The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  When I was seven, I tell these kids, I used to whistle every time I said the letter S. In school I got teased and because of this I did not have many friends and I did not talk very much. One day my teacher told the class we’d be putting on a play and that everyone had to participate. I was so nervous about reading aloud in front of everyone else that I pretended I was sick. I faked a fever by holding the thermometer up to a light bulb when my mother left the room. I was allowed to stay home for three days, until my teacher called, and my mother figured out what I was doing. When I went back to school, my teacher called me aside. All of the parts had been taken in the play, she said, but she had saved a special role for me, offstage. I was going to be the Manager of Sound Effects, just like in the movies. I practiced with my teacher every day after school for three weeks. In time I discovered I could become a fire engine, a bird, a mouse, a bee, and many other things because of my lisp. When the night of the play came, I was given a black robe and a microphone. The other students got to be just one part, but I became the voice of several animals and machines. And my father was so proud of me; it was the only time I remember him telling me so.

  That’s the story I give at those Coastal Studies cocktail parties Oliver and I go to. We rub shoulders with people who’ll give grant money. We introduce ourselves as Dr. and Dr. Jones, although I’m still ABD. We sneak out when everyone is going to sit down to the main course, and we run to the car and make fun of people’s sequined dresses and dinner jackets. Inside, I curl up against Oliver as he drives, and I listen to him tell me stories I have heard a million times before—about an era when you could spot whales in every ocean.

  In spite of it all, there’s just something about Oliver. You know what I’m talking about—he was the first man who truly took my breath away, and sometimes he still can. He’s the one person I feel comfortable enough with to share a home, a life, a child. He can take me back fifteen years with a smile. In spite of differences, Oliver and I have Oliver and I.

  In this one school where I spend Tuesdays, my office is a janitorial closet. Sometime after noon the secretary of the school knocks on the door and tells me Dr. Jones is on the phone. Now this is truly a surprise. Oliver is at home this week, putting together some research, but he usually has neither the time nor the inclination to call me. He never asks what school I head to on a given day. “Tell him I’m with a student,” I say, and I push the play button on my tape recorder. Vowel sounds fill the room: AAAAA EEEEEIIIII. I know Oliver too well to play his games. OOOOO UUUUU. Oh, you. Oh, you.

  Oliver is Very Famous. He wasn’t when we met, but today he is one of the leading researchers of whales and whale behavior. He has made discoveries that have rocked the scientific world. He is so well known that people take pictures of our mailbox, as if to say, “I’ve been to the place where Dr. Jones lives.” Oliver’s most important research has been on whale songs. It appears that whole groupings of whales sing the same ones—Oliver has recorded this—and pass the songs down over generations. I don’t understand much about his work, but that is just as much my fault as Oliver’s. He never tells me about the ideas burning in his mind anymore, and I sometimes forget to ask.

  Naturally Oliver’s career has come first. He moved us to California to take a job with the San Diego Center for Coastal Studies, only to find out East Coast humpbacks were his true passion. The minute I got to San Diego I wanted to leave, but I didn’t tell Oliver that. For better or for worse, I had said. Oliver got to fly back to Boston and I stayed here with an infant, in a climate that is always summer, that never smells like snow.

  I’m not taking his phone call.

  I’m not taking this again, period.

  It is one thing for me to play second fiddle; it is another thing to see it happen to Rebecca. At fourteen she has the ability to take a survey of her life from a higher vantage point—an ability I haven’t mastered at thirty-five—and I do not believe she likes what she is seeing. When Oliver is home, which is rare, he spends more time in his study than with us. He doesn’t take an interest in anything that isn’t tied to the seas. The way he treats me is one matter: we have a history; I hold myself accountable for falling in love in the first place. But Rebecca will not take him on faith, just because he is her father. Rebecca expects.

  I’ve heard about teenagers who run away, or get pregnant or drop out of school, and I have heard these things linked to problems at home. So I offered Oliver an ultimatum. Rebecca’s fifteenth birthday next week coincides with Oliver’s planned visit to a humpback breeding ground off the coast of South America. Oliver intends to go. I told him to be here.

  What I wanted to say is: This is your daughter. Even if we have grown so far apart that we don’t recognize each other when we pass, we have this life, this block of time, and what do you think about that?

  One reason I keep my mouth shut is Rebecca’s accident. It was the result of a fight with Oliver, and I’ve been doing my best to keep something like that from happening again. I don’t remember what that argument was about, but I gave him a piece of my mind and he hit me. I picked up my baby (Rebecca was three and a half at the time) and flew to my parents. I told my mother I was going to divorce Oliver; he was a lunatic and on top of this he’d hit me. Oliver called and said he didn’t care what I did but I had no right to keep his daughter. He threatened legal action. So I took Rebecca to the airport and told her, “I’m sorry, honey, but I can’t stand that man.” I bribed a stewardess with a hundred dollars to take her on the plane, and it crashed in Des Moines. The next thing I knew I was standing in a farmer’s cornfield, watching the wreckage smoke. It still seemed to be moving. The wind sang through the plane’s limbs, voices I couldn’t place. And behind me was Rebecca, singed but intact, one of five survivors, curled in her father’s arms. She has Oliver’s yellow hair and freckles. Like him, she’s beautiful. Oliver and I looked at each other and I knew right then why fate had made me fall in love with a man like Oliver Jones: some combination of him and of me had created a child who could charm even unyielding earth.

  2 OLIVER

  Hawaiian and West Indian humpbacks seem less unhappy to me than the whales off the coast of New England. Their songs are playful, staccato, lively. Violins, rather than oboes. When you see them diving and surfacing there is a certain grace, a feeling of triumph. Their slick bodies twist through a funnel of sea, reach toward the sky, with flippers outstretched, they rise from the pits of the ocean like the second coming of Christ. But the humpbacks in Stellwagen Bank sing songs that fill you to the core, that swell inside you. They are the whales with which I fell in love when I first heard the calls—eerie, splayed, the haunted sound your heart beats when you are afraid of being alone. Sometimes when I play the tapes of the Northern Atlantic stock, I find myself sobbing.

  I began working with Roger Payne in 1969, in Bermuda, when he and colleague Scott McVay concluded that the sounds made by humpbacks—megaptera novaeangliae—are actually songs. Of course there is a lot of leeway in the definition of “song,” but a general consensus may be “a string of sounds put together in a pattern by its singer.” Whale songs are structured like this: One or several sounds make up a phrase, the phrase is repeated and becomes a theme, and several themes make up a song. On the average songs last from seven to thirty minutes, the singer will repeat the song in its same order. There are seven basic types of sounds, each with variations: moans, cries, chirps, yups, oos, ratchets, and snores. Whales from different populations sing different songs. Songs change gradually over the years according to the general laws of change; all whales learn the changes. Whales do not sing mechanically but compose as they go, incorporating new pieces into old songs—a skill previously attributed solely to man.

  Of course, these are only theories.

  I did not always study whales. I began my career in zoology looking at bugs, then progressed to bats, then owls, then whales. The first time I heard a whale was years ago, when I had taken a rowboat off a larger ship and found myself sit