Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

11 REBECCA July 29, 1990

A clamshell of color snaps open and shut several inches from my face flashes lights and the sounds of animals that are dying what has happened I ask you what has happened? sometimes it comes to me times like this when the world has turned black and white sometimes it comes and it will not leave it does not leave no matter how many times I scream or I pray.

I saw people ripped in two flesh split like broken dolls in what used to be an aisle outside the sky had shattered and the world which I had always imagined as soft cotton blue was angry and stained with pain.

Do you see I had witnessed the end of the world I saw heaven and earth trade places I knew where devils came from I was so young at three and a half with the weight of my life on my brow I knew for sure my head would burst.

At the end of it all row nine sailed inches away like a glider in the night and over its rotten edge I watched the fireworks diamond glass explosions and in spite of myself I started to cry.

There is a sound that the mute make when they are murdered I learned this years later on the evening news their vocal cords cannot vibrate so what the listener hears instead is the air quivering pushing in pushing out a wall of silence this is the voice of terror in a vacuum.

For days I have felt a leopard crouching on my chest. I breathe in the stale air it exhales. It scratches at the inside of my chin and it kisses my neck. When it shifts its weight, my own ribs move.

“She’s coming to,” I hear, the first words in a long time.

I open my eyes and see in this order: my mother, my father, and the tiny attic room of the Big House. I squeeze my eyes shut. Something isn’t right: I have been expecting the house in San Diego. I have forgotten entirely about Massachusetts.

I try to sit up but the leopard screams and claws at me.

“What’s the matter with her?” my father is saying. “Help her, Jane. What’s the matter.” My mother presses cold towels against my forehead but does not notice this monster at all.

“Can’t you see it,” I say, but it comes out a whisper. I am drowning in fluid. I cough and phlegm comes up, and keeps coming. My father holds tissues into my palm. My mother is crying. Neither one of them understands that if the leopard will just move, I will be fine.

“We’re going to go home,” my father says. “We’re getting out of here.”

He is wearing the wrong clothes, the wrong face to be on this farm. I search my mother’s face for an answer to this. “Let me be with her a minute, Oliver.”

“We need to work this out together,” my father says.

My mother puts her hand on his shoulder. It looks cool, like a ladyslipper or a corner of the hayloft. “Please.”

The hayloft. “Tell me this,” I say. I try to sit up. “Hadley is dead.”

My mother and father look at each other and without a word my father leaves the room. “Yes,” my mother says. Her eyes spill over with tears. “I’m so sorry, Rebecca.” She reaches across the heart-sewn quilt. She buries her face in the cave of my stomach, in the breast fur of this leopard. “I am so sorry.” The animal stands and stretches and vanishes.

To my surprise I do not cry. “Tell me everything you know.”

My mother sits up, shocked at my bravery. She says that Hadley broke his neck in the fall. The doctors said he died instantaneously. It has been three days, but it took this long to raise his body from the gorge.

“What have I been doing for three days?” I whisper. I am embarrassed that I do not know the answer.

“You have pneumonia. You’ve been sleeping most of the time. You were gone when your father first arrived here-you’d run off after Hadley. He insisted on going with Sam to find you-”She looks away. “He didn’t like the idea of Sam staying here with me.”

So he knows, I think. How interesting. “What does he mean, ‘We’re going home’?”

My mother holds her hand to my head. “Back to California. What did you think?”

I am missing something. “What have we been doing here?”

“You don’t have to hear this now. You need to rest.”

I pull the quilt away from myself and gag. All over my legs are bruises and scrapes and yellowed gauze wrappings. My bare chest is crossed with raked furrows of dried blood. “When Hadley fell, you tried to climb down after him,” my mother says. “Sam pulled you away, and you started to scratch at yourself. You wouldn’t stop, no matter how many things they wrapped around you, or how much sedation you’d been given.” She starts to cry again. “You kept saying you were trying to tear your heart out.”

“I don’t know why I bothered,” I whisper. “You’d already done that.”

She walks to the other side of the room, as far away as she can possibly get. “What do you want me to say, Rebecca? What do you want me to say?”

I don’t know. She can’t change what has been done. I begin to realize how things are different when you grow up. When I was little, she would sing to me when I was sick. She would bring me red jello and sleep curled beside me to listen for changes in my breathing. She would pretend I was a princess locked in a tower by a wicked magician, and she acted as my lady-in-waiting. Together we would watch the door for my shining white knight.

