THE FOURTH CAR IN her driveway had Ohio plates. Jeff Cabrio’s. The alleged rainmaker. Carmen got out of her own car and walked around his, trying to peer inside it in the faint moonlight, but she could see nothing. The black Saab looked a bit battered, the right front fender dented. Who was this man who had conned Chris so easily? She didn’t even know what he looked like. He could be a raving lunatic for all she knew. Maybe she shouldn’t have agreed to let him live on her property.
Inside the adobe, the kitchen was cool and dark, and Carmen left the lights off, not certain which of her windows could be seen by the middle cottage. She locked the doors and checked the windows before going upstairs. She didn’t usually bother to lock up the house at night, but then she’d never had a strange man living at Sugarbush before.
Her legs were tired as she climbed the stairs, and the smell of smoke seemed to emanate from her skin. The fires were dying, though. Sometime this afternoon, the army of fire fighters had managed to contain the last pocket of flame in one small section of the canyon, where they would leave it to burn itself out. Fine. She was sick of talking about demolished houses and dying children. Yet, what would she talk about when the fires were gone? They had given her the air time she needed, the exposure. For the first time since she’d been back at News Nine, her colleagues had treated her as something other than superfluous.
Dennis Ketchum, the general manager of News Nine, had initially been reluctant to take her back in any capacity. That had hurt and surprised her, because over the past five miserable years, he and the News Nineproducers had talked about wanting her back, missing her skills. Every card she received from her former colleagues said something like ‘It’s just not the same without you here,’ and Carmen had come to believe their words. But her colleagues were only being kind—she could see that now. They were only encouraging her to get well.
She had foolishly thought they would give her San Diego Sunrise again. No one had said as much, but everyone knew that Sunrise was her show, her creation. She’d figured they’d have her co-anchor the news for awhile to let her get her bearings, and then they’d dump Terrell Gates and reinstate her as anchor for Sunrise. Instead they’d given her the “light” portion of the North County Report, three times a week, the smallest assignment they could come up with that would still place her in front of the camera. She’d covered a library opening, a protest over a mural painted on the side of a bakery, and the ten-year anniversary celebration of a playground. She’d had to beg to be allowed to cover the fire, and now the fire was under control and she would have nothing of significance left to say.
Carmen’s greatest fear was that they were right about her, although she would never, never let them know it. She had lost something these past few years, lost her ability to distance herself from her work. That weak, ineffectual interview she’d conducted with the mother of the children who died in the fire still haunted her. In the past she could have finished that interview and gone out for a drink with the rest of the crew. She wouldn’t have let the magnitude of what had happened hit her until she got home, where she would talk it out with Chris. Now the very memory of that night could bring on a fresh bout of nausea.
Late that afternoon, she had gone into the lunchroom at the studio to heat a cup of coffee in the microwave. Bill Jackson and Terrell Gates were sitting at one of the tables. Terrell with her innocent blue eyes and creamy young skin and the short blond hair San Diego Magazine had described as “tame enough for the traditionalists, yet savvy enough to draw the younger, new-age sophisticates to Sunrise.” Carmen had spoken with Terrell only a few times, and the younger woman never mentioned their connection, never even let on that she knew Carmen had once hosted Sunrise—that, in fact, the damn show wouldn’t exist if it were not for her.
Carmen nodded a greeting to Terrell and Bill, and the three of them were quiet while she waited out the minute it took to heat the coffee. After leaving the room, she heard their soft burst of laughter, then Bill’s muffled words—something about the “Carmen Perez fire report”—followed by Terrell saying, quite clearly, “I can’t believe she’s only thirty-nine. She’s pushing fifty, if she’s a day.”
Carmen had no office of her own, no dressing room, and so she locked herself and her coffee in one of the stalls of the ladies’ room and cried, vowing that this would be the last time she’d allow herself the weakness of tears, all the while knowing it wouldn’t be.
ABOVE THE BED IN her bedroom, the enormous skylight Chris had built let in the moonlight and the crisp, white glitter of stars. Carmen didn’t bother with the overhead light. She turned off the air conditioner and opened one of the windows to let in the cool night air. And she heard something. Music. She could see the cottages from here. Mia’s was dark, as was Jeff Cabrio’s, but a light burned on Chris’s front porch. He was sitting on one of the porch chairs, playing the guitar, singing. How long since she’d heard him sing? She strained her ears to catch a phrase, to place the song. Catch the Wind. He used to sing that one with Augie. She could picture them, father and son, sitting on the patio, their guitars and Augie’s mournful harmonica filling the stillness of the Sugarbush night.
She opened the other windows in the room and sat down on the floor, leaning her head against the windowsill. Once, years ago, she had been helping Chris unpack after a long road trip. He was putting his toiletries away in the bathroom when she found, tucked into a side pocket of his suitcase, a small black notebook. The proverbial Little Black Book. Her fear was so sudden she couldn’t protect herself against it or against the quick tears that came with it. She wasn’t naive; she knew what life was like on the road for baseball players. She knew there were women waiting for them in every town. And she knew Chris had lived life on the edge before he met her. But she had been so certain he’d grown above that.
She stood frozen, the book in her hand. Finally she opened it, and as she leafed through it she felt profound relief. At the top of each page, he’d written the name of a city, but instead of listing names of women beneath it, he had written the names and addresses of coffee houses and taverns where folk music was the norm, where he could take his guitar and make an impromptu appearance. While other players were reputed to drink, party, and womanize, Chris was known for showing up at clubs, guitar in hand, ready to play for a welcoming crowd. He wasn’t a first-rate musician, but that hardly mattered. He was good with an audience. Relaxed and funny.
Carmen remembered how she’d walked to the open bathroom door, leaned against the jamb. Chris’s back was to her; he was putting his toothpaste in the medicine cabinet.
“I found your little black book,” she said.
He turned around, bewildered for a moment, then laughed when he saw the book in her hand. “Not very exciting, is it?” he asked.
She tried to laugh too, but found she couldn’t. “For a minute there, I thought it was the real thing.”
His smile faded. “Carmen.”
She felt the tears again, this time spilling over, hot on her cheeks, and in two quick steps he was with her, his arms around her. The only place she’d ever felt safe enough to cry was in his arms.
“I miss you when you’re on the road,” she said. “I try not to let you know how much because I know you have no choice. I try to pretend I’m strong, but I’m not.”
He stroked her hair. “You’re very strong,” he said.
“When I saw that book, I thought I’d lost you.”
He’d leaned away from her then to look hard into her eyes, and she could see the hurt in his. “How could you even think I would do something like that?”
She hadn’t bothered to answer him then, but now, as the final strains of Catch the Wind drifted through the open window into the bedroom, she whispered, “You tell me, Chris.”
He stopped playing, and she waited, hoping he wasn’t through for the night. In another minute, he began again with a song she didn’t recognize, something soft and sweet, and she closed her eyes to listen.