Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

by Jodie Picoult

  I was not going to make a name for myself if I spent the day thinking about being in the throes of passion. I told Jane many things: that I had the flu; that I had switched to a project on jellyfish and had to do background research. I spent more time devoted to my job and I called Jane occasionally, with distance keeping us safe.

  About this time I witnessed a miracle: the birth of a pilot whale in captivity. We had been studying the mother’s gestation and I happened to be in the building when she started labor. We had her in a huge underwater tank for easy visibility, and naturally when such a marvel occurs everyone stops what they are doing and comes to see. The baby spit out of its mother in a stream of entrails and blood. The mother swam in circles until the baby had become oriented to the water, and then she swam beneath it in order to buoy it to the surface for air. “Tough break,” said a scientist beside me. “Being born underwater to breathe oxygen.”

  That day I went into town and bought an engagement ring. It had not occurred to me before: the only thing that could be better than becoming famous in my field was to do it with Jane by my side. There was no reason I could not have my cake and eat it too. She possessed all the qualities I knew I would never grow to espouse. By having Jane, I had hope. I understood sacrifice.

  Jane. Lovely, quirky Jane.

  Would she believe in second chances?

  Suddenly mortified by my behavior, I cross my hands in front of my groin. I pull on my clothes as quickly as possible and zip up my suitcase. I have to get out of here before this waitress comes. What have I been thinking? I drag the suitcase down the long hallway and into an elevator, hiding behind balustrades to make sure she isn’t coming. Then, calmed by Muzak, I take deep breaths and plummet to ground level, thinking of Jane. Jane, only of Jane.

  33 REBECCA July 15, 1990

  According to Indianapolis Jones, the DJ on this radio station (and no relative of ours), the temperature has reached 118 degrees. “One hundred and eighteen,” my mother repeats. She lifts her hands off the steering wheel as if it too is boiling. She whistles through her front teeth. “People die in this kind of weather.”

  We have stumbled into a drought and a heat wave, mixed. It also seems that time is passing much more slowly here, although I imagine that could be due to the temperature. We are destined for Indianapolis, but I don’t think we will ever make it. The way things are going this car will explode in the heat of its own gas before we get there.

  It is so hot I can’t sit up anymore. I never thought I’d say it but I wish we had the old station wagon back. Inside, there was plenty of room to create shadows. In an MG there’s no place to hide. I’m curled into the smallest ball I can manage, with my head pointing down on the floor mat. My mother looks at me. “Embryonic,” she says.

  Sometime before we actually cross into the city of Indianapolis the temperature rises another three degrees. The vinyl in the car begins to crack, and I point this out to my mother. “You’re being ridiculous,” she tells me. “That was cracked to begin with.”

  I feel the pores on my face breathe. Sweat runs down the inside of my thighs. The thought of entering a city-concrete and steel-disgusts me. “I mean it. I’m going to scream.” I summon up every morsel of strength I have left and shriek, a high pitched banshee sound that doesn’t seem to originate from any part of my body.

  “All right.” My mother tries to put her hands over her ears but she cannot do this and drive at the same time. “All right! What do you need?” She looks at me. “A Sno-cone? Air conditioning? A swimming pool?”

  “Oh yes,” I sigh, “a pool. I need a pool.”

  “You should have said that in the first place.” She nudges over the suntan lotion that sits on the seat between us. “Put this on. You’re going to get skin cancer.”

  According to the Indianapolis Department of Tourism, there is no city pool, but relatively nearby is a YMCA where we could probably pay admission to swim. My mother gets directions and (after stopping off for Uncle Joley’s letter) drives to the building. “What if it’s an indoor pool?” I whine. But then I hear it: the screams and the splashes of kids, towels dragging on concrete. “Oh, thank God.”

