“Do I remember Robert Blackwell?” the former class president laughed into the phone. She had the same slightly gritty New Jersey accent as Susan Cabrio. “You could have called anybody who attended Hubbard Junior High while he was there and they’d remember Robbie. He was one of those kids you never forget.”
Carmen held the phone to her ear as she dug through her briefcase in search of the tape recorder and the suction cup device that would allow her to tape over the phone. She hadn’t been prepared for this. She hadn’t expected success. “Well,” she said, inserting a new tape into the recorder and sitting down at the kitchen table, “I’m researching his background for a story I’m working on out here in southern California, and—”
“Really? What’s the story about?” Gail was a manic speaker, quick and eager.
“I’m not at liberty to talk about it yet. It’s an exclusive, and so I have to keep it quiet right now, but I hope you’ll still be willing to tell me a little bit of what you remember about him.” She thought about her conversation with Jeff that morning, how she might be endangering the people she was interviewing. “Your name won’t be used in any way,” she added.
“This is so wild,” Gail said. “I was thinking about Robbie just the other day because—”
“Excuse me,” Carmen interrupted her. “Would you mind if I recorded our conversation?”
“Record it? Sure. Whatever.”
Carmen attached the small suction cup to the side of the phone receiver. “Okay,” she said. “Please go on.”
“I was thinking about him, because at work the other day—I work in a hair salon—this woman was talking about her fourteen-year-old son who had somehow rigged up the phones in their house so that long distance calls were being charged to a neighbor’s phone. It had been going on for months, and they just caught up to him. He’s in a ton of trouble.”
Carmen frowned, wondering what that could possibly have to do with Jeff. Perhaps Gail Vidovich had been breathing the chemicals in her hair salon for too long. “Why did that remind you of Jeff?” she asked.
“Jeff who?”
“I mean, Robert. Robbie. You said that reminded you of him.”
“Right. It’s exactly the kind of thing Robbie would have done.” Gail laughed again. “Do you know what he did once?”
“What?”
“He somehow got all the clocks in the school—I am not making this up, every one of them—running fast, so that our periods were only forty-five minutes long instead of fifty, and by the end of the day we got out at something like two-thirty instead of three.”
Carmen smiled. “You’re kidding.”
“No. And it took them two days to figure out what was going on. See what I mean about him being memorable?”
“I do. What happened to him when he got caught, though?”
“Hmm.” Gail paused. “I don’t remember that part. Probably not much. I’m sure the administrators thought he should be punished, but they were so amazed that he could do something like that, that it was hard for them to discipline him. I mean, how do you punish a thirteen-year-old kid for doing something no adult in the school could begin to figure out how to do?”
“I can see the problem,” Carmen said. She wondered how Beth Cabrio would have reacted to her son’s antics. “Did you ever happen to meet his mother?”
“His mother? No. I don’t think I met any of his family.”
“What else can you tell me about him?”
“Well, he was cute. A charmer. Kind of skinny and a little younger than most of us—if I remember, he skipped a grade—but all the girls thought he was adorable. And, obviously, he was very smart, probably the smartest kid in the school, but he didn’t necessarily get the best grades because he acted like a lot of the work was beneath him.” Gail paused for breath. “They were always pulling him out of class to make him take special tests, and the teachers made a fuss over him. When they’d hear about something he did, like the clocks, they’d try to look disapproving, but you could see they were laughing inside.”
“So, he got away with a lot.”
For the first time, Gail hesitated. “Well, that makes him sound like a bad kid, and he wasn’t. He was a nice person, and even though he got all this attention for being smart, he didn’t have a swelled head.”
Naturally, Carmen thought. He was a saint.
“You called him a ‘charmer,’” she said. “Was he someone who would use his charm to his own advantage?”
“Hmm. Not with girls, if that’s what you mean, but we were all pretty young then. As I said, though, he could charm the socks off adults. He was in my English class, and he really had no earthly interest in diagramming sentences, you know? It wasn’t his thing at all. But he could always convince the teacher to let him do something else, something on his own instead. I doubt anyone but Robbie would have gotten that special treatment.”
“Didn’t the other kids resent him for that?”
“Oh, no. He was different and everyone simply accepted it.”
An entire school full of saints.
“What was he like in high school?” Carmen asked.
“Actually, he didn’t go on to PHS—Plainfield High School—with the rest of us. Now that I think about it, I remember something about his mother dying and him moving away.”
“His mother died?” Carmen tightened her grip on the phone. An almost personal sense of loss swept over her. Her clear vision of the young, homeless Beth Cabrio, struggling to find a stable life for herself and her son filled her head. She cringed when she remembered asking Jeff about his mother that morning. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Do you know how she died?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure, but that seems right, and I don’t have the faintest notion how she died. All I know is that Robbie moved out of Plainfield.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know that either, but you know who might? Danny Grace.”
“Who’s that?” Carmen pulled her notepad from the briefcase and jotted down the name.
“Danny was Robbie’s best friend.”
“So he would know about his home life, too? That sort of thing?”
