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

  To my surprise I do not cry. “Tell me everything you know.”

  My mother sits up, shocked at my bravery. She says that Hadley broke his neck in the fall. The doctors said he died instantaneously. It has been three days, but it took this long to raise his body from the gorge.

  “What have I been doing for three days?” I whisper. I am embarrassed that I do not know the answer.

  “You have pneumonia. You’ve been sleeping most of the time. You were gone when your father first arrived here-you’d run off after Hadley. He insisted on going with Sam to find you-”She looks away. “He didn’t like the idea of Sam staying here with me.”

  So he knows, I think. How interesting. “What does he mean, ‘We’re going home’?”

  My mother holds her hand to my head. “Back to California. What did you think?”

  I am missing something. “What have we been doing here?”

  “You don’t have to hear this now. You need to rest.”

  I pull the quilt away from myself and gag. All over my legs are bruises and scrapes and yellowed gauze wrappings. My bare chest is crossed with raked furrows of dried blood. “When Hadley fell, you tried to climb down after him,” my mother says. “Sam pulled you away, and you started to scratch at yourself. You wouldn’t stop, no matter how many things they wrapped around you, or how much sedation you’d been given.” She starts to cry again. “You kept saying you were trying to tear your heart out.”

  “I don’t know why I bothered,” I whisper. “You’d already done that.”

  She walks to the other side of the room, as far away as she can possibly get. “What do you want me to say, Rebecca? What do you want me to say?”

  I don’t know. She can’t change what has been done. I begin to realize how things are different when you grow up. When I was little, she would sing to me when I was sick. She would bring me red jello and sleep curled beside me to listen for changes in my breathing. She would pretend I was a princess locked in a tower by a wicked magician, and she acted as my lady-in-waiting. Together we would watch the door for my shining white knight.

  “Why do you want me to forgive you?” I say. “What do you get out of it?” I turn away and Sam’s sheep, all seven, scuttle down the path they’ve carved in the middle field.

  “Why do I want you to forgive me? Because I never forgave my father, and I know what it will do to you. When I was growing up my father would hit me. He hit me and he hit my mother and I tried to keep him from hitting Joley. He broke my heart and eventually he broke me. I never believed I could be anything important- why else would my own father hurt me? And then I forgot about it. And I married Oliver and three years later he hit me. That’s when I left the first time.”

  “The plane crash,” I say, and she nods.

  “I went back to him because of you. I knew that more than anything else I had to make sure you grew up feeling safe. And then I hit your father, and it all came back again.” She buries her face in her hands. “It all came back again, and this time it was part of me. No matter how far I run, no matter how many states or countries I cross I can’t get it out of myself. I never forgave him. He won. He’s in me, Rebecca.”

  She picks up an antique marbled pitcher that has been in Sam’s family for a long time. Without even really noticing, she lets it slip out of her grasp and shatter on the floor. “I came here and I was so happy, for a little while, I forgot again. I forgot about your father, and I forgot about you. I was so crazy in love-” she smiles, far away, “-that I didn’t believe anyone else could feel the way I did. Including- especially -my own daughter. If you could fall in love with someone who was twenty-five, and it was all right, then it couldn’t possibly be all right for me to fall in love with someone who was twenty-five. Can you see?”

  I have seen my mother with Sam in the shadow of the orchard; they’re joined at the mind. That is what has been different about these weeks: I have never seen her like this. I have never enjoyed being with her so much. I don’t understand what my father is doing here or why he wants her back. The woman he wants isn’t here. That woman doesn’t exist anymore.

  “But I’ve watched you with him,” I say.

  “If it was right, Rebecca,” my mother says, “it would have happened years ago.”

  I don’t have to ask her why she is going home, anymore. I already know the answer. My mother thinks she has failed: not just my father, but me. She can’t have Sam; it’s her punishment. In the real world, the best of circumstances don’t always come to be. In the real world, “forever” may only be a weekend.

