Heat

by Michael Cadnum

  But some shadow must have lingered. I completed a back three-and-a-half somersault, with a perfect tuck. My entry was not so good, though, my feet out of position. You dive with your whole body, and your whole heart, and if there’s a little question in your mind, it shows up somewhere, even in your toes.

  My fourth dive was textbook, from top step to pool bottom, and I let the momentum carry me along underwater, wanting this private silence, the pressure at my eardrums, the clunk and gurgle of the pool valves. Even when the pool water appears unruffled and without current, it isn’t. The pumps are at work, under the surface, pulling water through the filters.

  An injured athlete has an invisible spotlight around her, and the other teammates stand aside, giving that extra space. They mean no harm. But when your recovery has been established, that aura is gone, and you are yourself again. Hands reached for me, pounded my shoulders, and Miss P grinned and shook her head, in her best I-knew-you-could manner. But I didn’t join the team on the bleacher seats. I was on act two of the drama I had in mind. I skimmed across the concrete, into the locker room.

  I was quick to shower and pull myself into my clothes, arranging my full costume, someone going grouse shooting on the moors. I could feel Miss P’s puzzlement and annoyance like radar through the wall. My hair looked the way it always does when it’s wet. I was going to have metal snaps attached to my skull so the beret would stay on in a blizzard.

  Denise was there at the end of the row of lockers, looking at me with something close to suspicion, her bathing cap dangling off a finger.

  “That’s great,” she said, meaning it, but also going out of her way to sound like she meant it, so she didn’t—it sounded forced.

  She eyed my lady-of-the-manor garb and gave her swimsuit a tug at the butt, maybe a habit she picked up from me. One trouble with swimsuits: when you talk to someone dressed like a clothes store you feel at a disadvantage.

  Denise came toward me with an air of caution, and sat. She toyed with a terry-cloth towel, flicking it and rolling it. Her toenails dilapidated, ragged quarter moons. She hunched on the bench and splashed her toes in a tiny puddle, like maybe I had forgotten she was there.

  It’s amazing how little insight some people have, how little sense of what others feel.

  I unzipped the backpack and slipped the envelope from its pocket. I smoothed the gentle wrinkles with my fingers. In my fantasy I had kept reconstructing what would happen next. I would slip it under Miss P’s office door. I would leave it on her desk, on top of a pile of fitness equipment catalogs. Or maybe I would hand it to her in person.

  A dozen people slamming into a locker room can be deafening. “Way to go,” said one voice after another. “Looking good, Bonnie,” the dumb, earnest things people say to one another.

  Lockers open with a bang almost as loud as when they slam shut, the force of voices and laughter resounding in the metal compartments around us.

  Charlotte Witt, the full-bodied star of the Sacramento Invitational, stopped me outside Miss P’s office and said she was so happy I was myself again. Charlotte Witt has the classy air of an extremely athletic First Lady, the sort of person who sounds phony saying good morning. Miss P had taken her time entering the fog and noise of the locker room, but I felt her consciousness groping toward mine, puzzled that I had not come back to talk to her, wondering what was on my mind.

  The envelope contained my letter to Ms. Petrossian, resigning from the team. The message covered three lines, telling her that it was time for me to put my diving career behind me. I surprised myself—I carried the envelope outside, like someone looking for a mailbox, then zipped it into my pack.

  I carried it home, and slipped it into the bottom drawer of my dresser.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Every morning I rose in the darkness and did my running—“roadwork,” Dad always called it. I reached a new level of stamina, up-slope, down-slope, all the same to me.

  I worked out at the academy pool from noon until late every afternoon. Miss P gave me her standard encouragement, even making a joke of it, telling me to jog it when I was limping with exhaustion, then laughing, showing she was just kidding. She had little to say to me aside from coach chatter. Maybe she saw something independent in my comeback, something that had nothing to do with her.

  Only once did she stop me at poolside, swinging her brass whistle on a string. “Don’t forget to breathe,” she said. “Long in, long out.” She waited for me to acknowledge her words, like someone transmitting on shortwave.

