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.