Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices Read online

  And then last night they just started hanging around together. When I first saw it I couldn’t believe it; I thought that my mother found Sam to be such a hick, she had to see it for herself. In truth, I didn’t pay much attention. I had been spending time with Hadley- we’d hit it off immediately, and then after last night, well, who knew what would come of this. Hadley, who was so fascinating. He could do things that I had never seen anyone do: make seedlings grow, plane a rough tree into a board, build things that would last forever. He was absolutely incredible.

  Absolutely incredible. All this time, whether she knows it or not, my mother has been falling in love.

  “I think you’ve got the hots for Sam,” I say, testing the idea out loud.

  “Oh, please. I’m a married lady, remember?”

  I stare at her. “ Do you remember?” I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t. I could barely conjure a picture of my father’s face, and I had less of a reason to want to be away from him. When I thought about him really hard, I could see his eyes-wide, blue, unbelievably tired. His eyes, and the lines around his mouth (although not his mouth itself) and the bend of his knuckles holding a pen. That’s it, the memory of fifteen years.

  “Of course I remember,” my mother says, annoyed. “I’ve been married to your father for fifteen years. Aren’t you supposed to love the person you marry?”

  “You tell me.”

  This stops my mother dead in her tracks. “Yes, you are supposed to.” She says the words slowly. She seems to be trying to convince herself. “Sam is just a friend.” She waves her hand in front of us, as if she’s clearing away everything else she’s said. “My friend,” she repeats. Then she looks at me with such confusion I think she’s forgotten that she has been speaking to me all along. “I just wanted you to know that’s where things stand.”

  “Well, I appreciate that,” I say, and I try not to laugh. I don’t imagine that’s what she wants to hear. “Our ice cream is going to melt.” She grabs my hand to take me back to the counter. I shake her away, because Hadley is watching. “Please, Mom. I’m not three.”

  I walk over to Hadley and offer him some of my cone. He smiles and pulls me to sit on his lap while he winds his tongue along the ridges made by the soft ice cream machine. We end up trading our cones, because after all I do not like creamsicle.

  My mother is standing almost diagonally across from us. She is feeding Sam her cone while Sam is feeding her his cone. Sam misjudges the distance and dots a little vanilla on my mother’s nose. She giggles and mashes her cone onto Sam’s chin. Watching them, you have to smile. She’s acting like a kid, I think. She’s acting like me.

  Uncle Joley, Hadley and I ride in the back of the red pickup on our way to Pickerel Pond. It’s the place where Sam learned how to swim when he was a kid, a few miles away from the orchard. In the fifties, Sam yells from the cab of the truck, there was only this one pond. It’s the one we’ll see with lily pads that’s still stocked with fish. But then the residents in the area chipped in and they dug a huge hole beside it, added sand for the bottom, and built swimming docks. For a summer fee, your whole family could come and swim whenever.

  It is a perfect Sunday. The sun has scalded the metal of the flatbed and all three of us are sitting on our T-shirts. There isn’t much of a wind, but there seems to be a breeze when you find yourself thinking about it. The air smells like luck. “I think you’ll like this place,” Hadley says over the roar of tires. “No undertow.”

  Maybe my mother will even swim. I’ve always assumed that it’s the current of the ocean that keeps her from venturing into the water. In fact, she has been very optimistic about coming here for a picnic. She packed the lunch herself and keeps talking about how nice it will be to cool off.

  The sun beats on the crown of my head. I hold my palm up against it for a minute of shade. “It’s like fire,” I tell Hadley, and I make him touch it too.

  Uncle Joley, who has brought a ukulele, is trying to play the beginning bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” He has almost got the notes right, but it sounds like sick luau music. To me it is not soothing, but it lulls Hadley to sleep. His head rests in my lap. The entire trip, Uncle Joley strums unlikely songs: “Happy Birthday,” the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, “Blue Velvet,” “Twist and Shout.”

  Sam pulls into what looks like a thicket, but it opens up to a dirt path and then becomes a road. At the end is a parking lot with a metal gate and rusted hinges. “They tried to lock up here at night for a few years,” Sam yells to us. “But kids kept jumping the fence to party on the beach. When they left the gates open at night, all the kids stopped coming here.”

