Fire and Rain (11 page)

She felt the sharp unexpected sting of tears. “No. I can’t do that. I’m settled in here.”

“Don’t be a lunatic, Mia. You can’t pass up an opportunity like this. They want to use your work in their bloody brochure, for Christ’s sake.”

“Could you set it up for me? I know that’s asking a lot, but…” She hesitated, biting her lower lip. “Glen, I just don’t want to see you. I don’t want to see Laura, either. I’m doing all right here. Please, Glen. Will you do it for me?”

He sighed. “Which pieces do you want?”

“You pick,” she said, and she hung up the phone before he could say anything more.

IT WAS PAST SIX
when she arrived at the warehouse that evening, and Rick looked surprised to see her when he opened the door.

“I couldn’t make it at noon,” she said. “Is now okay?”

“Hey, anytime’s okay with me, Mia.” He lifted Eureka off the floor and draped her over his shoulder like a fluffy white boa as they walked to the rear of the building.

It was almost cool in the warehouse. Jeff was standing on a chair set against the rear wall, working with the window fan.

“Jeff fixed the fans so we can bring the cool air in at night and blow out the hot during the day,” Rick said.

Jeff stepped off the chair, glancing at her as he sat down on the edge of the long table. He lifted a stack of papers onto his thigh. “Can’t stay away, huh?” he said. He was wearing a blue shirt, unbuttoned, but still covering all she had planned to concentrate on tonight. She was disappointed.

“I’m going to need a couple more rolls,” she said. “It would be different if I just took them of you in one pose, the way I did with Henry. But here you’re moving around and it’s more difficult. Plus, I figured I should try a different speed film tonight.” She was rambling, rather defensively, and he wasn’t interested. He nodded at her and returned his concentration to the stack of papers, frowning, already lost in his work.

“We’re in the middle of a problem here,” Rick explained.

“I won’t disturb you.” She sat down on one of the desks to change lenses.

Jeff’s eyes were lowered in nearly every one of the shots she had taken the day before, but she didn’t feel she could ask him to raise his head. She was afraid of wearing out her welcome.

“No way around it,” Jeff said to Rick. “These numbers won’t work with this size trans-hydrator. Either we have to double the size, or double the amount we use. How big did you say that avocado grove by the gully is?”

“Ten acres,” Rick said. “Maybe twelve.”

Jeff walked over to a map they had tacked to the back of a bookcase. He rubbed his chin as he studied it.

“Jeff?” she said.

“Hmm?” He didn’t turn to look at her.

“I’m sorry to ask this, but—”

“You apologize a lot, Mia, are you aware of that?” he asked, his eyes still fixed on the map. He traced a line with his finger across part of Valle Rosa.

“I… no, I didn’t realize that. I’m sor—I mean, I was wondering if you would mind taking off your shirt.”

Rick’s head shot up, but still Jeff didn’t look at her, although there was the faintest suggestion of a smile on his lips. “I thought you were just into heads these days,” he said.

“Well, yes, I was. But I’ve changed my mind.” She felt the heat creeping up her neck to her face.

Jeff slipped a yellow-headed pin into the map. “That blush must be a terrible liability, Mia.”

How did he know she was blushing?

“I’m used to working with nude models,” she said. “I mean, it’s no huge deal to me. If you’d rather not, it’s fine.”

He turned to face her, the near smile warming the cool lock of his eyes. “It’s chilly in here tonight,” he said. “You’ll have to come back during the day when it’s warmer.”

She nodded. “All right.”

Jeff sat down again and took a long pull on a bottle of birch beer while she set about changing to another roll of film. Her hands were shaking, and she felt perspiration on her back. She would keep her idiotic mouth shut from now on.

She focused then on his hands, using the zoom, not daring to get too close. His hands were slender and dark, dusted with golden-brown hair, the nails clean and smooth. A second sculpture, she thought. It had been a long time since she’d done hands.

He stood up suddenly, and she lowered the camera. “Be back in a second,” he said, more to Rick than to her. He walked through the maze of furniture toward the side of the building, and she gave Rick a questioning look.

“The can,” he said.

“Oh.”

Rick returned his attention to the keyboard, and Mia sat still, listening to the soft clicking of the keys against the background of humming fans.

