Heat

by Michael Cadnum

  He turned back to unlock the car in the driveway, a low-slung, exotic-looking automobile. Rowan jogged up the driveway, and Dad asked how it was going, the way men do, so casual and macho they are inarticulate.

  “New car?” I heard myself ask.

  “Jack loaned me one of his,” he said. He swung the door open and I had a glimpse of a leather interior, the seats worn dark. “An old XKE—it needs all kinds of repairs.”

  “That was nice of him,” I said. Niceness was a concept I had picked up from Mom. Calling an act of generosity good made it sound heavy-handed.

  “That depends how you look at it,” said Dad.

  “Decent body work, though,” said Rowan.

  “Jack’s part owner of a shop down in Monterey,” said Dad. “Specializes in detailing.” He slammed the door and fussed with his key chain. The key made a quiet click, and Dad gave us a lift of his eyebrows, letting us in on the question: Will it start?

  The engine chattered and stalled. “Every time I turn the key, it’s major malfunction,” said Dad. “This is one of those cars so beautiful it’s about to fall apart.”

  He was tanned and had lost weight. Neighbors would be watching, a curtain parting, slipping shut.

  “We’ll set up some tennis,” he said. “I bet Rowan’s got a killer serve.” The car coughed and fell silent again. The car rolled a short distance down the driveway, grit crackling under the tires.

  I asked, “Where were you?”

  For a moment it was like he hadn’t heard me. He set the parking brake, fumbled with a knob on the dash. “Cindy had never seen Tahoe, can you believe that? We rented a cabin with a view of the lake, and a power boat, one of those Formula 27 PCs. I bought a couple of wet suits, some water skis.”

  “You had a good time?”

  “The best,” he said.

  “Maybe it has a manual choke,” said Rowan, leaning on the car.

  “It’s flooded,” said Dad.

  A moment passed, my dad fidgeting with the gearshift. “You’re not worried, are you, Champ?” he asked gently. “I’m going to come from behind, just like Silky Sullivan. You know the story of Silky Sullivan?” Dad was saying, talking to Rowan, about to embark on a story I had heard a hundred times.

  Rowan grinned, a perfect audience, chuckling at all the right places in the tale.

  Dad fell silent at last.

  “That’s great,” said Rowan, unaware that he had heard a third-rate version of the story.

  Dad started the car, the air heavy with the scent of carbon and sulfur. “Jack had the smog device disconnected,” said Dad with a grin: Hope I don’t get caught.

  He backed out of the driveway and floored the accelerator, the Jaguar roaring slowly up the street.

  Cindy called just before school started in September. “I don’t have time to talk right now,” she said. “I just thought you ought to know.”

  I was in a hurry myself, getting ready to see a play at Berkeley Rep with Mom, hopping on one foot, pulling on a pair of what Mom called “sensible shoes.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed. “What’s wrong?”

  “I want you to hear it from me first,” she said. What she meant was: You were the one I knew I could talk to. Then she took a moment, like I was supposed to guess.

  When I didn’t she said, “Harvey’s going to plead.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Myrna’s six kittens were all dark and long haired, and looked like very furry hamsters. Gradually they turned into cats—acrobats, climbing the living room drapes, boxing the grape ivy, thundering up and down stairs. I sat and watched them, calling them the way my family does, that little noise with my tongue. Still, it was obvious that Myrna would never lose her obsession with her litter. She would remain a single-minded, frantically devoted mother forever, huge cats hanging onto her nipples.

  All Mom had to do was flash a few Polaroids at her customers, and when someone said, “What darling kittens!” it was easy to find new homes. We kept one, a gray-blue male Mom called Bucket. When all the other kittens were gone, Myrna didn’t notice. Maybe she couldn’t count.

  Mom attended the sentencing, dressed in a somber wool skirt and jacket she rarely wore. She sat with Georgia and me at the back of the courtroom. We had never discussed whether or not she would come along. When the morning came, she said that she would drive us, and it was plain that she intended to sit there, too, whatever happened. I was wearing a new navy-blue skirt and a white blouse, no jacket; I looked like a stewardess on a hot day.