  My mother looks at me. When our eyes connect there are more words that come in silence. What you cannot have, I cannot have. My life created yours, and because of this my life depends on yours. How strange, I think. I learned about love’s Catch-22 before my own mother. I taught this lesson to her.

  She smiles at me and she lifts the sheet of gauze from my chest. “Sometimes I can’t believe you’re only fifteen,” she murmurs. She runs her fingers across my nipples and over my breasts. As my mother touches me the wounds begin to close on themselves. We watch in silence as split skin heals and bruises diffuse. Still, there will be scars.

  When he comes into the room in the middle of the night I am expecting him. He is the only one who hasn’t come to see me since I regained consciousness. First the door opens a crack, then I see the flashlight’s head, and by the time Uncle Joley makes his way to the bed, I know where we are headed.

  “If we drive now, we’ll be there in plenty of time,” he tells me, “and no one will have figured out where we’ve gone.”

  He carries me in his arms to an old blue pickup truck that didn’t have an engine for several weeks. He jump starts it by rolling it in neutral down the hill of the driveway. He has provided me with a cape-orange with fuschia pom-poms, a throwback to the seventies. Sitting between us on the cracked leather seat is a thermos of black coffee and an oat-raisin muffin.

  “I don’t suppose you’re feeling like yourself yet.” When I shake my head he turns on the windshield wipers. He squirts washer fluid, which fires over the back of the truck. It trickles into the flatbed, spurting like a water gun. “So much for that,” Joley says.

  He is a handsome man in a faded kind of way. His hair curls at his ears, even after he’s just had a haircut. The first thing you notice about his face is the space between his eyes-so narrow that it makes him look either mongoloid or very intelligent, depending on your frame of reference. And then there are his lips, which are full like a girl’s and as pink as zinnias. If you take your favorite Mel Gibson poster, and fold it up and put it in the pocket of your jeans and then send them through the washer and dryer, the picture you’d wind up with would be kinder, less startling, and smooth at the edges. Uncle Joley.

  The sun comes up as we cross the New Hampshire border. “I don’t remember much of this,” I tell him. “I spent a good deal of the trip in the back of a truck.”

  “Let me guess,” he says. “Refrigerated?”

  He makes me smile. When my father and Sam found us, I was running a 104-degree fever.

  Uncle Joley doesn’t talk much. He knows it is not what I need. He asks every now and then if I will pour him a cup of coffee, and I do, holding it to his lips like he is the one who is sick.

  We pass the brown road sign that delineates the White Mountain-region. “It’s beautiful here,” I say, “isn’t it?”

  “Do you think it’s beautiful?” my uncle asks. He catches me off guard.

  I survey the peaks and the gulleys. In Southern California, the land is flat and offers no surprises. “Well, yes.”

  “Then it is,” he says.

  We drive on roads that I have never seen. I doubt they are even really roads. They snake through the woods and look more like two tracks left from winter skiers than a path for a car, but they do provide a short cut. The truck bounces back and forth, spilling the coffee and rolling the untouched muffin under the seat. We end up in Hadley’s mother’s backy
ard, which I can’t help but recognize. We park the truck like a peace offering in the small space between the house and Mount Deception.

  “I’m glad you could come,” Mrs. Slegg says. She opens the screen door. “I heard what happened to you.”

  She puts her arms around me and helps me into her toasty kitchen. I am so ashamed. Her son is the one who has died, and here she is fussing over my scratches. “I’m sorry.” I stumble over the words Joley has coached me to say. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Hadley’s mother’s eyes widen, as if she is shocked to hear any phrase like this at all. “Sugar, it was your loss too.” She sits down on the ladderback chair beside mine. She covers my hand with her own puffy fingers. She is wearing a blue housecoat and a loud apron with an appliquéd raspberry. “I know just what the two of you need. Where have my wits been? You come all the way from Massachusetts and I’m sitting here like a tub of butter.” She opens the breadbox and takes out fresh rolls and crullers and sesame cakes.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Slegg, but I’m not very hungry yet.”

