by Jodi Picoult
Rebecca sits on the sand and crosses her legs Indian-style. “Are you going to go back?”
I sigh. How do you explain marriage to a fifteen-year-old? “You don’t just pack up and run away, Rebecca. Your father and I have a commitment. Besides, I have a job.”
“You’ll take me, won’t you?”
I shake my head. “Rebecca.”
“It’s obvious, Mom. You need space—” here Rebecca makes a sweeping gesture with her arms. “You need room to reconsider. And don’t worry about me. Everyone’s parents are doing it. Reconsidering. It’s the age of separation.”
“That’s ludicrous. And I wouldn’t take you even if I were leaving. You’re his daughter too. Answer me this,” I say, looking hard at her. “What did your father ever do to you to deserve you leaving?”
Rebecca picks up a rock, a perfect stone for skimming, and bounces it across the ocean six, no, seven times. “What did he ever do to deserve me staying?” She looks at me and jumps to her feet. “Let’s go now,” she says, “while we can still outsmart him. He’s a scientist and he tracks things for a living, so we need as much of a head start as we can get. We can go anywhere—anywhere!” Rebecca points towards the parking lot. “We only have a limited supply of money, so we’ll have to budget, and I can call up Mrs. Nulty at the pool and tell her I have mono or something, and you can call up the superintendent and tell him you caught mono from me. And I’m up for anything, as long as we drive. I have this thing about air travel . . .” She lets her voice trail off, giggling, and then she scrambles towards me, falling on her knees. “How does that sound, Mom?”
“I want you to listen to me, and listen carefully. Do you understand what happened this afternoon? I . . . . hit . . . your . . . father. I don’t know where that came from, or why I did it. I just snapped. I could do it again—”
“No you won’t.”
I begin to walk down the beach. “I don’t know what happened, Rebecca, but I got angry enough and they say these things happen over and over; they say it’s a cycle and it’s passed down, do you follow? What if I hit you by mistake?” The words cough out of my mouth like stones. “What if I hit my baby?”
Rebecca throws her arms around me, burying her face in my chest. I can tell that she is crying too. Someone near the volleyball net shouts, “Yeah, man, that’s game!” and I draw her closer to me.
“I could never be afraid of you,” Rebecca says so quietly that I think for a minute it may be the sea. “I feel safe with you.”
I hold her face between my hands and I think: this time around, I am in a position to change things. Rebecca hugs me, her hands knotted into fists, and I do not have to question what she is grasping so tight: my daughter is holding our future.
“I have no idea where to go,” I tell Rebecca. “But your uncle will.” Thinking about Joley it is easy to forget Oliver. My brother is the only person I have ever truly trusted with my life. We think each other’s ideas, we can finish each other’s sentences. And because he was there when this all began, he will be able to understand.
Suddenly I break free from Rebecca and sprint down the beach, kicking sand up behind me, like I used to do with Joley. You can run but you can’t hide, I think. Oh yes, but I can try. I feel air catch in my lungs and I get a cramp in my side and this pain, this wonderful physical pain that I can place, reminds me that after all I am still alive.
6 REBECCA
August 2, 1990
Sam, who has never in his life left Massachusetts, tells me about a Chinese ritual of death, minutes before I leave his apple orchard. We are sitting in the dark cellar of the Big House, on rusted milk cans from the early 1900s. We have adjusted to the heavy air, the white mice and the wet smell of apples that has been built into the foundation of this place: mortar mixed with cider to form sweet cement. Sam’s back is pressed against my back to help me sit up; I am still not feeling one hundred percent. When he breathes in, I can feel his heartbeat. It is the closest to him I’ve been since we arrived in Stow. I am beginning to understand my mother.
There are thick beams in the cellar walls, and forgotten cane rockers and cracked canning jars. I can make out the jaws of the animal traps. Sam says, “In China, a person cannot be buried until an adequate number of people have paid their respects.” I do not doubt him, and I do not ask how he knows of this. With Sam, you take things for granted. He reads a lot. “Even tourists can go into the funeral parlor and bow to the widow of a dead man, and they count. It doesn’t matter if you knew the person who has died.”
