“Anyone else?”
“Trinity, for all he’s done for me. Luanne for the same reason. You. Lately, it’s become very clear to me with whom I want to spend my remaining time.”
“How about a last trip somewhere? To the Amazon or something like that?”
“I think my traveling days are behind me. But that’s okay. I don’t have regrets on that end. I’ve traveled enough for ten lives.”
“How about one last feast at a Michelin-starred restaurant?”
“Food tastes bad to me now, remember? I’m pretty much living on smoothies and eggnog.”
“I keep trying to think of something else…”
“I’m fine, Mark. Right now, the apartment and the gallery are more than enough.”
He stared at the floor, head bowed. “I can’t help wishing that your aunt Linda were here for you.”
“You and me both,” she agreed. “At the same time, I wouldn’t want her to have to see me like this, to have to support me in the difficult days ahead. She already did that once for me, back when I needed it most.”
He nodded in silent acknowledgment before glancing at the box on the table. “I guess it’s my turn to give you your gift, but after wrapping it earlier, I wasn’t sure whether I should give it to you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know how you’ll feel about it.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Now you’ve got me curious.”
“Even so, I’m still hesitant to offer it.”
“What’s it going to take?”
“Could I ask you something first? About your story? Not about Bryce. But you left out something.”
“What did I leave out?”
“Did you end up holding the baby?”
Maggie didn’t answer right away. Instead, she remembered those frenzied couple of minutes after birth—the relief and exhaustion she suddenly felt, the sound of the baby crying, the doctors and nurses hovering over both of them, everyone knowing exactly what to do. Hazy images, nothing more.
“No,” she finally answered. “The doctor asked if I wanted to, but I couldn’t do it. I was afraid that if I did, I would never let go.”
“Did you know then that you were going to give away your teddy bear?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, trying and failing to re-create her thought processes. “At the time it felt like a spur-of-the-moment thing, but now I wonder if I’d known all along that I would do it.”
“Were the parents okay about it?”
“I don’t know. I remember signing the papers and saying goodbye to Aunt Linda and Gwen and then suddenly being alone in the room with my mom. Everything is pretty hazy after that.” Though it was the truth, talking about the baby triggered a thought she’d kept locked away over the years, and now it came rushing back. “You asked me what I wanted for Christmas,” she finally went on. “I guess I’d like to know whether all of it had been worth it. And whether I’d made the right decision.”
“You mean about the baby?”
She nodded. “Putting a baby up for adoption is scary, even if it’s the right thing to do. You never know how it’s going to turn out. You wonder if the parents raised the child right, or if the child was happy. And you wonder about the little things, too—favorite foods or hobbies, whether they inherited your physical tics or temperament. There are a thousand different questions and no matter how you try to suppress them, they still sometimes rise to the surface. Like when you see a child holding his parent’s hand, or you spot a family eating at the table next to you. All I could do was hope and wonder.”
“Did you ever try to find the answers?”
“No,” she said. “A few years ago, I toyed with the idea of putting my name on one of those adoption registries, but then I got melanoma and I wondered whether anything good could come of it, given my prognosis. In all candor, cancer kind of takes over your life. Though it would be gratifying to know how it all turned out. And if he wanted to meet me, then I definitely would have wanted to meet him.”
“Him?”
“I had a boy, believe it or not,” she said with a chuckle. “Surprise, surprise. The technician was mistaken.”
“Not to mention a mother’s instincts—you were so sure.” He slid the package toward her. “Why don’t you go ahead and open it. I think you might need this more than I do.”
Intrigued, Maggie stared at Mark curiously before finally reaching for the ribbon. It came free with a single tug and the loosely taped paper came off easily as well. It was a shoe box, and when she finally freed the lid, all she could do was stare. Her breath locked in her throat as time slowed, warping the very air around her.
The coffee-colored fur was matted and pilled; a second Frankenstein stitch had been added to one of the legs, but the original stitch was still there, as was the sewn-on button eye. Her name in Sharpie ink was almost impossible to make out in the dim light, but she recognized her childhood scrawl, and all at once, a wave of memories washed over her of sleeping with it as a child; holding it tight as she lay in her bed in Ocracoke; clutching it as she groaned through labor on the way to the hospital.
It was Maggie-bear—not a replica, not a replacement—and as she gently lifted it from the box, she caught the familiar scent, one strangely unchanged by the passage of time. She couldn’t believe it—Maggie-bear couldn’t be here; there was no possible way…
She raised her eyes to Mark, her face slack with shock. A thousand different questions flooded her mind, then slowly began to resolve as she grasped the full meaning of the gift he’d given her. He’d turned twenty-three earlier in the year, meaning he’d been born in 1996…Aunt Linda’s convent had been somewhere in the Midwest, where Mark had been raised…He’d struck her as strangely familiar…And now she was holding the teddy bear she’d given to her baby in the hospital…
It couldn’t be.
And yet it was, and when Mark began to smile, she felt a tremulous smile form in response. He stretched his hand across the table, taking her fingers in his own, his expression tender.
