CHRIS SLEPT THAT NIGHT on borrowed linens in one of the small cottages at Carmen’s sprawling Sugarbush. It was long after sundown when he arrived, and the three cottages, including Mia’s, were dark. He was glad of the darkness, glad he couldn’t see Sugarbush in its sunlit beauty, glad he couldn’t see Carmen’s spectacular, award-winning rose garden, or the way the manzanita trees clung to the edge of the canyon. But he could smell Sugarbush, and that was nearly as bad. The musky scent of the ornamental eucalyptus enveloped him as he watched Carmen unlock the door to the easternmost cottage. There was nearly half an acre between Mia’s dark cottage and his, and the remaining cottage stood between them. Behind the cottages, the canyon was a dark abyss.
Carmen switched on the lamp in the living room. “What do you think of the new color?” she asked, dropping a pile of sheets and towels onto the sofa.
Chris looked at the walls. She’d painted them a soft mauve shade, a color he had long associated with her. “Very nice,” he said. “Did you do all three in the same color?”
“Mia’s is yellow, the middle one’s blue.”
“How’s Mia working out as a tenant?”
Carmen shrugged and sat down on the arm of the sofa. “I rarely see her,” she said. “She’s quiet. Comes home alone every night and locks herself in her cottage.”
Carmen had been the one to suggest that Mia talk to him about a job. He’d hired Mia for many reasons, none of which made good business sense. He’d liked the idea that Mia would be living at Sugarbush, as if that would somehow keep him closer to Carmen. And there’d been something about Mia, some desperate quirk in her smile, the way she bit her lip after telling him she had absolutely no experience doing any of the things required of the position. Well, so what, he’d thought. He was green, she was green. A perfect match.
Chris raised the window shade to look out at the canyon. He could see no lights other than the stars. “There’s someone I might hire,” he said, testing the words. “Someone to help out with the water problem. If I do, would you consider renting the third cottage to him?” He turned to see Carmen’s frown.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
He had invited Jeff Cabrio to meet the following day with Rick Smythe, one of the engineers working in Valle Rosa’s water conservation program. “A guy came to see me today. I’m going to meet with him again tomorrow and make a decision about hiring him.”
“Hiring him to do what?”
“Make it rain.”
There was a moment’s silence before she laughed. “I hope you’re kidding.”
He smiled. “Actually I’m not.”
“Remember that movie with Burt Lancaster? The Rainmaker? You’d better rent it, Chris. You can borrow my VCR. The guy was a con-artist.”
“I think this one’s for real.”
Carmen gave him that look of disdain only she could achieve. “Chris. The media’s going to eat you alive.”
“You included?”
“Me first and foremost. I think you’ve lost your marbles.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I’ve lost everything else.” He was referring to his house, his possessions, but as soon as he spoke, he knew Carmen thought he was referring to her. She stood up and walked into the kitchen, where he could hear her opening and closing the cupboards.
“I’d apologize for the mouse droppings,” she said, “but they’re everywhere, even in the adobe. The drought’s really driven the mice out of the canyon.”
“I know.” He walked to the doorway of the kitchen. “I’ve had them, too.”
“If this guy’s sane, he can rent the cottage,” she said. “Otherwise, spare me, all right?”
“Fine.” He leaned against the door jamb. “By the way, I wanted to thank you for not interviewing me last night at the fire.”
“I would have if you hadn’t disappeared.”
“It was good to see you working again. It must have been hard though, with all that was going on.”
She let out an exaggerated sigh. “Not you too,” she said. “The work’s a piece of cake, Chris, just as it always has been. But the way everyone’s treating me is pissing me off.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like I’m the new kid on the block. I’ve got to jump through all their goddamned hoops all over again.”
“I’m sorry, Carmen,” he said, as though he were to blame. In a way, he was. This close, he could see new lines across her forehead and at the corners of her mouth. She wore jeans and a long-sleeved blue silk blouse. Someone had told him she always wore long sleeves now, that the scars were too noticeable. Her hair was still thick and shimmering, but the trademark swath of gray had widened over the past few years. “You’re still very beautiful,” he said.
She waved the compliment away. “The makeup guy spends about an hour on my face before I go on for my puny little North County Report. Thank God for the fires. At least this week I’ve gotten a little more air time.” Her face darkened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
Chris shrugged away the apology. “My Martin survived. And the photograph albums.”
“Always were sentimental to a fault, weren’t you?” She closed a cupboard door and peered inside the oven.
He suddenly remembered all the anniversaries they’d spent at the seedy bar where they’d first met. She would insist they go there and sit in the same booth, eat the same greasy burgers they’d eaten that night many years earlier. If anything, she had been more sentimental than he was. The hardness she was projecting tonight was an act. In the past, though, it had been an act for the rest of the world, not for him.
