Fire and Rain (39 page)

There were a few people milling around the back of the warehouse, but they said nothing to her as she let herself in the door. She quickly locked it again behind her and started up the stairs to the roof.

He was studying one of the pieces of equipment from underneath a huge black umbrella, but he turned sharply when she stepped through the trap door onto the roof. The fear in his face was quickly replaced by a smile as she walked toward him, and he reached out to pull her into a quick, wet hug.

“How’d I do?” he asked.

“I’d say you showed them.” She had to raise her voice to be heard above the furious pounding of the rain. It sounded like fireworks exploding on the umbrella. “It’s positively exhilarating.” From the roof she could see the sunlit horizon in every direction, and she turned in a circle to take it all in. “But spooky.”

Jeff looked at the horizon himself. “Right. It even gives me the creeps.”

She stepped beneath his umbrella again. “I’ve come to spirit you away,” she said. “You’ve got to get out of here.” She looked at the equipment. “Can you leave? My car’s in back. I’ll take you up to the mountains for the weekend.”

He shook his head. “I can’t possibly leave with this going on.” He waved an arm through the rain-filled air.

“Jeff, the vultures are not going to leave you alone.”

He stared at her for a minute, and she knew he was listening to the chanting of the crowd down on the street. “All right,” he said finally. “Give me a few more minutes here.”

She watched as he adjusted some of the buttons and dials on the equipment. Then he followed her down into the building, where he wrote a long, long note to Rick. “He can handle this for a couple of days, I guess. I hope.”

Only a few people saw him get into her car, and she drove out the back way to avoid the mob in front of the warehouse. They stopped at Sugarbush to change into dry clothes and throw a few things into suitcases. She didn’t notice until they’d gotten into the car again that Jeff had his briefcase with him.

Mia frowned at him. “Any chance you can leave that here?” she asked. “Can you try to relax for a couple of days?”

He hesitated for a moment, then carried the briefcase back into his cottage. But they were not even out of Valle Rosa before he had taken a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and scratched a few figures on it with a pencil. She said nothing, and as she turned the car off the main road, toward Idyllwild, he put the paper back in his pocket.

“Stop here,” he said when they’d reached the edge of Valle Rosa.

She pulled over to the shoulder of the narrow road. “What’s wrong?”

He leaned forward to look up at the sky. “Pull up a little more. Just a few feet. Slowly.”

She did as she was told, and sunlight suddenly poured through the windshield, making her duck back, squinting.

“Turn off the ignition,” he said, turning in the seat to look behind them. “Whoa.” He shook his head with an incredulous smile. “Check this out.”

Suddenly, Mia realized why he had made her stop. The front of the car was in sunlight, the rear in rain.

“Even I didn’t think it would be quite this abrupt a change between wet and dry,” he said. “I’d better work on softening the edges or there’ll be too distinct a line between brown and green.”

Destruction and rebirth
, Mia thought. “Yes,” she said. “You’d better work on that. And I hope it takes you a long time to get it right.” She smiled at him to let him know that, at least in part, she was teasing, but he turned away from her to look back at the rain.

IT WAS COOLER IN
the mountains, the air hazy, the sunlight filtered through pines and oaks and more greenery than Mia had seen in a long time. They found a cabin about a mile from the little town of Idyllwild. It was old, more funky than rustic with its patched linoleum floors and rusting white refrigerator.

“At least the bed is good.” Jeff sat down on the double bed tucked into the little alcove that served as a bedroom. He bounced a few times, testing the mattress, then held his hand toward her. “Okay, Mia,” he said, “relax me.”

She pushed his shoulders gently to the mattress and took off her shorts to straddle him in comfort, bending low to kiss him. He smiled, groaning, and seemed to beg for more with his lips and his tongue, but she drew her mouth away, teasing him.

“My rules,” she whispered. She would make love to
him
this time. She would make love in such a way that he could never again entertain the thought of leaving her.

He clung to her when it was over, clung so hard that she guessed there would be bruises on her back in the morning. And although she couldn’t have cared less, she made herself think about those bruises, about the shape they would take, and their color. She would think about anything to keep herself from crying. No tears. Not now. She wouldn’t acknowledge in any way that there were limits on their lovemaking, limits on their time together.