“Merry Christmas, Mom.”
Mark
Ocracoke
Early March 2020
On the ferry to Ocracoke, I tried to imagine the fear Maggie felt when she first arrived on the island so long ago. Even for me, there was a sense of trepidation, that I was being drawn into the unknown. Maggie had described the drive from Morehead City to Cedar Island, where the ferry launched, but her description didn’t quite capture the remoteness I felt as I passed the occasional lonely farmhouse or isolated mobile home. Nor was the landscape anything like Indiana’s. Though misty, the world was lush and green, clumps of Spanish moss hanging from branches that had twisted and gnarled in the unceasing coastal winds. It was cold, the early-morning sky white across the horizon, and the gray waters of the Pamlico Sound seemed to begrudge the passage of any boat attempting the crossing. Even with Abigail beside me, it was easy to understand Maggie’s use of the word marooned. As I watched the village of Ocracoke grow larger on the horizon, it felt like a mirage that might evaporate. Before my trip here, I’d read that Hurricane Dorian had ravaged the town back in September and caused catastrophic flooding; when I’d seen the news photographs, I wondered how long it would take to rebuild or repair. Of course, I was reminded of Maggie and the storm she’d experienced, but then lately, most of my thoughts had been preoccupied with her.
On my eighth birthday, my parents told me that I was adopted. They explained that God had somehow found a way for us to become a family, and they wanted me to know they loved me so much that their hearts sometimes felt like bursting. I was old enough to understand what adoption meant but too young to really question them about the details. Nor did it really matter to me; they were my parents and I was their son. Unlike some children, I didn’t have much curiosity about my biological parents; except in rare instances, I hardly ever thought about being adopted at all.
At fourteen, though, I was in an accident. I was goofing around wit
h a friend in a barn—his family owned a farm—and I cut myself on a scythe that I probably shouldn’t have touched in the first place. I happened to nick an artery so there was a lot of blood and by the time I reached the hospital, my face was almost gray. The artery was stitched and I was given blood; it turned out that I was AB-negative, and obviously, neither of my parents had the same blood type. The good news is that I was out of the hospital by the following morning and pretty much back to normal soon after. But for the first time, I began to wonder about my birth parents. Because my blood type was relatively rare, I occasionally wondered if my mother’s and father’s were rare as well. I also wondered if there were any other genetic issues of which I should be aware.
Another four years passed before I brought up the subject of my adoption with my parents. I was afraid of hurting their feelings; only in retrospect did I realize they had been expecting the conversation ever since they’d sat me down on my birthday so long ago. They explained to me that the adoption had been closed, that court orders were probably necessary to open the files, and it was unclear whether I would prevail if I went that route. I might, for instance, be able to learn necessary health information, but nothing more unless the birth mother was willing to allow the records to be unsealed. Some states have a registry for just such a thing—those who are adopted and those who offered a child for adoption can both agree that they’d like the records to be unsealed—but I couldn’t find evidence of such an option in North Carolina, nor did I know if my birth mother had sought one out. I assumed I was at a dead end, but my parents were able to provide enough information to help me with the search.
They’d learned several facts from the agency: that the girl was Catholic and the family didn’t believe in abortion, that she was healthy and under a physician’s care, that she was doing her schoolwork remotely, and that she was sixteen when she delivered. They also knew she was from Seattle. Because I was born in Morehead City, the adoption had been more complex than I’d realized. To adopt me, my parents had to move to North Carolina in the months preceding my birth in order to establish state residency. That knowledge wasn’t important to learning Maggie’s identity, but it underscored how desperate they’d been to have a child and how much they—like Maggie—had been willing to sacrifice in order to give me a wonderful home.
They shouldn’t have known Maggie’s name, but they did, partly by circumstance, partly by Maggie’s design. In the hospital, one had to pass through the maternity ward to reach the nursery, and it had been a quiet night at the hospital when I was born. When my parents arrived, only two of the maternity rooms were occupied, and one of those hosted a Black family with four other children. The other room, however, bore the name M. Dawes on a small placard near the door. In the nursery, they were also given the teddy bear, which had the name Maggie scrawled on the bottom of its foot, and all at once, they pieced together the name of the mother. It was something neither of my parents would ever forget, although they claimed never to have discussed it again, until they finally had the conversation with me.
My first thought was the same as probably everyone my age: Google. I typed in Maggie Dawes and Seattle and up popped a biography of a well-known photographer. Obviously, I couldn’t be certain then that she was my mother, and I scoured the rest of her photography website without luck. There were no references to North Carolina, no references to marriage or children, and it was clear that she now lived in New York. In her photograph, she looked too young to be my mother, but I had no idea when the portrait had been taken. As long as she hadn’t been married—and taken her husband’s name—I couldn’t rule her out.
