All We Can Do Is Wait

by Richard Lawson

  “It’s what they always do at these things,” Meghan yelled over the loud music. “It’s not like they dance or nothing.”

  Of course they didn’t dance. What had possessed Skyler to think that she and Danny might dance all night? Especially after the fight over the dress? She felt dumb, like a silly puppy dog who had eagerly followed Danny to the dance only to be ignored.

  Meghan leaned in close, smelling like hair spray and sweat, and said, “Doesn’t mean we can’t have fun!” She waved to Skyler to follow her, and they went into the women’s room, where Meghan produced another little bottle of vodka. She took a swig and handed it to Skyler, an eyebrow raised. “If they can do it, we can do it!” Skyler was already a little woozy from the couple of pulls she’d taken in the limo, but whatever. She felt newly indignant about the whole night. She was going to force herself to have fun. Meghan whooped and clapped as Skyler took a big swig then coughed, her throat burning.

  They heard the beginnings of a favorite song, “We Found Love,” coming on and tore out of the bathroom to join the mass of kids waiting to jump up and down at the drop. It was a different kind of fun than Skyler had expected, but it was fun nonetheless—reckless and messy.

  She spent most of the evening dancing with Meghan and the girls, feeling warm and happy from the vodka, careful to adjust her dress whenever it seemed to slip just a little.

  But toward the end of the night, when Danny had finally emerged from the bathroom, pretty far gone and seemingly forgetting to still be mad about the dress, Skyler convinced him to slow dance with her, resting her head on his chest as they swayed to “XO” by Beyoncé, that great, swelling song about deep, eternal, magical love. Danny had softened, kissing her forehead as they danced, holding her gently as they rocked back and forth.

  Skyler figured they were past it now, that it had just been an isolated flare-up, because Danny had been a little buzzed, because he was graduating and emotions were running high. They all took the limo back to Timmy McDonagh’s house, where there was a party since Timmy’s parents were away on a Caribbean cruise. Danny didn’t let Skyler out of his sight the rest of the night, but it felt like the good kind of Danny attention, the us-against-the-world kind, and when they’d gone up to an empty bedroom and had sex—almost like it was their first night together all over again—he said, “I love you, I love you, I love you” while they did it, the two of them falling asleep while spooning, Skyler feeling secure and reassured in Danny’s arms.

  • • •

  Skyler felt her phone vibrate again, quick and sharp, in her bag. Another text. She wasn’t going to look. She wasn’t going to look. It was him. She wasn’t going to look.

  Suddenly, the emergency doors swooshed open, and with a cacophony of yells and siren blares and pounding feet, the first of the Tobin Bridge victims were rushed into the hospital on gurneys, the present moment suddenly so close and immediate and urgent that Skyler could feel it clamping her in place.

  Here was the rest of her life, the rest of Kate’s life, about to be decided.

  Chapter Six

  Alexa

  SHE WASN’T SURE why, but Alexa found herself reaching for Scott’s hand as she watched the emergency room explode into action, nurses and doctors appearing as if from nowhere, all streaming toward the wail of the ambulances outside. It felt strangely like the people of honor had just arrived at the party being hosted for them, Alexa and all the other guests relieved that they were finally here, so the real evening could begin.

  Alexa caught herself before she found Scott’s hand, instead turning toward her brother, who was looking at the flurry of activity with a dazed, open-mouthed expression. Jason turned toward Alexa, gave her a weak look, eyebrows raised. “This is good. Right? This is good. They’re gonna be with this group, I bet.” Alexa still wasn’t sure where this optimism, manic and seeming forced, was coming from. That was not the Jason she’d known for some time now, save for maybe the few peaceful, happy months they’d spent in Wellfleet a year ago. That time had been a mostly unexplained anomaly, and soon Jason was back to his sulking, his stormy moods.

