Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

by Jodie Picoult

  For one thing, I haven’t any idea what I am going to say to her. I know, I am supposed to have prepared something elaborate, something akin to wooing, but everything that has crossed my mind in the past two days has simply disappeared. What I am left with is how I feel, and what am I supposed to do about it? I want to just walk up to Jane and say that I miss the way she flips pancakes. That no one but her has ever left me a love note on a steamed-up shaving mirror. I want to tell her that sometimes, when the sun is setting over the unfurled fluke of a humpback, I wish I had her beside me. That when I give a speech, I wish I could see her face in the first row. How stupid you are, Oliver, I think. You can write circles around any scientist in your field. You’ve published more than any researcher your age. You are supposed to be the expert. But you don’t know how to tell her that you can’t live without her.

  The week before Rebecca’s plane crash, Jane and I had a terrible-argument. I do not remember what it was about, but it could not have been any less ludicrous than this latest one about Rebecca’s birthday. The next thing I knew she had driven me to such a point that I hit her.

  It was a slap, not a punch, if distinctions matter. And after I did it I thought I would die. I knew about her childhood, her father. I knew what I wasn’t supposed to be.

  Jane took Rebecca to her parents’ place in Massachusetts. I wanted her back so badly I could taste it. But, like now, I did not know what to say. I just knew that where Rebecca went Jane would follow: she lived for Rebecca then, as she does now. So I threatened litigation if she didn’t send the child back. I expected her to come too, even if I didn’t say so directly.

  When I heard about the crash over the car radio, I started to shake so badly that I had to pull off the highway. This has not happened, I told myself. You have not lost your entire family at once.

  I drove to the airport and parked at a two-hour meter, the illogic of which struck me only after I had purchased a ticket to Iowa. I picked up a teddy bear-wishful thinking?-before I boarded. I looked around the plane wondering who else was headed to Des Moines because of the crash. When I arrived in Iowa, the wounded had already been shuttled to a hospital. My taxi pulled up directly behind another taxi, and Jane stepped out. I almost fell to my knees, seeing her there with mascara running down her face and her nose dripping. I stared at her and all the words defining forgiveness caught in my throat and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why Rebecca had not come out of that taxi as well. Stupefied, I asked where Rebecca was. I did not know that Jane had not been on fight 997; I did not learn that until several minutes later, and then only by deduction.

  We were asked to go to the morgue, along with the other frantic-relatives, to survey the bodies that had been pulled from the wreckage. Jane stood outside, cleaving to a fire extinguisher on the wall, while I crept into the refrigerated rooms. I do not remember looking at the bloodied shrouds of infants and children. If Rebecca’s body had been there, I am not certain I would have admitted it to myself or the coroners, anyway.

  We found Rebecca in pediatrics, tangled in wires and tubes. I lifted Rebecca’s arm and tucked the cheaply-made yellow bear underneath it. I pulled Jane close to me, burying my nose in her hair and rubbing my palms against her familiar shoulder blades. I never really had to say anything to get Jane to come home. I do not think I read the signals wrong when I believed that she understood.

  Jane comes around the plane and stands almost directly in front of the spot where I am hidden. This is my chance. I am going to tell her. I am going to start by speaking her name.

  She is close enough to touch. Wind breathes through the wreckage of the plane. It shrieks, an unnatural note. I reach my hand through the blind of corn stalks and stretch out my fingers. “Jane,” I whisper.

  But at that moment Rebecca emerges from the twisted gyves and fetters of metal. Her hands are pressed against the sides of her head. She is screaming, running from the body of the plane with her eyes closed. Jane holds out her arms. She says something I cannot hear and Rebecca’s eyes open. I push aside the corn stalks, revealing myself, but I do not think Rebecca, who is facing me, notices. She falls against Jane’s breast, clutching and gasping. Her eyes pass right over me and they do not see a thing, of that I am sure. Jane smoothes our daughter’s hair. “Ssh,” she says. She sings something very softly, and Rebecca’s breathing turns even again. She grabs fistfuls of Jane’s shirt, over and over.

