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I had envisioned all this, played it out in my mind. But now that I was close to committing act one, scene one, my fingertips were cold. Some musicians and stage-fright stricken actors take beta blockers, chemicals that shut down the anxiety centers of the brain.

I had timed my workout for early afternoon, so Miss P would be there with all the swimmers and divers. I couldn't suppress all the old doubt. It nagged at me, ugly inner voices warning me, as I pushed open the door from the locker room and caught the familiar waft of chlorine and that strange incandescence a swimming pool casts upward into the space that surrounds it.

I caught Miss P in an ideal moment, most of the team sitting at attention on the lower levels of the bleachers while Miss P demonstrated posture, how to stand, how to let you arms hang, full of their own weight and the weight of all your tension. You give your arms a shake, and you lose some of that anxiety, letting it run from your forearms, through your fingers, out into the air.

I kept walking, in no particular hurry, letting them all get a good look.

Miss P called my name, and Denise looked up from examining her toenails. It would be wrong to say I was unafraid. The old feeling was there, but now I had another feeling, a stronger one, to set against it.

Denise had lost a little too much weight, maybe clocking too many hours on the rowing machine with her personal trainer. Miss P believed in cross-training, practicing other sports to stay in shape, but I always wondered if Denise threw herself with too much gusto into everything that came along. Her father had been right to fire the tennis pro, the one with curly hair all over his shoulders.

Denise almost left her place on the bleachers. She nearly called something to me, a smudge of weariness under each eye. The new dives were taking the glow out of her. Her white bathing cap perched on the bleacher beside her, the top of a skull.

As I passed her I mouthed, “It's all right.” And I meant it. She stared right back with cautious disbelief, maybe because in her family people resolve their disagreements by giving each other the finger and taking near-miss swipes at each other's heads.

“Bonnie!” It was Miss P at her most commanding tone, a chilling sound, magnified by the hollow reverberation of the arena. “Get over here!”

I climbed the steps of the tower.

I had told my father once about the imaginary line in the platform, where the diver feels her dive should begin. How when the feet touch this place in the cold, sandpapery surface of the platform, the diver feels strangely at home.
“Querencia,”
Dad called it when I described it. “The place in the bull ring
el toro
makes his own. Once he finds that place, he'll kill all comers.”

I reached the top step and found the place in the platform where my dives begin.

I got good altitude, and did a back somersault.

The water is always a surprise the first dive of the day. Warmer than you expect, or—usually—colder. My nostrils burned, and the sterile taste of the water seeped through my lips. I let my breasts and tummy glide along the pool bottom, and then I let my body loft toward the light.

I broke the surface.

It had not been a very good dive. Just one somersault. Not the worst dive ever done, but far from my usual, my knees bent, my body at an angle. The splash had been bad, the water still simmering from the impact.

There were calls of encouragement, and Denise was clapping, but they were extras in my own personal movie, a part of the living wallpaper. They could have been cheering in Gaelic, Miss P, too, although she put her hands on her hips and assumed an aspect of approval: Go ahead, keep going.

As though I paid them any attention.

The second time off the tower I managed two somersaults, and I felt the whisper of air around the platform as my head almost kissed. I entered the water with about as much grace as an office chair.

I pulled myself out of the water, streaming and splashing all the way, and smoothed my hair back away from my eyes, pulling it tight with my hands, so tight my eyes slanted and my eyebrows stretched. I tugged the seat of my suit, and gave my nose a pinch, checking for excess fluid from my sinuses.

My fellow athletes and the few straggling spectators all froze in place, like a photograph. I mountaineered my way up the platform again, and drove every thought, every doubt, from my mind.

But some shadow must have lingered. I completed a back three-and-a-half somersault, with a perfect tuck. My entry was not so good, though, my feet out of position. You dive with your whole body, and your whole heart, and if there's a little question in your mind, it shows up somewhere, even in your toes.

My fourth dive was textbook, from top step to pool bottom, and I let the momentum carry me along underwater, wanting this private silence, the pressure at my eardrums, the clunk and gurgle of the pool valves. Even when the pool water appears unruffled and without current, it isn't. The pumps are at work, under the surface, pulling water through the filters.

An injured athlete has an invisible spotlight around her, and the other teammates stand aside, giving that extra space. They mean no harm. But when your recovery has been established, that aura is gone, and you are yourself again. Hands reached for me, pounded my shoulders, and Miss P grinned and shook her head, in her best I-knew-you-could manner. But I didn't join the team on the bleacher seats. I was on act two of the drama I had in mind. I skimmed across the concrete, into the locker room.

I was quick to shower and pull myself into my clothes, arranging my full costume, someone going grouse shooting on the moors. I could feel Miss P's puzzlement and annoyance like radar through the wall. My hair looked the way it always does when it's wet. I was going to have metal snaps attached to my skull so the beret would stay on in a blizzard.

Denise was there at the end of the row of lockers, looking at me with something close to suspicion, her bathing cap dangling off a finger.

“That's great,” she said, meaning it, but also going out of her way to
sound
like she meant it, so she didn't—it sounded forced.

She eyed my lady-of-the-manor garb and gave her swimsuit a tug at the butt, maybe a habit she picked up from me. One trouble with swimsuits: when you talk to someone dressed like a clothes store you feel at a disadvantage.

Denise came toward me with an air of caution, and sat. She toyed with a terry-cloth towel, flicking it and rolling it. Her toenails dilapidated, ragged quarter moons. She hunched on the bench and splashed her toes in a tiny puddle, like maybe I had forgotten she was there.

It's amazing how little insight some people have, how little sense of what others feel.

I unzipped the backpack and slipped the envelope from its pocket. I smoothed the gentle wrinkles with my fingers. In my fantasy I had kept reconstructing what would happen next. I would slip it under Miss P's office door. I would leave it on her desk, on top of a pile of fitness equipment catalogs. Or maybe I would hand it to her in person.

A dozen people slamming into a locker room can be deafening. “Way to go,” said one voice after another. “Looking good, Bonnie,” the dumb, earnest things people say to one another.

Lockers open with a bang almost as loud as when they slam shut, the force of voices and laughter resounding in the metal compartments around us.

Charlotte Witt, the full-bodied star of the Sacramento Invitational, stopped me outside Miss P's office and said she was so happy I was myself again. Charlotte Witt has the classy air of an extremely athletic First Lady, the sort of person who sounds phony saying good morning. Miss P had taken her time entering the fog and noise of the locker room, but I felt her consciousness groping toward mine, puzzled that I had not come back to talk to her, wondering what was on my mind.

The envelope contained my letter to Ms. Petrossian, resigning from the team. The message covered three lines, telling her that it was time for me to put my diving career behind me. I surprised myself—I carried the envelope outside, like someone looking for a mailbox, then zipped it into my pack.

I carried it home, and slipped it into the bottom drawer of my dresser.

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.