Ben’s parents had both chosen not to look at their strings, and it wasn’t until the lasagna had been finished and the final scoop of coffee ice cream was melting into a puddle in his bowl that Ben rallied sufficient strength to tell them about his.
He laid down his spoon and looked up, but his mother interrupted first.
“Oh, Ben, we forgot to tell you the most wonderful news!” she said. “You remember the Andersons, down the hall?”
Ben’s mother grew up in a small town in the Midwest, and she refused to become the type of urbanite who didn’t know her neighbors.
“The couple whose son had that rare blood disorder,” she reminded Ben.
“Oh yes, of course.” Ben nodded. He remembered his mother baking a crumb cake to bring to them last month. “How is he?”
“Well, that’s just it. He turned twenty-two last week, and the poor boy was terrified to open his box, but he decided to do it, and . . . his string is long!” Ben’s mother clasped her hands excitedly.
“That’s . . . wow,” Ben said, trying to mask his surprise and, truthfully, his envy.
“The doctor had told them not to give up, that the treatment might still work, and now they know it will!”
Ben’s father leaned back contentedly in his chair, the wooden frame creaking under his weight. “The family’s planning a big celebration this weekend and invited us to join,” he said.
“It’s proof,” Ben’s mother added. “Miracles happen.”
She smiled as she stood to clear the empty plates, and Ben found himself thinking about the woman with the rosary beads. He knew that his parents believed in God, but his upbringing had never been particularly religious, no prayers were said at dinner. Any pious fervor that once existed on either side of his family had apparently dimmed with each generation. But maybe his parents had more faith than he realized.
“Do you really believe in those?” Ben asked. “Miracles?”
His mother slid the last plate into the dishwasher and straightened her back. “I do,” she said. “I mean, maybe not the walking-on-water type, but . . . inexplicably wonderful things do happen, every day. Remember when you flipped off your bike and didn’t break a bone?”
Ben smiled and nodded at his mother. But he was suddenly rethinking his decision to tell them, to crush his parents with the devastating truth that they would likely outlive their child.
It was better, Ben thought, to believe in miracles.
Maura
For the longest time, Maura rarely thought about children. She had difficulty even imagining herself as a mother.
At age twenty-nine, she still saw herself as only slightly more mature than the teenage girl who snuck out of her parents’ house to attend underground concerts and once let a friend pierce her ears. （The infection lasted for weeks.） That stubborn, irresponsible young girl couldn’t possibly be a parent. She didn’t want to swap her late nights lingering at the bar for early mornings breastfeeding. She certainly didn’t want to deal with nine months of pregnancy and god knows how many hours of brutal labor, nor had she ever wished that upon any of her girlfriends over the years. She wanted the freedom to stay home all day in her sweatpants and do nothing at all, or to quit her job and travel the world, to someday own a second apartment in London or Madrid.
What’s more, the rare pangs of anything even resembling maternal desire occurred so infrequently—only when she saw a particularly adorable infant or learned of a friend’s new pregnancy—that Maura could easily dismiss them as a minor biological nuisance. If she truly wanted kids, she would have known by now. She was almost thirty, after all.
When Maura first met Nina, she worried that her non-maternal instincts might cause a rift in their relationship, but Nina, focused solely on becoming editor-in-chief, fortunately felt the same. She hadn’t grown up playing house like her sister, and she rarely dreamt of her future family, especially after she realized that the domestic bliss she saw on television—the sitcom husband and wife—didn’t reflect her own desires. All she really wanted was a partner in life, Nina said, someone to share in the journey. And Maura was satisfied, their futures aligned.
Until she opened her box.
The pangs became more frequent, more intense. Maura would have assumed that a woman’s yearning for a child was purely emotional, but for her it became somehow physical, a palpable sensation inside her body.
When she thought about having a child, she could feel her stomach tightening, scrunching up around a hollowness. Her hands and arms felt a subtle tingling, a restlessness stretching down into her fingers, wanting to touch something that wasn’t there and hold something that didn’t exist.