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

So I told her about tide pools, about the hearty crustaceans that survive such adverse living conditions. I told her I was going to study them for several years, and write my dissertation. “And then what?” she asked.

“And then what?” I had never even considered what might happen after. So much hinged on that final step.

“Will you move to something else? I don’t know, flounder, or swordfish, or dolphins maybe?” She grinned at me. “I like dolphins. I mean, I don’t know anything about them, but they always look like they’re smiling.”

“So do you,” I blurted out, and then closed my eyes. Stupid, stupid, Oliver. I opened one eye at a time, but Jane was still there, waiting for me to answer her question. “I don’t really know yet. Maybe,” I said, “I’ll study dolphins.”

“Good.”

“Good,” I repeated, as if my fate had been settled. “I have to go now, but I’d like to see you again. I’d like to go out sometime.”

Jane blushed. “I’d like that,” she said.

At those words, I felt as if a tremendous weight had been lifted. It was similar to the euphoria I had experienced when, as an undergraduate, my first scholarly article had been published. The significant difference was: that time, the euphoria left me pondering me -where I would go from here? Now, as high-spirited as I felt, all I could think about was Jane Lipton.

A man came out to the porch. Of course I know better now but back then I attributed to imagination my sense of Jane stiffening. “Jones?” The man said, a big, cavernous voice. “Alexander Lipton. Wanted to thank you for bringing back Jane’s wallet.”

“Purse,” Jane whispered. “It’s a purse.”

“It was nothing,” I said, shaking her father’s hand.

He was a large, overbearing man with tanned skin and narrow eyes. His eyes, in fact, disturbed me even then: jet black. I could not see where the iris ended and the pupil began. He was dressed for golf. He walked over to Jane and put his arm around her. “We don’t know what to do with our Jane,” he said.

Jane squirmed out of her father’s embrace and murmured something about seeing what had happened to the lemonade. She opened the door to the house so quietly it didn’t even swing on its hinges. She left me outside, alone with her father.

“You listen to me, Jones,” Alexander Lipton said. His face metamorphosed into that of a hard-line criminal lawyer, unwilling to give an inch. “When Jane turned fifteen I told her she could date whomever she’d like. If she likes you, that’s her business. But if you do anything to hurt my daughter, I swear I’ll string you by the balls from the Old North Church. I know your kind-I was a Harvard man, too-and if you so much as lay a hand on her before she turns seventeen, let’s just say I’ll make your life miserable.”

I thought, this man is psychotic. He doesn’t even know me. And then, as if it were a passing thunderstorm, Alexander Lipton’s face softened into that of a middle-aged man of means. “My wife tells me you’re a marine biologist.”

Before I had a chance to answer, Jane and her mother came through the door with a tray of glasses and an icy pitcher of lemonade. Jane poured and Mary handed out a glass to each of us. Alexander Lipton drank his lemonade in a single chugging gulp and as soon as he was finished, his wife was at his side to relieve him of the glass. He excused himself and left, and Mary followed behind him.

I watched Jane drink. She held the glass with both hands, like a child. I waited until she was done and then repeated that I really had to leave.

Jane walked me to the car. We stood in front of the old Buick for a moment, letting the sun beat onto our scalps. Jane turned to me. “I threw my purse into the water on purpose.”

“I know,” I admitted.

Before I got into the car I asked if I could kiss her goodbye. When she acquiesced I took her face in my hands, the first time I ever touched her. Her skin sprang back at my touch, slightly greasy with suntan oil. Jane closed her eyes and tilted her head back, waiting. She smelled of cocoa butter and honest perspiration. There was nothing I wanted more than to kiss her, but I kept hearing the voice of her father. I smiled at my good fortune; and, thinking I had all the time in the world, I pressed my lips against Jane’s forehead.

Dear Joley-

If Daddy could see me now. I spent the morning with Rebecca at the Indianapolis Speedway, at an auto museum filled with Nascars and racing paraphernalia. Do you remember when we used to watch all five hundred laps with him, every year? I never understood what it was that made auto racing such a biggie for him-it’s not like he ever tried the sport himself. He told me once when I was older that it was the absolute speed of it all. I liked to watch for crashes, like you. I liked the way there’d be a huge explosion on the track and billows of ebony smoke, and the other cars would just keep a straight course and head right for the spin, into this sort of black box, and they’d come out okay.

I practically had to drag Rebecca onto a bus that drove right along the speedway. I closed my eyes, and I tried to imagine that speed that enchanted Daddy. It wasn’t easy, lumbering along at 45 mph, on a track that’s meant for 220 mph. When we got off the bus, we were each handed a card signed by the track president: “I hereby certify that the bearer of this ticket has completed one lap around the Indianapolis ‘500’ Mile Speedway.” I laughed. It isn’t much, you know? But Daddy would have hung it over his desk, on the SAE fraternity bulletin board Mama was always trying to take down.

This is the best part, though: after we got that card, I thought about all the things I could do with it. I certainly wouldn’t hang it up on the refrigerator, or on any bulletin board, and I didn’t care enough to keep it in my wallet. I considered taking it to Daddy’s grave when I got to Massachusetts. And no sooner had I thought that very thought, than my fingers just released the card-just let go, like they belonged to someone else’s body-and the wind carried the card up to the clouds. It was a beautiful day, today, too-those big puffy clouds with ironed-flat bottoms, like you were looking at them from underneath a glass table where they had been arranged. The card crept higher and higher towards the sun, and when I realized I wasn’t going to see it again, I started to smile.

I don’t know why I felt it was important to tell you this; I suppose this letter is part-this and part-apology for the way I sounded when I called you the other day. Sometimes I act like it’s your fault Daddy never went after you, and I’m the martyr. Maybe it’s the way I try to make sense of it.

There are things that happened that I’ve never told you about, at least not in so many words, that I’m sure you’ve figured out by now. And there was a reason I never did tell you. When he started to come into my room at night, even though it was only once a month or so, I thought I was going crazy. Daddy was so incredibly nice to me when it was all happening. He told me over and over what a good girl I was, and I believed him. Still, when he turned the doorknob my fingers would curl around the edges of my mattress and my blood would run thick. It got to a point where the only way I could let him do the things he did was by pretending this wasn’t me at all. I would pretend to be in some other part of the room, like a corner or a closet. I’d watch. I could see everything that happened, which wasn’t nearly as bad.

One morning I faked being sick so that I wouldn’t have to go to school. While Mama was making me lunch I told her that Daddy had been coming into my bedroom at night, and she dropped the can of tuna all over the floor.