  I studied fresh videos of my dives every evening. Rowan watched with me, when he wasn’t in Carmel or Stinson Beach. I freeze-framed the image of myself as I powered upward, as I tumbled, as I knifed into the water.

  “I look terrible,” I would say. “Like a mannequin. Bonnie, the diving robot.” I’d push fast forward, through the jerky, streaking figures of other divers, until it was me again. Every diver I would face at Stanford would be much better than I was. Sometimes after I turned off the TV I was too depressed to talk.

  My mother watched with us if she got home in time, and while Rowan exclaimed, “Another great one, Bonnie!” I just sat there and stared at the screen. You could see the fear in my knees, in my shoulders, my face.

  In California a preliminary hearing is held within a week or two of the arraignment. It’s a miniature trial, with witnesses and cross examination, a chance for the People and the Accused to probe the strengths of the upcoming case. My father’s preliminary was set for the beginning of the following week, and as the day approached I felt the chill seep further into my bones. I wished there was some way the hearing could be postponed, or set aside indefinitely, lost in dog-eared files of paperwork.

  That weekend Jack Stoughton was on his way to a Save the Presidio fund-raiser in San Francisco. He was motoring across Van Ness Avenue when a driver ran a red light. The footage on Channel Two ten o’clock news showed a sad mess of Jaguar, and the unmistakable profile of Jack chatting with the paramedics as they loaded him into the ambulance. The paramedics were smiling, and one of them, a woman, laughed, her head thrown back, evidently entirely unaware of the camera.

  The KNBR reporter on the scene deplored the rash of hit-and-run accidents. Jack was interviewed in the hospital, with his head perched on top of a neck brace that made his spine look absurdly long, like a llama’s. “I had no idea what hit me,” said Jack, in a tone of merriment. The tape was edited at that point—you could see the jump cut.

  “Pain killers,” said Mom from her place in the shifting shadows of the living room. Her laptop was beside her, throwing a bluish light into her eyes. “Hear how he slurred?” Her white bird-of-paradise was in the advance edition of the Sunday paper, looking like a blossom from a distant galaxy.

  Cindy called Sunday night. The preliminary hearing would be postponed, and she and Dad were off to Bourbon Street.

  “You couldn’t buy such luck,” Mom said.

  Mom took me out on my birthday, to a place called Shark’s, overlooking the marina, red and yellow lights on the water. The staff sang “Happy Birthday” in harmony, the rum-chocolate cake crowded, seventeen pink candles. She gave me one of those ugly/pretty Hermes scarves and a gold Cross pen. Georgia had sent me a copy of Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, and I got a couple dozen cards from people I knew and liked, athletes, distant aunts. My father was always late with his card and a check, so I hadn’t expected anything.

  “This was so long overdue,” said Mrs. Beal.

  “We should have done this an age ago,” said her husband.

  Rowan winked at me. A servant—what else could I call her?—looked in from the doorway to see if I had spilled any of my peas. It was the day after my birthday, and the Beals were all having wine, jewel-glass goblets of ruby fluid poured from one of those bottles that give you lead poisoning from the cork seal. I had asked for ice water. They all toasted me, wishing me many happy returns.

  It was the first time I had ever eaten dinner
with the Beals, and I had the impression I was under careful scrutiny. The Tribune had run two articles about my father, and KTVU had featured Jack Stoughton in a smaller, less-padded neck brace, saying that his client would be “absolutely exonerated.” In the aftermath of this wash of news about my father, I sensed that everyone studied me from afar.

  Even the Beals’ invitation had to be viewed as a kind of test, an oral exam, whether or not I was up to their standards. I had come to recognize that there was a snappish, impatient side to Rowan’s father. But tonight Mr. Beal gazed across the table with the kindly, energetic manner of the vicar who poisons half his parishioners.

  “Rowan says you’re back to full form, diving,” he offered. This was an odd way of putting it, and I wondered if he had said full form, and then realized that it might refer to my figure, not my customary level of skill. So he added “diving,” to avoid embarrassing himself.

  “She’s better than ever,” said Rowan. “We can still buy tickets for the Pacific Invitational.”

