Jason advanced on Scott as he said this, Scott bristling and standing up a little straighter, Morgan trailing after Jason. Skyler could see that things could be about to get bad, that Scott would maybe only take Jason getting in his face for so long. She thought about turning and leaving, about going for the door, about walking away from them and letting herself return to that place of relief, of good news.
But instead she found herself walking up and getting between Scott and Jason, putting a hand on Jason’s chest. “Stop it, Jason,” she said. “Come on. Just stop it.” He backed off, throwing his hands up. But then a second later he turned back toward Scott, looking like he was going to lunge at him. Skyler stepped in front of him, using her whole body to block his advance. “Jason, stop!” She pushed him back, not hard, but enough to create some space between them. Jason staggered back. He threw up his hands again, muttering, “O.K.! O.K.!”
Skyler turned to Scott, who was pacing, his defenses up. Skyler knew what that pacing meant; she’d seen it before, of course. She reached out, put a hand on his arm. “Scott?” she said calmly. “Scott.” He stopped and looked at her, chest heaving. “Look,” she said. “I don’t know what you did, or why you and Aimee broke up. But, yes, you could have told us. You probably should have told us.”
“I just really needed to be here. Even if I didn’t see her, I needed to know—”
“I know, I know. I get that,” Skyler said. She felt centered, somehow, though also a little like she was watching herself, from beside or above herself. She felt a little like Kate. “But everyone’s emotions are so crazy right now. You have to understand why Alexa’s upset. Maybe you should go. One of us can call you or something. I’ll call you. I’ll wait. I said I wasn’t going to leave until all you guys know, so I won’t. O.K.? Maybe just go home, and I can call you.”
Scott seemed to think about this for a moment. Skyler looked over to where Aimee’s parents were. They were watching this scene now, Skyler trying to calm everyone down. She shot another look at Scott, who was nodding his head, working through something.
Watching Scott sort things, Skyler felt oddly sure that she could defuse this situation, like she suddenly had some kind of divine strength or something. Maybe her grandmother saying, “Thank God, thank God,” on the phone had done something to Skyler, conferred some blessing upon her. Or maybe it was Kate, finally seeing her alive, touching her cheek in the hospital room. Some transference had happened. Kate always kept a cool head, or at least always seemed so confident that she knew, somehow, what to do. And now Skyler almost felt that way too.
She looked up at Scott, and he nodded one more time and said, “O.K. O.K. You’re right. I’m gonna go. I should go. You’re right.”
Jason put up a hand, said, “Bye!” while Morgan glared. Scott turned to get his coat from one of the chairs. Alexa was staring from a slight distance away, expression hard and fixed.
Though, Skyler quickly realized, Alexa wasn’t watching them, she was looking past them, at Aimee’s parents, who were now talking to a doctor, a tall South Asian woman with a puff of dark hair. Where had she come from?
The doctor was saying something softly to Aimee’s parents, her arms folded over her chest, Aimee’s mother clutching her husband, nodding her head, and then letting out a wail—a terrible sound, like something they talked about in the ancient Greek plays Skyler had read in English class the year before—so loud that everyone in the room turned, even the nurses. Aimee’s mom was crumpling to the floor while her husband tried to hold her up, looking only a little more sturdy himself. The doctor reached out a hand to put on Aimee’s mother’s shoulder, but she couldn’t reach her. Mrs. Peck was all the way on the floor now, shrieking, “No! No! No!”
Skyler saw Morgan grab Jason, who stood frozen, watching Aimee’s parents. Alexa had a hand over her mouth. Aimee’s mother made a loud, guttural sound, her husband now on the floor with her, holding her, the doctor standing over them, patient and waiting.
Skyler turned and looked at Scott, holding his coat, watching this all unfold with a faraway look on his face, as if he’d just been told something he didn’t understand, even though it was so horribly clear just then that Aimee was dead.
