Heat

by Michael Cadnum

  You start a dive by making yourself as tall as possible, giving your body the optimum centrifugal force, and then you want to curl as tight as you can, spinning. I could not remember it. I could not remember the fall, toppling out of sync, my body not a projectile any more, not graceful, no magic in it at all, tumbling. I must have fallen in sideways, and Miss P must have hauled me off the bottom of the pool.

  A gentle hand wiped the dried soup off my face. “Let’s sit you up,” said the doctor after shining a light into my eyes, the inside of my eyeballs illuminated, caverns of black and red veins. The cushioned table was covered with white, crinkly paper that crumpled even more every time I shifted.

  The doctor used a pair of scissors. I keep my hair short, pulled back and fastened with a bolo band. He worked the band out of my hair, and I heard the whisper of the refuse-bin door as he disposed of the crusty thong. The scissors made a bright, loud snip snip, right up against the bone of my skull. I let him attend the back of my head with the sort of bowed head and stubborn patience I associate with a dog at an animal hospital, hating every moment but surrendering to the unfathomable wisdom of his masters.

  I was wearing a ridiculous hospital gown, with the back gaping, a towel over my shoulders. “This is very nice,” said the doctor, exactly the way a teacher compliments a student in freehand drawing. “Scalp wounds are so often not as bad as they look.”

  He was older than I expected, tufts of white hair at his temples, not one of the new interns who practice how to be doctors, probing livers for .38 slugs.

  “I’m not bad at sewing up heads,” he said with a smile almost as good as my dad’s, warm, kind, twinkly. He produced a small electric razor from the pocket of his white coat. He caught the look in my eyes and said, “I need to trim just a wee bit more.” He sprinkled a few stiff curls he had already snipped into my hand, to reassure me.

  My dad’s new wife would take one look at me and figure I had ringworm. I had seen Cindy at a distance, getting out of her car, waiting for an elevator, a briefcase under each arm bulging with paperwork. She was pretty, in a quick, bright-eyed way. I didn’t want to disappoint my father and show up with mange, and when I competed in Sacramento I’d have to wear a bathing cap so the judges wouldn’t nudge each other and whisper, “What’s the matter with her head?”

  He flicked on the little gray razor and the buzzing resonated throughout my body.

  “It’s only blood, though,” I said, trying to sound confident.

  “Don’t worry, Bonnie. There isn’t any cranial fluid leaking out.” He said cranial fluid with a little extra emphasis, one of those older guys who talk to teenage girls like they are objects of amusement.

  My mother didn’t drive nearly as well as she thought she did, and I dreaded the thought of her careening down from upper Broadway. I asked when I could go home, but he wasn’t listening, finished with clearing a patch around my cut. A small clearing, a meadow no bigger than two fingers wide, as I discovered when I felt up across my head, gingerly, carefully. He plucked my fingers away with a little laugh of impatience.

  The trash bin in the corner was labeled BIO-HAZARD, red letters. An icy spray misted the back of my head, and then I felt creepy little tugs, minute tightening pinches as he sutured my scalp.

  “I’m training for the Cal Expo Invitational,” I said. “Next week.” The actual water-sports season runs late winter through spring, but there were plenty of exhibitions to keep us busy.

  “Next week,” he echoed, only half listening.

  I couldn’t tell him that the academy had the only swimming/diving team in Alameda County invited to the competition. I couldn’t tell him that I had begun to have fantasies, Goodwill Games, Olympic trials. My seventeenth birthday was in three weeks, and when she was my age my mother had held a state record for the women’s hundred-meter freestyle.

  “My wife and I love watching gymnastics,” he said.

  “I’m a diver,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed. One thing I always make clear is how I disdain gymnastics, how little skill and courage it takes to prance the parallel bars compared with the elegance and mental clarity of the dive. Still, it didn’t seem right to get smart with a man sewing up my head.

