“Fire and Rain,” Jeff said. His voice was muffled against her chest.
“What?” she asked.
“The song he’s singing.”
“Oh.” She let her head fall to the pillow again as he stroked her hair. The muscles in her arms and thighs were weak and tremulous. She’d given them more of a workout in the past few hours than they’d had in a year.
“Jeff?” She stroked the tips of her fingers across his chest. “How come the hair on your chest and arms is so much lighter than the hair on your head?”
He chuckled. “That’s none of your business.” His tone was light, but she knew he was serious, and she swallowed the hurt. He would trust her only so far.
He sat up and stretched. “Let’s get a bottle of wine from the fridge and join Chris on his porch,” he said.
“Okay.” She got to her knees and began searching at the foot of the moonlit bed for her dress, but he caught her hand, and when she looked down at him she saw the fear in his face, the damage.
“Hold me again,” he said. “Please.”
She wrapped her arms around him, feeling a strength inside her she had forgotten she possessed. After a few long minutes, Jeff pulled away.
“Thanks,” he said. His smile was almost sheepish. “And Mia?”
“Hmm?” She stroked her fingers across his knee.
“The hair on my head is actually a few shades darker than yours.”
CARMEN WAS UNDRESSING IN her bedroom when she heard the music. She turned off the light and knelt by the window. All three of them sat on Chris’s porch—Chris and Mia on the rough-hewn chairs and Jeff on the top porch step, leaning against the post. Chris was playing the guitar, and Jeff hit something against his knee. At first she thought it was a tambourine, but then realized he was playing spoons. The three of them were singing, stumbling over the words to Puff the Magic Dragon. Mia was laughing so hard she was nearly doubled over.
Carmen folded her arms across her chest to comfort herself. She could put on her jeans, go over and join them, but she knew what would happen then. The easy-going rapport between the three of them would dissolve, and they would resent her more than they already did.
She stayed by the window for a long time, as long as she could stand it. Then, when the loneliness seemed too much to bear, she closed the window on the music and went to bed.
33
THE HOUSE WAS TINY—a diminutive, white, Spanish-style stucco on a postage-stamp lot one block from the Santa Monica beach. Carmen checked the address in her notebook. This was it. Janet Safer. The woman Jeff had dated during his years at MIT.
Carmen had used her yearbook ruse with one of the librarians at MIT, but this particular librarian’s husband had attended the school during the same period as Jeff. He had been friends with Janet Safer and knew her current address in Santa Monica. Carmen had been delighted. As a Californian, though, Janet Safer was quite likely to have heard of the Valle Rosa rainmaker, and Carmen had been extremely discreet in describing the reason for her interest in Robert Blackwell. Having a referral from an old friend of Janet’s had given her an edge.
Sure enough, Janet had greeted Carmen’s request for an interview with enthusiasm.
“Rob Blackwell!” she’d exclaimed. “I always wondered what happened to him.”
Carmen walked cautiously on the crumbling sidewalk leading up to the house. The yard had a neat, cared-for appearance, but the house itself looked as though it had been through one too many earthquakes. The stucco was cracked; the roof was missing a few of its red clay tiles. Still, this close to the beach the house was probably worth a good deal of money.
A woman opened the door before Carmen had a chance to ring the bell.
“Carmen Perez?” Janet Safer was tall and attractive, her dark hair pulled back in a pony tail. Deep dimples appeared in her cheeks when she smiled.
“Yes. And you’re Janet Safer?”
“Sure am.” The woman stepped back into the room to let her in, and Carmen nearly stumbled over the little girl hanging onto Janet’s leg. Carmen cupped the child’s head in her palm as she passed her and was startled to look down into the face of a child with unmistakable Down’s syndrome. Something froze in her heart. She should not have come here. She should have conducted this interview by phone.
“This is Kelly,” Janet said.
“Hi.” Kelly grinned up at her.
