Heat

by Michael Cadnum

  “Friday night,” he called, gunning the engine. Then he hit the side of his head, an exaggerated “I almost forgot.”

  He slipped a velvet box from his pants pocket.

  The box alone was luxurious, my fingers leaving silvery prints on the lavender plush.

  He gave me an open it lift of his chin.

  “They dive three hundred feet down for those pearls,” he said. “Holding their breath.”

  “No they don’t.” I laughed.

  “You could.”

  We headed toward the Golden Gate, back in toward the harbor. The shadow of the bridge was cool as we surged through it, and the wind from behind whipped the knot ends of my scarf up around my lips.

  Mom didn’t ask, not in so many words. She did inquire how everything was, that inclusive Everything that means the weather, human life, my father. She didn’t take the pearl out of its box. She said it was nice.

  But it was only when we were in her shop very early Friday morning that she said, “They won’t have kids, will they.” A statement, a definite assertion, as she fastened her green smock, bending to her most recent shipment.

  I could have said, How would I know. But the question was hard-edged, a consideration I had avoided. The last years of my parents’ difficulties had taken place behind the closed door of their bedroom, but I had overheard my dad’s whiplash whisper and his upbeat laugh: There, I’ve made a point. Mom can deal with tax accountants, and she can fire a cashier if the till is fifteen cents short, but in an argument she gets a stubborn, feline expression and just waits for the disagreement to pass.

  Tropical plants often arrive wrapped in bright-colored plastic, customs stickers and aphis-control tabs stuck on randomly. Mom stops talking when she unwraps a special order, using a tiny knife blade and a quiet, peering manner as she works, as though if the plant inside is blighted she can catch just a glimpse and stop right there, and not have to expose herself to full disappointment.

  “This is supposed to be a white bird-of-paradise,” she said, palpating the plastic wrapper, scarlet OVERNIGHT and RUSH taped over the seams. A photographer for the Sunday Examiner was shooting a spread at Dunsmuir house, a historical mansion on the bank of Lake Merritt.

  I stood by with a pair of iron shears, like someone ready to kill the specimen if it proved monstrous. If a bird-of-paradise is anything less than perfectly healthy it turns into black slime. I said something encouraging, and Mom continued to worry the shipping tape, unpeeling plastic.

  When the shipment was completely undressed, Mom peered at it through her half-lens glasses, examining each blue spike. I didn’t want to be late to see Dr. Breen, but I knew how fussy photographers can be. They insist that even the most rare exotics show up garden fresh—the hot lights kill blossoms in a few hours.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dr. Breen’s office was completely bare. Little steel hooks glittered on the walls where paintings had been removed, and aside from the examination table, with its required length of white butcher paper, and a small side desk, the doctor’s office was empty, the workplace of a person getting ready to flee the country. “Doctor will be right in,” said a nurse, one of those human dumplings who really should read up on cholesterol.

  I was never going to put a patient through anything like this.

  Dr. Breen herself was wearing something knit and slinky, a dress with a drop waist, mauve and very unusual, from what I could see of it through her unbuttoned lab coat. She gave me one bright look, up and down, taking me in the way men sometimes do, and then went back to the folders in her hands, leaning on her desk. She straightened her back, continuing to read.

  “I’m sorry to be so late,” she said at last.

  I heard myself say that I didn’t mind. Maybe one tiny part of my mind hadn’t wanted Dr. Breen to show up, and didn’t want to ever climb the tower again. I asked what color she was going to paint the walls.

  “Whatever color the architecture committee picks,” she said, looking through my folder. “What do you think—nerve white? Bone marrow pink?”

  I gave a little pro forma laugh.

  She pried a paper clip free, nodding as she read. “How have you been feeling?” not looking up.

  “Great.”

  This got her attention. “You haven’t experienced—”

  “Double vision, no.”

  I answered no to nausea, dizziness, and told her promptly that my appetite was fine.

  “And the event-specific amnesia.”

