Heat

by Michael Cadnum

  I used to perform what Mom called “community activities,” reading to women in a nearby nursing home. Mom donated orchids and bromeliads to the convalescent hospital, the place where her own mother had spent the last weeks of her life. I was probably following my mother’s example when I dropped by on Saturday afternoons to read detective novels to white-haired people who shifted in their wheelchairs to catch every clue.

  I remember feeling virtuous on the way home from these readings, but only on a honey-sweet, artificial level. On a deeper level, I felt a sickened dismay that a doctor wasn’t trying to do more for these frail women. And I was both entertained and frustrated by the mysteries I read. “Start at the beginning of chapter sixteen,” a voice would quaver, and I would read all of sixteen, and most of seventeen, enough to recognize that the detective was never going to drag the body out of the creek without going to the village for help. But I never found out who had committed the murder, and I never even knew the names of the patients I read to, careful to keep my voice loud and clear.

  I didn’t like the way the nurses played up their own good looks and radiant health, wheeling their patients down the hall with such cheer that it seemed disrespectful. I didn’t appreciate the way a nurse would beam at a stroke victim nodding off in her chair, “We’re getting a head start on our nap, aren’t we,” as though dying were a jolly business, a sort of summer camp PE.

  I couldn’t stand the way people pretend that everything is great, when it isn’t. I would have called it hypocrisy, but standing there, splashing tea on the coffee-table books. I couldn’t blame any of us for putting on an act. I got some paper towels from the kitchen, moving fast, as though the most serious crisis confronting humanity was the terrible problem of tea stains.

  Dad would be advising his fellow inmates on how to beat their DUI raps. He’d be drawing up petitions, wills, playing five-card draw. He’d come out of the county jail with after-dinner stories to last a lifetime.

  When I asked, finally, what crime my father was accused of committing, Cindy sat with one finger making a dimple in her cheek, as though I had spoken in Sanskrit, and Jack took a slurp of tea still way too hot.

  “It’s complicated,” he said, his eyes on Cindy, as though to get her okay to say more.

  “They say he’ll be disbarred,” said Cindy, her voice vague and almost inaudible, like a talk show left on in another room.

  My mind jumped this way and that, eager to twist this statement into something worth celebrating. To be stripped of your license to practice law was a disaster much worse than a weekend eating jailhouse jello.

  Jack said, “He’s accused of defrauding his clients.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mom took one look at me and said, “What’s wrong?”

  Maybe because I was home early, maybe because she had seen Jack’s profile in the red Jaguar as he dropped me off. Maybe because I set my gym bag carefully in the bottom of the hall closet and didn’t sling it onto the couch the way I usually did. The Jaguar purred away up the street, one of those quiet cars you can hear for a long distance.

  Her voice steel quiet, she asked, “What did he do?”

  I took my time arranging myself on the sofa, determined to say nothing about any of this to Mom. Jack had not talked much on the drive except to tell me not to sweat this, as though a slangy, casual approach would give me peace of mind. He did add, as he pulled over to the curb, “Cops love reading lawyers their rights.”

  But I wondered if news about Dad’s arrest had been on the radio—Mom doesn’t watch much TV. Or if the grapevine of Mom’s friends had flashed word that Harvey Chamberlain was marched in handcuffs down the front steps, away from his new bride. Did they use plainclothes cops, or uniforms? When they told him he had a right to remain silent, I wonder if he lifted his eyes from the driveway, the front lawn, to shame them with a smile.

  Mom had Polaroids of tropical flower arrangements spread out on the rosewood side table, proteas and ginger blossoms, and classical guitar tinkled in the background, the sort of music she stands in line to hear in concert. But when she saw I wasn’t talking, she snapped the remote to shut down the Bose sound system and brushed the pretty flower pictures into a pile with the side of her hand.

  “Talk to me, Bonnie,” she said, and even when I understood the impression she had, and wanted to reassure her, I still couldn’t make a sound.

  “If he messed with you—” Mom has bursts of articulate language, but she fades out when she’s upset. Her web page is almost all pictures, anthuriums and pink-fruited bananas, not nearly enough text.

