The Measure(76)

“Used to be?” Ben joked.

But his mother elbowed her husband gently. “Hey, that was a nice card,” she said. “And we meant it.”

As his parents returned to their respective piles, Ben looked down at the open card in his lap, the joke scrawled in his mother’s cursive, and he felt a strange twinge in his eye.

His mom was right. Ben couldn’t even remember a time when he was with his parents and still felt scared. He had only ever felt protected.

Even after he flipped off his bike as a reckless teenager and was lying in the hospital bed, anxiously awaiting his X-ray results, just the sight of his parents, running into the ER, had instantly steadied his nerves. It didn’t matter that they would spend the next hour chiding him for his carelessness. When he saw them coming, he simply felt safe.

So how could he not turn to them now, in the most frightening hour of his life, when he needed their comfort the most?

Yes, the truth would hurt them, Ben thought, but wouldn’t it hurt them more to find out later? To think their son hadn’t trusted them enough? After all the times they had been there?

“There’s something I need to tell you both,” said Ben. “I know about my string. It’s the real reason why Claire and I broke up. And . . . it has about fourteen more years. A decade and a half.” He smiled thinly. “It sounds a bit better that way.”

There was a brief pause then, a gap in time when nobody spoke or moved, and Ben worried that something in his parents had irrevocably cracked, shattered in one small instant.

Until his mother leaned forward and pulled him toward her and hugged him with the fierceness, the almost-otherworldly intensity, that can only be reached by a particular person in a particular moment: a parent sheltering their child. Ben was taller and broader than his mother, he had been since college, but somehow, now, her body seemed to wrap around Ben’s, engulfing him like he was a little boy, swaddling him with her whole self. And Ben’s father placed his hand atop his son’s shoulder, warm and heavy, exerting just enough pressure to keep Ben from folding over.

Ben realized, then, that Claire never once touched him when she told him the truth that night. It was quite shocking, in retrospect. She had squeezed her arms around herself, trying to hold herself steady. But Ben’s parents didn’t care about themselves, not right now. They cared only about their son.

So Ben sat there, on top of a storage trunk, in the arms of his mother, under the hand of his father, and everything that needed to be said was said in the silence, in their touch.





Jack




A few weeks after Javier left, Jack needed to escape their apartment, the entire place a reminder of their strained friendship. They had hardly spoken since their fight, and Jack finally understood why his father made them move to a new house when his mother left, the way that memories can tarnish a room.

So, on a Friday night, after a week of cybersecurity training for his new role in D.C., Jack walked straight to Union Station and boarded the next train to New York.

He took a seat in the rear car and looked out the window, foggy with years of fingerprint smudges and strangers’ breaths. He couldn’t wait to get to New York. He had only visited the city a few times before, but he knew that it was the only place in the world where there was always a crowd, no matter where you went or what time it was. The only place where his anonymity, an almost-normal life, was all but guaranteed.



Jack spent two days roaming the streets of Manhattan, sleeping on a buddy’s shabby gray futon, drinking and playing pool at a dive bar, trying to decipher the unintelligible announcements on the subway, slipping past unrecognized by anyone around him. But still he thought of Javier.

Every helicopter that rumbled overhead made him think of his friend, the pilot-in-training. Though he slept in the living room with the windows open, hearing every siren and shout and shattering of glass in the trash bags dragged to the curb, Jack’s mind was back in D.C., or their dorm room at the academy. Even New York couldn’t free him. The distractions of the city just weren’t enough to outweigh the guilt that nagged him, reminding Jack that he had yet to make good on his promise to Javier. To be worthy of his forgiveness.



By the end of the weekend, Jack was walking down the street, hands sunk in his pockets, depressed by his failed attempt at diversion. It wasn’t yet eight p.m., but the sidewalk was quiet, just a handful of pedestrians skimming past, a political canvasser shyly asking for signatures, a drummer tapping on overturned buckets.

Jack could see the two teenage boys approaching the activist, a short man with glasses clutching a clipboard. There was something about the way the boys carried their bodies, aggressive and arrogant, consuming more space than they possibly needed, that reminded Jack of his academy tormentors. As the boys swaggered closer to the oblivious canvasser, Jack picked up his pace.

The man actually tried offering the boys his pitch, flashing an innocent smile. “Do you have a minute to support Wes Johnson?” he asked.

One of the boys cocked his head. “You mean that short-stringer?”

“Senator Johnson has proven that he’ll be an advocate for all Americans, which includes those with short strings,” answered the activist.

“Why would I want to waste my vote on someone who’s just gonna kick the bucket? He should get his sad short-stringer ass out of the way. He’s a fuckin’ embarrassment.”