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Maggie watched as Maxine spread out her fingers out on the back porch table, her eyes widened with shock. Her wine was untouched, and the contract remained unfinished. She’d just been told about the mysterious and sad woman named Linda up at the Lodge and the fact that her story lined up almost too well with Maxine’s own.
How could any person grapple with that? Maggie wondered. The weight of it was immense.
Janine hustled back and forth, her cell pressed against her ear as she waited for Mallory to answer the phone. The sound of that name, Linda, still rang through the air over their table, and Maggie’s heart seemed on the verge of explosion. Was it possible that the baby in Linda’s photograph had been Maxine all this time? Was it possible that Linda had come to the Vineyard for some sort of last-ditch effort toward the love of family?
“Hi, Mallory. Yep, it’s Janine. I wonder if you could tell me if our patient, Linda, has already checked out this afternoon?” Janine stopped short in the midst of her manic pacing as she blinked back tears.
Maggie reached over and spread a hand over Maxine’s. Maxine flinched but didn’t move it. Beside Maggie, Kelli gulped her wine nervously, watching as the drama unfolded. Maggie wondered what other sorts of things you were allowed to see as a realtor. In many ways, you were overly-linked to people as they made enormous, life-altering decisions. Kelli must have seen so much.
“I remember her,” Maxine breathed finally. “That older woman. So tired-looking. So lonely-looking.”
Nancy leaned against the window of the porch with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. She looked incredulous. It was as though a bomb had just been dropped.
“You were close with her, weren’t you?” Maxine asked Maggie softly. Her eyes shifted toward hers.
“We had a few conversations,” Maggie affirmed. “She— she showed me an old photograph. Her and her husband and her baby.”
Maxine’s eyes shimmered. “I wouldn’t have thought in a million years that my mother would have any regret for leaving. I thought she’d run out of France and never looked back.”
“I think she’s spent the past forty years looking back,” Maggie countered. “It sounds to me like she’s really hurt herself over the years, punishing herself.”
“I wonder if she always knew it was me,” Maxine whispered. “When Janine and I were in the tabloids...”
“It’s possible that’s how she found you,” Grandma Nancy offered.
“All those years, I was listed as a Manhattan socialite in every trashy magazine,” Maxine muttered. “I had no idea my mother was reading about me. I had no idea she existed on the same island as me. She could have been half the world away. And even the past few weeks... I looked her in the eye once. She stared at me in an almost scary way. I couldn’t make any sense of it. I thought... I thought she was just a crazy old woman.”
“Shoot. Okay.” Janine spoke into the phone. “How long ago did she leave?”
Janine got off the phone and pressed it against her chest. “She checked out over an hour ago. One of the drivers took her to Oak Bluffs. It’s possible that she’s already left the island.”
Maggie sprung toward the doorway that led from the closed-in porch to the kitchen. She felt an incredible amount of power and strength. She suddenly sensed what needed to be done— and knew in her heart that her happiness no longer mattered. She needed to find Linda. This Christmas, Linda needed to understand the weight of her family’s love. She needed Maxine.
The other women were hot on her heels. There was a mad scramble for winter coats, hats, and gloves. Maggie rammed her feet into her boots as Janine jangled her car keys and hollered up to the upper floor for Alyssa, who appeared in a flash and performed a similar coat-glove-boot action. “What the heck is going on?” she demanded, which led to the rest of them speaking all at once to explain.
“That woman from the emergency room? The one who fainted?” Alyssa’s eyes welled with curiosity. “I don’t understand...”
Janine and Maxine hopped up front while Nancy, Alyssa, and Maggie crammed into the back. Kelli made them promise to tell her what happened the minute they found her, as she had several appointments to get to that afternoon.
“I’ll process the contact for you, Maxine!” she hollered, just as all their doors slammed and Janine revved the engine.
“What a day,” Grandma Nancy called as they rushed from the driveway and out onto the main road.
Snow swirled out from thick, grey clouds overhead. Alyssa slid her arm over Maggie’s shoulder and shivered, seemingly with a mix of fear and excitement. The radio spat out Christmas tunes, one after the other, and they all seemed eerie and haunted.
“I just hope she hasn’t left the island yet,” Maxine breathed.
“I’m driving as fast as I can,” Janine returned.
Once in Oak Bluffs, Janine parked just outside the ferry docks. A ferry buzzed alongside the nearest dock as several tourists scrambled on. A worker in a Santa hat accepted tickets and called, “Thank you for coming to the island! Merry Christmas, and have a safe trip back.” Maggie’s eyes traced down the long line of tourists but recognized no one.
Janine scrambled up toward the ticket-taker and asked if she could hop on to see if her friend was on the ferry. The ticket-taker shrugged “yes,” and she jumped on. A minute later, she leaped off and shook her head at the others. After the tourists all boarded, Maggie listened as Janine spoke to the ticket-taker with more specificity, asking if an older woman of around sixty-five had boarded in the previous two hours. The man shrugged as Janine hunted for some proof of Linda’s existence on her phone.
“Sometimes we have photographic records of our clients,” she explained as she hunted. “But it looks like Linda never submitted anything of that kind.”
Maggie furrowed her brow as chill overtook her. The sea looked tremendously volatile, like some kind of threat against their mission.
The ferry worker unraveled the ropes from the ferry to allow the large vessel its normal trek across the Vineyard Sound. Several tourists lined the outer edge of the boat and waved to the docks. One by one, Maggie, Alyssa, Maxine, Janine, and Grandma Nancy lifted their hands to wave in return. Maggie’s heart pounded with sorrow. It seemed unlikely that they would ever find Linda. She hadn’t even gotten around to asking after her Manhattan address.
When the ferry was too far for anyone to see them wave, Maxine burst into tears of confusion. Janine splayed a hand across her shoulder as Grandma Nancy leaped toward another worker to ask if they might look at the security footage to see if Linda had already gone through. Maggie turned to face the long line of surrounding shore, marveling at the confusion of a woman who’d looked her daughter in the eye for the first time in forty years and not known what to say.
“No wonder she was so lost,” Janine whispered distractedly. “She found the answer and turned back. Maybe she thought you didn’t need her after all.”
Maxine sputtered with sorrow. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? Now that I know she was here, all I want in the world is to talk to her. I want to hear the full story. I’ve spent decades shoving the story as far away from myself as possible, not wanting to know why my mother did what she did. Now... if I never see her again... It’s like losing her a second time. It’s like losing all hope.”