Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

by Jodie Picoult

  “Oh, Sam, you’re not going to make me do this.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “What does that have to do with it?” I say, starting to fight him.

  “Do you?”

  I am forced to look up at him. I would walk through coals, I would dance in fire. “Yes,” I say.

  “Good!” Sam scoops me into his arms, as if he is going to carry me over a threshold.

  I am so fascinated at first with the feel of his skin against mine that I do not pay attention to where we are going. Up until now only our hands have brushed, but now, all at once, I can feel his arms, his chest, his neck, his fingers. With the exception of Oliver, I have never been this close to a man. Sam takes long, high steps towards the water. I am losing control, I think. I have to get away from him. “Sam,” I say. “Sam. I can’t,” I say. I start panicking: I will drown. I will die. In another man’s arms.

  He stops so abruptly and speaks so casually I forget for a moment where we are; what we are doing. “Can you swim?”

  “Well, yes,” I admit, getting ready to explain. Well yes, but . Sam’s feet hit the water. “No!” I shout.

  But he will not stop. He clutches me tighter and moves steadily. The water reaches my toes. I stop kicking when the water begins to splash up in my face.

  What I see in those last few moments is my brother, flailing in the tide at Plum Island, caught in a dragging undertow. “Don’t do this to me,” I whisper.

  Somewhere, as if it is happening across a long distance, I hear Sam telling me not to worry. He tells me I can go back if I say the word. He tells me he will not let go. And then I feel this heavy water pressing in around me, changing the shape of my body. At the last minute I hear Sam’s voice. “It’s me,” he says, “I’m not going to let anything happen.” He fills my lungs with those words and I go under.

  55 JOLEY

  When Jane and I were very small, before the swimming accident at Plum Island, we used to build cities in the sand. Jane was the engineer; I was the slave labor. We fashioned pagodas and English castles. She’d form the furrows and I’d come after her with a bucket of ocean water. “The waterfall,” I’d announce. “ Construction of the waterfall ready to begin!” Jane did the honors, pouring the water in for the moat, or digging rivulets that ran right into the ocean, a permanent source. We drew windows with light pieces of driftwood, and we edged gardens made of stones and shells. Once we made a fortress so big that I could hide inside and toss tight-lipped mussels at people walking by. Even after we were finished playing, we left our buildings standing. We swam in the waves and we bodysurfed, keeping an eye on the slow destruction of our handiwork.

  This is what runs through my mind, like a grainy home movie, as Sam lifts my sister and brings her into the pond. This, and how slowly things change, and how malleable are boundaries. He picks her up and she is fighting, like we all expected.

  I may be the only person in this world who understands what Jane needs. And perhaps I don’t even know the half of it. I have seen her cut and bleeding on the inside. It is me she always turns to, but I am not always the one who can help.

  Jane stops kicking and resigns herself to the fact that she is going underwater. Sam says something to her. It’s there in her eyes, too, whether or not she will choose to admit it to herself.

  I learned a doctrine long ago from an ancient Muslim in

  Marrakesh: in this world, there’s only one person with whom you are meant to connect. This is a God-woven thread. You cannot change it; you cannot fight it. The person is not necessarily your wife or your husband, your long-term lover. It may not even be a good friend. In many cases it is not someone with whom you spend the rest of your life. I would hazard a guess that ninety percent of all people never find the other person. But those lucky few, those very lucky few, are given the chance to grab the brass ring.

  I have believed in Jane for so long, and I have loved her so. I could never find anyone that measured up to her, which is why I’ve kept from marrying. What is the point of love unless I can have the ideal?

  Take her, I find myself whispering to my friend Sam. The water closes in over their heads. I tell myself I am the lucky one, to have given Jane away twice. I wonder why, this time, it hurts so much more.

  56 SAM

  And then we burst through the surface of the water, gasping, and I’m still holding Jane tight. “Oh!” she cries. “This is so wonderful!” She looks at me, blinking water from her eyes. Her hair is sticking up in the back; her T-shirt is plastered to her body. She tentatively takes her right arm away from around my neck; then her left arm, and just like that she’s treading water. “I can do it,” she says, and she dives under the water again, coming up about eight feet away.

