Nina knew that she would never stop missing them, Amie and Maura and Ben. But she would honor her promise. She would not fall apart. She would be the rock, now, for Willie and Midge. She would keep making plans, for all three of them.
And after about a year had passed, Nina and the children had managed to rebuild their lives together, as a newfound trio. As a family.
Every few weeks, Nina took Willie and Midge on a trip into New York City, where the threesome would visit a museum or the zoo, or Nina would let the kids wander, awestruck, through the aisles of FAO Schwarz.
On the rare occasions when they spent the night, after a late Broadway show perhaps, they always stayed in the uptown hotel with the Beaux-Arts facade, one of Ben’s last projects in the city. The yearlong restoration had transformed the century-old hotel, a blemished jewel in disrepair, into a palace worthy of its history. Ben had purposefully chosen the hotel for his final undertaking. Something about giving the building a “second life,” if Nina recalled. A life that his children were now a part of.
One such evening in the city, after a long day studying dinosaur bones in the Museum of Natural History, Nina led the two children across the street and into Central Park. Under the shadow of the trees, the last light of the day piercing through the branches, the family of three stopped to see Amie’s bench.
Nina reached out her hand, where the loose folds of skin had only recently begun to betray her as a woman in her mid-forties, and ran her fingers along the smooth silver plaque, which Amie had gifted to Ben on their tenth anniversary, after spending the previous nine years secretly saving up for it.
Dear B,
No matter what happens, I still feel the same.
—A
Nina lowered herself down onto the bench, while Willie and Midge sprinted to the playground nearby.
Watching the children run, smiling, from the swings to the monkey bars and back, Nina marveled at their resilience. Amie and Ben would be so proud of them—the sweet, inquisitive, playful little humans they created.
In moments like this, Nina was glad that Amie had never opened her box, never felt the anger and anguish that plagued Maura, and never had to look at the soft, round faces of her babies with the searing knowledge that she wouldn’t see them grow old.
Nina even wondered, sometimes, whether Willie and Midge would have ever been born, if Amie had looked at her string. It was difficult enough for Amie to plan on raising a family without Ben. What if she had known that she, too, wouldn’t be there? Perhaps Amie’s decision to never look, to never know, had given both sisters the gift of these two precious souls.
Of course, Nina strove to be the mother that Amie had always been, so attentive and affectionate, but she also wondered about the kind of mom that Maura might have become, and it was Maura’s sense of fun and fearlessness and spontaneity that Nina wished to instill in these kids. An eagerness for life that both her sister and her wife had shared. Nina thought about how often she saw the phrase “Live Like Your String Is Short” emblazoned on T-shirts and tote bags and posters. The popular refrain was heard a lot nowadays, much more often than back at the beginning, when short-stringers were overwhelmingly cast as dangerous and depressed, rather than purposeful, open to life.
Nina watched as Willie and Midge quickly made friends with two other children on the playground, the four of them taking turns on the plastic yellow slide, shrieking with delight as they slid down. It always amazed Nina how children could forge such instant, honest connections, only to thrive on division as adults.
Nina’s fingers crept toward her neck and touched Maura’s pin, the two gold strings, that she had slipped onto one of her mother’s chains after Maura died. She had a habit of rubbing her thumb against the pendant like a talisman whenever she was deep in thought. Few people wore that pin every day, as Nina did. It was mostly reserved for special occasions or political events, like the pink ribbons that appeared each October, now that the overwhelming shock of the early years had largely petered out, aided by the fact that there were never any mass waves of violence perpetrated by short-stringers, as some had cautioned. Former president Rollins, once the loudest voice of warning, only rarely reappeared in the news, to promote his memoir or give a speech.
Despite the ongoing efforts of the Johnson Foundation and Strung Together, allegations of illegal string discrimination still persisted, of course, and the more intimate, personal prejudices against short-stringers were perhaps too slippery, too invisible, to ever truly stamp out. Protests still erupted sporadically, in response to particularly egregious cases, and Maura would be pleased, Nina thought, to know that they hadn’t been silenced.