“Oh no!” Rick said suddenly. “Oh shit” He grabbed his head with his hands, and looked up at Mia. “I went to save the data and I pushed the wrong key,” he was nearly whispering. “I lost everything he was working on this afternoon. He’ll kill me.”

“With one key?” She leaned toward him, whispering too. “Is there any way to get it back?”

He shook his head and stared at the screen. “It’s totally gone. I don’t believe I did that. Oh, shit, man. I’m going to leave and you can tell him,” he said, and she hoped he was joking.

They heard Jeff’s footsteps returning across the concrete floor, and Rick looked at her with a resigned sort of panic in his eyes. Mia tensed as Jeff sat down on the table again.

“Jeff,” Rick shook his head. “I’m sorry, man, I really blew it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I, like, created a catastrophe. I lost the sub-area data.”

Jeff’s eyes widened. She needed a shot of his eyes like that, but was too paralyzed to snap a picture. “All of it?” he asked.

Rick threw up his hands. “I just… I hit the wrong key.”

Jeff walked around behind Rick to study the computer screen. He rested his hands on the younger man’s shoulders.

“This is not a catastrophe,” he said, studying the screen with narrowed eyes. “Catastrophes are when farmers lose everything they’ve worked for all their lives because there’s no rain, or when little kids die in fires nobody can put out.”

Mia thought she saw tears in Rick’s eyes, and she lowered her own eyes to her camera.

“Let me sit here,” Jeff said.

Rick moved, and Jeff quickly took his seat, pressing a few keys on the keyboard. When he paused to study the screen, lips pursed together, Mia lifted her camera to get a shot of his eyes. Through her lens, they looked very tired.

“You’ll have to create it all over again,” Rick said.

“There are worse things I’ve had to do in my life.” Jeff frowned at the screen. There was a crease between his eyebrows, a few lines at the corner of each eye. Mia snapped her shutter. She would never be able to settle on one expression for him.

Jeff pressed another key and sat back, smiling. “Look.” He pointed to the screen and Rick broke into a grin.

“You got it back! I don’t believe it. How the hell did you do that?”

“The data was still in there. It only needed some coaxing. I’ll write down what I did so if it ever happens again you can take care of it yourself.”

Rick sank into the other chair. “I’m drained, man. I was about to find a bridge to jump off.”

“Hey.” Jeff turned to grasp Rick’s arm and give it a shake. “Don’t talk like that,” he said, with a seriousness that left Rick speechless. “Don’t even joke about it, okay? Nothing in your life is ever going to be that bad.”

THE CLOSEST ONE-HOUR
developing service was thirty miles away, but Mia didn’t think twice about making the drive. She ate dinner at a sterile, family-style restaurant next door to the shop while she waited for the prints.

She barely managed to make it to her car before ripping open the packages and pulling out the photographs. Studying them in the overhead light of her car, she tore through them with what she refused to admit to herself was more than an artist’s zeal. In an instant she knew the pose she wanted. He was standing up, his blue shirt open a few inches, a stack of papers in his hand. His eyes were raised upward to look at the map, and a few lines were carved deeply into his forehead. He looked tired. Troubled. He looked
afraid
. She hadn’t noticed that before, but it was unmistakable. Afraid of what? That he would fail in this? She would leave out the stack of papers. Open the shirt wider. And she would give him a background, a context. A bas-relief of a window. He would look out the window, one hand on the sill, troubled by whatever it was he saw out there.

The photographs she had of him without the shirt were excellent. Perfect. No reason—or excuse—to make a nuisance of herself at the warehouse again. Fine. She would get started on this the following night.

MIA PULLED INTO SUGARBUSH
at nine-thirty. Carmen’s Volvo was there, and Chris’s Oldsmobile, but Jeff wasn’t yet home. She pictured him and Rick still hunched over their endless sheets of numbers, and wondered if Carmen had said anything about him on the news that evening.

Under the good light in her kitchen, she studied the prints again, pulling out those she would use to guide her in the sculpture, piling the others separately. Jeff still hadn’t gotten home by the time she went to bed. She opened her shade so that if she lay close to the edge of her bed, she could see his cottage. She didn’t close her eyes. One lone coyote started his imploring howl, and she pulled her blanket tighter around her in the darkness, remembering Glen’s phone call. For the first time since moving to Valle Rosa, she felt alone. Lonely. Ironic that having two people living closer to her only seemed to make her loneliness more apparent.

