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

I see his eyes first-soft and brown as earth, the color of thunderstorms. They get wider as they see me. “What are you doing here?” Hadley says, grinning. He swings open the screen door and steps onto the porch in front of me. This object of my affection. He takes me into his arms and lifts me off my feet, holding me level with himself.

“Surprised?”

“Hell, yes.” Hadley touches my face with the pads of his fingers. “I can’t believe you’re here.” He cranes his neck around the pillars of the porch. “Who’s with you?”

“I came myself. I ran away.”

“Oh, no, Rebecca.” He straddles a rusted iron stool. “You can’t stay here. Where do you think they’ll come looking first?”

At this realization I sway again, thinking this has all been for nothing.-“I almost got raped coming here,” I say, starting to cry. “And I think I’m sick, and I don’t want to be at Sam’s without you.” My nose starts to run, and I wipe it on my sleeve. “Don’t you want me here?”

“Sssh.” He pulls me closer so I am standing between his legs. He locks his ankles behind me. “Of course I want you here.” He kisses my lips, my eyes and my forehead. “You’re burning. What’s happened to you?”

I tell him the story, the entire story, which makes him punch the door frame at one point and laugh at another. “I’ve still got to get you away from here,” he says. “Sam’ll come looking.” He tells me to wait here, and he disappears back into the house. Through the corner of the window I see a television set turned to The Twilight Zone, fuzzy pink slippers propped on an ottoman, and a square of quilted orange robe.

“Who was it?” I hear someone say.

Hadley comes back with two blankets, a loaf of bread, a plastic-cup and three cans of Chef Boyardee pasta. He stuffs all this into a knapsack. “I told my mother you were a friend of mine, and we were going out to a bar. That way she won’t worry, and she won’t know a thing if they come to ask her questions.”

Hadley takes my hand and leads me into the backyard, up to the face of this mountain. “This way,” he says. He places my foot in a crevice and shows me what to do.

Mount Deception is not particularly hard to climb. It levels off and becomes a flat plain for a while, then rises ten feet again, and so on until you get to the top. From an aerial view it must look like the pyramids in Egypt. Hadley carries the knapsack and climbs behind me in case I fall, which I’m proud to say I do not do. We continue like this for about an hour, using the moon as a torch.

Hadley takes me to a small clearing in a knot of pine trees. He walks me around the parameters of this space, and then holds me by the waist as we come to the north corner. There is a straight drop, a hundred feet maybe, to a cavern below with a stuttering river.

While Hadley makes us a home, I sit on the edge of this cliff, dangling my feet. I am not afraid of heights; they fascinate me. I drop twigs and stones, progressively larger, and try to hear how long it takes before they hit the rocks.

“Dinner,” Hadley says, so I turn back to the clearing. He has stretched one blanket over pine needles to form a surprisingly soft mattress. In the center is a candle (I hadn’t seen him carrying that, it must have been in his pocket) and a can of Raviolios. “I forgot utensils,” he says. He picks up the can and feeds me a piece of pasta with his fingers. It tastes cold and tinny, absolutely delicious. “Now, you promise you won’t get up in the middle of the night to pee and take a wrong turn?” Hadley rubs my arms, which are puckered with the cold. My teeth chatter.

“I won’t go anywhere without you,” I say. “I mean it.”

“Sssh.” Hadley stares at me as if he knows he will be tested on how well he remembers the shape of my mouth, the color of my eyes. “They don’t know you like I do,” he says. “They don’t understand how it is.” He lies down on his stomach and leans his cheek on my thigh. “Here’s the plan. We’ll stay here overnight, and then I’ll get the truck in the morning, and we’ll take a drive down to Stow again. If you talk to your mom about all this-if she sees we came back of our own free will-I think it will work out.”

“I’m not going back there,” I tell him. “I hate what she did.”

“Come on, Rebecca, everyone makes mistakes. Do you blame her? If your daughter was dating a guy ten years older wouldn’t you be a little worried?”

The moon dances across his hair. “Whose side are you on?” I say, but he’s kissing my knee, that ticklish spot, and I can’t really stay angry at him.

I lie down beside him and feel his arms close around me and for the first time in hours I get warm. He takes off his jacket and wraps it around my shoulders awkwardly, and when our foreheads bump together we laugh. As he kisses me I think about the smells of the cider press and the way summer feels when you know it is going to end.

I unbutton Hadley’s flannel shirt and hold it soft against my skin. The hair on his chest is an unlikely shade of red. It circles in spirals that remind me of my father’s nautical maps. I rub my fingers across them, the opposite way, making the hair stand on end. He sings to me.

Soon we are at that point we have been at before, naked except for each other. Hadley’s outstretched hands can cover the length of my spine. “Please,” I say to him. “I don’t want to be a kid anymore.”

Hadley smiles. He pushes the hair back from my forehead. “You aren’t.” He kisses my neck and then he kisses my breasts and my stomach and my hips and then down there. “What are you doing,” I whisper, but I am really speaking to myself. I feel something starting, some energy, that draws blood from my fingertips and begins unexpected to open. I pull back on Hadley’s hair and scratch at his neck. I am afraid I will never get to see his face again. But then he slides up my body and in and we move like a sail, like a wind; he kisses me, full, on the lips, and to my great surprise I taste like the ocean.

“Jesus, Hadley,” Sam says, and Hadley jumps up. He’s wearing his boxers. I pull his shirt over me and roll a blanket around my legs. I cannot see everyone clearly; there is some kind of fire behind my eyes.

“Hadley.” My voice is not my own. “This is my father.”

Unsure of what to do, Hadley holds out his hand. My father does not take it. I’m puzzled seeing my father in this environment. He is wearing suit pants and a polo shirt and brown loafers. I am amazed that he could climb up here with a sole like that.

My head is throbbing so heavily I lie back down. The park ranger-the only person here who has been paying attention to me-kneels down and asks if I am all right. “To tell you the truth,” I say, “I don’t really know.” I try to sit up with his help, but there are shooting pains in my ears and in my eyes. Hadley kneels down beside me. He tells the ranger to get me away from everyone, where there’s air.

“Get the hell away from her,” my father says. “Don’t touch her.”

Sam, standing beside him, tells Hadley it might be best.

“What do you know?” Hadley shouts at Sam.

I am having a great deal of trouble concentrating on the scene at hand. When people speak, I can’t hear the actual words until several seconds later. The sun swims in between their faces, bleaching them like overexposed photos. I try very hard to focus on Sam’s eyes, the brightest color of anything in front of me. Beside Sam, my father seems small and two-dimensional, like a paper doll.

“Rebecca,” my father’s voice comes to me through a tunnel. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

“He wouldn’t hurt her.” Sam leans in close to me with a face curved like a camera lens. “Can you stand up?”