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

She picks up an antique marbled pitcher that has been in Sam’s family for a long time. Without even really noticing, she lets it slip out of her grasp and shatter on the floor. “I came here and I was so happy, for a little while, I forgot again. I forgot about your father, and I forgot about you. I was so crazy in love-” she smiles, far away, “-that I didn’t believe anyone else could feel the way I did. Including- especially -my own daughter. If you could fall in love with someone who was twenty-five, and it was all right, then it couldn’t possibly be all right for me to fall in love with someone who was twenty-five. Can you see?”

I have seen my mother with Sam in the shadow of the orchard; they’re joined at the mind. That is what has been different about these weeks: I have never seen her like this. I have never enjoyed being with her so much. I don’t understand what my father is doing here or why he wants her back. The woman he wants isn’t here. That woman doesn’t exist anymore.

“But I’ve watched you with him,” I say.

“If it was right, Rebecca,” my mother says, “it would have happened years ago.”

I don’t have to ask her why she is going home, anymore. I already know the answer. My mother thinks she has failed: not just my father, but me. She can’t have Sam; it’s her punishment. In the real world, the best of circumstances don’t always come to be. In the real world, “forever” may only be a weekend.

My mother looks at me. When our eyes connect there are more words that come in silence. What you cannot have, I cannot have. My life created yours, and because of this my life depends on yours. How strange, I think. I learned about love’s Catch-22 before my own mother. I taught this lesson to her.

She smiles at me and she lifts the sheet of gauze from my chest. “Sometimes I can’t believe you’re only fifteen,” she murmurs. She runs her fingers across my nipples and over my breasts. As my mother touches me the wounds begin to close on themselves. We watch in silence as split skin heals and bruises diffuse. Still, there will be scars.

When he comes into the room in the middle of the night I am expecting him. He is the only one who hasn’t come to see me since I regained consciousness. First the door opens a crack, then I see the flashlight’s head, and by the time Uncle Joley makes his way to the bed, I know where we are headed.

“If we drive now, we’ll be there in plenty of time,” he tells me, “and no one will have figured out where we’ve gone.”

He carries me in his arms to an old blue pickup truck that didn’t have an engine for several weeks. He jump starts it by rolling it in neutral down the hill of the driveway. He has provided me with a cape-orange with fuschia pom-poms, a throwback to the seventies. Sitting between us on the cracked leather seat is a thermos of black coffee and an oat-raisin muffin.

“I don’t suppose you’re feeling like yourself yet.” When I shake my head he turns on the windshield wipers. He squirts washer fluid, which fires over the back of the truck. It trickles into the flatbed, spurting like a water gun. “So much for that,” Joley says.

He is a handsome man in a faded kind of way. His hair curls at his ears, even after he’s just had a haircut. The first thing you notice about his face is the space between his eyes-so narrow that it makes him look either mongoloid or very intelligent, depending on your frame of reference. And then there are his lips, which are full like a girl’s and as pink as zinnias. If you take your favorite Mel Gibson poster, and fold it up and put it in the pocket of your jeans and then send them through the washer and dryer, the picture you’d wind up with would be kinder, less startling, and smooth at the edges. Uncle Joley.

The sun comes up as we cross the New Hampshire border. “I don’t remember much of this,” I tell him. “I spent a good deal of the trip in the back of a truck.”

“Let me guess,” he says. “Refrigerated?”

He makes me smile. When my father and Sam found us, I was running a 104-degree fever.

Uncle Joley doesn’t talk much. He knows it is not what I need. He asks every now and then if I will pour him a cup of coffee, and I do, holding it to his lips like he is the one who is sick.

We pass the brown road sign that delineates the White Mountain-region. “It’s beautiful here,” I say, “isn’t it?”

“Do you think it’s beautiful?” my uncle asks. He catches me off guard.

I survey the peaks and the gulleys. In Southern California, the land is flat and offers no surprises. “Well, yes.”

“Then it is,” he says.

We drive on roads that I have never seen. I doubt they are even really roads. They snake through the woods and look more like two tracks left from winter skiers than a path for a car, but they do provide a short cut. The truck bounces back and forth, spilling the coffee and rolling the untouched muffin under the seat. We end up in Hadley’s mother’s backyard, which I can’t help but recognize. We park the truck like a peace offering in the small space between the house and Mount Deception.

“I’m glad you could come,” Mrs. Slegg says. She opens the screen door. “I heard what happened to you.”

She puts her arms around me and helps me into her toasty kitchen. I am so ashamed. Her son is the one who has died, and here she is fussing over my scratches. “I’m sorry.” I stumble over the words Joley has coached me to say. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Hadley’s mother’s eyes widen, as if she is shocked to hear any phrase like this at all. “Sugar, it was your loss too.” She sits down on the ladderback chair beside mine. She covers my hand with her own puffy fingers. She is wearing a blue housecoat and a loud apron with an appliquéd raspberry. “I know just what the two of you need. Where have my wits been? You come all the way from Massachusetts and I’m sitting here like a tub of butter.” She opens the breadbox and takes out fresh rolls and crullers and sesame cakes.

“Thanks, Mrs. Slegg, but I’m not very hungry yet.”

“You call me Mother Slegg,” she urges. “And no wonder, a little-thing like you. You can probably barely stand alone in a wind, much less take this kind of pain standing tall.”

Uncle Joley walks over to the window. He peers out at the mountain. “Where is the funeral going to be?”

“Not far from here. A cemetery where my husband is buried, God rest his soul. We have a family plot.” She says it so casually that I start to watch her for signs: did she not love her own son? Is she a closet mourner, tearing at her hair when everyone leaves?

A boy comes into the kitchen. He takes the milk out of the refrigerator before acknowledging us. When he turns, he looks so much like Hadley I feel as if I have been punched. “You Rebecca?”

I nod, speechless. “You’re-”

“Cal,” he says. “I’m the younger one. Well, I was.” He turns to his mother. “Should we go?” He is wearing a flannel shirt and jeans.

Cal, two of Hadley’s friends from high school and Uncle Joley are asked to be the pallbearers at the cemetery. There is a preacher who gives a nice, respectable service. In the middle of it all a robin lands on the casket. It begins to peck at the ring of flowers. After ten seconds of watching this peacefully, Mrs. Slegg screams to the preacher to stop. She falls onto the ground and crawls towards the casket to grab the flowers. In the flurry of noise the bird flies away. Someone leads Hadley’s mother away.

I do not cry throughout the entire ceremony. No matter where I turn I can see that mountain, waiting to claim Hadley again when he is part of the earth. Here I will remain with worms that are thy chambermaids, I find myself thinking, and for the life of me I cannot place the quote. It must be something I have learned in school but it is hard to believe. It seems so long ago, and I was such a different person.