Free Heat by Michael Cadnum Page A

It’s wonderful.”
    She laughed, looking a little like my sister Georgia.
    â€œI’m signing a release,” she said, briskly hurrying back to her doctor diction. “This form—”
    She said form with a trace of exasperation, another scrap of paperwork to clutter her life. She let a piece of stationery flutter in her hand, extended in my direction, Lloyd-Fairhill Academy in dignified Medieval-looking script at the top.
    â€œI’m clearing you,” she said.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    The ten-meter platform has no bounce to it, not like a diving board. The diver doesn’t experience any of that buoyant, walking-the-plank give under her feet. It’s like standing on the out-thrust edge of a building.
    All the energy for her leap must come from her own body, from her legs, from the sudden fulcrum of her own length, stretched high. She folds her arms around her knees, creating an axis. To spin faster she goes into a tighter tuck, becomes a smaller circle.
    Sometimes you begin your climb up the steps in chilly winter shadow and reach the apex of the dive in the heat of a summer afternoon. In the vacation resorts my parents enjoyed, even in the sunset days of their marriage, I always worked on my dives. In pools in Palm Springs and Vegas, I did layouts and pikes off the glittering white sandpaper of the springboards. I practiced half twists and curls, wishing I could go higher, wishing I could soar.
    â€œShe was born to it” was the way Mom put it. Even during the trial separation, Dad paid the monthly membership at the Skyline Country Club, until the instructor there said she had nothing more to teach me.
    A woman from the Tribune asked me once if I was ever afraid, and I said, “Of what?”
    I didn’t say anything to Mom in the waiting room, I just put the release form right down in front of her, on top of the article about the birds of the tundra.
    All the way home Mom drove faster than usual, shaking her head and making a little laugh through her nose. She kept looking at the release form at every stoplight.
    I smoothed the form out on my knee, although it wasn’t wrinkled, taking care with it. J . T . Breen .
    My hands were cold.
    You don’t wear pretty shorts and bright colored, classic tennis tops to battle my father. I dressed like someone getting ready to help Mom dig up a tree stump, cuffed khaki shorts and an oversize blue T-shirt. My racket is carbon and steel, a gift from Dad a couple of Christmases ago, a better racket than my tennis game deserved. Mom asked, “Why the long face?”
    â€œI’m not ready for this” was all I said, making myself sound ironic and lighthearted. I zipped the racket into its carrier, yet another gift from Dad, a three-hundred-dollar gym bag with a side pocket for tennis gear. Mom, who once had burst into tears in a match against Dad at the Hotel Coronado, put her hands on her hips, waiting for me to talk.
    I gave her a sigh exactly like one of her own, an utterly false, it’s-just-a-game, which should not have deceived her for a second. The clearance form was on the dining room table.
    I took my time on the long walk to Dad’s, hating myself for not practicing my serve with a phantom ball, just to work off some of the rust. I knew Cindy was one of those false novices, someone who insists they haven’t held a racket since they were eleven years old and then backhands every living creature into submission.
    At least all of this distracted me from my feelings, my sensation of dread.
    As I approached Dad’s neighborhood of men waxing sports cars, watering their drought-flouting lawns in the long, early evening glow, I began to jog and felt a little more loose, a little more centered. Miss P tells us to visualize the dive going right, to imagine it that way every time, and to see ourselves into the water.
    I pictured myself stopping one of Dad’s lobs at the net, chopping it, getting spin on the ball. I