The Measure(10)

“You know that I will always be here for you,” Nina said, “but maybe there are others who can be there for you in a different way? My sister said that her school has even started to host some string support groups.”

“I appreciate that you’re trying to help,” Maura replied, “but I’m not sure I want to be surrounded by a bunch of people weeping about their unfinished business.”

“Well, apparently they have different types of sessions based on how, um, how much time is remaining on your string. So there are groups for people who have less than a year left, and groups for people with maybe twenty years left, and then a group for those in between, like . . .” Nina looked unsure if she should continue.

“Like me,” Maura finished for her.

“Obviously you should only do what you feel comfortable doing, and I’ll support you no matter what.”

Maura looked at Nina, whose slight frame appeared even more fragile in the dim light of their third-floor walk-up, and she agreed to try the support group, if only to wipe away the watery mixture of guilt and grief that had pooled in Nina’s eyes as she spoke.



Less than a week later, Maura found herself walking toward the school that would house her group therapy session.

The streets had become a familiar scene; at least one business per block was boarded up by now. Often the owners placed signs on the locked doors and metal gates of their shuttered stores and restaurants with scribbled sentiments like “Gone to live my life,” “Spending more time with family,” or “Off to make some memories.” Maura passed by a piece of paper taped onto a former jewelry store: “Closed. Looking for closure.”

More disturbing than the signs, though, was another encounter—rarer, but not entirely uncommon—of stumbling upon a stranger’s discarded box peering devilishly above the rim of a garbage bin or from within a curbside pile of broken furniture.

In the days and weeks following the revelations of the strings, those reeling from the truth had found different methods of handling the unwelcome chests that had intruded upon their lives. Some, choosing willful ignorance in the hope of attaining its promised bliss, threw away their boxes to avoid temptation. The melodramatic hurled them into rivers and lakes or locked them away in a remote crevice of their house. The more cavalier just tossed them in the trash.

Still others attempted to obliterate the boxes in fits of rage, but these powerful chests, like the black box of an airplane, simply could not be destroyed, no matter how many times they were burned or smashed or violently trampled upon.

Pedestrians who came across an opened box that had been left on the side of the road, or perhaps flung out of a nearby window, tended to avert their eyes and quicken their steps, as if passing by a panhandler whose gaze they wished to avoid.

Luckily, Maura didn’t see any abandoned boxes that evening as she approached the entrance to the school. The quiet, brownstone-lined streets of the Upper East Side were either too genteel or too uptight for such a public display of emotion, she thought.

Fitting for its locale, the building looked old and fancy, the architectural equivalent of an elderly philanthropist dressed up for a benefit. It had one of those elaborate prewar exteriors that realtors love to point out, adorned with tiny gargoyles shaped like gryphons.

As she walked up the wide interior staircase, past marble plaques quoting Plato and Einstein, Maura’s fingers crept up to her face, touching the small turquoise nose ring she had worn since college that would surely violate the dress code of a place like this. Nina’s younger sister, Amie, had taught at this school for several years now, but Maura had never stepped foot inside before tonight.

She heard murmurs when she reached the second-floor landing and followed them to Room 204. Thankfully, she was the last to arrive.





Amie




Apparently she had never finished Atonement.

Amie’s arm was stretched painfully under her bed, fingers splayed, feeling for a pen that had seemingly rolled into oblivion, when her thumb brushed unexpectedly against the spine of a book. She pulled out the paperback, covered in a light layer of dust, and saw that her bookmark—gold-plated and monogrammed, a gift from an ex-boyfriend that had long stopped reminding her of their brief intertwinement—still rested in the furrow between pages, two-thirds of the way through.

Amie had been reading the novel back in March, and she couldn’t believe she had forgotten about it, she had been so engrossed in the story. But she had nodded off that night, the night the boxes arrived, with the book sleeping next to her in bed, and in the commotion of the following morning the novel must have slipped off the duvet and into the past, a sudden relic of the days before.

Before.

Amie held the book in her hands, remembering that morning. She had slept in late, as usual—a habit that her sister, Nina, never understood—unwilling to extricate herself from that night’s reverie, no doubt inspired by her reading. In the dream, she was a student at Cambridge in the 1930s, courted by a young man who spoke like Hugh Grant, and Amie remembered feeling faintly disappointed to have woken up alone in bed.

By the time Amie rolled off her mattress that morning, Nina had already left two panicked voice mails. (She was only a year older than Amie but had long deemed herself the voice of authority.)

“Call me as soon as you get this!” Nina shouted into the phone. “Don’t go outside yet, don’t do anything. Just call me first! Please!”