All We Can Do Is Wait

by Richard Lawson

  Which was not the point, of course. The point was Kate. The point was whether or not she was O.K. It didn’t matter then, maybe it wouldn’t ever, if Skyler could manage her life on her own. What a selfish thing to even think. Skyler chided herself and bit a nail, the bus lurching as it stopped and started, stopped and started. She felt nauseated. She hadn’t eaten much of anything that day, really, a yogurt before school and then nothing else. Not because she was too busy—Skyler was not exactly a model student—but because she’d been feeling unsettled all day, since the night before, when she’d gotten a text message from a number she didn’t know. All it said was Hey, but it filled her with dread, knowing that it was probably him.

  She’d gone to Kate’s room to tell her about it, but she was studying and had just said, “Ignore it,” which Skyler knew she wouldn’t be able to do. And Kate should have known that too. Skyler stood in Kate’s doorway, waiting for more advice, until Kate sighed and turned to her sister, sitting up on her bed. “Just do your thing. Don’t respond, delete the message, and do your breathing thing. It’s fine. You don’t have to respond to a text message, no matter who it’s from.”

  Skyler nodded. “I know, I know. Yeah. You’re right. It’s just . . . What if it is him?”

  Kate sighed again. She looked tired. She was a full-time student at Lesley and working a job way across the city. She barely had any time to sleep, let alone counsel her little sister every time she had an anxiety attack. Or whatever this was. Things had been better for a little while at that point, but still, standing there in Kate’s doorway, Skyler wanted more from her sister, some reassurance, some magic cure-all.

  Kate probably sensed that. “Skyler. You’re O.K. It’s over. It is. I promise,” she had said, before turning back to her textbook. Skyler wandered back to her room, the cramped little alcove in the corner of the second floor, clothes spilling off her raised bed, papers and blue books and other school ephemera littering nearly every surface. She tried her breathing thing, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply as she thought to herself, over and over again, Waves on the ocean, waves on the ocean. It’s just waves on the ocean.

  It was a little mantra Skyler had learned to repeat to herself when she was younger and scared of flying. They took a long flight to Cambodia every June when school got out, and Skyler had hated the turbulence as the plane rumbled along, flying north, over the Pole, down into Asia. Kate, always seeming so serene and practical on those endless flights, had told her that the bumps might feel big, but they were actually pretty small. “Think about being on a boat. You bounce a little, but not much. It’s just little waves. That’s all it is.” And it helped. Like pretty much everything Kate said to her, did for her, this had calmed Skyler down.

  Now, as the bus approached Fort Point Channel, another bridge looming, Skyler felt tetherless. She tried to focus on what she knew. The news had told her what? Cars that weren’t over the water yet had fallen into Charlestown. Cars that were had landed in the Mystic. Some people had managed to get out of their cars before they fell, but they still may not have made it off the bridge. The direction Kate was coming from, chances were she’d gone into the water, that she hadn’t made it to the Charlestown side yet. Skyler pictured the car, that familiar old Camry, bubbling and sinking.

  Waves on the river.

  Kate was a strong swimmer. Wasn’t she? Skyler couldn’t remember the last time they’d gone swimming. Maybe Buzzards Bay the Fourth of July before last. Maybe in their cousin George’s pool, in Philadelphia.

  But this water was cold. It was November, and dark. It had begun to rain. The bus’s windshield wipers made low, mournful squeaks as they worked, and the night suddenly felt unbeatable, like there was no way anything good could come out of it, like the only thing waiting for Skyler when she got to the hospital was very bad news. She began to feel that familiar panic and worry rise up in her, curdling in her stomach and then pressing on her chest. She reached for her phone in her bag. It was now . . . 4:22 in the morning in Phnom Penh. Skyler’s thumb hovered over the green “Call” button, but a new feeling of resolve stopped her. If she was going to be alone now, if she was going to have to help herself from here on out, this is where it would start.