  Hadley, who has woken up, says, “That’s ‘cause it wasn’t fun anymore. You only want to make trouble at a place that’s off limits.”

  Sam leans his head out his window and tries to look at Hadley. “You used to come here?” He laughs. “Figures.”

  Sam and my mother carry the cooler to the pond, and I take the towels, the paddle games and the yellow kickball. Uncle Joley brings his ukulele. At a green post, Sam signs his name on a clipboard.

  The pond is much larger than I had envisioned. It is almost perfectly square, but then again it was man-made. Adjacent to the swimming pond is the real pond, Pickerel Pond, and it is so large that I cannot see one of its edges. There are two Sunfishes, a muddy paddle-boat and a metal rowboat on the shore of the big pond, all labeled PPA, Pickerel Pond Association.

  Sam comes up behind me. “You can take out the boats if no one else is using them.” He turns to my mother, pointing out the sights that are missing at this swimming pond, twenty years after its creation. “There used to be a diving board off that dock. And over here? Second Dock here didn’t always connect to the shore. If you wanted to get to it you had to swim to it. And when you’re a little kid, you have to take a swimming test each summer to be allowed to swim beyond the buoys.”

  Hadley and Uncle Joley, who apparently have this all planned, take the towels and the ball from my arms. The grab me, kicking and screaming, and toss me on the count of three off First Dock. Somewhere, a fat lifeguard yells at us. No throwing. Not off that dock.

  Hadley jumps in after me and grabs my ankle. He pulls me under. The water is murky, colored with some blue dye, and colder in some spots than others. I tread water, trying to find a warm place where Hadley will not try to drown me again.

  Uncle Joley, who has been speaking with the lifeguard, does a swan-dive into the pond. He surfaces, already talking. “The reason this place looks like a giant Tid-E-Bowl is because of chemicals. They put the blue in to cloud the water so algae doesn’t grow as easily.”

  “Algae,” I say, “yuck.” I am sure there is algae or something worse at the beaches of San Diego, but there you rest assured it keeps going out with the tide.

  My mother keeps herself busy by spreading our towels on the small stretch of beach. It’s funny, it isn’t a beach at all. It’s more like a couple of bulldozer dumps of sand, raked nicely. These people, I think. We could teach them a thing or two.

  My mother creates a colony of towels. She borders the striped with the pink one, the Les Miserables promo towel with the Ralph Lauren. At the edge of all four of these she lays a big plaid blanket. I wonder who will get to lie there. She pays no attention at all to the position of the sun. “Hey,” she calls to Sam, but he is out of her range.

  In fact, at the exact moment she calls, Sam’s body hits the water in a double somersault. For someone without the aid of a diving board he has an awfully good amount of height and spring. All the rest of us, already in the water, clap. Sam pulls himself onto Second Dock and takes a bow.

  His body, unlike Hadley’s, is compact. He has dark hair on his chest that grows in the shape of a heart. The hair on his legs, surprisingly, isn’t as coarse. Sam has broad shoulders and a small waist, strong arms (all that lifting) and muscular thighs. I remember hearing something at the dinner table about him having trouble buying jeans-the legs always too tight, the wa
ist too big, or something like that.

  “Come on,” Hadley says, swimming up behind me. “Let’s race.” He begins to do a vigorous crawl across the pond. He almost collides with Uncle Joley, who is swimming a lazy backstroke and chanting something in another language. Swimming, I remember, is a sort of religious thing for Uncle Joley. My mother says she has no idea where he got that from.

  Hadley and I tie on the other side of the pond. “It’s because you’ve got ten years on me.”

  “Give me a break,” I laugh. “You just want an excuse.”

  “Oh, do I?” he says, pulling my hair and holding me under the water. I open my eyes, and massage his legs. When he lets me go, I swim between them, running my fingers along the inside. “That’s cheating,” he says.

  We move to the shallow end, where a bunch of kids are on the shore, spooning sloppy sand into pails. Hadley and I sit on the bottom of the pond, letting the water play at our wrists. “I used to do that all the time. Sand castles.”

  “You grew up on a beach. You must have gotten pretty good,” he says.

