Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

16 REBECCA July 25, 1990

When I see myself in the reflection of the truck’s window, I understand why nobody has stopped to pick me up. I’ve been in the rain for three hours, and I haven’t even reached the highway yet. My hair is plastered against my head, and my features remind me of a soft-boiled egg. Mud is caked on my arms and legs in paisley shapes: I don’t look like a hitchhiker; I look like a Vietnam vet.

“Thank God,” I say under my breath, and I blow a cloud of frost between my teeth. Massachusetts is not California. It can’t be more than fifty degrees out here, although it’s July, and the sun’s barely set.

I am not put off by truckers anymore, not since coming crosscountry. They look worse than they are, for the most part, like the so-called tough guys in school who refuse to throw the first punch. The man in the cab of this truck is shaved bald, with a tattoo of a snake running from the crown of his head down his neck. So I smile at him. “I’m trying to get to New Hampshire.”

The trucker stares at me blankly, as if I have mentioned a state he’s never heard of. He says something out loud, and it’s not directed to me, and suddenly I see another person appear in the passenger seat. I cannot tell if it is a boy or a girl but it seems this person had just woken up. She-no, he-runs a hand through his hair and sniffs in to clear his nose. My shoulders begin to shiver again; I can see there isn’t room for me.

“Listen,” the driver says, “You ain’t running away from home.”

“Okay. I’m not.”

“Is she thick, or what.” He squints at me. “We can’t stow away minors.”

“Minors? I’m eighteen. I just don’t look it right now. I’ve been on the road for hours.”

The boy in the passenger seat, who is wearing a White Snake shirt with cut-off sleeves, turns my way. He grins. He is missing his two front teeth. “Eighteen, hey?” For the first time I understand what it is like to be undressed by someone’s eyes. I cross my hands in front of me. “Let her get in the back, Spud. She can ride with the rest of the meat.” The two of them start to laugh hysterically.

“The back?”

The White Snake boy points with his thumb. “Lift the hatch and make sure you lock it from the inside. And,” he leans out the window so that I can smell the chocolate curdles of his breath. “We’ll stop for a little rest, baby. Real soon.” He slaps the driver high five, rolls up his window.

It is an unmarked white truck so I don’t know what to expect from its contents. I have to swing myself up on the steel frame to unhook the latch, then swing down and pull the handle with me. I know they are in a hurry so I climb back inside and pull the doors shut with the strings someone has attached to the padded inside.

There are no windows. It is pitch dark, and freezing. I reach around me like I am blind and feel the shapes of chickens shrinkwrapped in plastic, the T-bones in steaks. The truck begins to bounce. Through a wall of raw flesh I can hear the boy with the White Snake shirt, singing along to a tape of Guns ‘n’ Roses.

I am going to die, I think, and I am much more terrified than I was walking along the road at night. I am going to freeze to death and when they open this hatch two hours from now I’ll be blue and curled like an embryo. Think, I tell myself. Think. How in God’s name do the Eskimos live?

Then I remember. Way back, in fifth grade we studied them-the Inuit-and I had asked Miss Cleary how they stay warm in a home made of ice. Well, they have fires, she said. But believe it or not the ice is a house. Astrange house but a house indeed. It traps their body heat.

There is not much room to move in here but it is enough. I squat, wary of standing in a moving truck. Little by little I move meat away from the wall of the truck and pile it back up, leaving a tiny enclosure for my own body. It gets easier as my eyes adjust to the dark. I find that if I layer chicken with tenderloins, the walls don’t come tumbling down.

“What you doing back there, baby,” I hear. “You getting yourself-ready for me?”

And then the rough voice of the driver: “You gonna shut up Earl, or I’ll have to throw you back there to cool down.”

I curl into the small space I’ve created and wrap my arms tight around myself. Soon, I think, there’ll be someone else to do this for me. I don’t know that it is any warmer, but in my head I think it is and that really makes a difference.

I know it was her. I know that she was the one who told Sam to get rid of Hadley, or else why would Hadley go? He was happy there, Sam was happy with him there, there weren’t any problems. It was my mother; she gets in her head an idea that she can run the world for everyone and she actually thinks she’s right.

It’s okay for her to run around giggling like an idiot with Sam, right? But if I fall in love-real love, you know-it’s the end of the world. Hadley and I really have something. I know what I’m talking about, too. I’ve had boyfriends for a week or so in school, and this is nothing like it. Hadley’s told me about the way his father died working in front of him; about the time he almost drowned in a frozen pond. He’s told me about the time he stole a pack of Twinkies from the Wal-Mart, and couldn’t sleep till he gave it back. He’s cried, sometimes, telling me these things. He’s said there’s no one quite like me.