“I love you, Mia,” he whispered, when his breathing had quieted down. “I don’t want this to end.”

“Shh.” She pressed her fingertips hard against his lips, and neither of them spoke again. His grip on her loosened as he fell into a deep sleep, and she rolled carefully onto her side, her hand resting on his chest. She envied him his sleep, doubting she would be able to sleep at all. The pillow beneath her head was cool and musty, and she knew that smell would forever be linked in her mind to both hope and fear.

IN THE MORNING, THEY
walked into town for breakfast. They had blueberry muffins, which Jeff talked her into eating despite their fat content, and strawberry tea with lemon, and they talked about the fountain and the cat and where they might eat dinner that night. Mia relished every word, every simple, lazy, forgettable sentence. Toward the end of the meal, though, Jeff began to look preoccupied again.

“I should call Rick,” he said, reaching into his pants pocket for some change and eying the pay phone in the back corner of the little restaurant. “He should be watching for any erosion.”

Although she wanted to chastise him for worrying, she said nothing. She watched as he got up and walked toward the phone, knowing she had no right to stop him. His life was tied up in that equipment. That project. She should be glad she’d managed to get him away from it at all.

They walked most of the day, hiking on slender trails cut through the woods. Jeff taught her how to use her watch as a compass and how to determine direction by studying ant hills, which he claimed were always built on the south side of trees and rocks.

Her legs ached by the time they returned to the cabin. “I need a long soak in the tub,” she said, leaning against the wall to stretch the muscles in her calves.

Jeff picked up his comb from the dresser and ran it through his hair, studying his reflection in the mirror. “Would you mind some company?” he asked.

She wrinkled her nose at the thought of facing him across a tub of water in the stark light of the bathroom.

He met her eyes in the mirror. “We can leave the light off,” he said, reading her mind.

The tub in the cabin was old but deep, with a broad yellow rust stain in the enamel near the drain. They filled it with warm water, turned out the light and undressed in the semi-darkness of the small, steamy bathroom. Mia settled into the tub, her back against Jeff’s chest, the water nearly to her chin. She closed her eyes and sighed.

“I heard the satisfaction in that sigh,” Jeff said.

“Mmm.”

He bent his head to kiss her shoulder. They sat that way for a few minutes, Mia feeling the tension melting from her legs.

“I was hoping you’d bring the chemise I gave you,” Jeff said. “Don’t you like it? You never wear it.”

She drew in a breath. She had hoped the subject of the chemise would never come up. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “but I’d feel funny in it now. I’ll wear it after I have the reconstruction.”

He was quiet a moment. She felt his chin against the top of her head; his thumb gently traced the skin where her left breast had been. “But then I’ll never get to see you in it,” he said.

Her tears were too quick for her to stop. She brushed his hand away. “You haven’t talked about leaving since the first night we made love,” she said. “I was hoping—”

“Mia.” He wrapped both arms around her and held her tightly against him. “You know I can’t stay.”

“No!” She pulled away from him, splashing water onto the floor. “I don’t know that. You don’t tell me anything!
Carmen
knows more about you than I do.” She twisted around to look at him, and even in the darkness she could see the deep crease between his eyebrows. “If you have to leave, at least tell me why. Don’t I have the right to know? Or will I simply wake up one morning and you’ll be gone. I’ll never see you again, and I’ll never even understand the reason you left me.” She stood up and started to climb out of the tub, feeling awkward. Inelegant. She was glad the light was off.

“Careful.” He tried to grab her hand, but she snapped it away from him and stepped, dripping, onto the floor. She groped in the darkness for a towel, wrapped it around herself, and walked into the living room.

The old wing chair by the window had the same musty, damp smell as her pillow. She sat down in it and let the scent surround her. It was dark in the room, even darker outside. Stars glittered from behind the trees, but they were small and cold-looking and blurred by her tears.

She heard him get out of the tub. In a moment he was in the living room, a towel secured around his waist. He picked up a hassock from the corner of the room and dropped it directly in front of her. When he sat down, he rested his damp hands on her bare knees, squeezed them gently.

