All We Can Do Is Wait

by Richard Lawson

  There was also the gay thing, in the beginning a quiet, scary suspicion that Jason could mostly ignore when he first noticed it, a little bud in him not yet in bloom, but that had, over the last year or so, grown into something too big to turn away from or deny. Jason’s parents weren’t conservative people, not politically anyway, but theirs was not the kind of household where you talked about feelings and crushes and stuff like that, let alone sex.

  Jason’s friends, if you could call them friends, were all jockish, preppy boys from big houses out in the wealthy suburbs. They weren’t the kind of guys who would tolerate a gay friend. Or rather, they would tolerate it, but nothing further. Jason had imagined one of these conversations playing out many times, always ending the same way. He and Carter Chapman, maybe, stoned or drunk in Killington, sitting on the carpeting in the downstairs rec room, snow falling outside. (There was always something a little sexy about this image, Jason had to admit to himself.) Jason, feeling warm and bold, would say, “You know, man . . . I’m gay,” and Carter would bristle. Jason could see Carter thinking nervously for a second and then nodding his head, like you’re supposed to do. Saying, “That’s cool, that’s cool,” like you’re supposed to. But then the night would end abruptly, and the rest of the weekend would be weird. And when they got back to Boston—Carter’s parents dropping Jason off downtown before heading back to Concord—the city would feel lonely.

  Maybe it would be better, Jason often wondered, to be alone. But then he’d get frightened at the thought of having no one, even people he didn’t like all that much, and decide to bottle himself up, to not tell Carter or anyone, until he graduated and could leave.

  Graduation would be hard-won. Jason was kicked out of his first school, a boarding school in New Hampshire he’d begged his parents to send him to when he was in eighth grade, for stealing a case of champagne from the headmaster’s office—it was left over from some fund-raiser, the headmaster explained—and distributing bottles to the kids in his dorm. The truth was, he’d been looking for a way to get booted, not wanting to tell his parents that he’d made a mistake, that he hated this remote school and its stuffy traditions and wanted to come home. He’d also developed a furtive, dangerous crush on his roommate, Jamie, a kid from some insanely rich family in Colombia, who had shaggy brown hair, a beautiful accent, and a habit of telling Jason long, rambling stories about his sexual exploits back home. Jason had spent the better part of that year tormented in this frigid prison, and thus the case of Moët, just waiting to be nicked, had been a perfect out.

  Then there was a school in town, or in a close suburb of the city, a progressive kind of place where students called teachers by their first names and the choir sang nondenominational, or omnidenominational, songs during “the holiday season.” It wasn’t such a bad place, generous and laid-back as it was. But that was the year when, at fifteen, almost sixteen, Jason got into partying, first trying weed with a junior named Chance Righton in the wood-smelling basement in Chance’s dad’s condo in Stowe. He’d moved on quickly to drinking. It was many nights of booze from parents’ liquor cabinets, maybe some pills brought back from New York City, where Chance’s brother, Reardon, was a freshman at NYU. (Yes, Reardon Righton. They called him Rearin’ Right In, which Jason thought sounded kinda gay but was apparently a nickname given to Reardon after an encounter with an especially adventurous girl from Choate on Nantucket two summers previous.)

  Jason spent the winter of his sophomore year bumming around Chance’s dad’s ski condo, or up till dawn at the loft apartment on Commercial Street where a girl named Ainsley Briggs lived, essentially alone, as her parents spent most of their time at their country house. If Jason’s parents noticed any change in their son, his odd hours and frequent overnights at friends’ houses, they didn’t say anything. Linda was often busy helping to plan First Night in the lead-up to New Year’s, and then Theo went on scuba diving trips to Martinique with clients all throughout January and February. So winter was not a very scrutinized time for the Elsing children. By the time anyone but Jason and his teachers noticed his grades slipping, it was too late. He was not “asked back” for his junior year at the progressive school, leaving his parents frustrated, but not so much that they sat him down and talked to him, really asked him what was wrong.

