CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Every morning I rose in the darkness and did my running—“roadwork,” Dad always called it. I reached a new level of stamina, up-slope, down-slope, all the same to me.

I worked out at the academy pool from noon until late every afternoon. Miss P gave me her standard encouragement, even making a joke of it, telling me to jog it when I was limping with exhaustion, then laughing, showing she was just kidding. She had little to say to me aside from coach chatter. Maybe she saw something independent in my comeback, something that had nothing to do with her.

Only once did she stop me at poolside, swinging her brass whistle on a string. “Don’t forget to breathe,” she said. “Long in, long out.” She waited for me to acknowledge her words, like someone transmitting on shortwave.

I studied fresh videos of my dives every evening. Rowan watched with me, when he wasn’t in Carmel or Stinson Beach. I freeze-framed the image of myself as I powered upward, as I tumbled, as I knifed into the water.

“I look terrible,” I would say. “Like a mannequin. Bonnie, the diving robot.” I’d push fast forward, through the jerky, streaking figures of other divers, until it was me again. Every diver I would face at Stanford would be much better than I was. Sometimes after I turned off the TV I was too depressed to talk.

My mother watched with us if she got home in time, and while Rowan exclaimed, “Another great one, Bonnie!” I just sat there and stared at the screen. You could see the fear in my knees, in my shoulders, my face.

In California a preliminary hearing is held within a week or two of the arraignment. It’s a miniature trial, with witnesses and cross examination, a chance for the People and the Accused to probe the strengths of the upcoming case. My father’s preliminary was set for the beginning of the following week, and as the day approached I felt the chill seep further into my bones. I wished there was some way the hearing could be postponed, or set aside indefinitely, lost in dog-eared files of paperwork.

That weekend Jack Stoughton was on his way to a Save the Presidio fund-raiser in San Francisco. He was motoring across Van Ness Avenue when a driver ran a red light. The footage on Channel Two ten o’clock news showed a sad mess of Jaguar, and the unmistakable profile of Jack chatting with the paramedics as they loaded him into the ambulance. The paramedics were smiling, and one of them, a woman, laughed, her head thrown back, evidently entirely unaware of the camera.

The KNBR reporter on the scene deplored the rash of hit-and-run accidents. Jack was interviewed in the hospital, with his head perched on top of a neck brace that made his spine look absurdly long, like a llama’s. “I had no idea what hit me,” said Jack, in a tone of merriment. The tape was edited at that point—you could see the jump cut.

“Pain killers,” said Mom from her place in the shifting shadows of the living room. Her laptop was beside her, throwing a bluish light into her eyes. “Hear how he slurred?” Her white bird-of-paradise was in the advance edition of the Sunday paper, looking like a blossom from a distant galaxy.

Cindy called Sunday night. The preliminary hearing would be postponed, and she and Dad were off to Bourbon Street.

“You couldn’t buy such luck,” Mom said.

Mom took me out on my birthday, to a place called Shark’s, overlooking the marina, red and yellow lights on the water. The staff sang “Happy Birthday” in harmony, the rum-chocolate cake crowded, seventeen pink candles. She gave me one of those ugly/pretty Hermes scarves and a gold Cross pen. Georgia had sent me a copy of Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, and I got a couple dozen cards from people I knew and liked, athletes, distant aunts. My father was always late with his card and a check, so I hadn’t expected anything.

“This was so long overdue,” said Mrs. Beal.

“We should have done this an age ago,” said her husband.

Rowan winked at me. A servant—what else could I call her?—looked in from the doorway to see if I had spilled any of my peas. It was the day after my birthday, and the Beals were all having wine, jewel-glass goblets of ruby fluid poured from one of those bottles that give you lead poisoning from the cork seal. I had asked for ice water. They all toasted me, wishing me many happy returns.

It was the first time I had ever eaten dinner with the Beals, and I had the impression I was under careful scrutiny. The Tribune had run two articles about my father, and KTVU had featured Jack Stoughton in a smaller, less-padded neck brace, saying that his client would be “absolutely exonerated.” In the aftermath of this wash of news about my father, I sensed that everyone studied me from afar.

Even the Beals’ invitation had to be viewed as a kind of test, an oral exam, whether or not I was up to their standards. I had come to recognize that there was a snappish, impatient side to Rowan’s father. But tonight Mr. Beal gazed across the table with the kindly, energetic manner of the vicar who poisons half his parishioners.

“Rowan says you’re back to full form, diving,” he offered. This was an odd way of putting it, and I wondered if he had said full form, and then realized that it might refer to my figure, not my customary level of skill. So he added “diving,” to avoid embarrassing himself.

“She’s better than ever,” said Rowan. “We can still buy tickets for the Pacific Invitational.”

“We should,” murmured his father, in the tone of someone who had no serious intention of following through.

Maybe they were observing my table manners, how I managed to eat the dainty, half-raw lamb chop. “I am nowhere near what I need to be,” I said, knife and fork perfectly obedient to my hand. The ice cubes in the water were those round shouldered ingots you see in ads for scotch. I wondered if the servant, a gray-haired woman with the steady eye of a dental hygienist, got up first thing in the morning to chisel the cubes.

Mrs. Beal was dazzling in a blue sweater and a loop of pearls, the yellow-tinted variety. “How is your mother doing, through all this?” she asked, either forgetting that my parents were divorced or exhibiting such sterling good manners that a little detail like divorce made no difference.

I was ready. “We are distressed at how the justice system is being misused,” I said. “My sister Georgia is coming down to be at the preliminary. The assistant DA, Montie Carver, the one with the blond hair down to here, is the kind of hired gun who takes one look at a community activist like my dad—” And aches to shoot him down, I was about to say, but stopped myself. Was there a delicate way to express these impressions?

“He’s a hungry prosecutor,” said Mr. Beal, in the same way he would have said hungry weasel. “One of the best.”

I had been pretending to know more than I did. I had seen Carver’s name in headlines in the Chronicle, and I had glimpsed his face on Eyewitness News. I knew he had a reputation as an aggressive attorney in cases involving fraud against senior citizens, but I had taken hope at the fact that he was an assistant district attorney. Glancing down at my saffron rice, I felt uneasy.

“But Bonnie’s father has Jack Stoughton in his camp,” said Rowan breezily.

“Oh, well, in that case,” said Mr. Beal, with just a little too much haste, “we can look forward to a happy resolution.”

“Key lime pie for dessert,” Mrs. Beal whispered, bending close.