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

“It’s okay, Oliver,” Windy says, “Anne’s from the Center. She’s videotaping for our files.”

I sit up, panting. I watch the lens zoom closer. “Do you mind?” Still dripping, I crawl into Windy’s Zodiac. I instruct the students in the other boat to start hanging buoys around the whale in any manner they can-looping, hooking, anything, just so it doesn’t hurt her any more. The idea here is to tire her out, keep her floating at the surface so that we have a chance to cut away the net. Windy and I rope a few large sailing buoys around Marble’s tail.

“Okay,” I say, surveying the whale, now edged in pink floating balls like a decorated Christmas tree. “I want you to get the hell out of the way.” I say this expressly to Samuels, although I mean everyone in his boat. One of the students backs the second Zodiac several hundred feet away, leaving Windy and me alone alongside Marble.

I lean out of the boat, an arm’s length away from the soft surface-of Marble’s skin. At this point she is so exhausted she doesn’t try to fight as I snip at the net with a grappling hook, leaving entire chunks of it still tangled in her baleen. “You need to get closer to her,” I say, as we approach her fin. “I can’t reach the net.”

“I can’t get any closer without going right over her.”

“Then go over her. Just watch your engine.”

Windy and I argue this point, but in the long run he does move the tiny craft over the tip of Marble’s fin. I am confident that at this point she is tired enough to let us go about our business. I lean out of the boat and try to unravel the gill net.

Suddenly I am pitched backward. Marble exhales through her blowhole, a fetid combination of stale water and algae, and whacks the edge of the boat with her fin. She hits us twice so forcefully that the Zodiac rises and pitches, on the verge of overturning. “Fuck,” Windy cries, holding onto the rubber handles on the inside of the boat. The students in the other Zodiac begin to scream, and I hear it quite clearly, as if their voices have been attached to a speaker in our boat. Then I realize our Zodiac has been thrown into the air. I am tossed onto my back, on top of Windy, who is lying face down in the boat. It is purely by chance that the inflatable raft landed face up, rather than face down, in the freezing depths of this ocean, in the nether region of a whale. “Get off me,” Windy says. He sits up gently and rubs his arm. “I told you we shouldn’t go over her.”

“Is the engine all right?”

“Screw the engine. Are you all right?”

I grin as he takes inventory of his limbs. “I’m better than you,” I say.

“You are not.”

“Always was.”

“Bullshit,” Windy says. He fiddles with the Evinrude and starts it again. “Where do you want to go?”

This time, Windy approaches from the back of the whale, sneakingup between the fin and the lower half of the body. After several passes with the grappling hook Marble is free. Windy and I pass around the perimeter of the whale one last time, unhooking the buoys. Then we rev the boat’s engine backwards, floating several hundred feet north of the whale. It takes Marble several minutes to realize she is unencumbered, and then finally she sinks several feet below the surface of the water and swims off. About a quarter mile away, she is joined by a small group of whales. As they are leaving, Marble arches and dives, holding up the underside of her fluke and slapping it against the water with such force that we are all caught in the spray.

Windy and I watch Marble swim away into the swirling eddies of Stellwagen Bank. “Christ, that’s beautiful,” he says, and I put my hand on his shoulder.

“I’m only going to say this once,” he says, smiling, “so you’d better listen up. I want to thank you, Oliver. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Sure you could have.”

“You’re right. It just wouldn’t have been as much fun.” He laughs and guns the engine toward the shore. “You’re a crazy son of a bitch. I would have taken a dive to check the location of the net, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have taken a nap under the belly of a twenty-five-ton whale.”

“Yes you would,” I say. “When an opportunity like that presents itself, you don’t fight it.”

“You’re still crazy.”

“You’re jealous. You wish you could fight off the paparazzi.”

Windy rubs his forehead with his hand. “Christ. All the reporters. I forgot. How come nobody gives a damn about a whale until it’s in trouble, and then it become a national event?”

I smile. “I don’t mind talking to the networks.”

“Since when?”

“Since I’m trying to find Jane.” I don’t look at Windy when I say this. “Jane left me. She took my kid and she left. I’m under the impression she’s in Massachusetts, but I don’t know where for sure. So I figure if I make myself into a media hero, I can ask her back over the nightly news.”

“Jane left you? Jane left you?” He cuts the engine so that we are sitting in the middle of the Atlantic, the other Zodiac speeding off ahead of us. “I’m sorry you came here at all. You should have been looking for her.”

“You didn’t ask me,” I remind him. “I invited myself.”

“Is there anything I can do? You know you’re welcome to stay with me as long as you want.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. The only thing you can do for me right now is get me back to all those cameras and microphones.” The boat rocks back and forth, tossed by a passing wave. “I’ve got to get her back, you know,” I say, more to myself than to Windy.

“You will,” he says.

When we come closer to shore Windy lifts up the engine and lets us drift in with the tide. The crowd of newspeople runs down to the edge of the beach. “Dr. Jones,” they call. “Dr. Jones!”

I have heard that sound so many times; the pitch of twenty, thirty voices singing my name. I can feel the old college rush of adrenaline when I consciously register that it is me they are all waiting to meet. I used to hear that marvelous sound and think that this was my ticket to the top. Then I would go home and tell Jane, and she would ask all the right questions: How many reporters were there? Did you talk long? Will it be on the news? Were any of them pretty?

None like you, Jane.

I step off the boat seconds before Windy, who walks me up the beach with his arm around my shoulders. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, interrupted briefly by a hacking cough, “I’d like to introduce Dr. Oliver Jones, affiliated with the San Diego Center for Coastal Studies. Dr. Jones is singularly responsible for the rescue of Marble, the humpback that has been entangled in fishing nets for several days.”

It comes in a rush, the push of the microphones and the incoherent bubble of twenty different questions being asked at once. I hold up my hands and take a deep breath. “I’ll be happy to answer,” I say quietly, knowing well that first impressions last the longest, “but you need to speak one at a time.”

I point to a young black man in a yellow rain slicker. “Dr. Jones, can you describe the procedure used to disentangle the whale?” As I start to answer, I see Windy pass behind the throng of reporters. He signals an O.K. sign to me. He takes his cough syrup from his pocket and makes his way towards the group of students who were in the other Zodiac.

I tell them where the net was caught. I tell them we used a grappling hook to cut it away. I tell them about the whale that came up to Marble and stroked her gently, and I let them know such tenderness is often exhibited among humpbacks. I tell them everything they want to know and then finally someone asks the question I have been waiting to hear.