Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

Jane comes around the plane and stands almost directly in front of the spot where I am hidden. This is my chance. I am going to tell her. I am going to start by speaking her name.

  She is close enough to touch. Wind breathes through the wreckage of the plane. It shrieks, an unnatural note. I reach my hand through the blind of corn stalks and stretch out my fingers. “Jane,” I whisper.

  But at that moment Rebecca emerges from the twisted gyves and fetters of metal. Her hands are pressed against the sides of her head. She is screaming, running from the body of the plane with her eyes closed. Jane holds out her arms. She says something I cannot hear and Rebecca’s eyes open. I push aside the corn stalks, revealing myself, but I do not think Rebecca, who is facing me, notices. She falls against Jane’s breast, clutching and gasping. Her eyes pass right over me and they do not see a thing, of that I am sure. Jane smoothes our daughter’s hair. “Ssh,” she says. She sings something very softly, and Rebecca’s breathing turns even again. She grabs fistfuls of Jane’s shirt, over and over.

  I stand only three feet away, but it could be three hundred. I am not privy to this. I cannot heal. If given the chance, Rebecca would not run to me. I am not even sure that Jane would run to me. I let the corn close in around my face and I turn my back to them. Even if I could get Jane to listen to me, get her to understand why it is that I cannot live without her, it is not enough.

  It hits me: I am not part of this family. I would never say I am a scientist without offering proof. How can I say that I am a father, a husband?

  Jane is murmuring to Rebecca. The words get softer and softer and I realize they are walking in the opposite direction. And this is when I make what could possibly be the greatest-and most difficult-decision of my life. I will not call to them when I do not know what to say. I won’t reveal myself without having anything to show. I have much thinking to do, but right now I act purely on instinct. It is hard as hell, but I let them go.

  42 JANE

  After we check into the only motel in What Cheer, I find myself remembering things that I have not thought about for years. I could understand it if I were replaying the crash over and over in my head-that would make sense to me. But instead I am seeing my father, plain as day. He moves around the edges of the motel room, picking up glass tumblers and straightening the bathroom mirror. He flushes the toilet, twice. I do not dare fall asleep; I do not dare fall asleep. Then, just as I have expected, he starts to walk towards my bed. But he changes course and sits instead on the other bed, next to Rebecca. He breathes clouds of scotch and tugs the blanket away, revealing, ripe, my daughter.

  I was nine the first time it happened. My mother and father had a fight, and my mother left to stay with my aunt in Concord. I did everything I was supposed to: I made dinner for Daddy and Joley; I cleaned up the kitchen; I even remembered to put the hose into the sink when I ran the dishwasher. We all avoided talking about Mama.

  But because she was away, and because I felt I had earned it, I decided to go into her room, to her perfume tray. Mama smelled different every day: like oranges and spice, or fresh lemon pies, or cool marble, or even the wind. When she left the room she left a memory, a scent, behind her.

  I knew what I was looking for, a little red glass bottle in the shape of a berry that was called Framboise. The word was etched right on the glass. My mother did not let me wear perfume. Little girls who wear perfume, she said, turn into big girls who are tramps.

  I was very careful with the fragile bottle because I didn’t want to spill a drop. I turned it over on my finger the way I had seen her do every morning, and then I touched this finger, wet with the smell of raspberries, to my throat and my wrists and behind my knees. I turned around and around in a circle. How wonderful, I thought. It is with me no matter where I go.

  I stopped myself by catching my arms around the post of my parents’ bed. Standing at the door was my father.

  “What the hell have you been doing?” he said, sniffing the air. He leaned closer to grab my shirt and the smell of whiskey cut through the thickness of berries. “You will bathe. Now!”

  He made me strip naked in front of him, although I hadn’t done that in five years. He watched me from the door of the bathroom with his arms crossed. The entire time, I cried. I cried when the shower, too hot, scalded my skin and I continued to cry when I stepped onto the bath mat and toweled dry. “Go to your goddamned room,” my father said.

  I pulled a flannel nightgown over my head and turned down the covers of my bed. I told myself aloud this was like any other night, and I tried not to lie awake waiting for punishment.

  Joley came into my room on his way to bed. He was only five, but he knew. “Jane, what did you do wrong?” And I told him as best I could explain that I had stupidly been pretending to be Mama.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” I said. “Get out before he hits you too.”

  I waited the longest time that night, but my father did not come up to spank me. Maybe that was the worst part: imagining what terrible thing he was thinking up downstairs. A belt? A brush? When I heard him, heavy, coming up the stairs, I dove beneath the covers. I pulled my nightgown tight around my ankles, a drawstring. I counted to one hundred.

  At seventy-seven my father turned my doorknob. He sat down on the edge of the bed and waited for me to pull away the covers from my face.

  “I’m not going to punish you tonight,” my father said, “and do you know why? Because you were such a good little cook. That’s why.”

  “Really?” I asked, amazed.

  “Really.” He took off his shoes and asked if I would like to hear a story.

  “Yes,” I said, thinking this might not be so bad after all. My father started to tell me a story-a fairy tale-about an evil woman who kept her daughter locked in a closet with mice and bats. The girl’s father tried to get to this closet but the woman had huge guard dogs protecting it and he had to kill her, and then the dogs, before he could rescue his daughter.

  “And then what?” I asked, waiting to see what would happen.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t come up with the ending.”

  “You can’t just leave a story hanging,” I protested, and he said we should try to think of one together. But he was getting tired, so could he lie down next to me?

  I moved over on the bed and we talked about the ways the girl’s father might kill the evil woman. Stakes through the heart, I suggested, but my father was leaning towards poisoned tea. We came up with other things that might be lurking in the closet: ghosts and tarantulas and man-eating piranhas. Maybe the girl should try to get out by herself, I suggested, but my father insisted that was not the way it would happen.

  When he got cold he crawled under the covers, so close that when he spoke my hair fluttered. “What do you think will happen to that girl, Jane?” he said, and as he did that he put his hand on my chest.

  It wasn’t right, I knew that, because every muscle in my body tensed at once. It wasn’t right, but then again he was my father, wasn’t he? And he had been so nice. He could have hit me tonight, but he didn’t.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t know what should happen.”

  “Well, what about this? The father drives stakes through the heart of the evil woman and drugs the Dobermans with poisoned tea. That way both of our ideas come into play.” Without hesitation, like he was proud of it, he slipped his hand between my legs, coming to rest like a weight on my vagina.

  “Daddy.”

  “Do you like it, Jane?” my father whispered. “Do you like the ending?”

  I did not move. I pretended that this was some other little girl, someone else’s quivering body, and then when I heard my father’s breathing come deep and even, I slid away. I got out of bed without creaking the mattress and turned the doorknob like a whisper. I started to run as fast as I could. At the bottom of the stairs, I tripped and hit my head. Blood was running down my face when I flung open the front door and ran into the night, barefoot, no longer sure about anything, including who or what I was supposed to be.

&n