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

“I get your point, Sam.”

“No, you don’t. I don’t give a shit if you think this orchard should grow watermelons and cabbage. Go tell Joley and tell Rebecca and whoever the hell you want. And the day I die if you can convince everyone else, go ahead and replant the place. But don’t you ever tell me to my face what I’ve done so far is wrong. This farm-it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s like-it’s like me telling you your daughter is no good.”

My mother doesn’t answer. “I wouldn’t plant watermelons,” she says finally, and Sam laughs.

“Let’s start over. I’m Sam Hansen. And you’re-?”

“Jane. Jane Jones. God,” my mother says, “I sound like the most boring person on earth.”

“Oh, I doubt it.” I hear, quite clearly, the sound of their fingers pressed into a handshake. It is quiet as night.

Their footsteps come in fours, and they get closer to where I am sitting. In a panic I crawl to the other side of the shed, away from their voices. The only place to go is into the barn. I try to be quiet when my sneakers scratch against the hay. I press my belly to the floor and pull myself in on my fingertips.

When I sit up the first thing I see is a bat. It is dark and folded into the corner of the hayloft. I consider screaming but what good would that do me?

The bat screeches and flies past me. I put my hands up to shield my face and something catches my wrists. When I turn around, it is Hadley.

“What are you doing here?” I say, terrified.

“I live here,” Hadley says. “What are you doing here?”

“I was eavesdropping. Did you hear them?”

Hadley nods. He picks a stalk from the hay bales lining the wall and puts it between his front teeth. “I was hoping for a knockout in the first round.”

“You’re awful,” I tell him, but I laugh. In this light, he looks taller than usual. And his lips, the way they come down so far in the front. I hold out my hand. I want to touch him. Embarrassed, I pull away. “Did you get all your stuff done?”

“What stuff?”

“Dinner. What you were saying to my uncle.”

“Oh,” Hadley says. He shuffles his boots on the loose hay. “That.”

He doesn’t say anything for such a long time I think something might be wrong. I turn around and stare at him. “What’s the matter with me?”

“There’s nothing the matter with you,” Hadley says. “You’re a very pretty little girl.”

“I’m not a little girl.” I hold my chin higher.

“I know how old you are. I asked Joley.”

So much for that. “Well I don’t get it. I was having a really good time with you the other day, and then clear out of the blue you act like I have the plague.”

“I just can’t spend a lot of time with you.” He paces back and froth in the little square of light the moon makes on the floor of the barn. “I get paid for this, Rebecca. This is my job, you know?”

“No, I don’t know. I don’t know about jobs at all, but I have a pretty good idea of the way you’re supposed to treat a friend.”

“Don’t do this to me,” Hadley said.

I clench my fists at my sides. Do what ? I haven’t done anything at all.

He takes a step closer and my heart jumps, just like that. I take a step backward.

Pressed up against the stack of hay bales, I start to hyperventilate. I’m breathing in all this awful dry grass and it is getting to my lungs. Hadley leans in close to me, and I see my face reflected in his eyes.

I push my hand against his chest and walk to the other side of the barn. “So you have to get rid of the weeds, is that it? That’s what you were talking to Sam about. When do those apples drop- September?” I talk a mile a minute about a subject I do not know. “What are you going to do tomorrow? I was thinking, maybe I’ll walk into Stow Center tomorrow. I haven’t been there yet and Uncle Joley says there’s this record store I’d really like with a lot of neon and stuff. Did I ask you what you’re going to do tomorrow?”

“This,” Hadley says, and he wraps his arms around my waist and he kisses me.

I used to think that the best feeling in the world was flying on my bicycle down a hill that I had worked so hard to climb, flying faster than the speed of sound, with my arms and my hair waving. I’d cup one hand and try to catch the air and when I got to the bottom, after all that, there was nothing in my hand.

I think of this in the moments that Hadley is pressed up against me and I keep my eyes wide open, afraid that I’ll find nothing there when I am so convinced. He sees me, at one point, and smiles with my lips still touching his. “What are you looking at?” he whispers.

“You,” I tell him.

My father died three years before my mother. The doctor said it was a heart attack but Jane and I had our doubts. It had yet to be proven that my father had a heart at all.

Jane was living in San Diego by then, and I was in Mexico. I had been doing research on Cortèz, which turned into research on the the Holy Grail, which turned into research about I don’t know what. Jane was the only person who knew where I was-in a little village near Tepehuanas that was so small it didn’t have a name of its own. I lived with a pregnant housekeeper named Maria and her three cats. I dug a small excavation site in the wilds of the mountains. I found nothing, but I told that to nobody but Jane.

My mother, of course, called Jane first. She would have called me, I imagine, but she didn’t know my address, or how to dial an international call. She said that just like that my father had dropped dead. The hospital kept asking her if he had complained of gas or made sounds during the night, but my mother did not know. She got used to sleeping with earplugs many years ago to combat my father’s snoring, and she always went to bed before he did.

“Do you think,” Jane said noncommittally on the flight to Boston, “they have had sex during this decade?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t know what they do.”

Did I mention this all happened the weekend before Easter?

When we arrived at the house my mother was sitting on the front lawn. She was wearing a familiar purple bathrobe and Dearfoam slippers, although it was past noon. “Mama,” Jane said, rushing into her arms. My mother hugged Jane the way she always did: looking over her shoulder at me. I wondered, and I still do, if she looked at Jane when I was in her arms. For Jane’s sake, I always hoped so. “It’s over,” Jane said.

And my mother looked at her as if she was crazy. “What do you mean it’s over?”

Jane looked at me. “Nothing, Ma.” She pulled me aside as we climbed up the steps to the house. “What is it with her?” Jane said. “Or is it me?”

I wouldn’t know. I was the only person in that household my father did not inflict violence upon, thanks largely to my sister’s interference. Jane had given up her childhood for me, really, so what else could I say? “It’s not you,” I told her.

Jane and I were sent out to get a party platter for the guests after the funeral. Daddy’s body had been set on ice for three days now; no church would hold a service because of Easter. But now, with the funeral set for Monday, preparations had to be made. Jane and I went to Star Market’s deli counter; it was the closest and honestly neither of us cared about the caliber of the food. “Hey, honey,” said the burly man at the counter. “You having relatives over for Easter?”

While my mother went through the ritual of crying, pulling at her hair and stroking old photos, Jane and I sat upstairs in what used to be our rooms. We talked about everything we could remember that might help us put it all behind. I touched the places on Jane where there used to be bruises. I let her talk about the very worst time, but she only hinted at what had happened that night she was driven to leave.