Heat

by Michael Cadnum

  “I’ll tell Dad about my accident,” I said as Mom drove down the Fruitvale Avenue off-ramp. I meant: Don’t you tell him.

  Mom made one of her nonlaughs, not ha so much as puh. Meaning: I wouldn’t dream of interrupting his honeymoon. Although the idea must have had its appeal. Mom preferred to communicate with Dad through her attorney, a long-legged woman who looked like Bugs Bunny without the ears. Still, Mom was probably tempted by the idea of calling Dad away from bodysurfing to let him know his daughter was expected to live.

  The living room looked unfamiliar, as though I had been gone for months. I felt like a prospective buyer: My, all this space. It’s the color scheme, pale as possible. Mom never uses the fireplace. It’s painted white, too, inside and out, even the andirons—Baroque white, the most expensive latex on the market.

  The house was populated with cherry-colored heliconias in the dining room, and slick green monstera in the hall. On the landing of the stairs there was a broad-leafed philodendron that looked like a meat-eater. It always left a drool of water on my arm as I brushed by.

  “Myrna tried to climb inside my dresser,” Mom was saying, “and she tried Grandma’s old cedar chest, and she tried the garage.”

  “It’s a miracle she knows what to do,” I said.

  “She doesn’t,” said Mom.

  Myrna’s mother, Katie, had given birth to Myrna’s litter in a drawer full of screwdrivers and rusty nails, and my mom’s family had once kept a cat who gave birth on the engine of a Chrysler. Grandpa had been experiencing a bad oil leak in the car and had a habit of checking the dipstick, or a terrible thing could have happened.

  I was just in time. Myrna was in my bedroom closet, in a box Mom had put in among the sandals and worn-through running shoes. Myrna looked up at me as I made the little tsk tsk noises my family makes at cats. Even my dad does it—a habit he kept from his marriage with Mom. Our family never calls “kitty kitty” or whistles or calls a name. We make the crisp sound people make with their tongues against their teeth, the sound that usually means shame, shame.

  Myrna usually rose up to meet my touch, a calico cat with tobacco-gold and brunette patches and a white underbelly. Now she arched her back, radiant with whatever feline hormones rush through a cat when she goes into labor. This was her first litter, and she put a forepaw against the side of the sagging Green Giant creamed corn box, bracing herself.

  Pink cat water blotted the towel at the bottom of the box. Mom says cats are dumb as doorstops, but she is the one to give Myrna chicken liver. Myrna’s flanks heaved. I murmured encouragement, wondering what reassurance she could possibly derive from a member of an entirely different species telling her everything was okay. Myrna made what sounded like a song, or a mating moan. And then she would relax, purring so loudly you could hear it all the way across the room.

  I told myself I felt good, and I did, but a ringing in my ears made me sit at the edge of my bed. I talked to Myrna from where I sat, and she made a gentle trilling noise through her nose.

  Audrey was asleep in her cage, a white hump almost entirely covered by cedar chips. Rowan had rescued her from a snake wholesaler, the subject of a video his dad had made. Audrey was a female white mouse and had been scheduled to be a python’s lunch. Every time I came home I checked to make sure Myrna had left the mouse alone.

  Newspaper articles about Dad decorated my bulletin board along with my Wild Creatures of Africa calendar and pictures I had photocopied from books, the 1912 Olympics, the first year women divers had competed. The black-and-white divers—gray and light gray—smiled out at our world, carefully posed photographs. Even the photo of Sarah “Fanny” Durak, the best swimmer of her era, was a shot the cameraman had arranged with care, the swimmer pretending to be about to leap from poolside in her cap and boxy bathing suit. She had scandalized the world by wearing a one-piece—before then, women swam in a kind of skirted, layered outfit. The only action photo from that period was a blur, an unnamed diver in what looked like a simple forward-dive tuck, her momentum and the early photographic equipment turning her into a ghost.

  “Record Award in Cracked Foundation Suit” was tacked to the board beside “Out of Court Settle in Landslide,” a headline I had never thought made as much sense as it should. If a house tumbled downhill in record rains, or a cellar filled with long-stored fuel oil, Dad was there to help the owners get what they deserved.