  “We should,” murmured his father, in the tone of someone who had no serious intention of following through.

  Maybe they were observing my table manners, how I managed to eat the dainty, half-raw lamb chop. “I am nowhere near what I need to be,” I said, knife and fork perfectly obedient to my hand. The ice cubes in the water were those round shouldered ingots you see in ads for scotch. I wondered if the servant, a gray-haired woman with the steady eye of a dental hygienist, got up first thing in the morning to chisel the cubes.

  Mrs. Beal was dazzling in a blue sweater and a loop of pearls, the yellow-tinted variety. “How is your mother doing, through all this?” she asked, either forgetting that my parents were divorced or exhibiting such sterling good manners that a little detail like divorce made no difference.

  I was ready. “We are distressed at how the justice system is being misused,” I said. “My sister Georgia is coming down to be at the preliminary. The assistant DA, Montie Carver, the one with the blond hair down to here, is the kind of hired gun who takes one look at a community activist like my dad—” And aches to shoot him down, I was about to say, but stopped myself. Was there a delicate way to express these impressions?

  “He’s a hungry prosecutor,” said Mr. Beal, in the same way he would have said hungry weasel. “One of the best.”

  I had been pretending to know more than I did. I had seen Carver’s name in headlines in the Chronicle, and I had glimpsed his face on Eyewitness News. I knew he had a reputation as an aggressive attorney in cases involving fraud against senior citizens, but I had taken hope at the fact that he was an assistant district attorney. Glancing down at my saffron rice, I felt uneasy.

  “But Bonnie’s father has Jack Stoughton in his camp,” said Rowan breezily.

  “Oh, well, in that case,” said Mr. Beal, with just a little too much haste, “we can look forward to a happy resolution.”

  “Key lime pie for dessert,” Mrs. Beal whispered, bending close.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Georgia arrived late the night before the preliminary hearing. I was telling myself I wasn’t apprehensive about the next day, but the knock at the door nearly stopped my heart.

  I hurried to open it. A woman who looked very much like Mom gave me a grin, the porch light gilding her features. I hadn’t remembered her being quite so tall or heavyset.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I dropped by to see Dad.”

  This shouldn’t have surprised me, but I was suddenly full of questions about what she thought about Cindy’s taste in art, Dad’s improvements to his back garden. And how Dad looked to her.

  But you don’t hurry Georgia. She told us all about her new pickup, a Ford Ranger. “It’s amazing how they gear trucks so low,” she said, mystifying me. “You go ten miles an hour, you have to shift out of first.” She was wearing a denim skirt and old-fashioned tennis shoes, the canvas kind you can throw into the washing machine. Her top was a plaid lumberjack flannel, Northwoods chic.

  Mom made us melted cheese sandwiches, an old family favorite, although Georgia gave me a conspiratorial purse of the lips when Mom wasn’t looking: Who eats these things any more?

  She ate every crumb. It was wonderful to have her there. She gave her husband a call, saying she had arrived safely. I couldn’t help overhearing. She called him Sweetie. She was always reminding him to take vitamin E or wear a warmer sweater. Paul was finishing a degree in highway engineering. He worked as a dispatcher for Cal Trans, telling road crews where to find broken branches and washed-out pavement on Highway One.

  “Brilliant!” said Georgia, congratulating Myrna on her litter. The cat leaned into Georgia’s legs, purring. Sometimes you think cats must have excellent memories, instant recall of their friends.

  It was good to see Georgia, but it also underscored the crisis we were in. It was the sort of overly cheerful mood I associated with my grandparents’ funerals, everyone chattering, afraid to shut up. My sister asked me how my brain was functioning, “after they stuffed it back inside your head.”

  I let it stay jokey, how it turned out the human brain wasn’t all that important.

  Georgia told us things we already knew, that she was studying manipulatives for children, how play can be the same as learning. She was studying at Humboldt State, learning how to organize activity areas with good sightlines. She said it was definite, she was going to be a kindergarten teacher.

  “I’m so glad!” said Mom, in a tone of such feeling, I had to realize once again that Mom wished I had more ordinary goals, swimming instead of diving.