  “Jack didn’t do anything,” I said, sounding like he had. I studied the way the toe of my tennis shoe scuffed and smoothed the nap of the carpet.

  “What happened?”

  I was surprised at how the sounds came out, distorted by my feelings, and I knew Mom couldn’t make out a word. But she was a little mollified, half-convinced that Jack hadn’t overstepped decency in the front seat of his XJ6. She came over and sat next to me, and right beside me, knee to knee, waiting companionably for me to recover enough to talk, but not pressing, not reassuring me, because by now she knew she didn’t have a clue what was wrong.

  “They took Dad,” I said.

  Mom sat with her wise-cat expression and heard everything, everything I knew. I paced up and down, blowing my nose and telling her Dad would sue the County of Alameda for false arrest, and she kept the same attitude, her arms folded easily, letting me wind down.

  “Your father will deal with this,” she said, after my energy had spun itself out and I was seated again, on the floor with my back to the sofa. “He can take care of himself,” she added, but she said this like it was a character flaw.

  “I know it,” I said, aware that we were having a serious disagreement, even though our words seemed to follow the same path.

  She fed some silence into the conversation, the way you feed a fireplace with kindling. “You need to think about us,” she said.

  I was very close to telling her that life did not consist of making sure all the root fungus in the East Bay has been gamma-rayed to death.

  “You need to think about you,” she said.

  I used minimal force, but I couldn’t keep my voice steady. “Don’t you have any compassion at all?”

  I knew, as soon as I had spoken, that I was close to challenging Mom in a way she would never tolerate. She would get up and leave the room.

  “Think about your own future, Bonnie. Close your mouth, and take a breath, and think.”

  I spoke with care. “It’s a vendetta. The DA is out to get him.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. She went to the side table and sorted her flower snapshots, like a game of solitaire.

  Maybe. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “It’s a real embarrassment for Cindy,” she said. She snapped a rubber band around her Polaroids.

  “They hauled him away? Your dad?” said Denise.

  Hauled was a typical Denise verb. Things were always getting stuck, busted, ripped off in her local dialect.

  “You make it sound like it would make more sense if my mom got arrested,” I said.

  “Your mom would make a good crook,” said Denise.

  “That’s a nice thing to say,” I responded, feeling no desire to laugh.

  “She knows how to keep her mouth shut.”

  I didn’t say, Maybe you should take lessons.

  I could hear Denise kicking clothes and shoes off her bed, clearing a place to sit down. My own room was organized, in a fuzzy-logic way. A picture of the first female Olympic champion, Charlotte Cooper, cocked her racket beside a blow-up of Rowan working in the Rockies, cradling a boom mike. I rarely visited Denise’s room, not wanting to scale the piles of rubble.

  “But your dad. It doesn’t make any sense,” Denise said.

  “I know it.”

  “I mean, in order to defraud his clients he would have to withhold payments from them, for examp
le, right?” Denise was tossing things, soft thuds.

  “Clients pay lawyers,” I said, “not the other way around.”

  “Some of the people my dad has working for him,” said Denise in her husky monotone, “you absolutely would not believe.”

  Rowan wasn’t home. They have one of those professionally recorded answering messages, a telephone company sort of voice that says that none of the Beals are available right now. I couldn’t leave the message I wanted, that my father was in a county correctional facility. I asked Rowan to give me a call, sitting there fingering the plush box that held the pearl.

  Mom knocked and put her head in once, just before I snapped out my light. “Myrna’s in my room, I forgot to tell you.”

  Mom has a polyester shoe organizer in her closet, two dozen pockets for pumps, sandals, walking shoes, go-aheads, mukluks, handmades, flats, heels, ninety percent of them shoes she has worn once. Myrna had carried each kitten all the way to this new closet, and now she was ensconced in Mom’s old file boxes.

