by Jodi Picoult
He was into tide pools back then, and I listened to him talk of mollusks and sea urchins and entire ecosystems that were ruined at the whim of an ocean wave. Back then Oliver’s face would light up when he shared his marine discoveries. Now he only gets excited when he’s locked in his little study, examining data by himself. By the time he tells the rest of the world, he’s transformed from Oliver into Dr. Jones. Back then, I was the first person he told when something wonderful cropped up in his research. Today I’m not even fifth in line.
At the second landing I turn to Oliver. “What are you going to look for?”
“Where?”
“In South America.” I try to scratch an itch in my back and when I can’t reach it Oliver does.
“The winter breeding grounds. For whales,” he says. “Humpbacks.” As if I am a total moron. I give him a look. “I’d tell you, Jane, but it’s complicated.”
Pedantic asshole. “I’ll remind you that I am an educator, and one thing I have learned is that anyone can understand anything. You just have to know how to present your information.”
I find myself listening to my own words, like I tell my students, to hear where the cadences change. It is as if I am having an out-of-body experience, watching this weird one-act performance between a self-absorbed professor and his nutty wife. I am somewhat surprised at the character Jane. Jane is supposed to back down. Jane listens to Oliver. I find myself thinking, this is not my voice. This is not me.
I know this house so well. I know how many steps there are to get upstairs, I know where the carpet has become worn, I know to feel for the spot where Rebecca carved all of our initials into the banister. She did that when she was ten, so that our family would have a legacy.
Oliver’s footsteps trail off into his study. I walk down the hall into our room and throw myself onto the bed. I try to invent ways to celebrate Rebecca’s birthday. A circus, maybe, but that’s too juvenile. A dinner at Le Cirque; a shopping spree at Saks—both have been done before. A trip to San Francisco, or Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine—I wouldn’t know where to go. Honestly, I don’t know what my own daughter likes. After all, what did I want when I was fifteen? Oliver.
I undress and go to hang up my suit. When I open my closet I find my shoe boxes missing. They have been replaced by cartons labeled with dates: Oliver’s research. He has already filled his own closet; he keeps his clothes folded in the bathroom linen closet. I don’t even care where my shoes are at this point. The real issue is that Oliver has infringed on my space.
With energy I didn’t know I had, I lift the heavy boxes and throw them onto the bedroom floor. There are over twenty; they hold maps and charts and in some cases transcriptions of tapes. The bottom of one of the boxes breaks as I lift it, and the contents flutter like goosedown over my feet.
The heavy thuds reach Oliver. He comes into the bedroom just as I am arranging a wall of these boxes outside the bedroom door. The boxes reach his hips but he manages to scale them. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “These can’t stay.”
“What’s the problem? Your shoes are under the bathroom sink.”
“Look, it’s not the shoes, it’s the space. I don’t want you in my closet. I don’t want your whale tapes—” here I kick a nearby box, “—your whale records, your whales period, in my closet.”
“I don’t understand,” Oliver says softly, and I know I’ve hurt him. He touches the box closest to my right foot, and his quiet eyes hold the contents, these ruffled papers, checking their safety with a naked tenderness I am not accustomed to seeing.
This is how it goes for several minutes: I take a carton and stack it in the hall; Oliver picks it up and moves it back inside the bedroom. Out of the corner of my eye I see Rebecca, a shadow behind the wall of cartons in the hall.
“Jane,” Oliver says, clearing his throat, “that’s enough.”
Imperceptibly, I snap. I pick up some of the papers from the broken carton and throw them at Oliver, who flinches, as if they have substantial weight. “Get these out of my sight. I’m tired of this, Oliver, and I’m tired of you, don’t you get it?”
