The Wish(12)
“There were a lot of reasons. When I was just starting out in my career, I wanted to concentrate on that until I established a foothold. Then I started traveling a lot, and then came the gallery and…I guess I was just too busy.”
“And you never met someone who made you question all that?”
In the silence that followed, she unconsciously reached for the necklace, feeling for the small shell-shaped pendant, making sure it was still there. “I thought I did. I know I loved him, but the timing wasn’t right.”
“Because of work?”
“No,” she said. “It happened long before then. But I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been good for him. Not back then, anyway.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“You don’t know who I used to be.” She put down her cup and folded her hands in her lap. “Do you want to hear the story?”
“I’d be honored.”
“It’s kind of long.”
“Those are usually the best kind of stories.”
Maggie bent her head, feeling the images begin to surface at the edge of her mind. With the images, the words would eventually come, she knew.
“In 1995, when I was sixteen years old, I began to lead a secret life,” she started.
Marooned
Ocracoke
1995
Actually, when I’m being honest, my secret life really began when I was fifteen and my mom found me on the bathroom floor, green in the gills, with my arms wrapped around the toilet bowl. I’d been barfing every morning for the past week and a half, and my mom, more knowledgeable about such things than I was, raced to the drugstore and made me pee on a stick as soon as she got home. When the blue plus sign appeared, she stared at the stick for a long time without saying a single word, then retreated to the kitchen, where she cried on and off for the rest of the day.
That was in early October, and I was a little more than nine weeks along by then. I probably cried as much as my mom that day. I stayed in my room clutching my favorite teddy bear—I’m not sure my mom even noticed that I hadn’t gone to school—and stared out the window with swollen eyes, watching buckets of rain pour onto foggy streets. It was typical Seattle weather, and even now, I doubt there’s a more depressing place to be in the entire world, especially when you’re fifteen and pregnant and certain your life is over before it even had a chance to begin.
It went without saying that I had no idea what I was going to do. That’s what I remember most of all. I mean, what did I know about being a parent? Or even being a grown-up? Oh, sure, there were times when I felt older than my age, like when Zeke Watkins—the star player of the varsity basketball team—spoke to me in the school parking lot, but part of me still felt like a kid. I loved Disney movies and celebrating with strawberry ice cream cake at the roller rink on my birthday; I always slept with a teddy bear and I couldn’t even drive. Frankly, I wasn’t even all that experienced when it came to the opposite sex. I’d only kissed four boys in my entire life, but one time, the kissing went too far, and a little more than three weeks after that awful barfing-and-tear-filled day, my parents shipped me off to Ocracoke in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a place I didn’t even know existed. It was supposedly a picturesque beach town adored by tourists. There, I would live with my aunt Linda Dawes, my father’s much older sister, a woman I’d met only once in my life. They’d also made arrangements with my teachers so I wouldn’t fall behind in my studies. My parents had a long discussion with the headmaster—and after the headmaster spoke to my aunt, he decided to trust her to proctor my exams, making sure I didn’t cheat and that all my assignments were turned in. And just like that, I suddenly became the family secret.
My parents didn’t come with me to North Carolina, which made leaving that much harder. Instead, we said our goodbyes at the airport on a chilly November morning, a few days after Halloween. I’d just turned sixteen, I was thirteen weeks along and terrified, but I didn’t cry on the plane, thank God. Nor did I cry when my aunt picked me up at a rinky-dink airport in the middle of nowhere, or even when we checked into a dumpy motel near the beach, since we had to wait to catch the ferry to Ocracoke the following morning. By then, I’d almost convinced myself that I wasn’t going to cry at all.
Boy, was I ever wrong.
After we disembarked from the ferry, my aunt gave me a quick tour of the village before bringing me to her house, and to my dismay, Ocracoke was nothing like I’d imagined. I guess I’d been picturing pretty pastel cottages nestled in the sand dunes, with tropical views of the ocean stretching to the horizon; a boardwalk complete with burger joints and ice cream shops and crowded with teens, maybe even a Ferris wheel or a carousel. But Ocracoke was nothing like that. Once you got past the fishing boats in the tiny harbor where the ferry dropped us off, it looked…ugly. The houses were old and weather-beaten; there wasn’t a beach, boardwalk, or palm tree in sight; and the village—that’s what my aunt called it, a village—seemed utterly deserted. My aunt mentioned that Ocracoke was essentially a fishing village and that less than eight hundred people lived there year-round, but I could only wonder why anyone would want to live there at all.
Aunt Linda’s place was right on the water, sandwiched between homes that were equally run-down. It was set on stilts with a view of the Pamlico Sound, with a compact front porch, and another larger porch off the living room that faced the water. It was also small—living room with a fireplace and a window near the front door, dining area and kitchen, two bedrooms, and a single bath. There wasn’t a television in sight, which left me feeling suddenly panicked, though I don’t think she realized it. She showed me around and eventually pointed out where I would be sleeping, across the hall from her room in what usually served as her reading room. My first thought was that it was nothing like my bedroom back home. It wasn’t even like half my bedroom back home. There was a twin bed wedged beneath a window along with a padded rocking chair, a reading lamp, and a shelf crammed with books by Betty Friedan, Sylvia Plath, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Elizabeth Berg, in addition to tomes on Catholicism, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Mother Teresa. Again, no television, but there was a radio, even if it looked a hundred years old, and an old-fashioned clock. The closet, if you could call it that, was barely a foot deep, and the only way I would be able to store my clothes was to fold and stack them in vertical piles on the floor. There was no nightstand or chest of drawers, all of which made me suddenly feel like I was visiting unexpectedly for a single night, rather than the six months intended.