“Hi, Kelly.” Carmen smiled at the little girl, her heart pounding. Kelly was no more than four or five, with the telltale square build and almond eyes of a Down’s child. Carmen couldn’t look at her long. She felt a sick fear, the kind of fear another person might experience when told they would have to cross a raging river in a fragile canoe. In the past few years, she had turned away from damaged children—all children, really—when she passed them on the street and blocked the memory of their image from her mind. Still, they would find their way into her dreams.
Janet led Carmen into the small kitchen where she settled Kelly at the table with a coloring book and a box of fat crayons. Carmen wished the child didn’t have to sit with them. She would have liked it if Kelly could be safely locked away in another room for the next hour.
Carmen took a seat at the battered, drop-leaf oak table. The kitchen looked like a hundred others she had seen in these small, aging, California homes. Old cabinets sported what was probably their tenth coat of paint, this one a cobalt blue. Chipped white tile covered the counter tops.
“Perrier?” Janet asked, producing the bottle from the harvest gold refrigerator.
“That would be great.” Carmen watched Kelly page through her coloring book until she settled on the line drawing of a bird in a tree.
“Rob Blackwell,” Janet said again, shaking her head as she poured. “Flash from the past.” She set Carmen’s glass in front of her and took a seat on the other side of the table, next to her daughter. The pony tail made her look very young. She wore triangular-shaped silver earrings in both ears, and three small silver hoops through the upper lobe of her left ear. There was color in her cheeks that hadn’t been there a moment ago, and Carmen thought it must be the memory of Jeff that put it there.
“Here, darlin’.” Janet helped Kelly open the box of crayons, as Carmen set her tape recorder in the center of the table and turned it on.
“So,” Janet said, scooting her daughter’s chair closer to the table. “What would you like to know about him?”
“Tell me anything you remember. Tell me about your relationship with him.”
“Well.” Janet pulled her bare feet up onto her chair and hugged her knees. “Rob wasn’t your regular sort of guy, if you know what I mean.”
Carmen took a sip from her glass and nodded. “I’ve gotten that impression from other people I’ve spoken to.” She didn’t want to admit to her own personal knowledge of him.
“He was exceptional in just about every way,” Janet said. “Though the one place he really was a little screwed up was in relationships. He was one of those people who was afraid to get close. He’d sabotage closeness. I mean, things would be going well, and then he’d go out with some other girl and make sure I knew about it. I didn’t understand at first. Was he trying to make me jealous or what?” She smiled into her glass. “Eventually I caught on. He was afraid when things started getting serious. He really liked me, and it scared him. He’d lost his mother. Then he lost the man he thought of as his father. So naturally he was afraid he’d lose anybody else he loved.”
Carmen frowned. Jeff had lost his stepfather?
Kelly tried to push one of the buttons on the tape recorder, but her mother caught her hand and returned it to the coloring book without a word.
“You said he lost his father,” Carmen said. “Do you mean he died, or just that he was still in prison when you and Rob were dating?”
“He was in jail. You know all about that?”
“A bit.”
“What was his name?” Janet asked. “Jefferson?”
“
Jefferson Watts.”
Janet shook her head. “Rob had a lot of admiration for him. Somehow he managed to reconcile himself to the fact that Jefferson had broken the law—big time—and had even killed a couple of people.”
“A couple of people?”
“Yeah. I don’t remember the details. Rob never really told me because he didn’t think it was important. His father had gone straight by the time they caught up with him, and I guess that was all that mattered to Rob. I never met his father. Rob used to write to him a lot. He’d hear back from him every once in a while.”
“Mommy.” Kelly looked up from her paper with its thick waxy brown and blue lines. “Breaked.” She held up the blue crayon which she had worked down to the paper wrapper.
“I’ll fix it for you, buttercup.” Janet peeled off an inch of wrapper and handed the crayon back to her daughter, and suddenly Carmen wanted to change the focus of this interview. How did you feel when she was born? she wanted to ask. Did you fall into a depression you thought you’d never get out of? Do you know why she was born that way? Is there someone—anyone— to blame?
