The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [83]
She was about to knock when she heard that music. Loud as it’d be if the band were playing in her kitchen. Whaley figured the sound could not go any higher. She could have heard it up the hill to the house had not the wind been roaring and seething.
Sarah came into view. She stood on the threshold of that kitchen Woodrow’d tacked on to keep Sarah from having to tote everything up from the summer kitchen. She was holding her Bible and her lips were moving and she was swaying a little, to the music obviously, though when she came closer, into the lamplight, Whaley saw the look on her face, pure fear, no sign of the comfort she ought to draw from songs praising his only Son our Lord, from the leather book she clutched hard to her breast.
Before she could even think, Whaley was tiptoeing off the porch. The wet wind nearly blew her back up on it, for she’d lost her wits, forgotten how to walk in a storm. You have to act drunk to negotiate a sixty-mile-an-hour gust. Forget your bones, flow loose in the hips, fluid, let the wind move through you. The rain, well, it hadn’t bothered her on the way down but on the way back up the hill, every isolated drop stung like truth.
In the yard the island lit white with lightning, a quarter second’s clarity: things were forever after changed. She heard a pop, the house went dark, thunder followed. By the time she managed to push open the door that fought her off as if the house knew what she’d done, Maggie had the candles lit, was fussing with their grandfather’s old whale oil lamp, converted now to kerosene.
Maggie stopped her wick-twisting to ask with a look where in the world was Sarah.
“She didn’t want to come. Said she was fine where she was.”
Maggie said, “Whaley?”
“Oh, we’re back to Whaley now? What, Mag? I went down there, I asked her, I can’t order her, she doesn’t belong to us. She’s got her pride, that girl.”
Maggie said, “It’s just, Woodrow—”
“Woodrow obviously has nothing to do with whether she’s got the sense to save herself.”
But Woodrow, of course, had everything to do with why Whaley lied. The truth is she never let herself admit her reason for leaving Sarah alone. For years when she thought of why, she pushed why quickly out of her mind. She knew it had to do with Woodrow but it was only now that Woodrow was gone, that the island was abandoned, that she and Maggie had been sent across the sound to die, that Whaley could admit to little Liz and the readers of the Norfolk newspaper and the whole world what she only vaguely felt that night in the storm: Sarah, sooner or later, was going to take Woodrow away. If Woodrow left, they’d all have to leave.
“If anything happens to Sarah,” said Maggie, “I’d say Woodrow’s going to have something to do with it.”
“Nothing’s going to happen. She knows where to go if the water starts to rise.”
“I ought to go down there and talk to her.”
“Nonsense, you’re not going anywhere.”
“I’m just saying—”
“That she hates me and would rather drown than take my advice? I reckon it’s you she loves.”
“We get on all right.”
“Oh yeah, Mag. She loved it when you spread sin all over her backyard, shacking up in her summer kitchen with your high school boy.”
Maggie fell silent. She was like the storm outside—any lull was bound to be followed by fury.
“I guess I’ll be having that incident thrown back in my face until I die, won’t I?”
“No, Mag. Just happens to pertain to the subject of how Sarah hates me but loves you.”
“Everything in your mind pertains,” said Maggie.
“What in the world’s that mean?”
Another four seconds of calm. Whaley held her breath.
“Just that it must be very comforting to have everything all tidy and settled. Knowing you’re right, having all the evidence of everybody else’s wrongness—it must be nice.”
Whaley could not show it, but these words stung more than those gale-force-wind-driven raindrops. She did not want