Where the Crawdads Sing(55)



She whirled around. “Oh, really! YOU are the one who left me, who didn’t come back when you promised, who never came back. You are the one who never wrote to explain why or even if you were alive or dead. You didn’t have the nerve to break up with me. You were not man enough to face me. Just disappeared. CHICKEN SHIT ASSHOLE. You come floating in here after all these years . . . You’re worse than he is. He might not be perfect, but you’re worse by a long shot.” She stopped abruptly, staring at him.

Palms open, he pleaded, “You’re right about me, Kya. Everything you said is true. I was a chicken shit. And I had no right to bring up Chase. It’s none of my business. And I’ll never bother you again. I just need to apologize and explain things. I’ve been sorry for years, Kya, please.”

She hung like a sail where the wind just went out. Tate was more than her first love: he shared her devotion to the marsh, had taught her to read, and was the only connection, however small, to her vanished family. He was a page of time, a clipping pasted in a scrapbook because it was all she had. Her heart pounded as the fury dissipated.

“Look at you—so beautiful. A woman. You doing okay? Still selling mussels?” He was astonished at how she had changed, her features more refined yet haunting, her cheekbones sharp, lips full.

“Yes. Yes.”

“Here, I brought you something.” From an envelope he handed her a tiny red cheek feather from a northern flicker. She thought of tossing it on the ground, but she’d never found this feather; why shouldn’t she keep it? She tucked it in her pocket and didn’t thank him.

Talking fast, he said, “Kya, leaving you was not only wrong, it was the worst thing I have done or ever will do in my life. I have regretted it for years and will always regret it. I think of you every day. For the rest of my life, I’ll be sorry I left you. I truly thought that you wouldn’t be able to leave the marsh and live in the other world, so I didn’t see how we could stay together. But that was wrong, and it was bullshit that I didn’t come back and talk to you about it. I knew how many times you’d been left before. I didn’t want to know how badly I hurt you. I was not man enough. Just like you said.” He finished and watched her.

Finally she said, “What do you want now, Tate?”

“If only you could, some way, forgive me.” He breathed in and waited.

Kya looked at her toes. Why should the injured, the still bleeding, bear the onus of forgiveness? She didn’t answer.

“I just had to tell you, Kya.”

When still she said nothing, he continued. “I’m in graduate school, zoology. Protozoology mostly. You would love it.”

She couldn’t imagine it, and looked back over the lagoon to see if Chase was coming. Tate didn’t miss this; he’d guessed right off she was out here waiting for Chase.

Just last week Tate had watched Chase, in his white dinner jacket, at the Christmas gala, dancing with different women. The dance, like most Barkley Cove events, had been held at the high school gymnasium. As “Wooly Bully” struggled from a too-small hi-fi set up under the basketball hoop, Chase whirled a brunette. When “Mr. Tambourine Man” began, he left the dance floor and the brunette, and shared pulls of Wild Turkey from his Tar Heels flask with other former jocks. Tate was close by chatting with two of his old high school teachers and heard Chase say, “Yeah, she’s wild as a she-fox in a snare. Just what you’d expect from a marsh minx. Worth every bit a’ the gas money.”

Tate had to force himself to walk away.



* * *



? ? ?

A COLD WIND WHIPPED UP and rippled across the lagoon. Expecting Chase, Kya had run out in her jeans and light sweater. She folded her arms tightly around herself.

“You’re freezing; let’s go inside.” Tate motioned toward the shack, where smoke puffed from the rusty stovepipe.

“Tate, I think you should leave now.” She threw several quick glances at the channel. What if Chase arrived with Tate here?

“Kya, please, just for a few minutes. I really want to see your collections again.”

As answer, she turned and ran to the shack, and Tate followed her. Inside the porch, he stopped short. Her collections had grown from a child’s hobby to a natural history museum of the marsh. He lifted a scallop shell, labeled with a watercolor of the beach where it was found, plus insets showing the creature eating smaller creatures of the sea. For each specimen—hundreds, maybe thousands of them—it was the same. He had seen some of them before, as a boy, but now as a doctoral candidate in zoology, he saw them as a scientist.

He turned to her, still standing in the doorway. “Kya, these are wonderful, beautifully detailed. You could publish these. This could be a book—lots of books.”

“No, no. They’re just for me. They help me learn, is all.”

“Kya, listen to me. You know better than anybody that the reference books for this area are almost nonexistent. With these notations, technical data, and splendid drawings, these are the books everyone’s been waiting for.” It was true. Ma’s old guidebooks to the shells, plants, birds, and mammals of the area were the only ones printed, and they were pitifully inaccurate, with only simple black-and-white pictures and sketchy information on each entry.

“If I can take a few samples, I’ll find out about a publisher, see what they say.”

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