Later, after he'd flung the roof over the frame and hacked down half a mountainside's worth of brush to stack atop it and hide it from view, he slept. It was a deep sleep, the sleep of utter depletion, but it wasn't without dreams. Especially toward the end of it, when night had fallen and he woke and drifted off again half a dozen times. Then his dreams were the dreams of the hunted-they chased him, faceless hordes with bright Irish hair and grasping hands, and he ran and ran till they cornered him in a little wooden box on the side of the mountain. Then he was awake, awake to the soft glow of the lantern and America and the baby sleeping at his side. He smelled fruit-the smell was so strong he thought for a minute he was fifteen again and working a juice presser in the stand at the _mercado.__ With an effort, aching all over from his ordeal, he propped himself up on his elbows and surveyed the little shack, his new home, his refuge, his hideout. There was a pile of peels and rinds in the comer, seeds and pulp chewed for the moisture and spat out again, a huge pile, and then he looked at América, asleep, her lips chapped and her chin stained with the juice.
This was no good. She'd wind up with diarrhea if she didn't have it already. She was nursing, for Christ's sake-she needed meat, milk, eggs, cheese. But how could he get it? He didn't dare show his face at the store, and even if he did, all his money but for sixteen dollars was down there in the blackened canyon, cooling off beneath a blackened rock. Meat, they needed meat for a stew-and at the thought of it, of stew, he felt his salivary glands tighten.
It was at that moment, as if it were preordained, that the cat reappeared, delicate, demanding, one gray foot arrested at the doorframe. “Meow,” the cat said.
“Kitty, kitty,” Cándido said. “Here, kitty.”
5
IT DIDN'T LOOK GOOD. BOTH SIDES OF THE ROAD were blackened, the chaparral gone, the trees scorched. Kyra drove out of the normal world and into the dead zone, where the underbrush had been so completely eradicated she would have thought it had been bulldozed if it weren't for the crablike clumps of charred sticks here and there and the pale-gray ash that inundated everything and still, two days later, gave off heat. The trees that had survived-oaks, mostiy-were scarred all the way up to their denuded crowns and the ones out on the margins of the fire's path were charred on one side and still green on the other. She held her breath as she came round the last turn and caught a glimpse of the skewed remains of the Da Ros gate.
She was wearing jeans and sneakers and she'd thought to bring along a pair of work gloves, and she stopped the car now and got out to see if she could move the gate back manually. It wouldn't budge, what was left of it. She could see that the fire had swept right up the drive, scouring the earth and leveling the trees, and that the gate, with its ornamental grillwork and iron spikes, hadn't been able to hold it back. The gate had been bent and flattened, the paint vaporized and the wheels seized in their track. There was no way to drive into the property: she would have to walk.
More than anything-more than the acid stink of the air or the sight of all that mature landscaping reduced to ash-it was the silence that struck her. She was the only thing moving beneath the sun, each step leaving a print as if she were walking in snow, and she could hear the faint creak of her soles as they bent under her feet. No lizard or squirrel darted across the path, no bird broke the silence. She steeled herself for what was coming.
It wasn't her house, not really, she kept telling herself, and she wasn't the one who was going to have to absorb the loss. She would call Patricia Da Ros late tonight, when it would be morning in Italy, and let her know what had happened. If the place had been miraculously spared-and these things happened, the wildfires as unpredictable as the winds that drove them, torching one house and leaving the place next door untouched-it was going to be a hard sell. She'd already had three buyers call up to wriggle out of done deals on houses in the hills, and she knew that nobody would want to even look up here till spring at least-they had short memories, yes, but for the next six months it would be like pulling teeth to move anything anywhere near here, even a horse trailer. But if the house wasn't too bad, she'd have to get the Da Roses' insurer to re-landscape ASAP, and maybe she could use the fire as a selling point-it wouldn't burn here again in this lifetime, and that was a kind of insurance in itself…
And then she came over the hill and into the nook where the garage used to be and saw the tall chimneys of the house standing naked against the stark mountains and the crater of the sea: the rest was gone. The leather-bound books, the period furniture, the paintings, the rugs, the marble and the Jacuzzi and the eight and a half bathrooms-gone, all gone. Even the stone walls had crumbled under the weight of the cascading roof, the rubble scattered so far out you would have thought the place had been dynamited.
She'd been prepared for this-she'd seen it before-but still, it was a shock. All that beauty, all that perfection, all that exquisite taste, and what was it worth now? She couldn't bring herself to go any closer-what was the point? Did she really want to see the crystal chandeliers melted into a dirty gob of silica or discover a fragment of statuary pinned beneath a half-charred beam? She turned away-let the insurance adjusters work it out, let them deal with it-and started the long walk down the driveway without looking back.
Her other listing up here, a contemporary Mediterranean on two and a half acres with a corral and horse barn, hadn't been touched, not a shingle out of place. And why couldn't that have gone up instead? It was a choice property, on a private road and with terrific views, but it was nothing special, nothing unique or one of a kind, like the Da Ros place. What a waste, she thought, kicking angrily through the ash, bitter, enraged, fed up with the whole business. It was the Mexicans who'd done this. Illegals. Goons with their hats turned backwards on their heads. Sneaking across the border, ruining the schools, gutting property values and freeloading on welfare, and as if that wasn't enough, now they were burning everybody else out too. They were like the barbarians outside the gates of Rome, only they were already inside, polluting the creek and crapping in the woods, threatening people and spraying graffiti all over everything, and where was it going to end?
They'd held the two Mexicans for the fire-the same two who'd sprayed that hateful filth across the walls of the house-but they'd let them go for lack of evidence. And what a joke that was. They couldn't even be deported because the police and the INS weren't allowed to compare notes. But they'd done it, she knew they had, just as surely as if they'd piled up the brush, doused it with gasoline and set fire to the house itself. It was incredible. Beyond belief. She was in such a state by the time she reached the car her hand trembled as she punched in the office on her phone. “Hello, Darlene?” she said.
Darlene's voice was right there, a smooth professional chirp: “Mike Bender Realty.”
“It's me, Kyra.”
“Oh. Hi. Everything all right?”
Kyra gazed out the windshield on the wasteland around her, real estate gone bad, gone terminally bad, and she was still trembling with anger, the sort of anger the relaxation tapes couldn't begin to put a dent in, and she took it out on the receptionist. “No, Darlene,” she said, “everything's not all right. If you really want to know, everything sucks.”
Delaney dropped Kit at the airport on Sunday afternoon, and it was past four by the time he and Jordan got back. He was surprised to see Kyra's car in the driveway-Sunday was open house day and she rarely got home before dark this time of year. He found her in the TV room, the sound muted on an old black-and-white movie, the multiple-listings book facedown in her lap. She looked tired. Jordan thundered in and out of the room, a glancing “Hi, Mom!” trailing behind him. “Tough day?” Delaney asked.