  “I’ve been remembering it in sections.” I had prepared this statement, having anticipated the question, and it came out a little wooden.

  “Have you?” Friendly, but not friendly.

  I had to offer her something, something true. I had to give her some hint how I felt. “I have dreams.”

  Her gaze slipped off mine for an instant, as though dreams were not her field of expertise. “What of?”

  “The dive,” I said. I couldn’t keep from sounding a little exasperated—why else would I mention this? “The accident.”

  She gave me the little wrinkle of a smile I had noticed before, as though “accident” were a euphemism.

  “I didn’t get the right altitude,” I said. “And then, because of that, I didn’t have the leverage when I tucked in. Of course, I could have hit my toes. A guy in San Diego broke a metatarsal a few months ago, dinging the tower with his foot. I could have missed and gotten away with it. But I didn’t.”

  “You can’t remember it.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s all right that you can’t recall the actual dive, step by step.”

  “That’s what I mean—I know it’s all right.”

  “Tell me about the dream,” she said.

  “What made you choose neurology?” I asked. One way to cross-examine an expert witness successfully is to mix up your questions, keep the witness just a little off guard.

  She looked at me with her polite smile. Her makeup was good.

  “You could have picked—radiology,” I said, imagining her scurrying into the control booth, protecting her reproductive future from the electromagnetic waves.

  “Radiologists are the most boring people in the world,” she said, slipping out of her doctor voice for a second, as though visualizing radiologists at parties, next to her in meetings, excited about their new high-speed Kodak film.

  I wanted to be an ophthalmologist. I wanted to cure blindness, and I wasn’t afraid to imagine my touch searching the vitreous humor, the central fluid of the eyeball, for a steel splinter or a shard of glass.

  I had sometimes given into fantasies of my waiting room, with broad, comfortable chairs, easy for the sight impaired to find, with simple, beautiful abstract paintings, greens and blues, on the walls. I had fantasies I was a little embarrassed by, tall, soft-voiced male nurses telling frightened but increasingly hopeful patients, “Dr. Chamberlain will see you now.” But I had studied the university catalogs carefully, Duke, Harvard, Stanford. Dad had always said cost was no object.

  I told Dr. Breen about my dreams, putting some feeling into it.

  “These nightmares trouble you,” she suggested, gently.

  I hesitated. “A little.”

  “I never remember my dreams. I’m going through a divorce, and I would like to have access to whatever my unconscious might have to offer in the way of dream commentary. But—”

  This happens to me—people look at me, make a judgment about my character, and tell me about themselves. “That’s too bad,” I said. “About not dreaming.”

  “I’ve always envied people who had howling nightmares. Wonderful story dreams. Rich inner lives.”

  “You’re right to envy us. It’s wonderful.”

  She laughed, looking a little like my sister Georgia.

  “I’m signing a release,” she said, briskly hurrying back to her doctor diction. “This form—”

  She said form with a trace of exasperation, another scrap of paperwork to clutte
r her life. She let a piece of stationery flutter in her hand, extended in my direction, Lloyd-Fairhill Academy in dignified Medieval-looking script at the top.

  “I’m clearing you,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The ten-meter platform has no bounce to it, not like a diving board. The diver doesn’t experience any of that buoyant, walking-the-plank give under her feet. It’s like standing on the out-thrust edge of a building.

  All the energy for her leap must come from her own body, from her legs, from the sudden fulcrum of her own length, stretched high. She folds her arms around her knees, creating an axis. To spin faster she goes into a tighter tuck, becomes a smaller circle.

  Sometimes you begin your climb up the steps in chilly winter shadow and reach the apex of the dive in the heat of a summer afternoon. In the vacation resorts my parents enjoyed, even in the sunset days of their marriage, I always worked on my dives. In pools in Palm Springs and Vegas, I did layouts and pikes off the glittering white sandpaper of the springboards. I practiced half twists and curls, wishing I could go higher, wishing I could soar.

