Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

54 JANE

I’ve been with Sam all morning, and I can’t ever remember feeling so strange. He teaches me things I’ve never imagined knowing. If he said the thrill of my life would be doing handsprings across an open field, I’d probably follow his lead.

Which is all very well and good for me, but more than once today I have seen Rebecca staring at me as if she isn’t certain I am the same person I was three days ago. In all likelihood I may not be-I have to admit it’s been a radical transformation-I’m in much better spirits. I owe her an explanation. Every time I’ve looked at her today I’ve seen a reflection of Oliver in her eyes, which makes me feel guilty. Don’t get me wrong: we’re just friends, Sam and I. We have fun together; surely that’s not a crime. After all I am a married woman. I have a daughter to think about.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Sam says, looking across the truck at me.

“My thoughts? A penny?” I grin at him. “Ten bucks and you’re on.”

“Ten bucks? That’s robbery.”

“That’s inflation.”

Sam leans his elbow out the open window. “How about I pay for your ice cream?” He is driving us-me, Joley, Rebecca and Hadley-to yet another ice cream stand, en route to the pond where we can go swimming. Joley, Rebecca and Hadley are in the back of the truck, sitting on T-shirts to keep the hot metal from burning their legs, singing at the tops of their lungs.

“I’ve been thinking of how to explain to Rebecca why all of a sudden we stopped arguing,” I say.

“I don’t see why it’s any of her business.”

“That’s because you don’t have children. I owe her an explanation. If I don’t give her one, she loses trust in me. If she loses trust in me, she won’t listen, and she’ll wind up as another fifteen-year-old pregnant teenager smoking crack.”

“That’s an optimistic way to look at it. Why don’t you just tell her you finally succumbed to my charm?” He flashes a smile at me.

“Right. Very funny.”

“Tell her the truth. Tell her we had it out last night and called it a truce.”

“Is that what we did?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Sam says. “Didn’t we?”

I stick my head out the window, turning halfway around in the seat. Rebecca spots me and waves vigorously. Then all of a sudden I can see Hadley’s face and Joley’s, as they slide over from the other side of the flatbed. I turn around and lower myself back inside the cab. “But it’s more than that,” I say, and I’m not sure I should go on. What if it’s all in my head?

We come to a stop sign, and Sam pauses a second longer than he has to. “Jane,” he says, “you know why we were fighting so hard, don’t you?”

I do, but I don’t want to. I look up, and find Sam’s eyes on me. “If we didn’t like each other,” he says, “then there was nothing to be afraid of.”

I can feel the temperature in the truck. My forehead starts to perspire. “You know,” I say quickly, licking my lips, “I read somewhere that if it’s ninety-seven degrees out, but it’s seventy percent humidity, it feels like it’s a hundred and fifty-five degrees. It was in the Times . They had this fancy chart.”

Sam looks in my direction and smiles. He relaxes his shoulders and he shifts in his seat so he is that much farther away from me. “Okay,” he says, softly. “Okay.”

At the ice cream stand, I watch Sam from a distance. He is leaning against a telephone pole, beside Hadley and Joley, pointing to features on an all-terrain bike. Since we have been left alone, Rebecca will not look me in the eye.

I decide to lay it on the line. “Rebecca,” I say. “About Sam. What do you think? Really.” Rebecca’s eyes open wide, as if this is the last topic she expected me to bring up today. “Well, it’s pretty obvious that we’ve patched up our differences, and I imagine you’ve been wondering about it.”

“I don’t know him really well. He seems nice enough.”

“Nice enough for what?”

I move in front of her so that she is forced to look at me when she speaks. “If you mean, ‘Should I screw him?’” she says, “then, if you want to, yes!”

“Rebecca!” I grab her arm. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you here. Sometimes I think you aren’t the same kid I brought out East.” I shake my head, and when she turns her face up to me I can see it again: Oliver.

I take a deep breath. “I know you think I’m betraying your father.”

The truth is: when I’m with Sam, I don’t think about Oliver. And I like that. It’s the first time since we’ve left California that I’ve felt really free. On the other hand, I’ve never really considered what constitutes faithfulness in a marriage. I’ve never had to. Is it being unfaithful to Oliver if I spend time with a man who makes me forget about him?