  One celebrated case was featured in the most time-yellowed of the articles, Dad standing with his hands on his hips, his suit jacket hanging over one arm. His hair was longer then, mussed by the wind. He was always unknotting his tie, rolling up his sleeves, or putting more clothes on, whatever he could to keep going. “Harvey Chamberlain surveys lead-poisoned land,” read the caption. Kids had been playing in the dirt for generations. Dad sued the oil company that owned the land, and dozens of families shared the multi-million-dollar settlement.

  It had been so sudden, Dad announcing that he was marrying his secretary, that he would be back in ten days, say hi to my mother. Even Mom, always ready to make some ironic noise or shake her head like she was in on another one of life’s jokes, was quiet for a long time. And when she spoke about it at all, it was to say, “He’s marrying her,” in disbelief.

  Everyone talks about new life, how precious it is, but sometimes I wonder. The first kitten looked like a dark sock soaked in snot. Myrna got to work, washing, preening away the umbilical thread.

  I found myself sitting with my head crooked to one side, making sure nothing fell out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  That night I had the dream for the first time.

  Bleach-flavored water invaded my sinuses, my throat. A hammer blow deafened me. I felt my weight lumber awkwardly, falling through the water onto the trowel swirls of the bottom of the pool.

  I woke. I kicked at the sheets. It was one of those dreams when you wake thinking, I’ve been screaming. But you haven’t; the dream takes your voice.

  I pulled myself out of bed and sat at my desk and turned on the desk lamp. It’s so abrupt sometimes, the transition from dark to light. I peeked into the closet, and Myrna blinked upward in greeting, six furry tadpoles nursing.

  Audrey is always up at night, running in her well-oiled exercise wheel or nosing around the perimeter of her cedar, searching the wood shavings. She put her snout up to my finger through the rungs, and her whiskers tickled. I let Audrey out of her cage, and she policed my desk top, the lucky dice Dad had given me, and the Silky Sullivan key ring shaped like a four-leaf clover. Mom says I keep everything, and it’s true that the bottom drawer of my dresser is crammed with junior high school history tests with 100% scrawled beside my name, and pictures I’ve drawn, horses and swan dives.

  I had a headache, like a heart inside my skull, rhythmic, vivid red on and off when I closed my eyes.

  That morning, before breakfast, I slipped into my swimsuit, black with a Speedo emblem on the right hip. My mother watched, pretending there was nothing unusual happening, while I padded out to the backyard pool and took the steps into the shallow end.

  “Are you okay?” Mom asked, keeping her place in a soil catalog with one finger. She buys the stuff from Costa Rica and has to have it irradiated before it ships, and inspected by the Department of Agriculture. She was draped in a dark green velour robe, a large, plush garment.

  I gave her an opened-handed gesture: No big deal. The water edged upward, higher on the inside of my thighs. I tried to con myself into thinking I wasn’t nervous.

  She watched from the edge of the pool. She had just completed her morning swim, and the water was still trembling, her smoke-lens Barracuda goggles glittering on the poolside table. The pool was cool, even where the water gushed from the pump, a pucker marring the surface. I shivered. Mom stuffs all her hair into a bathing cap and swims underwater laps three or four times a week. It’s a pool of ordinary backyard dimensions, but it takes lungs to pull four laps without a breath, and she can do it.

  “Look out
for the bug,” Mom said, indicating a ladybug on its back, legs kicking. I rescued the bug, cupped her in my hand, and left the tiny red helmet floating in a small pool, wings half-cocked, ready to fly.

  I waded out to the slope of the deep end. Our backyard pool is not as pristine as the one at the school, a gray patina of algae along the water-level tiles. I stretched out and floated. One of my ears was ringing, a steely, persistent drone. I freestyled shakily up and down the pool a few times, and got out of the pool and toweled off with one of Mom’s old terry-cloth towels, telling myself I would not throw up.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A couple of days later, Rowan came with me to watch the dive video. I was a little surprised, and pleased, because I still wasn’t used to the fact that he seemed to like my company. As we walked up Lincoln Avenue toward the academy, he put one arm around me like he expected me to collapse on the sidewalk.

