Fire and Rain (27 page)

She lifted her head to look at him. “I want you to kiss me,” she said. “But that’s all. I need to know that’s all you’ll do.”

“All right,” he said, and with that promise in her ears, Mia opened herself to him. Jeff kissed her slowly, deeply, with a tenderness that gave her courage. She rose to her knees and straddled him, and at his look of surprise, said, “I want to touch your face.”

Shutting her eyes, she rested her palms against his cheeks, then slowly glided her fingers over the warm angles of jaw, his nose, his temples. The skin was satin-smooth on his forehead, rough with a day’s growth of beard on his chin.

“Feels good,” he said.

She moved her hands to his shoulders and shifted her weight until she could feel the heat of his erection through the denim of his jeans and the thin fabric of her shorts. She kissed him, pressing her hips against him, and was jolted by the beginning electric promise of an orgasm—an orgasm that would be unexpected and very welcome, but impossible to accept in this miserable, dishonest, hazardous fashion.

Jeff groaned, and kissed her harder, pulling her shirt from her shorts with one quick tug. She panicked as he slipped his hands beneath the shirt, as she felt them glide over the bare skin on her back.

Quickly, she sat up and grabbed his wrists, pressing them down hard on her thighs. “
Now
,” she said. “You really have to go now.”

He watched her through the narrowed eyes of a skeptic as she stood to tuck in her shirt. The room swirled slightly, but for the most part, she felt clear-headed and sober.

Jeff rose from the couch, placed his hands on his hips and stared at her until she had no choice but to raise her eyes to his.

“I’d be wrong to assume you’re merely a tease, wouldn’t I?” he asked.

She winced at the sound of the word. “Yes,” she said, surprised by the huskiness of her voice. “You’d be wrong.”

He leaned over to kiss her lightly on the cheek.

“What you are, Mia, is a liar,” he said. “A kiss is definitely not all you want.”

He lifted his glass and drained the last of the wine before giving her his half-smile and heading for the door.

From the window in her darkened bedroom, she watched him walk back to his cottage, the cat scampering after him in the moonlight, and the memory she’d been fighting much of the day flooded over her.

She’d had a difficult time finding a job after recovering from the mastectomy. Her depression over her loss, and over what she knew to be Glen’s true feelings about her body, must have come through during her interviews. Or maybe the interviewers could see that her enthusiasm would always lay at home with her clay and not at some tiresome desk job. The temporary agency was her last hope. When she showed up for work that first day and was told she wasn’t needed, she wasn’t disappointed. She would go home and go back to bed. Glen would be at his studio, Laura at work. There would be no one to chastise her or try to cheer her up.

She’d been surprised to see their cars in the driveway, but not nearly as surprised as when she walked in the front door. It was like stepping inside a dream. A nightmare. Her sister and Glen were in front of the fireplace, naked, Laura’s legs wrapped high around Glen’s waist as he thrust into her. Mia stood frozen, her hand on the doorknob.

Laura was first to see her.

“Mia!” She pushed Glen away from her and sat up, her perfect breasts glistening in the sunlight. Glen turned to face the door, his erection full and painfully familiar.

Mia spun around and ran out to her car. She drove blindly, with no sense of destination. Glen was behind her, though, in his old Rover. He caught up to her at the first corner and jumped out of his car wearing only his jeans. He was still zipping them up as he climbed into the passenger seat beside her.

“
Bastard
,” she said. “Get out!”

“No, Sunny. Pull over.”

She drove across the intersection and pulled up to the curb but didn’t turn off the ignition. Staring straight ahead of her, she spoke quietly. “Get out of my car, Glen. Leave me alone.”

He leaned over to turn the key in the ignition, and silence filled the car.

“Sunny.” He tried to pull her toward him, to hold her, but she flailed at him with her arms.

“Go to hell!” She pressed herself against the car door, as far from him as she could get. She was surprised she felt no urge to cry. There was far more rage inside her than sorrow. She longed for the satisfaction of hitting him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Laura and I were sort of thrown together, taking care of you.”

She scowled at him. “Please come up with something better than that. That’s so simplistic, it’s insulting.”

“We didn’t intend to fall in love. It simply happened. Sometimes these things are unpredic—”

“Shut up!”