  I stand only three feet away, but it could be three hundred. I am not privy to this. I cannot heal. If given the chance, Rebecca would not run to me. I am not even sure that Jane would run to me. I let the corn close in around my face and I turn my back to them. Even if I could get Jane to listen to me, get her to understand why it is that I cannot live without her, it is not enough.

  It hits me: I am not part of this family. I would never say I am a scientist without offering proof. How can I say that I am a father, a husband?

  Jane is murmuring to Rebecca. The words get softer and softer and I realize they are walking in the opposite direction. And this is when I make what could possibly be the greatest-and most difficult-decision of my life. I will not call to them when I do not know what to say. I won’t reveal myself without having anything to show. I have much thinking to do, but right now I act purely on instinct. It is hard as hell, but I let them go.

  42 JANE

  After we check into the only motel in What Cheer, I find myself remembering things that I have not thought about for years. I could understand it if I were replaying the crash over and over in my head-that would make sense to me. But instead I am seeing my father, plain as day. He moves around the edges of the motel room, picking up glass tumblers and straightening the bathroom mirror. He flushes the toilet, twice. I do not dare fall asleep; I do not dare fall asleep. Then, just as I have expected, he starts to walk towards my bed. But he changes course and sits instead on the other bed, next to Rebecca. He breathes clouds of scotch and tugs the blanket away, revealing, ripe, my daughter.

  I was nine the first time it happened. My mother and father had a fight, and my mother left to stay with my aunt in Concord. I did everything I was supposed to: I made dinner for Daddy and Joley; I cleaned up the kitchen; I even remembered to put the hose into the sink when I ran the dishwasher. We all avoided talking about Mama.

  But because she was away, and because I felt I had earned it, I decided to go into her room, to her perfume tray. Mama smelled different every day: like oranges and spice, or fresh lemon pies, or cool marble, or even the wind. When she left the room she left a memory, a scent, behind her.

  I knew what I was looking for, a little red glass bottle in the shape of a berry that was called Framboise. The word was etched right on the glass. My mother did not let me wear perfume. Little girls who wear perfume, she said, turn into big girls who are tramps.

  I was very careful with the fragile bottle because I didn’t want to spill a drop. I turned it over on my finger the way I had seen her do every morning, and then I touched this finger, wet with the smell of raspberries, to my throat and my wrists and behind my knees. I turned around and around in a circle. How wonderful, I thought. It is with me no matter where I go.

  I stopped myself by catching my arms around the post of my parents’ bed. Standing at the door was my father.

  “What the hell have you been doing?” he said, sniffing the air. He leaned closer to grab my shirt and the smell of whiskey cut through the thickness of berries. “You will bathe. Now!”

  He made me strip naked in front of him, although I hadn’t done that in five years. He watched me from the door of the bathroom with his arms crossed. The entire time, I cried. I cried when the shower, too hot, scalded my skin and I continued to cry when I stepped onto the bath mat and toweled dry. “Go to your goddamned room,” my father said.

  I pulled a flannel nightgown over my head and turned down the covers of my bed. I told myself aloud this was like any other night, and I tried not to lie awake waiting for punishment.

/>   Joley came into my room on his way to bed. He was only five, but he knew. “Jane, what did you do wrong?” And I told him as best I could explain that I had stupidly been pretending to be Mama.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” I said. “Get out before he hits you too.”

  I waited the longest time that night, but my father did not come up to spank me. Maybe that was the worst part: imagining what terrible thing he was thinking up downstairs. A belt? A brush? When I heard him, heavy, coming up the stairs, I dove beneath the covers. I pulled my nightgown tight around my ankles, a drawstring. I counted to one hundred.

  At seventy-seven my father turned my doorknob. He sat down on the edge of the bed and waited for me to pull away the covers from my face.

  “I’m not going to punish you tonight,” my father said, “and do you know why? Because you were such a good little cook. That’s why.”

  “Really?” I asked, amazed.

