Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

I unbutton Hadley’s flannel shirt and hold it soft against my skin. The hair on his chest is an unlikely shade of red. It circles in spirals that remind me of my father’s nautical maps. I rub my fingers across them, the opposite way, making the hair stand on end. He sings to me.

  Soon we are at that point we have been at before, naked except for each other. Hadley’s outstretched hands can cover the length of my spine. “Please,” I say to him. “I don’t want to be a kid anymore.”

  Hadley smiles. He pushes the hair back from my forehead. “You aren’t.” He kisses my neck and then he kisses my breasts and my stomach and my hips and then down there. “What are you doing,” I whisper, but I am really speaking to myself. I feel something starting, some energy, that draws blood from my fingertips and begins unexpected to open. I pull back on Hadley’s hair and scratch at his neck. I am afraid I will never get to see his face again. But then he slides up my body and in and we move like a sail, like a wind; he kisses me, full, on the lips, and to my great surprise I taste like the ocean.

  “Jesus, Hadley,” Sam says, and Hadley jumps up. He’s wearing his boxers. I pull his shirt over me and roll a blanket around my legs. I cannot see everyone clearly; there is some kind of fire behind my eyes.

  “Hadley.” My voice is not my own. “This is my father.”

  Unsure of what to do, Hadley holds out his hand. My father does not take it. I’m puzzled seeing my father in this environment. He is wearing suit pants and a polo shirt and brown loafers. I am amazed that he could climb up here with a sole like that.

  My head is throbbing so heavily I lie back down. The park ranger-the only person here who has been paying attention to me-kneels down and asks if I am all right. “To tell you the truth,” I say, “I don’t really know.” I try to sit up with his help, but there are shooting pains in my ears and in my eyes. Hadley kneels down beside me. He tells the ranger to get me away from everyone, where there’s air.

  “Get the hell away from her,” my father says. “Don’t touch her.”

  Sam, standing beside him, tells Hadley it might be best.

  “What do you know?” Hadley shouts at Sam.

  I am having a great deal of trouble concentrating on the scene at hand. When people speak, I can’t hear the actual words until several seconds later. The sun swims in between their faces, bleaching them like overexposed photos. I try very hard to focus on Sam’s eyes, the brightest color of anything in front of me. Beside Sam, my father seems small and two-dimensional, like a paper doll.

  “Rebecca,” my father’s voice comes to me through a tunnel. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

  “He wouldn’t hurt her.” Sam leans in close to me with a face curved like a camera lens. “Can you stand up?”

  I shake my head. Hadley takes my shoulders in his hands, regardless of what my father has said, which I do not remember anyway. He places his head so close to mine I can read his mind. He is thinking: I love you. Don’t forget that. “Let me talk,” I whisper, but nobody seems to hear me.

  “Look, she came to me. She hitched. We were headed to your place today to work this all out.” His words are too loud.

  “Hadley,” Sam says slowly, “I think you’d better let Rebecca come home with us. And I think you’d better stay here for a while.”

  Let me talk, I say again, but I am ignored. It occurs to me I may not be speaking at all.

  Hadley stands up and walks away from the clearing. He has his hands on his hips. When he turns around the veins in his forehead are strained and blue, and he stares at Sam. “You know me. You’ve known me forever. I can’t believe,” here he looks at my father, “I cannot believe that you- you -would doubt me. You’re my friend, Sam. You’re like my brother. I didn’t tell her to come here-I wouldn’t do that. But I’m not just gonna turn my back and let you take her away. Jesus, Sam,” he takes a step backward. “I love her.”

  With all the energy I have I lunge towards Hadley, not quite standingand not quite crawling. He catches me in his arms and presses my face into his chest. He whispers into my hair things I cannot make out.

  “Let go of her, you bastard,” my father mutters. Sam lays a hand on his arm but he shakes it off and yells into the sky. “Let go of my daughter!”

  “Give her to us, Hadley,” Sam says softly.

  “Sir,” the ranger says, the first word I hear without the static of the trees.

  “No,” I whisper to Hadley.

  He kneels down and takes my face in his hands. “Don’t cry, now. You look like an onion when you cry, your nose gets all long . . .” I look up at him. “There you go. Now I said I’d come for you, didn’t I, and your father came a long way to see you. Go on home.” His voice cracks, and he swallows hard. I trace his Adam’s apple with my finger. “You need a doctor. Go back to Sam’s and get better, and I’ll come for you. We’ll work this all out like I said. You go with them.”

  “Give her to us,” Sam says again.

  I know as sure as I know myself that if I leave that mountain without Hadley I will never see him again. “I can’t,” I tell Hadley, and it’s true. Except for him, I don’t have anyone left who will love me. I wrap my arms around his waist and pull myself closer.

  “You have to go with them,” he says gently. “Don’t you want to make me happy? Don’t you see?”

  “No,” I say, pulling myself to Hadley.

  “Go, Rebecca,” Hadley says, a little louder. He loosens my grip on his waist and holds my hands.

  “I won’t.” Tears are running down my face and my nose is running and I don’t give a damn. I will not, I tell myself. I will not.

  Hadley looks at the sky and with great force pushes me away by my wrists. He pushes so hard that I land several feet away on the rocks and the dirt. He pushes so hard that, without me beside him, he loses his balance.

  I try to grab at him but I am too far away. I catch the air, and he falls over the edge of the cliff.

  He falls so slowly, twisting in a somersault like a rough-cut acrobat, and I hear the rush of the river I heard last night before there was the beating of his heart in my hand. Thick as breath, I hear his spine hit the rocks and the water below.

  After this, everything that has built up inside me spills out. It is nonverbal. It is a chord that comes when a knife cleaves your soul. And only now, with this sound surrounding, does everyone choose to listen.

  17 O LIVER

  My car runs out of gas in Carefree, Arizona, of all places, and I am forced to walk a sweltering half-mile to find a gas station. It is not the mom-and-pop operation I am expecting, but rather a respectable steel and chrome Texaco. Only one attendant is there.

  “Hey,” he says as I walk up. He doesn’t really look at me, so I have the opportunity to survey him first. He has long brown hair and terrible acne; I place him at seventeen. “You’re not from around here.”

  “Oh,” I say, more sarcastic than I have to be. “How can you tell?”

  The boy laughs through his nose and shrugs. He seems to actually be thinking up an answer to my rhetorical statement. “I know everyone in this town, I guess.”

  “That’s astute of you.” I smile.

  “Astute,” he repeats, trying the word on for size. As if he remembers his occupation, he jumps off the ten-gallon drum he has been resting on and asks if I’d like some help.

  “Some unleaded,” I tell him. “My car is down the road.”

  He focuses his attention on my gas can, a gift from the bank where Jane and I have a savings account. Marine Midland Bank, it is called, and its logo is a streamlined cartoon whale-we chose the institution for obvious emotional reasons.

  “Hey,” the boy says. “I seen one of these.”

  “A gas can? I’d imagine so.”

  “No, a whale can. You know, this picture thing here. There was one in here yesterday being filled up. Some lady who filled her tank and then found out we took credit cards and asked if we could fill up the spare can too.”

  Jane, I recall, has a can like it. The second year we were banking-with Midland, we chose another gas can. We already had a nice toaster.

  “What did this woman look like?” I can feel my neck getting f