Songs of the Humpback Whale

by Jodi Picoult

But the two branch offices have no mail for me either. I think about throwing a tantrum but that won�t do anyone any good. Instead, I pace the anteroom of the post office, then I walk out onto the blazing sidewalk, where Rebecca stands, accusatory.

  �Well,� Rebecca says.

  �It should have been here.� I look up at the sun, which seems to have exploded in the past minute. �Joley wouldn�t do this to me.� I feel like crying and I am weighing the consequences when I look at the sun again and, hissing, it comes hurtling down at me and my world turns black.

  �She�s coming around,� someone says, and there are hands; hands with cool water pressing against my neck and my forehead, my wrists. This face, too big, looms into view.

  Oliver? I try to say but I can�t remember where my voice is.

  �Mom. Mom.� It�s Rebecca, I can smell her. I open my eyes wide and see my daughter leaning over me, the ends of her hair grazing my chin like silk. �You fainted.�

  �You hit your head, Mrs. Jones,� says the displaced voice I heard before. �It�s just a cut, no stitches needed.�

  �Where am I?�

  �You�re in the post office,� that other voice says, and then a man squats in front of me. He smiles. He is handsome. �Are you feeling all right?�

  �Okay.� I turn my head. Three young women with washcloths are on my right. One of them says, �Now don�t sit up too fast.�

  Rebecca squeezes my hand. �Eric was nearby when you collapsed. He helped me carry you in here, and his wives helped you cool off.� She looks frightened, I don�t blame her.

  �Wives. Oh.�

  One of the women gives Rebecca a little jar and tells her to hang onto it in case this happens again. �The heat is dry here,� Eric tells me. �This happens to visitors a lot.�

  �We�re not visiting, we�re just passing through,� I say, as if it matters. �What did I do to my head?�

  �You fell on it,� Rebecca says, matter-of-fact.

  �Maybe I should go to the hospital.�

  �I think you�ll be fine,� says the middle wife. She has long black hair woven into a French braid. �I�m a nurse, and Eric�s a doctor. A pediatrician, but he knows about fainting.�

  �You picked a lucky bunch to fall in front of,� Eric says, and the women laugh.

  I try to stand up and I realize my knees aren�t up to it. Eric grabs me quickly and loops my arm around his neck. The sky is spinning. �Sit her down,� Eric commands. �Listen,� he turns to Rebecca. �Let us take you to the lake. We�re on our way anyway, and it might do your mother some good to cool off.�

  �Is that okay, Mom?� Rebecca says. �Did you hear?� She is shouting.

  �I�m not deaf. Fine. Great.� I am lifted to my feet by Rebecca, Eric and two wives. The third carries my purse.

  In the back of Eric�s minivan are rubber floats and towels that get pushed out of the way for Rebecca and me. Eric positions me lying down, with my feet propped up on an inner tube. From time to time I take sips of cold water from a thermos. I have no idea where this lake is and I�m too tired to find out.

  But when we stop at the shores of the Great Salt Lake I am impressed. You can see across it for miles; it might as well have been an ocean. Eric carries me to the lake down a steep embankment, surprising for someone who is relatively slight. There are many people swimming here. I sit on the sandy bottom of the lake, in a shallow spot that wets my shorts and half my T-shirt. I beg not to go in farther than this; I don�t like to swim, or to feel that my feet cannot reach the bottom.

  I am wondering how my clothes will ever dry, when it occurs to me I keep floating up to the surface. I have to bury my arms in the sand to keep sitting. This takes all the energy I have. Eric and two wives paddle past me on a raft. �How do you feel?� he says.

  �Better,� I lie, but I am beginning to cool off. My skin no longer feels like it is raw and splitting. I duck my head under the water to wet my scalp.

  Rebecca runs past me, splashing. �Isn�t this excellent!� She dives and surfaces like an otter. I�ve forgotten how much she loves to swim, since I hardly ever take to the water.

  Rebecca moves a little farther out and says, �Hey Mom, no hands.� She sticks her arms and legs into the air, buoyant on her back.

  �It�s the salt,� Eric tells me, gently helping me to my feet. �You float better than you do in an ocean. Not bad, for a landlocked state.�

  Rebecca tells me to lie on my back. �I�ll swim you out. I�m a lifeguard, remember?� She wraps her arm across my chest and vigorously scissor-kicks. Because I am in her arms, her care, I don�t try to protest. Also because I am still feeling fairly sick.

