Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

67 JANE

They bring her back to me swathed in bandages. Her eyes are open but she isn’t looking at anything. Even when I stand right over her, she doesn’t see me. From time to time she says things about fire and lightning. She stood up during the second night, screamed at the top of her lungs, and got out of bed. She walked around the room, stepping over obstacles that were not there, touching her hand and shrieking from the burns. Then she sat on the floor, crouched, her head bent over her lap. When she looked up she was crying. She was calling for me.

Sam and Oliver drift in and out of the room at different times. They have both tried to get me to leave her side, but how could I do that? What if she chose that minute to regain consciousness, and I weren’t there?

When Sam comes in, he sits behind me and kneads my shoulders. We don’t say much to each other; he is just a presence for me, and that’s plenty. When Oliver comes in, he sits on the opposite side of the bed. He holds Rebecca’s other hand. As if she completes the circuit, when we are like this we can talk. I tell him what I feel for Sam, and it doesn’t hurt so much to reveal the truth. I tell him how it makes me feel to be in love like this. I do not apologize; it’s too late for that. And as for Oliver, I have to say he does not accuse. Instead he accepts what I have to say, and he weaves tales for me. He has become an expert storyteller. He reminds me of mishaps that occurred when we were dating; of escapades on our honeymoon to retrieve lost luggage, to find long-dormant hostels. He tells me together we can survive anything.

Oliver is in the room when she comes to. I have been tracing the hand-painted design on the edge of the walls, wondering what Sam’s mother is like, when Rebecca’s fingers move in my hand. Oliver looks up at me; he has felt it too. Rebecca opens her eyes, bloodshot and crusted, and coughs violently. “What’s the matter with her?” Oliver says. Anxious to do something, I press a towel against Rebecca’s forehead. Oliver holds tissues against Rebecca’s chin, catching the phlegm.

Finally, thankfully, Rebecca stops. She sighs-actually, it is more like she deflates. Oliver strokes her arm gently. “Baby,” he says, smiling down at her. “We’re going to go home. We’re getting out of here.” I do not say anything. I don’t care what he says. I will do anything-if Rebecca comes back whole.

Rebecca makes a motion to sit up, and I quickly stuff a pillow behind her back for support. “Tell me this,” she says. “Hadley’s dead?”

I don’t think Oliver has come to terms with this; with Rebecca’s ability to fall in love. I would not have believed it either, but I was there to witness it. Oliver looks at me, and then he gets up and leaves the room.

I don’t know why she has asked. Does she know for sure? Is she just looking for a corroborating witness? “Yes,” I say, and just like that, all the light drains out of my daughter’s face. I am afraid I am going to lose her again. Once you make the decision you want to die, nothing can bring you back. I start to cry, and I apologize to her. I’m sorry for thinking she was too young. I’m sorry for sending Hadley away. I’m sorry, just sorry, that it had to come to this.

I bury my face in the quilt on top of my daughter, thinking: this is not the way I wanted it to be. I was hoping to be the strong one, the one who would be there to help her stand again. But Rebecca holds her hand against my cheek. “Tell me everything you know,” she says.

So I recount the horror of Hadley’s death, his broken neck, his bravery. I tell her he felt no pain. Not like you, I think. I do not tell her that under slightly different circumstances of fate, Hadley might have lived. The rangers said the drop was but one hundred feet- not far enough to ensure death. What killed Hadley was the spot where he happened to land, the rocks that severed his spine. I do not tell Rebecca that inches away was the forgiving cushion of water. I say that Hadley’s funeral is tomorrow. It took this long to raise his body from the narrow chasm.

“This long?” Rebecca asks. I tell her three days have gone by. “What have I been doing for three days?”

She has pneumonia and she has been sedated most of the time. “You were gone when your father first arrived here. He insisted on going with Sam to find you. He didn’t like the idea of Sam staying here with me.”

I help her lie back down and tell her she ought to rest. She fights me, struggling to sit up. “What does he mean, ‘We’re going home’?”

“Back to California. What did you think?”

She blinks many times, as if she is trying to clear her mind, or remember, or possibly both. “What have we been doing here?”

She catches me so off guard that I don’t stop her in time from pulling the quilt back from her chest. When she sees her sores on her chest, arms and legs, she gasps. Her hands, trembling, reach out for something. They find me. “When Hadley fell, you tried to climb down after him. You wouldn’t stop.” I take a deep breath, feeling my voice catch. “You kept saying you were trying to tear your heart out.”

Rebecca turns her face so that she is looking out the window. It is dark now, and all she will see is the reflection of her own pain. “I don’t know why I bothered,” she whispers. “You’d already done that.”

I used to think, before this whole incident, that parental love was supposed to be unconditional. I believed that Rebecca would naturally be tied to me because I had been the one to bring her into the world. I didn’t connect this with my own experience. When I could not love my father, I assumed there was something wrong with me. But when they carried Rebecca in here from the stretcher of the ambulance, I came to see things differently. If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.

Suddenly I am dizzy with guilt. “What do you want me to say, Rebecca?”

Rebecca will not look at me. “Why do you want me to forgive you? What do you get out of it?”

Absolution, I think, the first word that comes to my mind. I get to protect you from what I went through. “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 father hurt me?” I smile, wringing her hand. “Then I forgot about it. I married Oliver and three years later he hit me. That’s when I left the first time.”

Rebecca pulls her hand away. “The plane crash,” she says.

“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.” I swallow, reliving that scene on the stairs in San Diego. The whale papers fluttering around my ankles. Oliver cursing at me. “This time it was part of me,” I say. “No matter how far I run. No matter how many states and countries I cross, I can’t get it out of myself. I never forgave him, because I thought that way I would have the last laugh. But he won. He’s in me.”

When she tries to sit up gain, I don’t stop her. I start to tell her about Sam. I let her know what it was like to give the stars we saw from the bedroom window the names of our ancestors. How he could finish the very thoughts I was thinking. “I didn’t believe anyone else could feel the way I did. Including- especially my daughter.”

I move to the edge of the bed, pulling the quilt back over her chest. I take her hand, counting her fingers. “I did this when you were a baby. Making sure there were ten. I wanted you to be healthy. I didn’t care if you were a boy or a girl. At least I said I didn’t. But it mattered. I used to hope I’d have a little girl, someone just like me. Someone I could go shopping with, and teach to wear makeup, and dress for the senior prom. But I wish now you hadn’t been a girl. Because we get hurt. It happens over and over.”

We stare at each other for a long time, my daughter and me. In the dim light of a sixty-watt bulb, I start to notice things about her that I have never seen. Everyone has always told me she looks like Oliver. I even thought she looked like Oliver. But here, and now, she has my eyes. Not the color, not the shape, but the demeanor- and isn’t that the most remarkable feature? This is my child. There is no denying it.

When I am looking at her, all of my decisions come clear. Love, I think, has very little to do with Sam, with Oliver, with Hadley. What it all boils down to is me. What it all boils down to is Rebecca. It is knowing that the memories I pass down to her will keep me from feeling pain the next time. It is knowing that she has stories of her own for me.

“Sometimes I cannot believe you are only fifteen,” I say. I pull back the quilt from my daughter’s chest and peel off the strips of gauze. In some places she starts to bleed again. Maybe this is good. Maybe something needs to be let out. I hold my hands across her chest, over her breasts. Her blood slips between my fingers. I want so much to heal.