“I’m sure your daughter would forgive you,” Hank said. “Especially once she heard the great news.”
“You don’t know her,” the woman said. “When she puts her mind to something, she can do anything. Even holding a grudge. She’ll have her new lease on life soon enough. She never needs to know that I looked behind her back. All that matters now is that she’s going to live.”
What a peculiar new world these strings had fashioned, Hank thought. For all the sadness, and deceit, and broken trust, for all the times that Hank had watched someone arriving at the hospital, gripping their box in fear, at least there was this: Hope for the mother of an ailing child. The grace in knowing that prayers would be answered.
Hank had followed up with Anika a few days later, asking if the daughter’s surgery went through.
“Unfortunately, we heard from the donor’s sister that he was treated for cancer last year,” she said. “We couldn’t use the lung.”
And yet, there was no need for despair. Hank could hear the mother’s words. If not this one, then the next.
He leaned his body weight into the bench, soothed by the staccato rhythm of the clubs striking the tees. How strange, Hank thought, to be the woman with the pink-tipped hair, anxiously unaware of the salvation, the gift, awaiting her.
But Hank noticed, then, that Ben was still struggling at his tee. So he stood up and approached Ben from the side, careful to avoid his swinging club, and rested an arm on his shoulder, ready to offer some reassurance.
Jack
Jack usually didn’t remember his dreams, but the morning after he proposed the switch, he woke up, groggy and fatigued, having dreamt of his grandfather.
Grandpa Cal was the only member of Jack’s family who never made him feel like an outsider, who had treated both Jack and Javier with the respect of a fellow soldier.
Jack had introduced them at a football game during freshman year, when Cal had the wispy white hair and arched back of any man in his early nineties, but still boasted the mental clarity of someone years younger. Jack listened as his grandfather recounted the familiar tale of lying about his age so he could enlist in the Second World War, when he was an impressively tall but still-pimpled teenager.
“What you boys are doing is a noble calling,” Cal told Jack and Javi, the three of them huddled close against the wind ripping through the bleachers before kickoff. “We tend to only hear stories about the bad ones, but the men I met in the service were some of the finest people I’ve ever known.”
Jack had heard it all before, at nearly every family gathering, but he was pleased to see Javi so engrossed.
“Before we could do any fighting,” Cal continued, “we spent sixteen weeks training up in New England, and a couple of the older guys sort of adopted me into their group. They snuck me some of their cigars and took me to movies on our nights off. This one boy in particular, Simon Starr, he really took me under his wing. Never let anybody say a mean word to me.
“But when they eventually gave us our assignments, it turned out that I was heading to the Pacific, while those older guys were being sent to Europe. And I’m sure Jack has told you that most of the men in my family have served in some way or another, so it was always expected that I would enlist at some point, but the war pulled me in at a much younger age than any of us could have anticipated, and no matter how prepared you may think you are, you can’t help but be afraid before shipping off.”
Javi nodded silently.
“Well, Simon could see that I was pretty upset about being separated from the group, so he pulled me aside and dug into his pocket for a little prayer card that he always carried around with him. He said it was the Hashkiveinu, a Jewish prayer asking God to protect you through the night. His fiancée back home had given it to him. And would you believe that he gave that prayer card to me? He told me it would keep me safe.”
Cal was shaking his head, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened all those decades ago. “And I’m a Christian man myself, but I kept that prayer tucked inside my uniform every day, and Simon was right. It kept me safe.”
“Did you stay in touch with Simon and the others after the war?” Javi asked.
Whenever his grandfather reached this part, Jack could see the shame on his face, the remorse. Grandpa Cal’s story—of his panic before heading out alone overseas and his regret of what came after—was one of the few times that Jack had ever seen a Hunter willingly drop the steely familial facade and expose themselves as vulnerable.