Chapter Fourteen
Alexa
IT WAS AS if the hospital, and the whole unfathomable day, suddenly snapped into focus; whatever hazy unknowability had existed was gone. Nothing had quite felt real until then, not even when Skyler got her good news.
None of it had been hard and provable and tangible, until Alexa watched Aimee’s parents, the parents of this stranger she would now never meet, sob in a heap on the floor, knowing now that their daughter was gone, that whatever hope they’d had—driving to the hospital that day, or from the hospital after she was born, or any day in between—was lost, irretrievable in the wreckage of the bridge. Alexa felt heavy and out of breath, like she was being crushed. She forced herself to tear her eyes away from Aimee’s parents, and retreated to a far corner of the room, to catch her breath and try to stop the room from spinning.
Why was she so upset? Of course it was sad that someone was dead, someone so young especially. But she didn’t know Aimee. She’d only learned of her existence a couple of hours before, in a photo from a school dance. It was just so strange to think that that smiling girl, happy and dressed up, was now dead. It was hard to even understand what that word really meant, the finality and severity of it. Alexa found a chair and fell into it, stunned and tired and reeling with ideas about her parents, about how they might be gone too—over, ended, no more life.
Of course, Alexa had known this feeling before, the suddenness and boggling, staggering vastness of it.
An image of Kyle flickered in her head, him at the ice cream store one night, showing her some little choreographed dance he’d made up to a local car dealership’s ad jingle, the two of them laughing like crazy at this stupid thing, Kyle waving a washcloth over his head as he swiveled his hips.
When had that been? June? July? Alexa couldn’t remember anymore. It had just been some silly night, the two of them punchy at the end of a long day. Kyle had probably driven her home, as he did on a lot of nights when they closed together. Maybe they’d listened to some music in the car, maybe they’d talked. Probably they had, speculating about life after summer, after school, after whatever came after that.
Sitting now on the hard chair in the waiting room—Aimee’s parents had been scooped up and led off somewhere deeper into the hospital—Alexa felt an acute and burning pain, missing Kyle so much just then. How could he be gone? How can anyone just . . . go away and never come back?
It had been over a year since Kyle died, and yet it all still felt so raw. Yes, Alexa’s grief had evolved—hardening, focusing itself, lodging somewhere permanently in her. It was once new, almost a surprise, a shock of sadness. But now it was just a fact of her life, mingling terribly with her feelings about Jason, her sorrow and dismay over his regression to the way he was before the Elsings’ summer of happiness and, eventually, doom.
Two months after Kyle’s death, another dark Boston fall setting in, Alexa and Jason had barely spoken about what happened. All Alexa knew was that Jason seemed allergic to her grief. Kyle died, and Alexa’s reaction was too much for Jason, so he backed away, as if the summer and their closeness had never happened. But of course they still had to exist in the same house together, and one night in October, alone in the basement kitchen together, Alexa felt a burning need to say something to her brother, to coax something out of him, some acknowledgment of where they were, and where they had been.
“It’s two months next Tuesday.”
Jason looked up from his cereal, his preferred dinner when Linda and Theo were out, confused. “Huh?”
“It’s two months, to the day. Next Tuesday. Since Kyle . . .”
Her brother’s face slackened and seemed to lose its color. “Oh.”
He returned to his cereal, chewing loudly for a few seconds before looking back up at this sister. “Why would you tell me that?”
“Because I can’t get it out of my head, Jason. Because you knew him too, and you liked him, and he was a part of our lives and now he’s gone and I just want to talk to someone about it.”
“Talk to Mom and Dad, then. Or talk to a therapist. I . . . don’t want to talk about that stuff. I can’t talk about it. I mean, what’s the point anyway?”
“The point is to, like, share what you’re going through with someone else, because it helps? Are you even sad that Kyle died?”
Jason stood up and practically threw his cereal bowl into the sink. “Jesus, Alexa.”