  “She was born to it” was the way Mom put it. Even during the trial separation, Dad paid the monthly membership at the Skyline Country Club, until the instructor there said she had nothing more to teach me.

  A woman from the Tribune asked me once if I was ever afraid, and I said, “Of what?”

  I didn’t say anything to Mom in the waiting room, I just put the release form right down in front of her, on top of the article about the birds of the tundra.

  All the way home Mom drove faster than usual, shaking her head and making a little laugh through her nose. She kept looking at the release form at every stoplight.

  I smoothed the form out on my knee, although it wasn’t wrinkled, taking care with it. J. T. Breen.

  My hands were cold.

  You don’t wear pretty shorts and bright colored, classic tennis tops to battle my father. I dressed like someone getting ready to help Mom dig up a tree stump, cuffed khaki shorts and an oversize blue T-shirt. My racket is carbon and steel, a gift from Dad a couple of Christmases ago, a better racket than my tennis game deserved. Mom asked, “Why the long face?”

  “I’m not ready for this” was all I said, making myself sound ironic and lighthearted. I zipped the racket into its carrier, yet another gift from Dad, a three-hundred-dollar gym bag with a side pocket for tennis gear. Mom, who once had burst into tears in a match against Dad at the Hotel Coronado, put her hands on her hips, waiting for me to talk.

  I gave her a sigh exactly like one of her own, an utterly false, it’s-just-a-game, which should not have deceived her for a second. The clearance form was on the dining room table.

  I took my time on the long walk to Dad’s, hating myself for not practicing my serve with a phantom ball, just to work off some of the rust. I knew Cindy was one of those false novices, someone who insists they haven’t held a racket since they were eleven years old and then backhands every living creature into submission.

  At least all of this distracted me from my feelings, my sensation of dread.

  As I approached Dad’s neighborhood of men waxing sports cars, watering their drought-flouting lawns in the long, early evening glow, I began to jog and felt a little more loose, a little more centered. Miss P tells us to visualize the dive going right, to imagine it that way every time, and to see ourselves into the water.

  I pictured myself stopping one of Dad’s lobs at the net, chopping it, getting spin on the ball. I imagined myself legging my way left and right, Cindy looking on, as I handled Dad myself. “You’ve been practicing!” Dad would say, surprised, mistaken.

  The front door was open, so even as I pressed the doorbell, the high-low bronze notes sounding somewhere within the walls, I was already on my way inside. I called for Dad, and for Cindy, force of habit sending me toward the kitchen for a glass of water.

  They were in the dining room, the two of them, Jack Stoughton and Cindy. My first impression was that I had interrupted an intimate moment between them. They were having an affair, and I was too astonished to feel the outrage that was already on its way in some part of my mind.

  But then I saw the crumpled Kleenex in Cindy’s hand, a white tissue so wadded and worn it was nearly reduced to lint. Jack wore one of his auburn-brown suits, but his hair was hastily combed, red strands starting away from his head. He looked directly at me and did not speak.

  “Oh, Bonnie,” said Cindy, in the tone she would have used to get my attention as I was about to leave. I knew what she was about to say—that she had forgotten about me, about our tennis date.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Cindy said nothing.

  My mouth was dry. I asked, “Where’s Dad?”

  Jack was taller than I remembered, and his eyebrows were white.

  “Your father,” he said, in a very gentle voice, “has been arrested.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Arrested, I thought.

  As in The spread of the disease has been arrested. It was almost possible to twist the words I had heard into good news—except for the way Cindy was destroying the tissue in her hands.

  Jack pursed his lips, preliminary to speech. He was going to pick his words with care, charging by the minute.

  Then I realized that Dad must have backed the Queen into a sailboat in a neighboring berth, or perhaps he had fallen into one of those webby, legal hazards, an unpaid parking ticket showing up on the computer when a cop gives you a ticket for a broken taillight. But Cindy was braced in the chair, looking across the walnut reflection of the dining table as if it and the rest of the room were all about to vanish. Jack approached me, lifted a hand, and almost let it fall on my shoulder.

