“You okay there, Ben?” Maura called over her shoulder.
Another man might have imagined Claire’s face on the golf ball and struck it with all his strength. But Ben didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to hurt Claire.
He could blame her for betraying him, for not allowing him the chance to choose for himself. But he couldn’t really blame her for leaving.
Claire had said it herself, she wasn’t strong enough. She needed security, stability. A lifetime guarantee. It was just who she was, and plenty of other people would have reacted the same. Perhaps most people would have. That didn’t make them bad people. And spending the rest of his life simmering in bitterness and spite wouldn’t do anyone any good.
Ben needed to look forward now, not behind.
He squinted at the darkening horizon, where the last slivers of the sun were burning off in a small swirl of fire above the Hudson, like the bonfires on the beaches in Europe, swallowing the strings in their flames.
Then Ben squared his shoulders, swung his arms, and sent the ball soaring toward the river.
Hank
After he had shown Ben and Maura the basics, Hank didn’t feel quite as interested in teeing up himself. So he took a seat on one of the benches with a view of the range, watching the tiny white dots dash across the green like shooting stars. The sunset coated everything with a mystical tint, and even the Hudson River below, so often derided by locals, struck Hank as quite beautiful now, its dark ripples tinted pink.
The water reminded Hank of a young woman he had once seen at New York Memorial, sitting on a bed in one of the pre-op rooms. The tips of her long black hair were dyed bright pink, the way that a few of the girls on Hank’s block growing up used to dip their hair in Kool-Aid.
“She’s waiting for a transplant,” Anika said, coming up behind him and offering him a coffee.
It was late May, one of his final days at the hospital and the first that felt like a return to normalcy after the shooting on the fifteenth. The ER had remained vacant for several days after, even once the police had finished their sweep, most patients preferring to travel a few minutes farther to a hospital that wasn’t a crime scene. But the city’s memory proved remarkably short, and the waiting room was back to capacity by the end of the month, Hank finding only a brief interlude to visit Anika upstairs.
“She’s not at the top of the list yet,” Anika explained, “but she happened to be here for a checkup when we got the call about a lung that might be a match.”
“That’s great luck,” Hank said. “I hope it works out.”
“How are you doing?” Anika asked, just as the pager at her hip began to sound. “Shit, I’ve got to handle this. You can have mine, too.” Anika handed him her own coffee, the lid still unopened.
“I don’t need this much caffeine!” Hank said with a smile, but she was already speeding away.
“I’ll take it, if you don’t want it.”
Hank turned around to see an older woman gesturing toward his spare cup.
“Oh sure, of course.” He passed it over.
“Thanks, it’s been quite the morning,” the woman exhaled, turning her face toward the warmth of the steam. “That’s my daughter in there, waiting to hear about the lung.”
“I can’t even imagine,” Hank said. “But it sounds like it might be good news today.”
“If this were happening a few months ago, the nerves would have wrecked me,” the woman said. She leaned in closer to Hank. “But I know something’s going to work out. If not this one, then the next.”
Hank was slightly confused, but he admired her faith. He just hoped she was capable of bearing disappointment.
“My daughter hasn’t looked at her string. And she made us all promise we wouldn’t look, either, but . . . I needed to prepare myself,” the woman said, glancing back at her daughter, who was leaning against the pillows of the hospital bed and reading a book. “It was long.” The woman smiled. “My baby’s string is long.”
“That’s amazing,” Hank said. “Truly.”
“Just don’t tell her I told you!” The woman took a sip of her coffee.
“Wait, you haven’t told your daughter that her string is long?”
“She made me swear not to look.” The woman shook her head ominously. “She’ll hate me if she learns that I did.”
Hank thought for a moment about Anika peeking at his string in the kitchen, how briefly betrayed he had felt. And Hank had privately theorized, from the way Ben spoke about his own experience—always “when my box was opened,” and never “when I opened my box”—that perhaps an even greater betrayal had befallen him.