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

“You must have had a bad dream, Jane,” she said. We were both crouched over the linoleum, wiping up the runny oil and the flakes of fish.

I told her it had happened over and over, and I didn’t like it. I started to cry, and she held me, getting fingerprints of grease on my nightgown. She promised me it would never happen again.

That night Daddy did not come into my room. He went into his own, and had a tremendous fight with Mama. We heard crashes and loud shrieks; in the middle of it all you came into my room and crawled under the covers. The next morning Mama had her arm bandaged, and the frame of their pine bed had been split.

The next time that Daddy came to my bedroom, he told me we had something very serious to discuss. “Here I am, spending all this special time with you,” he said, “and what thanks do I get? You run and tell your mother you don’t like to spend time with me.” He told me I’d have to be punished for what I’d done. He wanted to spank me, but he made me pull down my underpants before he started. As he struck me, he told me not to tell anyone again. He said he wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt. Not Mama, not Joley, not anyone.

In retrospect I believe I was very lucky. I have heard stories from the social workers at the San Diego schools about children younger than I who have sustained much more violent sexual abuse. It never got beyond the point of touching, and it only lasted for two years. When I was eleven, just as strangely as it all had started, it stopped.

So I wanted you to know why I never told you what I am sure you already have deduced. Perhaps now Daddy won’t be able to hurt you.

Please do not be angry with me. Please do not-

I stop writing here, and I reread the letter. Rebecca turns on the water in the shower and starts to sing at the top of her lungs. On second thought, I rip the paper into shreds. I rip it so many times there is no more than one word on each piece. I toss them into a garbage pail. And then, taking the matches the housekeeping staff has placed beside the bed, I set the shreds on fire. It is a plastic trash can and the flame scorches the sides. It will never be seashell pink again, I think. It is probably ruined forever.

Dear Jane,

When you were twelve you had a rabbit named Fitzgerald, you’d seen the name on the shelf at the library at school and liked the word. The rabbit wasn’t as interesting as the circumstances that surrounded it-Daddy had actually broken two of Mama’s ribs and she’d been hospitalized and you got so distracted by it that you refused to eat, sleep, whatever. In the long run Daddy broke the spell by bringing home this rabbit, striped like an Oreo, whose ears couldn’t quite stand up.

Unfortunately this was February and rather than building the rabbit a hutch you insisted we keep it safe and warm indoors. We took a thirty-gallon aquarium tank from the attic and put it on the floor of the living room. We filled it with wood chips that smelled of forests and then we dropped Fitzgerald in. He ran in confined circles and pressed his nose up to the glass. He pawed at the clear corners. All in all, he was a rotten rabbit. He chewed through telephone cords and socks and the edge of the rocking chair. He bit me.

You loved that demonic rabbit. You dressed it in applespotted baby clothes; hid it in your shiny, stooped church purse; you sang it ballads by the Beatles. One morning the rabbit was stretched out on its side-a revelation-we discovered the rabbit was male-but you felt this change of position was a bad omen. You made me stick my hand in Fitzgerald’s cage and when he didn’t nip me you knew he was sick. Mama refused to take him to the vet; she wouldn’t get close enough to the rabbit to drive it anywhere. She told you to be sensible and get ready for school.

You kicked and cried and tore the upholstery on a certain loveseat but in the end went to school. That day, however, as if God was involved, a nor’easter was predicted. When snow came down so heavily we couldn’t see the playground from our classrooms, we were dismissed. By the time we got home, Fitzgerald was dead.

It’s a funny thing, we’d never experienced death before this and yet both of us were pretty much matter-of-fact about it. We knew the rabbit was dead, we knew there was something to be done, and we did our best. I went to get a shoe box from Daddy’s closet (the only one large enough to fit a rabbit corpse in) and you found Mama’s sterling silver serving spoons and stuffed them in your snowsuit. We put on our down bibs and boots and then it came time to put the body in the shoe box. “I can’t,” you told me, and so I wrapped a dishcloth around Fitzgerald’s cold legs and lifted.

There were three inches of snow on the ground by the time we left the house. You led me to the school playground-the spot where the window of your classroom met the outdoors, a place where you could see the grave all day long. Taking a spoon out of your pocket, you began to chip at the frozen earth. You gave me a spoon, too. An hour later, when the brown ground had opened itself like a raw mouth, we set Fitzgerald to rest. We said an “Our Father” because it was the only prayer we both had memorized. You made a cross in the snow out of the stones we’d unearthed and began to cry. It was so cold the drops froze on your cheeks.

Take Route 70 to Route 2, and then to Route 40. Your endpoint is Baltimore. If you get there before five, you’ll be able to tour the medical museum at Johns Hopkins-a favorite of mine.

Afterward, you denied that you ever owned a rabbit. But this is what I remember about the incident: it was the first time I ever held your hand when we were walking, instead of the other way around.

Love,

Joley

It’s empty, except for the twenty teenaged boys who wear T-shirts emblazoned with the interests they have at stake. Medical Explorers, the shirts read. They are outlined with the faint black cartoon of a skeleton. Boning Up on the Future of Physiology. Apparently they are a division of the Boy Scouts, devoted to the study of medicine.

If that’s true-if these well-meaning young kids are planning to be doctors-I’d never bring them to this museum. Set off from the campus of Johns Hopkins like a quarantined captive, the building is even more dismal inside than it is outside. Dusty shelves and dimly lit glass exhibition cases form a maze for visitors.

Rebecca runs up to me. “This place grosses me out. I think Uncle Joley got it mixed up with somewhere else.”

But from the looks of things, I’d say this is just up Joley’s alley. The meticulous preservation, the absolute oddity of the collection. Joley collects facts; this is cocktail party conversation for a lifetime. “No,” I tell her, “I’m sure Joley got it right.”

“I can’t believe the things they’ve got in here. I can’t believe someone would go to the trouble of saving all the things they’ve got in here.” She leads me around the corner, to a gaggle of Medical Explorers who are bent over a small glass case. Inside is a huge overgrown rat, bloated and patchy, its glass eyes frozen toward the north. The card says it was part of a research experiment, and died from the cortisone shots. At death, it weighed 22.5 pounds, approximately the same as a poodle.

I stare at the gummy features a few minutes longer until Rebecca calls me from across the room. She waves me over to a wall-length exhibit of stomachs that have been frozen in time. Floating in large canisters of formaldehyde, the anomalies are tagged. There is a series of hair balls in the stomachs of cats and humans. There is a particularly disgusting jar with a stomach that still contains the skeleton of a small animal. Amazing! the tag reads. Mrs. Dolores Gaines of Petersborough, Florida, swallowed this baby kitten.