  After a second, when I have the courage to open my eyes, I see the clouds passing by, lazy and liquid. I listen to the way my daughter breathes. I concentrate on being weightless.

  �Look, Mom,� Rebecca says, dancing in front of me. �You�re doing it by yourself. Yourself!� She is no longer holding me. In the center of this great lake, forces I can�t even see keep me afloat.

  22 REBECCA July 21, 1990

 

  �What�s the matter with you!� I shout at Hadley. He walks down the hill out of my range of vision. For the life of me I cannot figure out what I have done.

  This is the way it has been all day. Hadley was already out when I woke up. He was with the sheep, feeding them. Sheep grain, Hadley said, is made of oats and molasses and corn and barley. Stick your nose in the bin, he said, it smells great. So I held my head in the cool metal storage trough and I breathed in this honey smell. When I lifted my head, Hadley had gone without saying goodbye.

  Just now I came upon him on the hill drinking from an army canteen. All I did was put my hand on his arm, real light, so I wouldn�t startle him. But Hadley jumped a foot and spilled water on his shirt. �For Chrissake,� he yelled, and he shook his arm away. �Can�t you just leave me be?�

  I don�t understand. He�s been so nice to me the three days we�ve been here. He was the one who offered to take me on a tour of the orchard. He showed me what the different types of apple were. He let me wrap grafting tape around his hand to practice at it. He showed me the way to make cider. I didn�t even ask, and he did all this for me.

  Yesterday when he took me out on the tractor I told him about my father. I told him the kind of work he does. I told him what my father looks like when he talks about his work. His lips twitch and his cheeks flush. When he talks about me, it is like he is talking about nothing at all.

  During our talk, Hadley had said, �I�m sure you can remember when you had a good time with him.� So I thought. But I could only remember when he had bought me a bicycle. He came with me into the street to show me how to ride it. He told me how to pedal and what balance was, scientifically. A couple of times he ran down the street beside me, yelling, You�ve got it! You�ve got it! Then he seemed to fall back. I kept pedaling and pedaling but I reached a hill I could not manage. I kept thinking, I want Daddy to notice me, how well I do. When I fell off the bicycle I watched it roll down the hill, dented and busted, and I did not notice I was bleeding. I needed stitches in my wrist and forehead that Christmas. My father had gone inside to take a business call.

  Hadley didn�t say anything at all when I told him that. He changed the topic. He told me if you handle apples like eggs and pack them just right, they will not bruise.

  I tried to talk about it again. Once I had gotten started, there was no stopping me. I told him about the time Daddy hit my mother, and about the plane crash. He stopped the tractor in the middle of the field to listen. I told him that I didn�t love my father.

  �Everyone loves their father.�

  �Why,� I had asked. �Who says that they�ve got that coming to them?�

  And Hadley started the tractor again and didn�t say much for the rest of the afternoon. He didn�t eat dinner with us. And now this.

  He thinks that I am a spoiled brat. That there is something wrong with me. Maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe you are supposed to love your parents, no matter what.

  It is easier with my mother; it has to do with th
e way we both think. I feel I must be following in her footsteps, because every time I turn around she knows exactly where I stand. She doesn�t really judge me like my friends� mothers do; she just takes me the way I am. Sometimes she really seems to like that, too. We�re more like equals, I suppose. She listens to me, but not because she�s my mother. She listens to me because she expects me to listen to her.

  When I was little I used to pretend my father had a pet name for me. He called me cookiepie and he would tuck me in at night, every other night, alternating with my mother. I believed in this so hard that I would shut my eyes tight under the covers until I heard footsteps, and someone stuffing the sheets under the mattress. Then I�d peek, and it was always my mother.

  As I got older I tried to see what held his interest. I�d snoop through the drawers in his study, holding charts this way and that. I�d steal his whale tapes and play them on my Walkman. Once I spent a week looking up all the words I didn�t get in an article he�d written. When he came home from his trip and saw that I had gone through his drawers he called me into the study. He made me bend over his knee and he spanked me. I was twelve.

