CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The night before the invitational I kept waking.

Audrey rustled softly in her cage, searching through the wood shavings. A mouse doesn’t blink in sudden light, or squint. I turned on the desk lamp and her cinnamon-red eyes looked up into mine.

She nosed my wrist and scurried up to the crook of my arm. I was thirsty already, my heartbeat heavy.

Getting onto the bus I didn’t look at anyone, I didn’t talk, and no one sat near me. I sucked a lozenge to keep my mouth moist, honey-and-lemon-flavored, sugar-free.

You can see so much from a bus, pleasure boats with their graceful, pearling wakes, and tankers sitting going nowhere, waiting to deliver their oil to the Chevron refinery in Richmond. I leaned my head against the bus window, and the vibration sang into my skull. I sat upright, suddenly aware of my injury, the hair completely furred-in around the cut.

Miss P gave each one of us a quick psych-up, telling us we were going to be great, hanging on with one hand against the movement of the bus, air brakes gasping. I could feel the cut with my fingertips.

When I imagined myself going to a university, I pictured the campus looking like Stanford, but greener. Much of Stanford is left as nature intended, which means there are tracts of brown field, oak trees in seas of golden wild rye.

I watched myself put one foot after another across the parking lot. People talked to me but I saw right through them, even Charlotte Witt, who was only apologizing for stepping on my foot. “I have to watch where I’m going,” she said, bubbly with nerves.

Denise did not wear a bathing cap. She had cut all her hair off a few days before, and looked like a stranger. She wrung her hair back with her hands, a gesture she must have borrowed from me. Her dives went badly, one clumsy splash after another, and they were her usual, undramatic attempts, dives she used to own.

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.