris was there, working on the plumbing. Her first reaction was anger—he knew she’d be getting home around this time. He was supposed to be out of the house. But the anger faded as quickly as it had come. In its place, she felt a sense of comfort. She remembered the feeling from long ago, the small, simple joy at the knowledge that he was home, that in a few minutes she could talk to him.

  Despite the occasional flashes of lightning, the rain wasn’t heavy, and she didn’t bother with her umbrella as she got out of the car. She took her suitcase from the trunk and walked through the darkness toward the adobe, so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t see Jeff until he spoke.

  “You stepped way out of bounds, Perez.” He was standing in the shadow of the adobe, leaning against the wall, arms folded across his chest.

  Carmen gasped and stopped walking, drawing her suitcase close to her side. There was something threatening in Jeff’s stance.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, moving toward the house again, but the muscles in her legs had turned rubbery, and her fingers shook as she reached for the door to the kitchen.

  “Are you satisfied yet?” he asked. “Have they started kissing your feet at work?”

  Chris had left the door unlocked. She stepped into the kitchen and tried to pull the door closed quickly behind her, but Jeff caught the knob in his hand and pushed his way past her into the room.

  Carmen let go of her suitcase and drew back against the counter. “Chris?” she called. She wanted to turn on the overhead light, but the switch was on the wall behind Jeff. Still, the flashes of lightning provided enough illumination for her to see the fury in his face.

  “Jefferson’s an old man,” he said. “They’ll pump him for information about me, and they won’t care if they kill him in the process.”

  “I didn’t identify him,” she said. “I was careful. I didn’t even say where—”

  He pounded a fist on the counter next to her and she jumped. She closed her eyes, wondering if she was in danger, if she should call once again for Chris.

  “Just how stupid do you think they are?” Jeff asked. “Look what you’ve managed to find out. How long do you think it will take them to piece together the clues you’ve given them?”

  She opened her eyes again. He loomed above her, tall and forbidding. The streaks of rain on the window were reflected in his cheeks and forehead, like gray, shifting scars. She forced her self to look at him squarely. “Who’s ‘they,’ Jeff? The police? The Drug Enforcement Agency? The FBI? Who exactly are you running from?”

  He shook his head, an incredulous look on his face. “You shove your way in wherever you want, don’t you? Well, this time you went one goddamned step too far.” He paced away from her, then back again. “You got me where I live. Is that what you want? How would you have liked it if, when you slit your wrists, some reporter stuck a microphone in your face and asked you how you were feeling?” He grabbed a juice glass from the counter and thrust it in front of her face. She tried to turn her head away, but he followed her with the glass. “How did you feel about your husband sleeping with a tramp and giving you VD, Ms. Perez?”

  Carmen sucked in her breath. “Stop it!” She tried to push his hand away, but the imaginary microphone remained in front of her lips. The strength in his arm scared her.

  “How does it feel to know your son lives in an institution, that no matter how old he gets, he’ll never be more than an infant in any way that matters?”

  Carmen covered her ears. She felt the rim of the juice glass against her chin and struggled once more in vain to brush it away.

  “What’s it like to turn your back on your own kid?” Jeff asked. “Your own little—”

  “That’s enough, Jeff.” Chris appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, and Jeff was immediately silent. He stared at Chris for an instant, then slowly lowered the juice glass to his side.

  Carmen dropped into one of the kitchen chairs, her hands shaking as she wiped the tears from her cheeks. She looked gratefully at Chris. He walked over to where she sat and put his hands on her shoulders. Still, Jeff wasn’t quite finished.

  Looking at Carmen, he spoke quietly this time, although the tremor in his voice still conveyed his rage. “You have one thing on your mind,” he said. “And that’s Carmen Perez. You don’t care what happens to Chris or your son or anyone else who might be in the way of your rise to the top of the dung heap.”

  “That’s not fair,” she managed to whisper.

  Jeff closed his eyes, and in the dim light she saw him trying to collect himself, control himself. For the first time since she’d known him, he looked weak. Defeated. She had crossed over into territory he’d felt was his, territory he could no longer protect. She felt thoroughly deserving of his wrath. Every ugly word he’d said was true. She had tried to escape from that truth by any means possible. She’d tried killing herself, drugging herself, withdrawing from the world, avoiding Chris, losing herself in her work. But suddenly it was all as unavoidable as his imaginary microphone had been in front of her face.

  The pain welled up inside her, catching in her throat. Chris squeezed her shoulders. There was a strength in his touch she hadn’t felt in years.

  With a sigh, Jeff ran a hand through his dyed, dark hair. “You said Jefferson was sick.” He looked down at her, the anger gone now from his features. “Is it the emphysema?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “He seems quite frail. He misses you. He misses his grandchildren. He… he loves all of you very much.”

  Jeff raised his hand to his eyes. “It’s better he doesn’t see me again. Better he doesn’t know…” He looked at Carmen. “Are they taking decent care of him?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  Jeff walked toward the door, stopping only to touch Chris’s arm. “Sorry,” he said, and Carmen knew as he stepped out into the rain that the apology was for Chris and not for her.

  As the door closed behind Jeff, Chris pulled Carmen to her feet and into his arms. She rested her head on his shoulder.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “How could you have told him the truth about Dustin?”

  “He’s a friend, Carmen. He’s the closest friend I’ve had in a long time.”

  A fresh wave of pain washed over her. “You used to think of me as your friend,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She hesitated before speaking again. “When I was driving up to Sugarbush and saw the lights on, I realized you were here. I was annoyed at first, but then I felt happy. I wanted to see you.”

  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.

  43

  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.