A small square of light sits in the center of the dirt floor. It comes from the only window in the cellar, which has been padlocked shut the entire time we’ve been here.
“Meanwhile, outside the funeral parlor, relatives sit on the sidewalk and fold paper into the shapes of castles and cars and fine clothing. They fold it into jewelry and coins.”
“Origami,” I say.
“I guess. They make piles and piles of these, you know, things that the dead person didn’t have when he was alive, and then when they cremate the body they add all these paper possessions to the fire. The idea is that the person will have all these things when he gets to his next life.”
Someone starts a tractor outside. I am amazed that the orchard is still business as usual with all that has happened. “Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
“Because I can’t tell your mother.”
I wonder if he expects me to tell her, then. I wonder if I can remember the way he told it. The exact words would mean so much to her.
Sam stands abruptly and the imbalance knocks me off the milk can. He looks down at me on the floor but makes no effort to pick me up. He hands me the flannel shirt—Hadley’s—that I have let him hold for a few minutes. “I loved him too. He was my best friend,” Sam says. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”
At the mention of this, I begin to cry.
Uncle Joley’s face appears in the square of the cellar window. He raps on the glass with such force I think the pane will shatter. I wipe my nose on Hadley’s beautiful blue shirt.
Uncle Joley has been outside with my parents. He must have been the one to talk my mother into going back to California. No one else here has that much power over her, except maybe Sam, and he wouldn’t tell her to go.
Sam picks me up in his arms. I am exhausted. I lean my head in the crook of his shoulder and try to clear my mind. Outside is too bright. I shade my eyes, partly because of this and partly because everyone who works at the orchard has come from the fields to see the spectacle, to see me.
My father is the only one who is smiling. He touches my hair and opens the door of the shiny Lincoln Town Car. He is careful not to get too close to Sam; after all, he is not a stupid man. I look at my father briefly. “Hey, kiddo,” he says under his breath. I feel nothing.
Sam stretches me on the back seat on top of old horsehair blankets I recognize from the barn. These remind me of Hadley. He looked nothing like Sam—Hadley had choppy fair hair and pale brown eyes like the wet sands in Carolina. His lip dipped down a little too far in the middle. “These are yours now,” Sam says. He puts a hand to my forehead. “No fever,” he adds, real matter-of-fact. Then he puts his lips to my forehead like I know he’s seen my mother do. He pretends it is to check my temperature.
When he closes the car door he cuts off the sound from outside. All I hear is my own breathing, still rasping. I crane my neck so that I can watch out the window.
It is like a beautiful mime. Sam and my father stand at opposite sides of the stage. There is a backdrop of willow trees and a green John Deere tractor. My mother holds both of Uncle Joley’s hands. She is crying. Uncle Joley lifts her chin with his finger and then she puts her arms around his neck. My mother tries to smile, she really tries. Then Uncle Joley points somewhere I can’t see and claps my father on the back. He propels my father out of my range of vision. My father turns his head. He tries to catch a glimpse of my mother, whom he has left behind.
Sam a
nd my mother stand inches apart. They do not touch each other. I get the feeling that if they did, a blue spark would appear. Sam says something, and my mother looks towards the car. Even from this distance, in her eyes I can see myself.
I turn away to give them privacy. Then Uncle Joley is at the window, rapping for me to roll it down. He reaches halfway into the back seat with his lanky arms and pulls me forward by the collar of my shirt. “You take care of her,” he says.
When he says that, I start to see how lost I am. “I don’t know what to do,” I tell him. And I don’t. I don’t know the first thing about holding together a family, especially one that resembles an heirloom vase, shattered but glued back together for its beauty, and no one mentions that you can see the cracks as plain as day.
“You know more than you think you do,” Uncle Joley says. “Why else would Hadley have fallen for a kid?” He smiles, and I know he is teasing. Still, he has admitted that Hadley did fall, that I did fall. Because of this simple thing I sink back against the seat. Now I am certain that I will finally sleep through a night.