Oliver says, “Sit down.” I don’t. He pushes me down by my shoulders, and I squirm away and with my feet shove three or four cartons into the hall. Again I seem to take a vantage point high above, in the balcony, watching the show. Seeing the fight from this angle, instead of as a participant, absolves me of responsibility; I do not have to wonder about what part of my body or mind my belligerence came from, why shutting my eyes cannot control the howling. I see myself wrench away from Oliver’s hold, which is truly amazing because he has pinned me with his weight. I pick up a carton and with all my strength hold it over the banister. Its contents, according to the labels, include samples of baleen. I am doing this because I know it will drive Oliver crazy.
“Don’t,” he says, pushing past the boxes in the hall. “I mean it.”
I shake the box, which feels like it is getting heavier. At this point I cannot remember what our argument is about. The bottom of the carton splits; its contents fall two stories.
Oliver and I grip the banister, watching the material drift through the air—paper like feathers and heavier samples in Ziploc bags that bounce when they hit the ceramic tile below. From where we stand we cannot tell how much has been broken.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, frightened to look at Oliver. “I didn’t expect that to happen.” Oliver doesn’t respond. “I’ll clean it all up. I’ll organize it. Keep it in my closet, whatever.” I make an effort to scoop nearby files into my arms, gathering them like a harvest. I do not look at Oliver and I do not see him coming for me.
“You bitch.” He grabs my wrists in his hands.
The way he looks at me cuts inside me, says I am violated, insignificant. I have seen these eyes before and I am trying to place them but it is so hard when I can feel myself dying. I have seen these eyes before. Bitch, he said.
It is in me, and it has been waiting for years.
As my knees sink, as red welts form on my wrists, I begin to take ownership of my own soul, something that has been missing since childhood. Strength that could move a city, that could heal a heart and resurrect the dead pushes and shoots and stands and (bitch) concentrates. With the sheer power of everything I used to dream I could be, I break away from Oliver’s hold and strike his face as hard as I can.
Oliver drops my other wrist, and takes a step backward. I hear a cry and I realize afterward it has come from me.
He rubs his hand across his cheek, red, and he throws his head back to protect his pride. When he looks at me again, he is smiling, but his lips are slack like a carnival clown’s. “I suppose it was inevitable,” he says. “Like father, like daughter.”
It is only when he has said this, the unspeakable, that I can feel my fingers striking his skin, leaving an impression. It is only then that I feel the pain spreading like blood from my knuckles to my wrist to my gut.
I never imagined there could be anything worse than the time Oliver struck me; the time that I had taken my baby and left him; the event that precipitated Rebecca’s plane crash. I believed the reason there was a God was to prevent such atrocities from happening to the same person twice. But nothing prepared me for this: I have done what I’ve sworn I could never do; I have become my own nightmare.
I push past Oliver and run down the stairs. I am afraid to look back, or to speak. I have lost control.
From the dirty laundry pile I quickly grab an old shirt of Oliver’s and a pair of shorts. I find my car keys. I pull a Rolodex card with Joley’s address and walk out the side door. I don’t look back, I slam the door behind me, and still wearing only a bra and a slip, climb into the cool refuge of my old station wagon.
It is easy to get away from Oliver, I think. But how do I get away from my own self?
I run my fingers over the leather of the seat, raking my fingernails into pits and tears that have developed over the years. In the rearview mirror, I see my face and I hav
e trouble placing it. Several seconds later I realize that someone is echoing my breathing.
My daughter holds a small suitcase on her lap. She is crying. “I have everything,” she tells me. Rebecca touches my hand; the hand that struck her father, that struck my own husband, that resurrected those dead and buried gaps.
4 JANE
When I was ten I was old enough to go hunting with my father. Every year when goose season came, when the leaves began to turn, my father became a different person. He’d take his shotgun out of the locked closet and clean the entire gun, down to the insides of the barrels. He’d go to the town hall and get a hunting license, a stamp with a picture of a bird so pretty it made me want to cry. He’d talk about that roast goose dinner he was going to get us, and then early on a Saturday he’d return with a fluffy grey bird, and he’d show Joley and me the place where the shot went in.