“Yes, you have the right to know,” he said softly. “You have the right to know everything about me, and Mia, I’m longing to tell you. I want to tell you about my childhood, and the crazy things I did when I was growing up and what my family was like—all those things that are so much fun to tell someone you’re falling in love with. And I want you to know why I’m in Valle Rosa, and why I’ll have to leave. You can’t know how badly… God, it would be such a relief to tell you everything.” He closed his eyes briefly, drawing in a breath, then locked his gaze with hers. “As unfair as it is that I can’t tell you about myself, Mia, it would be far more unfair to you if I did.”

She shook her head, still holding onto the anger. “Don’t you know I would never tell anyone?”

“Of course I do, but someday you might be in a position of
having
to tell what you know. You’d have no choice. I don’t want you in that predicament, for either of our sakes.”

She leaned forward and put her hands on his shoulders. “Then take me with you when you leave,” she said. “I’ll run, too. I don’t care.”

He pulled her hands from his shoulders and held them close to his lips. “I’ve learned a lot about myself over the last month or so,” he said. “I guess I thought I could run forever, but I’m not cut out for it. I’m not a loner. I need other people too much. This last week…” He grimaced. “A few times lately I’ve let myself imagine staying in Valle Rosa, staying with you, making a new life for myself there. But when those news vans rolled up outside the warehouse today, with Carmen Perez as the ringleader, I knew I had to get back to reality. I can’t stay in Valle Rosa. Yet I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to tolerate running. One way or the other, I’m going to lose you. Now or later.” He stroked his thumbs over the back of her hands. “You have a brilliant career ahead of you, Mia. But if you had no fixed address, no place to work, no way to let people know where you were—or even
who
you were—you’d come to resent me. And rightly so.”

She felt hope slip away from her as if it were something tangible, something she had hung onto but never really possessed.

“When will you go?” She spoke very softly.

“I’ll stay as long as I possibly can.”

“Will you think of me at all after you leave?”

He looked stunned. “I love you, Mia. I’m never going to forget you. Wherever I am, I’ll look at the stars at night and think, ‘These are the same stars Mia’s seeing in Valle Rosa.’”

“Except that Valle Rosa will be under a cover of rain clouds.”

He laughed. “Yes. I forgot about that.”

She didn’t smile. “Jeff?” she asked. “Are you married? Can you tell me that much?”

His eyes registered another flash of surprise. Then he closed them, shaking his head. “No, Mia. I’m not married. I was… but not anymore.”

She leaned forward then to kiss him. His hands slipped beneath her towel, tugging it away from her body. He parted her legs and lowered his head to her, and the last thing she saw before losing herself to him was the cool white blur of the stars.

CARMEN WASN’T NERVOUS
, AND that both surprised and pleased her. She sat in Dennis Ketchum’s outer office, waiting to be called into the sacred inner chamber, not even bothering to rehearse what she would say when he made the offer. She would try not to jump at it—not right away. She would hold out for a little more money than he offered initially. When he’d called her last night to ask her to come in this morning, his voice had been lively and promising, and she’d thought to herself:
At last
. She was going to get back
Sunrise
.

Through the window, she could see the rain clouds far in the distance, hovering over Valle Rosa. This was the third day of rain. She had announced Jeff’s plan on the news the night before: three days of rain, two of sun, repeating the pattern for as long as it took to fill the reservoir and bring life back to Valle Rosa. The sun was necessary, he told her, to keep spirits alive. Only a few people seemed disturbed by the unnaturalness of it all. Most were planning picnics and celebrations for the two days of sun, reveling in the predictability of the weather.

Dennis suddenly opened the door to his office. “Carmen?” He smiled. “Come in.”

She followed him into the poshly decorated office and took the seat he offered next to his broad cherry desk.

“Well,” he began, “every time I look in the direction of those rain clouds over Valle Rosa, I think of you. Our own Carmen Perez. I have to admit, I didn’t think Cabrio was for real. I thought you were chasing a fantasy, but I didn’t care, since everyone else in San Diego seemed delighted to tune in to
News Nine
and join you in the delusion. But this is something, Carmen.” He looked out the window toward Valle Rosa, shaking his head. “This is really something.”