When the front doors open it sounds like the metal seal breaking on a new can of tennis balls. My mother and father slide into their seats simultaneously. On my father’s side of the car, Uncle Joley is giving directions. “Just take one-seventeen all the way down,” he says. “You’ll hit a highway.”
Any highway, I think. They all take you to the same place, don’t they?
Sam stands across from my mother’s open window. His eyes have paled clear and blue, which gives the illusion that he has spaces in his head through which the sky shows. It is an eerie thing to see, but it holds my mother.
My father starts the car and adjusts his headrest. “We’re in for a long ride,” he says. He is as casual as I’ve ever heard him be. He is trying but it is too late. As he eases the car forward, dust foams at the wheels. My mother and Sam are still staring at each other. “I think we’re going to be just fine,” he says. He reaches behind his seat to pat my foot.
As my father pulls down the driveway my mother’s head turns to watch Sam’s eyes.
“You two have really been on some trip,” my father says. “You had me all over the place.” He keeps up his monologue but I lose track of the words. My mother, who has turned halfway around in her seat, closes her eyes.
I am reminded of a time that I watched Hadley bud grafting. He took a bud from a flowering apple tree and grafted it to the branch of an old tree that hadn’t been bearing fruit. With a sharp knife, he made a T-shaped cut in the bark of the old tree. He said it was very important to cut only the bark, not the wood of the tree. Then like a whittler, he pried away the folds of bark. He had the branch from the younger tree in a plastic baggie. He sliced off a middle-section bud, taking a little piece of the meat of the branch. To my surprise there was a leaf inside—I never really gave much thought to where the leaves were before they actually came out. Hadley cut off the leaf and gave it to me and then pushed the bud under the bark flaps of the old tree. He wrapped it tight with a greenish tape the way you might wrap a sprained ankle.
I asked him when this would start to grow, and he told me in about two weeks they’d know if the bud had taken. If it did, the stub of the leaf stem would be green. If it didn’t, both the bud and the leaf would have dried up. Even if the graft took, the bud wouldn’t branch until next spring. He told me that the great thing about grafting like this was that an old tree, a dead tree, could be made into something new. Whatever strain of apple was grafted would grow on that particular branch. So in theory you could have four or five different apple varieties coming off of one tree, all different from the original fruit the tree used to bear.
I pull away a blanket from the floor of the back seat. Underneath someone—Sam?—has put bushels of apples: Cortlands and Jonathans and Bellflowers and Macouns and Bottle Greenings. I am amazed that I can pick all these out by sight. Intuition tells me there are more in the trunk, and cider. All of these things to take with us to California.
I reach for a Cortland and take a large, loud bite. I interrupt my father, who is still talking. “Oh,” he says, “you took some with you, did you?” He has been saying something about the air quality in Massachusetts versus in L.A. He continues to talk, but neither my mother nor I listen. She is hungrily watching me with this apple.
I stretch out the other half to her. She smiles. She takes a bite even bigger than mine. Juice runs down the side of her mouth but she makes no effort to wipe it away. She finishes the apple down to its core. Then she unrolls the window and tosses it onto the road. She leans her head out the window. Her hair blows into her face, hiding parts of it and illuminating others.
A motorcycle swerves on the other side of the road. It comes close enough to alarm my father and to break my concentration. The Doppler effect, I think, listening to the engine scream lower and lower as it disappears. But it doesn’t really disappear. It just leaves my field of vision, temporarily.
My mother catches my eye: Be strong for me. Be strong for me. This silent chant fills the car. There is something to be said for the fact that my father cannot hear a thing. My mother’s thoughts come in waves, pulling me towards her like a tide: I love you. I love you.
