The Wish(104)

“I know you probably have questions,” she finally whispered. “But I don’t have the answers. I never tried to find out exactly what happened to Bryce. Like my aunt said in the letter, the details didn’t matter to me. All I knew was that Bryce was gone, and afterwards, something broke inside me. I went crazy. I wanted to run away from everything I knew, so I quit my job, left my family, and moved to New York. I stopped going to church, stayed out every night, and dated one bum after another for a long time, until that wound finally began to close. The only thing that kept me from going completely off the deep end was photography. Even when my life felt out of control, I tried to keep learning and improving. Because I knew that’s what Bryce would have wanted me to do. And it was a way of hanging on to something we had shared.”

“I’m…so sorry, Maggie.” Mark seemed to struggle to control his voice. He swallowed. “I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to say except that it was the darkest period of my life.” She focused on steadying her breath, her ears half-tuned to the sound of Christmas Eve revelers in the street. When she spoke, her voice was subdued. “It wasn’t until the gallery opened that a day passed when I didn’t think about it. When I wasn’t angry or sad about what had happened. I mean, why Bryce? Of anyone in the entire world, why him?”

“I don’t know.”

She barely heard him. “I spent years trying not to wonder what would have happened had he just stayed in intelligence, or had I moved to Washington, D.C., after he graduated. I tried not to imagine what our lives might have been like, or where we would have lived, or how many kids we would have had, or the vacations we would have taken. I think that’s another reason why I jumped at every travel gig I could get. It was an attempt to leave those obsessive thoughts behind, but I should have known that never works. Because we always bring ourselves with us wherever we go. It’s one of the universal truths of life.”

Mark lowered his gaze to the table. “I’m sorry I asked you to finish the story. I should have listened and let you end it with the kiss on the beach.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s how I’ve always wanted to end it, too.”

*



As the clock continued its countdown to Christmas, their conversation gently drifted from one topic to the next. Maggie was thankful that Mark hadn’t pressed further about Bryce; he seemed to recognize how painful the topic was for her. As she described the years that followed Bryce’s death, she marveled that the strands that informed so many of her decisions always stretched back to Ocracoke.

She described the estrangement from her family that occurred when she moved away; her parents had never given much credence to her love for Bryce, nor did they grasp the impact of his loss. She confessed that she hadn’t trusted the man Morgan had chosen to marry, because she’d never seen him gaze at Morgan the way Bryce had gazed at her. She talked about the growing resentment she felt toward her mother and her judgmental pronouncements; often, she found herself reflecting on the differences between her mom and Aunt Linda. She also spoke about the dread she felt on the ferry to Ocracoke when she finally worked up the courage to visit her aunt again. By that time, Bryce’s grandparents had passed away and his family had moved from the island to somewhere in Pennsylvania. During her stay, Maggie had visited all the places that had once meant so much to her. She’d gone to the beach and the cemetery and the lighthouse and stood outside the house where Bryce once had lived, wondering if the darkroom had been converted into a space more suitable to the new owners. She was rocked by waves of déjà vu, as though the years had rolled backward, and there were moments when she almost believed that Bryce might suddenly round the corner, only to realize it was an illusion, which reminded her again that nothing turned out the way it was supposed to.

At some point in her thirties, having consumed too many glasses of wine, she’d Googled Bryce’s brothers to see how they’d turned out. Both had graduated from MIT at seventeen and were working in the tech world—Richard in Silicon Valley, Robert in Boston. Both were married with children; to Maggie, though their photographs showed them to be grown men, they would always remain twelve years old.

As the clock’s hands inched toward midnight, Maggie could feel the exhaustion overtaking her, like a storm front rapidly approaching. Mark must have seen it in her face because he reached over to touch her arm.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t keep you up much longer.”

“You couldn’t even if you tried,” she said weakly. “There comes a time now when I just shut down.”

“You know what I was thinking? Ever since you started telling me the story?”

“What?”

He scratched at his ear. “When I think back on my life—and granted, I’m not all that old—I can’t help thinking that while I’ve had different phases, I’ve always just become a slightly older version of me. Elementary school led to middle school and high school and college, youth hockey led to junior hockey and then high school hockey. There were no periods of major reinvention. But with you, it’s been just the opposite. You were an ordinary girl, then you became the pregnant you, which altered the course of your life. You became someone else once you returned to Seattle, then cast that person aside when you moved to New York. And then transformed yourself again, becoming a professional in the art world. You’ve become someone entirely new, over and over.”