  Then, in a low, intent tone, Mom asked, “What did you think of Cindy?”

  Georgia gave a little nonlaugh, one of Mom’s.

  “Really?” Mom said.

  Georgia made no sound.

  My mother said, “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  I had hoped Georgia and I would talk long into the night. I had even set aside my most recent video, but Georgia said that driving always tired her out, and she would be worthless tomorrow if she didn’t get some sleep.

  It was the sort of thing Mom said, that she would be worthless if she didn’t eat soon, or rest for a while. Besides, there was a silence about Georgia, things she didn’t want to say. When I went to bed, I tried to sense my sister’s presence in the house. Was that her, running water in the back bathroom, closing the closet door in her old bedroom?

  Maybe I was hoping she would scratch at my door and sneak in, like in the old days, so she could tell me about a book she was reading, a poltergeist in a South Dakota farmhouse, or a region in the Caribbean Sea cruise ships sailed across never to be heard from again.

  Before the divorce Dad sometimes read us stories. Georgia came into my bedroom, older, allowed to stay up an hour later. One of our favorite tales was about a rabbit who dressed up in bark and branches to scare the daylights out of a fox. My father imitated the rabbit in a deep, chilling voice: “I am the spirits of all the rabbits you have eaten, Brother Fox!”

  A blind pedestrian would have little trouble crossing streets in downtown Oakland. Traveling roughly west to east, when the signal changes to green, an electronic twirp twirp sounds. The signal to cross north to south is the call of a cuckoo. Georgia and I parked her pickup in a pay lot on Alice Street, and passed one of the white Alameda County Sheriff’s buses, a new load of prisoners facing justice. Mom had explained how busy she was, so my sister and I marched up the steps to the courthouse, just the two of us, Georgia keeping up matter-of-fact chatter, lumber mills closing, her septic tank backing up.

  The first sign you see is WARNING WEAPONS PROHIBITED. Georgia took one look at this and said, “Damn!” And I couldn’t keep from laughing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The prosecutor, Montie Carver, had one of those tans you know come from a tanning booth, every inch of his body under his clothes the same unblemished bronze. His yellow hair was expensively long, and except for his gray suit and cuff links he loo
ked like the kind of parking lot attendant who collected big tips.

  My father wore one of the suits he had hand tailored in a shop off Union Square. It was a suit that didn’t look expensive, the sort of business outfit you barely notice, with a crisp white shirt and a dark tie. When he saw Georgia and me he gave us a thumbs-up, and he nodded and gave his award-winning smile to acquaintances in the courthouse audience.

  But the courtroom was crowded, and many of the people saw my father’s smile and looked right back, unsmiling, stonily silent. Cindy occupied a seat in the front row, a navy blue, nearly nautical blouse, her hair gathered back into a gold clasp. The effect was prim; she looked younger than I did.

  The witness swore to tell the truth and took his seat. Carver asked him to state his name and occupation. He was Allen Post, the owner of a foundry that manufactured every kind of manhole cover, from the big steel disks you see in intersections to the little ones in the sidewalk that seal pipes and cables. “People walk on my product all the time, and never know it,” said Mr. Post.

  Carver didn’t bother looking at his notes, but unlike the lawyers you see in movies, he didn’t wander around the courtroom. “Mr. Post, did you file a suit with the Isabella Construction Company?”

  “Yes, my new house—the house I had built—was a delight to my wife and myself. It was a beautiful place, but it had cracks in its foundation.”

  Carver raised a hand, glanced at Her Honor, and cautioned the witness not to answer everything all at once, let the testimony come out little by little. The judge was a woman with white hair and glasses, the theatrical sort of glasses frames that make the person wearing them look small and big-eyed.

  “Who was your legal representative during this lawsuit?” asked Carver.

  Mr. Post had a gray mustache and shaggy gray hair surrounding a bald spot. A broad shouldered, ham-fisted man, he looked like he could pick up a manhole cover and skim it like a Frisbee. He could not help looking briefly at my father as he answered, “Harvey Chamberlain.”