All We Can Do Is Wait

by Richard Lawson

  They walked over to Mary Oakes, who was cradling a phone under her chin. She saw Morgan, looked a little surprised, then held up a finger, asking her to wait.

  “Uh huh, uh huh, it’s looking like forty to fifty, yes, that’s the latest we’ve heard, I don’t know, Dan, it’s not like—Yes, I understand, we’re already almost at full—No, of course, I understand. O.K., thank you, Dan.”

  She hung up the phone. “Morgan. You’re still here.” Still here? Of course she was still here, Jason wanted to say. We’re all still here.

  Morgan nodded quickly, “Yeah, uh, this is . . .”

  Jason realized he’d never told her his name. “I’m Jason, Jason Elsing. I think my sister, Alexa, asked you about my parents, Linda and Theo . . . uh, Theodore Elsing?”

  Mary shot a look at Morgan, like it was her fault that this dumb kid was bothering her. She turned to Jason. “I’m sure she did, but unfortunately at this time there is only so much we’re able to tell the families. If you speak with the nurses and give them your parents’ names, they will update you as soon as they know something concrete. As you can see, right now we’re really trying to focus all our energy and attention on the victims—on the patients.”

  She took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “In the meantime, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait. I’m sorry there isn’t more I can tell you. And Morgan, you should have someone come get you. Is there someone who can pick you up?”

  Morgan shook her head. “No, I want to be here.”

  Mary Oakes sighed, nodded. “Well, do what you want, of course. But you’ll have to excuse me now, I have about a hundred more phone calls to make.” She picked the phone back up and turned away from them. Morgan looked at Jason and shrugged. They stood there for a second, not really sure what to do, Jason feeling like he’d already failed at his half-assed attempt to take some of the burden off his sister.

  “Hey,” Morgan said, sounding a little sheepish, maybe feeling bad that she couldn’t help more. “Do you maybe want to, like, go outside, get some air?”

  “Yeah. Sure,” Jason said, feeling defeated.

  Morgan smiled a little, a hint of crooked teeth, and nodded her head toward the door. They made their way through the crowd, not saying “Excuse me,” just pushing through, and then finally they were outside, where the rain had let up and the air felt wonderfully crisp and bracing.

  Morgan reached into her pocket and pulled out a small electronic cigarette. She took a drag off it, releasing out a cloud of vapor, which rose up and mingled with the rest of the wet air. Jason laughed, those things always looking so silly. But when Morgan held it out to Jason, he looked at it a little quizzically before taking a long drag himself, his lungs feeling cold and tingly. He handed it back to her, and they stood there for a moment in silence, Morgan taking another drag, the noise of the hospital wafting out in intervals as the doors slid open and shut.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t help more,” Morgan said after a while. “She’s kind of a bitch, Mary. I mean, she’s fine. She’s helped out me and my dad a lot. But her, um, what’s the thing, with doctors, like bed manners.”

  “Bedside manner.”

  “Yeah. She’s not great at that.”

  A weird thought burbled up in Jason’s mind. “She kinda reminds me of my mom, actually.”

  Morgan laughed, then, realizing who she was laughing about, abruptly halted herself. “Sorry.”

  “No, no, it’s O.K. It’s not a bad thing, not really.”

  Morgan nodded and they stood in silence for a while longer. Jason rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, let out a long, slow sigh. “Man. This blows.”

  Morgan laughed again, louder this time, a chortling bark of a sound. “It certainly fucking does.” She had a thick Boston accent, but not the fake kind you’d see in bad movies about Southie. The real kind, the kind with melody, and grace. It reminded Jason of Kyle, the way he had said certain words: clipped, hushed, elided.

  Before he could stop himself, Jason said, “You remind me of my boyfriend.”

  Morgan looked a little surprised, but absorbed this new information in stride. “He’s tall too?”

  Jason laughed, shook his head. “No. Just your accent and, I dunno, something else. He was . . .”

  “Poor?”

  Jason shifted uncomfortably.