  “I hated it. One minute you’ve got the pride of two hours’ work; the next minute a wave knocks it all down.”

  “So you decided not to go to the beach. Toddler boycott?”

  I turn to him, shocked. “How’d you know? I refused to go. I’d throw tantrums every weekend as my parents loaded up the car with floats and towels and coolers.”

  Hadley laughs. “Lucky guess. You must have been a ballsy little-kid.”

  “Must have been? Everyone tells me I still am.”

  “You’re ballsy all right,” Hadley says. “But you’re no kid. You’ve got more sense in your head than almost anyone I know, and you sure as hell don’t act like I did when I was fifteen.”

  “Back when there were dinosaurs.”

  “Yeah,” Hadley grins. “Back when there were dinosaurs.”

  I would have loved to see Hadley when he was my age. I pretend to bury a pebble. “How did you act?” I ask.

  “I cursed a lot and took up smoking. Sam and me were peepingtoms in the girls’ locker room in gym,” Hadley says. “I wasn’t quite as focused as you.”

  Focused. In Hadley’s eyes there is a perfect, round reflection of the sun. “I guess I’m pretty focused.”

  Hadley and I play with the paddle game in the shallow end of the pond and try to catch bullfrogs in our hands. We dig flat stones from the sandy bottom with our toes and see who can skim them further. Sometimes, we just stretch out on the slick wet wood of First Dock, and, holding hands, we sleep. From time to time I catch my mother’s eye. I do not know if she is looking at us in particular, or if it is just chance. She speaks to Sam at one point when he comes out of the pond to rest. Sam looks in our direction, and shrugs.

  At lunch my mother completely forgets to serve Hadley and pretends that it is an accident. Then, she makes a big deal about giving him a beer, and not giving one to me. “Some of us,” she says, staring at me, “are still too young to drink.”

  Hadley gives me half of his anyway when my mother gets up to go to the bathroom. Uncle Joley tells me to ignore her when she gets like this.

  After lunch, my mother insists on cleaning up the picnic. She double-bags the garbage and rearranges the leftovers. She refolds used napkins. She shakes the towels off to get rid of crumbs. Sam, who has been waiting for her, jumps into the pond and swims the perimeter twice while she is doing all this. Apparently she said she would go in after lunch.

  Finally Sam comes over to the oasis she’s created. She is standingin front of it trying to find something else to do. Uncle Joley, Hadley and I kneel in the shallow end, waiting to see what will happen. Hadley has his hands spread across my rib cage, pressing me back against the floating pockets of his bathing suit.

  Sam picks my mother up in his arms and begins to carry her towards the shallow end. She is still wearing her shorts.

  “No,” she says, laughing at first. She kicks her heels, and people-around the pond smile, thinking this is some kind of joke. I lean against Hadley and wonder when she is going to snap.

  “Sam,” she says, more insistent. They have passed the edge of Second Dock; they are almost at the edge of the water. “I can’t.”

  Sam stops for a moment, serious. “Can you swim?”

  “Well, no,” my mother says. Big mistake.

  Sam’s feet hit the water and my mother begins to shout. “No, Sam! No!”

  “Good for him,” Uncle Joley says, to no one in particular.

  Sam begins to wade deeper. The water hits my mother’s shorts, spreading like a stain. She stops kicking when she realizes it only makes her more wet. At one point I think she has almost resigned herself to what is going to happen. Sam, a man with a mission, continues to walk into the water.

  “Don’t do this to me,” she whispers to Sam, but we can all make out the words.

  “Don’t worry,” Sam says, and my mother clutches her arms tighter around him. He stares directly at her, like he has blocked out the rest of the watching world. “If you don’t want to go- really don’t want to go-then I’ll take you back. Now. Just say the word.”

  My mother looks terrified. I am starting to feel sorry for her.

  “I’ll be with you,” Sam says. “I’m not going to let anything happen.”

  She closes her eyes. “Go ahead. Maybe this is what I need after all.”

  With measured steps, Sam inches farther into the water until it reaches my mother’s chin. Then, telling her to focus on his eyes, right here -he says- my eyes -he ducks under the surface.

