The Watery Part of the World (13 page)

By the time she crossed the creek to knock on the door of the summer kitchen the conversation had gotten so huge and convoluted she didn't think she could bear its weight anymore. Might as well get it out there, in the air.

It had been three days without a word. She'd stayed close to home, avoiding her sister, who for once seemed to sense her sadness enough to give her wide berth.

No one home. Coming up the lane she ran into Woodrow.

“You seen Boyd?”

“He across over to Morehead.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, pretending to know all about it. “How long's he going to be gone now?”

Woodrow looked at her full-on, then past her to the bridge his great-great-great-grandfather, master builder, had built over the creek. He seemed to study it awhile, as if trying to figure out how it had withstood the years of storm surge and wind when half the houses on this island were storm wrack across the sound. At least Maggie decided he was pondering such, as it was far more palatable than thinking he knew exactly what was going on with this pathetic old white woman been left by her younger lover.

“I believe he said he'd be back today or tomorrow, one.”

“Thanks, Woodrow,” she said, chipper as all get-out, though she wasn't two steps away from him when she bit her bottom lip to keep it from quivering.

He did not come back that night, which was understandable as the sound was choppy that evening and he was too green on the water still to risk much in the way of weather. But the next day the sound was flat glass and he did not show up the next day either, nor the next. By the fourth day without word, she was despondent. She went down to the store and bought herself a pack of cigarettes and let herself in the summer kitchen and sat in an old rocker of Woodrow's and smoked. She didn't eat. She barely went to the bathroom. Once someone came and knocked on the door—Woodrow or Sarah—but she didn't dare open it, as the only person she wanted to see would not need to knock.

She was still waiting, noon of the sixth day, when her sister got the key from Woodrow and blew into the room.

“Carrying on like this ain't going to bring him back.”

“How would you know? What do you know about love?”

Whaley came and kneeled beside her. She reached out to run her fingers through Maggie's wild, wind-tossed hair, but Maggie pulled away.

“Surely you didn't think he'd stay.”

“Because I'm an old hag, right? That's why you think he left me?”

“Well, think about it. Surely the boy wants young'uns, Mag. You're not about to do him much good there.”

“I can have a child if I want to. It might kill me, but I'd be willing to try.”

Whaley turned away. Maggie thought she was crying. It took a few seconds to identify the soft sniffling as muffled laughter.

“Get out,” she said.

“I'm sorry, Mag. It's just, you're not seeing straight.”

“You're the expert. You've got so much experience in these matters, I don't know why I didn't come to you first.”

Whaley sighed and got up to leave. At the door she said, “He's down at the dock, by the way.”

Maggie waited until her sister was gone. She tidied up the summer kitchen and washed up a bit and even made a point of stopping by to talk to Sarah, who was watering her garden and regarded Maggie with a little less suspicion and disdain than usual, as if Maggie's obvious desperation (she was sure the entire island knew of her self-imposed solitary confinement, the reasons behind it) softened her a little.

Boyd was washing his boat. She stood ashore, watching, waiting
for the men hanging around the dock to notice her presence. One of them caught sight of her and said something under breath, and all of their heads turned at once, and then his pals filed past her and he was alone in the backlit dusk, time of day she always allowed to the two of them, soft settling bask before the mosquitoes emerged from the marsh and took over the night.

Already they were biting, but she never felt them. Why was this day her hardest on earth? She had lost her mother early on to cancer, her father to a slow ghastly alcoholic decline; her brother had drowned in the inlet when she and Whaley, ten and thirteen, were supposed to be looking after him. She'd had a husband beat her with a hairbrush and tie her hands to the clawfeet of a bathtub, spread jelly on her, and leave her caked and naked, baking the day long in the July heat, yet she'd never felt so low as she had while waiting for Boyd these last few days.

“Where've you been?”

He looked past her, up toward the village, which was dim and hazy now in the settling night. The water in the inlet was growing slick and black. She felt he was about to slip under its sheen and she reached out to hold him and he met her embrace but turned his face when she went to kiss him, offering his cheek.