“Are you? Because it’s been two months—almost two months—and you’ve barely . . . I’m sorry if I’m, like, too much for you or whatever, but I’m here, and I’m hurting, and a little support from you would—”
“Would what, Alexa? Would bring him back? Would make you not sad anymore? This is so pointless. You can’t change anything. What happened happened, and we— You just have to deal with it and move on. That’s it.”
Alexa was stung, as if Jason was saying that everything she was feeling was pointless. But maybe he was right. Maybe all this was doing was pushing Jason further from her, not helping her get through a difficult time. Maybe she did need to be more like her brother, detached and unmoved, guarded and self-preserving.
But try as Alexa did throughout the year, she couldn’t shake her feelings. She gradually gave up on Jason, the brother she knew that one summer becoming a memory, a fond one tainted with bitterness and hurt. But she kept Kyle active and present in her mind. She approached school less intensely—not because she was checked out but because she was focused on something else. Alexa held on to everything she’d shared with Kyle, everything she had let herself hope for her life. It took a year—a hard and punishing one, one affected as much by Jason’s absence as it was by Kyle’s—but Alexa finally worked up the courage to tell her parents that she was going to put off college, that she had a different life in mind.
And then the world fell apart.
Alexa was startled out of these thoughts by the sound of a voice, calm and quiet as it was. She looked up and there was Morgan, a concerned, nervous look on her face. “Hey. Alexa? You O.K.?”
Alexa’s mouth was dry, her eyes felt itchy. “Yeah. Thanks. I’m fine. How’s . . .” She looked around the room but didn’t see Scott.
“Oh. He went to the bathroom. I think he’s throwing up.”
“I don’t blame him,” Alexa murmured.
Morgan sat down next to her, pulled her sleeves over her hands. “I shouldn’t have said that to him. About not deserving to be here. That was . . .”
“You didn’t know. And I was mad too. He lied to us.”
“Yeah.”
They sat in conflicted silence—guilty, sad, scared, exhausted—for a minute. Morgan kept picking at the safety pins on her sweatshirt.
“He’s hurting, you know,” Morgan finally said.
“Of course he is. His girlfriend—his ex-girlfriend, whatever—just died.”
“Scott, yeah, but I mean your brother. Jason. He’s . . . hurting.”
Alexa was confused. Why was Morgan telling her this? How did she know anything about Jason?
“What?”
Likely hearing the pointedness in Alexa’s voice, Morgan stuttered out an explanation. “I just mean, he’s worried about your parents, obviously. But also . . . I don’t know. You should talk to him. I think he’s pretty messed up.”
The sadness and tiredness Alexa had been feeling suddenly drained and all she felt was an anger, a raging, roiling kind of anger that propelled her out of her seat.
“I’m sorry, what?” she yelped at Morgan, who jumped back in her chair, maybe not expecting this from Alexa, at least not in this moment of grief and shock. “I should talk to him? Do you have any idea—no, of course you don’t. We just met you. I have no idea who you are. What did he tell you? What did he say to you?”
Morgan stammered, “I just meant, I didn’t—”
Alexa wasn’t really listening to her. It didn’t matter what she said, it wasn’t Morgan’s fault. She was just trying to help. But watching Aimee’s parents, and remembering Kyle’s mother, how sad, on a bone-deep level, she’d been at the memorial service, how it was clear her life would never recover, and then to have Morgan say that Alexa should talk to Jason, after he’d essentially gone mute when Kyle died, too scared to deal with Alexa’s emotions, to help her in any way, to be the brother she needed and, fuck it, deserved, was enough to send Alexa over the edge.
She scanned the room for her brother, spotting him by the little water bubbler, handing a cup to Skyler, then taking a sip of his own, slow like he was drugged, face so annoyingly expressionless despite everything happening around him.
Alexa strode toward him, running high on the fuel of her shock at what Morgan had said. When Jason saw her coming, he lowered his water cup. Skyler gave her a small wave, her face falling as she saw that Alexa was clearly in some sort of rage.
