Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices Page 9

  They are gone. I survey the walls of the restaurant to see what town we are in but these places all look the same. Employee of the Month: Vera Cruces. We use eighty-five percent lean beef, flame-broiled not fried. The well-dressed woman comes out of the bathroom.

  “Please,” I say, sidelining her. “Can you help me?”

  She glances at my clothing, evaluating whether or not to speak to me. She reaches for her purse.

  “Oh, no, no money,” I say. “You see, I’m trying to get to New Hampshire. My mother lives there and she’s very ill and my boyfriend was driving me from our boarding school, but we’ve had a fight, and he left me here.” I turn away, and catch my breath like I’ve been sobbing.

  “Where do you go to school, dear?” the woman asks.

  I am stumped. The only prep schools I know are in California. “Boston,” I tell her, smiling. To distract her, I sway a little, and lean against the wall. She reaches out to support me and I take her warm, bony hand. “I’m sorry. I’m not feeling all that well.”

  “I can imagine. I’ll take you as far as Laconia, and we’ll see if we can put you on a bus.”

  The truth is, I’m not feeling all that well. I didn’t exactly fake it when I swooned. My eyes are burning something awful, and there is the taste of blood in my mouth. When this woman, who introduces herself as Mrs. Phipps, offers me her arm on the way to the car I am happy to take it. Inside, I stretch across the back seat with a Dior jacket as a blanket and fall asleep.

  When I wake up Mrs. Phipps is peering at me in the rearview mirror. “Hello, dear. It’s just past ten o’clock.” She smiles; she reminds me of a wren. “Do you feel better?”

  “Marvelous much,” I answer. It’s a phrase I heard once in an old movie and I have always wanted to use it.

  “Looks as if you have a fever,” she observes, detached. “Your face is red as a beet.” I sit up and look into the mirror; she’s right. “Now, I’ve been thinking. You look like a Windsor girl. Am I right?”

  I have no idea what a Windsor girl looks like. I smile. “You bet.”

  “I went to Miss Porter’s. But that was years ago, of course.” She pulls the car into a shopping center with an odd kiosk in the middle. “This is Laconia,” she says. “You slept most of the way. Now where is your mother?”

  I stare at her for a second until I remember what I’ve said. “Carroll, in the White Mountains.”

  Mrs. Phipps nods and tells me to stay in the car. She comes back with a bus ticket and a crisp ten dollar bill. “You take this, dear. In case you need anything along the way.” When I get out of the car she pats me as you might pat a disinterested cat and gives me directions for the trip. Her face is a wrinkled plum. She wishes my mother the best, and then gets in her Toyota and drives away, waving. I feel bad, watching her go. I feel bad that I have lied; I feel bad that this kind old woman is driving alone at ten at night, on the same roadways as violent, perverted truckers.

  Hadley’s house, 114 Sandcastle Lane according to the phone book, is a long and simple avocado-colored ranch that looks as if it was tossed by a tornado at the base of a huge mountain. This mountain is Hadley’s backyard, and if you stand a little too close you get the impression that the house is built against a natural wall of rock. There isn’t a doorbell, just a knocker in the shape of a frog. I know Hadley will answer, because I’ve come all this distance.

  I see his eyes first-soft and brown as earth, the color of thunderstorms. They get wider as they see me. “What are you doing here?” Hadley says, grinning. He swings open the screen door and steps onto the porch in front of me. This object of my affection. He takes me into his arms and lifts me off my feet, holding me level with himself.

  “Surprised?”

  “Hell, yes.” Hadley touches my face with the pads of his fingers. “I can’t believe you’re here.” He cranes his neck around the pillars of the porch. “Who’s with you?”

  “I came myself. I ran away.”

  “Oh, no, Rebecca.” He straddles a rusted iron stool. “You can’t stay here. Where do you think they’ll come looking first?”

  At this realization I sway again, thinking this has all been for nothing.-“I almost got raped coming here,” I say, starting to cry. “And I think I’m sick, and I don’t want to be at Sam’s without you.” My nose starts to run, and I wipe it on my sleeve. “Don’t you want me here?”