Mama came into my room at four A.M. and said if I was going goose hunting I’d have to get up. It was still pitch dark when Daddy and I left the house. We drove in his Ford to a field, owned by a buddy, that was used to grow field corn in the summer, which—Daddy told me—is what geese love the most. The field, which had sported stalks of corn much taller than me just weeks before, had been razed; there were false pillows of dust caught between stumps of corn left from summer.
My father opened the trunk and extracted the leather case that held the gun and the funny goose decoys Joley and I used as hurdles when we played Obstacle Course. He scattered them through the field, and then he took a pile of dead stalks and created a little hutch for me, and one for himself. “You sit under there,” he told me. “Don’t breathe; don’t even think about getting up.”
I squatted down like he did and watched the sun paint the sky as it slowly turned into Saturday. I counted my fingers and I took quiet, shallow breaths, as I’d been told. From time to time I stole a glance at my father, who rocked back and forth on his heels and absentmindedly stroked the barrel of his gun.
After about an hour my legs hurt. I wanted to get up and run around, let free that dizzy feeling behind the eyes that comes when you don’t get enough sleep. But I knew better. I stayed perfectly still, even when I had to go to the bathroom.
By the time the geese actually arrived (which according to my father, never took this long), the pressure on my bladder caused by squatting was unbearable. I waited patiently until the geese were feeding on the cornfield, and then I cried out, “Daddy! I have to pee!”
The geese flew into the air, deafening, a hundred wings beating like just one heart. I had never seen anything like it, this mass of grey wings blotting the sky like a cloud; I thought surely this was why he had wanted me to come hunting.
But my father, startled by my cry, missed his opportunity at a good shot. He fired twice but nothing happened. He turned to me; he didn’t say a word, and I knew I was in trouble.
I was allowed to go to the woods that edged the cornfield to pee, and, amazed that my father hadn’t given me any toilet-paper substitute, I pulled up my underpants and overalls feeling dirty. I settled quietly under my cornstalk hutch, much better. My father said under his breath, “I could kill you.”
We waited two more hours, hearing thunderous shots miles away, but did not see any more geese. “You blew it,” my father said, remarkably calm. “You have no idea what hunting is like.” We were about to leave when a flock of crows passed overhead. My father raised his gun and fired, and one black bird fluttered to the ground. It hopped around in circles; my father had shot off part of its wing.
“Why did you do that, Daddy?” I whispered, watching the crow. I had thought the purpose of hunting was to eat the game. You couldn’t eat crow. My father picked up the bird and carried it farther away. Horrified, I watched him wrench the crow’s neck and toss it to the ground. When he came back, he was smiling. “You tell Mama about that and I’ll give you a good spanking, understand? Don’t tell your brother either. This is between me and my big girl, okay?” And he gently placed his shotgun, still smoking, in its leather case.
5 JANE
“Okay,” I tell Rebecca. “I know what we’re doing.” Adjusting my side mirror, I pull out of the development and onto the freeway that leads to the beach at La Jolla. Rebecca, sensing that we are in for a long drive, rolls down her window and hangs her feet out the window. A million times I have told her that it is not safe for her to do that, but then again I don’t even know if it is safe for her to be with me anymore, so I pretend I don’t see her. Rebecca turns off the radio, and we listen to the hum and grind of the old car’s symphony, the salt air singing across the front seat.
By the time we reach the public beach, the sun is pushing scarlet against the underedge of a cloud, stretching it like a hammock. I park the car along the span of sidewalk that lines the beach, diagonally across from a late-afternoon volleyball game. Seven young men—I wouldn’t place any of them past twenty—arch and dive against the backdrop of the ocean. Rebecca is watching them, smiling.
“I’ll be back,” I say, and when Rebecca offers to go with me, I tell her no. I walk away from the game, down the beach, feeling the sand seep into the lace holes of my tennis shoes. It grits cool between my toes and forms a second sole beneath my foot. Standing straight, I shade my eyes and wonder how far out you have to be to see Hawaii. Or for that matter, how many miles off the California coast you must be before you can see land.
