The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [82]
Right out of the blue she said to no one—to herself, to the radio playing a song asking her did she know the way to San Jose—“What do Woodrow and Sarah do at night?”
The problem with her outburst was: Maggie in the room.
It took a minute for Maggie to get over the shock, visible in her wide eyes (actually she looked a little terrified), after which a smile took over her face, then gave just as quickly away to a familiar smirk.
“Must be the drop in pressure,” she said.
“What?”
“Making you all of a sudden curious about other people for once in your life.”
“I’m plenty curious, just not nosy. I’m not a gossip.”
“To answer your question,” said Maggie, uncharacteristically ignoring this jab, “seeing as how they are the only couple on this island, I’d wager that whatever they do, it’s way more fun than reading aloud grocery store prices.”
“You would be thinking that.”
“And you wouldn’t.”
Whaley figured she’d ignore a jab as well, though it wasn’t easy.
“Lord, they’ve got, what, ten or eleven children? Woodrow’s every bit as old as we are. I don’t think it’s on their minds every night.”
She wouldn’t have been talking to Maggie at all—especially not about this—if she hadn’t been feeling guilty about that dress. It was revolting, her speculating about Woodrow and Sarah’s private business. But somehow it brought Sarah into the room with them, out of the rain and wind, safe, sheltered. Woodrow too. She thought of him every time the wind rushed up to drown out the radio, every time some debris tapped against the side of the clapboard.
Maggie crossed her arms beneath her chest and sat there studying her. “Well, we ought to go check on Sarah. She ought not to be down there by herself in all this.”
She was half out of her chair when Whaley shot up and nearly shouted, “Stay here, I’ll go, you wash up now.”
Maggie lowered herself onto the chair. “You’re acting strange, Theo,” she said. She never called her sister by her given name. She never really called her anything at all, but if she had to get her attention she’d say Whaley first, or Linda.
Whaley was in the mudroom, pulling on their father’s peeling oiler, still dripping from Maggie’s earlier outing, and then she was out the door.
What she found first was a stillness so total her mind and body were put to rest: there would be no danger tonight. But as soon as she got out on the beach road, headed down the hill to Woodrow’s, the gusts came. She staggered into them like a drunk. The yucca rustled in the breeze and Whaley thought of how adjustable to the elements was everything on this island. Even, maybe, her sister, who she’d always thought of as fragile, weak, lazy-willed. Yet she’d survived. She was here still. She’d been here nearly as long as Whaley. To remain, she had to be stronger than Whaley gave her credit for.
As she neared Woodrow’s the rain was sideways, and down in the bottom, where Woodrow’s great-great-great-grandfather had chosen to rebuild his house after a storm came through and blew away both Hezekiah’s shed and Theodosia’s home place, the water had begun to pool. She felt it lap her ankles. She sloshed right through it, for even though she had years of evidence to the contrary—quite a few deaths to boot—Whaley feared the wind more than the water. She could climb up to the balcony of the church, could climb even higher, up the steeple if the water rose that high. The water would not wash away the church, which had stood there now for over 120 years. But the wind could take it all away.
Even though she meant to fetch Sarah and bring her back to the house, where the three of them could weather the storm together, and Sarah could be closer to the church in case the water rose, Whaley stole up on the porch as lightly as a cat. She told herself she didn’t want to scare Sarah, for who else besides her husband would come clomping up on her porch boards in the middle of a storm. She had never been down