The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [42]
“Because I’m an old hag, right? That’s why you think he left me?”
“Well, think about it. Surely the boy wants young’uns, Mag. You’re not about to do him much good there.”
“I can have a child if I want to. It might kill me, but I’d be willing to try.”
Whaley turned away. Maggie thought she was crying. It took a few seconds to identify the soft sniffling as muffled laughter.
“Get out,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Mag. It’s just, you’re not seeing straight.”
“You’re the expert. You’ve got so much experience in these matters, I don’t know why I didn’t come to you first.”
Whaley sighed and got up to leave. At the door she said, “He’s down at the dock, by the way.”
Maggie waited until her sister was gone. She tidied up the summer kitchen and washed up a bit and even made a point of stopping by to talk to Sarah, who was watering her garden and regarded Maggie with a little less suspicion and disdain than usual, as if Maggie’s obvious desperation (she was sure the entire island knew of her self-imposed solitary confinement, the reasons behind it) softened her a little.
Boyd was washing his boat. She stood ashore, watching, waiting for the men hanging around the dock to notice her presence. One of them caught sight of her and said something under breath, and all of their heads turned at once, and then his pals filed past her and he was alone in the backlit dusk, time of day she always allowed to the two of them, soft settling bask before the mosquitoes emerged from the marsh and took over the night.
Already they were biting, but she never felt them. Why was this day her hardest on earth? She had lost her mother early on to cancer, her father to a slow ghastly alcoholic decline; her brother had drowned in the inlet when she and Whaley, ten and thirteen, were supposed to be looking after him. She’d had a husband beat her with a hairbrush and tie her hands to the clawfeet of a bathtub, spread jelly on her, and leave her caked and naked, baking the day long in the July heat, yet she’d never felt so low as she had while waiting for Boyd these last few days.
“Where’ve you been?”
He looked past her, up toward the village, which was dim and hazy now in the settling night. The water in the inlet was growing slick and black. She felt he was about to slip under its sheen and she reached out to hold him and he met her embrace but turned his face when she went to kiss him, offering his cheek.
“I got me a place over in Morehead. Down in the Promise Land. Near my sister Bonnie and them. Guess I’m going to fish out of Morehead for a while.”
She would not look at him. She thought of Whaley, of the way she’d said, “Did you really think he’d stay?” as if the whole island knew the moment she mixed herself up with this boy how it would end. This did not feel like any end, though; it felt like the beginning of some new and hardly tolerable state of being in which air was precious and hard fought for and she cursed a girl dead four centuries who should have just stayed put.
“You guess,” she said. It came out something between a croak and a whisper. “What do you mean, you guess?”
When he did not reply she looked up from the shallows and said, “There’s not much guessing involved in going across and renting a goddamn house.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice weary and yet slightly fearful too. “I’m going to fish out of Morehead.”
“For a while,” she said. “Before you said, for a while.”
“Maggie,” he said, and touched her elbow in a way that made her feel like she was being steered, led along, like she’d stepped out of line.
She shook him loose and said, “Maybe we had more talking to do?”
“You coming with me?”
She looked at the sun dropping toward the water and thought, if I could just see across from here, if it was possible to stand on the dock over there and see the steeple, or smoke from Whaley’s chimney, or the ghost forest down southside.
“Is this about Barry Railey? Because what you heard …”
“I don’t care what you did when you were drunk one day. I care what this place does to you, how it makes you feel.”
“You’re telling me how