Jodie Picoult - Songs of the Humpback Whale - A Novel in Five Voices

If you are reading this you’ve made it to Gila Bend and I’m sure you’ve gotten yourself a good meal and a decent night’s rest. When you leave the P.O. you’ll see an apothecary on your right. The owner of the store is named Joe. Ask him how to get to Route 17. You’re heading towards the Grand Canyon. It’s something you ought to see. Tell Joe I sent you, and he’ll set you straight.

It’s an eight-hour drive. Same thing: Find a place to stay and go to the P.O. in the morning-the one closest to the northernmost point of the canyon. There’ll be a letter waiting to take you somewhere else.

About the circus: They took pictures of us riding that elephant, but you never knew. One where most of your face was hidden became the poster for Ringling Bros. the next year. It came in the mail when you were at school; I had been let out early from kindergarten. Mama showed me and wanted to hang it up on the wall of my bedroom. My pretty boy, she called me. I wouldn’t let her hang it up. I couldn’t stand seeing your hands around my waist but your face lost in the shadows. In the end she threw it out, or she said she did. She sat me down and said that I had been given my looks by God and that I’d have to get used to it. I told her, flat out, that I didn’t understand. They made me ride up front because of how I look, I told her. But don’t they know Jane is the beautiful one?

Love to you and Rebecca.

Joley

A clamshell of color snaps open and shut several inches from my face flashes lights and the sounds of animals that are dying what has happened I ask you what has happened? sometimes it comes to me times like this when the world has turned black and white sometimes it comes and it will not leave it does not leave no matter how many times I scream or I pray.

I saw people ripped in two flesh split like broken dolls in what used to be an aisle outside the sky had shattered and the world which I had always imagined as soft cotton blue was angry and stained with pain.

Do you see I had witnessed the end of the world I saw heaven and earth trade places I knew where devils came from I was so young at three and a half with the weight of my life on my brow I knew for sure my head would burst.

At the end of it all row nine sailed inches away like a glider in the night and over its rotten edge I watched the fireworks diamond glass explosions and in spite of myself I started to cry.

There is a sound that the mute make when they are murdered I learned this years later on the evening news their vocal cords cannot vibrate so what the listener hears instead is the air quivering pushing in pushing out a wall of silence this is the voice of terror in a vacuum.

For days I have felt a leopard crouching on my chest. I breathe in the stale air it exhales. It scratches at the inside of my chin and it kisses my neck. When it shifts its weight, my own ribs move.

“She’s coming to,” I hear, the first words in a long time.

I open my eyes and see in this order: my mother, my father, and the tiny attic room of the Big House. I squeeze my eyes shut. Something isn’t right: I have been expecting the house in San Diego. I have forgotten entirely about Massachusetts.

I try to sit up but the leopard screams and claws at me.

“What’s the matter with her?” my father is saying. “Help her, Jane. What’s the matter.” My mother presses cold towels against my forehead but does not notice this monster at all.

“Can’t you see it,” I say, but it comes out a whisper. I am drowning in fluid. I cough and phlegm comes up, and keeps coming. My father holds tissues into my palm. My mother is crying. Neither one of them understands that if the leopard will just move, I will be fine.

“We’re going to go home,” my father says. “We’re getting out of here.”

He is wearing the wrong clothes, the wrong face to be on this farm. I search my mother’s face for an answer to this. “Let me be with her a minute, Oliver.”

“We need to work this out together,” my father says.

My mother puts her hand on his shoulder. It looks cool, like a ladyslipper or a corner of the hayloft. “Please.”

The hayloft. “Tell me this,” I say. I try to sit up. “Hadley is dead.”

My mother and father look at each other and without a word my father leaves the room. “Yes,” my mother says. Her eyes spill over with tears. “I’m so sorry, Rebecca.” She reaches across the heart-sewn quilt. She buries her face in the cave of my stomach, in the breast fur of this leopard. “I am so sorry.” The animal stands and stretches and vanishes.

To my surprise I do not cry. “Tell me everything you know.”

My mother sits up, shocked at my bravery. She says that Hadley broke his neck in the fall. The doctors said he died instantaneously. It has been three days, but it took this long to raise his body from the gorge.

“What have I been doing for three days?” I whisper. I am embarrassed that I do not know the answer.

“You have pneumonia. You’ve been sleeping most of the time. You were gone when your father first arrived here-you’d run off after Hadley. He insisted on going with Sam to find you-”She looks away. “He didn’t like the idea of Sam staying here with me.”

So he knows, I think. How interesting. “What does he mean, ‘We’re going home’?”

My mother holds her hand to my head. “Back to California. What did you think?”

I am missing something. “What have we been doing here?”

“You don’t have to hear this now. You need to rest.”

I pull the quilt away from myself and gag. All over my legs are bruises and scrapes and yellowed gauze wrappings. My bare chest is crossed with raked furrows of dried blood. “When Hadley fell, you tried to climb down after him,” my mother says. “Sam pulled you away, and you started to scratch at yourself. You wouldn’t stop, no matter how many things they wrapped around you, or how much sedation you’d been given.” She starts to cry again. “You kept saying you were trying to tear your heart out.”

“I don’t know why I bothered,” I whisper. “You’d already done that.”

She walks to the other side of the room, as far away as she can possibly get. “What do you want me to say, Rebecca? What do you want me to say?”

I don’t know. She can’t change what has been done. I begin to realize how things are different when you grow up. When I was little, she would sing to me when I was sick. She would bring me red jello and sleep curled beside me to listen for changes in my breathing. She would pretend I was a princess locked in a tower by a wicked magician, and she acted as my lady-in-waiting. Together we would watch the door for my shining white knight.

“Why do you want me to forgive you?” I say. “What do you get out of it?” I turn away and Sam’s sheep, all seven, scuttle down the path they’ve carved in the middle field.

“Why do I want you to forgive me? Because I never forgave my father, and I know what it will do to you. When I was growing up my father would hit me. He hit me and he hit my mother and I tried to keep him from hitting Joley. He broke my heart and eventually he broke me. I never believed I could be anything important- why else would my own father hurt me? And then I forgot about it. And I married Oliver and three years later he hit me. That’s when I left the first time.”

“The plane crash,” I say, and she nods.

“I went back to him because of you. I knew that more than anything else I had to make sure you grew up feeling safe. And then I hit your father, and it all came back again.” She buries her face in her hands. “It all came back again, and this time it was part of me. No matter how far I run, no matter how many states or countries I cross I can’t get it out of myself. I never forgave him. He won. He’s in me, Rebecca.”