  Some of the people on the shore are clapping, having watched the whole ordeal. I wave to them while Jane tries out her sea legs. I follow her around-just in case-while she goes through all the antics a kid would the first day of summer at the beach. At this rate, I think, she’ll be doing a back flip off the dock by the end of the afternoon. She tells me she really likes swimming underwater the best, then jacknifes to touch the bottom.

  I go under, too. She’s got her eyes wide open, trying to see through the murky blue dye they’ve added here for health reasons. Basically, it keeps you from seeing anything farther away than five inches. I lean in close to Jane, letting her hair swim around my head like a mermaid’s. God, I’m close enough to kiss her. Her skin is translucent, nightmare blue. But then there is a flood of bubbles between us-I think I hear the muffled, deaf-man’s sound of Jane saying my name-and the moment’s gone by.

  I’ve fallen asleep on the towels, but I drift in and out of consciousness enough to know that Jane and Rebecca are whispering about Hadley. In spite of what I’ve said to Jane about Hadley’s good intentions, she doesn’t believe me. She keeps telling Rebecca he’s up to no good, and that she’s too young. I’m tired and sun-dazed, but I try to do the calculations in my head. There are ten years between Hadley and Rebecca. There are ten years between Jane and me.

  “I’m fifteen,” Rebecca whispers. “I’m not a kid.”

  “You’re a kid.”

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

  I want to hear this. I open my left eye a slit. “It was different then,” Jane says. Well, isn’t that something, I think. The old proverbial apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. I try to imagine Jane at fifteen, but it’s hard. First off, I know she didn’t look anything like Rebecca, so that’s that. Second, when she was fifteen is ten years earlier than when I was fifteen. She lived through the early Beatles and civil rights. I watched the soldiers come back from Vietnam. She was in fourth grade before I was even born.

  Rebecca’s voice starts to get louder. I wonder if Hadley is asleep, or if he’s faking it too. “You can’t just keep yourself from falling for a person. You can’t turn off your emotions like a faucet.”

  “Oh,” Jane says. “You’re an expert?”

  I consider sitting up here, before somebody gets hurt. But I wait until Jane finishes talking. “You can steer yourself away from the wrong people. I’m just warning you before it’s entirely too late.”

  I make a big act of stretching and yawning before I sit up. I rub my eyes with my fists. “So,”I say, grinning from Rebecca to Jane, “what did I miss?”

  “Nothing.” Rebecca stands up to take a walk. “I’m going somewhere.”

  Jane calls after her. “Don’t worry about her,” I say. “She can’t go all that far without the keys to the truck.” I reach lazily for her hand, the one with the splinter from this morning. “How’s your war injury?”

  Jane laughs. “I think I’ll live.”

  “The rowboat’s back at the dock. We can take it out, if you’re up for a little more fishing.”

  Pickerel Pond is glacial, formed by a massive chunk of ice that carved the valley. It’s bordered by two orchards, competitors, and the fertilizer they use has run into the
lake, making lily pads spring up all over the place. In about ten more years, they’ll choke the pond. For right now, though, they’re the best bets for fishing. I hand Jane the fishing rod. “Ladies first.”

  Jane picks out a shiny Mepps spinner and threads it on the end of the line. I never did ask her how she knows about fishing, but I’d assume it has to do with her husband, and his interest in the ocean. And right now, I don’t much feel like bringing him up. She casts and gets tangled in a fallen log, and has to tug to free the line. “I’m sorry,” she says, reeling in. She casts again, a good one, landing just where I would have placed it in the dark shadow of a cluster of lily pads.

  “Are you mad at me for taking you swimming?” I ask.

  “No. I should have done that a long time ago.” A cormorant cries, and a flock of starlings, frightened by the noise, dart out of a willow tree. Jane reels in and casts again, the same spot.

