The Wish(107)

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.

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.