  “Thank Him after you get inside,” my mother murmurs. You know the way your body feels on the hottest day of the summer, when you actually get within swimming distance of a cold, blue pool? How you feel more relaxed than you have in the seven hours you’ve suffered from heatstroke-as if all you had to do to cool off was imagine that you would finally be able to dive in? This is exactly the way I feel, waiting with my back pressed up against the cinderblock yellow walls of the YMCA. My mother is negotiating. It is not their policy, the woman says, to let in nonmembers. “Join,” I whisper. “Oh, please join.”

  I don’t know if it is mercy or fate that makes the woman let us in for five dollars each, but soon we are standing at the edge of heaven. The cement burns the balls of my feet. There is a lesson going on in the shallow end. The lifeguard keeps calling the kids her guppies. They are doing rhythmic breathing, and only half are following instructions.

  “Aren’t you going to go in?” I ask my mother. She is standing next to me, fully clothed, and she hasn’t even taken her bathing suit in from the car.

  “Oh, you know me,” she says.

  I don’t care; I don’t care. I don’t have time to argue with her. As the lifeguard yells and tells me not to, I dive into the deep end, into the heartbeat of ten feet.

  I hold my breath for as long as I can. For a moment, drowning seems better than having to face the heat above. When I burst to the surface, the air wraps around my face, as solid as a towel. My mother has disappeared.

  She is not at the car. She is not under one of the umbrellas, with large ladies in flowered bathing suits. I drip my way into the YMCA building.

  I pass a Tai Chi class. This amazes me: why would anyone be doing exercise on a day like today? Down the hall I see a blue door marked LADIES LOCKER. It is steamy and humid inside. A gaggle of women are crowded into the showers. Some are behind the showers with curtains but most choose the open showers with no privacy. Three women are shaving their legs and two are shampooing.

  The woman farthest on the right is young and has a tattoo over her left breast. It is a tiny red rose. “What do you have going for this weekend?” she says. I jump but she is not talking to me.

  The woman under the nozzle behind her reaches for her towel to wipe her eyes. She is tremendous, with patches of cellulite waffling across her arms and her thighs. Her stomach forms a furrowed V that hangs over her private parts. She has painted toenails. “Oh, Tommy’s coming out with Kathy and the baby.”

  “Tommy is the youngest?” the tattoo woman asks.

  “Yeah.” The other woman is older than I thought at first; without-the shampoo her hair is speckled, gray and black. She sounds Italian. “Tommy is the one who got messed up with this girl who’s been divorced. I keep telling him, You do what you do, but you don’t marry her. You know what I mean?”

  The other three women in the shower nod vigorously. One is shaped like a pear and has bleached hair. The next one is very old, and wrinkled all over like a giant raisin. She kneels on the floor of the shower, letting the spray hit her back, as if she is praying. The last woman has long white hair and is round all over: round shoulders, round hips, round belly. Her nipples are pushed-in, and stay that way. “Why do you let him come to the house, Peg?” she says. “Why don’t you tell him he comes alone or he don’t come at all?”

  The enormous woman shrugs. “How do you tell that to a kid?”

  One by one the women leave the showers until the only person-left is the old woman. I begin to wonder if she is a permanent fixture. Maybe she needs help. This is what I am thinking when the curtain opens from the shower across the way and my mother steps out. “Well, hi honey,” she says. She acts like it is perfectly normal to find me standing there.

  “How come you didn’t tell me you were coming inside? I was worried about you.”

&nb
sp; All the ladies are watching us. When we turn towards them, they pretend to be doing other things.

  “I did tell you,” my mother says. “You were underwater, though.” She unwraps the towel from her body; she is wearing her bathing suit. “I just wanted to cool off.”

  I’m not going to fight her. I walk through the twisted lines of lockers. My mother stops in front of Peg, who is hoisting up her underwear. “Give Tommy time,” she says. “He’ll come around.”

  Outside my mother sits on the edge of the shallow end, dangling her feet. When she really gets hot she sits on the first step of the pool and lets her butt get wet. When I see her there I swim up underwater and grab her ankles. She screams. “You shouldn’t sit here,” I tell her. “All the little kids pee in the shallow end.”

  “Think about it, Rebecca. Won’t it make its way to the deep end, then?”