  When Alexa pictured her family, there was the brightness of those twelve weeks surrounded by a sad sort of emptiness. It was hard to picture her family as a family, instead of separate units all floating around the same house by chance. Still, that her parents might be hurt, or worse, threw Alexa off balance in a way that made her feel she might never right herself again. She was trying to think positively. But she couldn’t help but already feel like an orphan, as if the last vestiges of her always distant parents had finally evaporated, disappeared, drifted off somewhere unreachable.

  The crowd of people in the waiting room was surging toward where patients were being brought in, against the loud protestations of Mary Oakes, hair out of place now, and the nurses who worked the reception desk. “Please! Please! Everyone remain calm,” they were all saying in near-unison, as people shouted demands for information. All of Alexa’s tablemates were standing, but Skyler was the only one trying to push forward into the group, using her small size to squeeze between people. Morgan, the girl who had just sat down with them minutes ago, was hanging back, biting a thumbnail and looking lost. Scott had a determined look on his face, as if he was about to go into battle. But he stood still, as unsure what to do as nervous-looking Morgan, as Alexa.

  A strange impulse shivered through Alexa, and she got out her phone. She selected her mom’s cell phone number from her contacts and pressed “Call,” wondering if maybe, now that people from the accident were in the same building as she was, she might hear it, her mom’s familiar ringtone, the soothing classical cello piece calling to her out of all this pandemonium. But the phone went straight to voice mail, her mother’s high, crisp voice instructing her to leave a message.

  Alexa hung up and tried her father’s phone, a number she rarely called, and it actually rang, giving Alexa a surge of hope before it too went to voice mail. Her father hadn’t set up an outgoing message, so it was just the robot lady reciting his number, then the dull beep of the prompt to start talking. Alexa considered saying something, an “If you get this, call me.” But she’d already left plenty of those for her mother hours ago, and it was really unlikely, even if he was in perfect shape, that her father would even check his messages. He was an e-mail man, glued to his BlackBerry at all times.

  Except, of course, for that summer—that charmed June, July, and August when her whole family found some kind of harmony, a cruelly brief little miracle passing through their lives, binding them together before pulling them apart as it left. Her father had put down his phone sometimes then, looking out at the ocean from the porch, leaning back in his Adirondack chair, legs crossed, ice in his cocktail glass tinkling. “Pretty good,” he would say, nodding in approval. And Alexa agreed. At least then, the view was remarkable.

  What had it been, back then? What crept in and fixed them for a little while? It was several things, most likely. Chief among them, the fact that Jason was clear-headed and almost kind. Not every day was like that evening on the beach, when they’d actually talked to each other. But things were lighter, airier, full of jokes and little kindnesses. Jason didn’t mind driving her to work, would even let her plug in her phone to listen to her music.

  One day on the drive over, Jason had surprised her by asking, “So, are you, like, dating anyone?”

  Alexa blushed. “Uh, no, why?”

  “I dunno. You’re always so eager to go to work. I figured you were, like, hooking up with someone in the pantry or whatever.”

  Alexa laughed. “Well, I’m not. I am definitely not.”

  “Well, you should,” Jason said. There was an awkward pause. “I mean, you’re, y’know, cool, and pretty.”

  Alexa laughed again. “Gee, thanks,” she said. “Thank you for validating my prettiness. That’s all I needed. Now I will go screw someone in the pantry.”

 
“I didn’t mean it like that.” He turned to her, looking serious. “I didn’t, honestly.”

  “I know.”

  They drove in silence for a moment, “Cake by the Ocean” blaring incongruously—or maybe perfectly aptly—on the stereo.

  Alexa turned to her brother. “Are you screwing someone?”

  “What, in the Grey’s pantry?” he said, eyes on the road. “No.”

  “But you are screwing someone.”

  “None of your business.”

  “You asked me if I was!”

  “Yeah, but I get to. I’m your protective older brother.”

  “Oh, gross,” Alexa said, making a retching sound. “I think you are, though. Not at Grey’s, but somewhere. I think that’s why you brought it up. You want to tell me, don’t you?”

  “I do not,” Jason said, the smallest of smiles creeping across his face.

  Alexa let it drop, content that she and her brother were getting along, making jokes, dancing around details of their personal lives.