  “Sssh.” He pulls me closer so I am standing between his legs. He locks his ankles behind me. “Of course I want you here.” He kisses my lips, my eyes and my forehead. “You’re burning. What’s happened to you?”

  I tell him the story, the entire story, which makes him punch the door frame at one point and laugh at another. “I’ve still got to get you away from here,” he says. “Sam’ll come looking.” He tells me to wait here, and he disappears back into the house. Through the corner of the window I see a television set turned to The Twilight Zone, fuzzy pink slippers propped on an ottoman, and a square of quilted orange robe.

  “Who was it?” I hear someone say.

  Hadley comes back with two blankets, a loaf of bread, a plastic-cup and three cans of Chef Boyardee pasta. He stuffs all this into a knapsack. “I told my mother you were a friend of mine, and we were going out to a bar. That way she won’t worry, and she won’t know a thing if they come to ask her questions.”

  Hadley takes my hand and leads me into the backyard, up to the face of this mountain. “This way,” he says. He places my foot in a crevice and shows me what to do.

  Mount Deception is not particularly hard to climb. It levels off and becomes a flat plain for a while, then rises ten feet again, and so on until you get to the top. From an aerial view it must look like the pyramids in Egypt. Hadley carries the knapsack and climbs behind me in case I fall, which I’m proud to say I do not do. We continue like this for about an hour, using the moon as a torch.

  Hadley takes me to a small clearing in a knot of pine trees. He walks me around the parameters of this space, and then holds me by the waist as we come to the north corner. There is a straight drop, a hundred feet maybe, to a cavern below with a stuttering river.

  While Hadley makes us a home, I sit on the edge of this cliff, dangling my feet. I am not afraid of heights; they fascinate me. I drop twigs and stones, progressively larger, and try to hear how long it takes before they hit the rocks.

  “Dinner,” Hadley says, so I turn back to the clearing. He has stretched one blanket over pine needles to form a surprisingly soft mattress. In the center is a candle (I hadn’t seen him carrying that, it must have been in his pocket) and a can of Raviolios. “I forgot utensils,” he says. He picks up the can and feeds me a piece of pasta with his fingers. It tastes cold and tinny, absolutely delicious. “Now, you promise you won’t get up in the middle of the night to pee and take a wrong turn?” Hadley rubs my arms, which are puckered with the cold. My teeth chatter.

  “I won’t go anywhere without you,” I say. “I mean it.”

  “Sssh.” Hadley stares at me as if he knows he will be tested on how well he remembers the shape of my mouth, the color of my eyes. “They don’t know you like I do,” he says. “They don’t understand how it is.” He lies down on his stomach and leans his cheek on my thigh. “Here’s the plan. We’ll stay here overnight, and then I’ll get the truck in the morning, and we’ll take a drive down to Stow again. If you talk to your mom about all this-if she sees we came back of our own free will-I think it will work out.”

  “I’m not going back there,” I tell him. “I hate what she did.”

  “Come on, Rebecca, everyone makes mistakes. Do you blame her? If your daughter was dating a guy ten years older wouldn’t you be a little worried?”

  The moon dances across his hair. “Whose side are you on?” I say, but he’s kissing my knee, that ticklish spot, and I can’t really stay angry at him.

  I lie down beside him and feel his arms close around me and for the first time in hours I get warm. He takes off his jacket and wraps it arou
nd my shoulders awkwardly, and when our foreheads bump together we laugh. As he kisses me I think about the smells of the cider press and the way summer feels when you know it is going to end.

  I unbutton Hadley’s flannel shirt and hold it soft against my skin. The hair on his chest is an unlikely shade of red. It circles in spirals that remind me of my father’s nautical maps. I rub my fingers across them, the opposite way, making the hair stand on end. He sings to me.

  Soon we are at that point we have been at before, naked except for each other. Hadley’s outstretched hands can cover the length of my spine. “Please,” I say to him. “I don’t want to be a kid anymore.”

