CHAPTER TWENTY

Well before dawn the summer before this, the telephone had startled me awake. I thrashed, struggling to find the clock radio, thinking it was time to get up and run my miles.

I picked up the telephone at last, desperate to silence the source of the noise. “Go outside in the backyard,” my father’s voice was saying, “and look up at the sky, Champion. Don’t ask, don’t talk, just do what I say, and call me back. Do you hear me? Are you there?”

I was sleep-silly, three-thirty in the morning. “Okay,” my voice said, like a rasp from the tomb. He hung up, and I sat there in the bedding. It’s hard for me—some people are brisk before breakfast. I crawl.

Mom had bought me a cute phone, mock antique, fake ivory and gilt, a rococo instrument a gangster’s girlfriend might use. The problem was you couldn’t take it anywhere. I staggered into the bathrobe I had long ago outgrown, the frilly one I rarely wore beyond the bedroom, and I mouse-footed my way through the kitchen, outside.

Neighborhood quiet surrounded me, a last cricket, a steady rush and hiss of freeway sound. I tilted my head. We don’t get much of a night sky in the Bay Area. Summer clouds, winter rain, city lights, smog. You can sometimes look up and catch the moon. And if you let your night vision develop you can see a few of the more brazen stars, point to point in the smoggy dark.

But I expected what I saw: not much, a few stalwart stars, a slender piece of moon going tan as it approached the western horizon. I was more concerned about not falling into the pool and not tripping over the sprinkler at the end of the hose. Still, I kept looking. Dad was watching with me, in his bamboo-and-gravel garden a couple of miles away.

A flash across the sky. Another. Like flaws in my own vision, glints that weren’t there, too fast. I lay down flat on the dewy crab grass.

It was a meteor shower, flicking chips of light that arced across the sky. I could almost sense my father watching with me.

I stayed like that until dawn and finally fell asleep there, curled up on the wet grass. Mom approached me in the sun glow, her features set, a woman afraid to make a sound. We made it a joke later, the expression on her face, but we both knew what she had been thinking, my body flung there on the tough, prickly grass.

The Beals dropped me off late that afternoon, sunburned and full of stories, shouting over the ragged, metallic jazz Mr. Beal loves to play at full volume, saxophones and anguished trumpets. They had a good laugh over the story of Rowan running full-out from a cougar at Tamales Bay, the cat wondering if Rowan was lunch.

“That was really stupid,” cried Rowan over a drum solo. “You never run from a predator.”

When I left the car Rowan snapped out of his nature-happy routine and reached for my hand. “Everything’s going to be all right, Bonnie,” he said. His father waited at the steering wheel, gazing off at the street, keeping time to the music with tiny movements of his head.

“Everything,” Rowan said, getting out of the car to hold me.

I couldn’t say anything that would keep him there in the gathering twilight.

“This is a piece of sea elephant skin,” I said.

Mom fingered the triangle of fuzzy polyester-like fur. She said, “Yuck,” but with something like wonder.

I was glad to reenter my mother’s solar system. Her professional life had spilled out of her office, paper clips and envelopes, and she was working at the dining room table. Her hair was gathered back in a shaggy, silvery ponytail, a style that didn’t look that good on her.

I gave her a brief verbal postcard, peanut butter and jelly and seagulls. I left out the sunlight in the hair of Rowan’s arms, the muscle in his jaw bunching as he chewed.

I put my elbows on the table.

As though sensing my deletion, Mom said, “Rowan and his dad had a good time?”

I wanted her to know that this had been a serious activity, contributing to science and the spread of knowledge. “I like them,” I added.

She gave me a thoughtful smile. “I do, too,” she said. She let one arm hang, the other draped across the table, a folder of receipts, the sort of paperwork you’re required to keep on file for four years. You can only work so long, even to take your mind off trouble.

I hadn’t planned to talk, but it happened. I found myself describing my dream and said I was down to antihistamines in the medicine cabinet, hoping they would help me sleep. I told Mom Miss P was thinking of retiring. I told her Miss P was leaving it all up to me. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that she was thinking of early retirement.

“Smart,” said Mom after a short silence.

“She’s good at it.”

“Are you hungry?” Mom asked, meaning: Did I want to keep talking?

“Not yet,” I said.

It got dark before we even noticed none of the lights were on.

Mom’s swimming career had burned out in her sophomore year at UCLA, a sprung rotator cuff in her right arm. The coaches drove us like this, she would say, showing a fist being shoved into someone. Maybe that’s why she stressed that swimming was ninety percent legs, because she had such ruined cartilage in her shoulders. The coaches, she thought, consumed her career, forcing laps when the team was puking water. I knew Mom would love to have me swim competitively, but she wasn’t crazy about platform diving. An eavesdropper would have wondered that the subject of my father never came up.

We sat in the dining room running my options, detailing, once again, her past growing up in Victorville in the Mojave Desert, the lights of LA blue on the horizon. Every morning as a girl she used a pool rake to skim off yucca spears and shiny black beetles this big, she would say, indicating an insect the size of a blackbird.

“Let the coaches push you around,” Mom said, “and they’ll kill you.”

I called Cindy, and she said the arraignment was set for the courthouse in downtown Oakland, but there was no way to predict any of the details. She said this in a way that told me she was familiar with the world of bail bonds and court calendars, and that I was not.