The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [41]
He got up and went inside, and she stood waiting for him to return—thought maybe he’d gone in for his shirt to protect against the gathering bugs, or had gone in to fetch himself something to drink—but he didn’t come back and she did not go to him. Instead she went home and slept alone, thinking he needed to be without her in order to understand how much he missed her.
She let him be for the next few days. It wasn’t easy, but she coddled the guilt he made her feel by calling her their worst enemy, and she spent her hours having conversations with him in her head, constructing arguments to prove wrong his notion that everything would be fine if only she’d come across with him. If at first it bothered her that her primary example of why leaving would be the end of them was well over four hundred years old, in time she came to see Virginia’s story as important to their own as Genesis in the Bible. It came first, and everything after was a continuation. Think what would have happened had Virginia just stayed put on this island where she had everything she needed. Greed’s what led her to go across, and greed and vanity and pride is what killed her and the rest of them too. Talk about an original sin. Think about those Tape Recorders coming across wanting to know what it is to live here on this island, and Whaley spouting her history of ancestors and recipes and ways to ward off bugs when the truth was that me and you, Boyd, maybe we aren’t even real people struggling with how to love but just another installment in a story started when some girl got restless and tired of the people she’d grown up with and lit out for afar. And look what happened to her. Boyd. Look what happened to all of them.
By the time she crossed the creek to knock on the door of the summer kitchen the conversation had gotten so huge and convoluted she didn’t think she could bear its weight anymore. Might as well get it out there, in the air.
It had been three days without a word. She’d stayed close to home, avoiding her sister, who for once seemed to sense her sadness enough to give her wide berth.
No one home. Coming up the lane she ran into Woodrow.
“You seen Boyd?”
“He across over to Morehead.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, pretending to know all about it. “How long’s he going to be gone now?”
Woodrow looked at her full-on, then past her to the bridge his great-great-great-grandfather, master builder, had built over the creek. He seemed to study it awhile, as if trying to figure out how it had withstood the years of storm surge and wind when half the houses on this island were storm wrack across the sound. At least Maggie decided he was pondering such, as it was far more palatable than thinking he knew exactly what was going on with this pathetic old white woman been left by her younger lover.
“I believe he said he’d be back today or tomorrow, one.”
“Thanks, Woodrow,” she said, chipper as all get-out, though she wasn’t two steps away from him when she bit her bottom lip to keep it from quivering.
He did not come back that night, which was understandable as the sound was choppy that evening and he was too green on the water still to risk much in the way of weather. But the next day the sound was flat glass and he did not show up the next day either, nor the next. By the fourth day without word, she was despondent. She went down to the store and bought herself a pack of cigarettes and let herself in the summer kitchen and sat in an old rocker of Woodrow’s and smoked. She didn’t eat. She barely went to the bathroom. Once someone came and knocked on the door—Woodrow or Sarah—but she didn’t dare open it, as the only person she wanted to see would not need to knock.
She was still waiting, noon of the sixth day, when her sister got the key from Woodrow and blew into the room.
“Carrying on like this ain’t going to bring him back.”
“How would you know? What do you know about love?”
Whaley came and kneeled beside her. She reached out to run her fingers through Maggie’s wild, wind-tossed hair, but Maggie pulled away.
“Surely you didn’t think