Fire and Rain (34 page)

Jeff was quiet. In the silence, Chris became aware of his own exhaustion. He was drained. Drained and very sad.

Finally, Jeff shifted on the bench, leaning forward, his forearms across the top of his thighs. He shook his head slowly. “Well, if you’d asked me to fabricate the worst possible explanation of why Carmen is the way she is, I couldn’t even have come close. God, what a nightmare.”

Chris leaned toward him. “Do you see why Carmen’s feistiness now pleases me so much? I did speak to her about leaving you alone, but she’s going to do what she thinks she has to do. And I have to admit, my loyalties are divided. It’s so good to see her going after a story again. It’s a sign she’s getting better. This past year she’s been free of all drugs—she doesn’t even drink. She’s been getting some exercise. She’s even trying to get her garden growing again. Going back to work was the final step, and she was devastated to find out they weren’t waiting with baited breath for her to get there.” He thought back to her phone call the other day, when she’d asked him questions about Dustin. “I’m worried about her. She’s still shaky. She’s just trying to keep her head above water. Maybe she’s not going about it exactly the right way, but it’s the only way she knows how, and it’s working for her. I only wish it wasn’t at your expense.”

Jeff sighed and stood up, shaking his head with a sad half-smile. “Come on,” he said. “I want to meet your son.”

The air conditioning inside the Children’s Home was cool and welcoming.

“I’m sorry, Chris,” Tina said, when she met them at the nurses’ station. “We were hoping to get him quieted down before you got here, but he’s been inconsolable today. We’ve tried everything.”

Chris nodded, and held the hall door open for Jeff to pass through ahead of him.

“What is she talking about?” Jeff asked, as they walked down the long corridor.

“Crying. Sometimes he cries, and no matter what you do, he won’t stop. You change him, hold him, sit him in his bean bag chair, sing to him, and nothing makes a difference.”

Three doors from Dustin’s room, they could already hear the little boy’s sobs.

Dustin was propped up in his bed, arms tight to his sides, chin lowered to his chest. His whole body shook with his crying, and his blue T-shirt had two dark, wet patches down his chest from his tears.

Chris pulled a chair close to the bed and leaned forward to hug Dustin’s unresponsive body. “What’s the problem, Dusty?” he asked.

Jeff stood at the head of the bed. “If I’d waited until I’d seen him, I wouldn’t have needed to ask if Carmen was his mother, would I?” He ran one hand over Dustin’s thick, dark hair. “He’s a gorgeous kid,” he said. “Can he see anything at all?” He held his hand in front of Dustin’s face. “Shadows? Light?”

Chris shook his head.

“Can he hear anything? Certain tones? Can he be startled by sound?”

“No.”

Jeff moved to the side of the bed and lifted Dustin’s small, well-formed hand and placed it palm down on his own. “Touch,” he said. “That’s all he has.”

Chris watched as Jeff slowly reached up to cup Dustin’s face with his hands. Dustin looked surprised. The crying stopped, as Jeff smoothly, methodically, wiped the tears from the little boy’s cheeks with his thumbs. Chris held his breath, and for the first time in over four years, felt a quickening of hope. This was a man who could work magic, a man who could work miracles. He leaned away from Jeff and his son. Leaned away and watched, but as suddenly as Dustin’s tears had stopped, they started again, spilling over Jeff’s thumbs, over the back of his hands. Jeff lowered his hands to the boy’s shoulders, let them slip down the rigid little arms. He cupped Dustin’s hands in his own, squeezed them, stroked them, and then finally let go.

“There are some things,” he said, “that can never be made right.”

Chris said nothing. His disappointment was intense, although he knew the nameless stab of hope he’d felt had been unrealistic and unfounded. He stood up, bending over to lift his son into his arms, and settled down in the rocker. Shutting his eyes, he drew Dustin’s head to his chin and began to sing. “Tell me why the stars do shine. Tell me why the ivy twine.”

He finished the song, and only then, only when Dustin began his grunting verbal protests to make him start again, did he realize the little boy had stopped crying. Chris opened his eyes and looked at Jeff, who was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, smiling.