“Oh, sure. They were always over each other’s houses.”
“Does Danny still live in Plainfield?”
Gail laughed. “No. He got out long ago and never came back. He’s a lawyer now, somewhere in Maryland. Probably goes by Daniel. He was an idiot in high school, though. Straight D’s.”
The eighth grade class president was now a beautician, the class idiot, an attorney. So much for junior high school being a predictor of the future.
Carmen wished Dan Grace were anything but a lawyer. So far, everyone with whom she’d spoken had been easy to probe for information. A lawyer would give her story greater credibility, but he was bound to ask questions, bound to be suspicious. “Is there anyone else who might know about Robbie’s family?”
“Hmm. No one I can think of. Give Danny a call. Tell him I said ‘Hi, and how’re ya doing?’”
Carmen hung up the phone and turned off her recorder. She stared at the notepad, where she’d written Daniel Grace, atty, MD. Probably the Bar Association could put her in touch with him. She could call them in the morning. Maybe not, though. She had to remember not to move too quickly.
She rifled through her briefcase, setting aside a few nerve-wracking unpaid bills, until she found the memo Craig had slipped on her desk before she’d left the station that afternoon. She’d been on the phone at the time, and Craig had given her a wink and a thumbs-up sign before disappearing back into the hall, and she’d known that the memo contained good news.
She set it on her kitchen table to re-read it. News Nine‘s ratings had climbed yet another notch on the nights she was on. That was all it said. Very brief. Brief, and beautiful.
It was working, her slow methodical unraveling of Jeff’s story from the ground up. There was something incredibly satisfying in feeding him to her audience in bits and
pieces, keeping his story alive, despite the fact that he hadn’t delivered a drop of rain. She was certain he never would. Nevertheless, she found herself reading the weather report each morning, praying for rain. Just a shower. Just a mist. Something to make people continue to think that Jeff Cabrio was worthy of their curiosity.
She pulled a sheet of stationery from her briefcase and wrote a quick letter to News Nine‘s general manager, Dennis Ketchum, requesting that her portion of North County Report be increased to five days a week. Her hand shook as she attached the letter to the memo detailing the new ratings. She slipped them both into an envelope, wondering if, in the morning, she would still possess the courage she’d need to deliver it to Dennis. No doubt, he had been among those wanting to get rid of her. Surely, he now realized that would have been a mistake.
She would get San Diego Sunrise back, she thought, as she sealed the envelope, and she would have as her guests the people she was interviewing. Perfect! All at once? Yes. Susan Cabrio. Barbara Roland. Gail Vidovich. This lawyer, Daniel Grace, if he was willing to talk. She would never be able to get Jeff himself to appear, but this would be even better. His portrait would be painted by the memories of others, painted in layers, far more complex than it could ever have been by having him on alone.
And the others were sure to tell things that Jeff himself never would.
22
THERE WERE FIVE OF them. Three men, a woman, and an infant, huddled at the side of the adobe. Chris watched them from the window of the master bedroom, where he was painting the walls the soft salmon color Carmen favored for most of the house. He’d heard a noise from outside, and when he’d turned off the light, he’d seen them filling empty plastic milk jugs with water from the hose. The undocumented workers from the canyon.
The men were small and stripped to the waist. Their bodies, caught partially in the light coming from the back of the house, were tight, the muscles well-defined. The woman was a little heavier; the child she held was wrapped in a blanket or towel—from this distance, Chris couldn’t tell which.
If they were speaking to one another, he couldn’t hear them. He’d closed all the windows in the adobe because soot from a new fire on the other side of the canyon was sifting through the screens, and he was afraid it would layer itself on the freshly painted walls. Besides, he was tired—very tired—of the smell of smoke.
So Carmen still did this, he thought, still let the workers living in the canyon use her water. No wonder her bill was astronomical.
It was rare to see women and children among the men. Usually it was the men who risked the journey north across the border, who did the hard labor and sent the money home to their families.
One of the men held the hose for the woman as she leaned over to wash her long, dark hair with a bar of soap. When she straightened up again, she unwrapped the child and soaped his small body, while the man poured water over him from a plastic jug. The child howled. It was cool outside, and Chris could imagine how the cold tap water felt on the baby’s skin. He thought of hurrying downstairs to fill a basin with warm water, but he knew what Carmen would say: “I never go out to talk with them anymore. They can pretend it isn’t charity if they don’t have to see me. They can keep their pride.”
Carmen could give and ask nothing in return. It was a side of her she allowed so few people to see, a side of her he didn’t want to forget existed.
As the woman dried her baby, the man plucked a prairie blanket flower from the earth and handed it to her. With a pang of loneliness, Chris walked away from the window and turned on the light again. He needed to finish his painting and be out of the adobe before Carmen arrived home.
23
LOOKING BACK, MIA KNEW that Glen had been frightened to see how her body had changed, although at the time he hadn’t let on. Even now she felt some gratitude toward him for hiding his fear, for allowing her to think he could see the worst she had to offer and still love her. Back then, she couldn’t have taken the blow. It was bad enough when it finally came.
