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 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.