At fourteen, though, I was in an accident. I was goofing around with 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.