  With her two kids coexisting in harmony, Linda seemed to calm down some. She drank less, for one. Sure, a cocktail with Theo before dinner, and some dry white wine during the meal, but nothing so excessive that she’d fall asleep on the sofa, like she did much of the time back in Boston, waking up the next morning testy and short with a hangover. There weren’t any blurry reveries into the past, no painful, forced conversations about girls from Linda’s college way back when. Theo seemed less distracted, less pinched about work. He and Linda both were back and forth from Boston, but far less than Alexa had expected them to be. They stayed for days at a time, falling into easy rhythms of morning and evening swims, tennis and lunch at the club in between. The trip was working.

  And, of course, there was Kyle. Maybe he’d been the key to all of it. Kyle had warmed the house. Though staying with Laurie and her cousin held the promise of a fun night of getting drunk and listening to music too loud well into the night, Alexa suspected that Kyle liked staying at the Elsings’ best, maybe because it offered some sense of family and normalcy that he didn’t get at home. Kyle, of course, was seeing the magical Pollyanna version of Alexa’s family—he’d likely have been shocked by how estranged they all were in Boston. But on the Cape, wrapped in the spell of those perfect summer winds, they’d put on a good show, and Kyle enjoyed it.

  He fit right in, engaging with Jason about bands and books—it turned out that Jason liked Chvrches and thought the movie version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower didn’t do justice to the book, who knew? Kyle made Linda laugh, a sound round like a bell, and she’d put her hand on his wrist and say, “Oh, you are funny. You really are funny,” as she wiped an eye. Theo was fascinated by Kyle’s scrappy, jerry-rigged existence, which Kyle was frank and forthcoming about. Alexa’s dad thought it was noble somehow. Kyle was “a real bootstrapper.”

  Alexa didn’t feel like she was losing him to her family, though. She felt like she was sharing him. She and Kyle still had plenty of time when it was just the two of them, at work and in the evenings after—and on some days off, though they didn’t share many of those. Alone together, they could easily, pleasantly fall into long conversations about big things. Places to travel, lives they’d like to lead.

  They played a game they called, simply, Five Houses, in which they had to name the five places in the world where they’d buy a house if money was no object.

  “A flat in Paris,” Kyle said one night, he and Alexa curled up on the love seat on the Elsings’ porch.

  “What about the town house in Notting Hill?” Alexa asked.

  “Oh right. Um . . . can I do both?”

  “You can do five houses anywhere you want. That’s the point. But remember, there is the Chunnel.”

  “The Chunnel!” Kyle exclaimed. “How could I forget the fucking Chunnel. O.K. So forget London. I’m Brexiting or whatever. I can just take the train from Paris if I want to see something in the West End.”

  “And to stay at my house in Oxford.”

  “In Oxford, yes, of course.”

  “A tree house in Bali, too,” Kyle murmured.

  “That’s four. Tokyo, New York, Paris, Bali. Where else?”

  Kyle thought for a while. He looked out toward the water. “Here.”

  “Like, Wellfleet?” Alexa asked, a little surprised. She figured he’d want to get as far away from the Cape as possible.

  “No, like, here. This house.”

  “My parents’ house?”

  Kyle turned toward her. She could only barely make him out in the dark, but he seemed to shrug a little. “Yeah. I’ll buy it from them.”

  “I don’t know if it’s for sale. I don’t know why you’d want it anyway. We’re talking any five houses in the world.”

  “It’s a good house,” Kyle said. “Full of good people.”

  Alexa laughed bitterly. “Ha. Right.”

  “Absolutely right,” Kyle said, grabbing Alexa’s hand in the dark.

  “I want to get out, though,” Alexa whispered. “I want to leave.”

  “So, you will.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You will.”

  There was something funny about the Five Houses game, the ridiculousness of it. But they took it seriously too, as if they should treat it with respect on the very slim chance it would jinx it not to.

  Kyle knew about all kinds of places, holding forth on streets in Rome and national parks in Africa, though, he confessed to Alexa, he’d never really been anywhere.