  “Kidding,” Morgan said, giving Jason a meek smile. “I mean, about your boyfriend, not about—I mean, my dad always says we’re gonna be the last poor family in Dorchester. You know, since you got all the rich people buying houses in Savin Hill. First it was the gays . . .” She looked at Jason. “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s O.K. I am a gay, it’s true. But, uh, don’t tell anyone that.”

  “They don’t know?”

  “They might, but I’ve never told them. So.”

  “I get it.”

  “Your dad, is he going to be O.K.? Did she tell you?”

  Morgan nodded, held the fake cigarette between her fingers, flicking it back and forth with her thumb, though there was no ash to flick off. “Yeah, yeah, he’ll be fine. I don’t know. Your parents are gonna be fine too.”

  “That’s what I told my sister, and she freaked out. She said I was high.”

  “Are you?”

  “Eh. Hard to tell at this point.”

  “Yeah. My mom used to take Oxy? Got hooked working at this hospital, ironically enough. She’d be fucked up for days. I hope you’re not taking that shit.”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Did she quit, your mom?”

  Morgan pulled up her hood, puffed on the e-cigarette. “Nope. She died.”

  “Oh man.”

  “I mean, I assume she died. You can’t get Oxy after a while, so you go for heroin, ’cause it’s easier to get, and cheaper. Which is pretty fucked up. So she was on that for a while, and then she left. My aunt said she came to stay with her in Nashua for a little while, but then she left there too, and that’s the last time anyone saw her. In fucking New Hampshire.”

  There was a long pause, then finally Morgan broke the silence.

  “So, tell me about your boyfriend,” she said, offering him the cigarette again. He took it, pulled on it, thought for a second. Jason felt a sudden closeness to Morgan, the way she set him at ease, talked to him like a person instead of a collection of disappointments.

  He wanted to tell her about everything that happened after that first kiss on the beach. About the next kiss, on the porch after Alexa had gone to bed.

  And the next one.

  And the next one, and the next one. In places he couldn’t remember anymore.

  He wanted to tell her about how he had said “I love you” while he and Kyle were driving to Provincetown, their first and only time going there together. The way Kyle had said nothing at first, only reached out his hand, the other hand loosely on the steering wheel, and ran it through Jason’s hair. How Jason had felt so seen and known and safe and alive just then.

  He wanted to tell Morgan about the first time he and Kyle had sex, awkward and giggling in Jason’s bed one night after drinking a bottle and a half of Linda’s wine. He wanted to tell her about how Kyle fell asleep first afterward, and Jason lay there listening to him breathing, running a finger along Kyle’s freckled back, wanting to eat him alive, to absorb him through his skin, to bury himself under Kyle’s armpit or behind his knee.

  He wanted to tell Morgan about all the bad things too. About how melodramatic and petty Kyle could be, about how much he lied about trivial things. About how he sometimes treated his and Jason’s secret like a weapon or a threat, to get something he wanted or to guilt Jason into indulging his fantasies for a little while longer.

  Jason would sometimes get annoyed hearing about all the wonderful things Kyle was going to do in New York—because as much as they were consumed with each other then, those
future plans never quite seemed to involve Jason. He would tell Kyle that, and Kyle would frown, his eyes darkening a little bit, and then, with a sinister breeziness in his voice, he would say, “Well, if I can’t talk to you about that, maybe I should talk to Alexa about us, or to your parents about us,” and Jason would give him a little shove and say, “Fuck off.”

  Jason wanted to tell Morgan about the fight that he and Kyle had, when the summer was fading and the real world loomed on the horizon. He wanted to tell Morgan how sorry he was. How he’d do things differently if he could. If he could, if he could, if he could.

  He didn’t tell her any of that, though. Instead, he just took another drag off Morgan’s cigarette and said, “You would like him.”

  She smiled, friendly but lined with sadness, shivering in her sweatshirt, pale under the streetlights.

