Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

“If we drive now, we’ll be there in plenty of time,” he tells me, “and no one will have figured out where we’ve gone.”

  He carries me in his arms to an old blue pickup truck that didn’t have an engine for several weeks. He jump starts it by rolling it in neutral down the hill of the driveway. He has provided me with a cape-orange with fuschia pom-poms, a throwback to the seventies. Sitting between us on the cracked leather seat is a thermos of black coffee and an oat-raisin muffin.

  “I don’t suppose you’re feeling like yourself yet.” When I shake my head he turns on the windshield wipers. He squirts washer fluid, which fires over the back of the truck. It trickles into the flatbed, spurting like a water gun. “So much for that,” Joley says.

  He is a handsome man in a faded kind of way. His hair curls at his ears, even after he’s just had a haircut. The first thing you notice about his face is the space between his eyes-so narrow that it makes him look either mongoloid or very intelligent, depending on your frame of reference. And then there are his lips, which are full like a girl’s and as pink as zinnias. If you take your favorite Mel Gibson poster, and fold it up and put it in the pocket of your jeans and then send them through the washer and dryer, the picture you’d wind up with would be kinder, less startling, and smooth at the edges. Uncle Joley.

  The sun comes up as we cross the New Hampshire border. “I don’t remember much of this,” I tell him. “I spent a good deal of the trip in the back of a truck.”

  “Let me guess,” he says. “Refrigerated?”

  He makes me smile. When my father and Sam found us, I was running a 104-degree fever.

  Uncle Joley doesn’t talk much. He knows it is not what I need. He asks every now and then if I will pour him a cup of coffee, and I do, holding it to his lips like he is the one who is sick.

  We pass the brown road sign that delineates the White Mountain-region. “It’s beautiful here,” I say, “isn’t it?”

  “Do you think it’s beautiful?” my uncle asks. He catches me off guard.

  I survey the peaks and the gulleys. In Southern California, the land is flat and offers no surprises. “Well, yes.”

  “Then it is,” he says.

  We drive on roads that I have never seen. I doubt they are even really roads. They snake through the woods and look more like two tracks left from winter skiers than a path for a car, but they do provide a short cut. The truck bounces back and forth, spilling the coffee and rolling the untouched muffin under the seat. We end up in Hadley’s mother’s backyard, which I can’t help but recognize. We park the truck like a peace offering in the small space between the house and Mount Deception.

  “I’m glad you could come,” Mrs. Slegg says. She opens the screen door. “I heard what happened to you.”

  She puts her arms around me and helps me into her toasty kitchen. I am so ashamed. Her son is the one who has died, and here she is fussing over my scratches. “I’m sorry.” I stumble over the words Joley has coached me to say. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Hadley’s mother’s eyes widen, as if she is shocked to hear any phrase like this at all. “Sugar, it was your loss too.” She sits down on the ladderback chair beside mine. She covers my hand with her own puffy fingers. She is wearing a blue housecoat and a loud apron with an appliquéd raspberry. “I know just what the two of you need. Where have my wits been? You come all the way from Massachusetts and I’m sitting here like a tub of butter.” She opens the breadbox and takes out fresh rolls and crullers and sesame cakes.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Slegg, but I’m not very hungry yet.”

  “You call me Mother Slegg,” she urges. “And no wonder, a little-thing like you. You can probably barely stand alone in a wind, much less take this kind of pain standing tall.”

  Uncle Joley walks over to the window. He peers out at the mountain. “Where is the funeral going to be?”

  “Not far from here. A cemetery where my husband is buried, God rest his soul. We have a family plot.” She says it so casually that I start to watch her for signs: did she not love her own son? Is she a closet mourner, tearing at her hair when everyone leaves?

  A boy comes into the kitchen. He takes the milk out of the refrigerator before acknowledging us. When he turns, he looks so much like Hadley I feel as if I have been punched. “You Rebecca?”

  I nod, speechless. “You’re-”

  “Cal,” he says. “I’m the younger one. Well, I was.” He turns to his mother. “Should we go?” He is wearing a flannel shirt and jeans.

  Cal, two of Hadley’s friends from high school and Uncle Joley are asked to be the pallbearers at the cemetery. There is a preacher who gives a nice, respectable service. In the middle of it all a robin lands on the casket. It begins to peck at the ring of flowers. After ten seconds of watching this peacefully, Mrs. Slegg screams to the preacher to stop. She falls onto the ground and crawls towards the casket to grab the flowers. In the flurry of noise the bird flies away. Someone leads Hadley’s mother away.

  I do not cry throughout the entire ceremony. No matter where I turn I can see that mountain, waiting to claim Hadley again when he is part of the earth. Here I will remain with worms that are thy chambermaids, I find myself thinking, and for the life of me I cannot place the quote. It must be something I have learned in school but it is hard to believe. It seems so long ago, and I was such a different person.

  The four men step forward and lower the leather straps that drop the casket slowly into the ground. I turn away. Up until this point I have pretended that Hadley is not in there at all; that this is just a token and he is waiting back at the Big House for me. But I see the struggle of muscles in Uncle Joley’s back and the sinews in Cal’s fingers. I am convinced that there is indeed something in the rough mustard box.

  I cover my ears so that I do not hear him hit the bottom. The cape falls away from my chest and exposes what has happened to me. Nobody notices except for Mrs. Slegg. She is some distance away, and she only cries a little bit harder.

  Before we leave the cemetery, Cal presents me with the shirt Hadley was wearing the night before he died. The one I wrapped around myself when my father and Sam came. It is blue flannel checked with black. He folds it into triangles, like a flag. Then he tucks in the corners and hands it to me. I do not thank him. I do not say goodbye to Hadley’s grieving mother. Instead, I let my uncle escort me to the truck. In near silence, he drives me back, where everyone else is waiting for their world to end.

  12 O LIVER

  I head to the Institute as if nothing has happened at all. I do not go in every day, and I have no real reason for going today of all days, except for the fact that as I walk through the halls I hear reverential acknowledgments of my presence-“Dr. Jones, Dr. Jones”- and this is somehow life-affirming.

  When I couldn’t sleep last night, I took the videotapes of the last trip to Maui and played them over and over on the VCR in the bedroom. On these tapes the humpbacks rise majestically out of the water, arch in midair, and slip back into the ocean, opening holes that weren’t there. Under the water you can see them, anticipate when they will break through the strained surface; their fins glistening and their flukes pulsing, and for that blessed moment before the magic ends, Jesus, they become pure beauty.

  I had watched the tape several times before the sun came up, and when it did I inexplicably found myself wondering how many months it had been since Jane and I had made love, and I am disappointed to say I could not come up with a concrete number.

  At the Institute, my office overlooks the San Diego Marina. There are three walls of glass, if you can imagine, and then one oak paneled door. It had been blond wood, but I decided to stain it to better see the grain of the wood, and Jane, who was up for a project at the time, insisted on doing it for me. She came into my office for an entire week, trying patches of stains on different pieces of the door molding: names like Colonial Cohasset and Mahogany Sheen and Natural, which seemed to me an irony. Finally she picked a shade called Golden Oak which was more brown than gold. I was at my desk the day she arrived with a squeegee and a disposable brush and a gallon of the