Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

Absentmindedly I watch Hadley walk up the hill. He’s wearing a blue flannel shirt that makes me think of the dark shade of Sam’s eyes. Suddenly the front door on the Big House opens and Rebecca flies out of it. She is still crying; I can tell from the way her shoulders quiver. She runs to Hadley and presses herself against him.

  For just a minute, I remember that Hadley and Sam the same age.

  Hadley cranes his neck, taking a look around. When I see him surveying the upstairs windows I duck back. Then I peek over the edge of the sill. Hadley is kissing the tears off my daughter’s face.

  It must be minutes that this goes on. I watch every move they make. She’s a baby. She’s just a baby. She doesn’t know any better- how could Hadley do something like this? The way she arches her neck and the curve of her eyebrows, and the way she moves her hands across Hadley’s back-there is something very familiar about this. Then it comes to me. Rebecca. When she is making love, she looks like me.

  I think I am going to scream, or vomit; so I fall away from the window, out of sight. Sam comes into the room then; I wonder if he has seen them as well. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he says. But by the time he crosses the room to look outside, Hadley has pushed Rebecca away to a safe distance. At least a foot of space separates them.

  “What?” Sam says. “What’s the problem?”

  “I can’t do this. It isn’t fair to you; it isn’t fair to my daughter. I can’t just think about myself. It’s been wonderful, Sam, but I think we should just go back to being friends.”

  “You can’t go backwards.” Sam moves away from me. “You don’t tell someone you love them, and send them flying, and then trash them the next time you see them.” He comes closer and puts his hand on my shoulder, but when I feel it starting to burn I shrug him away. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “Have you seen them? Hadley and Rebecca? He’s the same age as you, Sam. And he was practically screwing my daughter.”

  “Hadley wouldn’t do that. Maybe Rebecca egged him on.”

  My jaw drops. “Whose side are you on?”

  “I’m just saying you should look at is logically.”

  “Let me put it to you this way,” I say. “If I see him near my daughter again I’ll kill him with my own two hands.”

  “What does this have to do with us?”

  “If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in you,” I say, “I might have noticed what was going on between Rebecca and Hadley.” Sam starts to kiss my neck. It strikes me that this was the exact pose in which I just spied my daughter and Sam’s best friend. “You’re distracting me.”

  “I know. I planned to.” I start to protest but he holds his hand up to my mouth. “Just give me one more day. Promise me that.”

  When we leave the orchard, I haven’t even seen Joley yet. Sam tells me he’s down spraying organic pesticides on a section of the commercial grove. I want to find Rebecca one more time before I go, but she is nowhere to be seen.

  Sam drives the blue pickup truck to a nature sanctuary about thirty miles west of Stow. Run by an Audubon spin-off, it is a large penned-in area where there are deer, great horned owls, silver foxes, wild turkeys. The paths wind through natural habitats: ponds with fallen logs, tall gold grasses, antlered branches. We walk around holding hands; there is nobody here who knows us. In fact because it is a weekday there is almost nobody here. Just some elderly people, who watch us as much as they watch the wildlife. I hear one old woman whisper to her friend as we walk by. Newlyweds, she says.

  Sam and I sit for three hours on the brink of the deer habitat. Inside, the sign says, are a doe and a buck. We can spot the buck easily because it is drinking in the lake, but the doe is indistinguishable from the mottled foliage. We try to find her for a half-hour, and then we give up for a while.

  Instead, we sit facing each other on a low log bench and try to catch up on the rest of our lives. I tell Sam about the house in Newton, about Joley’s trek to Mexico, about cocktail parties at the Institute and about a little girl with a cleft palate who has been my favorite student now for three years. I tell him about the time Rebecca needed stitches in her chin, and about the plane crash, and finally, about how Oliver and I met. Sam, in return, tells me about his father in Florida, and about giving speeches at Minuteman Tech, about the almost extinct apple he’s been trying to recreate genetically, about all the places he has read about and wishes he could go. We say that we will travel together, and we make up a list as if it is truly going to happen.

  “There are all these things I used to say I wanted to do that I never got to do,” I tell him.

  “Why not?”

  “I had Rebecca,” I say, matter-of-fact.

  “She’s old enough to take care of herself.”

  “Apparently not. You didn’t see her this morning. You can’t decide these things for yourself when you’re only fifteen.”

  Sam grins. “Didn’t I hear right that you met old Oliver when you were fifteen?”

  I start to say that was different, but I change my mind. “And look where that got me.”

  “I think you’re overreacting.”

  “I think you aren’t her mother,” I snap. I take a deep breath. “I want you to fire Hadley.”

  “Hadley?” Sam says, incredulous. “I can’t do that. He’s my best friend.”

  I stand up, searching for that doe. “It’s just wrong. I know he’s wrong for Rebecca as much as I’ve known anything. He’s ten years older than her, for God’s sake.” I pause, and then turn to Sam. “Don’t say it.”

  Suddenly I see her, stepping through the trees with the grace of a ballerina. The doe lifts her legs high, sniffing with her head delicately bowed. Behind her is a caramel-colored fawn. Nobody said there was a fawn. “I’m not going to be here very long, Sam,” I say softly. “You know that and I know that.”

  Sam stands up, his hands in his pockets. “You’re giving me an ultimatum.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “You are,” Sam insists. “If I want you, I’ve got to do something about Hadley. And even so, it would be a temporary victory.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Sam grabs my shoulders. “Tell me you’ll leave him. You and Rebecca can stay with me in Stow. We’ll get married and we’ll have a zillion kids.”

  I smile sadly. “I’ve already got a kid. I’m too old to have babies.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Sam says. “You know that. We’ll live in the Big House and it’ll be perfect.”

  “It’ll be perfect,” I say, repeating his words. “It’s nice to think that.”

  Sam wraps his arms around me. “I’ll talk to Hadley. I’ll work something out.” He leans his head on my shoulder. “Perfect,” he says.

  Only Joley is in the Big House when we return. It is late afternoon, and he’s come in for a cold drink. As we walk into the house, Sam is grabbing at the waistband of my shorts. “Stop!” I laugh, swatting his hand away. That’s when I see my brother. “Oh,” I straighten up- we’ve been caught with our hands in the cookie jar.

  “Where have you two been?” Joley says, amused. At least he’s not shocked, like Rebecca. Where is she?

  “At the nature sanctuary,” Sam says. “Where is everyone?”

  “Finishing up. Rebecca’s down there too.”

  “Can I talk to you, Sam?” Joley asks, and Sam looks at me: We knew it was coming. He leads Sam into the kitchen and starts the faucet running, no doubt to keep me from listening.

  I walk into the den, where the television is on. The five o’clock local news. I swing myself sideways in the armchair so that my feet dangle over the edge. The anchorwoman is reporting on a fire that killed three people in Dorchester. Then a familiar logo appears on the screen behind her. Why do I know it? “And now,” the anchorwoman says, “we take you to Joan Gallagher, reporting from Gloucester, where rescue efforts have been underway for the past three days to save a humpback whale tangled in a fishing boat’s gill net. Joan?”

  “I don’t believe this,” I say out loud. “This stuff follows me.”

  “Thanks, Anne,” the reporter says dutifully. “Behind me is Stellwagen Bank, a major East Coast feeding ground for several groups of humpback whales. Many people have been following the pl