The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [22]
Therefore, using the situation to its advantage was not exactly manipulating Whaley, only his heightened and patently distrustful state of mind. The state was ephemeral; when he dropped back down to lowly earth, when he hurt again, was able to feel things dictated by cause and effect rather than some chimerical disengagement with reality, she would adopt a different set of rules.
Back at the shack, he helped her inside, stoked the fire, fetched her water, washed and dressed her wounds. For the next week she lay recuperating from her bite, which Whaley kept plastered with a poultice of mud, hornet’s nest, and unidentifiable herbs procured from an island widow known for her remedies. The pain grew worse and the poultice smelled foul and itched worse than any of the thousand bug bites she’d encountered on this island; her fever continued for a day and a half, but discomfort only exacerbated her scheming. She found herself energized by purpose, now that she no longer had to worry about survival, which was ensured by two things: Whaley’s feelings for her and whatever he was hiding from her about Daniels. She thought again of Daniels’s visit. So assiduously did she reconstruct it as she lay recuperating, almost always alone, Whaley out foraging for food or firewood, that nearly every detail felt different. To begin with, she was not scared. What was there to fear from a man who burst in on them in the middle of the night and then offered building materials? She’d sneaked looks at Daniels, noted the way he looked at Whaley, the way he looked at her. Flames reflected in his fierce blue eyes. In memory there was light enough to study him, to see what she needed to see, though a part of her surely realized that the fire was down to coals when he arrived, and that, had she bothered to look up at him instead of cowering on the floor, she would have seen only a profile in shadow.
Whaley doted on her as much as a man of his demeanor could be said to dote. He made sure she was comfortable, altered his routine to tend to her needs. When he was gone she missed him and this meant she felt something for him too, beyond gratitude, beyond the need for company. What she felt she would not let herself examine. As if feeling in the first place were something one could dissect. She liked it when he was with her, she disliked being apart from him. There were other things more worthy of her analysis. How she might retrieve her father’s papers. How she might enlist Whaley’s aid.
The latter she spent a good deal of time considering, even after her leg had healed enough for her to hobble about the cabin with the help of a crutch Whaley had fashioned for her from a live-oak limb. Ought she tell him now about her father’s papers? Certainly he had shown no interest in helping her retrieve the portrait. She worried that the papers would not interest him either, for he was no longer of the world that valued what those papers represented: her father’s greatness.
So began her pattern: she would winnow away at him with talk of her return to Daniels’s house. Usually she brought it up at night, when he was both exhausted from his day’s labor and more convivial, though rarely did he grace her talk of returning with much more than a grunt. She waited, and her leg grew stronger; she limped a bit, a nasty scar remained, but she needed to be able to run. She had a plan to distract the dog with food this time, but she knew that no matter how much food she took along, no matter how strong her leg, she would need Whaley. It would take two to keep the dog from attacking, and she needed a lookout while she searched Daniels’s quarters.
But Whaley remained unyielding. After weeks of trying to cajole him, she announced she would leave first thing in the morning for the compound. After all, she said, Daniels offered, and she had no reason to think that the offer did not still stand.
He took it calmly, did not look at her when at last he said, “The dog who nearly crippled you’s the only thing up there still stands.”
“I’ve