  Chapter Eight

  Skyler

  SHE’D MADE HER way to the nurses’ station, squeezing between what felt like an endless tangle of people, but whatever answers Skyler had hoped to find on the other side weren’t there. Just more confusion, more questions, more worry. Yet another nurse asked her where her parents were, but as Skyler tried to explain who she was trying to find, the nurse was distracted by someone else’s question and turned away from her. Skyler felt small and silly, yet again, so after a few frustrating minutes, she edged her way free from the reception desk and back into the emptier recesses of the waiting room, where she saw Scott, looking guilty. Alexa was curled up in a chair, looking like she’d given up.

  “Hey,” Skyler said to Scott, who gave her a halfhearted smile. Skyler gestured toward Alexa. “She O.K.?”

  Scott shrugged. “I guess. O.K. as we all can be right now.”

  Skyler sighed. “Yeah.” She and Scott stood there for a moment, not sure what to say to one another. Skyler, feeling nervous and wanting to sit down, said, “Maybe I’ll go check on her.”

  She made her way to Alexa and sat next to her, Alexa acknowledging her by pulling her head up from her knees, letting her feet drop to the floor, and leaning back in her chair in a slump. After a short silence, Alexa, eyes on the ceiling, asked, “Did you find anything out? About your sister?”

  Skyler shook her head. “No. Just . . . more waiting.”

  Her phone buzzed, again. Why hadn’t she just turned it off? She ignored it, but Alexa had heard the vibrating. “Shouldn’t you answer that? I mean, what if it’s your parents?”

  Skyler folded her hands over her bag, as if to muffle the sound of the phone. “It’s not my parents.” Alexa didn’t press it any further.

  “Where are you from again?” Alexa asked, her tone light and conversational, maybe trying to distract Skyler from whatever tenseness had seized her when the phone buzzed.

  “JP,” Skyler answered, a vision of the empty house, of Kate’s pristine room, just across the hall from Skyler’s messy one, darting into her head.

  “Oh, cool. JP seems cool. Like, lots of old hippies, right?”

  It was true. Parts of Jamaica Plain had long ago been taken over by crunchy vegetarian types who ran co-ops and held an annual Wake Up the Earth Festival every spring, and whose kids were white boys with dreadlocks and hyphenated last names. That generation of kids was mostly grown now, and so the neighborhood felt a little different, a newer, younger, less crunchy crowd of people moving in. But Skyler’s grandparents’ house had sort of weathered it all untouched, tucked away on a quiet street off South Street, close to the Forest Hills T station.

  “Yeah, lots of old hippies. And new yuppies. It smells less like pot all the time and more like . . . yoga mats.”

  Alexa laughed. “I thought hippies did yoga.”

  Skyler shook her head. “They’re the ones who, like, introduced yoga to white people. But the yuppies have taken it to a whole ’nother level.”

  “I’ve only been there once,” Alexa said. “Jamaica Plain. A girl from school lives there, and she had this party. It was pretty lame, but it was kind of funny because all these girls from my school were so, like, fascinated with the public school kids? They thought all the boys were so hot, with their accents.”

  Skyler wasn’t sure if she should find that story funny, a bunch of rich girls doing public school kid tourism in JP, which was by no means poor, at least not the part of JP Alexa had probably visited. But there was something amusing about it, a bunch of girls ogling all the dumb, basic, same-y boys Skyler was surrounded by at school every day. Everyone was interesting to someone, she guessed. And, of course, those boys had been interesting to her once too.

  Skyler fiddled with the ring on her finger, two hands clasping a heart.

  “I love those,” Alexa said. “They’re so . . . Boston.”

  Skyler wasn’t sure why she still wore it. It had once represented something good, something that made Skyler feel safe. Now, two years later, maybe it still kept her safe. Only now it was a talisman, used to ward off something bad.

  • • •

  In the weeks after prom, things had been good between Skyler and Danny. The euphoria of the about-to-graduate seniors was infectious. But then summer came, and shortly after the Fourth of July, Danny was fired from the golf course for vague reasons that, no matter how many times Skyler asked, Danny would not explain to her. He didn’t even tell her that he got fired. She had to hear that, embarrassingly, from Meghan Ehlers, the two of them standing off to the side during an Arboretum party, Skyler wondering aloud why he was in such a mood.