  “You’ve got to fix this, Jason,” his mother said, frowning at him in the kitchen a week after his glorified expulsion.

  “Fix what?” Jason asked, head pounding, not fully aware if it was day or night. The Elsings’ kitchen was in the basement of their town house, and there was no natural light.

  “This . . . whatever it is you’re doing,” Linda said, already sounding bored with the conversation. “We can’t just keep shifting you from place to place, Jason. You need some grounding; you need roots. You need a track record, a history in one place, so you can go somewhere decent.” She was referring to college, of course, though college was so far off Jason’s radar that she may as well have been talking about Mars.

  Jason nodded, said, “I know, I know,” and that was it. Linda returned to whatever work she was doing, and Jason dragged himself up to his third-floor bedroom to go to sleep.

  Mostly Jason’s parents seemed annoyed that they had to find him another school on such short notice. Alexa’s school was out of the question, because it was all girls. And even if Jason had been a girl, his grades were shit, so he never would have gotten in. So, the family settled on Neiman Prep, a small school in a quiet part of downtown that was known to be a dumping ground for rich burnouts, problem kids who had to bang around somewhere until they graduated and exploited legacies to go to universities they had no reason being at. If Theo and Linda were concerned or embarrassed about this downshift in Jason’s education, they didn’t let on, and Jason didn’t much care. By that fall, he’d grown sick of Chance and Ainsley and preferred to hole up in his room, taking pills, an Adderall or a Xanax, sometimes, ones he bought from a public school kid, meeting him in the Fens about once a week.

  There was something sexy about meeting a guy in the Fens, a known gay cruising and hookup spot between Fenway Park and the MFA, but Jason never dared try anything with the amateur dealer, whose name was Sean and who had the ratty, malnourished look of many a Dorchester or Charlestown boy. (He wore it well, though.) In fact, Jason didn’t try anything with anyone. Potent and horny-making as getting wasted could be, it also effectively removed him from normal socializing. If he wasn’t doing it alone, whoever Jason got fuzzy and fucked-up with—a few kids from Neiman, occasionally one or two of his less square, less preppy childhood friends—they all blended into the same amorphous blob, names and faces smeared together in the haze of the night.

  Things continued on like that for all of Jason’s junior year, his grades improving a little, but only because Neiman basically gave you a B just for showing up. Then, in May, the announcement of the Wellfleet plan. This dreadful moment at the dining room table.

  “When do we leave?” Jason asked.

  “June!” Theo said brightly. “Early June. Soon as you kids are done with exams.”

  I’m already done with exams, Jason thought, laughing a little to himself.

  “There’s a smile,” Theo said happily. “See? We’re going to love it.”

  Linda bobbed her head in agreement. “It’s going to be a wonderful summer.”

  Not convinced of the plan’s wonderfulness, Jason had a freak-out. He texted Sean and asked how big an order he could place before he left, but Sean replied tapped out sorry and then wanna meet anyway tho? :) and Jason panicked and never wrote back. Jason certainly didn’t know any of the townie dealers on the Cape, and so he was potentially faced with a summer without any of the downers that mellowed him out and put him to bed. It would likely just be weed and alcohol, which didn’t seem like enough.

  But as much as Jason was freaking out, he was, he slowly came to realize as May drew to a close, also a little relieved t
o be leaving Boston for a whole summer, to get away from the vacant, bottomed-out Neiman kids, to maybe reconnect with Brandon and Connor and some of his other old friends who’d drifted off into healthier, more productive lives. They were boring but safe, relatively wholesome. If nothing else, they were easier to pretend with. (Over the year, Jason had a couple of too-close-for-comfort moments with an out Neiman boy named Seth, a troubled, artsy kid from Brookline. There’d been some near-misses at parties, Seth touching Jason’s arm or brushing past him in a hallway, lingering as they pressed by each other, Jason running from the electric pull of it.) He and Brandon and Connor and maybe Fitz, if he was around, would get drunk, steal the golf cart from the club, hang out at the beach. Simple stuff. There were worse ways to spend a summer. Jason at least knew that.