  I try to remind her that this is a concrete pool; that she will be able to grab the edge of it the entire way around if she chooses to get wet above her waist. “It’s less deep than the Salt Lake, and you were doing the backfloat there.”

  “I did that against my will. You tricked me.”

  She exasperates me. I breaststroke away from her, diving over the blue and white bubble-string that separates the shallow from the deep end. I slide my belly down the concrete ramp and touch the drain of the pool. I run out of air and push off the bottom, roll onto my back. The clouds are stuck in the sky. I can make out all kinds of shapes: beagles and circus acts, lobsters, umbrellas. With my ears tucked under the surface of the water, I listen to my pulse.

  I backfloat until I crash into a woman wearing a bathing cap with plastic flowers. Then I tread water. My mother isn’t on the steps anymore, and she isn’t sitting on the edge of the pool. I glance around wildly, wondering where the hell she’s gone this time. And then I see her, chest-high in the water. With one hand she’s grabbing onto the ledge of the pool, and with the other hand she’s grabbing the blue and white string of buoys. When she gets to the other side she lifts the heavy line and ducks under it. I’ll bet she doesn’t hear the kids squealing, or the slap of thongs on puddles. I’ll bet she isn’t thinking of the heat. She grabs onto the edge of the pool again and slides one foot down the ramp of the deep end, testing her limits.

  34 SAM

  “So these two guys open a bar together,” Hadley says, and then he stops to take a drink of his beer. “They go through this whole big deal cleaning up the place and stocking it and then comes the big opening day. They’re waiting together for a customer, and in walks this grasshopper that’s six feet tall.”

  “Here we go,” says Joley.

  Hadley laughs and sprays beer all over my shirt.

  “Jesus, Hadley,” I say, but I’m laughing too.

  “Okay, okay. So there’s this grasshopper-”

  “Six feet tall-” Joley and I yell out at the same time.

  Hadley grins. “And it sits down at the bar and orders a vodka tonic. So the guy who’s waiting on him goes up to his buddy and says, ‘I don’t believe this. Our first customer is a grasshopper.’ And they have a few laughs and then he goes back to the grasshopper with his vodka tonic. And he says, ‘I can’t believe it. You’re our first customer and you’re a grasshopper.’ And the grasshopper says, ‘Yeah, well.’ So the bartender goes, ‘You know, there’s a drink named after you.’ “

  Joley turned to me. “This is going to be a disappointment. I can feel it.”

  “Shut up, shut up!” Hadley says. “So the bartender goes, ‘You know-’”

  “There’s a drink named after you,” I say, prompting him.

  “And the grasshopper says, ‘That’s ridiculous. I’ve never heard of a drink called an Irving.’ “ Hadley finishes the joke and then hoots so loud the whole place is looking at our table.

  “That’s the dumbest joke I’ve ever heard,” Joley says.

  “I have to agree,” I tell Hadley. “That was pretty stupid.”

  “Stupid,” Hadley says, “but real fucking funny .”

  Of course anything’s funny when you’ve had about ten beers apiece and it’s after midnight. We are onto our stupid joke contest: the one to come up with the stupidest joke gets out of paying the tab. We’ve been here for a while. When we first got here, around nine-ish, there was next to no one in the bar, and now it’s packed. We’ve been keeping tabs on the women that come in-no real lookers, yet, but it’s been getting darker, and everyone’s getting prettier. It will probably keep up like this for another hour: we’ll tell dumb jokes and talk about the women behind their backs and none of us will do a damn thing about it, so we’ll leave just the three of us and wake up alone with hangovers.

  We come here every few weeks-everyone’s welcome who works in the fields, to talk about their gripes at a place where it’s common knowledge the boss is buying. Some of the guys make up complaints just for the free beer. The meeting starts unofficially at nine, and usually by eleven-thirty most of the others have cleared out. From nine to ten we actually do discuss the business of the orchard: on my end, I tell everyone about the revenues and the new costs, or about meetings I’ve had with produce buyers, and the guys from the field talk about getting a new tractor, or division of labor. They’re the only guys I know of in an orchard who haven’t unionized, and I think it’s because of these conversations. I don’t know that much ever gets done-money’s tight-but I think they just like knowing that I am willing to listen.