  “Oh, you didn’t hear?” Meghan asked, seeming a little too excited to have information that Skyler didn’t.

  “No . . .” Skyler answered cautiously.

  Meghan made a little gasping sound and said, “He got fired. I don’t know. There was some fight or something.”

  No wonder he was thrashing around like crazy that night. But when Skyler asked him the next morning, knowing that asking him the night before would not have been a good idea, he shrugged it off. “I quit,” he said, kicking out of bed and stomping to the bathroom, Skyler realizing that was the end of the discussion.

  Skyler was in summer school, having failed physics that year. When she wasn’t in class or trying, halfheartedly, to study, she was with Danny, helping him pack and get ready to move to the apartment in Roxbury he and two of his friends would be living in when they started at Suffolk in the fall. Without a job, Danny might not have enough money to cover rent, and his parents, stretched thin with so many kids, three in college, would not be able to help him. They suggested he live at home, he could choose his mom’s or his dad’s house, but Danny wouldn’t hear it. He and Tommy and Timmy had too many plans for their newfound freedom—parties, mostly.

  So Danny was brooding and mean most of the summer, testy with Skyler and getting drunk pretty much every night. Sometimes he’d text her and demand that she come pick him up, seeming to forget that, though Skyler had her license, her grandparents wouldn’t let her drive the car after dark, let alone to pick up Danny in the middle of the night.

  Some nights, Skyler was able to convince Kate to do it, Kate looking frustrated as she drove to West Roxbury or Hyde Park or wherever it was that Danny was stranded. Other nights, Skyler would have to say no, and Danny would send angry texts, calling her a bitch and threatening her with the names of other girls, saying Ashley so-and-so or Meghan so-and-so would pick him up instead.

  Skyler hoped that once the summer was over and Danny was back in school, things would calm down, he’d have his place and she would go over there as much as she could, as much as Kate was willing to cover for her with her grandparents, really. But the summer ended and Danny moved and things only got worse. There were some scary nights when Skyler and Danny were alone in the apartment and he’d start thrashing around, demanding to know what she was doing all day. “I was in school, I was in school,” she would say, crying, but Danny would demand to see her phone, convinced she was cheati
ng on him with someone.

  The first time he pushed her against the wall and punched it, barely missing her head, he’d been immediately apologetic, saying, “Baby, baby, baby, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I fucked up.” By the end of his first semester, though, stuff like that had become routine. He threw a lamp, he cracked her cell phone while slamming it down on the night table after finding nothing incriminating on it. He was getting in fights with random guys at parties most weekends, heaving and bloody-nosed and wild-eyed, stomping around the apartment afterward while Skyler tried to calm him down.

  She didn’t tell Kate about most of this, but her sister could sense something was wrong. She’d started asking more pointed questions about Danny. She’d heard stuff too, of course, from the diffuse circle of friends who’d all known each other in high school. Kate had started at Lesley and was supposed to be living her own new, independent life, but she spent an increasing amount of her time checking in on Skyler, texting to make sure she was O.K., knocking on Skyler’s bedroom door when she heard her having some tearful late-night argument on the phone with Danny.

  “He’s abusing you,” Kate finally said, in February, the two sisters riding the 39 bus downtown to go shopping for a birthday gift for their grandmother. Kate couldn’t see the deep purple bruises on Skyler’s arms from when Danny had grabbed her the night before, furious about some imagined slight. (By then he’d all but dropped out of school, selling weed and, Skyler suspected, other things out of the apartment.) It was a sad kind of relief, hearing her sister say it out loud.

  Skyler began to cry softly, turning toward the window of the bus, not wanting her sister to see how bad she’d let things get. How ashamed and afraid she was.

  Kate turned toward her sister and then looked away. Skyler was scared it was out of disgust.

  “You just have to end it,” Kate said, matter-of-factly. The bus rumbled down Huntington Avenue, such a familiar route for such a strange conversation. But there it was. Skyler didn’t say anything, hoping her sister would keep going. Kate being Kate, she did. “You know you can, right? You’ll be O.K. We’ll get a restraining order if we have to.”