CHAPTER EIGHT

Sometimes Cindy would glance up, a morsel of chicken breast poised on her fork, mistaking yet another passing car for Dad’s BMW. But unless the car sounded a lot like Dad’s I was rarely deceived. As the evening went on and Dad called again, we settled into stories of Cindy’s childhood. She had grown up in Nevada, Iowa—pronounced with a long a: Ne-vay-da. “They make everything out of soy, ink and food, so my dad raised that, but what he loved was livestock.”

When I told Cindy her books about collectibles were an improvement over Dad’s usual reading matter, the Kentucky Derby and bare-fisted boxing, Cindy said that she was going to invest in transportable assets. This was the one phrase she used that made me stop and look sideways at her as I sipped my pineapple juice, wondering if this was the sort of thing you said if you were raised around abandoned silos. Her fingernails were the same color as mine, but longer.

Dad called yet again, and Cindy said things were great, do what you have to do. I could feel the conversation filling with things she didn’t want to mention, even when she took the portable phone into the den, where Dad kept the largely unread, leather-bound volumes he had inherited from his grandfather, Emerson and Dickens and geographies of a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

Finally, at the end of the third call, Cindy waved me into the den and I stood staring at the spine of Byron’s collected poems while Dad said he was sorry he had made such a mess of the evening, he would make it up to me. He was helping Mrs. Jovanovich.

Cindy drove me home after we had picked at our pine-nut tarts, fresh baked that day at Angelino’s in Montclair. As she dropped me off at my mom’s house, Cindy thanked me for coming over, as if I had done her a big personal favor. I couldn’t bring myself to say you’re welcome, staring into the silhouette of her head, her hair the kind that doesn’t take much of a curl, a lank wave down to each shoulder. I told her I wanted to hear more about tornadoes.

Mrs. Jovanovich was a white-haired woman who walked with two silvery canes. Her family had owned land near Pebble Beach, and her husband had been a television producer. Now her only daughter lived in England, and Dad shepherded her estate through insurance payments, lease agreements, even helping her buy a new hearing aid when an improved model was advertised. This was typical of the kind of support Dad gave his clients, and it was clear to me that Mrs. Jovanovich must have suffered some heart flutter or the legal equivalent of a fainting spell that kept him on the phone to London or to a doctor.

But when Mom asked how did it go, looking up from a mess of paperwork, I didn’t know what to tell her. She meant: Tell me you father didn’t marry a cliché blonde, a brainless flirt. But I didn’t want to go into detail and have to tell her that Dad had never shown up.

“She knows all about hogs,” I said.

“No kidding,” said Mom, with greater interest than I expected.

“You don’t want to live downwind,” I said. “If you raise too many pigs per acre it’s bad for the water table. The manure soaks into the ground.”

“Harvey must love hearing about that every night,” she said. Everyone called my Dad by his entire first name, never Harv.

“Hogs ate a boy’s fingers off,” I said, since the subject seemed to intrigue Mom. “He passed out from the fumes, and the animals thought he was fodder,” using Cindy’s exact words.

The drive from Oakland to Sacramento takes a couple of hours, some one hundred miles through metropolitan fringe, dairy-cow hills, and at last the flat pasture land that used to be an inland sea, according to Rowan. In prehistoric time, he means, although sometimes during winter a levee breaks and again the valley turns into ocean.

Denise suffers from hay fever, and she is almost superstitious about taking antihistamines before a meet, worried they might make her pee test come out false-positive. I tell her this is unlikely in the extreme, but athletes trust suffering.

Some schools rent little yellow school busses, or own cute little vans with REDWOOD PREPARATORY or CARMEL HIGH SCHOOL lettered on the door panel. The academy rents air-conditioned Peerless Stage busses, the same conveyances gamblers charter for the long trip to Reno. The bus was not half full, even with the chaperones, the volunteer supervisors, wives of dentists, and professors on sabbatical. The seats have head cushions, and the armrests have obsolete ashtrays, little metal doors you can flip open and see the old freckles of ash even professional maintenance cannot completely remove. The seats cushions are green velour, very comfy.