7 SAM
You are not going to believe this, but when I was a kid my father had this old radio upstairs in the barn that didn’t work, and I always figured if we ever got it going we’d hear all those old radio things: Amos and Andy, Pepsodent commercials, fireside chats. I imagined the voices would crackle like lousy phone connections, swallowing their own syllables. I used to bug my father daily to twist a green wire around a yellow one, or to poke at the huge pitted speaker, but he’d tell me to do whatever else I was supposed to be doing and that was the end of that.
My dad was almost fifty when I was born, and this radio was a thing from his heyday, I don’t know, but he wouldn’t let me touch it. It looked just like you are picturing it: large, wooden carved, slick shiny mahogany inlaid with brass, a speaker bigger than my face, a dial that was cracked by a fall. My father, knotted, patient, would follow me up to the hayloft to the ledge where the radio sat, impressive as a contemporary jukebox. I begged him to tinker with it, to make it run as he had the tractor and the hand-pump (he was like that), I begged because I wanted to hear his story.
My father had told me time and time again he had no patience for electric things, as he called them. He told me to put my time to better use. But this radio, it had mystery. What it was doing in a hayloft, I don’t know.
When I was fourteen I took a book on electronics out of the library and began to fidget with all the black and red snaked wires I could find in my house. I became fascinated with tangles. I took apart my alarm clock and put it back together. I took apart the telephone and put it back together. I even dismantled the conveyor belt we used to sort the apples for market. I began to wonder about the insides of other things. I did all this without attracting the attention of my father. Then I removed the back panel of the radio one Sunday and, scared of going further, left it right next to the radio for the next day.
But that was the night that the apples began to rot. It was the strangest thing. We had a hundred acres, and this disease, it was a plague, really, spread from east to west, slowly, hitting about twenty acres overnight, our best trees. We spent the next day spraying and pruning and trying all the other tricks in the book. The second night, the Macouns began to fall from the trees. My father took up smoking, which he’d quit. He checked the balance in the savings account. In the middle of the night I sneaked up to the hayloft. I lay in the piles of dry grass and timothy, imagining the Big Band swing sounds, the sweet Andrews Sisters, filling the arched roof and settling over the pickled beams. Then I screwed the back plate onto the radio.
Don’t expect miracles, we lost half our crop that year. It had nothing to do with the damn radio; it was a parasite whose scientific name I have forgotten. At fourteen, what did I know? Little white things, like potato bugs, on
ly more deadly. When my parents moved to Florida six years ago I had the radio fixed. I was twenty, I still expected to hear Herb Alpert, and I got Madonna. I laughed when I heard her, garbled, like an old gramophone.
It had nothing to do with the apples, did I say that already?
8 OLIVER
(From an article Oliver sits down to write for the Journal of Mammology:)
I hope they never come back.
Detailed analysis of humpback whale songs from the low-to midlatitude waters of the eastern North Pacific (Payne et al, 1983) and the western North Atlantic have shown that the songs change rapidly and progressively over time, obeying unwritten laws of change.
Previously, humpback whales were thought to sing only during the winter months, when they occupy low-latitude wintering grounds, and during migration to and from these grounds (Thompson et al., 1979, and others). Our observations between June and August in the high-latitude feeding area of Stellwagen Bank seemed to confirm these reports. In approximately 14h of recording during the mid-season, we heard only unpatterned sounds and no songs.
She must be coming back, or she wouldn’t have taken Rebecca. But you won’t find Oliver Jones apologizing. She’s the one at fault here. She’s the one who is to blame. I still have her mark on my face.
Until recently the only complete humpback whale songs recorded on high-latitude feeding grounds in any season were those reported by McSweeney et al. (1983) from two recordings made in southeast Alaskan waters in late August and early September. These recordings, which were the result of listening for 155 days during five summers, showed abbreviated versions of the wintering ground song of humpback whales from the eastern North Pacific, and contained the same material sung in the same order as the Hawaiian songs from the surrounding winter seasons.
I don’t know what has gotten into her lately. She isn’t acting like she usually does. Lately she has been there when I least expect her, demanding, anticipating things I cannot give. She should know what this all means to a scientist—the hunt, the track, the thrill of it. And now. She struck me—hard.