The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [44]
She felt worse for having tried and failed to find, through God, through prayer, a way out of her misery. Some of the dumbest people she knew were smart enough to get religion. Her failure to understand how God could help her out of her pain made her feel twice as inadequate as before, when she’d gone around having an imaginary conversation with Boyd all day long instead of her heavenly maker.
She went back to talking to Boyd all day long. She’d walk down island where the wind had leveled the dunes to a crisply rippled flat. There the wind blew so loud she could yell hard at him and not be heard by a tern pecking oats alongside her.
Sometimes she would leave off talking to him and just dream. It kept her going, this elaborate day-or-night dream—she entertained it whenever, would will it no matter the sun or moon—of Boyd appearing again on the island. She’d look up from whatever in this dream occupied her—mending a fishing net (a chore she associated always with him) or weeding the sandy tomato patch out behind the summer kitchen, something, whichever, and there he’d be. Out of nowhere having showed up on this island he’d fled because she would never leave it. He’d not say the things people say in this fantasy Maggie was smart enough to know she shared with every sick-hearted sucker ever pined after someone who left them. Nothing obvious like I’m back, or You were right I could not live without you, or Let’s begin anew my darling. Nor would he say something smart-ass flirty like You missed a weed, toeing an anthill with a brogan, grinning his shy crooked smile. In her dream he said nothing because there wasn’t anything to say.
She tried to say nothing about him to other people. She knew that restoring her dignity (what little of it she could restore on this island where everyone stored in their head, along with the middle names of their children and the fifty states and their capitals, every time she’d ended up kissing someone not communally recognized as hers for the kissing) depended upon pretending he—they—never happened. She tried to never speak his name aloud.
Sometimes, going along, she’d nearly double over with shame. For she’d withstood life on this island that drove grown men, war veterans, sobbing for their mamas. She’d spent a night lying in six inches of cold water while the wind plucked a steeple from the church where half the village was riding out a nor’easter. She’d seen a boy she loved in grade school—little Tommy Bellamy, not but eight—brought in from the surf with both his legs chewed to bone below the knee, strings of pearly muscle trailing down from this thighs, his eyes crazy eternally open from the shock of one minute swimming along in the shallows with his buddies and the next dragged into a bloodred whirlpool by a rogue great white. She’d seen drownings, people she’d known all her life, hauled in accordion-bloated. Her own kin stretched out in the sand, blown up by a wind could care less what it delivered.
To be laid low by his leaving—sometimes, walking along, the very idea of it would get away with her so bad she’d nearly buckle. Never speaking his name to any soul (least not her sister) would at least keep them from knowing how scarred she was. But there was one person with whom she allowed herself the risk of talking about Boyd. Well, not talking about. Woodrow, being Woodrow, word-stingy, unreadable, never said much. But he listened. She felt okay talking to him about it because he felt things himself he’d never share with anyone on this island, even his Sarah. And because her sister would disown her if she knew she was telling her private deepest business to a colored man, however hard-working and indispensable he was to them on the island even back then.
“You ever see Boyd over in Morehead?” Maggie asked Woodrow one day. Her face ablaze in the asking, like