And Ben thought that Amie might like him, too. But what if she only liked the part of Ben that she met this week, the hero who helped a neighbor in need, and not the sad, self-pitying short-stringer who was also, inextricably, a part of Ben?
He looked up at his parents, both in their early sixties now, sorting through the records of their shared life, of decades spent side by side. How could Ben ask any woman to choose him, when he couldn’t give her that?
His last few months with Claire, around his thirtieth birthday, were the first time that Ben actually contemplated marriage and fatherhood in a real, palpable sense, rather than some elusive hypotheticals. And after Claire left him, after he learned about his string, suddenly all of the future steps that he’d always taken for granted—getting married, raising a family, watching his kids grow up as he aged with his wife—were no longer guaranteed.
It was painful for Ben to think that if the strings had never arrived, or if Claire had never opened his box, then he simply would have pursued those steps, no questions asked, no second thoughts. But now those second thoughts tortured his mind.
“Oh gosh, look at this!” His mother lifted a pint-size pumpkin costume from the box labeled Halloween.
Ben leaned over to examine the ensembles in the box: Woody’s cowboy hat, a retractable lightsaber, even the matted faux-beard from his yearlong obsession with Antoni Gaudí after a family trip to Spain.
“These will make some little kids so happy.” His mom smiled, placing everything in the donation bin.
His dad was about to crush the empty box when Ben spotted a small Hallmark card stuck to the bottom. On the front of the card was a cartoon ghost shouting Boo! and on the inside, his parents had written, Don’t be scared! We’re always watching out for you.
“I guess we used to be a little schmaltzy,” said Ben’s father.
“Used to be?” Ben joked.
But his mother elbowed her husband gently. “Hey, that was a nice card,” she said. “And we meant it.”
As his parents returned to their respective piles, Ben looked down at the open card in his lap, the joke scrawled in his mother’s cursive, and he felt a strange twinge in his eye.
His mom was right. Ben couldn’t even remember a time when he was with his parents and still felt scared. He had only ever felt protected.
Even after he flipped off his bike as a reckless teenager and was lying in the hospital bed, anxiously awaiting his X-ray results, just the sight of his parents, running into the ER, had instantly steadied his nerves. It didn’t matter that they would spend the next hour chiding him for his carelessness. When he saw them coming, he simply felt safe.
So how could he not turn to them now, in the most frightening hour of his life, when he needed their comfort the most?
Yes, the truth would hurt them, Ben thought, but wouldn’t it hurt them more to find out later? To think their son hadn’t trusted them enough? After all the times they had been there?
“There’s something I need to tell you both,” said Ben. “I know about my string. It’s the real reason why Claire and I broke up. And . . . it has about fourteen more years. A decade and a half.” He smiled thinly. “It sounds a bit better that way.”
There was a brief pause then, a gap in time when nobody spoke or moved, and Ben worried that something in his parents had irrevocably cracked, shattered in one small instant.
Until his mother leaned forward and pulled him toward her and hugged him with the fierceness, the almost-otherworldly intensity, that can only be reached by a particular person in a particular moment: a parent sheltering their child. Ben was taller and broader than his mother, he had been since college, but somehow, now, her body seemed to wrap around Ben’s, engulfing him like he was a little boy, swaddling him with her whole self. And Ben’s father placed his hand atop his son’s shoulder, warm and heavy, exerting just enough pressure to keep Ben from folding over.
Ben realized, then, that Claire never once touched him when she told him the truth that night. It was quite shocking, in retrospect. She had squeezed her arms around herself, trying to hold herself steady. But Ben’s parents didn’t care about themselves, not right now. They cared only about their son.
So Ben sat there, on top of a storage trunk, in the arms of his mother, under the hand of his father, and everything that needed to be said was said in the silence, in their touch.
Jack
A few weeks after Javier left, Jack needed to escape their apartment, the entire place a reminder of their strained friendship. They had hardly spoken since their fight, and Jack finally understood why his father made them move to a new house when his mother left, the way that memories can tarnish a room.