The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [78]
“Whatever reason, and God knows what that reason was, I was spared. God or whatever’s out there touched me too. People could see it, so they let me be. But that’s not the most powerful part of her I carry around. The deepest part is, well, I don’t even know how to begin to talk about it.”
Maggie nodded toward the parlor, where the portrait hung in the deepening shadows of nightfall.
“Sometimes, I’ll happen to look up at that picture of her, not often because we’ve had it all these years and you know how it is, you don’t hardly see it after so long. But I’ll be walking past her and I’ll feel her eyes on me and I’ll stop and look up and it’s like her loneliness is whispering to mine, like she’s saying, I know you don’t belong here either but you too are touched, this island is all you have, don’t you dare give up on it because let me tell you child, anywhere else you go you’re going to feel a whole lot worse.”
Maggie had half-turned to Whaley and spoke in her direction, but it appeared like she was well across the island, her eyes unfocused and watery.
“I guess that’s how come I stayed. After Boyd left, I felt like there was nothing left of me. And then, whenever I went over to Morehead that time with Woodrow, I thought I’d surely have to leave the island after that. But I stayed because of her. She let me know somehow it wouldn’t be any better anywhere else. Hell, it’d be a whole lot worse. I could look at her long enough and gain the strength I needed to stay here, even after the storm took Sarah, when there wasn’t but you and me and Woodrow left.”
Maggie looked at her—seemed to see her—for the first time. But Whaley turned away. It seemed her sister sought her sympathy, that she felt she’d opened herself up, but Whaley saw it as further proof of Maggie’s self-absorption and could not keep from saying so.
“Well, I appreciate you telling me all this, Mag. Reason why is, it makes me accountable for what I told Dr. Levinson today. Which was all lies. I got caught up in the story I reckon. Wanted to spice it up a little. Truth is I don’t have one iota of that woman in me. She’s—you reminded me of this and I thank you for it—she was a vain, selfish, foolish thing from all I’ve ever heard of her. Lived off in her head most all of the time, expected everybody else to take care of her. Wasn’t for your great-great-great-grandfather she would have starved to death over at Nag’s Head, or got herself killed stealing from that man who spared her life. She was touched all right—not right in the head.”
Maggie just sat there going tighter around the eyes and mouth as Whaley laid it out, until she was looking somewhere to the left of Whaley with this what-did-I-expect-opening-up-to-her, she’s-always-like-this kind of smirk on her face. She got up and left the room, didn’t say word one.
But as far as Whaley could remember she’d never strayed with Dr. Levinson and them into an area she ought to have avoided. Until today. Maggie said she was going to stick her head in, say hello to Liz. Whaley was going to see to it that she did just that, stick her head in, keep the rest of herself out in the hallway, for she didn’t want her sister to hear what all she had to tell Liz.
Which in her head went like this:
One day in late September, Whaley met Woodrow at the back door when he brought the mail. Usually Woodrow came and went, leaving whatever he’d brought—mail, vegetables from the garden he tended, fish or crab he’d caught, something she’d asked him to fetch for her over in Meherrituck—on the back stoop, rattling the back screen door on its hook once or twice to signal he’d come and was going. One of the things she liked most about Woodrow was that, unlike Maggie, he wasn’t one to waste hours going on.
She figured she knew Woodrow as well as anyone except Sarah. They knew each other so well they scarcely needed words, could read each other in the shorthanded and invincible way each had learned to read the sky, the wind, the tide.
That day she asked Woodrow into the kitchen where she had money counted out