WHEN THE KNOCK CAME on her door very early in the morning, Mia expected it to be Jeff. She’d been up for hours already, doing her laundry in the bathtub and working on the sculpture. But she wasn’t yet dressed. She wiped her hands on the clay-stained rag and loosened the folds of her blue robe across her chest to make the absence of her breast as unnoticeable as possible.
When she opened the door, though, it wasn’t Jeff, but Carmen who stood on her front porch. Behind her, Sugarbush lay spread out in breathless beauty, the dry earth rose-colored in the fire-charged air of the sunrise. She wore an off-white pants suit, and the rose color glowed on one side of her face and body. For a moment, Mia simply drank in the scene with the rapture of an artist viewing a lure.
“May I come in for a minute, please?” Carmen asked.
Mia took a step backward to let her in, reflexively raising her hand to her neck, covering the left part of her chest with her forearm.
Carmen closed the door behind her. The warm, pink sunlight poured through the windows, illuminating the shadows and lines on her face and shimmering in the gray streak of her hair.
Yet there was no denying Carmen’s beauty—a tired sort of beauty, somehow made even more extraordinary by its gentle aging.
Carmen glanced at the plastic on the floor and at the terra cotta sculpture taking shape on the stool. “You’re working,” she said. “I’ll only take a minute of your time.”
Mia folded her arms across her chest, a stiffness to her body that was beginning to feel all too natural. She remembered Jeff saying she was protective of herself physically, that she was careful to keep others out of her personal space. He was right. Perhaps this cool rigidity had become so much a part of her that she would never be able to lose it, not even once her body was whole again. She would remain forever tense and hyper-alert, always turning away, trying to hide herself from the eyes of others.
Right now, though, her tension was only partially related to her body. She felt nervous having Carmen see how she had transformed the cottage. She had moved the furniture around and covered the floor with plastic. The laundry she’d done that morning hung on lines stretched across the hallway. It looked like a community of ghosts. Would Carmen mind? Would she feel Mia had taken undue liberties with a space she was merely renting?
“That was something else yesterday, wasn’t it?” Carmen walked across the living room and leaned against the arm of the sofa. “The rain?”
“Yes,” Mia said. The owner of the avocado grove had sent Chris a bouquet of flowers. Suddenly, Chris was being viewed as some sort of hero.
Carmen folded her own arms beneath her breasts. “Did you know all along that he’d succeed? Did you have some sixth sense?”
Mia smiled. “I was probably every bit as astonished as you were.” She’d cried when she saw the footage of that remarkable rain. She’d cried from happiness for Jeff and for his success and his vindication. And she’d cried from the realization that he was nearing his goal, nearing the time he would leave Valle Rosa.
Carmen looked down at the sketch pad on the sofa, idly running her fingertips across the drawing Jeff had made of the fountain. “You’ve become good friends with him,” she said. It was almost an accusation.
Mia sat down behind the stool. She knew now what Carmen was after this morning, and she felt suddenly powerful, suddenly superior. She had something Carmen wanted, and she also had the integrity to keep it from her.
“Yes,” she said. “We’re friends.”
“So, what is he like?” Carmen lowered herself to the sofa. “I can’t get near him. All he does is bark at me. What has he told you about himself?”
“Nothing. And I don’t question him, either.”
Carmen’s eyes suddenly fell on the bulletin board propped up against the coffee table. “Oh!” she said, reaching over to lift the board to her knees. She studied the layer of photographs. “These were taken inside the warehouse!”
“Yes.”
“Why do you have them?” She glanced at the sculpture on the stool in front of Mia. “You’re sculpting him!” She rested the bulletin board against the back of the sofa and stood up, circling the stool, studying the emerging sculpture. It didn’t yet resemble anyone in particular. The pose was in place—a man standing, shirt open, one hand raised to draw back a curtain that didn’t yet exist—but he lacked identifying features, and the bas-relief of the window was still wrapped in plastic on the coffee table. Carmen continued to walk around the stool, and Mia thought of a hungry wolf circling its prey.
“You’re working from the pictures?” Carmen asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll pay you for those pictures, Mia.” Carmen gestured toward the bulletin board. “A month’s free rent.”
Mia laughed, shaking her head.
“Just one picture, then. You can pick which one.” Carmen returned to the sofa and plucked one of the pictures—Jeff and Rick poring over the computer—from the board. She frowned at it. “What’s it like inside? What are they doing in there?”