“We wanted to wait until you were strong and well again before we told you.”

“How very considerate of you both.”

Glen was quiet a moment. “I still love you, Sunny,” he said, his voice thick. “But it’s simply not the same as it used to be.”

She swallowed a sarcastic reply. Right now, she needed to deal in the truth. “I repulse you,” she said quietly.

“No.”

“You can’t make love to me, but apparently you have no problem at all making love to my sister.”

She pulled the diamond engagement ring from her finger. He tried to grab it from her, but she opened the car window and threw the ring as far as she could into the road.

“Sunny! You’re bloody crazy!” Glen opened the door and ran into the street to hunt for his precious diamond, and Mia took that opportunity to drive off, knowing that, except to get her clothes and some sculpting supplies, she wouldn’t return to her house again.

She stopped looking at herself in the mirror after that day. This wasn’t her real body, she told herself. It was a shell. A temporary shell.

After the lights flicked off in Jeff’s cottage, she lifted the mirror from the wall above the dresser and rested it against the headboard of her bed, so that as she sat in front of it, she was reflected from waist to chin in the pale moonlight coming through the window. She began unbuttoning her shirt, slowly, the way she thought a man might, the way Jeff might.

Could she tell Jeff? He wasn’t at all like Glen. Maybe he would respond warmly. Not with pity, but compassion. Maybe he could see past the damage in a way that Glen could not.

She slipped the shirt from her shoulders, but found it difficult to look at her image. Even in the hazy moonlight, even wearing a bra, it was obvious that she wasn’t normal. Her right breast was full where it met the bra. The left side of her chest gave her the look of a child dressed in her mother’s underwear. She forced herself to unhook the bra, let it fall.

She pressed the tips of her fingers hard against her lips. It was worse than in her memory. The skin was a smooth, white plane, unbroken by a nipple, but crossed with the pink line of the scar.

Mia lowered the mirror face down on the bed and closed her eyes.

She would take his friendship. Settle for that. She wouldn’t kiss him again or let him hold her or touch her. She wouldn’t take the chance of frightening him away. She couldn’t expect anyone else to love her when she couldn’t even love herself.

THE AVOCADO GROVE COVERED
a little more than two acres on the sloping rim of Cinnamon Canyon. Carmen parked her car on the crest of a hill and got out, shading her eyes to survey the land below her. In the distance, smoke rose above the horizon, the latest in a string of fires burning their way toward Valle Rosa. Last night, the blaze had destroyed six homes and killed a teenaged girl who had apparently slept through the warnings to evacuate. In the middle of the night, Carmen visited the neighborhood with a camera crew. The people looked exhausted. “Don’t know how much more of this we can take,” one woman said into Carmen’s microphone.

Carmen had slept poorly after that midnight outing, haunted by the vision of the fire fighters dragging the charred body of the girl from the ruins of one of the houses, so she had been awake when Jeff started his car in the driveway of the adobe. It wasn’t quite five o’clock. She put on her robe and looked out the bedroom window to see his tail lights disappear around the first curve in the road. Her curiosity wouldn’t allow her to go back to sleep. She got dressed and drove to the warehouse, stopping the car a block away to watch as Jeff and Rick pulled the two flatbed trucks out into the street. She followed them at a distance as they drove to the grove, then used her car phone to call the station, requesting they send a camera crew to this little corner of Cinnamon Canyon as quickly as possible.

Rick had parked his truck at the south end of the grove, closest to where Carmen stood, while Jeff had parked his to the north, a good distance away. The arrangement of the trucks seemed important, and the men had shifted them back and forth on their respective roads in a peculiar
pas de deux
before being satisfied with their resting spots. It wasn’t until Rick got out of the truck that Carmen realized they were communicating with one another by two-way radios. Rick spoke into the little box in his hand, and Jeff waved to him from the other side of the grove.

She wished she had binoculars. From this distance, each truck looked identical. Each carried what appeared to be something like a satellite dish, surrounded by three tall, broad white cylinders. There were several black boxes on the floor of the trucks, boxes which must have had buttons or knobs on them, because Rick and Jeff knelt next to them, pressing or pulling or turning things, talking all the while into the radios in their hands.