  And so in June they went, the Elsings, packing up the new Volvo and the old Saab, Theo letting Jason drive once they got off 495, the cool, blue early June wind blowing in the windows, the deep, satisfying greens of a Massachusetts summer welcoming them as they wended up the thin arm of the Cape. As they approached the house, gravel crunching under the tires, Jason felt a sudden jolt of excitement, maybe even hope. It seemed, that early evening, the sky behind the house purple and dreamy and big, like maybe something was about to change.

  • • •

  “What the hell, Jason?” Alexa planted herself in the center of the ER entrance, her eyes red from crying, her chin trembling.

  “Sorry, sorry, I just had to get some air.”

  “You’ve been gone for twenty minutes. I didn’t know where you were. I mean, don’t you care what’s happening right now? Do you even know what’s happening right now?”

  “Do you?”

  “I—no. I mean, yes, I do. They said the first people from the accident are going to be here soon and that we just have to wait. Someone will tell us if they, if Mom and Dad, are brought in. But there’s, like, a million other people waiting in there. I don’t know how they’re going to find us.”

  “Mom and Dad?”

  “No, the lady, the hospital lady who will tell us if they’re here.”

  “Oh. Well. I mean . . . we’ll just . . . be there, right? So she’ll find us.”

  “It would really help if we’re both in there, just in case.”

  Jason took her meaning. “O.K. I won’t leave again, I promise.”

  They walked toward the waiting room, which was full of harried, frenzied people, most of them crowded around the reception desk, pleading with a tired-looking nurse or secretary or someone, who threw up her hands and said, “I can only help one person at a time. Please let me do that.”

  “Are they all waiting on people from the bridge?” Jason asked, knowing it was a dumb question as soon as he asked it, but finding it hard to comprehend how all these people—there had to be fifty of them, maybe more—knew someone who’d happened to be crossing the Tobin Bridge, in the middle of the day on a Monday, at the exact moment of the collapse.

  Alexa nodded, and then seemed to get annoyed. “It’s really bad, Jason. Like, really bad. I don’t know if . . . They said a lot of people drowned.”

  “Who said?”

  “Twitter.”

  Jason rolled his eyes. There it was. Haughtiness. “No one on Twitter knows what they’re talking about. Remember the Marathon? They were saying, like, a hundred people had died at first, and it was really like two.”

  “It was three.”

  “Whatever. It wasn’t a hundred. It can’t be that bad. People were in cars. This is just . . . People are just panicking.”

  “Aren’t you panicking? Are you even worried about them?”

  “Of course I am, Alexa. I just . . . We don’t know anything, do we? So let’s just assume everything’s O.K. Because it probably is.”

  Alexa stared at him in disbelief and, then, disgust. “Are you high right now?”

  “What?”

  “Are you high?”

  Jason ground his teeth, looked down at the floor. He wasn’t. He hadn’t taken anything that day, he was pretty sure. But he still felt high. Maybe from the night before. Which scared him, and made him feel like a loser. Haughtiness, gone. “No. I’m not high, Alexa.”

  “Because ‘let’s just assume everything’s O.K.’ when there’s been a huge accident involving our parents and we have no idea what’s going on sounds like high talk to me.”

  “Jesus, Alexa, I’m not high. But I am sick of you bitching at me. I’m here. I’m staying. I’m sorry I went outside. I’ll find the lady and ask her if she knows anything, O.K.? What does she look like?”

  “She’s got blond hair.”

  “That’s really helpful, Alexa, thanks.”

  Alexa looked like she’d been slapped. “Fuck you, Jason. Honestly, fuck you.” She turned from him and stalked off into the crowd of people, disappearing around a corner by some chairs. Jason stood there, feeling dumb, his face hot from something like shame. His hand itched for his phone.