  She would ride the bus until the last stop, then walk the remaining few blocks to the hospital, in the rain if need be. She would wait as long as she needed to, she would ask as many questions as she could. She would keep herself composed, she would not cry or break down or worse. She would not text the mysterious number back, both fearing and sickly hoping that it was him. She would not try to call her mother, wherever she was. She would not bother her old, tired, sweet, and stern grandparents, who’d already seen a lifetime of death and horror before Skyler had even been born. She would handle this herself, whatever this was.

  The bus hissed to a stop, and Skyler gathered her things. She stepped out into the cool rain falling on Cambridge Street in a thin veil. There was the world again, immediate and loud, car tires sloshing through water, sirens wailing both toward and away from her. Boston was a jumble, dark and disorienting, and Skyler felt herself standing very much in the middle of it. Not the center of it, not the focus of all this chaos, but caught in its tightest, fastest winds, circling around her, whipping past and jostling her like turbulence. She steadied herself, took a few deep breaths, and then turned toward the hospital, running down Cambridge Street until she saw the fluorescent glow of the emergency room sign cutting through the dark and rain.

  • • •

  As expected, the scene at the hospital was overwhelming. People were pushing and yelling, a crowd of them by the reception desk. Skyler immediately felt helpless. How was she ever going to get past all these people to ask whomever she needed to ask about her sister? She considered turning and leaving—flight, ironically, coming so much more easily to her than fight. But she closed her eyes and planted her feet. Waves waves waves waves. She felt her panic dip down a little, relieving the pressure in her chest, her head not tingling quite so much. When she opened her eyes she felt surprisingly clear, as if everything had snapped into focus. She knew she had to take advantage of this likely brief moment, before her brain reminded her of the dire gravity of the situation she was in and she was once again knocked off course.

  She shouldered her bag and walked toward the crowd of people, a mix of ages and faces, some angry, some teary, others ghost-white with worry. As she got closer, she was able to plot a course through the crowd. She was small and slight, only about five-foot-three and skinny, so she could slip between people without much trouble. She scooted past a few people, saying a quiet “Excuse me,” a turn here and a pivot there, and then she was through, past the scrum to where it was, somehow, quieter, like she’d passed through the wall of a hurricane and now here was the eye. Eerie and ominous and tingling with dread, but still.

  Skyler looked around and saw an official-looking woman, tall and pale, talking in hushed, serious tones to a few people by some swinging doors. There were two women with babies, both miraculously asleep for the moment. Not many people were sitting, but Skyler saw a girl about her age, looking regal and sad. Something about the way the girl was dressed, the way her blond hair was somehow still shiny even in this drab lighting, in this terrible place, made Skyler think that she was rich, that she probably lived in some big house somewhere and was waiting to hear if her butler had died or something.

  Skyler realized she was staring—something about seeing someone her age, also alone, in this very grown-up and real-life place was transfixing—and turned away, back toward the tall, pale woman. She seemed to be finishing her conversation with the couple, putting a bony hand lightly on the man’s shoulder, so Skyler quickly strode up to her, not wanting to lose her chance to ask the official-looking woman what she knew.

  “Excuse me?” Skyler croaked, barely any sound coming out. She suddenly realized she hadn’t said anything out loud in probably two hours. She cleared
her throat, thought about grabbing the woman’s sleeve but didn’t want to seem like a child. “Excuse me?” she said, louder this time, more confident.

  The woman turned and Skyler caught a glimpse of her nametag. It said “Mary Oakes,” and then “Patient Relations.” The woman looked down at Skyler, regarding her with a cold curiosity.

  “Where are your parents?”

  Skyler was thrown. “Uh. I don’t know.”

  “Were they in the accident?”

  “What? No. My sister. My sister was.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Kate Vong? Do you know anything about her? Do you know if they’re bringing her here?”

