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

I shake my head. Hadley takes my shoulders in his hands, regardless of what my father has said, which I do not remember anyway. He places his head so close to mine I can read his mind. He is thinking: I love you. Don’t forget that. “Let me talk,” I whisper, but nobody seems to hear me.

“Look, she came to me. She hitched. We were headed to your place today to work this all out.” His words are too loud.

“Hadley,” Sam says slowly, “I think you’d better let Rebecca come home with us. And I think you’d better stay here for a while.”

Let me talk, I say again, but I am ignored. It occurs to me I may not be speaking at all.

Hadley stands up and walks away from the clearing. He has his hands on his hips. When he turns around the veins in his forehead are strained and blue, and he stares at Sam. “You know me. You’ve known me forever. I can’t believe,” here he looks at my father, “I cannot believe that you- you -would doubt me. You’re my friend, Sam. You’re like my brother. I didn’t tell her to come here-I wouldn’t do that. But I’m not just gonna turn my back and let you take her away. Jesus, Sam,” he takes a step backward. “I love her.”

With all the energy I have I lunge towards Hadley, not quite standingand not quite crawling. He catches me in his arms and presses my face into his chest. He whispers into my hair things I cannot make out.

“Let go of her, you bastard,” my father mutters. Sam lays a hand on his arm but he shakes it off and yells into the sky. “Let go of my daughter!”

“Give her to us, Hadley,” Sam says softly.

“Sir,” the ranger says, the first word I hear without the static of the trees.

“No,” I whisper to Hadley.

He kneels down and takes my face in his hands. “Don’t cry, now. You look like an onion when you cry, your nose gets all long . . .” I look up at him. “There you go. Now I said I’d come for you, didn’t I, and your father came a long way to see you. Go on home.” His voice cracks, and he swallows hard. I trace his Adam’s apple with my finger. “You need a doctor. Go back to Sam’s and get better, and I’ll come for you. We’ll work this all out like I said. You go with them.”

“Give her to us,” Sam says again.

I know as sure as I know myself that if I leave that mountain without Hadley I will never see him again. “I can’t,” I tell Hadley, and it’s true. Except for him, I don’t have anyone left who will love me. I wrap my arms around his waist and pull myself closer.

“You have to go with them,” he says gently. “Don’t you want to make me happy? Don’t you see?”

“No,” I say, pulling myself to Hadley.

“Go, Rebecca,” Hadley says, a little louder. He loosens my grip on his waist and holds my hands.

“I won’t.” Tears are running down my face and my nose is running and I don’t give a damn. I will not, I tell myself. I will not.

Hadley looks at the sky and with great force pushes me away by my wrists. He pushes so hard that I land several feet away on the rocks and the dirt. He pushes so hard that, without me beside him, he loses his balance.

I try to grab at him but I am too far away. I catch the air, and he falls over the edge of the cliff.

He falls so slowly, twisting in a somersault like a rough-cut acrobat, and I hear the rush of the river I heard last night before there was the beating of his heart in my hand. Thick as breath, I hear his spine hit the rocks and the water below.

After this, everything that has built up inside me spills out. It is nonverbal. It is a chord that comes when a knife cleaves your soul. And only now, with this sound surrounding, does everyone choose to listen.

My car runs out of gas in Carefree, Arizona, of all places, and I am forced to walk a sweltering half-mile to find a gas station. It is not the mom-and-pop operation I am expecting, but rather a respectable steel and chrome Texaco. Only one attendant is there.

“Hey,” he says as I walk up. He doesn’t really look at me, so I have the opportunity to survey him first. He has long brown hair and terrible acne; I place him at seventeen. “You’re not from around here.”

“Oh,” I say, more sarcastic than I have to be. “How can you tell?”

The boy laughs through his nose and shrugs. He seems to actually be thinking up an answer to my rhetorical statement. “I know everyone in this town, I guess.”

“That’s astute of you.” I smile.

“Astute,” he repeats, trying the word on for size. As if he remembers his occupation, he jumps off the ten-gallon drum he has been resting on and asks if I’d like some help.

“Some unleaded,” I tell him. “My car is down the road.”

He focuses his attention on my gas can, a gift from the bank where Jane and I have a savings account. Marine Midland Bank, it is called, and its logo is a streamlined cartoon whale-we chose the institution for obvious emotional reasons.

“Hey,” the boy says. “I seen one of these.”

“A gas can? I’d imagine so.”

“No, a whale can. You know, this picture thing here. There was one in here yesterday being filled up. Some lady who filled her tank and then found out we took credit cards and asked if we could fill up the spare can too.”

Jane, I recall, has a can like it. The second year we were banking-with Midland, we chose another gas can. We already had a nice toaster.

“What did this woman look like?” I can feel my neck getting flushed and the hair on the back of my neck standing. “Was there anyone with her?”

“Shit, I don’t know. We get a million people in here a day.” He looks up at me, and to my complete embarrassment I recognize this as a look of pity. “They weren’t from this town though, I can tell you that.”

I grab him by the shirt collar and hold him pinned to the diesel fuel tank. “Listen to me,” I say, enunciating clearly. “I am looking for my wife and that may be her. Now you think about it and try to remember what she looks like. You try to remember if she had a little girl with her. If you talked to her about where she was going.”

“Okay, okay,” the boy says, pushing me away. He gives me a sideways look and makes a slow circle around the self-service island. “I think she had dark hair,” he says, looking at my face to see if he is getting the answer right. He smacks his hands on his thighs, then. “The girl was pretty. A real fox, you know? Blond and a tight little ass. She asked for the key to the bathroom,” he laughs, “and I told her I’d give her the key to my house too, if she met me there after work.”

This is the best news I have heard in hours. Nothing is certain with such a vague description, but in a situation such as this some hint of evidence is better than nothing. “Where were they headed?” I ask, as calm as I can be given the circumstances.

“Route Seventeen,” he says. “They asked how you get back to Route Seventeen. Maybe they’re headed to the Canyon.”

Of course they were going to the Grand Canyon. Jane was with Rebecca, and Rebecca would want to see as much as possible, each tourist trap en route. An angle I hadn’t considered.

“Thank you,” I say to the boy. “You have made my day.”

The boy grins. He needs braces. “That’s a buck twenty-five,” he says. “Hell. It’s on the house.”

I run from the gas station without thanking the boy. I do not notice the heat or the distance on the journey back. The Grand Canyon. I feed in the gas and turn the ignition, imagining this union of Jane, Rebecca and the majestic red walls that were cut by the Colorado River.

In my opinion, if you leave things to their natural course, they go bad. Apples that grow wild along the shores of brooks tend towards blight. I’m not saying that you can’t get a perfect apple without chemical help, but I’ll tell you it’s not easy.