  He wanted to hear his voice again. He wanted his voice to take him back, to last summer, to all that possibility. When his parents, his imperfect but good parents, were intact, accounted for. When he was just a seventeen-year-old fuckup, not whatever he was now. An orphan, maybe. Whose sister hated him. He knew that all he had to do was talk to Alexa, to tell her why things had been so tense and sad between them for the past year, why he’d gone down another rabbit hole after a short summer when things had cleared up, when he was bright and alert again. But he couldn’t find the words. Not then, not ever.

  Not since Labor Day a year ago. Jason closed his eyes and thought of the boy in the voice mail. The boy who loved him, and had first said so while calling from a party in Provincetown late one summer night. In the magical, lost time before everything in the world seemed to crumble and fall apart.

  Chapter Two

  Skyler

  THE BUS FELT impossible. Though she took a city bus to school every day, and home from school too, in that moment, as Skyler struggled to hold her bag while cradling her phone with her chin and trying to get her CharlieCard out of her wallet, for a second all she could focus on was how impossible it was to just get on this bus so she could get to where she needed to be.

  Where she needed to be. After miraculously not dropping anything, and finding a seat toward the front of the bus, the horrifying fact of where Skyler was going rushed back in like cold into a room. The phone, still cradled on her shoulder, was making a weird purring, chirping sound, telling her that the call she was trying to make wasn’t going to go through. Or no one was answering. What time was it there, anyway? She was trying to call her grandparents in Phnom Penh, where they were spending a month. But as she did the math she realized that it was four in the morning in Cambodia, and though her grandparents were light sleepers, they would, on principle, refuse to answer the phone that early. Because they didn’t like to be bothered, but also, Skyler suspected, because they knew, more than most people, how bad the news on the other end of the line could be.

  As the bus lurched down Summer Street, Skyler listened to the brrrp-brrrp, brrrp-brrrp a few more times before hanging up and throwing the phone in her bag. She sighed, tried to calm herself down, leaning her head back against the cool glass of the bus window and closing her eyes. What good would calling her grandparents really have done, anyway? They were thousands of miles away and realistically couldn’t just up and rush back. They were old and slow, and changing their flight would cost too much money. They weren’t due home for weeks. Skyler was alone. She knew that.

  Skyler had been on the phone with her sister, Kate, when everything went wrong. They were talking—well, they were arguing, really, about the stupid car and who was going to use it on Saturday—when Kate said, “Wait, something’s happening. Oh my God, I have to—” There was a clattering, an awful crunching sound, and then the phone went dead. Then there were Skyler’s few sec
onds of blind panic, then the frantic calling of 911, then the waiting, and now this, heading on a bus to the hospital to wait some more. To find out if her sister was crushed inside that stupid car on her way home from a job she hated. Or if she’d drowned. Or if she was alive and things would go back to being . . . if not perfect, at least not this.

  Traffic was bad, a combination of rush hour and the broader madness of the accident tangling up the city. Horns were blaring, and Skyler thought about her grandparents, about the streets of Phnom Penh, choked with mopeds and scooters and tuk-tuks. She’d hated visiting there as a kid, the place her grandparents had fled years before so strange and foreign and inhospitable, too noisy and bright, nothing like their quiet enough street in plain old Jamaica Plain, where nothing much ever seemed to happen.

  Skyler wished her grandparents were back, but she also knew that she’d hate to see them distraught, dealing with all this horror, real and potential. What if what Skyler was convinced she knew was actually true? What if Kate was dead, swallowed up by a random accident—it was an accident, wasn’t it? Do terrorists blow up bridges?—and that was it? What the hell was Skyler going to do? The only person in the world who she could really talk to, who understood what Skyler had been through in the past two years, was her sister, her calm and resourceful and usually reasonable sister. It didn’t make any sense that this could happen to Kate. This kind of calamity was supposed to befall Skyler—she was the messy one, the fragile one, the one who always needed scooping up after some disaster. Kate, solid, good, boring Kate, she was the rock. Kate was the one who would inevitably hold their small family together after their grandparents were gone. But now it was entirely possible that she had been ripped out of the world and that Skyler would have to sort out her life on her own.