The Wish(106)

“How about one last feast at a Michelin-starred restaurant?”

“Food tastes bad to me now, remember? I’m pretty much living on smoothies and eggnog.”

“I keep trying to think of something else…”

“I’m fine, Mark. Right now, the apartment and the gallery are more than enough.”

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…