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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 pool 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.”

I took a moment. I wanted my life in neat compartments, Miss P in one comic strip, my father in another. “He'll be okay.”

“How about you?” she said.

I couldn't talk.

“Platform diving isn't your entire career,” she said. “You have family concerns, you have plans to take up medicine, make a contribution to society.…” She let her voice drift into what she thought was an agreeable tone of promise.

“You're saying I can't do it.”

“I'm saying you don't have to.”

I had trouble meeting her gaze.

“You're wondering why I'm not tough, like I used to be. The legendary Miss P.”

I was a little embarrassed. Her nickname was rarely acknowledged by her—it was always
Miss Petrossian
.

“It's actually not a bad form of motivation,” she was saying, “the manipulative approach. Make the athlete see that it's all up to her, while the coach looks on from a great height, noble, long-suffering.”

“Psychology.”

“If you can't make the Pacific Coast Invitational, for sure you'll miss Seattle, and there won't be any Goodwill Games, no pre-Olympic Trials—”

The invitational was being held at Stanford in the fall. I told myself not to worry about something so far in the future, but Miss P always had next year's calendar already on the wall, scribbled notes on weekends a year away.

“That's all right, if that's what you want,” Miss P said, putting a paper clip into its box. “Just don't lie to yourself. Every hour that goes by and you aren't working, there are competitors out there in Denver and Salt Lake City and El Centro relieved to hear it. Because they're hard at work right now, Bonnie.” She gave me some silence. Then she said, “And you aren't.”

“Subtle,” I said.

She was studying me, trying to read my expression. Dad always said, look them right between the eyes. “I'm going to tell you something I don't want you to discuss with anyone. This is just between you and me.”

I waited.

Miss P likes sappy movies, the kind Mom likes,
The Sound of Music, ET
. One of her favorite movies was about a dog and a cat and a pig who traveled three hundred miles through raging rivers and snowbound hell to find their owners. “I'm starting to consider early retirement,” she said.

I was glad she kept talking—I wasn't ready to make a sound.

“What gets harder is caring about scores and wondering what coach is deploying what computer program to teach center of gravity and angle of descent.”

I kept quiet, letting my emotions rise to the surface and sink.

“I want you to see that life is more than endurance conditioning,” she said, “and one-half twist layouts.”

“But you still care,” I said.

“Do I?”

For a few heartbeats we just looked at each other.

“My attitude isn't the point. I'll tell you what matters.”

At last the conversation was on solid, familiar ground.

“If
you
care, Bonnie,” she was saying. “If
you
still want to dive, the first thing you do on Monday is run three miles. You come here, nine o'clock, and we start you off on the springboard.”

“The springboard!” I protested.

“You're too proud for that?”

Swimming I could handle. Maybe I could talk her into letting me swim laps all morning Monday. Maybe I could take up swimming, the two-hundred-meter breaststroke, and be realistic about my future.

I was going to say that my father was facing his arraignment on Monday. I couldn't possibly be here.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“I heard you up again in the night,” said my mother from the dining room.

She doesn't mind holding a conversation with someone she can't see. She'll talk to a closed door, right at you, or through earphones. It was the next morning, after a night of bad dreams.

“I wake up a lot,” I said.

I was slicing a banana. The banana sections looked like primitive coins.

“Why are you eating it like that?” Mom demanded, bustling through the kitchen.

I said something about it being good practice in lab technique. She had a folder marked “Immigration Service” in her hand. An employee had been using the Social Security number of a deceased cousin. She would spend the morning selecting letter formats on her word-processing menu: Business Letter, Personal Letter, Death Warrant.

I had been wondering what role she would adopt: distant but still caring ex-wife, indifferent, nosy. She had opted this morning for the frantic, business-as-usual ploy she used when a cat has died or an unexpected envelope has arrived from the IRS. She said, as she hurried off to the Spartan shelves and drawers of her home office, “I forgot to tell you—there's a postcard for you, from Georgia. Under the wooden fruit.”

A sweeping panorama, a beach with gigantic driftwood, the ocean-cured logs of the north coast. “Thinking of you, Egg Head!” she had written in her graceful, feminine hand.

“I called her last night and told her about your father,” Mom said.

I asked what Georgia had said.

“She's worried about you,” Mom said. “She always said you and your father are like this,” she added, holding up two fingers side by side.

Georgia once said the pattern of seeds in a slice of banana look like a monkey's face. My mom says the Man in the Moon looks like a rabbit eating cabbage. I had a piece of rye toast for breakfast, sliced banana, and a glass of pineapple juice.

I gave Rowan a call, knowing the Beals were probably gone for the weekend. But to my surprise Mrs. Beal answered, and said that they had heard about my father's troubles and that they had every sympathy. That was the way she expressed it, making this all sound historical, the Time of the Troubles.

Mrs. Beal has the most wonderful voice on the phone, it melts all opposition. “But you have to come over,” she protested. Or maybe she has the gift, knowing what the caller needs to hear.

Mrs. Beal's parents were always appearing in the society pages, fund raisers for the ballet. Mr. Beal's family used to own a company that manufactured environment controls for airplanes—the mechanisms that allow aircraft flying through cold and lethally thin air to turn the atmosphere into warm, breathable gas. Mr. Beal's scuffed hiking boots and loose-fitting plaid shirts were made to order, and their driveway always had brand new cars spattered with mud.

I wondered what they fed you Sunday morning in a county jail.

Mrs. Beal opened the door wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and showing a smile of perfect teeth, the kind you capture after years of orthodontia. She's a size eight and buys clothes already faded, carefully tailored rips at the knee. “Bonnie!” she cried, and I was a survivor, home from a war.

“You're just the one we need,” said Mr. Beal.

“I keep telling Dad you're the most resilient person I know,” said Rowan, offering me a plate of corn muffins.

“Resilient,” I echoed. The Beal family doesn't say you look “good.” They say you look “top-hole.”

Rowan at once lowered his eyes. For a bright, earnest guy he is easy to embarrass. “I mean—full of life,” he said.

“Is
that
what I'm full of?” I said, to laughter all around. Good old Bonnie, keeping her sense of humor. Sometimes I thought that despite their ever-warm welcome, Rowan's parents preferred one of his other girlfriends, the mature sophisticate with long, glossy hair, off to Washington D.C. or Paris to visit her uncle the ambassador.

My dad likes Rowan, always showing him how to lay down a perfect bunt, choking up on the bat, and how to get loose before racket ball, stretching, getting those thigh muscles, the adductor longus, the adductor magnus, ready for action.