  Dad wore a suit, a new gray three-piece. Cindy wore a sherbet outfit thing, with a yellow scarf, and a costume jewelry insect on her breast, like someone auditioning for hostess at a pancake restaurant. I almost said something to Georgia about what awful clothes, but Cindy had drawn on her lipstick badly, one point of her upper lip higher than the other, and sat straight up in her chair, no one to either side of her.

  Montie Carver and Jack spoke before the judge arrived, quiet, heads together, nodding. Jack had grown a mustache, and it made him look heavier, years older. Montie had a tiny Band-Aid on the bridge of his nose.

  When the judge arrived we all stood. She had a new pair of glasses, glittering gold frames.

  I heard what was said, but the words sounded unreal to me. The sounds of shoes squeaking on the polished tile floor and the tiny whirring of the computers were much more loud and clear than the lumbering sounds of human speech.

  When the judge read the sentencing agreement, people in the audience turned to each other with satisfied expressions, and a couple of people clapped.

  I didn’t expect what happened next and would have fled the room, except I couldn’t rise from my chair, and I had to sit there, unable to make a move.

  Even afterward, in the fish restaurant in Berkeley, I was numb and caught up by tiny details, the salt on the crackers, the purple cabbage in the coleslaw. The restaurant had a view of San Francisco Bay. I felt it was wrong to be here, as if we were celebrating, even though I know that mourners often treat themselves to decent food; life is hard enough, they might as well enjoy the chowder.

  Georgia and my mother made conversation about a stilt or a shearwater, some sort of bird, hunting lunch at the edge of the bay. Georgia liked wildlife, but Mom rarely commented on the behavior of nature. This particular waterfowl got a lot of comment, dodging persistently among the lapping waves far below the restaurant. “I’m not one of those people who would like to be a bird,” Mom said.

  “Paul said to send his best,” said Georgia as the plates arrived, as though the commencement of serious eating was somehow ceremonial. The waitress got us all set, tartar sauce in little paper cups, and then Mom and Georgia picked up their forks.

  If I had said anything at all, I would have said how surprised I was. I had not expected the handcuffs—the way he walked hunched beside the bailiff, suit jacket buckled outward from his chest.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I laced my shoes and tiptoed my way through the dark rooms of the house.

  I didn’t have to be so quiet that morning—Mom was doing her laps. She had begun getting up early, expanding her business to include cut flowers, dried ornamentals. She had arranged the flowers for a wedding in Tilden Park, white wicker flower stands anchored with bricks inside, where no one could see. I watched her swim, feeling strangely protective, someone who could pull her from the water if there was an emergency.

  I couldn’t help reading one of her memos on the dining room table, her reply to someone’s e-mail, telling him she didn’t want any scrawny Halfmoon-Bay roses, she’d pay air freight from Nipomo.

  It was a week after the sentencing. I stretched a little on the dewy lawn, grass clippings sticking to the sides of my shoes. I headed uphill, pushing myself hard.

  I maneuvered back over the Warren Freeway and found myself getting a little warm and a little sweaty by the time I was almost all the way to the Beals’ house. I sat at their curb. Mrs. Beal was perfectly nice on the phone, bu
t you could hear her being perfect, a touch of effort in her voice. The family was keeping Rowan busy, taking him to play tennis with a state senator’s daughter, but he called me often, even when he was out of town.

  I searched along the curb, up the sidewalk, stooping, discarding. The early sun made so many things sparkle—not all of them were pretty when you took them in your hand.

  I put a white pebble inside their mailbox, a fragment of quartz. It was something to mention when I spoke to him on the phone: By the way, did you get my rock?

  When I had showered and was in my street outfit, denim pants and a tropical blue cashmere sweater Mom gave me when one of her clients paid her a bonus, I stood at the top of the stairs.