  I went through a period then where I tried to see what other things might possibly hold his attention. I watched the way he moved around my mother. I expected to see it-love-but it was strange. They lived in the same house and could go for an entire day without saying anything to each other. I tried to see what I could do to make him notice me. I wore skirts that were too tight. I insisted on wearing makeup to school. I had my best friend�s older sister buy me a pack of cigarettes and I left them on top of my textbooks, right where my father would see it, but in the end he said nothing to me at all. In the end, it was my mother who grounded me for a month.

  There is only one time that I can remember my father in command of a situation. When I was five we sailed to Bermuda as a family-my father for work and my mother and I for pleasure. We visited many tourist attractions and we roasted hot dogs on the beach. We went out on my father�s rented boat to record the whales one day. My mother held onto the rail and I held onto my mother. My father ran around the boat, calling to the men who worked for him to change course and to raise the speed to so many knots. He paused only for a moment at the bow with his binoculars and when he saw what he was looking for he smiled so wide. He smiled like I had never seen him smile. I got scared and buried my face in my mother�s side.

  Without Hadley around there�s nothing for me to do at this orchard. Uncle Joley has gone to town with Sam and I don�t know any of the other workers by name. They are polite, but they don�t take time to explain.

  I�ve been walking aimlessly, and to my surprise I find my mother in the commercial section of the orchard. My mother, who doesn�t know and doesn�t care about farming at all. It�s a lazy kind of day. �You can feel the heat just hanging here, can�t you,� she says when she sees me. �It�s enough to make you want to go back to California.�

  She is sitting with her back pressed against a tree, one that I know has been sprayed recently. It will make her pretty cotton skirt smell like citronella. I don�t mention this, though. It is already too late. �Where have you been hiding yourself at this wonderful Club Med?�

  �Not much to do, is there? I was off with Hadley but he�s ignoring me today.� I try to sound nonchalant. �Acting like a big shot with Sam gone.�

  �Oh, please,� my mother says. She lolls her head backwards so that her chin points into the breeze. �Don�t even mention his name.�

  �Sam?�

  �The man is a fool. No social graces whatsoever. And rude-� she rubs her neck with her right hand, �-rude like I can�t tell you. I was in the bathroom this morning, and you know the way there�s no lock? Three guesses who comes waltzing in when I�m in the shower. And he has the audacity to stand in front of the mirror and lather his whole face with shaving cream before I can say, Excuse me. So when I do he turns around-turns around!- and looks at me. He gets all pissed off and says he isn�t used to having women around who spend half their lives in the bathroom.�

  I think this is hilarious. �Did he see you?�

  �Of course he saw me.�

  �No,� I say. �Did he see you?�

  �How should I know? And why should I care?�

  �Uncle Joley says Sam�s a really good businessman. He�s made the place three times as profitable as it was when his father was around.�

  �He may be a great businessman for all I care, but he�s a lousy host.�

  �We didn�t exactly come here invited.�

  �That�s not the point.� I want to ask her what the point is, but I decide to let it be.

  My mother stands up and twirls the cotton skirt. Citronella. She doesn�t seem to notice. �What do you think?�

  She had been raiding a closet in the room she�s sleeping in- Sam�s mother�s, I assume, all her extra clothes she didn�t take to Florida. The two women are not the same size; my mother has been wearing most things with a belt of Sam�s that she added another hole to.

  �Mom,� I ask, �why do you and Sam hate each other? You don�t know him well enough for that.�

  �Oh yes I do. Sam and I grew up with these stereotypes, you know? In Newton we used to make fun of all the tech kids who couldn�t get into colleges-not even state schools. It seemed every mechanic and carpenter had come from Minuteman and was proud of it, and we couldn�t understand it; you know the value of a good education. There�s no denying that Sam Hansen is an intelligent man. But don�t you think he could do a lot better than this-� She sweeps her arm out over these one hundred acres, green and wild and polkadotted with the heads of early apples. �If he�s so smart, why is he happy running a tractor all day?�

  �That�s not what he does all day,� I protest. �You haven�t even walked around this place. They work so hard! And it�s all orchestrated, you know? Season by season. You couldn�t do it.�

  �Of course I could. I just don�t want to.�

  �You have got some chip on your shoulder. Honestly.� I roll over onto my stomach, breathing clover. �I don�t think that�s why you hate Sam. My theory is you hate him because he is so unbelievably happy.�

  �That�s ridiculous.�

  �He knows exactly what he wants, and he goes and gets it. You may not want the same thing, but he�s still a step ahead of you.� I stare up at her. �And that is driving you crazy.�

