Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

I used to try to mix the two. I took Rebecca and Jane on trackingvoyages; I played tapes of the New England humpbacks in the house, piping the melodies into the kitchen and the bathroom. And then one day I found Jane hacking at a speaker in the kitchen with a carving knife. She said she couldn’t listen anymore.

  Once, when Rebecca was five, all of us sailed to Bermuda to observe the breeding grounds of the East Coast humpbacks. It was warm then, and Rebecca pointed at porpoises we passed on our way out to the reefs. Jane was wearing my rain gear-I remember this because there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but she preferred it to the goosebumps she got from the wet wind. She stood at the railing of Voyager, my hired boat, with the sun beating down on her hair, turning her scalp a shade of pink. She gripped the rail tightly; she never was firm-footed on the water. When we docked she’d walk with tentative steps to convince herself she was on solid ground.

  Whales play. When we got to the exact spot and lowered the hydrophone into the ocean, there was a group of whales several hundred yards away. Although we were recording a whale singing way below the surface, we couldn’t help but watch the others. Their flukes slapped against the water; they rolled, languorous, stroking each other with their dorsal fins. They shot out of the water, ballistic. They slipped in and out of the waves, marbled in ebony, white.

  When the melancholy notes of the whale’s song filled the boat, it became clear that we were watching a ballet, executed artfully, except we didn’t know the story being told. The boat pitched from left to right and I watched Rebecca grab Jane’s leg for support. I thought, My two girls, have they ever been so beautiful?

  Although she was only five, Rebecca remembers many things from our trip to Bermuda. The whales are not one of them. She can tell you of the texture of pink sand; about Devil’s Hole, where sharks swim below your feet; of an estate’s pond with an island shaped the same as the actual island of Bermuda. She cannot remember her mother in yellow rain gear, or the slow-moving humpbacks that frolicked, or even the repeated cries of the whale below, to which she asked, Daddy, why can’t we help him? I don’t recall if Jane offered her opinion. In regard to whales, she has largely remained silent.

  3 J ANE

  My daughter is the family stoic. By this I mean that while I fly off the handle in given situations, Rebecca tends to hold it all inside. Case in point: the first time she experienced death (a beloved guinea pig, Butterscotch). She was the one to clean out the cage, to bury the small stiff form in the backyard, while I cried beside her. She did not cry for eight and a half days, and then I found her washing dishes in the kitchen, sobbing, as if the world had ended. She had just dropped a serving platter on the floor, and shards of pottery radiated from around Rebecca’s feet, like the rays of the sun. “Don’t you see,” she said to me, “how beautiful it was?”

  Rebecca is in the living room when I get home from work. This summer she’s working as a lifeguard and her shift ends at two, so she’s already home when I get home. She’s eating carrot sticks and watching “Wheel of Fortune.” She gets the answers before the contestants do. She waves to me. “A Tale of Two Cities,” she says, and on the TV, bells ring.

  Rebecca pads into the kitchen in her bare feet. She is wearing a red bathing suit that says GUARD across her bust and an old baseball cap. She looks much older than fourteen and a half, in fact sometimes people think we are sisters. After all, how many thirtyfiveyear-old women do you know who are just having their first babies? “Daddy’s home,” Rebecca warns.

  “I know. He tried to call me this morning.” Our eyes connect.

  Rebecca shrugs. Her eyes, the shape of Oliver’s, dart past my shoulder but seem to have trouble finding an object of focus. “Well, we’ll do what we always do. We’ll go to a movie he wouldn’t like anyway, and then we’ll eat a pint of ice cream.” She opens the door of the refrigerator lazily. “We don’t have any food.”

  It’s true. We’re even out of milk. “Wouldn’t you rather do something different? It’s your birthday.”

  “It’s not that big a deal.” Suddenly she turns to the door, where Oliver is standing.

  He shifts from one foot to the other, a stranger in his own home. As an afterthought, he reaches for me and kisses my cheek. “I’ve got some bad news,” he says, smiling.

  Oliver has the same effect on me each time I see him: he’s soothing. He’s very handsome-for someone who spends so much time outside, his skin isn’t dry and leathery, it is the color of iced coffee, smooth as velvet. His eyes are bright, like paint that hasn’t dried, and his hands are large and strong. When I see him, his frame filling the doorway, I do not feel passion, excitement. I can’t remember if I ever have. He makes me feel comfortable, like a favorite pair of shoes.

  I smile at him, grateful for the calm before the storm.

  “You don’t have to say it, Daddy. I knew you wouldn’t be here for my birthday.”

  Oliver beams at me, as if to say, See? There’s no reason to make a fuss. Turning to Rebecca he says, “I’m sorry, kiddo. But you know the way it is-it’s really in everyone’s best interests if I go.”

  “Everyone who?” I’m surprised I say it out loud.

  Oliver turns to me. His eyes have gone flat and dispassionate, the way one looks at a stranger in a subway.

  I slip out of my heels and pick them up in my right hand. “Forgetit. It’s done.”

  Rebecca touches my arm on her way into the living room. “It’s all right,” she whispers, stressing the words as she passes.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Oliver says. “Wait till you see your birthday present!” Rebecca doesn’t seem to hear him. She turns up the volume on the TV, and leaves me alone with my husband.

  “What are you getting her?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”

  I press my fingers together-this is a habit I’ve acquired for dealing with Oliver-and head up the stairs. At the first landing I turn around to find Oliver following me. I think about asking when he is going to leave, but what comes out of my mouth instead is unexpected. “God damn you,” I say, and I actually mean it.

  There is not much of the old Oliver left. The first time I saw him was in Cape Cod when I was waiting with my parents for the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. He was twenty, working for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. He had straight blond hair that fell asymmetrically across his left eye, and he smelled like fish. Like a normal fifteenyearold, I saw him and waited for sparks to fly, but it never happened. I stood dumb as a cow near the dock where he was working, hoping he’d notice me. I didn’t know I’d have to give him something to notice.

  That might have been the end of it except he was there when we came back over on the ferry two days later. I had wised up. I tossed my purse overboard, knowing it would float with the current in his direction. Two days later he called me at home, saying he’d found my wallet and would I like it back. When we started dating, I told my mother and father it was Fate.

  He was into tide pools back then, and I listened to him talk of mollusks and sea urchins and entire ecosystems that were ruined at the whim of an ocean wave. Back then Oliver’s face would light up when he shared his marine discoveries. Now he only gets excited when he’s locked in his little study, examining data by himself. By the time he tells the rest of the world, he’s transformed from Oliver into Dr. Jones. Back then, I was the first person he told when something wonderful cropped up in his research. Today I’m not even fifth in line.

  At the second landing I turn to Oliver. “What are you going to look for?”

  “Where?”

  “In South America.” I try to scratch an itch in my back and when I can’t reach it Oliver does.

  “The winter breeding grounds. For whales,” he says. “ Humpbacks.” As if I am a total moron. I give him a look. “I’d tell you, Jane, but it’s complicated.”

  Pedantic asshole. “I’ll remind you that I am an educator, and one thing I have learned is that anyone can understand anything. You just have to know how to present your information.”

  I find myself listening to my own words, like I tell my students, to hear where the cadences chang