Chris hugged Dustin close to him, ignoring the wired rigidity in the little body. “Can we stay a while longer?” he asked Jeff. “Do you mind?”

Jeff shook his head. “We can stay all day if you like.”

THEY WERE NEARLY BACK
to Sugarbush when Chris began thinking about the ease with which Jeff had touched Dustin.

“Do you have any children?” he asked.

Jeff turned his head to look out the window as if Chris hadn’t spoken, and Chris wished he could take the question back. He’d broken the cardinal rule Jeff had set in place between them.

Neither of them spoke as Chris drove into the parking area next to the adobe. They got out of the car, and he opened the back door.

Jeff lifted the bags of supplies into his arms, but made no move to leave. “I need to ask you something… awkward,” he said.

Chris looked at him in surprise. He couldn’t imagine anything more awkward to discuss than the story he had told Jeff that afternoon. “Shoot,” he said.

Jeff shifted the bags in his arms. “How did you live with yourself?” he asked, then added quickly. “I’m not trying to be flip. I really need to know how you got up every morning without wanting to run away.”

Chris knew he was being complimented. He had done something this remarkable man didn’t see himself capable of doing.

“I
did
want to run away,” he answered honestly, then smiled, thinking of how he longed for the mayoral election in November. “Sometimes I still do.”

“Well.” Jeff didn’t look satisfied with the answer, but he seemed disinclined to press for more. “Thanks for the ride,” he said.

“Right,” Chris said. “Glad you came with me.”

Jeff started toward the cottages, but turned before he reached the edge of the parking area.

“Chris?”

Chris closed the car door and shaded his eyes to look at him.

“I had three children,” Jeff said. “Perfectly healthy, whole children. But I lost them all.” He turned away again, and as he walked toward the cottages, Chris saw for the first time the laborious world-weary set of his gait.

ALTHOUGH IT WAS SATURDAY
, Mia went into the office early in the morning. She had gotten little work accomplished that week and thought she should take advantage of the fact that both Jeff and Chris were in San Diego and she’d be able to work undisturbed by either of them. Her desk was piled high with the letters Jeff’s experiment had inspired. As she inserted a piece of paper into the typewriter to respond to the first letter, however, she knew her concentration would be no better today than it had been during the week. No matter how she tried to shift her thoughts to the task at hand, they slipped back again and again to Jeff and the magical turn her life seemed to have taken.

Even Chris was treating her with a new awareness, a new affection. He seemed pleased by her link to Jeff. “I know you don’t need any lectures, Mia,” he said, in what sounded like a fatherly tone, “but be careful, okay?” He said it with such genuine worry that she felt herself tearing up at his concern.

“Maybe you can make him stay?” she had asked him, hoping Chris knew something about Jeff’s plans which she did not.

“No one can make him do anything,” he’d replied, and she knew he was absolutely right.

The week since she and Jeff had become lovers had been one of the best in her life—at least when she could prevent herself from thinking into the treacherous future. Jeff made it easy for her. He had stopped talking about leaving and in that way had fed her fantasy that he might not.

Not only had her work at the office suffered, but she’d gotten nothing done on the sculpture or the fountain either. Her evenings were spent with Jeff, her nights in his bed or hers. It looked as if the year she had planned to be alone and sexless might turn out to be quite the opposite. “You’ve been sublimating your sexual needs in your clay,” he’d said to her the other night. “Sublimate them in me instead. Really, it’s all right. I volunteer to take them on.”

He cooked her pasta with roasted vegetables and bought heavy whole grain breads for her. “You’re all bones, girl,” he’d say, watching her eat. He told her regularly, with a twist in his voice each time, that he loved her. He told her often enough that she was beginning to believe him. And yet, no matter how close she got to him, there was always a part of him she couldn’t touch.

She left the office around two. Back at Sugarbush, she did Jeff’s laundry as well as her own in Carmen’s washer and dryer. She had folded his clean T-shirts and was slipping them into his dresser drawer when her fingers caught on something hard. She drew it out from the back of the drawer and set it on the dresser. It was a jewelry box, a black ring box. She opened the lid slowly to reveal a worn gold band. She took the ring out of the box and held it in her palm. It was heavy. Plain. The gold was scratched in a few places. She slipped it on her finger and it hung loosely, like a gold bangle bracelet might hang from her wrist. It had to be his. Either he was married now, or he had been married, or… or what? Could she ask him? Who was the woman? Was she waiting for him? Was she the reason he would have to leave Valle Rosa? Leave her?