Karen Barker, the social worker in Dr. Bella’s office, had counseled her. Was there a man in her life? Yes, Mia had said, she was engaged. She and Glen had planned the wedding for that very month, but they had put it off until she was feeling well again.
“Has he seen the incision?” Karen asked, and Mia started to cry, realizing how desperately she needed him to do exactly that, and how afraid she was of his reaction. It was hard enough to look at the scar herself.
Karen asked her what Glen was like, and Mia told her how he had helped her care for her mother, how he had even stayed with the older woman one night a week while Mia took a class. She told her how, when Laura had moved home devastated after breaking up with Luke, her boyfriend of several years, Glen had worked to cheer her up.
“He sounds like a sensitive man,” Karen said. “A caring man. He’ll be fine. You have to trust him. You’re trying to be very strong for him, but he sounds like someone who likes taking care of people. Let yourself be taken care of for a change, Mia. Give him the chance to do that. Give him the chance to show how much he loves you.”
She and Glen were in her bedroom that evening. Since her mother’s death a year earlier, Glen had lived in the house with her, had slept with her every night. After the surgery, though, he’d started sleeping in her mother’s old room. “What if I roll over and accidentally hurt you?” he asked, and she hadn’t been able to tell him that mattered to her far less than having him close.
She had taken a shower and had put on her white chenille robe, and she stood close to him, near the bedroom window. “I’d like you to see—” She couldn’t find the word. Her chest? Her incision? “My scar,” she said.
Glen nodded. “Good.” He sat down on the bed. “I wasn’t sure if I should ask or not. I didn’t want to push you.”
She undid the tie of her robe, wishing the lights were dimmer. The skin of her hands had a bluish cast to them in the stark overhead light. She could see every vein. She didn’t like the idea that the skin of her chest would look so translucent, so deathlike. She opened the robe, but left it on, her eyes on Glen’s face.
“Just for a year,” she said. “It’ll only be like this for a year. Then I can have the reconstruction surgery and it won’t look so—”
“It’s fine, Sunny,” he interrupted her. “It’s not so horrid.” He reached up to touch the taut skin covering her chest, and she flinched, pulled away. “Does it hurt?” he asked.
“No.” She laughed. “You surprised me, that’s all. It burns a little when you touch it, but it doesn’t actually hurt.”
“Do you feel… off balance?” He smiled at her.
“A little.” For the first time in weeks she felt a surge of happiness. The poison was gone from her body. The danger. And Glen could handle this.
He reached up to tie the sides of her robe together again, then he stood and held her. “I love you.” He kissed her temple.
“I’d like you to sleep in here tonight,” she said.
She felt him nod against her head. “All right.”
The next day she stopped by Dr. Bella’s office, although she had no appointment. She poked her head into the social worker’s cubicle. “You were right,” she said. “Glen was great.”
For several days everything seemed as though it would return to normal. She felt strong enough to work with clay again. Glen spent his mornings at his studio, but despite the fact that she insisted she wanted to cook, he came home early enough each night to make dinner for her and Laura. Laura was working as an assistant buyer for a large department store, and she was starting to laugh again; Luke’s name came up less and less in conversation.
Then Laura started helping Glen cook, both of them gleefully banishing her from the kitchen when she tried to participate. They told her she was still recovering. She needed to be cared for, pampered, and she tried to ignore the feeling of being left out.
Glen didn’t bring up sex, and Mia figured it was up to her to let h
im know she was ready to make love again. More than ready. She’d put in her diaphragm for three nights in a row in the hope that he would suggest it, but there was a distance between them in bed that she tried to deny. He was afraid of hurting her, she thought.
On the fourth night, she told him that her diaphragm was in.
“Ah,” he said. “You must really be feeling better.”
She got into bed wearing her cotton nightshirt and pushed her way close to him. He wrapped his arms loosely around her.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I won’t break.”
He kissed her, but there was no passion in the kiss, no fire, and she nuzzled closer to him, close enough to feel the softness of his penis through his boxer shorts. After a moment he drew back from her. “I’m wiped out tonight,” he said, stroking her hair. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay.” She had never been that close to him when he wasn’t hard and ready for her.
The following night was a repeat performance, and on the third night when he rolled away from her, he sounded truly upset. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said.
“It’s my breast.”
“No, no, Sunny.” He put his arm around her, pulling her head to his shoulder. “It’s me. Maybe I need a physical myself.” He laughed. “Have you ever known me to strike out three nights in a row?”
She had never known him to strike out even once, but she said nothing.
He wasn’t in the bed when she woke up the following morning, although it was quite early. She got up and went to the closet for her clothes. Through the air conditioning shaft that ran through the rear of the closet, she heard voices. Glen, talking to Laura. She could hear them clearly; she didn’t even have to rest her ear against the shaft to make out their words.
“I nearly retched when I saw it,” he was saying. “I know I’m a shit for feeling that way, but it’s grotesque. She’s damaged beyond repair. She looks like a freak. I try to block it out of my mind when I’m sleeping with her, but I can’t. I can’t even… perform.”