“Anyhow,” Janet continued, “once Rob read me a letter he’d gotten from Jefferson. He wrote that Rob should work hard in school, that he had a lot of promise and could really make something of himself. He said Rob should live within the law and not make the kinds of mistakes he had made, and so on.”
“And did he? Live within the law?”
“Rob? Oh, God, yes.” Janet laughed, her glass halfway to her mouth. She set it on the table again. “He was very straight-arrow. It was always hard for me to believe he grew up with a criminal in the house.” She winced. “It would really have upset him to hear me talk about Jefferson that way.”
“How long did the two of you date?”
“Nearly three years. Our last three at MIT. I’m the one who ended it.” She stood to get another ice cube from the freezer and dropped it into her glass. “God, I felt so bad.” She took her seat again. “I got scared when he started talking about marriage and kids. Here I’d persuaded him to date me exclusively, to take our relationship seriously, and then when he did, I backed away.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Well, as I said before, Rob wasn’t a regular sort of guy. When I thought of actually settling down for a lifetime with someone so… out of the norm, it terrified me.” Janet knit her brows together. “He was so intense. Plus, he had no money. He was on a scholarship and working as a teaching assistant to be able to feed himself. I started thinking about raising kids with him, with no money and with his attachment to an old drug-dealing murderer and to this weird friend of his, Kent Reed.”
“He was still friends with Kent Reed when he was at MIT?”
“You know about Kent?” Janet asked.
“A little.” Carmen wondered if the librarian’s husband might have some idea where the peculiar Mr. Reed was living these days.
“God, what a weirdo.” Janet shuddered. “And yes, unfortunately Rob was still friends with him then. Kent followed him from their high school to MIT, where Rob thought it would be great fun for me to fix him up with my girlfriends. I told him to forget it—I valued my friends too much to do that to them.”
Kelly tapped her mother’s arm. “Dooce?” she asked.
“Apple or orange?” Janet stood again and opened the refrigerator.
“Appa.” Kelly put down her crayon and folded her hands neatly on top of her drawing, waiting while her mother poured the juice into a glass. Something about the gesture—those chunky little hands, folded, patient—touched Carmen in a way that was almost painful. She tried to tear her gaze away from the child, but the sheen of the little girl’s dark hair and the dimples, so much like her mother’s, were captivating.
I don’t want to feel this, she thought. I don’t want to feel anything.
She watched Kelly take a long drink from the glass her mother handed her, then forced her attention once more to Janet. “What was Kent like?”
“Oh, wow.” Janet took her seat again and swept her bangs off her forehead. “He was very tall. Gangly, like Ichabod Crane. He’d make a point of shocking people with his deformed hand. And he whined. Complained from sunup to sundown, I swear. He’d get under your skin—or at least under my skin—real fast. And he could be mean, too.” She narrowed her eyes to make her point. “I remember he was president of the chess club and he got kicked out of a tournament for ‘poor sportsmanship’ after he threw the board in his opponent’s face.”
“Why on earth was Rob friends with him?”
“I used to wonder that myself. He’d deny it, but I think it was at least partly the hand.”
“You mean he felt sorry for Kent because of his hand?” That would make some sense. Jeff Cabrio and his underdogs.
“Well, no, I mean he felt guilty since he was the cause of it.”
Carmen glanced quickly at her recorder to make sure the tape was still running. “I didn’t know that,” she said, selecting her words with care. “I thought Kent lost his fingers in high school, when he planted a bomb in another boy’s locker.”
Janet hesitated. “Hmm,” she said. “I thought you knew. I feel kind of funny telling you.”
“Use your own judgment, Janet.” Carmen kept her voice even, but she was squeezing her glass between her fingers.
“Well, it’s true that Kent lost his fingers when he tried to plant the bomb, but it was Rob who made the bomb. He never intended it to be stuck in someone’s locker, and it went off before it was supposed to.”