She shut the oven door and leaned back against it.
“They treat me as though I’m going to fall apart any minute at work,” she said. “I’m absolutely fine, and they tiptoe around me like I’m some pathetic little porcelain doll. Have you seen the woman who took over San Diego Sunrise? If I can call her a woman. I swear, she must be no older than nineteen.”
He nodded. Of course he had. For a year or so after Carmen’s breakdown, Sunrise, the early morning show she had created and anchored, flew through a series of hosts, none of whom could begin to match Carmen’s combination of brains, brass and beauty. But then they hit on Terrell Gates and quickly knew they had a winner. Terrell’s style was much different than Carmen’s. Her scrubbed, girl-next-door looks made her sudden eruptions of bite and sass disarming to her guests and titillating to her audience.
“Do you think she’s any good?” Carmen asked him.
“She’s very young,” he answered carefully, “but I think she’s finding her niche.”
He saw the sheen of tears in her eyes as she turned away from him, and he wished he had found another way to answer. He wanted to touch her. He hadn’t touched her in so long.
She walked past him quickly, avoiding his eyes. “Mia didn’t want a phone,” she said, “but I suppose you will, so go ahead and arrange it.”
He opened the door for her, and she stepped out onto the small wooden porch. “Carmen,” he said, “if you ever want to talk… You know, sometimes when you used to get upset at work, when you had to do something like interview that mother last night or whatever, and you’d come home and want to talk about it… “
She cocked her head. “Look, Chris, I invited you to move in here because I felt sorry for you. I’d feel sorry for anyone who’d lost his home, okay? You need a place to live, and I’ve got a place you can have. That’s all there is to it. I am really sick of people treating me like I’m made of glass.”
“Don’t do that,” he said.
“What?”
“This is me, Carmen. You don’t have to try so hard to act tough with me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She stepped off the porch, and didn’t bother to face him when she spoke again. “Let me know if there’s anything else you need, all right?”
He watched her walk across Sugarbush until she melted into the darkness. Behind him, the small, mouse-infested cottage waited. He was going from bad to worse, he thought, the continuing saga of his life the past five years.
The double bed took up nearly every inch of space in the cottage’s one bedroom, and a soft breeze blew in through the open window as he made the bed. He had nearly drifted off to sleep when the coyotes started their eerie howling. It sounded like a dozen or more of them, but he knew two or three could easily make that much noise. They sounded very near. He lay there, listening. He’d forgotten how close Sugarbush was to nowhere.
After a sleepless hour, he got up to bring the photograph albums back to the bed. He looked through the first one, the one he and Carmen had started more than a decade ago, with pictures of their two weddings. The first wedding had been held in San Diego, with all the hoopla and media attention. Augie was there, his broad, beaming smile focused in every picture on his son and new daughter-in-law. Chris’s other relatives had flown in from Arizona, but Carmen’s family wasn’ticeably absent. The aunt and uncle who had raised her and the cousins she’d grown up with were no longer speaking to her by that time. Women were not supposed to flaunt themselves on television, they said, and she was so unfeminine on TV. So pushy. Cold. The qualities for which Carmen was rewarded professionally made her the object of disdain in her Latino family. He didn’t think she had ever quite recovered from the pain of their rejection.
The two women Carmen had considered her closest friends appeared in many of the pictures. Chris had heard separately from each of them in the last year. Carmen wouldn’t see them, they complained. They wanted to help, wanted to do whatever they could to get her on her feet again, but she ignored their phone calls and their invitations. Their children missed her, they said. Indeed, Carmen had always had a special relationship with any child who crossed her path. Chris tried to explain to her old friends as best he could his interpretation of the problem: Carmen couldn’t bear to see them or their children. She couldn’t bear to be reminded of what she’d longed for and what had been taken from her.
Chris turned the page of the album, and the setting of the photographs switched from San Diego to Mexico City, where the second wedding, an intimate affair in a small chapel, had been held for the benefit of Carmen’s elderly parents. Her parents, who had worked all their lives as migrant farmers, had sent Carmen north of the border when she was five years old to give her a better chance for a decent education. That she had received, but her excellent performance was rarely rewarded by her aunt and uncle, who had tried to groom her to be a good wife and mother and little more.
It had been a long time since he’d looked at those pictures. Carmen was so beautiful, so happy. She was twenty-seven and he was twenty-eight. They had met while she was working for News Nine, covering a baseball scandal in which he, thankfully, had no involvement. They began dating and made an attractive, high-visibility couple, both of them having solid reputations in San Diego and rising rapidly to the top of their respective careers. There was a good deal of speculation as to whether or not Chris Garrett would be able to settle down. He was known for a wild streak that seemed incompatible with marriage, but he surprised everyone, including himself, at his ability to give up the other women and the excessive drinking and the escapades. Only Carmen had believed him capable of being a good husband, and in her he discovered the joy of having a real friend. Before that, his friendships had been limited to those men with whom he played ball. Friendships which were intense and engrossing and playful, but in the final analysis, superficial. These days, though, he didn’t have even that. He’d lost his teammates the same time he’d lost his wife. Despite the few friends he’d made at the high school where he taught, it had been a very lonely five years.