Suddenly, Rick turned around, and Carmen knew she’d been spotted. Jeff stood on the flatbed of his truck, one hand on his hip, the other holding the radio. Obviously, he and Rick were discussing her presence. In another minute, Rick jumped off the back of his truck and started walking up the canyon toward her, working his way through the thick, leathery chaparral. She was glad it was Rick she would have to deal with and not Jeff.

The
News Nine
van arrived on the road behind her just as Rick neared the crest. Jake Carney and Toby Wells sauntered lazily out of the van, laughing.

“They only sent two of you?” she asked, disappointed. No one was taking this very seriously.

“Right,” Jake said, opening the rear of the van for his equipment. He stopped to wipe his forehead with a red bandana pulled from his pocket. “Christ, it’s hotter than blazes out here already.”

“Well, come on,” Carmen said. “We’re going to have to try to get closer.”

“You can’t.” Rick skirted a withered scrub oak on the ridge and came to a stop in front of her. He was winded. Sweat matted his blond hair to his forehead. “Jeff says for you to keep your distance.”

“What exactly are you doing?” Carmen asked.

Rick looked across the grove at Jeff, as though wondering how much the older man would want him to say. “It’s an experiment.” He spoke with cautious apprehension, but the boyish excitement in his eyes was unmistakable.

“I’d like the cameras to get a little closer, please,” Carmen said. “We need a better look at the trucks.”

“No,” Rick said with some force in his voice. “You can’t come any closer than this. It’ll interfere, okay? This is delicate stuff.” He started walking back toward the canyon.

“What if one of the cameramen came down on foot?” Carmen called after him.

Rick faced her again with a groan and an exaggerated slump of his shoulders. He said something into the radio, then took a few steps toward her, holding the little box in front of him. “He wants to talk to you,” he said.

She took the device from Rick’s hand and held it to her ear. She looked to the north, where Jeff stood facing her from the truck. “Hello?” she said.

“Do you want to see rain fall over Valle Rosa, Carmen?” Jeff’s voice crackled in her ear.

She thought she could actually
feel
his eyes locking with hers across the expanse of the grove.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then stay right where you are. No closer. All right?”

“All right,” she said, defeated.

Rick took the radio from her hand, and as he made his way back into the canyon, Carmen turned to Jake and Toby.

“We’ll film it from here,” she said.

“Film
what
from here?” Toby asked.

“Typical Valle Rosa footage,” Jake said, sitting down on the crest. “Blue sky, yellow sun, dead avocado trees.” He pulled the red bandana from his pocket again and wiped it across his forehead.

An hour later, Jake and Toby were sprawled on the dusty earth, sweating profusely and drinking orange soda out of cans. Carmen had refused their offers of something to drink, although she was very hot. Her blouse was stuck to her back with sweat; she wished she could roll up the long sleeves. Walking back and forth along the rim of the canyon, she watched as Rick and Jeff fiddled with their equipment, spoke into their radios, and gestured to one another with broad sweeps of their arms.

“Nice little wild goose chase, Carmo,” Jake said, yawning. The van radio sputtered behind them, and Toby slowly got to his feet. He paced back to the van, and a few minutes later came to stand next to Carmen.

“We’re wanted in Escondido,” he said. “Four alarm fire and they—”

“Shh!” Carmen held her hand up to stop him. She raised her chin, turned her head, struggling to hear… what? Something different, something very faint. A high-pitched hum. Soft, but growing louder, so loud that Jake got up off the ground to join them on the ridge, staring in the direction of the trucks.

And then it happened. At first it was a mere hint of gray in the sky over the grove. Carmen thought it was her imagination, but then the gray deepened—and spread. Rick spoke into his radio, and he and Jeff knelt next to their black boxes, pressing buttons, turning knobs, as the blue of the sky between the two trucks gradually gave way to the thickening gray shadow.

“Holy shit,” said Toby.

“Get the cameras!” Carmen ordered, and in a minute the phenomenon was being caught on film. The cloud spread across the sky, slowly, like syrup, its color now an opaque, ominous near-black. There was a churning at its core, a slow-moving, dark tumble of mist, suspended directly above the center of the grove. The churning spread as the ends of the roiling cloud reached toward the trucks, and the grove was blanketed in thick, cool shadow.