  Mom keeps her financial archives here, records going back to the days of the marriage, three steel boxes with latches and locks. Myrna had her back against one of the boxes, FIREPROOF in red letters.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sometimes a bed is a trap, the sheets a tangled net. I kicked, sweating, tearing the blankets from my body. I was afraid to search my scalp, afraid to press in on my head, sure the skull cap would be fragmented, my hand covered with warm strawberry jam.

  I had worked my way through the Dimond Pharmacy vial, and I was down to my last three codeine. I cat-footed into the bathroom, tossed down the medicine with a swallow of water, and stood without turning on the light, wondering what it’s like, lying in a jail bunk.

  Back in my bedroom, I closed my eyes, groping for the lamp switch. I pushed it, and the light dazzled me, even with my eyes tight.

  Pearls come in hues. You can’t see the variations at first. Only when you hold one in the creases of your hand and really look. Some pearls are pink blushed, others a soft blue. The gift Dad had given me swung back and forth on its fine gold chain, luminous, the color of a vein just beneath the skin.

  To my surprise, Dad had not changed the message on his answering machine on his return from Hawaii. “This is Harvey!” he said, like it was great news, stop the presses, the message he had recorded the day he brought the Panasonic home from Circuit City. I thought Cindy would have recorded a new greeting. “Hello, Cindy,” I singsonged into the phone. I added that I was just checking in, aware more than ever what a peculiar, solitary conversation it is, talking to a machine.

  Mom had torn the page out of the newspaper, a big ad for pickup trucks, a smiling auto with hands and feet holding up a CREDIT PROBLEMS? sign. She had left the entire page draped over a bowl of wooden Indonesian apples.

  My hand reached for it then fell back to my side.

  In the end, even though I didn’t want to read it, I did, in a few heartbeats. “Grand Jury Slams Eastbay Att’y.” No picture, just news of an indictment, a charge of grand theft and fraud, the state bar association commenting how seriously it took the fiduciary conduct of its members. I knew from past interviews with sports reporters how much gets left out of a news story. It said nothing about my father being in custody.

  His name wasn’t in the headline, although it was printed three times within the news column. Most of the people I knew wouldn’t read page nineteen of the Saturday newspaper.

  Mom was outside, beyond the pool, near the fishpond, talking on the phone. She has four large white and gold carp, living submarines that nose the tendrils of green scum, mouthing it like very old men. It’s one of the reasons she’s cautious about loving a cat, sure that Myrna is going to wrestle one of these whales onto the patio. Mom saw me and her expression softened, but we didn’t speak, sending each other reassurance across the leaf-flecked surface of the swimming pool.

  What was I going to say to him when we met? Hi, Dad, too bad about your trouble with the cops? My mother might recommend the silent hug, heartfelt but free of definition. But I didn’t know how Dad was going to carry this off. Hi, Champion, I’m suing Alameda County.

  I used to read comics in the Sunday paper and wish I could draw and ink my own, about a cat who said smart things about the life around it. Bonnie’s going to need some antacids and maybe even some Immodium, my cartoon cat would be thinking today. I think what I liked most about comics was the way every moment was separate from the others, in its own neat box.

  I pushed the metal doors to the academy pool. They are heavy, and you have to lean into the push bars with your full weight. I didn’t look toward the deep end of the pool, or the tower.

  Miss P was teaching a handful of little kids how to use a kickboard. Little heads, little splashes, feet kicking, kicking from one side of the pool to the other in the shallow end. You learn like that, hanging onto a flat floatation device, until you can freestyle, and you can’t remember a time when you couldn’t swim.

  I sat, arms crossed over my front, remembering my tapes on how to attain inner peace, deep breath in, deep breath out. It’s all breath, one of my tape instructors says. Come what may, you keep breathing.

  Even so, the echoed voices and the splashing cheerfulness made it hard to sit there. I’ve seen the videos, infants swimming like puppies, pearls of air leaking from their smiles, but we forget and have to learn it all over again. If Miss P was surprised to see me, she didn’t show it, tweeting her whistle, clapping her hand, calling, “Straight legs, Angelina! Straight!” miming it, standing there holding an invisible kickboard, kicking one leg. Miss P can’t fake her feelings. Her eyes were alive, curious.

