“How was your relationship with Morgan?”
“To my amazement, she was actually interested in what had happened to me while I’d been in Ocracoke. After making her swear not to tell our parents, I ended up spilling pretty much the whole story, and by the end of that first summer, we were closer than we had ever been. But once she started at Gonzaga, we drifted apart again because she was rarely at home. She took summer classes after her first year, worked at music camps the summers after that. And, of course, the older she got and the more she settled into college life, the more it became clear to both of us that we really didn’t have anything in common. She didn’t understand my lack of interest in college, couldn’t relate to my passion for photography. In her mind, it was as if I had quit school to become a musician.”
Mark leaned back in his chair and raised an eyebrow. “Did anyone ever figure it out? The real reason you’d gone to Ocracoke?”
“Believe it or not, they didn’t. Madison and Jodie didn’t suspect a thing. They had questions, of course, but I was vague in my answers, and soon enough, it was back to the usual. People saw us together and none of them really cared enough to probe in detail why I’d left. Like Aunt Linda had predicted, they were preoccupied with their own lives, not mine. When school started again in the fall, I was nervous on the first day, but everything was completely normal. People treated me exactly the same, and I never got wind of any rumors. Of course, I wandered the halls that entire year feeling like I had little in common with any of my classmates, even while I was taking pictures of them for the yearbook.”
“How about your senior year?”
“It was strange,” she mused. “Because no one ever mentioned it, by that point, my stay in Ocracoke began to feel like a dream. Aunt Linda and Bryce seemed as real as ever, but there were moments when I could convince myself that I’d never had a baby. As the years went on, that became even easier. One time, maybe ten years ago, a guy I’d met for coffee asked me if I had kids, and I told him no. Not because I wanted to lie to him but because in that instant, I truly didn’t remember. Of course, almost immediately, I did remember, but there was no reason to correct myself. I had no desire to explain that chapter of my life.”
“How about Bryce? Did you send him a Christmas card? You haven’t mentioned him.”
Maggie didn’t answer right away. Instead, she swirled the thick liquid in her glass before meeting Mark’s eyes.
“Yes. I sent him a card that first Christmas after I returned home. Actually, I sent it to my aunt and asked her to deliver it to his house, because I couldn’t remember Bryce’s address. Aunt Linda was the one who put it in his mailbox. Part of me wondered whether he’d forgotten all about me, even though he’d promised that he wouldn’t.”
“Was the card…personal?” Mark inquired, his tone delicate.
“I wrote a message, just kind of updating him on what had gone on since I’d last seen him. I told him about the delivery, apologized for not saying goodbye. I told him that I’d gone back to school and bought a camera. But because I wasn’t sure how he felt about me, it wasn’t until the very end that I admitted that I still thought about him, and that the time we had together meant the world to me. I also told him that I loved him. I can still remember writing those words and being absolutely terrified of what he might think. What if he didn’t bother to send a card? What if he’d moved on and met someone new? What if he’d eventually come to regret our time together? What if he was angry with me? I didn’t have any idea what he was thinking or how he would respond.”
“And?”
“He sent a card, too. It arrived only a day after I sent mine, so I knew he couldn’t have read what I’d written, but he followed the same script I had. He told me he was happy at West Point, that he’d done well in his classes and had made a number of good friends. He mentioned that he’d seen his parents on Thanksgiving and that his brothers had already started exploring various colleges they might want to attend. And, just like I’d done, in the last paragraph, he told me that he missed me and he still loved me. He also reminded me of our plan to meet on my twenty-fourth birthday in Ocracoke.”
Mark smiled. “That sounds just like him.”
Maggie took another sip of her eggnog, still enjoying the taste. She made a note to keep it stocked in her refrigerator, assuming she’d be able to find it after the holidays. “It took a few more years of Christmas cards for me to believe that he was really committed to our plan. To us, I mean. Every year, I’d think to myself that this was the year the card wouldn’t come or that he’d tell me it was over. But I was wrong. In every Christmas card that arrived, he counted down the years until we could see each other again.”
“He never met anyone else?”
“I don’t think he was interested. And I really didn’t date much, either. In my last years of high school and community college, I was asked out here and there and occasionally I went, but I never had romantic interest in any of them. No one measured up to Bryce.”
“And he graduated from West Point?”
“In 2000,” she said. “Afterwards, like his dad, he went to work in military intelligence in Washington, D.C. I’d graduated from high school and finished taking classes at community college as well. Sometimes I think we should have followed his suggestion and reunited right after he graduated, instead of waiting until I was twenty-four. It all feels so arbitrary now,” she said, a melancholy look coming over her. “Things would have turned out differently for us.”
“What happened?”
“We both did what I’d recommended and became young adults. He worked at his job and I worked at mine. Photography was my whole world early on, not just because I was passionate about it but also because I wanted to be someone worthy of Bryce, not just someone he loved. Meanwhile, Bryce was making adult decisions about his life, too. Do you know that old army commercial? Where the song goes, ‘Be all that you can be…in the army’?”
“Vaguely.”
“Bryce had never given up on the idea of becoming a Green Beret, so he applied to SFAS. Aunt Linda wrote and told me about it. I guess Bryce’s parents had mentioned it to her and she knew I’d want to know.”
“What’s SFAS?”
“Special Forces Assessment and Selection. It’s at Fort Bragg, back in North Carolina. Long story short, Bryce was assessed with flying colors, eventually went through the training, and ended up being selected. All of that happened by the spring of 2002. Of course, by then, the military had made special forces a priority and wanted the highest-quality people they could find, so I’m not surprised Bryce made it.”
“Why was it a priority?”
“Nine Eleven. You’re probably too young to remember what a cataclysmic event that was, a turning point in America’s history. In Bryce’s Christmas card in 2002, he said that he couldn’t tell me where he was—which even to me was a tip-off that he was someplace dangerous—but that he was doing okay. He also said that he might not be able to make it to Ocracoke the following October, when I was to turn twenty-four. He said that if he wasn’t there, not to read anything into it—he’d find a way to let me know if he was still deployed and would arrange for an alternate time and place for us to finally meet.”