We’ll get married-isn’t it Mississippi or someplace like that where fifteen is legal?-and we’ll live on a farm of our own. We’ll have strawberries and wax beans and cherry tomatoes and apples, I suppose, and absolutely no rhubarb. We’ll have five kids, and if they all look like Hadley that’s fine with me, as long as I have one little girl to myself. I’ve always wanted someone like me.

I’ll invite my father for the weekend-that’ll drive my mother crazy. And when she and Sam come to visit we won’t let them in. We’ll post Dobermans trained for her scent. And when she stands outside her car and calls to us, begging forgiveness, we’ll turn on the outside stereo speakers and flood away her voice with Tracy Chapman, Buffalo Springfield and those other ballads Hadley likes.

He came to me before he left. He sneaked into my room and pressed his hand against my mouth before I could speak. He told me he had to leave and then he slipped off his boots and got under the covers. He put his hands up my nightgown. I told him they were cold, but he just laughed and pressed them against my belly until he caught my heat. “I don’t understand,” he whispered. “Sam and me have been together for almost fifteen years. He’s more my brother than my brother. This is more my home.” I thought he might be crying and that was something I did not want to see, so I didn’t turn to face him. He said, “I’ll be back to get you, Rebecca, I mean that. I’ve never been with anyone like you.” Those, I think, were the exact words.

But I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for him, watching my mother coring Macs with Sam in the kitchen or rubbing his feet after dinner. I wasn’t going to watch that and pretend like nothing had happened. Obviously, she doesn’t care about me, or she wouldn’t have pushed Hadley away.

Once I said to Hadley, “You know you’re almost old enough to be my father.” I mean, ten years is some difference. And he told me I was no ordinary fifteen-year-old. Fifteen-year-olds in Stow read Tiger Beat and go to the Boston malls to see visiting soap opera stars. I told him that Stow was about three years behind, then-in San Diego that’s what twelve-year-olds do. And Hadley said, “Well, maybe these kids are twelve after all.”

I believe in love. I think it just hits you and pulls the rug out from underneath you and, like a baby, demands your attention every minute of the day. When I get close to Hadley I breathe faster. My knees shake. If I rub my eyes hard, I can see his image in the corners. We’ve been together one whole week.

We haven’t done it yet. We’ve come awfully close-like that time in the hay on the horse blankets. But he’s the one who keeps pushing me away, what do you make of that? I thought all guys wanted was sex-which is another reason I’m crazy about him. He said to me, “Don’t you want to be a kid for a couple of days longer?”

My mother told me about sex when I was four. She started by saying, “When a man and a woman love each other very much . . .” and then she stopped herself and said, “When a man and a woman are married and love each other very much . . .” I don’t think she knows I caught the slip. I’m not supposed to have sex until I’m married, which doesn’t make any sense to me. Number one, most girls in high school have done it by the time they graduate and very few get pregnant-we aren’t stupid. And number two, it’s not like marriage is the peak of your life. You can be married, I think, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are in love.

Maybe I fall asleep for a while in this chicken igloo. When I wake up I am not sure if it is my eyes blinking or the door opening that lets in a slice of light. Whatever it is it goes away very quickly, and it is several seconds too late when I notice we aren’t moving.

The boy is there, tossing away the wall of ice with the force of a superhero. In the darkness his teeth are blue like lightning. I can see his ribs. “You been quiet,” he says, revealing me.

I am not as frightened as I should be. I consider playing dead but I am not sure that will stop him.

“Let’s play a game. I’ll go first.” He strips off his T-shirt, to show his skin, which glows.

“Where are we?” I hope it is a McDonald’s, where, if I scream, I have a chance of being heard.

“If you’re real good I’ll let you out to take a look.” He thinks about what he’s said and then he laughs, and takes a step forward. “Real good.” He pokes my shoulder. “It’s your turn, baby. The shirt. Take off the shirt.”

I collect all the saliva I can and spit at his chest. “You,” I say, “are a pig.”

Because his eyes are still adjusting to the light I have the advantage. While he is trying to figure out what I’ve done I push past him and lunge for the latch on the door. He grabs me by the hair and, pinning me by the throat, presses me up against the cold, cold wall. With his free hand he grabs mine and holds it against his crotch. Through his jeans, I can feel him twitch.

I bring my knee up with power that surprises me and crush it against him. He falls back on the broiler-fryers and the strip streaks, clutching his groin. “You little fuck!” he yells. I throw open the latch and tear into the fast-food restaurant.

