Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

69 JOLEY

In all the years you’ve been coming to me for advice, I’ve never been able to get you to do something you didn’t already have your heart set on doing. There: my secret’s out. I’m not the sage I pretend to be; the fact is, Jane, you’ve got a mind of your own, and you only need me to pull the answers out from inside you. So I think you know what you are going to do. I think you understand, in this case, what would be the right thing.

Let me tell you a little something about love. It’s different every time. It’s nothing more than a chemical reaction, an arrow over an equation, but the elements change. The most fragile kind of love is that between a man and a woman. Chemistry, again: if you introduce a new element, you never know how stable the original bond is. You may wind up with a new union, with something left behind. I believe that you can fall in love many times with many different people. However I don’t think that you can fall in love the same way twice. One type of relationship may be steady. Another may be fire and brimstone. Who is to say if one of these is better than the other? The deciding factor is how it all fits together. Your love, I mean, and your life.

The problem is that when you’re old enough to really find a soulmate, you’re already carrying around all this extra baggage. Like where you grew up, and how much money you make, and whether you like the country or the city. And sometimes, most of the time, you fall really hard for someone who you just can’t squeeze into the limits of your life. The bottom line is: when your hearts sets its sight on someone, it doesn’t consult with your mind.

Most people don’t marry the loves of their lives. You marry for compatibility; for friendship. And Jane, there’s a lot to be said for that. It may not be a kind of relationship where you can read each other’s minds, but it’s comfortable, like a familiar warm spot on your favorite chair. That’s just another kind of love, one that doesn’t burn itself out, one that lasts in the real world.

You don’t know how lucky you are. There’s one person for each of us on this whole planet with whom we can really connect. And you found yours. I know how it feels too, you see, because I have had you.

I have always been your greatest fan, Jane. I can identify you in a room by the motion of the air around you. I knew it would be like this from the night that Daddy first crashed into my room. He flung open the door and saw you already sitting on the bed, holding a pillow up around my ears so that I wouldn’t have to listen to the sounds downstairs of Mama crying. He told you to get the hell out of my room. You were no more than eight, all bones, and you hurled yourself at his groin with the force of a tropical storm. Perhaps it was just the region you hit that triggered his reaction, but I don’t believe that. I can still see his head striking the sharp corner of the wooden bureau, and his eyes rolling back. You looked at him, whispered, Daddy ? “I didn’t do that,” you said, “you hear?” But even at four, I understood. “You’re the only one who could have,” I told you, and to this day that holds true.

You have untapped strength, Jane. It’s what got you through your childhood. It’s what kept Daddy from going after me. It’s what Oliver fell in love with, what Sam fell in love with, what I fell in love with. You came to me in Massachusetts, you said, because you couldn’t remember who you were anymore. Don’t you see? You’re everyone’s anchor. You are our center.

I want you to say it. Tell me what you are going to do.

Again.

You will not be sorry. I know; I have carried a memory of you wherever I have gone for thirty years now. That’s the way it had to be. You will see. No matter what. You will take him with you.