Denise and I are among the leading lights of the swim and dive team, and we are also the youngest members, so the other athletes leave us alone. There is no chill involved, it’s all amiable. But Denise and I often lunch together, or swing into the back seat of a bus, and they give us a nod or a wave and let us be. Miss P came to the rear of the bus, hand to hand along the seat backs, asking if Denise was okay.

“Snot,” said Denise, sounding like someone talking from inside a pillow. “My head is full of it.”

Miss P shook her head sympathetically and hunched to get a better view of the dry, empty fields. “Adrenaline will clear it,” said Miss P, and this was true. A sudden shock, or anticipating the gaze of five thousand strangers, will clear your sinuses before you even suit up.

“My head feels like it’s this big,” said Denise almost peacefully.

“I’m allergic to acacia,” said Miss P, and I could see that the coach needed to keep her mind occupied, too.

I wasn’t scheduled to dive. I had put on a show of disappointment, looking around at things with a hard, frustrated glare, but as I sat there watching the dried-up scenery go by, I was relieved.

I didn’t know how I would feel, watching my friends compete. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to look without my ears ringing, the pain coming back.

Miss P had been legendary as a coach who made her athletes run fifteen laps if someone giggled during roll call. But by the time I got to the academy Miss P had lost weight, dwindling from the hardy, tanned brunette who took the top members of the academy swim team to three bronzes in the Goodwill Games a few years ago.

She was still a good coach—a better coach now, in a way, because a touch of frailty made her athletes patient with her if she forgot her whistle or had to sit down during touch-and-go, the relay laps we swim by the hour. She had stayed with me while we watched the videotaped accident backward and forward, until I could see what happened with my eyes closed, my head kissing the edge of the platform.

Sacramento is a sprawling, flat town, with trees blue in the distance, mirage shivering the streets. One step out of the bus and I wanted to climb right back in. Denise made an exaggerated stagger, like someone who’s been shot, but it was no joke. The weather report had said it would hit one hundred and five Fahrenheit, and it felt way hotter than that all the way across the asphalt parking lot.

Parking attendants with EVENT STAFF on their backs in yellow letters squinted around at things, talking into handheld radios, probably to make sure their colleagues had not succumbed to heat stroke. The academy men trailed off with a male assistant, Mr. Browning, the guy who shot the videos, and the women angled into our own facility, but you could see when we split up how few we were.

Our team had a corner of the locker room, a roomy place used by professional teams hardly anyone in Oakland knows anything about, a football league with teams in cities like Salt Lake City and Barcelona, and soccer teams who play in front of nine loyal fans. But marginal pro teams still have plush facilities, and we enjoyed the feel of carpeting under our toes, and lockers big enough to accommodate half a wardrobe.

Swimmers tried on their goggles, took them off, untangled the straps, tugged them on again. Denise climbed into her black swimsuit and put on the red-and-white warm-up togs Miss P insists on, telling us we have to wear our colors whenever we represent the academy.

I wore exactly what Denise was wearing, and what they all wore. I kept my eyes up, looking people in the eye, zipped all the way to my chin even in the Martian-surface heat we had to single-file our way through. I didn’t want to look in the direction of the platform. I wondered if it was a mistake to be there at all.

I forced myself to watch the swimmers in their preliminary heats, my ears ringing. I sat on the bench while Denise did her dive, screwing up every time, especially on her entry. A front dive is a plain dive, but if your entry is good—the rip you make entering the water—the judges love it. If it looks like nothing has happened, it goes well. One minute the diver is erect on the tower, and the next she’s gone, hardly a ripple.

In Denise’s case there was a ripple. On all three dives. A splash, water all over the place. And each time you could see what a mistake it was. You could see it in Denise’s eyes each time she came out of the pool. Miss P looked at me and shook her head in apology to me, to the team. But I stood up and clapped my hands, and each time I told Denise how well she had done.