The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [39]
“I’ve got to get up at the crack,” he said. “We better get to bed.”
The next morning, after getting up with Boyd to accompany him down to his boat — hugging on him so long and hard he had to gently pry her fingers off his shoulders—she was struck with terror that everything seemed about to crumble. What she wanted more than anything was for him to reassure her that things were going to be okay. Boyd seemed both unnerved and flattered by her neediness. He was willing to nurse her back to normalcy, but she could tell he found the whole process unpleasant.
When she got to the house Whaley was sitting on the porch with her coffee. She would not look at Maggie when Maggie took a seat beside her.
“I’m sorry, okay?”
“Okay what?”
Maggie had no answer for this, though she understood the question.
“I would tell you what happened with Barry Railey if I thought you wanted to hear it.”
“Spare me,” said Whaley.
“All right. I’ll spare you, but what you’re getting spared is the truth.”
Whaley looked at her full-on for the first time that day. “You need a bath, Mag.”
For the next week or so, Maggie was tentative and shy around both Whaley and Boyd. She spent hours weeding the garden and cooked dinner for Boyd every noon when he came in off the water, more to take her mind off things than at attempt to redress her wrongs, for Whaley’d just as soon let it go than speak of it again, though she’d never forget—Maggie knew her sins were tallied in that place where her sister kept score, a book of pages filled to the margins with black slants—nor, heaven forbid, forgive. She just had better things to do than listen to Maggie’s mess. What else was there to say about it in Whaley’s view but I’m right and you’re wrong?
With her sister she knew where she stood. Boyd kept her guessing. Had she been asked, say by little Liz, who was known to ask her such, whether she liked a little mystery in a man, she’d surely have said, Oh hell yes, sign me up for the deep end, the more I knew them the more I need to be wanting to know about them, and it would have been true, for she’d never been with a man whose head and heart she didn’t have figured out in a flat week, not to mention other parts of their body it took less than a day to understand. Now, though, with Boyd—it felt like he was pulling away from her a little each day, not so dramatically that she could see it in his eyes or hear it in his voice or God forbid feel it in his touch but detectable still in a way that got away with her terribly just because it was so slight, like the way the island itself was drifting every day a little bit southward, though to stand on her porch or, she’d heard, to fly over it in an airplane, it looked the same as it always had, ever since she could remember, ever since Whaley used to take her by the hand and lead her down the lane to see their aunt Mandy, who would let them dress her cats up in rags she swore belonged to the famous daughter of the vice president of the United States of America. And the island looked the same as it did when the vice president’s daughter set foot on it, and yet it was a different island, or rather it was in a different place.
That was how it was with Boyd. He was the same but in a slightly different place. Wind in the night had picked up and moved tiny parts of him, the equivalent of sand grains, atoms, molecules, droplets of water they claim humans are mostly made of.
Maggie stood looking at him one afternoon as they mended nets in Woodrow’s backyard. He had his shirt off and she was admiring the ropey muscles that had strung up across his back and shoulders since he’d been out on the water. Well, that’s good, she thought. At least there’s more of him for the wind to take away. Might take a while longer than it would have when his rangy self first set foot on