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

What my mother says is: “I know you think I’m betraying your father.”

I stare up at her in amazement. This isn’t about me at all. She hasn’t even noticed me and Hadley.

“I know that I am still married to him. Don’t you think every time I see you in the morning I think about what I’ve left behind in California? A whole life, Rebecca, I left my whole life. I left a man who, at least in some ways, depends on me. And that’s why sometimes I wonder what I’m doing out here, in this godforsaken farm zone-”She waves her arm in the air, “-with this-”

When her voice falls off, I interrupt her. “This what?”

“This absolutely incredible man,” she says.

An absolutely incredible man?

My mother stops walking. “You’re pissed off at me.”

“No I’m not.”

“I can tell.”

“I’m not. Really.”

“You don’t have to lie . . .”

“Mom,” I say, louder. “I’m not lying.” Am I? I face her and put my hands on my hips. I think, who is the child here? “So what’s been going on between you and Sam, anyway?”

My mother turns beet red. Beet red, on my own mother! “Nothing,” she admits. “But I’ve been having some crazy thoughts. It’s nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

My own mother. Who would have thought. “I didn’t think you two got along.”

“Well, neither did I,” she says. “But I guess compatibility isn’t the issue.” She stares in the direction of Hadley and Sam, who are waiting with Uncle Joley at the front of the ice cream line. This place is different from the one we went to yesterday, back when my mother and Sam didn’t like each other. This place makes its own ice cream. It has only seven flavors and Sam says it’s always busy. “We should head back,” my mother says, without any real determination.

When we first got here, Sam wanted nothing to do with my mother. After the whole sheep-shearing fiasco, which was a lousy first impression, he’d told Hadley my mother was some uptown bitch with a lot to learn about real life. And when Hadley told me, and I’d told my mother, she’d snorted and said that an apple farm in East Jesus wasn’t real life.

And then last night they just started hanging around together. When I first saw it I couldn’t believe it; I thought that my mother found Sam to be such a hick, she had to see it for herself. In truth, I didn’t pay much attention. I had been spending time with Hadley- we’d hit it off immediately, and then after last night, well, who knew what would come of this. Hadley, who was so fascinating. He could do things that I had never seen anyone do: make seedlings grow, plane a rough tree into a board, build things that would last forever. He was absolutely incredible.

Absolutely incredible. All this time, whether she knows it or not, my mother has been falling in love.

“I think you’ve got the hots for Sam,” I say, testing the idea out loud.

“Oh, please. I’m a married lady, remember?”

I stare at her. “ Do you remember?” I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t. I could barely conjure a picture of my father’s face, and I had less of a reason to want to be away from him. When I thought about him really hard, I could see his eyes-wide, blue, unbelievably tired. His eyes, and the lines around his mouth (although not his mouth itself) and the bend of his knuckles holding a pen. That’s it, the memory of fifteen years.

“Of course I remember,” my mother says, annoyed. “I’ve been married to your father for fifteen years. Aren’t you supposed to love the person you marry?”

“You tell me.”

This stops my mother dead in her tracks. “Yes, you are supposed to.” She says the words slowly. She seems to be trying to convince herself. “Sam is just a friend.” She waves her hand in front of us, as if she’s clearing away everything else she’s said. “My friend,” she repeats. Then she looks at me with such confusion I think she’s forgotten that she has been speaking to me all along. “I just wanted you to know that’s where things stand.”

“Well, I appreciate that,” I say, and I try not to laugh. I don’t imagine that’s what she wants to hear. “Our ice cream is going to melt.” She grabs my hand to take me back to the counter. I shake her away, because Hadley is watching. “Please, Mom. I’m not three.”

I walk over to Hadley and offer him some of my cone. He smiles and pulls me to sit on his lap while he winds his tongue along the ridges made by the soft ice cream machine. We end up trading our cones, because after all I do not like creamsicle.

My mother is standing almost diagonally across from us. She is feeding Sam her cone while Sam is feeding her his cone. Sam misjudges the distance and dots a little vanilla on my mother’s nose. She giggles and mashes her cone onto Sam’s chin. Watching them, you have to smile. She’s acting like a kid, I think. She’s acting like me.

Uncle Joley, Hadley and I ride in the back of the red pickup on our way to Pickerel Pond. It’s the place where Sam learned how to swim when he was a kid, a few miles away from the orchard. In the fifties, Sam yells from the cab of the truck, there was only this one pond. It’s the one we’ll see with lily pads that’s still stocked with fish. But then the residents in the area chipped in and they dug a huge hole beside it, added sand for the bottom, and built swimming docks. For a summer fee, your whole family could come and swim whenever.

It is a perfect Sunday. The sun has scalded the metal of the flatbed and all three of us are sitting on our T-shirts. There isn’t much of a wind, but there seems to be a breeze when you find yourself thinking about it. The air smells like luck. “I think you’ll like this place,” Hadley says over the roar of tires. “No undertow.”

Maybe my mother will even swim. I’ve always assumed that it’s the current of the ocean that keeps her from venturing into the water. In fact, she has been very optimistic about coming here for a picnic. She packed the lunch herself and keeps talking about how nice it will be to cool off.

The sun beats on the crown of my head. I hold my palm up against it for a minute of shade. “It’s like fire,” I tell Hadley, and I make him touch it too.

Uncle Joley, who has brought a ukulele, is trying to play the beginning bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” He has almost got the notes right, but it sounds like sick luau music. To me it is not soothing, but it lulls Hadley to sleep. His head rests in my lap. The entire trip, Uncle Joley strums unlikely songs: “Happy Birthday,” the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, “Blue Velvet,” “Twist and Shout.”

Sam pulls into what looks like a thicket, but it opens up to a dirt path and then becomes a road. At the end is a parking lot with a metal gate and rusted hinges. “They tried to lock up here at night for a few years,” Sam yells to us. “But kids kept jumping the fence to party on the beach. When they left the gates open at night, all the kids stopped coming here.”

Hadley, who has woken up, says, “That’s ‘cause it wasn’t fun anymore. You only want to make trouble at a place that’s off limits.”

Sam leans his head out his window and tries to look at Hadley. “You used to come here?” He laughs. “Figures.”

Sam and my mother carry the cooler to the pond, and I take the towels, the paddle games and the yellow kickball. Uncle Joley brings his ukulele. At a green post, Sam signs his name on a clipboard.

The pond is much larger than I had envisioned. It is almost perfectly square, but then again it was man-made. Adjacent to the swimming pond is the real pond, Pickerel Pond, and it is so large that I cannot see one of its edges. There are two Sunfishes, a muddy paddle-boat and a metal rowboat on the shore of the big pond, all labeled PPA, Pickerel Pond Association.