Heat (18 page)

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 saying.

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.

She wrapped her arms around me and said, “You were on the ten o'clock news.”

“Okay,” I said, guarded, certain that some late news had changed everything.

She said, “You were beautiful!”

The body remembers things at night. Wind, the rhythm of waves. I lay in the dark on my bed, my eyes closed, feeling the waft and rock of the water in my limbs. When I opened my eyes, I stared upward.

Only later, when I woke and sat up, did I begin to feel happy, and it was a new happiness, a little like fear. Surely the judges would change their minds. Surely by morning there would be a phone call, and it would all be taken away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Cindy picked me up early, when it was still dark. Only one house down the street had its lights on, a rectangle of light on the lawn. The freeway murmur on the horizon was hushed. Mom stood on the front lawn, her arms crossed. I could not see the look in her eyes, but I knew what she was thinking.

Even when it wasn't dark anymore, Cindy didn't turn off the headlights. Through the tule fog, farms glided by, barns and horses. The old Jaguar smelled of leather balm and mechanical funk, iron and oil.

Seven weeks had passed and it felt like winter. Georgia called me often, asking me how things were going. She filled me in on little details of her life, Sweetie buying her a set of watercolors, her Italian-seasoning herb garden full of thyme and not much else. I could see how someday Georgia and I might be close the way she and Mom were, no words required. We didn't talk about Dad much, but her silence was gentle.

Cindy was saying she was surprised at how many big rigs there were, and I was agreeing that the truck traffic was bad, so early on a Saturday morning. “Don't truckers get the weekend off?” she said.

Mom had said maybe I should avoid this. Maybe it wouldn't do me any good to see him there, and besides, I didn't need the distraction. Scouts from universities had been coming to my workouts, men in sports jackets and tasseled loafers. They usually carried a video camera, but sometimes they did nothing but watch, their hands in their pockets.

The fog was so heavy Cindy had to run the windshield wipers all the way over the Altamont Pass, and as we descended into the Central Valley the visibility got worse, morning a rumor, the road ahead vague brake lights as drivers lost their nerve and slowed down.

I was tense, now that it was really happening, fussing with my new blouse, a light-weight blue rayon, tiny sleeves. I should have worn something warmer. I ran my fingers through my hair, and I could feel the tiny kiss of scar on the back of my head.

“Did you bring a roll of quarters?” Cindy asked. “Don't worry if you didn't, I still have plenty left from last time.”

I had stopped by Wells Fargo Bank on MacArthur Boulevard the day before and traded in a twenty-dollar bill for two rolls. The coins felt like a handgun, weighing down my purse. But to reassure myself, I hunted for them among the Doublemint and Pilot fine-point pens. I found them, safe, right where they belonged.

“My first couple of visits I tried saying thanks, after they ran my face through the X ray twice.” Her makeup kit, she meant. “Trying out a little courtesy, thinking it wouldn't hurt. They didn't exactly say, ‘You're welcome.' I have come to figure politeness means nothing to someone working in a place like that.”

I couldn't tell her how hard it was for me to do this. I couldn't admit to anyone the way I felt about seeing him in such a place.

“What kind of person takes that kind of job?” she was saying. Cindy did all the talking, and I urged her along. She had stories of weather, blizzards, record freezes, lightning storms so bad she was warned not to go near a telephone. “That's how you get bit,” she said. “By the electricity. In the atmosphere.” Her sentences short, jumpy. She chewed her Doublemint like she was trying to wear it out.

By the time we reached Modesto the sun had nearly burned through, the fence posts and even the cattle black and wet, too early in the winter for the damp to awaken the mustard or the oat weeds. I enjoyed the sight of farmhouses, like boats, single points of light.

I saw it before I knew what it was, low, flat buildings, like a factory, gray and brown, surrounded by fields just two or three weeks away from turning green.

The sign outside was surrounded by white and purple flowers, violets:
SAN JOAQUIN MEN'S COLONY
. Cindy searched for a place in the parking lot, the old Jaguar purring. The visitors gathered in the distance at one end of the lot, and there was nothing conspicuous about this crowd, nothing that indicated why they were here, or where they were. They could have been waiting for a Target or Walmart to open, moms and kids tired of standing up.

“We might as well make sure it's locked,” said Cindy, with a wan smile, taking her time, keys, purse, double checking both doors, walking to the front of the car, checking the headlights. She let her gum drop onto the asphalt with a dainty gesture.

There were only a few men, some of them jumping up and down, hands stuffed in jeans pockets against the cold. We all waited for a gate to open in a chain-link fence, concertina barbed wire along the top. Far away through the mist a Department of Corrections officer was heading our way, blowing on his hands.

We gave my father's name, Cindy speaking with exaggerated clarity,
“Harvey Pierce Chamberlain,”
and she gave his inmate number, nine digits. This corrections officer was a red-haired woman with heavy eye makeup. She reminded me of Ms. Ashcroft, my fifth-grade teacher, who had permanent mascara tattooed around each eye. The officer located my father's name on a list and had us both sign in with the kind of pen the post office uses; your writing is half ink and half empty space.