“I know that I’m still married to him,” I say. “Don’t you think that every time I see you in the morning I think about what I’ve left behind in California? A whole life, Rebecca, I’ve left my whole life. I’ve left a man, who, at least in some ways, depends on me. And that’s why sometimes I wonder what I’m doing out here, in this godforsaken farm zone with this . . . this . . .” I stop, catching sight of Sam in the distance. He winks at me.

“This what?” Rebecca says, her voice quiet.

“This absolutely incredible man.” It just slips out and after it does I know that I am in trouble.

Rebecca takes a few steps away from me, rubbing her chin as if she has been struck. Her back is facing me, and I try to imagine the expression she will have in her eyes when she turns. “So what’s going on between you and Sam, anyway?”

I can feel myself blush from the tip of my neck up to my eyebrows. I hold my hands up to my cheeks, trying to stop it from happening. “Nothing,” I whisper, upset that she would think such a thing. My own daughter. “Absolutely nothing.” But I’ve been having some crazy thoughts.

“I didn’t think you two got along.”

“Neither did I. I guess compatibility isn’t the issue.” So, I think. Then what is? Joley is at the front of the line, juggling several ice cream cones. “We should head back,” I suggest, but I don’t make a move to go anywhere.

“You’ve got the hots for Sam,” Rebecca says, matter-of-fact.

“Oh please. I’m a married lady,” I say, “remember?” The words come to my lips automatically. Married.

“ Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember. I’ve been married to your father for fifteen years. Aren’t you supposed to love the person you marry?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “You tell me.”

I narrow my eyes. “Yes, you’re supposed to.” It remains to be seen, though, whether you can continue to love the person you marry. But that isn’t what is at stake, here. “Sam is just a friend,” I say emphatically. “My friend .” If I say it over and over I will start to believe it.

The ponds opens out of nowhere in the middle of a thicket. It is square and sparkling, surrounded on three sides by short sunburned grass and on one side by a makeshift beach. Sam tells me it’s a sandy bottom. “It doesn’t matter to me,” I say cheerfully. “I’m not planning on going in.”

“I bet you change your mind,” he says.

“I bet she doesn’t,” Joley says. “I’ve been trying to get her into the water for twenty years.” He lays the ukulele he’s been playing on his towel, and strips off his T-shirt. He is wearing faded madras bathing trunks. “I’m coming,” he calls to Hadley and Rebecca, who are already waiting at the brink of the water.

I start to arrange the towels neatly on the beach. I do it the way I like best: all towels touching, so that no sand gets through.

“At least come down to the edge of the water with me,” Sam says.

I look up just in time to see Hadley doing a nicely executed swan dive from one of the two docks that run into the middle of the pond. “All right.” I leave the towels half-arranged. “But just to the edge.”

Hadley and Rebecca are standing in the more shallow water. He swims underneath her and puts her feet on his shoulders, and then stands so that she towers like a giant and dives. She surfaces, and slicks her hair back from her face. “Do it again!” she cries.

Before I know it Sam has me standing ankle deep in the water. “It’s not so bad, is it?”

It is warmer than I expected. I shake my head. I stare down at the blue-tinted water and this is when I see them.

If I didn’t know better I would say my ankles were surrounded by a million squiggling sperm. I nearly jump out of the inch of water I’m standing in, and Sam pushes me back. “They’re just pollywogs. You know. They turn into tadpoles.”

“I don’t want them near me.”

“You don’t have a choice. They were here first.” Sam lowers his hands to the water. “When we were little we used to take tadpoles home in a bucket. We’d try to feed them lettuce but they always died.”

“I’m not one for frogs,” I say.

“Just worms?”

“Just worms.” I smile.

“Frogs are remarkable, you know,” Sam says, taking my hand. “They breathe air and water. They breathe through their skin. Experts say that frogs are the missing link in evolution. They say humans came from the seas, and frogs make the transition between water and earth.”

“How do you know all this?”

Sam shrugs. “I pick it up here and there. I read a lot.” In the background, I hear Rebecca scream. Instinctively my head jerks up, and I find her safe on the floating dock, where Hadley is trying to push her over the edge. Sam watches this, and then turns to me. “It must be incredible being a mother.”

I smile. “It’s pretty incredible. You find that you have this raw animal instinct. I could pick out Rebecca’s scream from any other kid here, I bet.” I watch Rebecca gracefully bellyflop off the dock.

Sam lets go of my hand and points to the water. I find that I am standing in it again, this time up to my thighs. I hadn’t even noticed we were walking in. I jump a little, but we are so far away from the edge of the beach that there’s really nowhere for me to go. “That was a dirty rotten trick,” I say.