  It seems like a very long time. Everyone on the shore of the pond is watching. Several industrious kids with scuba masks swim out closer and peek underwater to see what is going on. Then my mother and Sam burst out of the water in unison, gasping for air. “Oh!” my mother cries. “It’s so wonderful!” Her eyelashes blink back water, and her arms make wide circles in front of her, with ripples that reach us. Sam is triumphant. He winks at Uncle Joley and stays beside her, a personal lifeguard, fulfilling his promise to my mother. Nothing is going to happen, after all, as long as he is there. Well it’s about time, I think. Hadley and I, bored by all the theatrics, check into taking a canoe out onto the larger pond. As we go, my mother is doing the crawl.

  At one point my mother and I are the only two awake. We lie on the towels on our backs and try to find pictures in the clouds. I see a llama and a paper clip. She sees a kerosene lamp and a kangaroo. We both look for a chameleon, but there is none to be found.

  “About Hadley,” my mother says, “I’ve been thinking.”

  I feel my shoulders tense. “We have a lot of fun together.”

  “I’ve noticed. Sam says Hadley likes you a lot.”

  I lean on one elbow. “He said that?”

  “In not so many words. He said he’s a very responsible person.” She picks grass absentmindedly with her left hand.

  “Well he is. He takes care of just about everything on the farm that Sam doesn’t. He’s his right-hand man.”

  “Man,” my mother says. “Exactly. You’re a kid.”

  “I’m fifteen,” I remind her. “I’m not a kid.”

  “You’re a kid.”

  “How old were you when you started to go out with Daddy?”

  My mother rolls onto her stomach and pushes her chin into the sand. I can barely understand her. I think she says, “It was different then.”

  “It’s not different. You can’t just keep yourself from falling for a person. You can’t turn off your emotions like a faucet.”

  “Oh, you’re an expert?”

  I think about saying, Neither are you, but decide against it.

  “You can’t keep yourself from falling in love,” she says, “but you can steer yourself away from the wrong people. That’s all I’m trying to say. I’m just warning you before it’s too late.”

  I roll away from her. Doesn’t she know it’s too late already?

  Sam, awake, sits up betwe
en us. To keep up a conversation we’d have to talk across him. My mother, probably against her better judgment, gives me a look. We’ll continue this later, she is saying.

  They decide to go fishing in the metal rowboat, and leave me to watch over Uncle Joley, Hadley and the cooler. I take out a nectarine and eat it slowly. The juice drips down my neck and dries sticky.

  My mother doesn’t know what she is talking about. I don’t believe I have a thing for “older men.” I think I have a thing for Hadley. I reach down and swat a fly from his ear. He has three birthmarks on his lobe, three I hadn’t noticed before. I count them, twice, fascinated. When I am with him, I don’t know who I am. I don’t know and I don’t care; it must be someone wonderful because he seems to be having such a good time. And he holds me the way I used to hold china dolls as a child. They were so beautiful, their painted faces, that I only let myself take them off the shelves in my bedroom for minutes at a time.

  Uncle Joley doesn’t snore, but he breathes heavily when he sleeps. It drives me crazy. It’s a raspy noise that comes in currents. You get into a rhythm listening to him, and then all of a sudden he alters the pattern, and you find yourself hanging, waiting for him to complete what he’s started. After about three minutes of listening to this I stand and stretch. I walk around the pond, dipping my toes in the water and writing my initials in the sand. H.S. + R.J. I realize there won’t be any tide to wash this away.

  On the far end of the pond are a thatch of reeds and cattails. They are wheat-yellow and as high as I am. The area is off-limits, a swamp. When the lifeguard isn’t looking I step behind the first row. Once I do this, I am hidden. I take a last look at Hadley; I sift through the reeds with my arms.

  The ground is a sponge that closes up around my ankles. I keep walking. I want to know where I will end up. Somewhere, there must be water.

  The cry of a cormorant tells me I have reached the edge. I can’t actually see a shore; I have to part the thickest growth here with my hands. I have come to a part of Pickerel Pond that I couldn’t see from the swimming area. It is an inlet shaded by willow trees. In the middle is a rowboat, my mother and Sam.