The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [46]
“Can’t wait,” she said, clutching at her stomach.
Woodrow shook his head at her lie.
“What?” she said.
“She’s a woman too. How you think you can fool her with that?”
“She’d near about rather hear me talk about Boyd than go on about my private parts.”
Woodrow said, “Me and her both.”
Maggie laughed a little, encouraged by his smart mouth.
“So?”
“I got to go back over there to get Sarah next week.”
She felt her breath go shallow. “Woodrow, I mean, I’m asking a favor I know, but Sarah, she …”
“Sarah won’t say nothing to you about nothing you do.”
“I’m not worried about her saying anything.”
Woodrow waited for her to tell him what she was worried about, which made it harder for her to do so.
“She doesn’t much care for me, I know.”
“Sarah cares for everybody the same,” he said. “Except her family. She takes care of her babies. They come first to her, them and God.”
“I just worry that, you know, she’ll think …”
“Whatever she thinks, you won’t hear about it. She ain’t gone say nothing to you, Miss Maggie.”
“I swear I wish you’d call me Maggie.”
“I swear I wish a lot of things,” said Woodrow.
Maggie wished a lot of things herself. This she had in common with Woodrow but not her sister, who was all the time saying she did not wish for what the Lord had not yet provided. One thing Maggie knew Whaley wished for, though, was for her little sister to act right, which was to say, act like she did. Well, no matter how hard she tried, this island was not going to let Maggie act right to suit her sister.
It was a risk, going across. Maggie thought of Virginia, safe one day at her home here on the banks, the next thing anybody knew the lot of them, all her kith and kin, lost and presumed dead. Not unlike Maggie’s great-great-great-grandmother, her ship boarded out from Diamond Shoals by thieves, everyone aboard murdered but her. Because she was not right in the head, they spared her life? One not-right-in-the-head woman gets herself and her whole colony lost, another gets saved. Well, Maggie couldn’t sit around studying the fates of the dead for clues to what she would do. All she’d be able to come up with was a contradiction, and she’d die bitter and alone trying to decide which story to trust.
When Whaley was up at the post office Maggie packed a bag and hid it behind the shed, an ancient cardboard suitcase with leather flaking off the handle and gathered pockets along the sides for God knows what, she had never seen anyone use the thing, since she had a working memory it had sat up under the gable in the attic. Rainy days she and Whaley had filled it with baby clothes and wash cloths and paraded around the attic as if disembarking from the train. What wayfarer had brought it there and why had he left it behind? Surely it belonged to no kin of hers.
The pockets she filled with sharks’ teeth and sand dollars. Between her two good dresses and her Boyd’s T-shirt she layered pictures of all her brothers and sisters taken at a backyard oyster roast when her father was still living, a picture of the house itself, all spruced up with sod on the lawn and flowers in the window boxes, another of the village taken from the front steps of the church just before the Ash Wednesday storm of ’62. She had to slip these out of picture frames, which left empty glass for Whaley to find, so she hid them in the sea trunk in the spare bedroom and prayed her sister did not notice before she left. Toting the suitcase out to the shed, she cringed at its contents: pictures and shells, some underwear, a certificate she’d received for four years’ perfect attendance Grades 3 through 7. Things a child would take when running away from home.
She’d have told Whaley if she thought Whaley would find some way to react other than hateful. Female trouble? Her sister wouldn’t have pried. It was true that, as she said to Woodrow, Whaley’d nearly rather hear her go on about Boyd than to have to listen to her get gritty-specific about her insides. But she didn’t want to even not hear her sister respond. Whaley would know she was