Fire and Rain

by Diane Chamberlain

  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.

  7

  “THEY’RE SWARMING,” MIA SAID. “I locked the door, but it’s still a little frightening.”

  Chris stood next to her desk, looking out the window at the sea of reporters and irate citizens of Valle Rosa who had assembled on the small, brown front yard of the office. Some of the crowd spilled into the street, others, into the minuscule, dusty park next door. Sam Braga from the Valle Rosa Journal stood above the gathering on a footstool he must have brought with him, and the cameras were trained on him. Chris knew what he was saying, since Sam had called earlier that morning to vent his ire over Chris’s hiring of Jeff Cabrio.

  “Where the hell do you get off making that kind of unilateral decision?” Sam had barked into the phone. Chris had never heard Sam angry before, hadn’t known he was capable of growling. “We need new stoplights. There’ve been two accidents at the intersection of Fig and Jacaranda just this month. And Verde needs to be widened, and we’ve—”

  “We need rain,” Chris had interrupted him.

  “What we need is someone at the helm of this ship who doesn’t have his head up his butt. I spoke with the National Meteorology Service to ask them if it’s possible to make it rain here, and they laughed me off the phone.”

  Chris winced. It hadn’t occurred to him to call anyone. He had made the decision to hire Cabrio on a whim. No, more than a whim. His de
cision had been based on a feeling so deep in his gut he couldn’t name it or describe it.

  He hadn’t predicted this wrath, though, this outpouring of hostility. It was a lot like being booed off the mound.

  From his vantage point at the window, Chris thought that Sam looked very tall up on that footstool—tall and slender and bespectacled and frail, just as he had looked as a boy. Chris and Sam had grown up in the same neighborhood in Valle Rosa, two of the handful of people who’d never left. Chris’s love of Valle Rosa was matched only by Sam’s.

  “Someone dropped off a petition for you earlier.” Mia lifted a few papers from her desk.

  Chris turned away from the window. “A petition for what?”

  “They want you to do something about the Mexican illegals who live in the canyons.”

  “I’m sure they do,” he said, disgusted. “And they’re Guatemalans. And Salvadorans. Not just Mexicans.”

  “Oh. Well, these people are complaining because they’ve had to put locks on their outside taps to keep the Mex… the undocumented workers from coming out of the canyons and using their water.”

  And they were the same people, he was certain, who hired the workers for ridiculous wages in the daytime hours. It was only at night, when the aliens were tired and hungry and thirsty, that they were asked to become invisible.

  “There’s no water for them in the canyons,” Chris said wearily. “I guess we should just let them die, huh?”

  Mia grimaced. “I think the signers of this petition would go along with that.” She bit her lip, then spoke on a tentative note. “Chris?”

  He smiled at her. “Give me some good news for a change, Mia, okay?”

  “I’m afraid they’ve been putting stuff on the porch.” Her voice was apologetic.

  “What do you mean? What stuff?”

  She nodded toward the window, and he stepped next to it at an angle, close enough to see out without being seen himself. The small porch of the office was littered with so much debris that at first he couldn’t discern one object from another. Then he saw the avocados, small and dry and hard-looking, and the tiny, withered oranges, and the baskets of dehydrated strawberries and stunted ears of corn.

  Mia moved next to him. “See the mice?” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Mice?” Chris squinted into the rubble. It was a minute before he realized that the half-dozen or so clear plastic bags nestled among the fruits and vegetables were crammed with dead mice. “Shit,” he said. “This is revolting.”

  “There’s Carmen.” Mia pointed into the crowd.

  Chris spotted her immediately. Dressed entirely in white, she stood out from the rest of the crowd. She was holding her microphone up to Braga; then she turned and spoke to one of the cameramen, her hands cutting through the air, her movements quick and sharp and assured.

  “I guess I have to go out there,” he said. At one time he’d had no fear of cameras, no fear of facing a mob of reporters. Carmen had groomed him for that part of public life, teaching him how to handle questions, how to modulate his voice. She’d denied having much to do with his success, though. “You have a natural presence in front of the camera,” she’d told him. “You know how to make friends with it. It’s a rare ability.”

  At the moment, he felt none of that old self-confidence. This crowd wasn’t likely to be welcoming. His heart battered his rib cage, and the surge of fear he felt as he turned the doorknob reminded him of the day five years ago when he’d last faced a sea of reporters. He remembered struggling against tears that day— and failing.

  The sun was blinding as he stepped onto the front porch, and he carefully cleared a space in the debris with his feet so he had a place to stand. The crowd turned in a wave, away from Sam Braga and his footstool, to face Chris. The reporters instantly began firing questions at him.

  “What do you have to say to the transportation board?”

  “Do you think you’ve made a wise decision?”

  “What proof do you have that Cabrio can make it rain?”

  Chris tried to smile, holding up his hands to still the crowd. He should have predicted this impromptu press conference today and worn something other than a T-shirt and shorts.