  Hadley smiles. He pushes the hair back from my forehead. “You aren’t.” He kisses my neck and then he kisses my breasts and my stomach and my hips and then down there. “What are you doing,” I whisper, but I am really speaking to myself. I feel something starting, some energy, that draws blood from my fingertips and begins unexpected to open. I pull back on Hadley’s hair and scratch at his neck. I am afraid I will never get to see his face again. But then he slides up my body and in and we move like a sail, like a wind; he kisses me, full, on the lips, and to my great surprise I taste like the ocean.

  “Jesus, Hadley,” Sam says, and Hadley jumps up. He’s wearing his boxers. I pull his shirt over me and roll a blanket around my legs. I cannot see everyone clearly; there is some kind of fire behind my eyes.

  “Hadley.” My voice is not my own. “This is my father.”

  Unsure of what to do, Hadley holds out his hand. My father does not take it. I’m puzzled seeing my father in this environment. He is wearing suit pants and a polo shirt and brown loafers. I am amazed that he could climb up here with a sole like that.

  My head is throbbing so heavily I lie back down. The park ranger-the only person here who has been paying attention to me-kneels down and asks if I am all right. “To tell you the truth,” I say, “I don’t really know.” I try to sit up with his help, but there are shooting pains in my ears and in my eyes. Hadley kneels down beside me. He tells the ranger to get me away from everyone, where there’s air.

  “Get the hell away from her,” my father says. “Don’t touch her.”

  Sam, standing beside him, tells Hadley it might be best.

  “What do you know?” Hadley shouts at Sam.

  I am having a great deal of trouble concentrating on the scene at hand. When people speak, I can’t hear the actual words until several seconds later. The sun swims in between their faces, bleaching them like overexposed photos. I try very hard to focus on Sam’s eyes, the brightest color of anything in front of me. Beside Sam, my father seems small and two-dimensional, like a paper doll.

  “Rebecca,” my father’s voice comes to me through a tunnel. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

  “He wouldn’t hurt her.” Sam leans in close to me with a face curved like a camera lens. “Can you stand up?”

  I shake my head. Hadley takes my shoulders in his hands, regardless of what my father has said, which I do not remember anyway. He places his head so close to mine I can read his mind. He is thinking: I love you. Don’t forget that. “Let me talk,” I whisper, but nobody seems to hear me.

  “Look, she came to me. She hitched. We were headed to your place today to work this all out.” His words are too loud.

  “Hadley,” Sam says slowly, “I think you’d better let Rebecca come home with us. And I think you’d better stay here for a while.”

  Let me talk, I say again, but I am ignored. It occurs to me I may not be speaking at all.

  Hadley stands up and walks away from the clearing. He has his hands on his hips. When he turns around the veins in his forehead are strained and blue, and he stares at Sam. “You know me. You’ve known me forever. I can’t believe,” here he looks at my father, “I cannot believe that you- you -would doubt me. You’re my friend, Sam. You’re like my brother. I didn’t tell her to come here-I wouldn’t do that. But I’m not just gonna turn my back and let you take her away. Jesus, Sam,” he takes a step backward. “I love her.”

  With all the energy I have I lunge towards Hadley, not quite standingand not quite crawling. He catches me in his arms and presses my face into his chest. He whispers into my hair things I cannot make out.

  “Let go of her, you bastard,” my father mutters. Sam lays a hand on his arm but he shakes it off and yells into the sky. “Let go of my daughter!”

  “Give her to us, Hadley,” Sam says softly.

  “Sir,” the ranger says, the first word I hear without the static of the trees.

  “No,” I whisper to Hadley.

  He kneels down and takes my face in his hands. “Don’t cry, now. You look like an onion when you cry, your nose gets all long . . .” I look up at him. “There you go. Now I said I’d come for you, didn’t I, and your father came a long way to see you. Go on home.” His voice cracks, and he swallows hard. I trace his Adam’s apple with my finger. “You need a doctor. Go back to Sam’s and get better, and I’ll come for you. We’ll work this all out like I said. You go with them.”

  “Give her to us,” Sam says again.

  I know as sure as I know myself that if I leave that mountain without Hadley I will never see him again. “I can’t,” I tell Hadley, and it’s true. Except for him, I don’t have anyone left who will love me. I wrap my arms around his waist and pull myself closer.