Oliver said once that at certain places south of San Diego you can see whales from the coast, without binoculars. When I asked him where they were going, he laughed. Where would you go? he said, but I was afraid to tell him. In time, I learned. I discovered that Alaska to Hawaii and Nova Scotia to Bermuda were the parallel paths of two humpback whale stocks. I learned that the West Coast whales and the East Coast whales did not cross paths.
Where would you go?
At thirty-five, I still refer to Massachusetts as home. I always have. I tell colleagues I’m from Massachusetts, although I have been living in California for fifteen years. I watch for the regional weather in the Northeast when I watch the national news. I am jealous of my brother, who roamed the whole world and by divine providence was allowed to settle back home.
But then again, things always come easily to Joley.
A seagull comes to a screeching hover above me. Batting its wings, it seems enormous, unnatural. Then it dives into the water and, having caught carrion, it surfaces and flies away. How amazing, I think, that it can move so effortlessly between air and sea and land.
There was one summer when we were kids that my parents rented a house on Plum Island, on the north shore of Massachusetts. From the outside it seemed pregnant, a tiny turret on top that seemed to distend into a bulbous lower level. It was red and needed a paint job, and contained framed posters of tabby kittens and nautical trivia. Its icebox was a relic from the turn of the century, with a fan and a motor. Joley and I spent very little time in the house, being seven and eleven, respectively. We would be outside before breakfast and come in only when the night seemed to blend into the line of the ocean that we considered our backyard.
Late in the summer, there were rumors of a hurricane, and like all the other kids on the beach we insisted on swimming in the tenfoot waves. Joley and I stood at the shore and watched columns of water rising like icons from the ocean. The waves taunted: Come here, come here, we wouldn’t hurt you. When we got up enough courage, Joley and I swam out beyond the waves and rode them in on our bellies, getting pounded into the beach so forcefully that handfuls of sand got trapped in the pockets of our bathing suits. At one point, Joley couldn’t seem to catch a wave. Floating several hundred yards out in the ocean, he tried and swam as hard as he could, but at seven he didn’t have the strength. He got tired quickly, and there I was, my feet buried by the undertow, watching monstrous swells form a fence that kept us apart.
It was so quick that no one noticed, no other kids and no parents, but as soon as Joley began to cry, I dove under the water and frogki
cked until I was well behind him; I burst to the surface, wrapped my arms around him and swam with all my power into the next wave. Joley swallowed some sand, landing face down on the rocky beach. Daddy came out to get us, asking what the hell were we doing out here in this weather. Joley and I dried off and watched the hurricane through the cross-taped windows of the cottage. The next day, which was bright and sunny, and every day after that, I did not go into the water. At least not past my chest, which is what I will only do now. My parents assumed it was the hurricane that had scared me, but that wasn’t it at all. I didn’t want to offer myself so easily to the entity that had almost taken away the only family member I loved.
I inch towards the water, trying not to get wet, but my sneakers get soaked when I hold my wrists into the water. For July it is fairly cool, and it feels good where my skin is still burning. If I swam far out, over my head, would I soothe the part of me that hates? The part that hits?
I cannot remember the first time it happened to me, but Joley can.
Rebecca’s voice pulls me. “Mom,” she says. “Tell me what happened.”
I would like to tell her everything, beginning at the very beginning, but there are some things that are better left unsaid. So I tell her about the shoe boxes and Oliver’s records, about the broken carton, about the shattered baleen samples, the ruined files. I tell her that I hit her father, but I do not tell her what Oliver said to me.
Rebecca’s face falls, and I can tell she is trying to decide whether or not to believe me. Then she smiles. “Is that all? I was expecting something really big.” She reaches into the sand, shyly, and winds a piece of dried seaweed around her fingers. “He deserved it.”
“Rebecca, this is my problem, not yours—”
“Well it’s true,” she insists.
I can’t really disagree with her. “Anyway.”