  “Not even to see Wicked,” he sighed to Alexa that night, sitting on the porch with a dreamy look on his face after getting back from smoking a joint with Jason. They laughed, Wicked being the kind of show that dumb tourists would go to New York to see. Not them, though. They’d go see weird plays and eat at ethnic restaurants in Brooklyn. “I can’t wait,” Kyle would say quietly, whenever they talked about New York, like the dream was just around the corner, coming fast—but also like it was very, very far away.

  When he was around, which was surprisingly often for her brother, Jason indulged Alexa’s idle fantasies more than he might have back in Boston. Sometimes he’d sit on the steps of the porch, listening to Alexa and Kyle prattle on. He’d chime in with some random comment, something like “I hear Budapest is cool,” but mostly he seemed content to just sit and listen, a happy, stoned expression on his face, hair salty and knotty, a true beach bum.

  Once Kyle had told Jason that the scruff he’d grown out—a barely there scraggle of blond beard—was cute, and Jason had blushed. Him! Alexa’s brother, blushing. It was a whole new Jason.

  The summer unfolded, endless and green, and Alexa felt herself changing. Passing thoughts about altering her own course, of taking a cue from Kyle and Courtney and, hell, even her brother, developed into a conviction. She was going to listen to all these ambitions inside her and do something about them. Not put them on hold for four years while she went to a socially acceptable school.

  She was envious of Kyle, of his relative freedom, the fact that he could just pack up and go. And he, in his way, gently encouraged her to see that she could be free too.

  “I mean, you’ll go to school eventually,” he said. “But why can’t you, like, live a little first? British kids do it. A gap year. Before they go to uni.”

  He said that in a sing-song British accent, Anglophilia another of his interests, most of which seemed to take him away from his life in Bourne with his mother.

  Another night, later in the summer, mid-August maybe, when they were closing up Grey’s together, Kyle seemed in a particularly chipper mood, bopping around the store and singing Carly Rae Jepsen to himself.

  “What are you so happy about?” Alexa asked him, washing the frappé cups and wiping all the dribbled ice cream from the stainless steel countertop.

  Kyle smiled and said, “I don’t know
! I just think things are going to be good. When they come, the things. They’re going to be good.”

  “The things,” Alexa repeated.

  “Yeah. You know, life or whatever. Stuff. Stuff that isn’t this!”

  Alexa always felt a little hurt when Kyle, or the Price twins, or even Courtney, alluded to how much they hated it there, in Eastham, at Grey’s. “I like this stuff,” she replied, quietly.

  Kyle stopped restocking waffle cones and looked at her, hard. “I know you do. And so do I. You know I do. But like we’ve been saying: We’re both gonna get out at some point. And when we do, when the time comes, I’m just saying I think it’s going to be good. I can feel it.”

  And for the first time in a long time, Alexa found that she really agreed with him. It did feel like that, there in the middle of August, hot but not sticky, the crickets outside like a chorus of assent, a million “yes yes yeses,” telling Alexa, and Kyle, that this feeling was real, that they really were changing, that life was beginning, full of promise and possibility.

  Now, of course, she realized that she’d been wrong, that Kyle had been wrong, terribly so. Here she was in the hospital waiting room a year and change later, in the middle of all this mess, all these endings. A few families who seemed to have gotten some bad news were crying in corners of the waiting room. A lone woman, looking silly and out of place in her gym clothes, was sobbing so loudly by the nurses’ station that Alexa almost wanted to ask her to quiet down.

  But other people, including one of the mothers with a baby, had seen their loved ones, husbands and wives and children and sisters and brothers, wheeled through, and now, at least, had some sense of hope. They’d caught a glimpse of their person, still alive, making Alexa feel mean and jealous.

  Still no sight of her parents. Still no reassurance from Jason, who was craning his neck toward all the activity but not doing much else. She wanted to smack him, just then, to do something to get that dull look off his face. But then she thought about what he might do, what he probably would do, when he inevitably found out—whether her parents were alive or not—why they’d been on the bridge that day.