The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [40]
“I know all about that time with Barry Railey,” he said.
She was stretching the net out, standing across the yard from him; there was some wind that day, and at first she thought the wind had picked up his words and twisted and mixed them, for he remained bent to his task until she did not respond. He looked up at her quickly, saw something in her eyes, dropped his own eyes to the net.
“Whaley told you?”
“Don’t matter who. Matters who didn’t.”
“What you heard is a lie.”
“Really?” He put down his end of the net, lit a cigarette, picked up his work again.
“I didn’t throw myself at him if that’s what you heard.”
“But you went off with him?”
“I was with him, yes. And I let him kiss me before I came to my senses and stopped him.”
“What made you come to your senses, Mag?”
Maggie looked across the island toward the ocean. More than anything she wanted her bask, the water on her shoulders, liquid heat and sea foam frothing around her.
“You’re the one ran off to do God knows what across the sound. I don’t like it when you’re gone. It doesn’t feel right over here.”
“I went to my cousin’s baby’s christening, Mag. I was gone three days. I asked you to go with me. Asked you more than once. I’m going to ask you again to come across with me, for good, but I’m not going to keep asking you over and over. We could never be over here. It just won’t work. You won’t let it. You’re scared of your sister. You don’t want anything to change. I have to stay in some black man’s outbuilding. You get to come across the creek when you want, and then you cross over and who knows why you act like you do over here, but you do, Mag. As long as we stay over here, you’re going to keep getting in the way of us.”
The woods Virginia led her through were a damn lie, Maggie thought, like the forests she’d seen in kids books, the pictures alongside the teaching sentences. Where was the brush and scrub so thick you had to hack at it with a machete to clear a path? In Virginia’s forest the trees were high and far apart and friendly animals frolicked in deep blue shadow that flickered with sunlight through leaf canopy, and raccoons were sweet-eyed and never rabid, and snakes never hid beneath rocks but basked atop them like the tourists came to Meherrituck to burn their skin lying half-naked on the beach. This is the way Boyd would paint it over there too. A fat lie to get her across. What would keep her contained in Morehead or little Washington or wherever else over there he wanted them to settle? Even the islands had bridges to the mainland and all that coming and going, all those roads and intersections. He was dead wrong: she could never be what he needed her to be over there. She could never stay still.
“No place is going to keep people who love each other from loving each other.”
“You know this how?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“I’m just asking,” said Boyd, “how you happen to come by that particular bit of wisdom.”
“You want me to have done everything in order to know it? Some things you just know. You don’t have to have experienced them.”
She was lecturing him. In her tone she heard something that terrified her: her big sister’s sanctimony.
“Well, if you love me, you can love me just as good across the water.”
“What about your family? I thought you came across to be where your father was raised?”
“True enough. But then I fell in love. I might would stay if it weren’t for you. But we just cannot be over here. You won’t allow it.”
“So you’re leaving?” She turned away from him, dried her eyes on her T-shirt.
“I don’t know,” he said. “No.”
“I don’t know either,” she said, and then she felt it burn through her, the spite, the very thing that led her down to buy white liquor in some old boy’s root cellar the moment he pushed off the dock that day.
“Seems like if you’re going to leave me, well, seems like it’d hurt a lot worse then than now.”
“So you want me to go?”
“I don’t. But I feel like everybody’s against us. Everything and everybody.”
“You,” he said, dropping his end of the net in the grass.
“What?”
“You seem like the worst