The waiting room filled, so many children, so many women who looked my age, chewing gum, helping toddlers stand upright, gazing at the clock on the wall, five minutes to eight. At eight o'clock exactly a corrections officer began to call the names of inmates, one name at a time. The visitors would stand and arrange their clothes for a moment before they slipped through the door, a green metal barrier that closed tight for a long minute or two before the next name would be called.

The plea bargain he and Jack arranged with the DA gave him two years, eighteen months if he didn't knife anybody. Cindy said it was the easiest, and least expensive, solution. But as soon as I saw my first envelope addressed to me from the prison, I went sick. His return address was written along the lefthand edge of the envelope, not in the corner like a normal letter. And the paper was a single sheet of lined paper, not the hundred percent cotton bond he always preferred.

Cindy chewed her lip, lipstick on her front teeth. When it was our turn, we followed the corrections officer down a hallway and waited while our purses were X-rayed. Cindy had warned me to wear no jewelry. The X-ray guard handed me my purse. I thanked him, and he said, “You bet.”

My heart was tripping. My letters to him were all about Rowan's video, the one he was making about otters in Monterey Bay, and about my diving, my chances at winning college scholarships.

We weren't close to seeing him, not yet. Another female guard stamped the back of my right hand, a moist kiss of ink, just above my thumb, a blurred star. I forced myself to not rub it, not try to obliterate it with spit.

Soon
.

I tried to sense his presence somewhere, but there were only walls and doors, the sound of locks ratcheting, doors opening, the interior of the next room decorated with bulletin boards, a map of California, our location a circle in red ink. Our footsteps made a sound that was not quite in sync with our movements, a hushed echo.

Under the eye of a corrections officer in the shadows, we put our hands into a box of green light. The star glowed fluorescent lavender.

My mouth had a funny taste. Maybe some of the magic ink on my hand was seeping into my skin, into my nervous system. The bolt shot in another door, and we entered a very large room, the size of a good-size cafeteria. Cindy and I checked in again, an officer finding our names on a list. I printed my name in neat block letters and wrote out my signature, my entire name.

We found an empty table and two chairs. Vending machines dispensed candy along one wall, Snickers and Mars bars, bags of Fritos and barbecue-flavored potato chips. There were plastic cartons of white-bread sandwiches. I broke open one of the rolls of quarters I had brought for this very purpose and fed the machines, coming back to where Cindy was waiting. Still no sign of my father. No inmates at all yet, the room filling with visitors, children having trouble keeping their voices down.

Cindy peered into her compact, licked her teeth, and smiled like a mad woman, making sure her teeth were okay.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

They arrived one by one.

They each showed up at the door, took half a second to look around, and went directly to the appropriate table. What surprised me was how many of them wore glasses, the lenses gleaming in the fluorescent lights. And how many were gray-haired or bald, as though it took experience to be a prisoner here—this was not a place for beginners.

Each inmate was allowed one quick hug, a kiss, and then they had to take their seat with their hands clasped in front of them, facing the half dozen officers along one wall. The prisoners were dressed alike, a gray T-shirt and gray pants. A form letter from the Department of Corrections had warned, “no visitor will be admitted wearing gray clothing of any kind.”

T-shirts always made Dad look square-shouldered and athletic. He didn't see us. Cindy stood and waved her arm side to side, a farm girl hallooing silently across a wide field. He still didn't—and then he gave a tuck of his head and a smile.

We hugged like people in an airport, joyful, but taking it in stride.

“Those sandwiches look good!” he said, prying one of the plastic cartons with his fingernail.

“I thought we'd wait for lunchtime,” Cindy said, as though it was important to do things in the right order.

“Lunchtime!” he said, like he had never heard of such a silly idea.

I took a bite, tuna, with a thin patina of lettuce.

He chewed for a while, “Delicious!” muffled by a mouthful. He had lost more weight, a pucker at the corner of each eye. We tore into our food, glad to have something to do, although I could barely swallow.

He rubbed his hands together, tugged at the short sleeves of his shirt. “When I'm out of here,” he said, letting us get used to the feel of the words, emphasizing the phrase with his eyes, “When I'm out, I'm starting a service. For people who've bought cars that are defective.”

Cindy said something I couldn't make out, busy with her Doritos. She cleared her throat and said, “You'd be proud of that Jaguar.”

He thought about this, his chin jutted ironically, maybe wondering if he was, in fact, likely to feel proud of a car.

“It runs fine,” Cindy said, and I could tell she was wounded by something that had passed between them. They had shared so little conversation in recent weeks that even a glance could hurt. It surprised me, the strength of her feelings.

“Consumers buy cars with cracked head gaskets,” my father was saying, putting some kindness into his voice. “Faulty exhaust,” he added, and Cindy smiled.