I hide in the ladies room, figuring that is the safest place. Inside the stall I lock the door and crouch on the toilet seat. I count to five hundred and try to ignore the people who rattle the lock to see if there is someone inside. I will not ride with men, I vow. I can’t afford to.

When the coast is clear I come out of the stall and stand in front of the sink area. I wash the mud off my arms and legs with warm industrial soap and scrub my face; then I hold my head under the air blower to dry my hair. There are icicles in the scalp. As I poke my head out the bathroom door, an older woman wearing a green wool suit with a matching fedora and a strand of pearls goes inside.

They are gone. I survey the walls of the restaurant to see what town we are in but these places all look the same. Employee of the Month: Vera Cruces. We use eighty-five percent lean beef, flame-broiled not fried. The well-dressed woman comes out of the bathroom.

“Please,” I say, sidelining her. “Can you help me?”

She glances at my clothing, evaluating whether or not to speak to me. She reaches for her purse.

“Oh, no, no money,” I say. “You see, I’m trying to get to New Hampshire. My mother lives there and she’s very ill and my boyfriend was driving me from our boarding school, but we’ve had a fight, and he left me here.” I turn away, and catch my breath like I’ve been sobbing.

“Where do you go to school, dear?” the woman asks.

I am stumped. The only prep schools I know are in California. “Boston,” I tell her, smiling. To distract her, I sway a little, and lean against the wall. She reaches out to support me and I take her warm, bony hand. “I’m sorry. I’m not feeling all that well.”

“I can imagine. I’ll take you as far as Laconia, and we’ll see if we can put you on a bus.”

The truth is, I’m not feeling all that well. I didn’t exactly fake it when I swooned. My eyes are burning something awful, and there is the taste of blood in my mouth. When this woman, who introduces herself as Mrs. Phipps, offers me her arm on the way to the car I am happy to take it. Inside, I stretch across the back seat with a Dior jacket as a blanket and fall asleep.

When I wake up Mrs. Phipps is peering at me in the rearview mirror. “Hello, dear. It’s just past ten o’clock.” She smiles; she reminds me of a wren. “Do you feel better?”

“Marvelous much,” I answer. It’s a phrase I heard once in an old movie and I have always wanted to use it.

“Looks as if you have a fever,” she observes, detached. “Your face is red as a beet.” I sit up and look into the mirror; she’s right. “Now, I’ve been thinking. You look like a Windsor girl. Am I right?”

I have no idea what a Windsor girl looks like. I smile. “You bet.”

“I went to Miss Porter’s. But that was years ago, of course.” She pulls the car into a shopping center with an odd kiosk in the middle. “This is Laconia,” she says. “You slept most of the way. Now where is your mother?”

I stare at her for a second until I remember what I’ve said. “Carroll, in the White Mountains.”

Mrs. Phipps nods and tells me to stay in the car. She comes back with a bus ticket and a crisp ten dollar bill. “You take this, dear. In case you need anything along the way.” When I get out of the car she pats me as you might pat a disinterested cat and gives me directions for the trip. Her face is a wrinkled plum. She wishes my mother the best, and then gets in her Toyota and drives away, waving. I feel bad, watching her go. I feel bad that I have lied; I feel bad that this kind old woman is driving alone at ten at night, on the same roadways as violent, perverted truckers.

Hadley’s house, 114 Sandcastle Lane according to the phone book, is a long and simple avocado-colored ranch that looks as if it was tossed by a tornado at the base of a huge mountain. This mountain is Hadley’s backyard, and if you stand a little too close you get the impression that the house is built against a natural wall of rock. There isn’t a doorbell, just a knocker in the shape of a frog. I know Hadley will answer, because I’ve come all this distance.

I see his eyes first-soft and brown as earth, the color of thunderstorms. They get wider as they see me. “What are you doing here?” Hadley says, grinning. He swings open the screen door and steps onto the porch in front of me. This object of my affection. He takes me into his arms and lifts me off my feet, holding me level with himself.

“Surprised?”

“Hell, yes.” Hadley touches my face with the pads of his fingers. “I can’t believe you’re here.” He cranes his neck around the pillars of the porch. “Who’s with you?”

“I came myself. I ran away.”

“Oh, no, Rebecca.” He straddles a rusted iron stool. “You can’t stay here. Where do you think they’ll come looking first?”

At this realization I sway again, thinking this has all been for nothing.-“I almost got raped coming here,” I say, starting to cry. “And I think I’m sick, and I don’t want to be at Sam’s without you.” My nose starts to run, and I wipe it on my sleeve. “Don’t you want me here?”