  Mom was in the back garden, out by the fishpond, on the phone, from the sound of it. I think I caught the word “azaleas,” Mom planning an order for the winter, months away. Pink azaleas. She never used to bother with shrubs like that. From the top of the stairs, I could see a heap of papers, catalogs, invoices, not far from where Myrna was asleep, her tail and one white leg just within view.

  I hesitated.

  Quietly, soundlessly, I slipped into Mom’s bedroom. I opened the closet door.

  I stood still, listening. She was still outside, a vague voice from so far away she was almost inaudible.

  I stooped, nudging the closet door to one side, the shoe organizer stuffed full of custom-made sandals and patent-leather pumps Mom always said she was too tall to wear. The three steel boxes were still there.

  But the boxes looked different from the way they had the last time I saw them, months before. They were labeled FIREPROOF, as always. But each one was unlocked, not closed all the way. I opened one of them, hinging back the lid. It was empty.

  All three of them were empty.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  I descended the stairs, taking each step deliberately. I knelt before the fireplace.

  At first it looked as pristine as ever, the deluxe latex paint unmarred.

  But I studied it. Someone had lit a fire here, not recently—no ash smudged my finger as I ran it along the cold iron of the grill. The ghosts of flames flickered up along the painted brick interior. Someone had cleaned out the fireplace with care, and scrubbed the cracks between the bricks.

  Mom was in the kitchen, greeting one of the cats, “How are you this morning, Bucket?”

  I selected a banana from the wooden bowl and peeled it. I found a plate and sliced it carefully. Some people ask why don’t I eat oranges, or peaches, or mangoes.

  We have North America’s loudest refrigerator, a gigantic white Whirlpool that’s always pumping Freon, whatever fridges do, making a noise that makes you want to yank the plug out of the wall.

  I said, “Dad’s protecting you.”

  Mom looked at me like she was surprised I was in the house.

  “That’s why he agreed not to fight the case,” I said. “To keep you out of trouble.”

  Mom made one of her plosive little laughs, almost never an expression of humor.

  I told her about the empty steel boxes, the signs of a fire. And I could see her considering telling me I had no business in her room, in her files. I could see her thinking, I don’t have to talk. Mom could tell me that she burned up some old folders because she was sick of having them around.

  I had already gone beyond what I intended to say, and I was sure she would leave the room.

  “Maybe you don’t want to know,” she said.

  I managed to send her a signal the way Georgia does, no words required.

  She didn’t talk right away, but there was nothing hostile or defensive about this quiet.

  “Maybe I don’t want to know, either,” she said at last. Mom looked down at her hands, fingers spread out on the counter.

  “Maybe even the divorce was a way of protecting you,” I said. “Like he could see the future, a long time ago.”

  “That’s one thing he could never see,” she said.

  I waited.

  “But you’re right. I wasn’t sure. I was afraid.”

  When she was quiet now it was because she wanted to be fair to me—if I wanted to end this conversation, now was the time.

  Mom took a few more moments before saying anything, getting my protein mix out of the cupboard, selecting a spoon. She said, “He always did things he shouldn’t do. Even back then, although I never asked questions. I stayed ignorant, by choice. He helped me start my business.”

  “You profited from stealing,” I heard myself say, unable to shut my own mouth. “The same as he did.”

  She didn’t speak for a few heartbeats. Then she said, “I don’t know for a fact that I profited from anything illegal. But I can’t be certain. When I heard he was going to plead, I couldn’t sleep at night. I destroyed all my old records—I didn’t know what an investigator might find there. But if I profited without knowing it, Bonnie, so did you. We all did.”

  I went outside.

  The carp in the fishpond spend their whole lives barely moving, bearded, with transparent fins, gills pumping. They are scarlet and gold, with inky black spots in places you would never expect, a tail, or a fin.

  Mom joined me. She gave me a glass of protein drink, full to the brim, some of it leaking over, running onto her fingers. She washed the protein drink off her fingers in the fishpond, and the carp lifted toward her fingers, as though the stuff was something they could eat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The night before the invitational I kept waking.

