Amie felt truly happy. So she was startled to suddenly find herself standing outside the wrought-iron gates of the Van Woolsey, wondering if perhaps she had been walking toward it, unconsciously, all this time.
She stopped in front of the building, as she had often done before, and tilted her head upward to take in its enormity: the Renaissance Revival facade, the rows of windows cracked open to attract a breeze, the imposing archway revealing the courtyard inside.
And as she stared at the Van Woolsey, the truth washed over Amie.
She would never live there now.
From the beginning, Amie knew that Ben wanted to raise a family in a small house in the suburbs, one like his childhood home, with a backyard where the ground sloped just enough to sled down when it snowed. It sounded perfect to Amie. But she also knew that, if she married Ben and had children, she would one day be a single mother, supporting her kids on a schoolteacher’s wage, and who knows where they would live then?
Maybe after the kids left for college, Amie would move back to Manhattan. She would transport her empty nest—which, by then, would be emptier than most—into a building much cheaper than this one.
The security guard happened to be away from his post, so Amie crept closer to the gate and peered inside at the manicured garden. It was empty at the moment, and Amie was struck by the realization that the courtyard was always empty, whenever she walked past. In fact, she couldn’t recall ever seeing a person sitting by the fountain or sipping coffee on one of the curved white benches, let alone a couple or family enjoying this private paradise.
Surely hundreds of tenants led happy lives beyond this gate, and yet the building seemed suddenly so devoid of life, especially compared to the ever-bustling sidewalks of Broadway behind her, where she and Ben had so often walked hand in hand.
“Excuse me, ma’am. Can I help you?”
The guard appeared from around the corner, eyeing Amie suspiciously.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I was just looking,” she said.
“Are you a prospective tenant?” he asked her.
Amie paused, glancing back at the vacant courtyard, at the fantasy she had been nurturing for the past eight years of her life in New York.
“No,” she said softly. “I’m not.”
The guard gave her a slight nod, and she turned away from the building, from the dream that she wasn’t meant to live, while her mind filled instead with new reveries. She must have played out ten different versions of the imminent proposal in her head: standing on Bow Bridge, drifting in a rowboat on the lake, sitting in the Shakespeare Garden. But, knowing Ben, it wouldn’t be any of those public spots. It would be somewhere secret, someplace with a story that only he knew.
And as Amie walked down the street to meet him, she heard the melody play in her head, the song that had brought them together. Whatever will be, will be. Some things we just can’t control, she thought.
But what about everything else?
What about all the choices that we make, each day? Who we choose to be, and how we choose to love? Every choice that was made to look, or never look, inside the box.
The choice that Amie made at her sister’s wedding, to return inside to Ben.
The choice that she was about to make now, the answer she would give him.
And the life they would choose to build together. The dreams they would choose to chase.
Ben
One Sunday afternoon, Ben emerged from his apartment into the first blush of spring, the trees beginning to yawn awake, the scents of the grass and the nearby food carts carried along the breeze. His group was meeting earlier that day, instead of their typical evening time, in order to visit the new exhibit at the New York Public Library, commissioned by several prominent members of the Strung Together movement to mark the one-year anniversary of the strings’ arrival last March. The centerpiece of the temporary show was a sculpture crafted with five hundred of people’s actual strings.
It was one of Strung Together’s first organized ventures in the art world and the first big exhibition to tackle the strings, a retrospective on a phenomenon still ongoing. Perhaps, in the years to come, there would be more exhibits, Ben thought. Since the strings and their boxes couldn’t be destroyed, museums across the world had assumed the hallowed mission of collecting and safeguarding these permanent artifacts, these relics of a life, from anyone who wished to donate. Those strings that weren’t bequeathed to museums typically found their new homes among family heirlooms, on mantels, and in hope chests. Many boxes took the place of urns. Still others were ultimately buried alongside their owners, opened or forever unseen.