“My God.” Carmen set her glass down, truly shaken.
“Right. So I think that’s part of why Rob hung out with Kent, but also, there’s no denying that Rob was simply fascinated by Kent’s mind. No one else liked Kent, but Rob was never the type to pick his friends based on their popularity. He was very secure that way.” Janet let out her breath as though she was exhausted by all she had revealed. “Anyway, while I could respect him for caring about his stepfather and Kent, I couldn’t see marrying into that mess and bringing my kids up with it.” She looked at Carmen, almost apologetically. “I couldn’t see having a future with him.”
Carmen nodded, noticing a mist of tears in Janet’s eyes.
“It was a very hard choice for me to make,” Janet said. “I was down for a long time after we broke up. Sometimes I still think about him, about how my life would be different. I wouldn’t have this one, for example.” She rested her hand on her daughter’s back, and Carmen nodded again in sympathy before realizing it wasn’t regret she heard in Janet’s voice. Janet was glad she had made the choices which resulted in her daughter. “I can’t imagine my life without her,” she said.
Carmen murmured something, something she hoped sounded appropriate and gracious, all the while wondering where Janet had found the strength, the depth of love, she’d needed to welcome this child into her life.
They spoke for a few more minutes, but Carmen was anxious to escape. As they walked to the door, Janet asked, “Someday can you let me know what this is all about?”
“Yes,” Carmen said. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I’m free to talk about it.” She rested her hand on the doorknob and turned to look at Janet. “There must not have been too many women at MIT when you were there,” she said.
“Not many. I got my doctorate there, too.”
Carmen studied this pony-tailed woman with admiration. “You’ve accomplished a lot,” she said.
Janet laughed. “Well, I was ambitious back in those days. Right now a Ph.D. in physics seems a little unimportant. I worked for a few years after I got it. Then Kelly was born, and I knew she needed me more than my job did. So here I am.” She followed Carmen out into the sunny front yard. “Do you have kids?” she asked as they walked down the decrepit sidewalk.
Carmen shook her head, grateful she had reached her car. She walked around it to the driver’s side. “Thanks so much for your time,” she said, getting in behind the wheel.
?
??Hey!” Janet called after her. “Give Rob a hug for me!”
SHE DROVE TO A 7-Eleven where she eyed the beer. It would take a lot of beer to numb her at that moment, a lot of beer to block out little Kelly Safer’s face from her mind, a lot to block out Janet Safer’s loving touch on her daughter’s hair. And more alcohol than she could consume to block out the memory of her response to Janet’s question—that quick shake of her head. No, I have no children.
She bought a large coffee and sat in her car to drink it. If only she could crawl into bed and go to sleep. But she had a two- hour drive ahead of her. Two hours to think. Her eyes fell on the pay phone in the corner of the parking lot.
She rested the coffee on the floor of the car as she got out and began walking toward the phone. She seemed to be moving on automatic pilot, something trying to hold her back, something stronger pushing her forward.
Mia answered when she dialed the number for Chris’s office, and Carmen was relieved when she put her through without trying to make small talk.
“Where are you?” Chris asked. “I hear traffic.”
“Santa Monica. I just did an interview up here.” She spoke quietly, pressing the metal cord between her fingers.
“Carmen? Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Well… why are you calling?”
She squeezed her eyes closed. “I was wondering if you could tell me about Dustin.”
Chris hesitated. “About Dustin? Do you mean…”
“Just anything. Tell me anything about him. Whatever comes into your mind.”
“Hang on a second.”
She heard him walk across the room, heard the closing of his office door. Then he was back on the phone.
“Well, do you remember his dark hair? How much he had when he was born?”
“Yes.”
“It’s beautiful. Very thick, with a little wave to it. He has your coloring. He looks a lot like you, actually. He’s a handsome kid, except for his eyes.”
A truck squealed around the corner next to the phone booth, and she put her finger in her ear to block the sound. “Tell me about his eyes,” she said. “Tell me the worst.”