  “Really.” He took off his shoes and asked if I would like to hear a story.

  “Yes,” I said, thinking this might not be so bad after all. My father started to tell me a story-a fairy tale-about an evil woman who kept her daughter locked in a closet with mice and bats. The girl’s father tried to get to this closet but the woman had huge guard dogs protecting it and he had to kill her, and then the dogs, before he could rescue his daughter.

  “And then what?” I asked, waiting to see what would happen.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t come up with the ending.”

  “You can’t just leave a story hanging,” I protested, and he said we should try to think of one together. But he was getting tired, so could he lie down next to me?

  I moved over on the bed and we talked about the ways the girl’s father might kill the evil woman. Stakes through the heart, I suggested, but my father was leaning towards poisoned tea. We came up with other things that might be lurking in the closet: ghosts and tarantulas and man-eating piranhas. Maybe the girl should try to get out by herself, I suggested, but my father insisted that was not the way it would happen.

  When he got cold he crawled under the covers, so close that when he spoke my hair fluttered. “What do you think will happen to that girl, Jane?” he said, and as he did that he put his hand on my chest.

  It wasn’t right, I knew that, because every muscle in my body tensed at once. It wasn’t right, but then again he was my father, wasn’t he? And he had been so nice. He could have hit me tonight, but he didn’t.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t know what should happen.”

  “Well, what about this? The father drives stakes through the heart of the evil woman and drugs the Dobermans with poisoned tea. That way both of our ideas come into play.” Without hesitation, like he was proud of it, he slipped his hand between my legs, coming to rest like a weight on my vagina.

  “Daddy.”

  “Do you like it, Jane?” my father whispered. “Do you like the ending?”

  I did not move. I pretended that this was some other little girl, someone else’s quivering body, and then when I heard my father’s breathing come deep and even, I slid away. I got out of bed without creaking the mattress and turned the doorknob like a whisper. I started to run as fast as I could. At the bottom of the stairs, I tripped and hit my head. Blood was running down my face when I flung open the front door and ran into the night, barefoot, no longer sure about anything, including who or what I was supposed to be.

  A policeman found me in a neighbor’s yard early the next morning,and brought me back to the house. He held my hand and rang the doorbell and my father came to answer the door. Daddy was wearing his best suit and even Joley had on a nice Sunday shirt and a button-on tie. “We just called the station,” my father said, beaming. “Damn quick service.” He joked with the policeman and invited him in for coffee. He looked at the cut on my forehead and tried to rub over the dried blood with his finger but I pulled away. “Suit yourself, Jane,” he said. “You can take care of it upstairs.” As I crawled up the steps, with Joley behind me, I heard my father talking to that policeman. “We don’t know what the problem is,” he was saying. “It’s those nightmares.”

  “What did he do, Jane?” Joley asked when I had locked the bathroom door behind us. I wouldn’t tell him, but I let him watch as I cleaned my cut with Bactine. He stripped the Band-Aid for me. It did not surprise me that the cut was the shape of a cross.

  I told Joley I had to pee and pushed him outside. Then I locked the door again and pulled my nightgown over my head. I ripped it into shreds and threw it in the garbage pail. On the back of the door was the full-length mirror Mama used when she got all dressed up to go out. I could hear my father downstairs, laughing. I gazed into the mirror, expecting to find outlined the very parts that I could say I hated-but I was standing tall, thin, arms at my sides. I knew from this alien rhythm in my heart that I had become a different person. I did not understand how, under the circumstances, I could possibly look the same.

  43 JANE

  I’ve told Rebecca she can plan whatever she’d like for our day in Chicago. Me, I don’t much feel in the mood. I didn’t get much sleep last night, and because I screamed through the nightmare, neither did Rebecca. When I woke up she had her arms around me. “Wake up, wake up,” she said over and over. When I came around I did not tell her what my nightmare was about. I said it had to do with the plane crash. And then, in the morning when she was showering, I called Joley.

