Gina Nutt: “Maybe Mary” introduces us to a narrator who has spent years believing it’s possible that her friend, who went missing in her youth, is still alive. How did you go about fine-tuning her voice to calibrate uncertainty and belief? 
Anna Vangala Jones: As her story unfolds, it stood out to me even as I was writing it that she is much less fixated on what happened to Mary than the idea that it’s possible they could still reunite someday. It’s almost like this one youthful undying hope was frozen in time at the age when she lost her best friend and is the thought she refuses to let go of even as the decades rush past. The obsession with Mary’s fate hasn’t taken over the narrator’s life completely. We see she’s gone on to become a librarian as she’d always wanted, fall in love, have two daughters of her own—so in these meaningful and significant ways, she has matured and at least partially moved on and accepted that she can’t know what truly happened to Mary. She isn’t putting her life on pause as she tries to discover the truth. There is no amateur detective’s web up on her wall with Mary’s picture at the center and threads connecting her to all the possible culprits and causes of her disappearance. We never hear our narrator laying out theories as to what may have happened. We only know that she cherishes the belief that Mary ran away for her own reasons unrelated to the strength of their friendship and that, when she is able, she will return to see her again somehow. And yet when she meets the Maybe Mary at the heart of this story, she is plagued by doubts and uncertainty. It’s the logical rational voice she cannot bury that is telling her this isn’t Mary—that it can’t be Mary because the real Mary is most likely gone. I think this internal battle is inherent to her voice and her approach to the Mary she loves as well as the maybe Mary in front of her.

GN: In addition to juggling internal doubts, the narrator finds friction with her husband and therapist over her Mary search. How did this story evolve from its early premise? What tensions revealed themselves as you stayed with these characters? What surprised you as you worked?
AVJ: I’m not someone who comes up with a story idea and then outlines and writes it. I’m someone who just dives straight into a new story when the seeds of one start to develop in my mind and so it tends to reveal itself to me as I am writing it—the premise, the plot, the characters, their relationships. I might be handwriting or typing or hearing it begin to form in my head in the shower or outside on a walk and then I’m desperately trying to remember so I can write down the best parts of it later. It’s not always a reliable process! But I trust it for the most part. In this story’s earliest iteration, the very first line I wrote was the one about how the narrator can’t remember what she was wearing when she was first alerted to her friend’s disappearance and asked to assist in whatever way she could. I think she carries a deep guilt inside her that she couldn’t contribute the key bit of information to help unlock the mystery of Mary’s whereabouts. It has haunted her all these many years that she couldn’t say what Mary was wearing, if she’d met any new strangers recently, or if she’d said anything indicating fear of something or someone. But as I continued writing, the story developed beyond that into this idea that in the present, she is obsessed with finding Mary still alive and meeting her again in person. So the concept of her interviewing these Maybe Marys in search of the real Mary just spilled out onto the page as I kept trying to better understand my narrator. I then was able to focus on this one meeting with this one woman who she hopes could be her.

I think that her therapist and husband simply voice aloud the concern and doubt that lives inside her own head—that this search is for nothing and she can’t find Mary because she has been gone for a long time now. Somewhere inside her, she knows how strong the probability is that they are right and that even she, herself, might agree with them. But this is in strong contrast to the childish hope in her heart that since there is no body and no definitive answer, her Mary could still be out there waiting to be found. I think her fear is that if she allows herself to truly believe that Mary is dead, it is an unforgivable betrayal to her friend and it’s almost like closing the door in a potentially alive Mary’s face. So I think she externalizes those voices of doubt that eat away at her and assigns them entirely to her husband and therapist. They get to be the big bad villains who have given up on Mary while she gets to cling to this hope and stubborn belief that her friend needs her and so she will wait for her as long as it takes. This ongoing tension of her head and heart in a constant struggle defined the story for me. Something that surprised me, particularly in the asides about her husband and therapist, was the moments of humor to be mined from this otherwise dark and sad story. Our narrator is haunted by this loss without closure and yet there is an unreliability in the way she expresses her commitment to believing Mary is still alive and a hint of ridiculing herself for this belief at times that I enjoyed as I was writing her.

GN: The story culminates with an encounter between the narrator and a plausible Mary double. What do you think is uncanny about love? How do you see fiction wrestling this mystery?
AVJ: There are all these very real ways in which this Maybe Mary resembles the narrator’s Mary and calls to mind all the shared memories of their past. There is also an element of the placebo effect, where if you think something is working or want it to work, you can convince yourself that it is—so she is desperate to see Mary one more time and can force herself to find these similarities. But she also can’t fully quiet her doubts that they are nothing more than coincidences. It also makes me think of pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon where people may see faces or other images or patterns in things like clouds or trees or floor tiles, like an illusion. She has reached a point where she can see Mary in everyone and everything.

I think there is something truly uncanny about love, and how love lives on in grief after death where sometimes their absence makes the image of them even clearer in your mind. I don’t know if this happens to you where it can even be clearer than when you get to look at them every day and don’t have to try to recall them. Of course, our memory blurs over time and yet the loss of someone who is a truly important, meaningful staple in your life can cause their image to grow brighter rather than dimmer. So I think there’s a lot of things going on here that contribute to her hope that she could possibly be looking at the real Mary. That is also helped along by Dawn the waitress saying that this could be her. Our narrator’s love and longing is extremely powerful and is helping her to see Mary. Her mind makes certain connections that she wants to be true so badly. But her doubts hold her in place at the end, seated and silent, as Maybe Mary leaves. I don’t think fiction has the answers to these mysteries but it brings us closer to understanding these spiritual questions we grapple with the entire time we are alive.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
AVJ: I love this idea of a creative mosaic. We are totally an amalgamation of the people and things we love, art very much included. When I read a new book or short story or poem that inspires me to sit down and immediately write, there is no better feeling. When I go for a drive or walk with my family to our favorite beautiful places, whether it’s due to breathtaking nature or stunning architecture, I find myself pulling out my phone to jot sentences down in my notes app or record a voice note before I forget the words. But tied more closely to my own writing than anything is probably music. I feel like music isn’t something I listen to passively. Music I love makes its way into my bones and influences my art without me always being fully conscious of it. One of my favorite things to do is to track what music I was listening to most before or during writing a new story and then create a playlist afterward named after the story that is composed of songs I was listening to or that capture the story’s essence for me. There is always some mix of classical and instrumental only along with jazz, americana, blues, rock, among others, with a clear preference for singer/songwriters with a guitar or piano and lyrics that move me as much as any book, story, or film. I also care about writing at the sentence level and the rhythm, flow, or lyrical beauty that can be achieved—there is so much writing that I love not only for the story but also for the music of the language.