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

My mother looks terrified. I am starting to feel sorry for her.

“I’ll be with you,” Sam says. “I’m not going to let anything happen.”

She closes her eyes. “Go ahead. Maybe this is what I need after all.”

With measured steps, Sam inches farther into the water until it reaches my mother’s chin. Then, telling her to focus on his eyes, right here -he says- my eyes -he ducks under the surface.

It seems like a very long time. Everyone on the shore of the pond is watching. Several industrious kids with scuba masks swim out closer and peek underwater to see what is going on. Then my mother and Sam burst out of the water in unison, gasping for air. “Oh!” my mother cries. “It’s so wonderful!” Her eyelashes blink back water, and her arms make wide circles in front of her, with ripples that reach us. Sam is triumphant. He winks at Uncle Joley and stays beside her, a personal lifeguard, fulfilling his promise to my mother. Nothing is going to happen, after all, as long as he is there. Well it’s about time, I think. Hadley and I, bored by all the theatrics, check into taking a canoe out onto the larger pond. As we go, my mother is doing the crawl.

At one point my mother and I are the only two awake. We lie on the towels on our backs and try to find pictures in the clouds. I see a llama and a paper clip. She sees a kerosene lamp and a kangaroo. We both look for a chameleon, but there is none to be found.

“About Hadley,” my mother says, “I’ve been thinking.”

I feel my shoulders tense. “We have a lot of fun together.”

“I’ve noticed. Sam says Hadley likes you a lot.”

I lean on one elbow. “He said that?”

“In not so many words. He said he’s a very responsible person.” She picks grass absentmindedly with her left hand.

“Well he is. He takes care of just about everything on the farm that Sam doesn’t. He’s his right-hand man.”

“Man,” my mother says. “Exactly. You’re a kid.”

“I’m fifteen,” I remind her. “I’m not a kid.”

“You’re a kid.”

“How old were you when you started to go out with Daddy?”

My mother rolls onto her stomach and pushes her chin into the sand. I can barely understand her. I think she says, “It was different then.”

“It’s not different. You can’t just keep yourself from falling for a person. You can’t turn off your emotions like a faucet.”

“Oh, you’re an expert?”

I think about saying, Neither are you, but decide against it.

“You can’t keep yourself from falling in love,” she says, “but you can steer yourself away from the wrong people. That’s all I’m trying to say. I’m just warning you before it’s too late.”

I roll away from her. Doesn’t she know it’s too late already?

Sam, awake, sits up between us. To keep up a conversation we’d have to talk across him. My mother, probably against her better judgment, gives me a look. We’ll continue this later, she is saying.

They decide to go fishing in the metal rowboat, and leave me to watch over Uncle Joley, Hadley and the cooler. I take out a nectarine and eat it slowly. The juice drips down my neck and dries sticky.

My mother doesn’t know what she is talking about. I don’t believe I have a thing for “older men.” I think I have a thing for Hadley. I reach down and swat a fly from his ear. He has three birthmarks on his lobe, three I hadn’t noticed before. I count them, twice, fascinated. When I am with him, I don’t know who I am. I don’t know and I don’t care; it must be someone wonderful because he seems to be having such a good time. And he holds me the way I used to hold china dolls as a child. They were so beautiful, their painted faces, that I only let myself take them off the shelves in my bedroom for minutes at a time.

Uncle Joley doesn’t snore, but he breathes heavily when he sleeps. It drives me crazy. It’s a raspy noise that comes in currents. You get into a rhythm listening to him, and then all of a sudden he alters the pattern, and you find yourself hanging, waiting for him to complete what he’s started. After about three minutes of listening to this I stand and stretch. I walk around the pond, dipping my toes in the water and writing my initials in the sand. H.S. + R.J. I realize there won’t be any tide to wash this away.

On the far end of the pond are a thatch of reeds and cattails. They are wheat-yellow and as high as I am. The area is off-limits, a swamp. When the lifeguard isn’t looking I step behind the first row. Once I do this, I am hidden. I take a last look at Hadley; I sift through the reeds with my arms.

The ground is a sponge that closes up around my ankles. I keep walking. I want to know where I will end up. Somewhere, there must be water.

The cry of a cormorant tells me I have reached the edge. I can’t actually see a shore; I have to part the thickest growth here with my hands. I have come to a part of Pickerel Pond that I couldn’t see from the swimming area. It is an inlet shaded by willow trees. In the middle is a rowboat, my mother and Sam.

My mother has just caught a fish, I have no idea what kind it is. Its spine is a series of spikes that grow shorter and shorter; the hook seems to be caught in its cheek. My mother holds the fishing line while Sam smoothes the spikes of the fish and gently removes the hook. As he does this I hear a faint pluck. He holds the fish into the water and they both watch it swim away at an amazing pace. I myself did not know fish could move that quickly. When I look up at my mother and Sam, they seem quite pleased with themselves.

Sam has propped the oars on my mother’s seat. She has her hands on the gunwale of the rowboat and is leaning back slightly. Sam, balancing, comes forward and catches his arms around her waist. When she sits up she doesn’t look startled. She leans forward and kisses him.

I feel my heart beating faster and I think about leaving, but they will hear me then. I consciously try to think of my father, expecting him to jump to mind. But all I can remember is my own reaction, last Mother’s Day, when my father cooked breakfast in bed for her. He woke me up to ask about my mother’s favorite type of eggs and I looked at him as if he were crazy. He was married to her, after all. Didn’t he know she doesn’t eat eggs?

Sam cups his hand around my mother’s right breast and kisses her neck. He says something to her I cannot hear. His thumb keeps rubbing and like magic I see her nipple appear. My mother tightens her grip on the edge of the boat. She opens her eyes to look at him. As the boat turns in the wind I see Sam. His eyes-well, they look like they are growing deeper. I can’t describe it any better than that. He kisses her again, and from this new angle I see her mouth meet his, her tongue meet his.

They move so slowly. I do not know if this is something that has to do with the balance of the rowboat, or with what is happening. My head is pounding now and I don’t know why. I cannot decide if I should be angry at her. I cannot decide if I should try to leave. All I know for sure is that I have never seen my mother like this. It crosses my mind: maybe this is not my mother; check again.

I turn around and run as fast as I can through the swamp. I trip across the chained “KEEP OUT” sign and cut my thigh. Ignoring the lifeguard’s whistle I dive into that cool, anonymous pond. I open my eyes as wide as I can. I imagine water rushing into the back of my head. When I reach the other side I hide under the dock until I am ready. Then I throw myself down on my towel, beside Hadley, as if I really do not care at all.

It’s seven in the morning and I’m driving on a humming highway with no other cars around me when suddenly I see a big pink truck approaching in the rearview mirror. I think, Oh good, some company. And this thing, this thing, gets closer and pulls next to me and-honest to God-it’s a hot dog on wheels. Well it’s a car, I suppose, but it’s covered with a papier-mâché façade shaped like a large frankfurter in a roll. It has a squiggle of mustard on it too. Etched on the side of the bun is professional sign-painter’s lettering, which says OSCAR MAYER. “Incredible,” I say.