A sudden flame of jealousy burned inside her, and it hadn’t subsided by the time Jeff returned from San Diego late that afternoon. She was sitting in her living room, her hands slipping idly over the clay she would use for the fountain, when he walked in the front door. He was wearing the red-and-brown Hawaiian shirt he’d had on that first day in Chris’s office. All she’d wanted from him that day was a chance to sculpt a lure. He had given her far more than that.

He was carrying a box wrapped in green paper. If he said hello, she didn’t hear him. As he sat down on her sofa, she felt a distance slip between them that she hadn’t known this past week.

He let out a long sigh, resting his head against the back of the couch, and closed his eyes.

“Jeff?” she asked, “are you all right?”

“Hmm?” He opened his eyes to look at her. “Yes. I’m fine.” His smile was weak and distracted, and she wasn’t reassured. “Oh.” He suddenly leaned forward to rest the box on the coffee table. “This is for you.”

She covered the clay and went into the kitchen to wash her hands. Back in the living room, she sat next to him on the sofa, careful to leave a space between them. He wanted that distance, she thought. He barely seemed to be in the room with her at all.

She unwrapped the box. Inside, was a jade green satin chemise. She lifted it up by the delicate shoulder straps.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, although she felt the color creeping into her cheeks. The chemise was blatantly sexy. She would look ridiculous in it right now.

“I thought the green would be good on you.”

“I love it. Thank you.” She lowered it back into the box in a pile of green satin.

Jeff grew quiet again, his head resting against the back of the sofa, his eyes staring into space.

“Did you get what you needed in San Diego?” she asked.

He smiled again, this time ruefully. “I got more than I needed, thank you.”

“What do you mean?”

He shook his head. “Nothing, really.” He stood up and walked toward the door. “I’m afraid I’ve got some work to do, Mia. I’ve spent the whole day riding all over the county. Have to make up for it now.”

She frowned at him. “What about dinner? I could make us something.”

“What?” He looked puzzled by the question. “Oh. No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”

She couldn’t bring herself to ask if she would see him at all that night. She couldn’t ask him if, for the first time in a week, they would be sleeping separately. She was afraid to hear his answers.

IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT
, and she was in bed, crying softly, when she heard him open the door to her living room. She quickly dried her eyes in the darkness, and she lay still as he undressed and slipped into the bed next to her. He put his arms around her, rested his head in the crook of her shoulder, and she could feel the exhaustion in his body. He would want to sleep, not talk, not make love. That was all right. He was here.

“I was afraid you didn’t want to sleep with me tonight,” she whispered, and he whispered something in return, something muffled inaudibly by her shoulder, but which she thought sounded very much like “I love you.”

She woke up sometime during the night. Her room was dark and still, but the coyotes were howling so loudly she thought they must be just outside her window. She rolled over to reach for Jeff, but her hand felt only the empty expanse of sheet next to her.

She got out of bed, pulling on her robe, and walked through the cottage. He wasn’t in the bathroom, and the living room was dark except for the small, white squares of moonlight thrown across the carpet from the windows. The front door was open, though. She walked out onto the porch.

He was sitting on the steps, and he didn’t even glance at her when she sat down next to him. The coyotes howled from the canyon, and she shivered. Jeff’s face was turned away from her, but she could see the grim set of his jaw, and on his cheek, the shine of perspiration. Or perhaps, tears.

She tentatively put her arm around him, resting her cheek against his shoulder. “Do you want to talk?”

She felt him shake his head.

“No,” he said, but he reached for her arm and clutched the sleeve of her robe in his fist. She relaxed. He wanted her there.

The coyotes howled again, and when they had finished he spoke.

“It was a dream,” he said. “A nightmare. I saw the faces of those children who died in the fire. I saw them burning. I could hear them crying. Screaming.”

“The coyotes,” she said.

“Maybe. Yes, maybe that’s what made me dream it.”