“I got me a place over in Morehead. Down in the Promise Land. Near my sister Bonnie and them. Guess I'm going to fish out of Morehead for a while.”

She would not look at him. She thought of Whaley, of the way she'd said, “Did you really think he'd stay?” as if the whole
island knew the moment she mixed herself up with this boy how it would end. This did not feel like any end, though; it felt like the beginning of some new and hardly tolerable state of being in which air was precious and hard fought for and she cursed a girl dead four centuries who should have just stayed put.

“You guess,” she said. It came out something between a croak and a whisper. “What do you mean, you guess?”

When he did not reply she looked up from the shallows and said, “There's not much guessing involved in going across and renting a goddamn house.”

“Okay,” he said, his voice weary and yet slightly fearful too. “I'm going to fish out of Morehead.”

“For a while,” she said. “Before you said, for a while.”

“Maggie,” he said, and touched her elbow in a way that made her feel like she was being steered, led along, like she'd stepped out of line.

She shook him loose and said, “Maybe we had more talking to do?”

“You coming with me?”

She looked at the sun dropping toward the water and thought, if I could just see across from here, if it was possible to stand on the dock over there and see the steeple, or smoke from Whaley's chimney, or the ghost forest down southside.

“Is this about Barry Railey? Because what you heard …”

“I don't care what you did when you were drunk one day. I care what this place does to you, how it makes you feel.”

“You're telling me how I feel now?”

“You never answered my question yet. Are you coming with me?”

“Is this your idea of a discussion? You repeating the same question?”

“It's down to yes or no,” he said. “I told you I wasn't going to keep asking. I'm leaving this coming Saturday.”

If she never answered his question, if she kept it hanging in the air, would Saturday come?

“Well?” Boyd said.

He did not understand what he was asking her to do. How could she explain it to him? How could anyone tell somebody else what it was to
be
over here? Her sister preferred to warrant her loneliness by laying it all on men, their fickle nature, their love of what's between legs, their laziness and general dishonesty, but Maggie knew that Whaley too did not so much choose her lot as submit to the wind, not whatever it blew her way, but the fact that it was going to blow. That was the only fact Dr. Levinson and them need record.

“You just don't know,” she said. “Don't understand.”

“I know I love you more than I love any spit of sand and sea oat. I know you don't love this place so much as you need it to make you feel miserable right on.”

“There you go again, telling somebody what they're feeling.”

“I'm thinking what I'm hearing here is not a yes or a maybe,” he said, and he went back to swabbing the stern of his boat with a rag.

This was a Wednesday. She thought she'd see him one last time,
and on Saturday she sliced some cucumbers and soaked them in vinegar and hot chili pepper like he liked them and sliced some cold chicken and some of Whaley's thick bread. She iced some coffee and made a cherry pie. Whaley watched her cook all day. Late, in the waning light, she came upstairs and knocked on the door to Maggie's room.

“Might as well eat it if you're not going to take it down there to him.”

Maggie didn't say anything. She lay with her back to the door, facing the sloping wall of the dormered room.

“You're not hungry, Mag?”

She'd lost weight, maybe a little more than was good for her. She'd always been proud of her hips, never minded nor complained about the spread of her thighs. Now she felt bone when she sat, felt the drained-away flesh like a phantom finger lost in an accident.

“Been picking all day,” she lied.

Whaley made a noise in her throat, as if she did not believe her but did not have the energy to argue with her lies.

“Just tell me when he's gone off island,” Maggie said to the wall.

“You can't lie in bed for another whole day.”

“On second thought, don't tell me,” she said. “I'll know.”

Her sister made another one of her disapproving sound effects. When she lightly shut the door, Maggie considered how
this exchange qualified as nearly tender. Surely it would be the most sympathy she could expect from her sister, who she knew to be biting her tongue.