“Honestly, Carmen, I don’t have the vaguest idea.” She must have conveyed some annoyance in her voice, because Carmen’s shoulders suddenly drooped and she bit her lip.
“I know I’m intruding,” she said. “I know I’m being unfair, but I need to learn more about him.”
“I doubt I know any more than you do. Even if I did, he’s my friend.”
Carmen nodded, the look on her face one of resignation as she handed the photograph over to Mia. “Well,” she said, “he’s lucky to have you.” She sighed and glanced around the room again, her eyes falling on the laundry hanging in the hallway. “Oh, Mia, you poor thing!” She walked toward the hall with its crisscrossed lines of underwear and over-sized T-shirts. “This is ridiculous. You can’t even walk down the hall. And how are you washing it—in the sink?” She peered into the bathroom, and Mia tried to imagine what she was seeing: towels hung from the shower curtain rod, buckets of clay-laced water in the tub, the prosthesis on the edge of the sink.
Carmen disappeared into the bathroom. Mia took a deep breath and followed her in, clutching her robe tightly around her. Carmen was tapping a loose wall tile into place above the tub.
“From now on,” she said, standing straight again, “you’re using my washer and dryer. Any time, okay? The spare key is under the potted lemon tree on the patio.”
Mia must have looked suspicious of her motives, because Carmen said, “No obligation, Mia. Really.” She pointed toward the damp laundry in the hallway. “This is crazy.”
“Okay. Thanks.” Mia took a step into the hall, hoping to lure Carmen out of the bathroom, out of the cottage, but the older woman’s eyes had fallen on the sink.
“What’s that?” she asked. “Some sort of—?” She stopped short, and Mia saw the realization dawning on her.
“It’s a breast prosthesis,” Mia said, with a sense of doom. Carmen was a woman capable of using people to her own gain, a woman always on the lookout for other people’s secrets. For a panicky moment, Mia thought of offering her Jeff’s pictures in exchange for her silence.
Carmen shut her eyes, pressing her fingertips to her mouth. “Oh, Mia,” she said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”
Mia was shaken by the sincerity in her voice. “I don’t need… I don’t want pity,” she said.
Carmen opened her eyes again. There was sympathy in them, sympathy that could only be construed as genuine. “I had no idea,” she said. “I was jealous of you. I am jealous of you. I know you don’t need pity.”
“Jealous of me?”
“Of your youth. Your talent. Of the lovely life you’ve created for yourself—coming way out here to pursue your art. Your passion. And I envied how easily you seemed to fall into a relationship with a man no one else can get close to.”
“I’m Jeff’s friend. I don’t want anything else from him. He knows he can trust me.”
“And he knows he can’t trust me for a minute, huh?” Carmen’s smile was wistful.
“Not for a second.”
Carmen nodded toward the prosthesis. “How long has it been?” she asked. “Are you all right now?”
“The surgery was in January, and I’m fine. I’ll have reconstructive surgery next year.” She walked back into the living room, Carmen close behind her, but at the front door, the older woman stopped.
“I mean it about the laundry,” she said. “And if there’s anything else you need, please let me know.”
“Just don’t mention me in your reports on Jeff, all right?” Mia asked. “The next thing you’ll say is that he’s befriended a one-breasted woman.”
Carmen looked stricken. “Do you think I would do that? Do you think I’m that cruel?”
Mia answered her with silence. She knelt down on the plastic and began organizing the pictures on the bulletin board.
“I’m sorry for what you’ve gone through.” Carmen stepped closer, touching Mia’s shoulder, bending low, and with some horror Mia realized she meant to embrace her. She folded her arms across her chest again and stood up, and Carmen dropped her own hands to her sides.
“I’m not a mean person, Mia,” she said. “Really I’m not.”
Mia felt herself color. She was the mean one. Instantly, she knew that it was Carmen in need of the comfort an embrace would provide. Carmen needed it far more than she did.
Tell me about your son, Mia thought. Tell me what’s made you so hard.
“I know you’re not cruel,” she said, walking toward the door again. “You’ve been good to me. But you’re hurting Jeff.”
Carmen nodded, slowly. “Well.” She reached for the door knob, “if it’s any consolation, I don’t like myself much either these days.”
She offered Mia a cheerless smile and left the cottage, slipping quietly once more into the rose-colored morning.