All We Can Do Is Wait(2)
Jason took the phone from his ear, tempted to restart the message. But then an ambulance siren blared next to him, jolting him out of the warm world of the voice mail, and Jason remembered where he was: standing outside Boston General, five P.M. on a Monday in November, waiting to find out if his parents were still alive. Jason could, he realized for maybe the hundredth time in the last hour, be an eighteen-year-old orphan. His parents were missing, or unaccounted for, like so many other people. Surveillance cameras had captured their car inching up the bridge in midday traffic, and then it disappeared with everything else when first one section, and then another one, gave way. Jason had seen the footage, somehow already leaked online, small and black-and-white and fake-looking. His sister, Alexa, had found out first, of course—and now here they were, along with all the other clueless, crying loved ones, waiting to find out just how much the world had suddenly changed.
But Jason couldn’t even really begin to think about his parents, about where they might be and in what condition, if they were just bodies in bags somewhere, if they were hurt and bleeding, if they’d asked for their children. That was all too much to comprehend, to even consider processing, so Jason found himself reaching back, not dwelling on tangled metal and crumbled concrete but instead on the ski slope of a boy’s nose, his gravity-defying hair, the way his mouth drooped down just a little on one side, into a pout or a sneer depending on his mood. He missed him all the time, of course, but now that ache felt profound—physical, elemental, molecular. This was what it was to love someone, Jason figured, but there was nothing to be done about that now.
Except, maybe, to listen to the voice mail one more time. He tapped the arrow button and pressed the phone in close, losing himself again in the melodic, confident voice, twinged with that bit of giddy nerves, saying to Jason what Jason wanted so much to say back. The voice mail ended and Jason began to feel himself emptying out again. The high of the message was quick, lasting only a few seconds before the realities of the day came crashing, thudding, screaming back in.
Jason looked up and saw the beginnings of chaos. People on phones—or clutching spouses or children—were hurrying toward the emergency room doors. Nurses and doctors were waiting expectantly for the first wave of ambulances from the site.
I’m too young for this, Jason thought. Most of the time, Jason tried to assert a worldliness, a cultivated jadedness. It was a pose he struck at school. (Or rather, schools—he was on his third school in as many years.) It was probably how Alexa would say he treated her. Jason suddenly remembered a brief conversation he’d had—tense and a little sad—with his mother, a year or two before.
They were in the library, what Jason’s mother called the sitting room or parlor at the front of the house. Jason was sitting there in some fog, fiddling on his phone, when his mother came in, saying goodbye on her way to some event or other. She looked at him with that half-concerned, half-bored look of hers for a moment and then turned to leave, before remembering that, oh right, this was her teenage son, being left home alone, and she should probably make sure he wouldn’t burn the house down.
“You’ll be all right?” she asked, fastening a tasteful gold earring to an earlobe.
Jason looked up at her, gave her one of his withering looks. “Will you?”
His mother seemed a little stung, and was certainly annoyed. “You know,” she said, her eyes cold and piercing, or as much as they could be from behind their usual glassiness, “you’re awfully haughty these days, aren’t you?” She said it in such a way—that word, “haughty”—that Jason thought there was something behind it; he had a suspicion about what kind of boys, what kind of young men, Jason’s mother found to be “haughty.”
Jason’s mother was right, though. About the haughtiness, about what that haughtiness might mean. Trying so hard—for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate, even to himself—to cover up a fundamental part of himself led to Jason projecting this air of betterness, of knowing, talking to his parents like they weren’t his parents at all. He liked how it felt: detached and mature and, despite all his messes, self-possessed.
Still, it hurt when his mother made her subtle implications about what she might know, in such a pointed and disapproving tone. Jason remembered feeling stung there in the library, listening to his mother’s heels clack out of the house. All he wanted to do was chase after her and tell her the truth and have her hug him. But he didn’t, and the haughtiness, his remove, eventually returned, as it always did.
But now all this . . . he was definitely not old enough for this. He felt small and panicky, a swell of fear rising up in his chest. He’d need another. Just one more, before he collected himself and went to deal with the present. He found a favorite message, a short one. The sound of a party, one voice breaking through, drunk and happy, yelling, “You should’ve come with me toniiiiight! I love you! I mean, shit, I’m drunk! I’m drunk! I gotta go!” Then a laugh, a blare of music, and the click of the phone hanging up. I love you. It was one of the few times someone who wasn’t his parents had ever said that to him.
His parents. The hospital. Here. He had to be here. It was beginning to rain, the sidewalk pavement getting darker in splotches. Jason knew he should go inside, find Alexa, stay with her as long as it took to make sure everything was going to be O.K. It had to be O.K., didn’t it? How much bad stuff could happen to one kid in a year?