  “What are you missing out on today?” I asked. I sounded sure of myself, but around Rowan I felt like a songbird, full of small talk. The codeine made me feel like I was walking through wet cement. Part of the problem might have been lack of sleep. Mom was always checking on me, pretending not to be worried, making sure my bedroom window was closed, offering me an extra pillow.

  Rowan has a way of looking into you and seeing what’s there. Gray eyes, a touch bluer than mine. He has a great hook shot, but decided he wants to concentrate on acoustical physics and meteorology. He doesn’t know if he will be a sound engineer or a weatherman, but I can talk about medicine with him and he follows my line of thought. “We’ve been recording a saw-whet owl,” he said. “There’s one living in a cypress near Pescadero, off Highway One. Four nights in a row,” he added. That explained the sounds of surf I had heard on the hospital phone.

  He stayed right next to me, close, especially when a crack in the sidewalk made its way toward us, and when we passed a gardener buzz sawing a juniper into submission, I thought Rowan would scoop me into his arms and carry me. I dug an elbow into him and he loosened his grip. I marched ahead for a while, all the way up the hill in the June sun.

  We reached the stairs down to the multi-terraced campus, and I held on to the rail. I had a dazzling three-second pain in my head.

  Pain on, pain off, like a blinking red warning. Aside from a scraped knee now and then, I had never been injured before in my life. Dr. Breen had cautioned me to expect double vision, but on the fourth day after my accident, the day before Dad was due back from Napili Bay with his bride, I knew I had to hide the way I felt or I would be hospitalized.

  I took the stairs two at a time, with a show of my usual spirit, but by the time I was heading down the open-air corridor, past the bougainvillea trellis, the world was swinging in slow, nauseating circles.

  Lloyd-Fairhill is a prep school, privately endowed by rich graduates. Our school doesn’t have a workaday PE department with an asphalt basketball court. It has a Jacuzzi room, and a sauna, and an arena for the swimming/diving/water polo teams with a THX sound system so you could hear your name spoken from all directions at once as you tugged your swimsuit straight. The problem with the school was that the campus was too small for all the art galleries and faculty lounges crammed into it. Softballs were always damaging the solar energy panels on the math wing, and when barn swallows built their nests over the cafeteria, you had to duck under their fluttering, swooping wings on your way to get a bowl of vegetarian chowder.

  I had attended the Oakland Public Schools, but my mom had switched me to private schools partly so I could compete in water sports, and partly so I could get an education good enough to shoehorn me into a pre-med program when I got to college. It wasn’t a snap decision, but Mom finally had heard enough of my descriptions of what went on in the OPS classrooms. I had an eighth-grade history teacher who taught us that the U.S. government salted the clouds over the Atlantic so all the rain would fall at sea, causing Ethiopians to die of drought. When she heard about this, Mom decided it was time to send me to an improved environment.

  I would be a junior in September. After two years at Lloyd-Fairhill, I still felt awkward among kids who ate fresh-baked croissants for breakfast. My mother wrote out a check to the academy every month without a word of complaint. She was always off delivering bromeliads to model homes in Blackhawk and Pinole, and when my dad wasn’t too busy sorting out his clients’ lives there was a monthly check from him. We couldn’t make it without the extra cash from Dad.

  The doors of the academy are all painted a dazzling blue, and they are wired to a security system. Police arrested two guys over Christmas vacation for peering through the rhododendron and just thinking—merely considering—jimmying the computer lab door.

  Miss P answered my knock, and I was glad to see Denise there, perched on her chair with her chin on her knees. She gave me a smile, but didn’t go so far as to say good morning—she saw the look in my eyes.

  “You don’t want to see this,” said Denise. Denise is pretty, and the dives she performs are pretty, too. She makes up for it with her mouth, always saying something no one wants to hear—something that usually happens to be true—with an accent like a gangster. Her dad arranged it so she works out with a series of personal trainers, all women, after a former tennis pro made a pass at her over Easter vacation.

