All We Can Do Is Wait(14)

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But then a hospital phone rang and Alexa was jolted back into the present.

When she’d heard about the accident just a few hours earlier, she hadn’t gotten a call. She’d been at school, waiting in the guidance office with Ms. Reeve and the head of the upper school, Ms. Cline. Alexa’s parents were due there at 2:00 to talk about Alexa’s “uncharacteristic” (Ms. Cline’s word) grade slippage over the last term. When the meeting had been scheduled, Linda was exasperated, saying to Alexa, “Don’t we have enough of this with your brother?” This was different, though. Alexa was pulling A minuses and B pluses, instead of straight As. She wasn’t flunking or fucking up, she’d just lost focus, she’d lost some drive. She’d also opted not to run cross-country that fall, to everyone’s disappointment.

They knew she’d had a hard year. They said that taking some time to process was natural, healthy. But maybe now it was time for Alexa to reapply herself, to get her junior year started right, so she could confidently apply to her long list of supposed dream schools. (At the top of the list: Amherst, Penn, Princeton, Georgetown. Bowdoin was her safety.)

Something in Alexa was fundamentally different, though. All the idle talk with Kyle that summer, about leaving after graduation, going off to do something that mattered in the world, had solidified into a determination, just not one she’d shared with her parents yet. And so this meeting was to be Alexa’s grand reveal, a coming out of her own, when her parents, and Ms. Cline, and Ms. Reeve, would see that she wasn’t screwing up. That she was in fact pursuing something even nobler than college. She was going to help people. They’d understand that, once she told them.

But tunnel traffic was bad, so Alexa’s parents decided to go a little out of the way and take the Tobin Bridge to get to Alexa’s school. Linda texted her that they would still be on time, they were almost at the bridge.

In the cramped guidance office, twenty awkward minutes went by. Alexa smiled at Ms. Cline and Ms. Reeve as they made small talk about some trip to Maine that Ms. Cline had taken that August.

“It’s a beautiful island, Vinalhaven. Alexa, have you ever been?”

Alexa shook her head no. “We go to the Cape in the summer. Or we used to. I didn’t go much this past summer.”

Ms. Reeve nodded knowingly, frowning with concern. “No, of course not. Of course not.”

Ms. Cline, choosing to breeze through this darker moment, said, “Well, you really should go. It’s very peaceful. Not much to do there, and really too cold for swimming, but I got a lot of reading done, and we made wonderful food every night.”

“It sounds nice,” Alexa said weakly.

Ms. Cline beamed. “It is. It really is. There’s this one—”

She was interrupted by her phone making a little trill, and then Ms. Reeve’s phone went off too. Then Alexa’s. She wasn’t sure if she should answer her phone in front of faculty, but it could be from her mother, so she reached for her phone, but was stopped by a gasp.

“Oh! Oh my goodness,” Ms. Reeve yelped. “There’s been an accident. The Tobin Bridge. The news is saying there’s been a collapse? That it collapsed?”

Alexa felt a plunge in her throat, stretching down to her stomach.

Ms. Cline and Ms. Reeve seemed to realize what this might mean at the same time, both turning to Alexa with looks of wild, uncomprehending worry on their faces.

“What do you mean, it collapsed?” Alexa stammered. “The whole bridge?”

Ms. Reeve looked back at her phone, adjusting her glasses as if that might make the news change.

“When?” Alexa implored, reaching for her phone in her pocket.

“Just now, I think . . .” Ms. Cline murmured. “Just now.”

“I don’t understand,” Alexa said. But, somehow, she did. Alexa knew then, with some kind of supernatural sureness, that her parents’ car had been one of the ones caught in the collapse, buried under a pile of concrete or, worse, twirling down to the bottom of the Mystic River. Alexa abruptly stood up and bolted out of the office. She heard Ms. Reeve and Ms. Cline both call out to her, but she didn’t care. She tore down the hallway toward her locker. She needed to get her things and leave.

But leave for where? She stopped in the hallway, frantic and running on some strange energy, and opened Twitter on her phone. Her feed was mostly breaking news and speculation about the collapse, pictures of the Tobin Bridge, or what used to be the Tobin Bridge, making her stomach churn. She saw one tweet, from Channel 7, that mentioned “victims” and “Boston General.” That was all she needed. Boston General wasn’t all that far.

She ran the rest of the way to her locker, calling Jason as she went. He finally answered on about the millionth ring, sounding tired and out-of-it as ever, and certainly surprised to see his sister calling him in the middle of a school day. Or, really, calling him at all.

What she didn’t tell Jason when she finally got him on the phone, what she couldn’t tell him, now at the hospital, because he was Jason being Jason, and because he had stormed off, was that this was her fault. That her parents never would have been on that bridge if she hadn’t been messing up at school, if she had just been the dutiful daughter for one more year, if she had just waited to figure her life out until it really belonged to her. But now she’d probably gotten two people—not just two people, her parents—killed, and she had no one to turn to.