  “I was hoping we could talk,” I say. “Even though I’m not one for talking much.” I stare over the edge of the rowboat to a rock several feet ahead that rises out of the water with such pride you’d think it was a tiny mountain. “I wanted to bring up what we were discussing on the way over here.”

  “Boston radio DJs?”

  “Not quite.” I look up at her, she’s smiling. “This isn’t real easy, you know.”

  “We don’t have to talk. Why ruin a good thing?”

  We both stare at the purpled weeds that have swallowed the gold hook. We stare as if we are expecting some miracle to happen. “Look,” I say.

  Jane interrupts me. “Don’t. Please. I’ve got a home to go back to.” She looks at me for only a second, then turns away. “I’ve got Oliver’s daughter.”

  “She’s your daughter too.”

  “Sam, I like you. I really do. But that’s where it ends. I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea.”

  “The wrong idea,” I say, getting my guard up. “What did you think I was talking about anyway?”

  A wave, coming out of nowhere, tenderly swings the boat. “Sam,” she says, her voice cracking.

  I don’t know what she has planned to say, because at that moment her line begins to run back and forth in front of the lily pads and underneath us. “It’s a sunfish,” I say, forgetting everything in the thrill.

  “What do you think of that?” Jane says, swinging the rod in my directionso that I can release the fish. “I’m two for two.”

  “You’re luckier than I am, even on a good day. I should take you out with me more often.” I don’t look at her when I say this; I smooth my free hand over the spiky scales of the sunfish until it stays limp on the hook. Then I quickly pull up and out and hold it over the edge of the rowboat, watching it leave faster than my eye can follow.

  Jane leans against the bow of the boat, watching me. I don’t think she’s noticed that fish at all. “You don’t want to get involved with me, Sam. Everything is going so well for you now, and I’d only be trouble.” She looks down, twisting her wedding band around her finger. “I don’t know what I want. Please don’t push me, because I don’t know how strong I can be. I can’t even tell you what I’m going to do tomorrow.”

  I move closer. “Who’s asking for tomorrow? All I wanted was today.”

  She pushes me off with her hands. “I’m an old lady.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “and I’m the Pope.”

  Jane is still holding me at bay. Inches. “Is it adultery if you just kiss?” she whispers. She presses her lips against mine.

  Oh, God, I think, so this is what it can be like. She tastes of sassafras and cinnamon. I move my tongue between her lips, over the neat barricade of her teeth. She opens her eyes then, and she smiles. My mouth, on hers, smiles too. “You look different up close.” When she blinks, her eyelashes brush against my cheek.

  I press my palms against the back of her head and her shoulders. I tear my mouth away from hers, gulping in the stale air of the lily pond, and fall to my knees in front of her. I’ve forgotten we’re in a boat, and it pitches from side to side, so that we both have to keel ourselves. I kiss her along the line from her ear to her neck and I move one hand from her back to her breast. Jane loosens her arms from around my neck and grabs onto the gunwale of the rowboat. “No,” she says, “you have to stop.”

  I sit back obediently on the low rowboat seat, watching the ripples we’ve made in the pond. We are left staring at each other, flushed, with all that has happened hovering in between. “You just say the word,” I murmur, breathless, and I lightly let go.

  57 OLIVER

  Windy meets me on the shore of the weathered little beach at Gloucester. He hands me a neoprene wet suit and a yellow Helly-Hansen cap. Although he is a garrulous man by nature, in the midst of this throng of television and radio correspondents, he says nothing. He waits until I have stepped into the fifteen-foot inflatable Zodiac, until he has revved the outboard, and only then does he smile at me and say, “Who the hell would have expected Oliver Jones to be my guardian fucking angel?”

  Windy McGill and I worked together at Woods Hole before it was fashionable to be involved in the cause of whales. We were the two gofers for the prestigious scientists; we were expected to fit in our own doctoral research around the time spent analyzing data or getting coffee for these other biologists. We discovered quite by accident that we had both been graduated from Harvard the same year; that we were both researching tidal communities for our doctorates; that we had been born a day apart at the same Boston hospital. It almost came as no surprise that our research turned in the same direction: towards humpbacks. Of course we’ve taken different tacks. Windy steers clear of whale songs; he’s worked on different methods of identification of humpbacks. At this point, he’s credited for the Provincetown research that is used to catalog entire generations of whales.

