Nina didn’t want to talk about the final days, about the rare abnormality in Maura’s heart that had gone undetected. She didn’t want to talk about the ending. So she talked about the story itself.
“It’s easy to look at our time together and think that we were so unlucky. But isn’t it better to spend ten years really loving someone, rather than forty years growing bored or weary or bitter? When we think about the greatest love stories ever written, we aren’t judging them by their length. Many of them were even briefer than my marriage with Maura. But our story—mine and Maura’s—it felt deep, and it felt whole, despite its length. It was an entire, wonderful tale in and of itself, and even though I’ve been given more chapters than Maura, her pages were the ones you couldn’t put down. The ones that I’ll keep rereading, over and over, for the rest of my life. Our decade together, our story, was a gift.”
The faces in the back were growing blurry now, so Nina wiped her eyes with a crumpled tissue and looked down at the speech before her. She owed it to Maura to finish.
“And, in true Maura fashion, she even gave me a final message to ensure that hers was the last voice we would hear at her service: ‘Tell them that I always wanted to be an explorer. That I always tried to take the first step, to be the first one to dive into the freezing water, the first to taste the strange-looking food, the first to get onstage and sing. And now I’ll be the first to know what happens next, the first to find out what’s waiting for us all. I promise to do enough recon that I can tell you all about it when you get here.’”
A few weeks after the service, Nina finally left her parents’ house and returned home, alone, to finish her book. A compilation of stories inspired by the strings, and the people who used them for good, that she had been working on for nearly three years. The dedication page was already typed—For Maura, simple and honest—but Nina was reluctant to part with the manuscript, to pass it off to her editor.
So that night Nina read through the stories again.
The woman born with the BRCA mutation, who never expected her long string, now spearheading advancements in breast cancer research. The twenty-three-year-old raised in a gang-ridden neighborhood, whose long string offered him the hope of escape, now running an after-school program for at-risk youth. The short-stringer who carried his box on his back while he summited Mount Everest.
Maura lived within the manuscript, too, in her role at the Johnson Foundation. The woman whose public awareness campaign, whose tribute to the sacrifice of a young short-string soldier, helped lead to the STAR Initiative’s ultimate defeat in the Supreme Court. A greater legacy than she ever could have imagined.
Maura would tell her to hand in the book, Nina thought. Try to let go. It was time.
Nina remembered one of the last conversations she’d had with Maura. “You were always the stable one, the rock, the one with all the plans,” Maura had said. “So I need you to be that person now, okay? You can’t fall apart. Amie and Ben need you, and their children need you, and your life needs you. Promise me that you’ll still be the rock. That you’ll keep on making plans.”
But Nina had only two plans right now, publishing this book and getting through the next year. Tomorrow, she would start on the first. Tonight, she needed one more moment alone with these stories, with Maura’s story, before sharing them with the world.
Amie
Like all married couples, Ben and Amie argued.
She would grumble at him for failing to empty the trash, for not loading the dishwasher properly. He would sometimes question her cautiousness, insisting that their children, Willie and Midge, were indeed ready to take off the training wheels.
They rolled their eyes and raised their voices, but they each found a surprising comfort in their quarrels, in this natural part of marriage and parenthood, realizing that their own lives—despite their unusual challenges—could still be so conventional, so deliciously normal.
Ben wanted everything to happen fast. He put a down payment on a house in the suburbs before Willie was even born, and he and Amie were gifted with two children who progressed rather rapidly. Their first steps, first words, first hobbies, all came in quick succession, and soon enough they were learning how to play piano and shoot basketballs. Ben and Amie did all that they possibly could to give them memories for the rest of their lives, recollections of their time as a foursome. Ben coached both of his kids’ Little League teams and took painting classes with each. Amie read to her children in bed at night, whisking them off to faraway lands. Both Amie’s and Ben’s parents moved nearby and doted on their grandchildren, filling the house with toys and treats, while Nina became the “cool aunt,” as she and Maura had joked about once, inviting the children into the city for monthly sleepovers at her apartment.