  I got up and slipped a photocopy of the release form into her hand, like a spy delivering a letter of transit. She shook it open, but didn’t look at it until she had blown a whistle and the class hung on the side of the pool, wet, smiling faces. Even then she only read it long enough to register my name and the doctor’s signature.

  Mom says it’s all in the legs, and for Mom I think it is. She’s tall, and built for power rather than grace. I swim with everything, my entire body. Every part of the anatomy surges through the water, and if you start thinking My shoulders are too square, I should lock my knees, you’re doing it wrong.

  When the class was dismissed, Miss P told the mommies what a wonderful bunch of little fish they were, and I let myself get up from the bench and pad over to the water, giving the quaking surface a swipe with my toes. Miss P plucked a nose clip off the wet concrete without bending her knees.

  Miss P waited, watching me. I was going to do a flat dive, the easiest dive in the world, but instead I lowered myself, hitching down into the water, and let go. I stroked across, side to side, and did a few underwater short laps.

  I climbed from the water and trailed the wet all the way along the concrete, all the way over to the tower. I swung my arms, worked my shoulders. I was trembling, sure I’d gray-out and collapse.

  Chrome has no color. It reflected the arena, warping it, my hand approaching distorted, a fleshy polyp extending toward the rail. Hesitating.

  I put my hand on it, forcing myself. I wrapped my fingers around the chrome, the bright surface flawed here where passersby touched it, hanging on to it, looking up to count the steps.

  Higher, where no one but the divers climbed, the chrome was pristine. The rail is never as cold as you expect it to be.

  I couldn’t stand the way the metal got warmer under my hand.

  Miss P tugged at the door, the same door the paramedics had trundled through that afternoon. I wanted to call out to her. The metal barrier made a resounding steel thud.

  Miss P could still hear me if I called out. She would be right here—I knew she was listening, in her office with the clipboard, sitting there, aware. Maybe right on the other side of the door, giving me time.

  By now the surface was going slack, the ripples and chop from the children gradually slowing, the racing lanes in the bottom of the po
ol straightening, clarifying, almost geometrically exact. One bare foot on the bottom step of the tower, and all I could think was—how dry the step is, the sandpapery surface harsh under the ball of my foot. I didn’t climb—I just closed my eyes.

  The cut in my head throbbed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “How’d it go?” Miss P said, standing beside her desk. Her working space is a heap of schedules, pamphlets, her in/out tray loaded with sports catalogs still in their see-through envelopes. A first aid kit had popped open, elastic bandages and a cot splint.

  I was tugging on the beret I had begun to accept as a fashion accessory, a part of my permanent costume. I looked pretty good in it. My street clothes were sweat pants today, and the kind of ancient, predivorce shirt of my father’s that Mom wears to hose down the fishpond.

  “It went okay,” I said.

  I wanted to swallow my tongue, turn myself inside out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She took the cap off a tube of lip balm, applied a little. “You did the best you could.”

  “Monday,” I said. I added, “It’ll be harder and harder, the longer I put it off.”

  She sat. She said nothing, finding a place on her desk for the tube of lip moisturizer.

  “Monday—I promise.”

  Miss P leaned forward in her chair. “In the old days I would have told you to go back in there, suit up again, and drop your body off the top of that tower.”

  I nearly said, I’d do it—go ahead.

  Miss P leaned back in her chair. “Is anyone pressuring you?” she said at last.

  “My mom never nags me about working out,” I said. That’s what we called it: doing back three-and-a-half somersaults with a difficulty rating of 3.3. “Working out,” like it was sit-ups and a jog around the track.

  “Do I pressure you?”

  “Sure. You tell me not to dive when my brain is seeping out of my head.”

  She let herself laugh quietly and segued into, “The Pacific Coast Invitational at Stanford …” She turned to her wall calendar, a vast, paper tablet scrawled with red and black marker, circled appointments. She lifted the calendar page up so we could both see September, fierce red stars marking the date, weeks from now. She let July fall back into place. “If you aren’t ready—” She made her hands open like a book, closed them. “I heard about your father.”