  After speaking to him I was inclined to drive straight through to Massachusetts. To hell with Joley and his letters; to hell with my problems charting direction. We could be in Massachusetts by tomorrow morning, according to the legend of the U.S. map. In the car, I asked Rebecca what she thought about this. I expected her to jump at the chance: I’d seen her counting the states left to cover when she thought I wasn’t looking. But Rebecca looked at me and her mouth dropped. “After all this, you can’t just quit halfway!”

  “What’s the big deal?” I said. “The point all along was to get to Massachusetts.”

  Rebecca looked at me and her eyes clouded. She settled into her seat, and she crossed her arms over her chest. “Do whatever you want.”

  What could I do? I drove to Chicago. Even if we decided to drive straight through, we still had to go to Chicago.

  My first choice would have been the Art Institute or the Sears Tower Skydeck, but Rebecca opts for the Shedd Aquarium, an octagon of white marble on the edge of Lake Michigan. The brochure Rebecca picks up on the way inside boasts that it is the largest indoor aquarium in the world.

  Rebecca runs ahead to the huge tank in the center of the aquarium, the Caribbean coral reef complete with rays and sharks and sea turtles and eels. She jumps back as a sand shark lunges at a piece of fish in the hand of a diver. “Look at its belly. I bet they always keep it full. Why bother to eat when you aren’t hungry?”

  The shark rips its teeth into the fish, biting it in half. As it takes the second part, it is more gentle. The diver strokes the shark on its nose. It seems to be made of grey rubber.

  Rebecca and I walk through the saltwater exhibits, where fish congregate in bright splashes like kites against an open sky. They come in the most incredible colors; I have always been amazed by this. What is the point of being fuchsia, or lemon, or violet, when you are stuck under the water where no one can see you?

  We pass polka-dotted clownfish and blowfish that puff up like porcupines when the other fish come too close. There are fish here from the Mediterranean and the Arctic Ocean. There are fish here that have traveled the world.

  I am stuck in front of a magenta starfish. I have never seen anything so vivid in my life. “Come look at this,” I tell Rebecca. She stands beside me and mouths, Wow. “Why do you think that leg is shorter?” I ask.

  A passing woman in a white lab coat (marine biologist?) hears me and leans over the small tank. Her breath fogs the window. “Starfish have the power of regeneration. Which means if a leg gets cut off or ripped
in some way, they can grow a new one back.”

  “Like newts,” Rebecca says, and the woman nods.

  “I knew that,” I say, primarily to myself. “It has to do with their habitat, tide pools. In a tide pool, waves come and destroy the marine equilibrium every few minutes, so nothing ever really gets a chance to settle.”

  “True,” the woman says. “Are you a biologist?”

  “My husband is.”

  Rebecca nods. “Oliver Jones. Do you know him?”

  The woman sucks in her breath. “Not the Oliver Jones. Oh, my. Would you mind very much if I brought someone here to meet you?”

  “Dr. Jones isn’t with us on this trip,” I tell her. “So I don’t know as I’d be all that interesting to one of your colleagues.”

  “Oh, you most certainly are. By association, if nothing else.”

  She disappears behind a panel that I didn’t realize was a door. “How did you know about tide pools?” Rebecca asks.

  “Rote memorization. They’re all your father talked about when we were dating. If you’re a good girl I’ll tell you about hermit crabs and jellyfish.”

  Rebecca presses her nose up to the glass. “Isn’t it awesome, that someone in Chicago would know Daddy? I mean, it kind of makes us celebrities.”

  In the oceanic community, I suppose she is right. I hadn’t even associated this aquarium with Oliver, at least not on a conscious level. These delicate fish and quivering invertebrates are so different from the hunkering whales Oliver loves. It’s hard to believe they exist in the same place. It’s hard to believe that a whale wouldn’t take up all the space, all the food. But then again I know better. These tropical fish are in no danger from the humpbacks, which are mammals. Whales don’t prey on them. They screen plankton and plants through their baleen.

  I have a vision of a sample falling two stories in a Ziploc bag, smashing against the blue Mexican tiles of the foyer in San Diego. Baleen.