The Measure by Nikki Erlick
Dedication
For my grandparents,
with love and gratitude
Epigraph
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
Spring Amie
Ben
Several Years Later Javier
Jack
Nina
Amie
Nina
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
It was difficult to imagine a time before them, a world in which they hadn’t come.
But when they first appeared, in March, nobody had any idea what to do with them, these strange little boxes that came with the spring.
Every other box, at every stage in people’s lives, had a clear meaning, a set course of action. The shoebox holding a shiny new pair to be worn on the first day of school. The holiday present crowned with a looped red ribbon, skillfully curled on a scissor’s edge. The tiny box with the long-dreamt-of diamond inside, and the large cardboard packages, sealed with tape and labeled by hand, loaded into the back of the moving truck. Even that final box, resting under the earth, whose lid, once shut, would never be opened.
Every other box felt familiar, understandable, expected even. Every other box had a purpose and a place, fitting comfortably within the course of a typical life.
But these boxes were different.
They came at the start of the month, on an otherwise ordinary day, under an otherwise ordinary moon, too early to blame the March equinox.
And when the boxes came, they came for everyone, all at once.
Small wooden chests—at least, they looked wooden—that emerged overnight, millions and millions of them, in every town and every state and every country.
The boxes appeared on finely mowed lawns in the suburbs, nestled between hedges and the first blooms of the hyacinth. They sat atop well-trampled doormats in the cities, where decades of tenants had passed through the threshold. They sank into the warm sands outside tents in the desert and waited near lonely lakeside cabins, gathering dew in the breeze off the water. In San Francisco and S?o Paulo, in Johannesburg and Jaipur, in the Andes and the Amazon, there wasn’t anywhere, or anyone, that the boxes couldn’t find.
There was something both comforting and unsettling about the fact that every adult on earth suddenly seemed to be sharing the same surreal experience, the ubiquity of the boxes both a terror and a relief.
Because, in many ways, it was the same experience. In nearly every manner, these boxes were identical. All were dark brown in color, with reddish tints, cool and smooth to the touch. And inscribed on every box was a simple, yet cryptic message, written in the native tongue of its recipient: The measure of your life lies within.
Within each box was a single string, initially hidden by a silvery white piece of delicate fabric, so even those who lifted the lid would think twice before looking at what lay underneath. As if the box itself were warning you, trying to protect you from your own childish impulse to immediately tear away the wrapping. As if the box were asking you to pause, to truly contemplate your next move. Because that one could never be undone.
Indeed, the boxes varied on only two accounts.
Each small chest bore the name of its individual recipient, and each string inside measured a different length.
But when the boxes first arrived that March, amid the fear and the confusion, nobody quite understood what the measure truly meant.
At least, not yet.
Spring
Nina
When the box inscribed with Nina’s name appeared outside her door, Nina was still asleep in bed, her eyelids twitching slightly as her dormant mind wrestled with a difficult dream. (She was back in high school, the teacher demanding to see an essay that Nina had never been assigned.) It was a familiar nightmare for someone prone to stress, but it was nothing compared to the one awaiting her in the waking world.
Nina woke up first that morning, as she usually did, and slid off the mattress, leaving Maura undisturbed in her slumber. She slipped into the kitchen, still wearing her plaid pajama set, and switched on the burner under the plump orange teakettle that Maura had found at a flea market last summer.
The apartment was always deliciously quiet at that early hour, the silence only interrupted by the occasional hiss of a droplet escaping from the lid of the teapot and landing with a sizzle among the low flames of the stovetop. Later, Nina wondered why she hadn’t heard any commotion that morning. There were no screams or sirens or televisions blaring, nothing to alert her to the chaos already unfolding outside her home. If Nina hadn’t turned on her phone, then perhaps she could have stayed in the stillness for just a while longer, savoring the time before.
But instead she sat on the couch and looked at her phone, the way she started every morning, expecting to read a handful of emails and scroll through various newsletters until Maura’s alarm went off and they debated eggs or oatmeal. It was part of Nina’s job as an editor to keep herself informed, but the sheer number of apps and outlets had grown with every year in the role, and it sometimes overwhelmed Nina to think that she could spend an entire lifetime reading and never keep up.