“You could get in a lot of trouble for confessing to this,” Maura said. “Are you sure you want to do it?”
“I am,” Jack said firmly. He was already estranged from his biological family; it was time for him to stand with the one he had chosen.
“Then I’d be proud to help,” said Maura. “I think Javier’s story deserves to be heard.”
After Jack shook Maura’s hand, leaving the letter in her care, he stepped out onto the sidewalk and looked up at the sky. Javi had been a pilot for the last four years. Who knows how many times he had flown up there, among the clouds?
Jack hoped that Javi, wherever he was now, would appreciate the irony in this moment. Anthony Rollins had callously used Javi’s string to advance his career five years prior, and now that same string would hopefully play a part in his demise.
The memorial that week was small, attended only by Javier’s family, Jack, and two soldiers on temporary leave.
Jack was standing near the casket, which was closed and draped with an American flag, when a woman came up beside him. “Your friend was a very brave soldier,” she said.
The woman had arrived late, after the service already ended, slipping into the back of the room. Her face looked unfamiliar to Jack. “He saved all of us that day,” she whispered.
Jack realized, then, that she must have been one of the two civilian doctors whom, according to Mr. and Mrs. García, Javi had rescued before he died. Anika Singh, he believed. All parties involved in the mission had allegedly signed NDAs, but Captain Reynolds had shared the story of Javi’s courage with his parents.
“Javi didn’t deserve this,” Jack said. “He didn’t deserve a short string.”
Then Anika turned and looked at Jack with the kindness, the understanding, that he could only describe as the way a mother should look at her son.
“You know, your friend Javier reminds me of another man I used to know, whose string was also much shorter than it should have been. But he and Javier both made such a difference with their lives. Their impact will be felt for years, even generations,” she said. “In a way, I think the two of them had the longest strings I’ve ever seen.”
Nina
The anniversary of the arrival had come and gone, years had begun to pass, and soon enough the world was approaching nearly a decade of life with the strings.
Some ultimately felt grateful for the boxes, for the chance to say goodbye, to never regret the last words uttered. Others found comfort in the strings’ uncanny power, enabling them to believe that the lives of their short-string loved ones were not, in fact, cut short. They were just as long as they were meant to be, since the moment they were born and the length of their string was seemingly determined. It made losing them somehow easier to accept, trusting that nothing could have changed the ending, that their deaths did not hinge upon any particular decisions they made, what they did or didn’t do. Because of the strings, there was no need to wonder what might have happened if they had lived in a different city, or eaten different foods, or driven a different route home. The loss still hurt, of course, still didn’t make sense, but it was almost a relief not to be hounded by what-ifs. Their lives were simply the length that they were always going to be.
But this wasn’t a comfort to the short-stringers themselves, the ones who confronted the injustice most intimately. It was a comfort to the long-stringers who survived, the ones who continued on in their absence.
Maura’s parents asked Nina to speak at the funeral.
It was the first eulogy she had ever delivered, and it took nearly all the strength she could muster to let go of her mother’s hand, leave her seat in the first pew, and stand before the crowd of mourners.
Nina quickly scanned the room, looking for a face to settle on while reading her remarks. Nobody in the first few rows would do: Maura’s family members were all crying softly, and she didn’t want to look at Ben and Amie, who were probably thinking about their own version of this funeral, which would be held, inevitably, a few years from now. So Nina spoke instead to a handful of strangers in the back, perhaps colleagues or old acquaintances of Maura’s whom she never had the chance to meet.
Nina spoke about her wife’s passion and fearlessness and wit and the impressive speed with which she made friends. She relayed how Maura had learned about the Johnson Foundation and promptly left her job in publishing to work for the senator’s team—her sixth job overall, but the first to feel like an instant fit. She had finally thrived at work, found a place to channel her energy, working with the foundation to protect her fellow short-stringers.