“Why do you want me to forgive you?” I say. “What do you get out of it?” I turn away and Sam’s sheep, all seven, scuttle down the path they’ve carved in the middle field.

“Why do I want you to forgive me? Because I never forgave my father, and I know what it will do to you. When I was growing up my father would hit me. He hit me and he hit my mother and I tried to keep him from hitting Joley. He broke my heart and eventually he broke me. I never believed I could be anything important- why else would my own father hurt me? And then I forgot about it. And I married Oliver and three years later he hit me. That’s when I left the first time.”

“The plane crash,” I say, and she nods.

“I went back to him because of you. I knew that more than anything else I had to make sure you grew up feeling safe. And then I hit your father, and it all came back again.” She buries her face in her hands. “It all came back again, and this time it was part of me. No matter how far I run, no matter how many states or countries I cross I can’t get it out of myself. I never forgave him. He won. He’s in me, Rebecca.”

She picks up an antique marbled pitcher that has been in Sam’s family for a long time. Without even really noticing, she lets it slip out of her grasp and shatter on the floor. “I came here and I was so happy, for a little while, I forgot again. I forgot about your father, and I forgot about you. I was so crazy in love-” she smiles, far away, “-that I didn’t believe anyone else could feel the way I did. Including- especially -my own daughter. If you could fall in love with someone who was twenty-five, and it was all right, then it couldn’t possibly be all right for me to fall in love with someone who was twenty-five. Can you see?”

I have seen my mother with Sam in the shadow of the orchard; they’re joined at the mind. That is what has been different about these weeks: I have never seen her like this. I have never enjoyed being with her so much. I don’t understand what my father is doing here or why he wants her back. The woman he wants isn’t here. That woman doesn’t exist anymore.

“But I’ve watched you with him,” I say.

“If it was right, Rebecca,” my mother says, “it would have happened years ago.”

I don’t have to ask her why she is going home, anymore. I already know the answer. My mother thinks she has failed: not just my father, but me. She can’t have Sam; it’s her punishment. In the real world, the best of circumstances don’t always come to be. In the real world, “forever” may only be a weekend.

My mother looks at me. When our eyes connect there are more words that come in silence. What you cannot have, I cannot have. My life created yours, and because of this my life depends on yours. How strange, I think. I learned about love’s Catch-22 before my own mother. I taught this lesson to her.

She smiles at me and she lifts the sheet of gauze from my chest. “Sometimes I can’t believe you’re only fifteen,” she murmurs. She runs her fingers across my nipples and over my breasts. As my mother touches me the wounds begin to close on themselves. We watch in silence as split skin heals and bruises diffuse. Still, there will be scars.

When he comes into the room in the middle of the night I am expecting him. He is the only one who hasn’t come to see me since I regained consciousness. First the door opens a crack, then I see the flashlight’s head, and by the time Uncle Joley makes his way to the bed, I know where we are headed.

“If we drive now, we’ll be there in plenty of time,” he tells me, “and no one will have figured out where we’ve gone.”

He carries me in his arms to an old blue pickup truck that didn’t have an engine for several weeks. He jump starts it by rolling it in neutral down the hill of the driveway. He has provided me with a cape-orange with fuschia pom-poms, a throwback to the seventies. Sitting between us on the cracked leather seat is a thermos of black coffee and an oat-raisin muffin.

“I don’t suppose you’re feeling like yourself yet.” When I shake my head he turns on the windshield wipers. He squirts washer fluid, which fires over the back of the truck. It trickles into the flatbed, spurting like a water gun. “So much for that,” Joley says.

He is a handsome man in a faded kind of way. His hair curls at his ears, even after he’s just had a haircut. The first thing you notice about his face is the space between his eyes-so narrow that it makes him look either mongoloid or very intelligent, depending on your frame of reference. And then there are his lips, which are full like a girl’s and as pink as zinnias. If you take your favorite Mel Gibson poster, and fold it up and put it in the pocket of your jeans and then send them through the washer and dryer, the picture you’d wind up with would be kinder, less startling, and smooth at the edges. Uncle Joley.

The sun comes up as we cross the New Hampshire border. “I don’t remember much of this,” I tell him. “I spent a good deal of the trip in the back of a truck.”

“Let me guess,” he says. “Refrigerated?”

He makes me smile. When my father and Sam found us, I was running a 104-degree fever.

