All We Can Do Is Wait(29)

“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.