The Measure(104)

Ben and Amie were not surprised when they received Ben’s diagnosis. They were prepared. And Ben knew immediately that he wouldn’t move into the hospital. He would stay home, with his wife and kids, just as they had planned.

Nina asked her sister if she would return to the city after Ben was gone, and Amie pictured her life in the house without Ben: the fridge stuffed with frozen casseroles, the neighbors shaking their heads solemnly every time they walked past her lawn. But it was still the house where Ben had insisted on carrying her across the threshold when they moved in, despite the fact that she was five months pregnant. It was still the house where he spent an entire week building a swing set in the backyard. She couldn’t leave their home.



One night, Nina sat at the kitchen table with Amie and Ben, as Ben finalized his will. To Nina’s surprise, Ben leaned back in his chair, looked at them both, and told them that he was satisfied. Satisfied that his open box had been forced upon him when he was younger, satisfied that he had shared the happiest years of his life with Amie, Willie, and Midge, and satisfied that he would not be leaving his family in a state of disarray.

After Ben went upstairs to sleep and the sisters were left alone, Nina asked Amie if she, too, felt satisfied with her choice.

“I suppose I may still change my mind,” Amie said. “But I don’t think I will. I used to spend so much time inside my head, fantasizing about all these potential futures and different what-ifs. But ever since Willie and Midge were born, I haven’t really had any more visions like that. I think becoming a mom has made it so much easier to stay in the present.”

“Because you lose focus for one minute and they’ve stuck their hand on the stovetop?” Nina asked.

“Well, yes, there’s that.” Amie laughed. “But it’s not just that. I always used to wonder about these other versions of myself potentially leading different lives, but now I know that this life is the one I was meant for. I can feel it every time I kiss their pudgy little cheeks, or watch Ben lift them up on his back.”

Amie was quiet for a moment. “Of course, seeing a long string, like you did, is the greatest blessing,” she added. Then she lifted her phone to look at the home screen, a photo of Ben and the kids trick-or-treating last Halloween. “But I still feel pretty blessed myself.”



Willie and Midge’s college savings accounts; the mortgage on the house; the updated version of Ben’s will—everything was all in order. And everybody—from Ben’s and Amie’s parents, to Nina, to Willie and Midge—was as ready as they could be.

But nobody was ready for the call from the police department, reporting that Ben and Amie’s car had been struck on the highway, while driving home from one of Ben’s doctor’s appointments.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” the officer said.

But it was more loss than anyone expected.



The morning after the accident, Nina, grief-stricken and sleep-deprived, stumbled into her sister’s closet and pulled out the box that Amie had kept there, unopened, for the past fourteen years. Nina already knew what was inside, what her sister had never seen, but she wanted to see it for herself.

Amie’s string.

With the same ending as Ben’s, all along.

Nina tenderly lifted the string from the box and held her sister’s life in her hands, then pressed it gently against her chest as she wept and wept.





Nina




Children were never part of her plan, but Nina adopted Willie and Midge without a moment of doubt. Though only eleven and nine years old, they reminded her so much of Amie. They had her imagination, and they had her eyes, and having the two of them was like having a piece of her sister that would remain with Nina, always.

She knew that Amie wanted her children to continue living in their home, so Nina sold her place in Manhattan and moved into the house in the suburbs, with both Ben’s parents and her own parents in apartments nearby, so Willie and Midge would never be alone.

Nina knew that she would never stop missing them, Amie and Maura and Ben. But she would honor her promise. She would not fall apart. She would be the rock, now, for Willie and Midge. She would keep making plans, for all three of them.

And after about a year had passed, Nina and the children had managed to rebuild their lives together, as a newfound trio. As a family.



Every few weeks, Nina took Willie and Midge on a trip into New York City, where the threesome would visit a museum or the zoo, or Nina would let the kids wander, awestruck, through the aisles of FAO Schwarz.

On the rare occasions when they spent the night, after a late Broadway show perhaps, they always stayed in the uptown hotel with the Beaux-Arts facade, one of Ben’s last projects in the city. The yearlong restoration had transformed the century-old hotel, a blemished jewel in disrepair, into a palace worthy of its history. Ben had purposefully chosen the hotel for his final undertaking. Something about giving the building a “second life,” if Nina recalled. A life that his children were now a part of.

One such evening in the city, after a long day studying dinosaur bones in the Museum of Natural History, Nina led the two children across the street and into Central Park. Under the shadow of the trees, the last light of the day piercing through the branches, the family of three stopped to see Amie’s bench.