Trying to shake off the melancholy that had suddenly settled over him, Chris turned another page in the album. And there was Sugarbush. He and Carmen had bought Sugarbush shortly after they were married, then had set about remodeling the beautiful old adobe for their home. It wasn’t long afterward that Carmen was given her own show, San Diego Sunrise, a half hour every morning during which she’d interview politicians, movie stars, whomever she chose. Her guests were always apprehensive, never knowing how kind Carmen Perez was feeling that day. She bent the rules of journalistic etiquette, but the staff of News Nine gave her free reign despite any fear they might have had of legal reprisal. Her ratings were simply too good. Carmen wasn’t yet thirty and had everything she’d wanted. Everything except a child.
Chris opened the second album. These pictures were far more familiar to him. He looked at them often. The first was a shot of the scoreboard taken during the Padres-Pirates game, the announcement reading, “It’s a Boy!!! Dustin Garrett, 6 pounds, 3 ounces!! Congratulations Chris and Carmen!!” Then followed a series of pictures of Dustin in the hospital, snuggling cheek to cheek with a radiant Carmen, his already thick, dark hair so much like hers. Chris remembered sleeping poorly after they brought Dustin home from the hospital, not so much because of Dustin’s own wakefulness, but because he couldn’t still his thoughts. He imagined teaching his son to ride a bike, coaching him in little league, all the things Augie had so enthusiastically done with him.
Once they brought Dustin home, Chris took so many pictures of him that the camera broke. (“You wore it out, man,” said the young clerk in the camera store.) And then the setting of the pictures switched back to the hospital again. He’d had to force himself to take those pictures. Dustin looked so small and gray, a painful array of tubes and needles invading his doll-like body. They’d told him Dustin was going to die, and he’d thought these pictures would be all he would have of his son. But the little boy hadn’t died. He’d surprised his doctors. Disappointed them, too, Chris had thought at the time. In their kind hearts, they had wanted this particular child to die. He was certainly blind, they told him, definitely deaf. The brain damage was severe. Profound was the word they used. Irreversible. He could still remember Carmen’s screams when they told her.
IN THE MORNING LIGHT, Chris was stunned by what had become of Sugarbush. Nothing short of the fires could have provided such graphic evidence of the changes wrought by the drought. He had seen his own yard and the dry chaparral of Cinnamon Canyon daily, and so he had barely noticed the slow and insidious changes there. But it had been several years since he’d gotten a good look at Sugarbush, and what he saw sent a chill through him. Every growing thing seemed to be withering, dying. Carmen’s once dazzling rose garden was nearly dead. There were only a few bushes near the middle of the garden that appeared to be hanging on, as though she had given up on it slowly, focusing her time and water on the center as the edges died away.
How had she tolerated it, watching the one thing she still treasured, the one thing in which she could still take pride, fade away? “Gardening’s excellent therapy for her,” one of the shrinks had told him. “Gives her a chance to nurture something.”
He walked over to the cottage Mia was renting and knocked on the door. She opened it and gasped her surprise at seeing him there. She was barefoot, wearing blue shorts and a baggy white T-shirt.
“Morning, Mia,” he said, and with a gesture toward his cottage, added, “I’m going to be staying out here while my house is being rebuilt.” He was certain she knew that he and Carmen had once been married. What she would make of him living in an outbuilding on Carmen’s property, he had no idea.
He peered past her into the living room. The walls were bare, and he could see no furniture whatsoever from where he stood. But there was sheet plastic on the floor.
“Wasn’t the cottage furnished when you moved in?” he asked.
She glanced behind her to see what he was seeing. “Oh, yes. I moved most of the furniture into the dining room so I could have a big space to work in.”
“Work?”
“Clay,” she said, shrugging, as though he should have known. “It gets messy.”
He was curious, but he had too much to do today to question her further. Obviously there was more to Mia than he had thought.
“I’m going to be in late today,” he said. “I have to buy some clothes and a few other things. Then I have a meeting with the guy who stopped by yesterday.”
Mia colored, and he knew he had mentioned Jeff only to see the reaction in her face.
“At the office?” she asked.
He smiled. “No, at a restaurant. Would you rather I invited him back to the office?”
She jutted her chin at him indignantly. “You’re misinterpreting my interest,” she said. “He has extraordinary bone structure in his face.”
“Right, Mia,” he said with a wink, then turned to step off her porch. “I’ll probably be in around two or so.”