  “Don’t we already have enough problems?” a woman shouted from the street. “You’re playing games with our lives and our livelihood.”

  The gathering responded with a fresh roar of indignation, and he held his hands up once again and waited for silence.

  “I understand you have a lot of questions,” he said when he thought he could be heard, “but for now, all I can tell you is that I take full responsibility for hiring Mr. Cabrio. I believe he’ll succeed in helping Valle Rosa with its severe water problem, but I’m prepared to take the blame if he fails.” He turned back to the door.

  “Chris?”

  He looked down to see that Carmen had elbowed her way to the front of the crowd. Her eyes were huge. Brown velvet. Mesmerizing.

  “Where is Mr. Cabrio now?” she asked.

  “He doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Chris said, and although he found it difficult to turn away from Carmen, he opened the door and walked inside.

  He took a call at Mia’s desk from the Los Angeles Times, telling the reporter exactly what he’d told the crowd. Then he walked back to his own office, opening the door to find Carmen sitting behind his desk.

  “Jesus,” he said, startled. “How did you get in?”

  “Back door.” She smiled. “You’re lucky I was the only one who thought to check it. And look.” She swept her arm through the air. “No cameras. No mikes. Just me.”

  “You’ve never needed a camera to be intimidating, Carmen.” He sat down across the desk from her. Although the fire had nearly burned itself out, a papery chunk of ash clung to Carmen’s hair where it curved softly over her shoulder. He resisted the temptation to reach over and brush it away.

  “Where is he from?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Chris. This is off the record.”

  He smiled. “Nothing’s ever off the record with you.”

  She leaned forward. “I need a story, Chris. The fires are old news. Don’t make me beg.”

  Her voice was strong, but there was a fear in her eyes he had never seen before. “I’m sorry, Carmen. I don’t know anything about him to tell you.”

  “Where did he work before coming here?”

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  “I know you’re not stupid enough to hire him without knowing something about him. Was he working in Ohio?”

  Chris shrugged, suddenly glad he knew so little.

  “Do you think I could interview him? Everybody’s caught up in the you part of the story—you know, how Chris Garrett took one too many line drives to the head. So I could focus on him.”

  “He wants to be left alone.” He smiled again. “And he’s a little bit strange.”

  Carmen shuddered. “And you’ve invited him to live on my property. Thanks a lot.”

  He tried not to show any emotion when she called Sugarbush her property. “He’s not dangerous. Actually, he’s very likable.”

  “Look, Chris. I’m broke. They’re paying me some sort of token salary at News Nine. I need to prove to them they need me.”

  “Why don’t you go somewhere else? It’d be their loss.”

  “I spoke with Joe Simmons over at KCBJ. He was warm and friendly until he heard I was calling about work. He said, ‘Let me be frank, Carmen. Forty would be one thing if you’d been working steadily on Sunrise and the ratings had stayed high. But to try to make a comeback at forty. Forget it.’ He said he was surprised News Nine took me back at all.”

  Nice business she was in, Chris thought, although he knew that baseball hadn’t been much better. “Maybe there’s something else you could do. Some other kind of work?”

  “Like what? Teaching high school?”

  He sucked in his breath. “Low blow, Carmen.”

  She looked do
wn at her hands, a rare blush staining her cheeks. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t have a lot of money myself right now,” he said. His money had been eaten up by medical bills. Carmen’s. Dustin’s. “But I can—”

  “No.”

  “Just rent. You could be making money off that cottage if I wasn’t in it.”

  She looked at her hands again, then cocked her head at him. “I’ll tell you what you could do, if you think it’s fair.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, the house needs work. I’ve got some plumbing problems, and the walls have really gotten dingy and can use a new coat of paint, and half the windows are stuck shut, and—”

  “Yes.” The idea delighted him. “I’d be happy to do some work in the house.”

  “When I’m not there,” she added hastily.

  “Fine. And let me at least pay for the paint and any materials I—”

  “Chris.” She groaned. “I don’t want your money. Just give me Cabrio. Give me the story.”

  “I don’t have a story to give you.”

  “Where is he now? Where’s he holed up.”

  Chris hesitated. He saw that fear in her eyes again, passing through her like a spasm she couldn’t control.

  “In that abandoned warehouse by the reservation,” he said.

  She sat back, a triumphant gleam in her eye.

  “Leave him alone, Carmen. Please. Let him work in peace.”

  She stood up to leave. “I won’t disturb him,” she said. “I promise.”

  8

  JEFF LEFT HIS COTTAGE before dawn and returned after dark, five days in a row. Mia watched him come and go. She’d be up early in the mornings, working on Henry, when she’d hear the banging of his screen door, and if she looked out her window she could barely make him out as he walked across Sugarbush through the lifting darkness. At night she watched for the beam of his flashlight as he walked from the driveway to his cottage. Inside his cottage, his lights stayed on no more than an hour before he turned them out, and she pictured him falling, exhausted, into bed. He hadn’t been kidding when he told Chris he would give him all his waking hours.