Uncle Joley doesn’t talk much. He knows it is not what I need. He asks every now and then if I will pour him a cup of coffee, and I do, holding it to his lips like he is the one who is sick.

We pass the brown road sign that delineates the White Mountain-region. “It’s beautiful here,” I say, “isn’t it?”

“Do you think it’s beautiful?” my uncle asks. He catches me off guard.

I survey the peaks and the gulleys. In Southern California, the land is flat and offers no surprises. “Well, yes.”

“Then it is,” he says.

We drive on roads that I have never seen. I doubt they are even really roads. They snake through the woods and look more like two tracks left from winter skiers than a path for a car, but they do provide a short cut. The truck bounces back and forth, spilling the coffee and rolling the untouched muffin under the seat. We end up in Hadley’s mother’s backyard, which I can’t help but recognize. We park the truck like a peace offering in the small space between the house and Mount Deception.

“I’m glad you could come,” Mrs. Slegg says. She opens the screen door. “I heard what happened to you.”

She puts her arms around me and helps me into her toasty kitchen. I am so ashamed. Her son is the one who has died, and here she is fussing over my scratches. “I’m sorry.” I stumble over the words Joley has coached me to say. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Hadley’s mother’s eyes widen, as if she is shocked to hear any phrase like this at all. “Sugar, it was your loss too.” She sits down on the ladderback chair beside mine. She covers my hand with her own puffy fingers. She is wearing a blue housecoat and a loud apron with an appliquéd raspberry. “I know just what the two of you need. Where have my wits been? You come all the way from Massachusetts and I’m sitting here like a tub of butter.” She opens the breadbox and takes out fresh rolls and crullers and sesame cakes.

“Thanks, Mrs. Slegg, but I’m not very hungry yet.”

“You call me Mother Slegg,” she urges. “And no wonder, a little-thing like you. You can probably barely stand alone in a wind, much less take this kind of pain standing tall.”

Uncle Joley walks over to the window. He peers out at the mountain. “Where is the funeral going to be?”

“Not far from here. A cemetery where my husband is buried, God rest his soul. We have a family plot.” She says it so casually that I start to watch her for signs: did she not love her own son? Is she a closet mourner, tearing at her hair when everyone leaves?

A boy comes into the kitchen. He takes the milk out of the refrigerator before acknowledging us. When he turns, he looks so much like Hadley I feel as if I have been punched. “You Rebecca?”

I nod, speechless. “You’re-”

“Cal,” he says. “I’m the younger one. Well, I was.” He turns to his mother. “Should we go?” He is wearing a flannel shirt and jeans.

Cal, two of Hadley’s friends from high school and Uncle Joley are asked to be the pallbearers at the cemetery. There is a preacher who gives a nice, respectable service. In the middle of it all a robin lands on the casket. It begins to peck at the ring of flowers. After ten seconds of watching this peacefully, Mrs. Slegg screams to the preacher to stop. She falls onto the ground and crawls towards the casket to grab the flowers. In the flurry of noise the bird flies away. Someone leads Hadley’s mother away.

I do not cry throughout the entire ceremony. No matter where I turn I can see that mountain, waiting to claim Hadley again when he is part of the earth. Here I will remain with worms that are thy chambermaids, I find myself thinking, and for the life of me I cannot place the quote. It must be something I have learned in school but it is hard to believe. It seems so long ago, and I was such a different person.

The four men step forward and lower the leather straps that drop the casket slowly into the ground. I turn away. Up until this point I have pretended that Hadley is not in there at all; that this is just a token and he is waiting back at the Big House for me. But I see the struggle of muscles in Uncle Joley’s back and the sinews in Cal’s fingers. I am convinced that there is indeed something in the rough mustard box.

I cover my ears so that I do not hear him hit the bottom. The cape falls away from my chest and exposes what has happened to me. Nobody notices except for Mrs. Slegg. She is some distance away, and she only cries a little bit harder.

Before we leave the cemetery, Cal presents me with the shirt Hadley was wearing the night before he died. The one I wrapped around myself when my father and Sam came. It is blue flannel checked with black. He folds it into triangles, like a flag. Then he tucks in the corners and hands it to me. I do not thank him. I do not say goodbye to Hadley’s grieving mother. Instead, I let my uncle escort me to the truck. In near silence, he drives me back, where everyone else is waiting for their world to end.