All We Can Do Is Wait(3)
His voice mail ritual done, Jason put his phone back in his pocket and ran his hands through his hair. The rain was picking up quickly, and it was cold. The clocks had been set back an hour the day before, and this was the first really dark afternoon of the year. So it was dark, and cold, and raining, and yet Jason still felt rooted in place, unable to turn around and go find his sister. Because he didn’t know what was left of his life inside. Though, to be fair, he didn’t know what was left of his life out there, either, standing on a street corner, listening to year-old voice mails.
? ? ?
“The whole summer?”
Jason was sitting at the dining room table with his parents and Alexa. May of the year before. Jason’s face felt hot, indignant, like he’d just been slapped while being told he was going to jail.
“We think it would be good. For all of us,” Jason’s father, Theo, said, giving a hopeful little glance toward Jason’s mother, Linda. “To get away, as a family. And you kids love it out there.”
“For a weekend, I guess, when we were kids,” Jason whined. He could hear the brattiness in his voice, could feel childish tears of frustration stinging in his eyes. Normally he would never show that much emotion in front of his parents, but right then he didn’t care. They had just told Jason and his sister that they’d be spending the entire summer, the whole three-month expanse of it, at the family’s vacation home in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod. Just the four of them. Together. Alone. All summer.
“You’re still kids,” Linda said, a little chiding, a little wistful.
“Alexa?” Jason turned to his sister. “Are you going to say anything about this?”
Before she even did it, Jason knew that Alexa was going to take their side. Even though Jason was sure Alexa didn’t really want to go, that there was no way she was thrilled about being shipped off to the Cape with her fucked-up family until Labor Day, Jason knew his sister would say and do the right thing, the good thing, the responsible thing. Sure enough, she did.
“I don’t mind,” Alexa said. “I mean, I’ll get a job. I dunno. It could be fun.”
Fun. There were many things a summer in the beach house with Theo, Linda, Jason, and Alexa and no escape could be, but fun was not one of them. Jason rolled his eyes at his sister and turned back to his parents. They barely had any control over him then, and frankly barely monitored what he did. But this, here, this seemed serious. Like maybe Jason couldn’t wriggle out of it. They were going, and there was no way they were going to leave him at home. Maybe he could run away. But where would he go?
Jason lived in the Back Bay, a beautiful old section of Boston full of well-appointed town houses, home to many of the city’s wealthy and well-connected. It being Boston, the wealth there wasn’t ostentatious, but it was certainly there. Jason and Alexa grew up in the thick of it, their mother the descendant of a long family line that could trace its roots back to the Mayflower. Not needing to work for money, Linda spent most of her time organizing and hosting benefits, for the Parks Department, for the Gardner Museum, for the Huntington Theatre. Everyone knew Linda Elsing. Jason’s father, Theo, worked as a consultant or something, making lots of money by making even more money for other people.
So, in the material ways, Jason’s life was comfortable. He’d gone to fancy private schools. Spent winter weekends at friends’ parents’ ski houses in Waterville Valley, or Killington, or Sunday River. Summer weekends in Wellfleet. They drove German and Swedish cars, had a show-quality yellow lab named Charles, who died when Jason was fifteen. Anyone peering in on the Elsings’ lives from the outside would see something ideal—well-to-do New England WASPs at their finest, hale and smart and modest. (Jason’s mother would tut-tut disapprovingly whenever she saw some gaudy new house being built out on the Cape, preferring the more reasonable Shingle-style home she’d inherited from her parents when they died.)
But, as is true of many homes, the Elsings’ houses contained little darknesses, secrets and struggles that, as Jason and Alexa became teenagers, began to strain the seams of the family’s bond. Linda was never without a glass of champagne at her many events, which turned into glasses of wine at home, descending her into a melancholy blurriness that Jason tried his best to avoid. As this happened, Theo grew distant, consumed by his squash games and business trips and, for a time, long walks along the Charles with Charles. Alexa, a year younger than Jason, was a tense and worried teenager. Their relationship, once close, had begun to fray, as Alexa worked herself into knots and Jason tested out his new role as the black sheep of the family.
There was also the gay thing, in the beginning a quiet, scary suspicion that Jason could mostly ignore when he first noticed it, a little bud in him not yet in bloom, but that had, over the last year or so, grown into something too big to turn away from or deny. Jason’s parents weren’t conservative people, not politically anyway, but theirs was not the kind of household where you talked about feelings and crushes and stuff like that, let alone sex.
Jason’s friends, if you could call them friends, were all jockish, preppy boys from big houses out in the wealthy suburbs. They weren’t the kind of guys who would tolerate a gay friend. Or rather, they would tolerate it, but nothing further. Jason had imagined one of these conversations playing out many times, always ending the same way. He and Carter Chapman, maybe, stoned or drunk in Killington, sitting on the carpeting in the downstairs rec room, snow falling outside. (There was always something a little sexy about this image, Jason had to admit to himself.) Jason, feeling warm and bold, would say, “You know, man . . . I’m gay,” and Carter would bristle. Jason could see Carter thinking nervously for a second and then nodding his head, like you’re supposed to do. Saying, “That’s cool, that’s cool,” like you’re supposed to. But then the night would end abruptly, and the rest of the weekend would be weird. And when they got back to Boston—Carter’s parents dropping Jason off downtown before heading back to Concord—the city would feel lonely.