“Sssh.” He pulls me closer so I am standing between his legs. He locks his ankles behind me. “Of course I want you here.” He kisses my lips, my eyes and my forehead. “You’re burning. What’s happened to you?”

I tell him the story, the entire story, which makes him punch the door frame at one point and laugh at another. “I’ve still got to get you away from here,” he says. “Sam’ll come looking.” He tells me to wait here, and he disappears back into the house. Through the corner of the window I see a television set turned to The Twilight Zone, fuzzy pink slippers propped on an ottoman, and a square of quilted orange robe.

“Who was it?” I hear someone say.

Hadley comes back with two blankets, a loaf of bread, a plastic-cup and three cans of Chef Boyardee pasta. He stuffs all this into a knapsack. “I told my mother you were a friend of mine, and we were going out to a bar. That way she won’t worry, and she won’t know a thing if they come to ask her questions.”

Hadley takes my hand and leads me into the backyard, up to the face of this mountain. “This way,” he says. He places my foot in a crevice and shows me what to do.

Mount Deception is not particularly hard to climb. It levels off and becomes a flat plain for a while, then rises ten feet again, and so on until you get to the top. From an aerial view it must look like the pyramids in Egypt. Hadley carries the knapsack and climbs behind me in case I fall, which I’m proud to say I do not do. We continue like this for about an hour, using the moon as a torch.

Hadley takes me to a small clearing in a knot of pine trees. He walks me around the parameters of this space, and then holds me by the waist as we come to the north corner. There is a straight drop, a hundred feet maybe, to a cavern below with a stuttering river.

While Hadley makes us a home, I sit on the edge of this cliff, dangling my feet. I am not afraid of heights; they fascinate me. I drop twigs and stones, progressively larger, and try to hear how long it takes before they hit the rocks.

“Dinner,” Hadley says, so I turn back to the clearing. He has stretched one blanket over pine needles to form a surprisingly soft mattress. In the center is a candle (I hadn’t seen him carrying that, it must have been in his pocket) and a can of Raviolios. “I forgot utensils,” he says. He picks up the can and feeds me a piece of pasta with his fingers. It tastes cold and tinny, absolutely delicious. “Now, you promise you won’t get up in the middle of the night to pee and take a wrong turn?” Hadley rubs my arms, which are puckered with the cold. My teeth chatter.

“I won’t go anywhere without you,” I say. “I mean it.”

“Sssh.” Hadley stares at me as if he knows he will be tested on how well he remembers the shape of my mouth, the color of my eyes. “They don’t know you like I do,” he says. “They don’t understand how it is.” He lies down on his stomach and leans his cheek on my thigh. “Here’s the plan. We’ll stay here overnight, and then I’ll get the truck in the morning, and we’ll take a drive down to Stow again. If you talk to your mom about all this-if she sees we came back of our own free will-I think it will work out.”

“I’m not going back there,” I tell him. “I hate what she did.”

“Come on, Rebecca, everyone makes mistakes. Do you blame her? If your daughter was dating a guy ten years older wouldn’t you be a little worried?”

The moon dances across his hair. “Whose side are you on?” I say, but he’s kissing my knee, that ticklish spot, and I can’t really stay angry at him.

I lie down beside him and feel his arms close around me and for the first time in hours I get warm. He takes off his jacket and wraps it around my shoulders awkwardly, and when our foreheads bump together we laugh. As he kisses me I think about the smells of the cider press and the way summer feels when you know it is going to end.

I unbutton Hadley’s flannel shirt and hold it soft against my skin. The hair on his chest is an unlikely shade of red. It circles in spirals that remind me of my father’s nautical maps. I rub my fingers across them, the opposite way, making the hair stand on end. He sings to me.

Soon we are at that point we have been at before, naked except for each other. Hadley’s outstretched hands can cover the length of my spine. “Please,” I say to him. “I don’t want to be a kid anymore.”

Hadley smiles. He pushes the hair back from my forehead. “You aren’t.” He kisses my neck and then he kisses my breasts and my stomach and my hips and then down there. “What are you doing,” I whisper, but I am really speaking to myself. I feel something starting, some energy, that draws blood from my fingertips and begins unexpected to open. I pull back on Hadley’s hair and scratch at his neck. I am afraid I will never get to see his face again. But then he slides up my body and in and we move like a sail, like a wind; he kisses me, full, on the lips, and to my great surprise I taste like the ocean.

“Jesus, Hadley,” Sam says, and Hadley jumps up. He’s wearing his boxers. I pull his shirt over me and roll a blanket around my legs. I cannot see everyone clearly; there is some kind of fire behind my eyes.