  “You have to go with them,” he says gently. “Don’t you want to make me happy? Don’t you see?”

  “No,” I say, pulling myself to Hadley.

  “Go, Rebecca,” Hadley says, a little louder. He loosens my grip on his waist and holds my hands.

  “I won’t.” Tears are running down my face and my nose is running and I don’t give a damn. I will not, I tell myself. I will not.

  Hadley looks at the sky and with great force pushes me away by my wrists. He pushes so hard that I land several feet away on the rocks and the dirt. He pushes so hard that, without me beside him, he loses his balance.

  I try to grab at him but I am too far away. I catch the air, and he falls over the edge of the cliff.

  He falls so slowly, twisting in a somersault like a rough-cut acrobat, and I hear the rush of the river I heard last night before there was the beating of his heart in my hand. Thick as breath, I hear his spine hit the rocks and the water below.

  After this, everything that has built up inside me spills out. It is nonverbal. It is a chord that comes when a knife cleaves your soul. And only now, with this sound surrounding, does everyone choose to listen.

  17 OLIVER

  My car runs out of gas in Carefree, Arizona, of all places, and I am forced to walk a sweltering half-mile to find a gas station. It is not the mom-and-pop operation I am expecting, but rather a respectable steel and chrome Texaco. Only one attendant is there.

  “Hey,” he says as I walk up. He doesn’t really look at me, so I have the opportunity to survey him first. He has long brown hair and terrible acne; I place him at seventeen. “You’re not from around here.”

  “Oh,” I say, more sarcastic than I have to be. “How can you tell?”

  The boy laughs through his nose and shrugs. He seems to actually be thinking up an answer to my rhetorical statement. “I know everyone in this town, I guess.”

  “That’s astute of you.” I smile.

  “Astute,” he repeats, trying the word on for size. As if he remembers his occupation, he jumps off the ten-gallon drum he has been resting on and asks if I’d like some help.

  “Some unleaded,” I tell him. “My car is down the road.”

  He focuses his attention on my gas can, a gift from the bank where Jane and I have a savings account. Marine Midland Bank, it is called, and its logo is a streamlined cartoon whale-we chose the institution for obvious emotional reasons.

  “Hey,” the boy says. “I seen one of these.”

  “A gas can? I’d imagine so.”

  “No, a whale can. You know, this picture thing here. T
here was one in here yesterday being filled up. Some lady who filled her tank and then found out we took credit cards and asked if we could fill up the spare can too.”

  Jane, I recall, has a can like it. The second year we were banking-with Midland, we chose another gas can. We already had a nice toaster.

  “What did this woman look like?” I can feel my neck getting flushed and the hair on the back of my neck standing. “Was there anyone with her?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. We get a million people in here a day.” He looks up at me, and to my complete embarrassment I recognize this as a look of pity. “They weren’t from this town though, I can tell you that.”

  I grab him by the shirt collar and hold him pinned to the diesel fuel tank. “Listen to me,” I say, enunciating clearly. “I am looking for my wife and that may be her. Now you think about it and try to remember what she looks like. You try to remember if she had a little girl with her. If you talked to her about where she was going.”

  “Okay, okay,” the boy says, pushing me away. He gives me a sideways look and makes a slow circle around the self-service island. “I think she had dark hair,” he says, looking at my face to see if he is getting the answer right. He smacks his hands on his thighs, then. “The girl was pretty. A real fox, you know? Blond and a tight little ass. She asked for the key to the bathroom,” he laughs, “and I told her I’d give her the key to my house too, if she met me there after work.”

  This is the best news I have heard in hours. Nothing is certain with such a vague description, but in a situation such as this some hint of evidence is better than nothing. “Where were they headed?” I ask, as calm as I can be given the circumstances.

  “Route Seventeen,” he says. “They asked how you get back to Route Seventeen. Maybe they’re headed to the Canyon.”

  Of course they were going to the Grand Canyon. Jane was with Rebecca, and Rebecca would want to see as much as possible, each tourist trap en route. An angle I hadn’t considered.