Was Jeff lonely? Was he married? Did he have a lover somewhere?

What if he came over when he got home? Maybe she should leave a light on in the living room to let him know she was still up.
Do you know how good you are?
They could talk about her sculpting. She could make him a cup of tea. He’d looked so tired at seven. By now he’d be exhausted. She could rub his shoulders.

The fantasy was unexpected, unsolicited. Completely unwanted, and yet tenacious. She pushed it from her mind, only to have it sneak in again when she let her thoughts wander.

All right, so he’d stop over. He’d walk into her living room, lean wearily against the wall. He wouldn’t talk much. He’d just be a walking need. “I’m sick of being alone,” he’d say, “And you looked pretty good to me tonight in the warehouse.”

No
. He didn’t talk that way. And he hadn’t really looked at her at all in the warehouse. He’d more or less simply tolerated her presence. She might as well have been snapping pictures of the furniture for all he’d responded to her.

So he wouldn’t say much. Perhaps he would say nothing at all. He’d reach for her, hold her. A long embrace fed by exhaustion and the need to touch another human being.

That thought alone brought tears to Mia’s eyes. Just to hold someone. To have someone hold her. It had been so long.

The coyote bayed again, miserably, and was answered by no one. Mia brushed tears from her cheeks with her fingertips.

He would hold her, and then, not thinking, he’d kiss her. The kiss would be a little hard, a little desperate. She would feel the day’s growth of beard on her cheeks and chin. She would open her mouth for him—she wouldn’t be able to stop herself. And then…

And then what? There was no place for the fantasy to go but up in smoke.

She climbed out of bed, cursing herself, cursing her crazy imagination. She pulled the shades, blocking out Jeff’s cottage, and stomped into the living room, where she sat on the floor and began slapping clay onto the board she would use for the bas-relief of the window. She kneaded the red clay, crammed her fingers into it, pounded it, and then, suddenly, stilled her hands to listen.

He was walking across Sugarbush. She heard him take a step onto the porch of his cottage. Then the footsteps started again, this time approaching her own cottage. She froze, her fingers in the clay.

He knocked at her door. “Mia?”

She was in her yellow cotton nightshirt, and her hands were caked with clay. She wiped them quickly on a rag and opened the door.

There were gray circles under his eyes. “It’s after midnight and I saw your light was still on,” he said. “Just wanted to be sure you’re okay.” He noticed the clay stains on her hands and shook his head with his tired half-smile. “You’re driven, aren’t you? When do you sleep?”

“You’re a fine one to talk.”

“Mmm,” he said. “Right. Your neck’s bothering you, huh?”

She started to shake her head no, but then realized she was holding her neck with her left hand as a way to keep her arm strategically placed over her the flat left plane of her chest. “A little,” she said.

“Shouldn’t work down there on the floor.”

“You’re probably right.” She thought about the cup of tea, the desperate embrace, the kiss that would leave her nowhere to go.

“Well, ‘night,” he said, turning.

“Thanks for stopping by,” she said.

She closed the door softly, then walked into her bedroom and sat down on the floor by the window to watch him walk back to his own cottage. The coyote struck up his howling again, this time joined by a host of his friends, and Jeff looked out to the canyon before opening his cottage door and closing himself inside for the night. The lights flicked on in his cottage, and he walked past one of the windows. She raised her right hand to her lips. Her fingers smelled of clay, of earth. Closing her eyes, she let her hand trace a line over her cheeks, her chin, her throat, let it drift to her right breast, cupping its light weight in her palm.

She hadn’t counted on him. She hadn’t counted on her neediness. And she hadn’t counted on the traitorous stirrings of a body she had tried to put in cold storage.

CHRIS STOOD ON THE
rim of the canyon, two miles from Sugarbush, looking down at what was left of the small neighborhood in which he’d grown up. The five houses had been leveled, except for their chimneys, which rose Stonehenge-like from the charred rubble, and the refrigerators and stoves, hulking and black. The manzanita trees which had graced this little valley were nothing more than eerie black skeletons against the red sky. The air hurt to breathe, and he tied his handkerchief over his nose and mouth.