The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  Jane picks out a shiny Mepps spinner and threads it on the end of the line. I never did ask her how she knows about fishing, but I’d assume it has to do with her husband, and his interest in the ocean. And right now, I don’t much feel like bringing him up. She casts and gets tangled in a fallen log, and has to tug to free the line. “I’m sorry,” she says, reeling in. She casts again, a good one, landing just where I would have placed it in the dark shadow of a cluster of lily pads.

  “Are you mad at me for taking you swimming?” I ask.

  “No. I should have done that a long time ago.” A cormorant cries, and a flock of starlings, frightened by the noise, dart out of a willow tree. Jane reels in and casts again, the same spot.

  “I was hoping we could talk,” I say. “Even though I’m not one for talking much.” I stare over the edge of the rowboat to a rock several feet ahead that rises out of the water with such pride you’d think it was a tiny mountain. “I wanted to bring up what we were discussing on the way over here.”

  “Boston radio DJs?”

  “Not quite.” I look up at her, she’s smiling. ‘This isn’t real easy, you know.”

  “We don’t have to talk. Why ruin a good thing?”

  We both stare at the purpled weeds that have swallowed the gold hook. We stare as if we are expecting some miracle to happen. “Look,” I say.

  Jane interrupts me. “Don’t. Please. I’ve got a home to go back to.” She looks at me for only a second, then turns away. “I’ve got Oliver’s daughter.”

  “She’s your daughter too.”

  “Sam, I like you. I really do. But that’s where it ends. I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea.”

  “The wrong idea,” I say, getting my guard up. “What did you think I was talking about anyway?”

  A wave, coming out of nowhere, tenderly swings the boat. “Sam,” she says, her voice cracking.

  I don’t know what she has planned to say, because at that moment her line begins to run back and forth in front of the lily pads and underneath us. “It’s a sunfish,” I say, forgetting everything in the thrill.

  “What do you think of that?” Jane says, swinging the rod in my direction so that I can release the fish. “I’m two for two.”

  “You’re luckier than I am, even on a good day. I should take you out with me more often.” I don’t look at her when I say this; I smooth my free hand over the spiky scales of the sunfish until it stays limp on the hook. Then I quickly pull up and out and hold it over the edge of the rowboat, watching it leave faster than my eye can follow.

  Jane leans against the bow of the boat, watching me. I don’t think she’s noticed that fish at all. “You don’t want to get involved with me, Sam. Everything is going so well for you now, and I’d only be trouble.” She looks down, twisting her wedding band around her finger. “I don’t know what I want. Please don’t push me, because I don’t know how strong I can be. I can’t even tell you what I’m going to do tomorrow.”

  I move closer. “Who’s asking for tomorrow? All I wanted was today.”

  She pushes me off with her hands. “I’m an old lady.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “and I’m the Pope.”

  Jane is still holding me at bay. Inches. “Is it adultery if you just kiss?” she whispers. She presses her lips against mine.

  Oh, God, I think, so this is what it can be like. She tastes of sassafras and cinnamon. I move my tongue between her lips, over the neat barricade of her teeth. She opens her eyes then, and she smiles. My mouth, on hers, smiles too. “You look different up close.” When she blinks, her eyelashes brush against my cheek.

  I press my palms against the back of her head and her shoulders. I tear my mouth away from hers, gulping in the stale air of the lily pond, and fall to my knees in front of her. I’ve forgotten we’re in a boat, and it pitches from side to side, so that we both have to keel ourselves. I kiss her along the line from her ear to her neck and I move one hand from her back to her breast. Jane loosens her arms from around my neck and grabs onto the gunwale of the rowboat. “No,” she says, “you have to stop.”

  I sit back obediently on the low rowboat seat, watching the ripples we’ve made in the pond. We are left staring at each other, flushed, with all that has happened hovering in between. “You just say the word,” I murmur, breathless, and I lightly let go.

  57 OLIVER

  Windy meets me on the shore of the weathered little beach at Gloucester. He hands me a neoprene wet suit and a yellow Helly-Hansen cap. Although he is a garrulous man by nature, in the midst of this throng of television and radio correspondents, he says nothing. He waits until I have stepped into the fifteen-foot inflatable Zodiac, until he has revved the outboard, and only then does he smile at me and say, “Who the hell would have expected Oliver Jones to be my guardian fucking angel?”

  Windy McGill and I worked together at Woods Hole before it was fashionable to be involved in the cause of whales. We were the two gofers for the prestigious scientists; we were expected to fit in our own doctoral research around the time spent analyzing data or getting coffee for these other biologists. We discovered quite by accident that we had both been graduated from Harvard the same year; that we were both researching tidal communities for our doctorates; that we had been born a day apart at the same Boston hospital. It almost came as no surprise that our research turned in the same direction: towards humpbacks. Of course we’ve taken different tacks. Windy steers clear of whale songs; he’s worked on different methods of identification of humpbacks. At this point, he’s credited for the Provincetown research that is used to catalog entire generations of whales.

  Windy pulls a bottle out of his pocket—cough medicine—and offers me a swig. I shake my head, and lean back against the bubbled bow of the little boat. Zodiacs tip at the drop of a hat, but I manage to strip and get the wet suit over my body. Windy watches me out of the corner of his eye. “Getting a little thick around the middle, Oliver?” he says, patting his own ribs. “Goddamned cushy California jobs.”

  “Fuck you,” I say good-naturedly. “Tell me about this whale.”

  “Her name is Marble. White markings on her neck and her fluke. Three years old. Got herself all tangled up in a gill net some asshole left behind.” He squints, and adjusts the rudder to the left. “I don’t know, Oliver. It took us two days just to find her out here. She’s testy and she’s tired, and I don’t know how much longer she’ll hold on. I’ll tell you this,” he says, “I’m glad you’re here. If I’d known you were back in Massachusetts, I would’ve called you in a minute.”

  “Bullshit. You hate it when I steal your thunder.”

  Windy and I discuss our intended course of action. The most pressing problem is knowing where exactly the gill net has become entangled on the whale. Windy’s primary observation—“around the jaw”—isn’t precise enough. Once this has been determined, it will be much easier to cut away the net. The assessment, however, is the most dangerous aspect of a whale rescue: one slap of a fluke or a fin is deadly. Last year, in northern California, a colleague was killed when he dove beneath a whale to determine the points of entanglement.

  As we get farther away from the Massachusetts shoreline, I begin to feel the prickling to which I am accustomed; the heady excitement of the unexpected. Few humans have seen it, the look in the eyes of a beached whale one has redirected towards the black ocean. Few humans understand that relief transcends verbal communication; that gratitude is not limited to our genus and species.

  I spot the second Zodiac before Windy and direct him towards it. Four students are crowded into the little raft, along with Burt Samuels, a biologist who is getting too old for this. Twenty years ago, this man would command us to scrub sea lion shit from decaying study tanks and we would jump at his beck and call. And now we are defining the pace.

  Marble rolls miserably on her side, feebly fanning the water with her dorsal fin. One of the students calls out to Windy—apparently three whales have been hovering nearby, waiting