“Hadley.” My voice is not my own. “This is my father.”

Unsure of what to do, Hadley holds out his hand. My father does not take it. I’m puzzled seeing my father in this environment. He is wearing suit pants and a polo shirt and brown loafers. I am amazed that he could climb up here with a sole like that.

My head is throbbing so heavily I lie back down. The park ranger-the only person here who has been paying attention to me-kneels down and asks if I am all right. “To tell you the truth,” I say, “I don’t really know.” I try to sit up with his help, but there are shooting pains in my ears and in my eyes. Hadley kneels down beside me. He tells the ranger to get me away from everyone, where there’s air.

“Get the hell away from her,” my father says. “Don’t touch her.”

Sam, standing beside him, tells Hadley it might be best.

“What do you know?” Hadley shouts at Sam.

I am having a great deal of trouble concentrating on the scene at hand. When people speak, I can’t hear the actual words until several seconds later. The sun swims in between their faces, bleaching them like overexposed photos. I try very hard to focus on Sam’s eyes, the brightest color of anything in front of me. Beside Sam, my father seems small and two-dimensional, like a paper doll.

“Rebecca,” my father’s voice comes to me through a tunnel. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

“He wouldn’t hurt her.” Sam leans in close to me with a face curved like a camera lens. “Can you stand up?”

I shake my head. Hadley takes my shoulders in his hands, regardless of what my father has said, which I do not remember anyway. He places his head so close to mine I can read his mind. He is thinking: I love you. Don’t forget that. “Let me talk,” I whisper, but nobody seems to hear me.

“Look, she came to me. She hitched. We were headed to your place today to work this all out.” His words are too loud.

“Hadley,” Sam says slowly, “I think you’d better let Rebecca come home with us. And I think you’d better stay here for a while.”

Let me talk, I say again, but I am ignored. It occurs to me I may not be speaking at all.

Hadley stands up and walks away from the clearing. He has his hands on his hips. When he turns around the veins in his forehead are strained and blue, and he stares at Sam. “You know me. You’ve known me forever. I can’t believe,” here he looks at my father, “I cannot believe that you- you -would doubt me. You’re my friend, Sam. You’re like my brother. I didn’t tell her to come here-I wouldn’t do that. But I’m not just gonna turn my back and let you take her away. Jesus, Sam,” he takes a step backward. “I love her.”

With all the energy I have I lunge towards Hadley, not quite standingand not quite crawling. He catches me in his arms and presses my face into his chest. He whispers into my hair things I cannot make out.

“Let go of her, you bastard,” my father mutters. Sam lays a hand on his arm but he shakes it off and yells into the sky. “Let go of my daughter!”

“Give her to us, Hadley,” Sam says softly.

“Sir,” the ranger says, the first word I hear without the static of the trees.

“No,” I whisper to Hadley.

He kneels down and takes my face in his hands. “Don’t cry, now. You look like an onion when you cry, your nose gets all long . . .” I look up at him. “There you go. Now I said I’d come for you, didn’t I, and your father came a long way to see you. Go on home.” His voice cracks, and he swallows hard. I trace his Adam’s apple with my finger. “You need a doctor. Go back to Sam’s and get better, and I’ll come for you. We’ll work this all out like I said. You go with them.”

“Give her to us,” Sam says again.

I know as sure as I know myself that if I leave that mountain without Hadley I will never see him again. “I can’t,” I tell Hadley, and it’s true. Except for him, I don’t have anyone left who will love me. I wrap my arms around his waist and pull myself closer.

“You have to go with them,” he says gently. “Don’t you want to make me happy? Don’t you see?”

“No,” I say, pulling myself to Hadley.

“Go, Rebecca,” Hadley says, a little louder. He loosens my grip on his waist and holds my hands.

“I won’t.” Tears are running down my face and my nose is running and I don’t give a damn. I will not, I tell myself. I will not.

Hadley looks at the sky and with great force pushes me away by my wrists. He pushes so hard that I land several feet away on the rocks and the dirt. He pushes so hard that, without me beside him, he loses his balance.

I try to grab at him but I am too far away. I catch the air, and he falls over the edge of the cliff.

He falls so slowly, twisting in a somersault like a rough-cut acrobat, and I hear the rush of the river I heard last night before there was the beating of his heart in my hand. Thick as breath, I hear his spine hit the rocks and the water below.

After this, everything that has built up inside me spills out. It is nonverbal. It is a chord that comes when a knife cleaves your soul. And only now, with this sound surrounding, does everyone choose to listen.