There were links on her website that connected to her YouTube channels and I ended up watching a number of her videos, a habit I continued even while in college. Though most of the technical information in her videos was incomprehensible to me, there was something captivating about her. I eventually uncovered another clue. In the background of the work studio in her apartment hung a photograph of a lighthouse. In one of her videos, she even referenced it, noting that it was the photograph that first inspired her interest in the profession back when she was a teenager. I froze the video and took a picture, then Googled images of North Carolina lighthouses. It took less than a minute to figure out that the one on Maggie’s wall was located in Ocracoke. The nearest hospital, I also learned, was in Morehead City.
Though my heart skipped a beat, I knew it still wasn’t enough to be absolutely certain. It wasn’t until three and a half years ago, when Maggie first posted that she had cancer, that I became convinced. In that video, she noted that she was thirty-six, which also meant that she’d been sixteen years old in 1996.
The name and age were right. She was from Seattle and had been in North Carolina as a teenager, and Ocracoke seemed to fit as well. And, when I looked hard enough, I thought I even noted a resemblance between us, though I admit that might have been just my imagination.
But here was the thing: while I thought I wanted to meet her, I didn’t know if she wanted to meet me. I wasn’t sure what to do and I prayed for guidance. I also began to watch her videos obsessively—all of them—especially the ones about her illness. Oddly, when discussing cancer on camera, she radiated a kind of offbeat charisma; she was honest and brave and frightened, optimistic and darkly funny, and like a lot of people, I felt compelled to keep watching. And the more I watched, the surer I was that I wanted to meet her. In no small way, it felt as though she’d become something akin to a friend. I also knew, based on her videos and my own research, that remission was unlikely, which meant I was running out of time.
By then, I’d graduated from college and had begun working at my dad’s church; I’d also made the decision to further my education, which meant taking the GRE and applying to graduate schools. I was fortunate enough to be accepted at three terrific institutions, but because of Abigail, the University of Chicago was the obvious choice. My intention was to enroll in September of 2019, like Abigail, but a visit to my parents changed all that. While I was there, they asked me to move some boxes into storage; after hauling them to the attic, I came across another box. It was labeled MARK’S ROOM, and curious, I lifted the lid. There I found some trophies and a baseball mitt, folders filled with old schoolwork, hockey gloves, and numerous other keepsakes that my mom hadn’t had the heart to throw out. In that box, alongside those items, was Maggie-bear, the stuffed animal that shared my bed until I was nine or ten years old.
The sight of the bear, and Maggie’s name, made me realize again that it was time to make a decision about what I really wanted to do.
I could do nothing, obviously. Another option was to surprise her in New York with the information, perhaps have lunch together, and then return to Indiana. That’s what I assume many people might have done, but it struck me as unfair to her, given what she was already living through, since I still had no idea whether she even wanted to meet the son she’d long ago given up for adoption. Over time, I began to consider a third option: perhaps I could fly to New York to meet her, without informing her who I was.
In the end, after much prayer, I chose the third option. I initially visited the gallery in early February, tagging along with a group from out of state. Maggie wasn’t there, and Luanne—trying to distinguish between buyers and tourists—barely noticed me. When I stopped by the gallery again the following day, the crowds were even larger; Luanne looked harried and barely able to keep up. Maggie was absent again, but it slowly began to dawn on me that beyond having a chance to meet Maggie, I might be able to help her at the gallery. The more I thought about it, the more the idea took hold. I told myself that if I eventually had the sense that she wanted to know who I was, I would reveal the truth.
It was a complicated matter, though. If I received a job offer—and I didn’t even know whether a job was available at that time—I would have to defer graduate school for a year, and though I assumed Abigail would accept my decision, she likely wouldn’t be happy about it. More importantly
, I needed my parents to understand. I didn’t want them to think that I was somehow trying to replace them or didn’t appreciate all they had done for me. I needed them to know that I would always consider them my parents. When I returned home, I told them what I’d been considering. I also showed them a number of Maggie’s videos about her battle with cancer, and in the end, I think that’s what did it. They, like me, knew I was running out of time. As for Abigail, she was more understanding than I expected, despite the wrench it threw in our longstanding plans. I packed my bags and returned to New York, unsure how long I would stay and wondering whether it would work out. I learned everything I could about Trinity’s and Maggie’s work, and eventually brought my résumé to the gallery.
Sitting across from Maggie during my interview was the most surreal moment of my life.
* * *
Once I was hired, I found a permanent place to live and deferred graduate school, but I’ll admit there were times when I wondered whether I’d made a mistake. In my first few months, I barely saw Maggie, and when we did cross paths, our interaction was limited. In the autumn we began to spend more time together, but Luanne was often with us. Strangely, though I’d wanted to work in the gallery for personal reasons, I discovered that I had an aptitude for the job and eventually came to enjoy it. As for my parents, my dad chose to refer to my work as “a noble service”; my mom simply said she was proud of me. I think they anticipated that I wouldn’t be home for Christmas, which was why my dad arranged the trip to the Holy Land with members of the church. While it had always been a dream of theirs to go, I think there was a part of them that didn’t want to be at home during the holidays if their only child wasn’t around. I tried to remind them frequently of my love for them, and how much I’d always cherish them as the only parents I ever knew or wanted.
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