  “We’ll get it all put right,” said Jack.

  I recognized the oddly British phrasing of the legal world, a verbal landscape that has chain-smoking divorce specialists inserting Esquire after their names.

  The expression on my face made him change his vocabulary, and even his voice sounded more regular-guy. “This kind of thing happens,” said Jack, standing close to me, but not touching.

  “What kind of thing?” I asked, a little surprised that I could make a sound.

  Jack turned to Cindy, as if to let her know that he would say nothing, or tell all, it was up to her.

  “It’s a misunderstanding,” said Jack. He tilted his head to one side, I can’t talk right now.

  “They won’t post bail until Monday,” said Cindy, in an oddly steady voice, despite the trembling fingers she ran through her hair. It was easy to imagine that she had been good at her job, shepherding a law practice.

  “He’s in jail for the weekend,” I said, partly to let them know that they could talk to me, I knew my way around. And also as a reality check—I wanted them to say no, of course that’s not what we mean.

  “The district attorney planned it this way,” said Cindy in her small, no nonsense voice. “They waited until Friday afternoon to execute the warrant, and he has to spend the weekend in custody. In Santa Rita,” she added. “There’s an injunction against admitting any more inmates to the jail in Oakland because of overpopulation.” She rubbed a hand up and down her forearm as she said this.

  I found myself at her side, my hand on her shoulder, the way Jack had almost comforted me. She looked up at me, her eyes blank but steady. Santa Rita jail was far east of Oakland, in a dry valley near a golf course. Cattle grazed and barns gradually decomposed in the heat. I had passed it a few times on the bus, going to swim and dive meets in Modesto and Bakersfield. It appeared to be a very large, somber junior high school, with guard towers.

  Jack rested his hand on the back of a chair. “Your father’s always had his critics,” he said.

  Crooked building contractors, I thought. Insurance companies who didn’t cough up after a fire. Maybe the DA was a former real estate broker. Maybe some advice Jack had given my father, some legal caper Dad had entered into as a favor for h
is old friend, had belly flopped.

  Jack gave a little shake of his head, wearing an expression of sorrowful innocence, and maybe I had a speck of intuition, too; for some reason I believed him.

  I had to sit down, but I didn’t.

  I dealt myself a little solace: It would be better than the Oakland jail. Early in his career Dad had handled a few criminal cases, and he had said Santa Rita wasn’t so bad, once they learned to put an automatic suicide watch on men waiting for arraignment. He said that the Oakland cells were rape holes, no place for a human being.

  “I’ll make some tea,” I said, and Cindy put her hand over mine, quickly, as though I had said something that shocked her. But it was only sudden gratitude, or her way of saying no thanks.

  “Tea would be great,” said Jack, and if I hadn’t been sure that he simply wanted me out of the room for a while I would have been thankful for his bluff heartiness.

  But tea was more my mother’s style, what she gave me when I was in bed with a rare episode of flu. Lipton’s was folk medicine to Mom, what you drank when you got bad news on the phone. I don’t think anyone I know really enjoys the taste. When I had dropped pan lids and tea strainers on the floor, found a tin of Twinings Irish Breakfast that had never been opened, I had water on to boil and a set of questions ready to ask.

  I was acting the part of a cool, collected lawyer’s daughter. This tea was loose, not the kind that came in bags, and bits of it scattered all over the countertop, all over the floor. Two spoonfuls of tea, or five? I kept the image from my mind, my father sitting on a jail cell cot.

  When I wrestled a tray from the cupboard, and had cups, spoons, sugar cubes all arranged, I reentered the dining room. Cindy was on the phone, speaking in a calm, quiet voice, saying their dinner plans had changed, they wouldn’t be needing a reservation tonight.

  Jack was combing his hair in the mirror over the fireplace. He was going to say that he had to rush off, that he didn’t want any tea. I could tell by the I’m-out-of-here lean to his body. One glance at me and he said, “Sure, just what I need.” I saw why Dad might enjoy his company.