She kept it mostly bit for the next few months. A winter of near constant squalls. The clothes dried inside, hung and hampered everywhere—the backs of chairs, the stair railing. Maggie went around in a ratty old white T-shirt Boyd had left at the summer kitchen. The shirt smelled of him still, or maybe she willed it to; she wore it to sleep in and she wore it to garden in and she wore it even to church, and in the cold winter winds she went without a bra and wore it upside her skin so that he was the one next to her body, Boyd, she felt him on her all the while.

Her loneliness was of the low-grade don't-ever-leave-even-when-you're-sleeping variety. She moved like a night crab around the island, jerky and nervous among the people she'd grown up with, skittish, intolerant of the kind of small talk that she'd once been so good at.

Whaley said: Find God. Maggie ignored her, but she tried. She prayed, and her prayers stretched out desperate and needy for longer and longer increments until they linked verbs at noon, the entire day one single waking prayer. She wanted to feel what she'd been promised, which was deliverance from the pain of longing. But she did not feel a thing except tired of carrying around a one-sided conversation in her head all day long, and when she complained to Whaley, her sister told her she was a fool and selfish to
expect results from God. She was seeking atonement, deliverance, her sister told her. This would not do. You have to put yourself in God's hands, ask to be an instrument of his will.

She felt worse for having tried and failed to find, through God, through prayer, a way out of her misery. Some of the dumbest people she knew were smart enough to get religion. Her failure to understand how God could help her out of her pain made her feel twice as inadequate as before, when she'd gone around having an imaginary conversation with Boyd all day long instead of her heavenly maker.

She went back to talking to Boyd all day long. She'd walk down island where the wind had leveled the dunes to a crisply rippled flat. There the wind blew so loud she could yell hard at him and not be heard by a tern pecking oats alongside her.

Sometimes she would leave off talking to him and just dream. It kept her going, this elaborate day-or-night dream—she entertained it whenever, would will it no matter the sun or moon—of Boyd appearing again on the island. She'd look up from whatever in this dream occupied her—mending a fishing net (a chore she associated always with him) or weeding the sandy tomato patch out behind the summer kitchen, something, whichever, and there he'd be. Out of nowhere having showed up on this island he'd fled because she would never leave it. He'd not say the things people say in this fantasy Maggie was smart enough to know she shared with every sick-hearted sucker ever pined after someone who left them. Nothing obvious like I'm back, or You were right I could
not live without you, or Let's begin anew my darling. Nor would he say something smart-ass flirty like You missed a weed, toeing an anthill with a brogan, grinning his shy crooked smile. In her dream he said nothing because there wasn't anything to say.

She tried to say nothing about him to other people. She knew that restoring her dignity (what little of it she could restore on this island where everyone stored in their head, along with the middle names of their children and the fifty states and their capitals, every time she'd ended up kissing someone not communally recognized as hers for the kissing) depended upon pretending he—they—never happened. She tried to never speak his name aloud.

Sometimes, going along, she'd nearly double over with shame. For she'd withstood life on this island that drove grown men, war veterans, sobbing for their mamas. She'd spent a night lying in six inches of cold water while the wind plucked a steeple from the church where half the village was riding out a nor'easter. She'd seen a boy she loved in grade school—little Tommy Bellamy, not but eight—brought in from the surf with both his legs chewed to bone below the knee, strings of pearly muscle trailing down from this thighs, his eyes crazy eternally open from the shock of one minute swimming along in the shallows with his buddies and the next dragged into a bloodred whirlpool by a rogue great white. She'd seen drownings, people she'd known all her life, hauled in accordion-bloated. Her own kin stretched out in the sand, blown up by a wind could care less what it delivered.

To be laid low by his leaving—sometimes, walking along, the very idea of it would get away with her so bad she'd nearly buckle. Never speaking his name to any soul (least not her sister) would at least keep them from knowing how scarred she was. But there was one person with whom she allowed herself the risk of talking about Boyd. Well, not talking
about.
Woodrow, being Woodrow, word-stingy, unreadable, never said much. But he listened. She felt okay talking to him about it because he felt things himself he'd never share with anyone on this island, even his Sarah. And because her sister would disown her if she knew she was telling her private deepest business to a colored man, however hard-working and indispensable he was to them on the island even back then.