  “You call me Mother Slegg,” she urges. “And no wonder, a little-thing like you. You can probably barely stand alone in a wind, much less take this kind of pain standing tall.”

  Uncle Joley walks over to the window. He peers out at the mountain. “Where is the funeral going to be?”

  “Not far from here. A cemetery where my husband is buried, God rest his soul. We have a family plot.” She says it so casually that I start to watch her for signs: did she not love her own son? Is she a closet mourner, tearing at her hair when everyone leaves?

  A boy comes into the kitchen. He takes the milk out of the refrigerator before acknowledging us. When he turns, he looks so much like Hadley I feel as if I have been punched. “You Rebecca?”

  I nod, speechless. “You’re-”

  “Cal,” he says. “I’m the younger one. Well, I was.” He turns to his mother. “Should we go?” He is wearing a flannel shirt and jeans.

  Cal, two of Hadley’s friends from high school and Uncle Joley are asked to be the pallbearers at the cemetery. There is a preacher who gives a nice, respectable service. In the middle of it all a robin lands on the casket. It begins to peck at the ring of flowers. After ten seconds of watching this peacefully, Mrs. Slegg screams to the preacher to stop. She falls onto the ground and crawls towards the casket to grab the flowers. In the flurry of noise the bird flies away. Someone leads Hadley’s mother away.

  I do not cry throughout the entire ceremony. No matter where I turn I can see that mountain, waiting to claim Hadley again when he is part of the earth. Here I will remain with worms that are thy chambermaids, I find myself thinking, and for the life of me I cannot place the quote. It must be something I have learned in school but it is hard to believe. It seems so long ago, and I was such a different person.

  The four men step forward and lower the leather straps that drop the casket slowly into the ground. I turn away. Up until this point I have pretended that Hadley is not in there at all; that this is just a token and he is waiting back at the Big House for me. But I see the struggle of muscles in Uncle Joley’s back and the sinews in Cal’s fingers. I am convinced that there is indeed something in the rough mustard box.

  I cover my ears so that I do not hear him hit the bottom. The cape falls away from my chest and exposes what has happened to me. Nobody notices except for Mrs. Slegg. She is some distance away, and she only cries a little bit harder.

  Before we leave the cemetery, Cal presents me with the shirt Hadley was wearing the night before he died. The one I wrapped around myself when my father and Sam came. It is blue flannel checked with black. He folds it into triangles, like a flag. Then he tucks in the corners and hands it to me. I do not thank him. I do not say goodbye to Hadley’s grieving mother. Instead, I let my uncle escort me to the truck. In near silence, he drives me back, where everyone else is waiting for their world to end.

  12 OLIVER

  I head to the Institute as if nothing has happened at all. I do not go in every day, and I have no real reason for going today of all days, except for the fact that as I walk through the halls I hear reverential acknowledgments of my presence-“Dr. Jones, Dr. Jones”- and this is somehow life-affirming.

  When I couldn’t sleep last night, I took the videotapes of the last trip to Maui and played them over and over on the VCR in the bedroom. On these tapes the humpbacks rise majestically out of the water, arch in midair, and slip back into the ocean, opening holes that weren’t there. Under the water you can see them, anticipate when they will break through the strained surface; their fins glistening and their flukes pulsing, and for that blessed moment before the magic ends, Jesus, they become pure beauty.

  I had watched the tape several times before the sun came up, and when it did I inexplicably found myself wondering how many months it had been since Jane and I had made love, and I am disappointed to say I could not come up with a concrete number.

