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

“Is that so?” Rebecca says, hands on her hips. “Straight from the boss’s mouth?”

“You’d better watch it,” I say quietly.

“ I’d better watch it? Me? I don’t think I’m the one who’s got the problem. I’m not the one who is cheating on my husband.”

Instinct: I raise my hand to strike her. Then, shaking, I bring my arm down to my side. “We can discuss this later.”

“I think you’re disgusting!” Rebecca yells, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “I can’t believe you’d do this to Daddy! I can’t believe you’d do this to me! Whatever you think, he still loves you. He’s coming here, you know. And then what are you going to do?” She turns around and thunders down the stairs.

Sam finds me in the open doorway. “She came in here,” I say. “Rebecca. She hates me now.”

“She doesn’t hate you. Give her a little time.” But nothing he says can keep me from crying. He puts his arms around me, he rubs my shoulders-all of which worked wonders last night, but this is different. This is a rift between my daughter and me. This is something he could not possibly heal.

Eventually Sam leaves me alone for a while. He says he’s going to make sure Joley knows what’s getting sprayed with what today. He kisses me before he leaves, and tells me I’m beautiful. On his way out he turns around. “Your nightgown’s on wrong.”

I move to the window that looks out onto the brick patio in front of the house. When my cheek is pressed against the sill my face doesn’t feel half as hot. I’ve been so selfish. All right, Jane, I think. You’ve had your moment in the sun. Now just put it behind you. You have to work with your loose ends and see what you can make of them. When Sam comes back, I’ll tell him this. I will say that it might have worked in another time or another place. If I was ten years younger; if he worked behind a desk. And then I’ll go out and find my daughter. You see? I’ll say. You have to love me again. Don’t you see what I have given up for you?

Absentmindedly I watch Hadley walk up the hill. He’s wearing a blue flannel shirt that makes me think of the dark shade of Sam’s eyes. Suddenly the front door on the Big House opens and Rebecca flies out of it. She is still crying; I can tell from the way her shoulders quiver. She runs to Hadley and presses herself against him.

For just a minute, I remember that Hadley and Sam the same age.

Hadley cranes his neck, taking a look around. When I see him surveying the upstairs windows I duck back. Then I peek over the edge of the sill. Hadley is kissing the tears off my daughter’s face.

It must be minutes that this goes on. I watch every move they make. She’s a baby. She’s just a baby. She doesn’t know any better- how could Hadley do something like this? The way she arches her neck and the curve of her eyebrows, and the way she moves her hands across Hadley’s back-there is something very familiar about this. Then it comes to me. Rebecca. When she is making love, she looks like me.

I think I am going to scream, or vomit; so I fall away from the window, out of sight. Sam comes into the room then; I wonder if he has seen them as well. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he says. But by the time he crosses the room to look outside, Hadley has pushed Rebecca away to a safe distance. At least a foot of space separates them.

“What?” Sam says. “What’s the problem?”

“I can’t do this. It isn’t fair to you; it isn’t fair to my daughter. I can’t just think about myself. It’s been wonderful, Sam, but I think we should just go back to being friends.”

“You can’t go backwards.” Sam moves away from me. “You don’t tell someone you love them, and send them flying, and then trash them the next time you see them.” He comes closer and puts his hand on my shoulder, but when I feel it starting to burn I shrug him away. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Have you seen them? Hadley and Rebecca? He’s the same age as you, Sam. And he was practically screwing my daughter.”

“Hadley wouldn’t do that. Maybe Rebecca egged him on.”

My jaw drops. “Whose side are you on?”

“I’m just saying you should look at is logically.”

“Let me put it to you this way,” I say. “If I see him near my daughter again I’ll kill him with my own two hands.”

“What does this have to do with us?”

“If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in you,” I say, “I might have noticed what was going on between Rebecca and Hadley.” Sam starts to kiss my neck. It strikes me that this was the exact pose in which I just spied my daughter and Sam’s best friend. “You’re distracting me.”

“I know. I planned to.” I start to protest but he holds his hand up to my mouth. “Just give me one more day. Promise me that.”

When we leave the orchard, I haven’t even seen Joley yet. Sam tells me he’s down spraying organic pesticides on a section of the commercial grove. I want to find Rebecca one more time before I go, but she is nowhere to be seen.

Sam drives the blue pickup truck to a nature sanctuary about thirty miles west of Stow. Run by an Audubon spin-off, it is a large penned-in area where there are deer, great horned owls, silver foxes, wild turkeys. The paths wind through natural habitats: ponds with fallen logs, tall gold grasses, antlered branches. We walk around holding hands; there is nobody here who knows us. In fact because it is a weekday there is almost nobody here. Just some elderly people, who watch us as much as they watch the wildlife. I hear one old woman whisper to her friend as we walk by. Newlyweds, she says.

Sam and I sit for three hours on the brink of the deer habitat. Inside, the sign says, are a doe and a buck. We can spot the buck easily because it is drinking in the lake, but the doe is indistinguishable from the mottled foliage. We try to find her for a half-hour, and then we give up for a while.

Instead, we sit facing each other on a low log bench and try to catch up on the rest of our lives. I tell Sam about the house in Newton, about Joley’s trek to Mexico, about cocktail parties at the Institute and about a little girl with a cleft palate who has been my favorite student now for three years. I tell him about the time Rebecca needed stitches in her chin, and about the plane crash, and finally, about how Oliver and I met. Sam, in return, tells me about his father in Florida, and about giving speeches at Minuteman Tech, about the almost extinct apple he’s been trying to recreate genetically, about all the places he has read about and wishes he could go. We say that we will travel together, and we make up a list as if it is truly going to happen.

“There are all these things I used to say I wanted to do that I never got to do,” I tell him.

“Why not?”

“I had Rebecca,” I say, matter-of-fact.

“She’s old enough to take care of herself.”

“Apparently not. You didn’t see her this morning. You can’t decide these things for yourself when you’re only fifteen.”

Sam grins. “Didn’t I hear right that you met old Oliver when you were fifteen?”

I start to say that was different, but I change my mind. “And look where that got me.”

“I think you’re overreacting.”

“I think you aren’t her mother,” I snap. I take a deep breath. “I want you to fire Hadley.”

“Hadley?” Sam says, incredulous. “I can’t do that. He’s my best friend.”

I stand up, searching for that doe. “It’s just wrong. I know he’s wrong for Rebecca as much as I’ve known anything. He’s ten years older than her, for God’s sake.” I pause, and then turn to Sam. “Don’t say it.”

Suddenly I see her, stepping through the trees with the grace of a ballerina. The doe lifts her legs high, sniffing with her head delicately bowed. Behind her is a caramel-colored fawn. Nobody said there was a fawn. “I’m not going to be here very long, Sam,” I say softly. “You know that and I know that.”