  Audrey rustled softly in her cage, searching through the wood shavings. A mouse doesn’t blink in sudden light, or squint. I turned on the desk lamp and her cinnamon-red eyes looked up into mine.

  She nosed my wrist and scurried up to the crook of my arm. I was thirsty already, my heartbeat heavy.

  Getting onto the bus I didn’t look at anyone, I didn’t talk, and no one sat near me. I sucked a lozenge to keep my mouth moist, honey-and-lemon-flavored, sugar-free.

  You can see so much from a bus, pleasure boats with their graceful, pearling wakes, and tankers sitting going nowhere, waiting to deliver their oil to the Chevron refinery in Richmond. I leaned my head against the bus window, and the vibration sang into my skull. I sat upright, suddenly aware of my injury, the hair completely furred-in around the cut.

  Miss P gave each one of us a quick psych-up, telling us we were going to be great, hanging on with one hand against the movement of the bus, air brakes gasping. I could feel the cut with my fingertips.

  When I imagined myself going to a university, I pictured the campus looking like Stanford, but greener. Much of Stanford is left as nature intended, which means there are tracts of brown field, oak trees in seas of golden wild rye.

  I watched myself put one foot after another across the parking lot. People talked to me but I saw right through them, even Charlotte Witt, who was only apologizing for stepping on my foot. “I have to watch where I’m going,” she said, bubbly with nerves.

  Denise did not wear a bathing cap. She had cut all her hair off a few days before, and looked like a stranger. She wrung her hair back with her hands, a gesture she must have borrowed from me. Her dives went badly, one clumsy splash after another, and they were her usual, undramatic attempts, dives she used to own.

  I think Denise missed our friendship more than I did. I couldn’t help feeling a flicker of my old compassion for her—I didn’t like seeing Denise fail so badly. Besides, I might pick up her bad luck.

  I sat getting my breathing right the way I wanted it, hating the sight of the arena, the other divers, wanting to pay attention to nothing but my own arms and legs, the fingernails I had filed down myself.

  Rowan and his father sat halfway up in the bleachers, two distinct people in a blur of strangers. Rowan stood and clapped his hands when I turned to survey the crowd, something I rarely did. You tell yourself the people out there don’t matter. They do, but they almost don’t. Rowan called something, but I could not make out what he was sayin
g.

  Even during the earliest heat I did not visualize my dives before I climbed the steps. I did not see them mentally from start to finish, all the way into the water. Each time I climbed from the pool I didn’t bother looking toward Miss P. I didn’t acknowledge the applause, if there was any. There was a space around me, a white rectangle.

  At the beginning of each dive I climbed the steps, firm-footed. And it seemed I should be able to see a landscape from the top of the stairs, look out upon more than a building like an airplane hangar, a ceiling girded with black steel beams.

  The judges sat at their table, with the half-distracted air of people trying to do hard math in their heads. Each time I got good altitude. My center of gravity was a pivot point in my body, a place that thrilled as I went into my tuck.

  I remember wishing the pool was deeper, so the bottom would not rush toward me, my fingertips pressing, pushing it away.

  Rowan and his father gave me a ride home from the academy after the bus dropped us all off. Rowan said they had been lucky to be there. This night would be one of those “gilded dates that live forever,” Rowan said.

  They waited in their car as I walked up the dewy front lawn of my house in the dark. I turned and waved from the front step.

  I didn’t open the door for a moment. I was glad to be home at last, away from the smiles and the reporters who talked their way into a ride on the bus, their little black tape recorders in hand. I thought one of them would slip in a question about my father, but no one did. They all wanted to use the word “comeback,” how I had recovered from what one of them called a career-ending concussion. “And now you’re one of the best prep platform specialists west of the Rockies,” one had said, a man with a silver crew cut.

  I let the front door swing open.

  Mom could never stand to see me dive, but she always waited until late, sitting with the television picture on and the sound muted.