  “Of course you are, a diver,” he said, a man humoring a precocious child. “We’ll have a neurologist do a workup a little later on,” he said. “I have two sons,” he said, stepping back to examine me from distance with the look a sculptor gives clay. “I always wished I’d had a daughter,” he added. It is almost embarrassing the way adults confide in me. I wonder why, and Rowan tells me I have that look, someone they can talk to.

  “There might be some discomfort,” he said.

  When I practice medicine, I will say pain when that’s what I mean.

  “I’ll see you get medication,” he said, and I did feel a stab of compassion for him, a kind man, spending his nights watching Olympic highlights on video. As the daughterless doctor made his way outside, he whisked aside a curtain, a magician who was gradually getting a feel for his act.

  My mother blinked against the sight of me perched there on the examination table, but then got her strength together and hurried to my side. But her hug stopped halfway; she didn’t want to risk crushing the delicate eggshell of my head. She took one of my arms instead, squeezing it hard.

  She said it would be all right, and her voice was tight with emotion. “Who’s minding the shop?” I said, using a paper tissue on my eyes.

  People love working for Mom, and she has a crew of efficient, self-effacing plant lovers. Mom’s exotic flowers end up in Architectural Digest, on Mr. Mel Gibson’s coffee table. Mom was wearing a green coat much like the one the doctor had been wearing, except that it looked good on her, tucked in at the waist. A yellow, custom-stitched Green Heaven decorated her breast pocket.

  “They want to keep you overnight,” she said.

  Paralysis, I thought. I heard myself say that there was nothing wrong with me.

  “A nice private room,” she said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A knock at the door, and another visitor was in my private room.

  “Bonnie Chamberlain,” said a slim woman. Tell the patient her name—that’ll make her feel better. “I’m Dr. Breen.” She had short dark hair done in stylish waves, one of those brisk, practical hairstyles that lets everyone know it cost money.

  She carried an oversize manila folder with a metal strap to keep the pages from falling out, and a very large peat-green folder, the color of one of my Mom’s favorite sweaters. I had been in the hospital two and a half hours and already my files were getting fat. She wore a white medical coat, with a bright yellow scarf at her throat, the sort older women tie in place to hide what Denise calls chicken neck.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said. She had long, cinnamon-red fingernails, not someone who worked with her hands.

  Mom was gone, off making phone calls. Miss P and Denise had slipped away, home for supper, getting on with their lives. I used to imagine hospitals were places people went to get rest.

  The doctor took the cap off her pen. For a private room, the place was noisy, plumbing squealing. “Hey, hey, hey,” said a relaxed jovial voice somewhere in the corridor, and another voice responded casually, “I know it.”

  “I already explained everything to the radiologist,” I said. The X-ray doctor had been a large woman with thin little legs, hurrying back into her cubicle: “Don’t move while I count three.”

  “But you and I haven’t had a chance to talk, have we?” A speck of white on her tongue, a breath mint.

  “You’re the neurologist,” I said, actually just checking. She could have been a journalist, an award-winner. I didn’t have a head ache so much as skull awareness, a throb in the bone.

  How can smiles say so much: I’m in a hurry, stop stalling. Yes, I’m the expert on the human nervous system.

  I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Did you look at my X rays?”

  “I have them her
e,” she said, nestling the green folder close to her body. “They aren’t so hard to examine, if you put them up to the window. Would you like to see?”

  I felt like a person being interviewed for an important, long-sought position. I should think before each answer, I warned myself. She would not want to exhibit an X ray unless it proved something.

  I didn’t want to look.

  She put a large transparent rectangle up against the view and held it as she spoke. The process of having my head X-rayed and having the electrical function of my brain measured had taken place on one of the lower floors of the hospital, and at any other time in my life I would have taken an avid interest in the proceedings.

  I told myself that I was not appalled at the vision of my milk-white bone, transparent all the way along the skull to the hard wall, where she had trouble indicating the point of impact. “Right there,” she said, as the transparency slipped.