  The woman’s face softened a little. But just a little. “The patients most in need of care will be brought here, but extraction at the scene is taking longer than anticipated. It’s a safety concern. I can only tell you what I’ve told everyone else: You are very likely in the right place, there is a high probability that your sister will be brought here, but I cannot guarantee anything. Of course, we will update all of you as often as we are able.”

  Skyler felt stuck, and oddly disappointed. She didn’t know anything now that she hadn’t an hour ago. “So I should just wait?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Mary Oakes said, turning to talk to the other people who were queuing up to ask her the same question. “If you would all just please wait as calmly as possible, we will know more soon.”

  Skyler stood still, not sure what to do now. She looked up at the wall clock: 4:52 in the morning in Phnom Penh. Her grandmother would be awake in an hour or so. She always woke up early and went to bed late. She had trouble sleeping, had had trouble sleeping since she left Cambodia in the 1970s. “I don’t know why you go back there, how you can go back there,” Skyler’s mother had once said to her grandmother. “After everything they did to you.” Skyler’s grandmother had just pursed her lips and stayed silent, as she often did when her daughter, Leap—called Lucy in America—started in on her.

  Skyler watched as Mary Oakes surveyed the room and then, with a prim little nod, turned and walked through the swinging doors, disappearing into some inner sanctum of the hospital, which was presumably being prepared for the first rush of victims. Skyler felt the flutter of helplessness rise in her again. Was knowing nothing better than knowing the worst? She wasn’t sure.

  She reached for her phone and swiped it open. Her heart sank when she saw that the mysterious number, with an 857 area code, had texted her again. You O.K.? For a crazy second Skyler thought maybe it was Kate, trying to reach her somehow, with someone else’s phone. Impulsively, Skyler began to type back but then stopped herself. Why wouldn’t Kate just call? She was one of the few people Skyler knew who actually remembered people’s phone numbers.

  And why would she be asking Skyler if she was O.K., when it was Kate who’d been in the accident? Skyler’s grandfather—who was really her step-grandfather, her actual grandfather having gone missing before the family fled Cambodia—had once told her a story about the ghosts of people tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge. They haunted an infamous prison, and even years later, guards would set food out for these ghosts, thinking they must be hungry. Skyler found herself wondering, insanely, if maybe Kate was already a ghost and was trying to contact her through the phone.

  Which was dumb. The number had texted her last night, before any of this had happened. It was him. She knew it was. The broken, shameful part of herself wanted desperately to write back, to tell him that no, she was not O.K., that her sister was probably dead, that despite everything, she wanted to see him, to have him hold her and tell her that she was going to be fine. But knowing how angry her sister would be if she did that, Skyler didn’t. She put her phone away, hoping he hadn’t seen the little bubbles that indicated someone typing on the other end.

  Her phone buzzed again, and Skyler thought about the turbulence on those plane rides to Cambodia, the little dips and sudden jolts, the steady drone of the engines sometimes interrupted by piercing whines or roars. “The plane’s just readjusting,” Kate would say when Skyler tensed in her seat. “That’s all that’s happening. Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s wrong.”

  Skyler would nod and try to believe what Kate was telling her. But then the plane would bump again and she would instinctively reach for her sister’s hand, knowing then, at least, that she still had that to hold on to.

  Chapter Three

  Alexa

  LONELY IN A crowded room. That phrase—something the school counselor, Ms. Reeve, had said a few times during their meetings over the last year—was running through Alexa’s head as she stood in the ER waiting area, huddles of distraught people talking nervously, frantically typing on phones, pacing back and forth as much as they could in the cramped, fluorescent-lit room. Alexa was alone, and she felt it, a familiar empty feeling, a confusion and a resignation. Jason would be no help, it seemed. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise, not when he’d been so distant, so caught up in his own moodiness, for over a year.

  Wasn’t it supposed to be the older sibling who took care of things? Wasn’t Alexa, the younger sister, the one who should be freaking out and bratty, not left to handle all the heavy, practical worry? This seemed unfair. Which Alexa knew was childish, to think that anything on a day like this should have any sense of fairness about it, but there she was, standing by herself in a mass of strangers, wishing that just this once, things would work the way they were supposed to.

