At least her decision seemed to be working out for her. Anika was on track to become chief of surgery someday. Plus, she hadn’t given up on Hank completely.
At least once a month since their breakup two years prior, either Hank or Anika took advantage of their continued friendship when they were in need of a particular release. It was just so easy between them. All the embarrassment and modesty and awkwardness had long since disappeared, and neither was offended if the other received an urgent call from the hospital in flagrante.
But, sitting at the table with Anika now, Hank couldn’t even think about those evening liaisons without remembering the night in April. The night Anika had learned the truth.
The sex had been especially good that night, the kind of desperate, greedy intensity that you only really tap into when the stakes feel heightened, when the world outside is going to shit. And that spring, the world sure went to shit.
When the boxes first arrived, Hank hadn’t opened his right away.
He was wary of the inscription and wanted to wait until there was more information. But once the strings were officially confirmed, Hank still couldn’t decide what to do. A part of him saw the boxes like a routine medical test: If something’s happening to your body, then you should want to know the truth. Even if you can’t alter the final result, there might be something you can do to improve your life. But the other part of him, the part that dealt with the anger and grief of patients and families on a daily basis, wondered if perhaps it was better to postpone any pain as long as possible.
In the end, though, the scientist within Hank won out. He simply couldn’t run away from the knowledge on offer.
So he opened his box and measured his string with the at-home calculator and learned that he was fully, irrevocably fucked. He had already entered his final window, the thin span of time in which his life would end.
He should have just kept the damn box closed.
Hank briefly contemplated quitting his job to spend his final months traveling, but he was lucky enough to have already seen a great deal of the world, spending two summers abroad in Europe and the year before med school backpacking through Asia. And besides, his job was all he had. The sterile white walls of the hospital were the boundaries of his life, his coworkers his only friends. But Hank had never really minded the fact that he spent most of his hours in the ER. He liked his job. He liked the adrenaline and the challenge and the fact that he was saving lives, something many people aspire to, but few actually do.
He knew that he was sometimes selfish, perhaps deriving a little too much pleasure from the gratitude of patients he helped, but he reasoned that if heaven or its equivalent did exist, he had probably earned a spot up there. And it couldn’t hurt to keep saving lives in the meantime.
Hank hadn’t really dated in the two years since Anika, his father had already passed away, and he didn’t want to send his seventy-six-year-old mother into shock, so he decided not to tell anyone about his string. He didn’t want to burden someone else with the news, and he didn’t want pity or charity. He only wanted to stay strong, and he wouldn’t be able to do that if everybody started treating him like a victim.
Hank had seen enough tragedy and lost enough patients—enough short-stringers, before they were called short-stringers—that he didn’t bother asking, Why me? Hank was no different from the patients who had been wheeled into his ER every day for the past two decades. Why them, before? And why him, now? These were pointless questions that only fueled the hurt.
About a week after he opened his box, Hank was changing in the hospital locker room at the end of an all-day shift, about to head home for three days off, his first real break in months, when he suddenly realized that he didn’t want to go home. A full seventy-two hours without any patients, any work, any distractions, sounded like a nightmare. He couldn’t spend that much time alone with his thoughts.
Hank felt his whole body clench with dread, thinking of the anxious days awaiting him. He slammed his locker shut and smacked it harshly with his hand.
“That bad of a day, huh?”
Hank turned to see Anika, still in her scrubs, staring at him with concern. And something inside him caved.
“Do you want to get a drink?” he asked.
One drink turned into more drinks and, soon enough, Anika was back at Hank’s apartment, and the two of them enjoyed their particularly good sex, and for the briefest of moments Hank actually forgot about the box in his kitchen with the short string inside.
After they were finished, Anika left Hank relaxing sleepily against the pillows and slipped into one of his T-shirts from the dresser beside the bed, maneuvering around his apartment as if it were her own.