  At the Institute, my office overlooks the San Diego Marina. There are three walls of glass, if you can imagine, and then one oak paneled door. It had been blond wood, but I decided to stain it to better see the grain of the wood, and Jane, who was up for a project at the time, insisted on doing it for me. She came into my office for an entire week, trying patches of stains on different pieces of the door molding: names like Colonial Cohasset and Mahogany Sheen and Natural, which seemed to me an irony. Finally she picked a shade called Golden Oak which was more brown than gold. I was at my desk the day she arrived with a squeegee and a disposable brush and a gallon of the stuff, although a quart would have done the job. She was very methodical, so much so that I was proud of her, working from the bottom to the top to avoid dripping, blotting the door after each coat. In truth she was quite lovely to watch. Then, when she finished, she stepped back from the door towards my desk. “What do you think-” she started to say, and then she covered her mouth. She ran to the door and began to scrape at the drying stain with the squeegee. I ran up and put my arms around her, trying to calm her down. “Don’t you see it,” she insisted, gesturing wildly. She pointed to several lines in the grain of the wood.

  “It looks beautiful.” Indeed the grain stood out.

  “You don’t see it,” she cried. “There. It’s plain as day now. The face of the devil.”

  Jane has not come to my office since then, since I refused to have the door stripped. I sort of like it. I close the door behind me, and twisting my head this way and that, I try to make out this face.

  It is obvious that she is headed to her brother’s, and that she is doing this via automobile or train-she can’t get Rebecca to fly. Most likely she is not taking a train; it would be too easy for me to trace the tickets. I could second-guess her and take a plane to Boston, and be there by the time she arrives. But then again her godforsaken brother would already be there, and he would find some way to warn Jane. They have this telepathic connection that, although astounding, frustrates.

  Second option: I can contact the police after a matter of time, and have an APB put out. After all, I did not do anything illegal that would make Jane leave, and I can bring her in on charges of kidnapping. Of course then I lose the freedom to act on my own.

  Third option: I can go after her myself. Somewhat like trying to put a butterfly on a leash and take it for a walk, but I imagine if I got the knack of the route I could catch her.

  I have never written a conclusion without collecting data to ground the hypothesis. And I have never been stumped scientifically. Perhaps you just go, and take inventory along the way. Perhaps you catch her and then decide what you are going to say.

  “Shirley.” I buzz my secretary, a tall woman with dyed red hair who I imagine has a crush on me.

  She swings open the oak door. “Yes, Dr. Jones?”

  “I have a problem that I’m afraid you are going to have to take care of.” Her lips set in a straight line, ready for the responsibility. “In regards to the trip to Venezuela . . . I need
you to cancel.”

  “The trip?”

  I nod. “Do anything you have to do. Lie, cheat, anything. I need at least a month of personal time. Tell them that. Personal.” I lean across my desk and I take her wrists (her wrists) in my hands. “I’m counting on you,” I say softly. “Our secret.” The Institute will eat the coast of this trip, and I’m afraid to say in the frenzy, poor Shirley will lose her job. I must remember to send her something when this is over.

  She nods, a brave soldier. “Dr. Jones, will you be calling in for your messages?”

  “Twice a day,” I lie. I would rather wrap this mess up quickly and get entrenched in my research again than do a mediocre job, ten minutes here and ten minutes there. I will not call until I have found Jane.

  When the secretary leaves, I switch off the overhead lights and pull the blinds. I put on the Stellwagen tapes, the haunting, tortuous medley from the floor of the ocean. In the late 1970s, the Voyager spacecraft went into orbit carrying greetings in fifty-five languages, music from Bach, Mozart and a rock group, and these songs of the humpback whale.

  The map of the United States I pull out of my drawer is faded but functional. It looks foreign; I am accustomed to the swirls and eddies of navigational charts. With a ruler and a red marker I draw a three-inch radius, and then expand that into a circle. This is as far as they could have gone last night. Phoenix, or Vegas, or Sacramento, or Guaylas, Mexico. My parameters.

  If I can track whales, which I hardly know at all, then I can surely track my wife.

  Except this requires thinking like Jane: sporadic, eclectic, impossible. With whales we have clues. We have currents, feeding grounds and sightings. We know the starting place of their journey and the end point. We work forward, connecting the incremental pieces that we find. It is not much different from navigation by sonar-the process used by whales, in which sound waves are bounced off of geological formations underwater to chart a clear course.