  Looking around, Alexa assessed that she was probably the youngest person in the waiting room, save for two babies who were being clutched close by their wild-eyed mothers, maybe waiting on news of husbands or wives or, Alexa realized with a jolt of dread, maybe other children. Noise seemed to come in waves, no phones at the reception desk ringing and then, all of a sudden, all of them going off at once. That’s when the talk in the room would swell back up to a din and the crowd would start moving its way toward the desk and the doors to the outside, looking to see if someone was being brought in from the scene of the accident. But then nothing would change.

  Alexa got close enough to a blond woman to see that she was wearing a nametag. “Mary Oakes,” it read. And beneath that, “Patient Relations.” So she wasn’t a doctor, just some sort of spokeswoman or something. Still, when Alexa looked at her sharp nose and little line of a mouth, it looked like she knew more than she was letting on, like there was a crucial bit of information she was calculatingly keeping from all these panicked people.

  Alexa stood near Mary Oakes, tall and pale with hair the color of the white corn you could buy at farm stands on the Cape in the summer, as a timid, tired-looking woman walked away from Mary and toward a man who had just arrived. They were older than Alexa’s parents, the parents of someone in college, or grad school, maybe. The man looked panicked as he asked his wife what was happening.

  “He was on the bridge,” she told him. “He was driving on the bridge.”

  “Where?” the man asked.

  “On the bridge, the Tobin Bridge, when—” the woman stammered.

  “I meant on what side, Eveyln. Northbound? Southbound?”

  The woman looked annoyed suddenly, less tired from grief and more from years of frustration, maybe. “North, Howard. He was driving to see you . . .”

  “I didn’t know,” the man, Howard, said quietly.

  “Yeah, well . . .” Evelyn trailed off.

  “Is north good?” the man asked after a small, freighted pause.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!” the woman yelped, bursting into tears. Her husband—or maybe ex-husband, from the sound of it—awkwardly put his arms around her.

  The couple seemed so tiny and scared in the middle of the hospital’s frenzy. Alexa pulled herself away, feeling nosy and intrusive.

  It went on like this. Mary Oakes would disappear for a minute or two behind some swinging doors but then retur
n, standing on the edge of the room with her arms crossed, making herself available for questions but never really answering anything. Eventually the room would ebb back into nervous quiet, which made Alexa feel restless and even more alone, like a little girl in a place full of grown-ups where she wasn’t supposed to be. She found a seat—most people seemed too anxious to sit down—and tried to calm herself. She wanted Jason there with her, but also suspected that he’d just frustrate her if he was, as he had been doing pretty steadily since the summer before.

  • • •

  Like her brother, Alexa was wary of her parents’ plan for a family bonding summer. But the truth was that a summer in Boston didn’t really seem much better. Alexa had a few friends, girls she ate lunch with and would occasionally see on the weekends, but they always seemed like best friends with each other and not with her. She did a number of extracurriculars—she ran on the cross-country team in the fall, worked as the copy editor for the school paper, painted scenery for the theater club’s productions—but she never found the community that others seemed to. A lot of what she did was lonely by design, solitary work that Alexa could focus on without the interference—welcome or otherwise—of other people.

  “Why do you think that is?” Ms. Reeve, the school counselor, had asked Alexa once during one of their regular meetings. “That you seem to gravitate toward things where you’re alone?”

  Alexa hadn’t really thought about it before. “I don’t know. I guess . . . I guess it’s just easier to do what I need to do when I’m the only person I need to rely on.”

  “But don’t you think you might be able to do more things, or at least different things, if you teamed up with other kids?”

  “Probably. But it just always seems easier not to.”

  “Are you lonely, Alexa?” Ms. Reeve asked, sitting forward in her chair, a concerned, imperious look on her face.