  “Let’s get it over with,” I said.

  “You’re sure?” asked Miss P, holding the remote like a space-age weapon you had to handle with great care. She has a way of crooking her head around from person to person, getting reassurance from everyone.

  “We can put this off,” said Miss P.

  “Let’s do it now.”

  “You heard her,” said Denise.

  Miss P got up and put the remote on top of the television. “Convince me,” she said, and the nervous, spare person was gone.

  “I can’t put this off forever,” I said.

  “Why not?” said Miss P. She found a tube of lip balm, pulled off the cap, and applied some to her lips. “No law says if you injure yourself you have to watch the video.”

  “James Cagney never went to any of his own movies,” said Rowan.

  “That example doesn’t apply,” I said. Rowan’s family has a massive collection of black-and-white movies in video boxes, and his dad writes articles on sound effects in films.

  “It makes me sick to look at it,” said Denise. Her father is a former third-string quarterback for the Oakland Raiders, and her family runs a chain of lobster and sirloin restaurants. They are warm-hearted, open people who tell each other to shut up as though this were a form of courtesy. None of them speaks in complex sentences, telling each other to pass the butter, pass the parmesan without a single thank you.

  On the wall above the bell schedule was a glossy photo of me doing a forward flying two-and-a-half somersault off the tower. I found it a little hard to believe that this was a picture of me, that I had been that good. “Please,” I said.

  My friendship with Denise was often a matter of deciding which of us was stronger. She shrugged and made a show of turning away to look at a fire extinguisher.

  Miss P shrank to a resigned, agreeable person. She sat beside me and pushed the fleshy buttons of the remote, and caused a jittery, streaky fast-forward to appear on the screen. A couple of the other swim team members leaped through their reverses, their half-twists, but only Denise and I practiced off the tower at the other end of the pool.

  There we were, running through our reps, maybe ten dives each. Miss P stabbed the remote with her forefinger, let my image in the screen waddle jerkily to the platform, a silent-movie stuttering quality to the male figures rearranging themselves on the seats in the distance. The images slowed, settled into real time. I couldn’t help appraising myself the way a diving judge does, because your dive starts the moment you toe your way out onto that cold, wet sharkskin-gritty surface of the tower.

  My short blond hair pulled back, my tan, my small bust, my broad shoulders—I looked like a human being designed by God for
water.

  Miss P stopped it before I left the edge, rewound it. I watched again as my screen self turned halfway up the ascent to say something to someone. Smiling, but not casual. I was intent, at one point absentmindedly pulling the seat of my swimsuit. Like many swimmers and divers, I bought my swimsuits a size too tight.

  At first I thought it had to be the wrong tape—even when I saw the whole dive.

  Rewind, I wanted to say. At the same I wanted to close my eyes. Miss P was determined, now. If I wanted to watch she would let me, again and again. The VCR whined. I light-footed my way up the tower.

  But there was nothing wrong, nothing you could see playing the tape real-time. I leaped, got good altitude on my stretch, a 9.5 beginning, and then I curled, somersaulted and it all looked okay, all the way down into the water. My entry was so-so, actually, but not terrible. If you didn’t notice what Miss P did next you would expect me to haul myself dripping out of the pool to pad over to the steps and climb up all over again.

  She leaped to her feet and made a front dive off poolside. She strong-armed her way to the bottom where the shifting water obliterated what was down there, the shimmering of the water defracting me into a shapeless figure Miss P pulled from the bottom, scissor kicking to the surface.

  “What did I tell you,” said Denise.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I had my nails done. I do this maybe once a year, preferring to use a pair of Revlon clippers and an emery board to keep my nails rounded and short so I won’t break one off swimming laps. I sat in Lyn’s Beauty Nails, soaking my pinkies in that little bowl they use, with the indentations for the fingers.

  A soap opera raged in the far end of the room, where a tiny woman with carefully drawn-on eyebrows and lipstick was having a pedicure, a wife having an affair with her brother-in-law about ten inches away. “Short-short-short?” asked Lyn, sounding like she couldn’t believe it.