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

Rebecca laughs. “You must write plots for All My Children in your spare time.”

“So the groundskeeper sees the baron approaching with the body of the woman he loves and has to decide whether to take off with the car or to grieve over the woman. And of course he stays-”

“Of course.”

“-and is shot by the baron, who then drives the car to a deserted town in Montana where it is not likely to be found, and moves his estate to Estonia under an assumed identity.” I take a deep breath, proud of my story. “What do you think?”

“Number one, how did the money get into the car, then, if the woman never had a chance to get it before she was knocked off? Number two, no idiot in his right mind would take a bullet just because his girlfriend has been killed too. If he really loved her he’d go off and live the life they’d planned together.” Rebecca shifts in her seat and inadvertently knocks the rearview mirror. “You’re a hopeless romantic, Mom.”

“Well, whose money do you think it is?”

Rebecca starts to throw the flowers from the bouquet she’s collected in the air, one by one. They seem to fly away as if they have lives of their own. “I think that Indian guy put his savings account in the car a long time ago, so long that he’s completely forgotten. He’s probably after us in the blue Jeep right now.”

“That’s lousy,” I tell her. “That’s hardly a good story at all.”

“If you want to spice it up, then maybe he got the money from robbing a bank. Which would explain why he doesn’t keep his cash there in the first place.” Rebecca cocks her head to one side. “Now that we’re rich, what are we going to do to celebrate?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Take a shower. Get another pair of underwear. And other luxuries like that.”

“We should buy some clothes,” I agree. “Not that the selection around here is going to match our style.” Some style. I’ve been wearing the same dirty shirt of Oliver’s for four days, and Rebecca has been sleeping in the bathing suit she wears all day.

“So we’ll go shopping the next town we find.”

“The next town that looks like a town,” I clarify.

“The next town that has a store .” Rebecca pushes her hands against her stomach. “When did we have breakfast?”

“Two hours ago,” I say. “Why?”

Rebecca curls into a ball, her head on the armrest beside the stick shift. Here she doesn’t have the room for movement the station wagon allowed her. “My stomach hurts. Maybe I’m not hungry. Maybe I ate a bad egg or something.”

“Do you want to stop?” I turn to look at her; she’s a little green.

“No, just keep driving.” Rebecca closes her eyes. “It’s not so bad. It comes and goes.” She kneads her hands in a knot, and presses it against her stomach.

For about half an hour, Rebecca falls asleep, which makes me feel better because I know she is no longer in pain. This is the mark of a mother; I am able to feel what she feels, to hurt when she hurts. Sometimes I believe that in spite of the traditional birth, Rebecca and I were never disconnected.

She has not missed much, being asleep. We have passed the border into North Dakota, and we seem to be leaving the great purple swells of mountains behind us.

“Are we there yet?” Rebecca rolls into a sitting position, pushingher hair away from her face where it has unraveled into thin strings. She folds her legs into her habitual sitting position, and then she screams.

I swerve the car onto the shoulder of the road and brake violently. “What’s the matter?”

Rebecca reaches between her legs and lifts her hand and on it there is blood.

“Oh, Rebecca,” I say, “Relax. You just got your period.”

“That’s all?” she says, dazed. “Is that all?”

She starts to smile, and then she actually laughs a little. I help her stand up outside the car and we survey the damage: her bathing suit is covered with a spreading brown stain and there is some blood on the vinyl MG seat. I wipe this clean with a rag from the trunk, and then Rebecca and I take a walk further into the flatlands on the side of the road. There are no cacti or brush to hide behind here, but then again there aren’t many passing cars either. We take my pocketbook, which Rebecca, thank God, had remembered to grab in San Diego, and rummage through it for a tampon or a sanitary napkin. I am hoping for a napkin; I don’t want to have to explain the use of a tampon. When I find one I help Rebecca position it in the bottom of her bathing suit. “We’ll get you something else to wear at the next store.”

“This is disgusting,” Rebecca says. “This is like a diaper.”

“Welcome to womanhood.”

“Listen, Mom.” Rebecca looks at me sidelong. “Don’t give me any of those talks about how I’m growing up, all right? I mean, I’m fifteen and I must be the last girl in school to get my period, which is bad enough. I know all about sex, so I don’t want the responsibility lecture either, agreed?”

“No problem. But if you get cramps again, let me know. I’ll give you Midol.”

Rebecca smiled. “I’ve been wanting this to happen for so long, you know? So I could get boobs. I can’t believe this is what I’ve been waiting for.”

“Someone should tell you when you reach twelve that it’s no great shakes.”

“I feel like an idiot. I thought I was dying.”

“When it happened to me I said the same thing. I didn’t even tell my mother. I just went to lie down on my bed and folded my arms across my chest and expected that I would die before the day was out. Joley was the one who found me, and got your grandmother, and then she gave me all those lectures you don’t want me to give you.”

We reached the car and Rebecca hesitates before sitting down. “Do I have to sit there?” she says, although it is clean.

“You’re the one who wanted the sports car.” I watch her climb in and adjust herself in her seat several times, getting used to the sanitary napkin. “Okay?” I ask, and she nods without looking at me. “Let’s find a place to go shopping.”

Rebecca leans her head against her arm, propped on the open window. There is so much I wish I could warn her about; the chain reaction that is a consequence of this event. The acquisition of hips, for example, and the discovery of men, and falling in love, and falling out of it.

Rebecca, suddenly self-conscious, sifts through the glove compartment she has already inventoried. She is looking for something, or pretending to look for something, that isn’t there at all. She closes her eyes, letting the wind unleash her hair and blow the garbage twist-tie in the direction of Montana.

The people wearing white T-shirts marked CREW ask us to join the line of cars. It stretches like a snake along the dock in Port Jefferson. While we are waiting my mother makes up stories about the people she passes in surrounding cars. A woman with a baby beside her is going to visit her long-lost aunt in Old Lyme, the one for whom the baby is named. A businessman is really a government spy, checking on the U.S. Coast Guard. Sometimes I wonder about my mother.

“This way,” a man yells. My mother puts the car into gear. She rolls it up a side ramp and into the hinged mouth of the ferry. It is like we are driving right into the jaws of a great white whale.

We are beckoned by another crew member and told to park the car halfway up a steep ramp on the side. There are two symmetrical ramps, and cars are parked on them and beneath them. I had been wondering how they would fit us all in.

It is a one-hour-and-fifteen-minute ride. We spend it on the upper deck, lying on our backs on the compartment that holds life jackets. Between this and the convertible I am starting to get some color. Even my mother is looking tan.