  �Thank you, Dr. Freud.� My mother sits down on the cool grass and hugs her knees to her chest. �I�m not here to see Sam. I�m here to see Joley. And we�re having a wonderful time together.�

  �So now what?�

  When she begins to speak she stutters. �We�ll just stay for a little-while. Stay and figure out some things, and then we�ll come to a decision.�

  �In other words,� I say, �you have absolutely no idea when we�re leaving.�

  My mother shoots me a look that suggests she still has the power to punish me. �What is this all about, Rebecca? Do you miss your father?�

  �What makes you think that?�

  �I don�t know. You can tell me if you do. I mean, he is your father. It�s natural.�

  �I don�t miss Daddy.� My voice goes flat. �I don�t.� Humidity slides across the hills and hangs on the tree branches. It presses against my throat and makes me choke a little. I don�t miss my father, not even when I am trying to miss him.

  �Sssh,� my other says, pulling me closer. We sit beneath the heavy arms of an old McIntosh tree that has been grafted to bear Spartans. She is holding me for the wrong reasons and still it feels nice. Far away, I see the Jeep drive up with Sam and Uncle Joley. They get out and begin walking towards where we are sitting. At a certain point, Uncle Joley notices my mother and me. He says something to Sam and points. They stop walking and Sam�s eyes connect with my mother�s for a moment. Uncle Joley continues to walk towards us but Sam turns sharply to the left. He does not follow.

  At dinner that night, Uncle Joley tells us about the buyer for Purity, a woman named Regalia Clippe. Although Sam had mentioned her, Uncle Joley hadn�t met her until today. She was five feet tall and weighed over two
hundred pounds. She loved gossip and the story today was about herself: she had just returned from getting married at the Church of the Living Gospel in Reno, Nevada. Her brand new husband ran the only sod farm in New Hampshire and (could they tell from the circles beneath her eyes?) she hadn�t been getting a lot of sleep.

  �I don�t know, Joley,� my mother said, laughing. �I think people like that follow you around. You�ve met more than your fair share.�

  Hadley, who had come for dinner, asked me to pass the zucchini. It was more than he�d said to me all day.

  � I met Regalia Clippe. She�s my buyer. It has nothing to do with Joley,� Sam says.

  �I didn�t mean anything by it.� My mother looks at me.

  �The Church of the Living Gospel,� Uncle Joley says, and my mother laughs. He leans his elbows on the table. �You�ve got a really nice laugh, Jane. Like bells.�

  �Church of the Living Gospel Bells?� Sam says, and everyone cracks up. I try to catch Hadley�s eye, but he�s staring at his food like it�s something he has never seen before.

  �We�ve got to do something about the weeds in the west corner,� Hadley says to Sam. �They�re out of control. If you want we can let the sheep in-now that they�re sheared there�s no reason to keep them penned.� Sam nods, and Hadley grins at his plate. He is pleased, I can tell, to have made that decision.

  �Well, the good news,� Sam says, �is that Regalia Clippe renewed our contract for Red Delicious.�

  �That�s great,� I say.

  Hadley looks up. �Yeah, but how many others is she buying from, Sam?�

  �Sure, Hadley, just knock the wind out of my sails.� Sam is smiling; he is not really angry. �I don�t know. I didn�t ask her. But she was real happy to have us back again and last year we made up Collins� shipment when the aphids hit him, so that�s that.�

  For dinner we are having zucchini and almonds, fried chicken, peas and mashed potatoes. It is really very good. Sam cooked it all in a matter of minutes. Hadley says Sam always does the cooking.

  �So what did you two do today?� Uncle Joley asks. My mother is about to answer when she notices that Uncle Joley is staring right at Hadley and me. Hadley�s face turns bright red. My mother folds her hands in her lap.

  Sam drops his fork, which clatters on the edge of his plate. Finally Hadley looks up at my uncle. �We didn�t do anything, all right? I had a lot of stuff I had to get done.� He rolls his napkin into a ball and whips it across the room. It misses the garbage pail; instead, it hits the dog. �I�ve got somewhere I have to go,� Hadley mutters. He scrapes his chair back and runs out of the kitchen.

  �What�s his problem?� Sam helps himself to a mountain of potatoes and shakes his head.

  �Sam,� my mother says, �I was wondering why you don�t grow anything but apples here?