The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [90]
Whaley was silent. She wished she’d never admitted to this failure, for it was a lie. It wasn’t a failure, and she knew there was nothing she could do to stop her sister from hurting.
“There you are then,” said Maggie. “If you believe you can change me—or Woodrow or whoever—you must believe in the notion of change.”
Maggie drank off the rest of her milk, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand like a child, and sailed up to bed.
Whaley reached over, turned down the wick on the lamp, sat in the hard darkness. She felt exposed and a little maligned by what Maggie said, and it did not seem fair to her, for she wasn’t the one who’d gone across and made a fool of herself. Why should she feel bad? She’d let Maggie turn her words around, she’d failed to express herself. That was her only failure. She did not explain that you couldn’t get rid of the wrongest parts of you; you just had to say no to them. So no, you weren’t really changing, you were just triumphing over weakness.
She thought that this was something Woodrow knew through and through, though he let himself hurt, she’d seen him do it. He wasn’t fragile like Maggie, but things people said got away with him, like they had today. Simple innocent remark about his age. Well, she meant it, she wasn’t going to take it back, but on the other hand she did not mean for it to hurt like it did. Maggie and Woodrow were both so sensitive. She’d never ever meant this word in the positive way some used it—to describe a person who felt and cared deeply, intelligently, like Theodosia. She meant it as a criticism, a sign of weakness.
None of this would have mattered had they been three people living anywhere else, but that night she felt it all on her shoulders, the weight of this island, its fate. She felt their survival depended not so much upon Woodrow and what he did for them—bringing in food, meeting the mail boat, slaughtering hogs, fixing broke things—but in her ability not to go sulking when someone flung a certain random combination of words her way. This island was not words. It wasn’t feelings, for Pete’s sake. It was sand, wind, sea oat, wax myrtle, water bush, red cedar, live oak, yaupon. It was peat, marl, loam and slough, hammock, marsh, and dune after dune. It was sound on one side and sea on the other and a ribbon of sand between, running right out toward the Gulf Stream, the crust of a continent defying the overwash and daring a wind to take it away.
What would happen to the island when they left? This question kept her sitting up in the dark until first light seeped in the windows. None of them had all that much time left, and when they left, well, wasn’t as if any of those who’d fled were going to return. Oh, there was no shortage of fools wanting their own island, even some willing to put up with the elements to say they lived all alone in a ghost town fifty miles out in the ocean. But they were fools—summer people, tourists, kids, hippies—and they wouldn’t last.
She thought of Theodosia, how she’d come to this island with a man so far from the type she’d been brought up to love. He taught her how to get by, how to love this island that in Theo’s day was at its grandest, though Theo lived long enough to see it start to dwindle down to what it was now: just the three of them. Her great-great-great-grandmother had spent all her life looking, trying to fill some hole—just like Maggie—and in the end she found her happiness right here on this island. She adapted, what it was. Made do.
Thoughts of Theo and Woodrow kept Whaley up and tossing until, near dawn, she decided she’d go down to the dock and see Woodrow off. It would be a test, see if he was still mad. He needn’t be mad at her—she meant no offense, found it silly the way words got away with Woodrow so when he’d withstood so much worse.
From the beach road, just south of the dunes they used to call the Widow Walk, where women of the island went to spy their men coming in off the water, Whaley saw the empty dock. Squinting, she could make out Woodrow’s