The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [24]
The sight of her face—years younger, so fresh and untainted by the travails to come, the humiliation and unfairness that was, at least, her life, if not the general nature of things—startled her so deeply that she forgot entirely her mission. No longer did her father’s papers even exist. For all she thought of them they could have been spread out, a carpet, beneath her feet. The portrait had saved her life. Had it not the power to turn a murdering thief fearful of the vengeance of God? Had Daniels not sworn up and down the island that the girl in the portrait—her younger, innocent, hopeful self—had spoken to him as she had spoken to her? If he revered it enough to hang in his parlor, surely he’d want it back badly enough to allow her to be reunited with her father.
Her wounded leg ached as she carried the portrait down the dark hallway. She was careful not to look at the woman in the painting for fear that life in Daniels’s den had turned her, that she might, with only her eyes, bring Theo to harm. She slung it under her arm and, when she was down the back stairs, lurched across the courtyard toward the cart.
She did not see Whaley until well after she heard the hiss of the dog and then a silence as the dog came hurtling through the unnaturally dense and still air. She managed to toss the portrait out of the way rather than use it to protect herself, for it seemed to her that she’d used up all her chances, that the choice she made was final and fateful. She closed her eyes to the attack and when she opened them Whaley stood over her, though the dog was still on her. A blurry second and she realized: he had figured out her plan. He had discovered her gone and figured out where she was. He had let the dog out of the shed. Now he was watching her die. She understood then: love too had limits. People could love you so much that they compromised their every shred of dignity, the love they lavished would strip them to skeletal, but there were things you could do to make them stop loving you, even if they were eaten up with it, even if they said they would die for you. At some point they had to protect themselves.
Or maybe he did not love her. Or what if he did love her and was letting her die because he was the only one who ever loved her for who she was and what if he knew that she would never settle for such honesty because she was incapable of reciprocating? These were the things she wanted to have filled her mind when, years later, she thought of that afternoon when Whaley let the dog nearly kill her before he killed the dog and dragged her and the portrait across the dunes to a skiff tied to a sound-side dock and rowed them from one island to another.
IV
MAGGIE WHALEY
Yaupon Island, North Carolina
ONE OF THOSE NIGHTS not long after the last storm swept the island clean, Maggie sat with her sister on the steps of the church. Whaley was reading aloud her Norfolk grocery store prices. To Maggie this noise was as closely known as the roll of surf on the beach. Something settled so deep inside she hardly heard it, though her sister, to read her prices, trumped up a special voice, frilly ball dress compared to her usual wrinkled housecoat drawl.
The way her sister put on aggravated the life out of Maggie. Whaley’d sat in the same pew at the same little school Maggie had and learned from the same old mildew-ravaged books. They’d read aloud for the same succession of not-long-for-this-island schoolteachers the very same sentences that children off island doubtless mumbled without intent or comprehension, because what they smacked of, these teach-you-to-read sentences, was a world known and taken for granted by children everywhere except for Yaupon and the few left-behind places like it. Daddy’s automobiles chugged up the