“I know,” she murmured. “But I don’t think there’s anything you can do. Your mom made the arrangements, and that’s why I wanted to come up here to tell you right away. So you wouldn’t be surprised.”
I could feel the tears again, different tears than the previous night’s, filled with a different kind of fear and pain.
“I want to see him again!” I cried. “I can’t just leave like this.”
“I know,” she said, compassion weighting every word.
“We had a fight,” I said. I could feel my lip beginning to quiver. “I mean, sort of a fight. I told him I couldn’t marry him.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I have to see him! Can’t you try to talk to my mom?”
“I did,” she said. “Your parents want you to come home.”
“But I don’t want to leave,” I said. The thought of living with my parents again, not my aunt, wasn’t something I could face right now.
“Your parents love you,” she promised me, squeezing my hand. “Just like I love you.”
But I feel it with you more than I do with them. I wanted to say that to her, but my throat locked up and this time, I simply gave in to the sobbing. And, just as I knew she would, my sweet and wonderful aunt Linda held me tight for a long time, even after my mom finally entered the room.
* * *
Manhattan
2019
“Are you okay? You look troubled.”
Maggie watched as Mark set the eggnog in front of her. “I was remembering the next morning at the hospital,” Maggie said. She reached for the glass while he took his seat again. When he was settled, she told him what had happened, noting his dismay.
“And that was it? You didn’t return to Ocracoke?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Did Bryce make it to the hospital? Couldn’t he have caught the ferry?”
“I’m sure he thought I’d be coming back to Ocracoke. But even if he had figured it out and made it to the hospital, I can’t imagine what it would have been like with my mom there. After my aunt and Gwen left, I was devastated. My mom couldn’t understand why I kept crying. She thought I was questioning the decision to give up the baby for adoption, and even though I’d already signed the papers, I think she was afraid that I was going to change my mind. She kept telling me that I was doing the right thing.”
“Your aunt and Gwen left?”
“They needed to catch the afternoon ferry back to Ocracoke. I was a wreck after saying goodbye to them. Eventually my mom got tired of it. She kept going downstairs to get coffee, and after I had dinner, she ended up returning to the hotel.”
“Leaving you alone? Even though you were so upset?”
“It was better than having her there and I think both of us knew it. Anyway, I eventually fell asleep and the next thing I really remember is the nurse wheeling me out of the hospital while my mom pulled up the rental car. My mom and I didn’t have much to say to each other in the car or the airport, and once I got on the plane, I remember staring out the window and feeling the same sense of dread that I’d felt when I’d left Seattle to come to North Carolina. I didn’t want to go. In my head, I kept trying to process everything that had happened. Even when I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about Bryce and Ocracoke. For a while, the only thing that made me feel better was Sandy. She knew I was struggling, and she wouldn’t leave my side. She’d come into my room or follow me around the house, but of course every time I saw her, I was reminded of Daisy.”
“And you didn’t go back to school?”
“No,” she said. “That was actually a good decision by my parents and the headmaster. When I think back, it’s clear I was depressed. I slept all the time, had zero appetite, and wandered around feeling like a stranger in my own house. I wouldn’t have been able to handle school. I couldn’t concentrate at all, so I ended up bombing every single final. But because I’d done well until then, my overall grades still ended up okay. The only upside to my depression was that I dropped all the baby weight by the time summer started. After a while, I finally felt up to seeing Madison and Jodie, and little by little, I began to inch my way back into my old life.”
“Did you talk or write to Bryce?”
“No. And he didn’t call or write, either. I wanted to, every single day. But we had our plan, and whenever I thought about contacting him, I reminded myself that he was better off without me. That he needed to concentrate on him, just like I needed to focus on me. My aunt wrote to me regularly, though, and she’d offer the occasional nugget about Bryce. She informed me that he became an Eagle Scout, went off to college on schedule, and a couple of months after that, she mentioned that Bryce’s mom had come by the shop to let her know that Bryce was doing exceptionally well.”
“How were you doing?”
“Despite my renewed contact with my friends, I still felt strangely disconnected. I remember that after getting my driver’s license, I’d sometimes borrow the car after church and visit garage sales. I was probably the only teenager in Seattle scouring the newspaper for used bonanzas.”
“Did you ever find anything?”
“I did, actually,” she said. “I found a Leica thirty-five-millimeter camera, older than the one Bryce used but still perfectly functional. I rushed home and begged my dad to buy it for me, promising to pay him back. To my surprise, he did. I think he understood more than my mom how desperate and displaced I felt. After that, I started taking pictures, and that centered me. When school started, I joined the yearbook staff as a photographer so I could take photos in school, too. Madison and Jodie thought it was silly, but I couldn’t have cared less. I’d spend hours at the public library, flipping through photography magazines and books, just like I did in Ocracoke. I’m pretty sure my dad thought the phase would pass, but at least he humored me when I showed him the photos I’d taken. My mom, on the other hand, was still doing her best to turn me into Morgan.”
“How did that go?”
“It didn’t. Compared to what they’d been in Ocracoke, my grades were terrible in my last two years of high school. Even though Bryce had taught me how to study, I couldn’t make myself care enough to try all that hard. Which, of course, is one of the reasons I ended up at community college.”
“There was another reason?”
“The community college actually had some classes that interested me. I didn’t want to go to college and spend my first two years doing gen-ed and studying the same things I had in high school. The community college offered a class on Photoshop, and others on indoor and sports photography—they were taught by a local photographer—as well as a few classes in web design. I never forgot what Bryce had told me about the internet becoming the next big thing, so I figured that was something I needed to learn. Once I finished all those, I started working.”
“Did you live at home the whole time you were in Seattle? With your parents?”
Maggie nodded. “The job didn’t pay much, so I didn’t have a choice. But it wasn’t bad, if only because I didn’t spend much time there. I was either at the studio or the lab or on location shooting, and the less I was around, the better my mom and I seemed to get along. Even if she still made it a point to let me know she thought I was wasting my life.”