“No, of course not.” Anthony shook his head. “But I do believe that we’ve earned our success. We’re protecting the future of this country. Giving the people what they want. Do you remember our first date at the café on campus? I told you it was my dream to be president, and you just said, ‘Okay. We can do that.’ And then went back to sipping your latte like it was nothing. I couldn’t tell if you were crazy, or joking, or what. But you weren’t. You were serious.” Anthony smiled.
“I remember.”
“You had so much faith in us, even then, when we were just two kids.” Anthony touched his wife’s cheek, the skin soft and damp under his thumb. He looked straight into her eyes. “Do you have faith in us now?”
“You know I do,” she said.
“And do you have faith that God wants this for us?”
“I do.”
“Well, so do I. We’re meant to do this.” Anthony wrapped his arm around his wife’s shoulders, and Katherine leaned her head against his chest, relaxing into the familiar comfort of his solid form.
“The path we’re on now—I know it’s a difficult one,” Anthony said, stroking his wife’s hair. “But it’s the only way we’re going to win.”
It was only after Katherine had fallen asleep that Anthony actually thought about Jack.
Anthony and his wife had never wanted children. Kids would certainly not have fit into either of their schedules, and Katherine seemed perfectly content to play the doting aunt at birthdays and graduations, to help out whenever her brother was particularly burdened, and then return to the thrilling life she was building with Anthony.
Of course, Anthony felt sorry for his short-stringer nephew. He always thought Jack seemed a little out of place, the scrawny kid at family reunions, usually picked last as a partner for the three-legged race. He never had the same sense of fight in him, Anthony thought. Probably inherited too much from his flaky mother, who ran off to Europe like some socialist. Anthony just hoped that Jack’s short string wouldn’t lead him to do anything rash, anything that could taint his and Katherine’s good names.
And then it hit him. The protests and the shooting had made it alarmingly, if unsurprisingly, obvious that Anthony had a popularity issue among short-string voters. Perhaps Jack had just given him a solution.
Maura
Coverage of the shooting lasted for days: “Local Doctor Remembered as a Hero.” The anchors mourned the martyrdom of a dedicated physician who saved a congressman and a crowd of spectators from a potential rampage. Few reports mentioned that Hank was only at the rally in order to protest the congressman’s actions.
In the days and weeks that followed his death, Maura felt anxious, unmoored. But she still had to set her alarm each morning and ride the subway to work and sit inside her cubicle, staring at a spreadsheet, listening to the smack of her coworker’s gum. Maura’s department was scaling back, every team had to trim their budgets, and though Maura never let any of her jobs define her, she had always liked her role in publishing—crafting clever captions for social media posts, brainstorming new publicity strategies, all the interesting gatherings of creative minds—until now. Hank was dead, her own life tumbled by, the whole world seemed set on fire, and yet she was expected to keep sending press releases and finding excess expenses to cut, as though nothing at all had changed?
Of course, Maura needed a paycheck. She couldn’t just quit because of her string. And she couldn’t even contemplate any moves without hearing the warnings on loop: You’re a short-stringer. Your options are limited. Your time is valuable. Choose wisely.
That’s when Maura realized why Hank’s death had been so unsettling. It wasn’t just the profound loss, or the shocking violence. It was the fact that Hank was the first.
Not the first person that Maura knew who had died, of course, but the first short-stringer that Maura knew who had reached the end of their string. Who had run out of options, out of time.
And it made Maura wonder about how it might happen to her. The scissor that would snip the strand.
Nina, with her gloriously long string, had actually been given two gifts: A lengthy life and the ability to assume that death would catch up to her naturally, perhaps in her sleep, when she was old and tired and ready. The peaceful ending that we all deserved, yet only the lucky few got.
Maura was not so lucky.
The science was sharpening quickly, measurements growing more exact. The window in which your life would end was tightening by the minute, and both short-and long-stringers had gone back to the updated website to amend their expectations. But the precision only fueled the fear, as what was once a handful of years became a season, became a month.