  Merritt Hospital has views of the Oakland Hills. If I shifted all the way over to one side of the bed, I could almost see the Lloyd-Fairhill campus, a school Mom and I had chosen because the head life-sciences teacher was a former assistant editor for Science. And because they had a new, earthquake-proof gym, and had a swim and dive team that competed up and down the West Coast.

  Afternoon shadows crept up the slopes and valleys of the hills, filling in the rough sparseness that was still easy to see, where several years before, the great fire had annihilated eight hundred homes.

  “No fracture,” I said.

  “And no detectable swelling,” she said, with a wrinkle of amusement appearing on one cheek.

  “You mean I wouldn’t be sitting here like this if I had a fractured skull.”

  She had trouble getting the X ray back in its folder. “You should lie back quietly,” she said. “And stay calm.”

  “I’m calm.”

  “Tell me where you are,” she said.

  I toyed with the idea of pretending this was a joke. “You check to see if my brain works by giving me a test.”

  “A little bit like school,” she said.

  “You’re going to give me a chemistry midterm?” I said, staying polite, barely.

  “How many elements can you name?”

  “In alphabetical order, or by atomic weight?”

  When I get to be a doctor I’ll remember times like this, I told myself. An after-hours silk blouse peeked out the front of her white coat. She sported sexy black half-heels open at the toe, pedicure and manicure matching color. I rattled off the elements, actinium and aluminum all the way toward zinc and zirconium, but she lifted her hand at californium, not one quarter of the way through.

  I named the hospital, told her it was by Highway 580 in an area known as Pill Hill, and that my dad had used several doctors from the hospital as expert witnesses over the years.

  “What did you have for breakfast this morning,” she said, not giving it the intonation of a question, in a hurry to go to a reception or maybe she had a dinner date with a surgeon. Imagine the cocktail gossip: One of my patients is missing three quarters of her brain.

  Dad had always stressed the difference between being a sworn witness and just answering questions. “Ask anybody who was there,” I responded. “They got a good look.”

  “Do you remember?” she asked after a pause.

  “I always have the same thing for breakfast,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “I mix Trader Joe’s Milk & Egg Protein Powder in a blender, and have that with a banana and some toast.”

  “How did you get to the pool today?”

  I kept myself from telling a lie. “I can walk there from home.”

  “What did you do today?” she asked, emphasizing the last word. An attorney would say that she was badgering the witness. But I was being unresponsive, and we both knew it. The hospital sheets are stamped along the seam, Bay Hospital Supply. I ran my hand over the bedding.

  “That’s what I did,” I said meeting her gaze again, my voice suddenly taking on a weight of surprise and sincerity. “That Harlequin Great Dane was out of its yard. A gigantic dog—it scares all the little kids. I talked to it and gave it a pat.” My voice dwindled in wonderment: I could remember.

  The morning came back to me, the thin, gray-haired man creaking by on a bike, delivering throwaway newspapers, a gardener’s canvas cloth spread out on the sidewalk, filling with milkweed and cockleburs. The dog stood on its hind legs, front paws on the top of the wall. I had to reach up to pat the dog’s head.

  I usually get dog saliva on my fingers. It’s a little disgusting, but the dog can’t help it.

  “Tell me,” she was saying, “about your accident.”

  “You do the same thing, over and over. Do the right thing, in the right way, a million times.”

  “What went wrong?”

  Every time a step whispered in the hall I prayed it was Mom, but shadows fled back and forth and the door stayed still.

  “I can’t remember the dive,” I said at last.

  Mom was at the window, gazing out through the Venetian blinds at the lights of the hills. “We’ll have to see how things go,” she said, not turning to look at me.

  Mom is a striking-looking woman, although I don’t know if a stranger would call her beautiful. I find myself looking at her sometimes, just to watch her. She has prematurely gray hair that she wears full, down to her shoulders, and she is tall enough to look good in anything she wears. She has tiny acne scars in her complexion, and when she forgets to put on her makeup you can see her feelings through their disguise.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said. I had swallowed two codeine tablets. I wondered if they were taking effect. Maybe that was why my tongue felt fat, nothing wrong getting stuck, those two ng sounds like chewing gum.