Sam grins. “I suppose, but it worked.”

I can feel him looking right through me, so without glancing up I turn away. “I’m going to finish setting up the towels. You go ahead in.”

It doesn’t take long to set up six towels, however, so I sit on the corner of one and watch them all horse around in the pond. Hadley and Rebecca are working on finding her center of balance. It is somewhere near her hips; I could have told them that. Rebecca takes a running start in the shallow water towards Hadley, and then he lifts her high into the air, trying to hold her up by her pelvis, and then inevitably one of them breaks and they both collapse into the water. Joley is doing a lazy backfloat, his favorite summer stroke, pursing his lips and spouting a fountain. And Sam is showing off. He runs down the length of one of the wooden docks, springing into the air, tucking his taut, tanned form into a double somersault. He’s just like a kid, I think, and then I remember that he is a kid.

He pulls himself onto the dock and takes a bow. Everyone, even the lifeguard, claps. Sam dives into the water again and swims the entire length of the pond underwater. He comes towards me on the towel, and shakes his hair out all over me. It feels nice, being wet. “It’s no fun in there without you. Come on in, Jane.”

I tell him the story about Joley, and how he almost drowned, and how I haven’t gone under water since then. Every now and then when it gets very hot I’ll take a dip into a pool, or let the ocean run over my ankles. But since Joley, I will not- cannot -go beneath the surface. I won’t risk the consequences.

Sam stands up and cups his hands around his mouth. “Hey Joley!” he yells. “Do you know you’re the reason she won’t go in?”

Rebecca and Hadley are on the dock, sunning themselves. I wonder-how they can possibly be comfortable on the hard wood, without a towel of a T-shirt under their heads. I see them partially obscured through Sam’s legs, but when he sits back down to dry off I have a clear view of my daughter. She is so thin her ribs are raised against the red fabric of her bathing suit. Her feet point sideways, a hereditary trait. And her hand, on the dock, smoothly covers Hadley’s.

“Sam,” I say, pointing this out. “Is there something going on I should know about?”

“No. Rebecca’s just a little kid. And Hadley’s no fool. Look at them-they’re fast asleep. They probably don’t even know they’re doing that.”

I could swear I see Rebecca’s eyes slit open then, slick and green, but maybe I am mistaken.

I forget all about this and sit on the edge of the beach, vicariously swimming through Sam. He has me call out a stroke, and then he does it. Midway I’ll call out another stroke, and he’ll switch. When he looks like he’s having too easy a time of it, I call out the butterfly. I watch his arms crest out of the water, and his torso emerge, his mouth round and gasping for air.

When lunch is over, Sam dives into the water, and I think this means he’s forgotten about me. But after he gets wet, he walks back out to the beach. “You made me a promise,” he says. “After lunch, you said.”

“Oh, Sam, you’re not going to make me do this.”

“Do you trust me?”

“What does that have to do with it?” I say, starting to fight him.

“Do you?”

I am forced to look up at him. I would walk through coals, I would dance in fire. “Yes,” I say.

“Good!” Sam scoops me into his arms, as if he is going to carry me over a threshold.

I am so fascinated at first with the feel of his skin against mine that I do not pay attention to where we are going. Up until now only our hands have brushed, but now, all at once, I can feel his arms, his chest, his neck, his fingers. With the exception of Oliver, I have never been this close to a man. Sam takes long, high steps towards the water. I am losing control, I think. I have to get away from him. “Sam,” I say. “Sam. I can’t,” I say. I start panicking: I will drown. I will die. In another man’s arms.

He stops so abruptly and speaks so casually I forget for a moment where we are; what we are doing. “Can you swim?”

“Well, yes,” I admit, getting ready to explain. Well yes, but . Sam’s feet hit the water. “No!” I shout.

But he will not stop. He clutches me tighter and moves steadily. The water reaches my toes. I stop kicking when the water begins to splash up in my face.

What I see in those last few moments is my brother, flailing in the tide at Plum Island, caught in a dragging undertow. “Don’t do this to me,” I whisper.

Somewhere, as if it is happening across a long distance, I hear Sam telling me not to worry. He tells me I can go back if I say the word. He tells me he will not let go. And then I feel this heavy water pressing in around me, changing the shape of my body. At the last minute I hear Sam’s voice. “It’s me,” he says, “I’m not going to let anything happen.” He fills my lungs with those words and I go under.