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

Sam comes up behind me. “You can take out the boats if no one else is using them.” He turns to my mother, pointing out the sights that are missing at this swimming pond, twenty years after its creation. “There used to be a diving board off that dock. And over here? Second Dock here didn’t always connect to the shore. If you wanted to get to it you had to swim to it. And when you’re a little kid, you have to take a swimming test each summer to be allowed to swim beyond the buoys.”

Hadley and Uncle Joley, who apparently have this all planned, take the towels and the ball from my arms. The grab me, kicking and screaming, and toss me on the count of three off First Dock. Somewhere, a fat lifeguard yells at us. No throwing. Not off that dock.

Hadley jumps in after me and grabs my ankle. He pulls me under. The water is murky, colored with some blue dye, and colder in some spots than others. I tread water, trying to find a warm place where Hadley will not try to drown me again.

Uncle Joley, who has been speaking with the lifeguard, does a swan-dive into the pond. He surfaces, already talking. “The reason this place looks like a giant Tid-E-Bowl is because of chemicals. They put the blue in to cloud the water so algae doesn’t grow as easily.”

“Algae,” I say, “yuck.” I am sure there is algae or something worse at the beaches of San Diego, but there you rest assured it keeps going out with the tide.

My mother keeps herself busy by spreading our towels on the small stretch of beach. It’s funny, it isn’t a beach at all. It’s more like a couple of bulldozer dumps of sand, raked nicely. These people, I think. We could teach them a thing or two.

My mother creates a colony of towels. She borders the striped with the pink one, the Les Miserables promo towel with the Ralph Lauren. At the edge of all four of these she lays a big plaid blanket. I wonder who will get to lie there. She pays no attention at all to the position of the sun. “Hey,” she calls to Sam, but he is out of her range.

In fact, at the exact moment she calls, Sam’s body hits the water in a double somersault. For someone without the aid of a diving board he has an awfully good amount of height and spring. All the rest of us, already in the water, clap. Sam pulls himself onto Second Dock and takes a bow.

His body, unlike Hadley’s, is compact. He has dark hair on his chest that grows in the shape of a heart. The hair on his legs, surprisingly, isn’t as coarse. Sam has broad shoulders and a small waist, strong arms (all that lifting) and muscular thighs. I remember hearing something at the dinner table about him having trouble buying jeans-the legs always too tight, the waist too big, or something like that.

“Come on,” Hadley says, swimming up behind me. “Let’s race.” He begins to do a vigorous crawl across the pond. He almost collides with Uncle Joley, who is swimming a lazy backstroke and chanting something in another language. Swimming, I remember, is a sort of religious thing for Uncle Joley. My mother says she has no idea where he got that from.

Hadley and I tie on the other side of the pond. “It’s because you’ve got ten years on me.”

“Give me a break,” I laugh. “You just want an excuse.”

“Oh, do I?” he says, pulling my hair and holding me under the water. I open my eyes, and massage his legs. When he lets me go, I swim between them, running my fingers along the inside. “That’s cheating,” he says.

We move to the shallow end, where a bunch of kids are on the shore, spooning sloppy sand into pails. Hadley and I sit on the bottom of the pond, letting the water play at our wrists. “I used to do that all the time. Sand castles.”

“You grew up on a beach. You must have gotten pretty good,” he says.

“I hated it. One minute you’ve got the pride of two hours’ work; the next minute a wave knocks it all down.”

“So you decided not to go to the beach. Toddler boycott?”

I turn to him, shocked. “How’d you know? I refused to go. I’d throw tantrums every weekend as my parents loaded up the car with floats and towels and coolers.”

Hadley laughs. “Lucky guess. You must have been a ballsy little-kid.”

“Must have been? Everyone tells me I still am.”

“You’re ballsy all right,” Hadley says. “But you’re no kid. You’ve got more sense in your head than almost anyone I know, and you sure as hell don’t act like I did when I was fifteen.”

“Back when there were dinosaurs.”

“Yeah,” Hadley grins. “Back when there were dinosaurs.”

I would have loved to see Hadley when he was my age. I pretend to bury a pebble. “How did you act?” I ask.

“I cursed a lot and took up smoking. Sam and me were peepingtoms in the girls’ locker room in gym,” Hadley says. “I wasn’t quite as focused as you.”

Focused. In Hadley’s eyes there is a perfect, round reflection of the sun. “I guess I’m pretty focused.”

Hadley and I play with the paddle game in the shallow end of the pond and try to catch bullfrogs in our hands. We dig flat stones from the sandy bottom with our toes and see who can skim them further. Sometimes, we just stretch out on the slick wet wood of First Dock, and, holding hands, we sleep. From time to time I catch my mother’s eye. I do not know if she is looking at us in particular, or if it is just chance. She speaks to Sam at one point when he comes out of the pond to rest. Sam looks in our direction, and shrugs.

At lunch my mother completely forgets to serve Hadley and pretends that it is an accident. Then, she makes a big deal about giving him a beer, and not giving one to me. “Some of us,” she says, staring at me, “are still too young to drink.”

Hadley gives me half of his anyway when my mother gets up to go to the bathroom. Uncle Joley tells me to ignore her when she gets like this.

After lunch, my mother insists on cleaning up the picnic. She double-bags the garbage and rearranges the leftovers. She refolds used napkins. She shakes the towels off to get rid of crumbs. Sam, who has been waiting for her, jumps into the pond and swims the perimeter twice while she is doing all this. Apparently she said she would go in after lunch.

Finally Sam comes over to the oasis she’s created. She is standingin front of it trying to find something else to do. Uncle Joley, Hadley and I kneel in the shallow end, waiting to see what will happen. Hadley has his hands spread across my rib cage, pressing me back against the floating pockets of his bathing suit.

Sam picks my mother up in his arms and begins to carry her towards the shallow end. She is still wearing her shorts.

“No,” she says, laughing at first. She kicks her heels, and people-around the pond smile, thinking this is some kind of joke. I lean against Hadley and wonder when she is going to snap.

“Sam,” she says, more insistent. They have passed the edge of Second Dock; they are almost at the edge of the water. “I can’t.”

Sam stops for a moment, serious. “Can you swim?”

“Well, no,” my mother says. Big mistake.

Sam’s feet hit the water and my mother begins to shout. “No, Sam! No!”

“Good for him,” Uncle Joley says, to no one in particular.

Sam begins to wade deeper. The water hits my mother’s shorts, spreading like a stain. She stops kicking when she realizes it only makes her more wet. At one point I think she has almost resigned herself to what is going to happen. Sam, a man with a mission, continues to walk into the water.

“Don’t do this to me,” she whispers to Sam, but we can all make out the words.

“Don’t worry,” Sam says, and my mother clutches her arms tighter around him. He stares directly at her, like he has blocked out the rest of the watching world. “If you don’t want to go- really don’t want to go-then I’ll take you back. Now. Just say the word.”