“What did you say to Morgan?” Alexa demanded of her brother. He blinked, confused. “What?”
“To Morgan. What have you been telling her about your poor, sad life?”
“Alexa, I—” Jason started. But he stopped himself, frowning in resignation. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Because she seems to be under the impression that you’re in some great pain that I need to talk to you about. That I need to, like, give you therapy or something. Which is weird, don’t you think? Considering you haven’t really done a single thing to be there for me, to help me, today, or for, I don’t know, the past fucking year.”
Jason gave her the same blank look, the zooming out in his eyes, the unmoored, indifferent detachment that had broken her heart so many times, confused her so much, since Kyle died. But now it was making her furious, desperate to shake her brother awake and make him be her brother again.
“I mean, Jason, do you even understand what is happening here? What happened today? Do you understand that that girl is dead, that Mom and Dad are probably dead? Because I have been walking around with this alone, Jason. Alone. And I am so tired of it. I am so tired of wanting you back, and hating you, and wanting you back, and hating you.”
Her brother was trembling now. He brushed a piece of hair from his eyes. “I’m here. I mean, I’m here, right now.”
“No you’re not!” Alexa screamed. “No you’re not. You haven’t been here in a long, long time, Jason. And I just want to know why. That’s all I want you to tell me. I just want to know why you’ve been ignoring me, why you refuse to acknowledge that something really shitty happened to me last summer. That something really bad is happening to us right now. You’re my older brother. You’re supposed to help me. You’re supposed to . . .”
“I’m supposed to what, Alexa? Magically make you feel better? I can’t do that. How many times do I have to tell you that? I don’t know what you want from me!”
“I want you to be a fucking human being for once! You’re like a robot. Do you feel anything? Aren’t you scared? Aren’t you sad? This stranger,” Alexa yelled, pointing to Morgan and immediately feeling bad for doing it, “tells me that you’re all ‘messed up.’ What does that even mean? Who are you, Jason? Honestly, who are you? You know, Kyle always thought that—”
“Don’t tell me what Kyle thought,” Jason spat back, surprising his sister. His eyes were watery but angry, and he had the beginnings of a mean sneer on his face. “You don’t know a fucking thing about what Kyle thought.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Jason?” Alexa cried. “He was my friend, my friend, remember?”
“You didn’t know anything about him!” Jason roared back, people in the waiting room turning to look at these
two screaming kids. “That’s the most pathetic part! You think you and Kyle had some great thing, some great friend affair last summer. But you didn’t even know who he was. Or who he was with most of the time . . .”
What was Jason saying? What did he mean, who Kyle was with? Then, looking at her brother, trembling and teary (when was the last time she saw Jason cry?), it suddenly hit her, like an electric shock, her world inverting, the past warping. And then her brother confirmed what she’d just realized.
“He was with me, Alexa,” Jason yelped, his voice croaking. “He was with me! Kyle loved me, he was mine. Not yours. So don’t tell me what he thought, or what he said, or who he was. Because you have no idea. You had no idea. Kyle was mine. He loved me. And I loved him. And it’s my fault that he’s gone.”
Chapter Fifteen
Jason
THE FIRST TIME Kyle left a voice mail for Jason, the day after their first kiss, Jason was surprised, but overjoyed. He listened to it over and over again. There was nothing remarkable about it, just Kyle’s voice rambling about some customer at work, then followed by a little pause, a sigh, and then Kyle saying, “I don’t know. I just wanted to talk to you, I guess.”
The next time they saw each other, their first time alone together, carefully orchestrated around Alexa’s work schedule, Jason made fun of Kyle for the voice mail.
“I mean, who leaves voice mails? It’s 2016.”
“I leave voice mails. Don’t you want to hear my beautiful voice?”
Jason blushed. They were sitting far down the beach from Jason’s house, watching the afternoon dog walkers throw tennis balls into the ocean, black labs and golden retrievers bounding after them.
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