  Miss P called. I told her this was the first time I had drunk an entire cup of Brim instant decaffeinated coffee. It came with the dinner, and I didn’t see how people could drink the stuff.

  Denise called, too. She said my voice sounded peculiar but at least I could talk. Denise and I used to go to the same elementary school. Her dad bought her large, hand-crafted dollhouses at a store on Solano Avenue. Long after we had outgrown doll-houses Denise would have me over to help furnish her latest three-story Victorian mansion. I think Denise took up competition diving because we were used to doing things together.

  My sister Georgia called while I was getting a little drowsy, and the sound of her voice made me sit up in bed. Georgia never calls anyone, rarely writes, and almost never visits, but not because we hate each other. She’s married and lives near Eureka, up near the Oregon border. She and Mom get along fine, communicating through mental telepathy or dream imagery or some other nonverbal technique. I have the feeling Mom worries about me, but feels that Georgia is going to live to be the first two-hundred-year-old human being.

  I told Georgia that it was a mistake to keep me here overnight, and I could hear the concern fade from her voice and a familiar, humorous skepticism take its place. Or maybe it was just the difference in our ages.

  “What I want to know is,” said Georgia, “did you crack the bottom of the pool?”

  Rowan called. I bunched the front of my hospital gown together, thankful he couldn’t see me. I heard myself chattering, asking him where he was, what he was doing, and he said, with cheerful mystery, that he and his dad were “out in the field.”

  I heard the crash and lull of surf and wondered what the Beal family project was on this particular night—the sea lion, the kit fox, or some virtually unknown creature whose cry no one had ever recorded before.

  “Don’t worry,” said Rowan.

  “I won’t!” I responded, despising myself for sounding so featherbrained. Rowan’s usual friends had always been seniors with sports cars, the kind of student Yale sends advisors out to interview. Recently Rowan and I had begun to spend time together, and I still couldn’t believe my good fortune.

  “They’ll have you out of there in no time,” said. Rowa
n.

  “I know it,” I said, as though the brain and everything about it was no mystery to me.

  All night I was afraid to fall asleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The world looked like something thrown together in the dark.

  A man on a roof garden in the distance set out a white table and white chairs. They were heavy; he had to drag them into place. When he was done he stood and looked at the sunrise, hands on his hips, like the sun was barely on time.

  The sounds of orderlies and nurses saying good morning made me dress quickly, a plaid blouse I never wore, with mother-of-pearl snap buttons, and tight stretch pants, the kind that look like black leotards. Mom had brought the clothes the evening before, and I wondered what she thought of what I usually wear.

  The room had an almost perfectly square mirror framed in stainless steel. My face looked back at me, gray eyes. From the front I couldn’t see the bite taken out of my head. Even when I turned my head, I couldn’t make out the rat bite in my scalp.

  Dr. Breen made her one-knock entrance, wearing dove-gray pants and another scarf, silver-blue silk, and something expensive under her white coat—russets and port blues.

  “How was your night?” she asked.

  “Good,” I said. Even when I had slipped into sleep, nurses had awakened me, in and out of the room all night, making sure I knew where the call button was, “If you need to tinkle.”

  I felt like my skull was floating in midair, but I was sure if I said so Dr. Breen would send me downstairs to have my head fastened securely. The bed had a little wing, like a desktop, that swung into place if the patient wanted to eat or rest her elbows. The wing had locked into place, and I had been forced to squirm my way out of the sheets.

  “If you can wrestle one of our world-champion beds,” said Dr. Breen, “you can’t be doing too badly.”

  “It’s policy,” said the orderly. “I know you can walk, you know it. But policy says I wheel you down to the lobby.” It was a chrome wheelchair, thin gray rubber wheels. There was a traffic jam—gurneys, wheelchairs, piles of laundry. The orderly pushing me said, “Beep beep,” and another one said, “Beep yourself.”