The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [43]
“You never answered my question yet. Are you coming with me?”
“Is this your idea of a discussion? You repeating the same question?”
“It’s down to yes or no,” he said. “I told you I wasn’t going to keep asking. I’m leaving this coming Saturday.”
If she never answered his question, if she kept it hanging in the air, would Saturday come?
“Well?” Boyd said.
He did not understand what he was asking her to do. How could she explain it to him? How could anyone tell somebody else what it was to be over here? Her sister preferred to warrant her loneliness by laying it all on men, their fickle nature, their love of what’s between legs, their laziness and general dishonesty, but Maggie knew that Whaley too did not so much choose her lot as submit to the wind, not whatever it blew her way, but the fact that it was going to blow. That was the only fact Dr. Levinson and them need record.
“You just don’t know,” she said. “Don’t understand.”
“I know I love you more than I love any spit of sand and sea oat. I know you don’t love this place so much as you need it to make you feel miserable right on.”
“There you go again, telling somebody what they’re feeling.”
“I’m thinking what I’m hearing here is not a yes or a maybe,” he said, and he went back to swabbing the stern of his boat with a rag.
This was a Wednesday. She thought she’d see him one last time, and on Saturday she sliced some cucumbers and soaked them in vinegar and hot chili pepper like he liked them and sliced some cold chicken and some of Whaley’s thick bread. She iced some coffee and made a cherry pie. Whaley watched her cook all day. Late, in the waning light, she came upstairs and knocked on the door to Maggie’s room.
“Might as well eat it if you’re not going to take it down there to him.”
Maggie didn’t say anything. She lay with her back to the door, facing the sloping wall of the dormered room.
“You’re not hungry, Mag?”
She’d lost weight, maybe a little more than was good for her. She’d always been proud of her hips, never minded nor complained about the spread of her thighs. Now she felt bone when she sat, felt the drained-away flesh like a phantom finger lost in an accident.
“Been picking all day,” she lied.
Whaley made a noise in her throat, as if she did not believe her but did not have the energy to argue with her lies.
“Just tell me when he’s gone off island,” Maggie said to the wall.
“You can’t lie in bed for another whole day.”
“On second thought, don’t tell me,” she said. “I’ll know.”
Her sister made another one of her disapproving sound effects. When she lightly shut the door, Maggie considered how this exchange qualified as nearly tender. Surely it would be the most sympathy she could expect from her sister, who she knew to be biting her tongue.
She kept it mostly bit for the next few months. A winter of near constant squalls. The clothes dried inside, hung and hampered everywhere—the backs of chairs, the stair railing. Maggie went around in a ratty old white T-shirt Boyd had left at the summer kitchen. The shirt smelled of him still, or maybe she willed it to; she wore it to sleep in and she wore it to garden in and she wore it even to church, and in the cold winter winds she went without a bra and wore it upside her skin so that he was the one next to her body, Boyd, she felt him on her all the while.
Her loneliness was of the low-grade don’t-ever-leave-even-when-you’re-sleeping variety. She moved like a night crab around the island, jerky and nervous among the people she’d grown up with, skittish, intolerant of the kind of small talk that she’d once been so good at.
Whaley said: Find God. Maggie ignored her, but she tried. She prayed, and her prayers stretched out desperate and needy for longer and longer increments until they linked verbs at noon, the entire day one single waking prayer. She wanted to feel what she’d been promised, which was deliverance from the pain of longing. But she did not feel a thing except tired of carrying around a one-sided conversation in her head all day long, and when she complained to Whaley,