Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

I want you to say it. Tell me what you are going to do.

  Again.

  You will not be sorry. I know; I have carried a memory of you wherever I have gone for thirty years now. That’s the way it had to be. You will see. No matter what. You will take him with you.

  70 S AM

  Until now, I didn’t know there was a down side to being able to read your mind. It’s written all over your face, you know. I don’t blame you. I should have known that you would go back to him. Back to California.

  Later, when you are gone, it’s going to hit me. Hadley, and then you, leaving at the same time. I won’t blame you for what happened to him; I couldn’t. But I haven’t really grieved yet, not for him; not for you. In time, I’ll make peace with myself for Hadley’s death. With you, though, it will not be so simple.

  It would be easy to say that when you leave I could just pretend this didn’t happen. Truth is, you weren’t here for all that long. I’ve always been sort of suspicious of immediate attraction, anyway, and I could just tell myself over and over that infatuation isn’t the same as love. But you and I both know that would be lying. You can tell yourself anything you want, but you can’t make what happened go away. It happened fast because we were making up for lost time.

  When I picture you, it’s a collage I see, not one whole picture. There’s you sitting in the manure, doesn’t that seem like a year ago? And talking to Joley under the shade of a Gravenstein tree, the sun casting shadows on your back. I think I knew I loved you then, no matter how I acted. Maybe I always knew.

  I keep thinking we were so stupid. If we hadn’t fought so hard when we first met, we would have had nearly twice as much time together. But then if we hadn’t fought so hard I wonder if I could have loved you so damn much.

  It sounds funny to say it here, just like that, in the light of day. I love you. You hear it so often, you know, on soap operas and stupid sitcoms that sometimes the words are just sounds, they don’t mean anything. But God, I would shout it to the world day and night if it meant I could keep you with me. I’ve never tried to pack so much into one phrase in my whole life.

  Is it different for you, because I am not the first man you’ve loved? I might as well say it, because it’s true. You went first to Oliver. So what I want to know is: does your heart feel like it’s being ripped out? Is it easier for you? Have you felt this way before?

  I haven’t either. I can’t imagine ever feeling this way again. Not the pain, not now, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about us. When I was with you nothing mattered. I could have watched this whole orchard get wiped out by blight. I could have witnessed massacres, a war, Armageddon. It wouldn’t have made a difference.

  I know that there will be other women, but they couldn’t compare. Maybe I’ll change, maybe love will change, but I think we were a once-ina-lifetime. You could never leave me; that’s why I am not more upset. You can’t possibly break these feelings. They stretch, and they last. You’re taking them with you back to Oliver, back to Rebecca. You will never be the same, because of me.

  If I have to remember you, just for a second, it will be like this: you kneelingin front of me, at the windowsill, counting the stars. I don’t remember why we decided to do that, it’s an impossible, infinite task. Maybe because when we were together, we thought we had all the time in the world. You gave up at two hundred and six. That’s when you started to name them, after grandparents, great-grandparents, distant ancestors. Antique names like Bertha and Charity and Annabelle, Homer and Felix and Harding. You asked me for family names, and I told you. We mapped the sky with our heritage. Do you know what a star is? I asked you. It’s an explosion that happened billions and billions of years ago. The only reason we see it now, is because it’s taken that long for the light, the sight, to travel here into our line of vision. I pointed to the North Star, and said I wanted to name it after you. Jane, you said, too plain for such a bright one . I said you were wrong. It was the biggest explosion, obviously, and it has taken many years to reach us, but it will be here for many more.

  I will think about you every day for the rest of my life. It had to be this way; I can’t see myself surfing on a beach any more than you can imagine raising sheep. We come from different backgrounds, and we happened to cross for a little bit of time. But what a time that was.

  Don’t say it. This is not goodbye.

  Look at me. Hold me. I can get across so much more that way. There are things we need to say that there aren’t words for, yet.

  Oh I love you.

  71 R EBECCA July 3, 1990

  I always pay attention to my parents’ fights. They’re incredible. It is hard to understand how so much anger could come from such indifference. When I picture my parents, I see them walking in concentric circles, in opposite directions. My mother’s circle is inside my father’s, for financial reasons. My father walks clockwise. My mother walks counterclockwise. Naturally they do not cross paths. From time to time they look up and see each other from the corners of their eyes. And it is this break in the line of vision that sparks an argument.

  They are fighting, today, over me. My fifteenth birthday. My father is planning to be out of the country on my birthday. Out of fourteen birthdays, he has been here for seven. So it is not like this is something new. But my mother seems to have lost control. She yells at him in the kitchen, things I choose to ignore. I walk away from them on purpose, and turn up the game shows on TV.

  But it is when they get upstairs that things begin to get interesting. My parents’ bedroom is directly over the living room where I am watching TV. I can hear shouting. Then I hear very distinctly the thud of something being dropped. And something else. I jump up and throw my baseball cap down on the couch. I tiptoe up the stairs, hoping I can catch the tail end of this.

  “I’ve had it,” my mother shouts. She has a big cardboard box, the kind my father keeps his research files in. She lifts it with all her strength-she’s not so big-and chucks it into the hall. I think she sees me on the staircase, so I duck. Then my father walks out into the hall. He takes the box my mother has thrown and rights it. He lifts it by its handles and sets it back inside the door.

  For reasons I don’t understand, my mother is faster than my father. A wall of cartons builds up so quickly that I cannot see much of anything at all. They have blocked off the access to their bedroom. “Jane,” my father says. “That’s enough.”

  I cannot see what my mother is doing. This makes me angry. So many days of the year I put up with them ignoring each other; the moments they connect, even fighting, are so rare. Anything, to watch them together. So I creep to the second floor of the house and shove the cartons a certain way. I push and rearrange them gently so that I don’t make too much noise but I create a peephole. I see my father standing in a pile of loose papers and graphs. He looks helpless. He moves his hands in front of him, as if he can still catch them falling.

  Then he grabs my mother’s shoulders. I think maybe he is hurtingher. She struggles back and forth, and with a force I didn’t realizeshe had, she breaks away.

  My mother lifts one of the cartons still out there and holds it over the banister. She rattles it like a maraca.

  My father comes charging out of the bedroom. “Don’t,” he warns. Then the carton breaks. Slow-motion, I can see white bones in Ziploc bags, sharp strands of baleen, ribbons of charts and observation logs, all falling. Just like that, I stop breathing.

  This is when, out of the blue, I remember the plane crash.

  My father hit my mother once, when I was a baby. And she took me and flew to the East Coast. That’s how the story goes. My father insisted she bring me back, so she put me on a plane headed to San Diego. But the plane crashed. I tell it like this, matter-of-fact, because I do not remember it. I was, as I say, a baby. What I know of the crash I have learned from reading newspaper articles, many years later.

  I don’t think about this crash much-it was a long time ago- but I believe that it has crossed my mind now for a reason. Maybe it is the thing that gets me to stand up a