  Windy pulls a bottle out of his pocket-cough medicine-and offers me a swig. I shake my head, and lean back against the bubbled bow of the little boat. Zodiacs tip at the drop of a hat, but I manage to strip and get the wet suit over my body. Windy watches me out of the corner of his eye. “Getting a little thick around the middle, Oliver?” he says, patting his own ribs. “Goddamned cushy California jobs.”

  “Fuck you,” I say good-naturedly. “Tell me about this whale.”

  “Her name is Marble. White markings on her neck and her fluke. Three years old. Got herself all tangled up in a gill net some asshole left behind.” He squints, and adjusts the rudder to the left. “I don’t know, Oliver. It took us two days just to find her out here. She’s testy and she’s tired, and I don’t know how much longer she’ll hold on. I’ll tell you this,” he says, “I’m glad you’re here. If I’d known you were back in Massachusetts, I would’ve called you in a minute.”

  “Bullshit. You hate it when I steal your thunder.”

  Windy and I discuss our intended course of action. The most pressing problem is knowing where exactly the gill net has become entangled on the whale. Windy’s primary observation-“around the jaw”-isn’t precise enough. Once this has been determined, it will be much easier to cut away the net. The assessment, however, is the most dangerous aspect of a whale rescue: one slap of a fluke or a fin is deadly. Last year, in northern California, a colleague was killed when he dove beneath a whale to determine the points of entanglement.

  As we get further away from the Massachusetts shoreline, I begin to feel the prickling to which I am accustomed; the heady excitement of the unexpected. Few humans have seen it, the look in the eyes of a beached whale one has redirected towards the black ocean. Few humans understand that relief transcends verbal communication; that gratitude is not limited to our genus and species.

  I spot the second Zodiac before Windy and direct him towards it. Four students are crowded into the little raft, along with Burt Samuels, a biologist who is getting too old for this. Twenty years ago, this man would command us to scrub sea lion shit from decaying study tanks and we would jump at his beck and call. And now we are defining the pa
ce.

  Marble rolls miserably on her side, feebly fanning the water with her dorsal fin. One of the students calls out to Windy-apparently three whales have been hovering nearby, waiting to learn the fate of Marble. One circles closer and sidles up to Marble, who rolls onto her belly. The second whale disappears beneath the water, unfurling the edges of its fluke. Gracefully, gently, it strokes Marble’s back with its tail. It caresses her several times, and then sinks and vanishes.

  “I’m going in,” I say, pulling a mask over my face. We stop alongside the second Zodiac, which is slightly larger and which has an oxygen tank, ready to go. I adjust the harness and check my gauges, and then with the help of one of the students, I sit on the edge of the inflatable boat. “On three.” The oxygen mists against my skin. I look out through the mask, that familiar perspective of being on the inside of a fishbowl. One. Two. Three.

  The rush and light of the world sizzles and then smoothes underwater. I adjust to breathing below the surface of the water; and then I blink and concentrate on finding the green gill net tangled about this massive wall of whale. I hear Marble moving, pendulous, creating unnatural currents. She sees me out of the corner of her eye, and she opens her mouth, creating a rush of seaweed and plankton from which I have to kick away.

  I circle her tail first. I move quickly and steadfastly, noting mentally where the net is tangled (right fin, clear of the fluke). I hold my breath when I swim beneath her, praying to a God I am not sure I believe in. She is over thirty feet long, and she weighs well over fifty thousand pounds. Do not dive, I whisper. For God’s sake, Marble, do not dive.

  I lie beneath her on my back, floating motionless. I know that I should get out of the way as quickly as possible, but what a view. It makes you hold your breath, such beauty. Right there, the creamy white of her belly, nicked with scars and barnacles and grooved at the jaw like a zinc sinkboard.