The Measure(47)

“She’s not at the top of the list yet,” Anika explained, “but she happened to be here for a checkup when we got the call about a lung that might be a match.”

“That’s great luck,” Hank said. “I hope it works out.”

“How are you doing?” Anika asked, just as the pager at her hip began to sound. “Shit, I’ve got to handle this. You can have mine, too.” Anika handed him her own coffee, the lid still unopened.

“I don’t need this much caffeine!” Hank said with a smile, but she was already speeding away.

“I’ll take it, if you don’t want it.”

Hank turned around to see an older woman gesturing toward his spare cup.

“Oh sure, of course.” He passed it over.

“Thanks, it’s been quite the morning,” the woman exhaled, turning her face toward the warmth of the steam. “That’s my daughter in there, waiting to hear about the lung.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Hank said. “But it sounds like it might be good news today.”

“If this were happening a few months ago, the nerves would have wrecked me,” the woman said. She leaned in closer to Hank. “But I know something’s going to work out. If not this one, then the next.”

Hank was slightly confused, but he admired her faith. He just hoped she was capable of bearing disappointment.

“My daughter hasn’t looked at her string. And she made us all promise we wouldn’t look, either, but . . . I needed to prepare myself,” the woman said, glancing back at her daughter, who was leaning against the pillows of the hospital bed and reading a book. “It was long.” The woman smiled. “My baby’s string is long.”

“That’s amazing,” Hank said. “Truly.”

“Just don’t tell her I told you!” The woman took a sip of her coffee.

“Wait, you haven’t told your daughter that her string is long?”

“She made me swear not to look.” The woman shook her head ominously. “She’ll hate me if she learns that I did.”

Hank thought for a moment about Anika peeking at his string in the kitchen, how briefly betrayed he had felt. And Hank had privately theorized, from the way Ben spoke about his own experience—always “when my box was opened,” and never “when I opened my box”—that perhaps an even greater betrayal had befallen him.

“I’m sure your daughter would forgive you,” Hank said. “Especially once she heard the great news.”

“You don’t know her,” the woman said. “When she puts her mind to something, she can do anything. Even holding a grudge. She’ll have her new lease on life soon enough. She never needs to know that I looked behind her back. All that matters now is that she’s going to live.”

What a peculiar new world these strings had fashioned, Hank thought. For all the sadness, and deceit, and broken trust, for all the times that Hank had watched someone arriving at the hospital, gripping their box in fear, at least there was this: Hope for the mother of an ailing child. The grace in knowing that prayers would be answered.

Hank had followed up with Anika a few days later, asking if the daughter’s surgery went through.

“Unfortunately, we heard from the donor’s sister that he was treated for cancer last year,” she said. “We couldn’t use the lung.”

And yet, there was no need for despair. Hank could hear the mother’s words. If not this one, then the next.

He leaned his body weight into the bench, soothed by the staccato rhythm of the clubs striking the tees. How strange, Hank thought, to be the woman with the pink-tipped hair, anxiously unaware of the salvation, the gift, awaiting her.

But Hank noticed, then, that Ben was still struggling at his tee. So he stood up and approached Ben from the side, careful to avoid his swinging club, and rested an arm on his shoulder, ready to offer some reassurance.





Jack




Jack usually didn’t remember his dreams, but the morning after he proposed the switch, he woke up, groggy and fatigued, having dreamt of his grandfather.

Grandpa Cal was the only member of Jack’s family who never made him feel like an outsider, who had treated both Jack and Javier with the respect of a fellow soldier.

Jack had introduced them at a football game during freshman year, when Cal had the wispy white hair and arched back of any man in his early nineties, but still boasted the mental clarity of someone years younger. Jack listened as his grandfather recounted the familiar tale of lying about his age so he could enlist in the Second World War, when he was an impressively tall but still-pimpled teenager.

“What you boys are doing is a noble calling,” Cal told Jack and Javi, the three of them huddled close against the wind ripping through the bleachers before kickoff. “We tend to only hear stories about the bad ones, but the men I met in the service were some of the finest people I’ve ever known.”

Jack had heard it all before, at nearly every family gathering, but he was pleased to see Javi so engrossed.

“Before we could do any fighting,” Cal continued, “we spent sixteen weeks training up in New England, and a couple of the older guys sort of adopted me into their group. They snuck me some of their cigars and took me to movies on our nights off. This one boy in particular, Simon Starr, he really took me under his wing. Never let anybody say a mean word to me.