  It always ends up with me, Hadley and Joley-most likely because we all live in the Big House, we all drive down here together, and we all have nothing better to do. We participate in the obligatory dumb joke event. We put quarters in the jukebox and talk about whether or not Meatloaf songs really belong with the oldies-Joley says yes, but he’s five years older anyway. Hadley finds some girl and talks to us for about three hours about how he’d like to dance with her and do other unmentionable things, but he chickens out halfway to her table and we get to rib him about it. If Joley has enough to drink, he’ll do his Honeymooners imitations and his best turkey call. Is it any wonder that I’m always the one who drives us home?

  “So tell us about your sister,” I say to Joley, who returns from the bar with three more Rolling Rocks.

  “Yeah,” says Hadley. “Is she a babe?”

  “For Christ’s sake. She’s his sister .”

  Hadley lifts his eyebrows-this is a real effort for him by now. “So what, Sam? She’s not my sister.”

  Joley laughs. “I don’t know. I guess it depends on what you call a babe.”

  Hadley points to a girl in a red leather dress, leaning on the bar and sucking on an olive. “That’s what I call a babe,” he says. He purses up his lips and makes kiss noises.

  “Will somebody get that boy laid?” Joley says. “He’s a walking gland.”

  We watch Hadley stand (almost) and make his way towards the red-leather girl. He uses the backs of chairs and other people to steer by. He makes it all the way to the bar stool next to her, and then turns to look at us. He mouths, Watch this . Then he taps the girl on her shoulder and she looks at him, grimaces, and flips the olive into his face.

  Hadley reels back to our table. “She loves me.”

  “So your sister will be getting here soon?” I ask. I haven’t any idea, really. Joley brought it up once, and that was it.

  “I figure five more days, maybe.”

  “You looking forward to seeing her?”

  Joley sticks his thumb into the neck of an empty green bottle. “Like you don’t know, Sam. It’s been so damn long, with her out in California.”

  “You guys pretty tight?”

  “She’s my best friend.” Joley looks up at me and his eyes are bare, the way they get that makes people so uncomfortable around him.

  Hadley sits with his cheek pressed into the table. “But is she a babe? That’s the question.”

  Joley pulls Hadley’s head up by a chunk of hair. “You know who’s a babe? I’ll tell you who’s a b
abe. My niece. Rebecca. She’s fifteen, and she’s gonna be a knockout.” He lets Hadley’s face fall back down, slapping against the formica.

  “Jailbait,” Hadley murmurs.

  I look at Hadley. “You gonna get sick, Hadley? Do you need to get to the john?”

  Hadley tries to shake his head without lifting it off the table. “What I really need, is another beer.” He waves his hand in the air. “Gar-konn!”

  “That’s garÁon, you idiot. He’s pathetic,” I say to Joley, like I do every week.

  “So tell me about this Jane.” Someone’s got to hold up a conversation.

  “Number one, she’s on the run. I figure her husband will show up at the orchard some time after she gets there.”

  “That’s nice,” I say, sarcastic. “Nothing like a scandal in Stow.”

  “It’s not anything like that. The guy’s an asshole.”

  “What are we talking about?” Hadley says.

  I pat him on the shoulder. “Go back to sleep,” I say. “But isn’t he a famous asshole?”

  “I guess.” Joley rolls his empty beer bottle on its side. “That doesn’t make him any less of an asshole.”

  “If he’s such an asshole why is he coming after her?”

  “Because she’s a babe,” Hadley says, “remember?”

  “Because he doesn’t know how to let go. He doesn’t understand that she’d be better off without him because he doesn’t know how to think about anything but himself.”

  Joley looks at Hadley, who says, “This is too fucking deep,” and leaves to go to the bathroom.