All We Can Do Is Wait(39)
Scott assumed the doctor was there to speak to Alexa. He wasn’t sure why, and it made him feel terrible to think it, but he had some dark intuition that Alexa and Jason’s parents weren’t going to be O.K. That they had been crushed or drowned or whatever else, and these two kids, so dark and worldly seeming, would be orphans. They could handle it, though. They’d figure it out. They had money, they had each other, even if Jason was an asshole. That meant something. They could bear the news somehow.
Mary Oakes, though, had turned to Skyler, was pointing at the doctor, who nodded and put her hand on Skyler’s shoulder. Skyler flinched at her touch and looked, panicked, at Alexa, and then to Mary Oakes, and then back to the doctor. Slowed down, sped up, all of this happening in the tick of seconds, but seeming to take forever. Now the doctor was turning, walking back toward the swinging doors, and Skyler was following her, nervously, taking halting steps, eyes wide and teary.
Alexa trailed after her until she reached Scott, grabbing his arm and staring off toward the doors.
“What happened? What did they say?” Scott asked. Alexa shook her head.
“I—I don’t know. They just said that they had to talk to her, about her sister, and they said that they wanted to talk somewhere quiet. That can’t be good, right? That’s got to be bad news . . .”
Scott heard something in Alexa’s voice that he thought he recognized. Something he was feeling too. There was, in the meanest and shittiest of ways, a twisted kind of hope burbling up in Scott. If Skyler’s news was bad, did that tip the scales somehow for the rest of them? What were the odds that they’d all get bad news that night? All their loved ones couldn’t be dead, right? So wasn’t there a kind of cruelly hopeful arithmetic in the fact that Kate was gone? If Kate died, then the odds were better that Aimee would be O.K., that Jason and Alexa’s parents might be O.K. Scott looked down at Alexa and wondered if she was doing this same math in her head, this same wishful equation, one that, he knew deep down, wasn’t really how these things work.
How did he get here? Wishing that some strange girl, who seemed nice enough and had been a comforting, calming presence all night, had lost her sister so that Aimee could be saved? It was so easy to suddenly feel like a bad person, Scott thought. It was so easy to become a bad person. To stand there and wish for something terrible for someone else.
He saw that Alexa was crying and, instinctively, he hugged her, pulled her in tight and thought of Aimee, the way she used to cry so easily—sometimes because she was practicing, to get better at her acting. She’d go on YouTube and watch random videos and would pretty much instantly lose it. She’d be laughing soon after, and Scott had gotten used to just letting her cry.
Sometimes he’d cry too, around her, because she made it so easy. They watched Toy Story 3 and cried together, not, like, big embarrassing sobs, but definitely tears. Definitely something he’d never do in front of his friends. It was almost fun, to be so nakedly emotional with Aimee, to feel like a kid again, when you could just cry any time you wanted.
“See, don’t you feel better?” Aimee said once, after showing him some video of a dog being reunited with his owner, a soldier who had just come home from Afghanistan.
“I guess?” Scott said, tears streaming down his face, and laughed. Aimee laughed too. A good, weird day.
Alexa’s crying was something else, though: deep and scared and meaningful. But it didn’t make Scott want to do the same. It only made him want to disappear, to close his eyes really tight and have this all not be what it was, to not be here, to have the bridge uncollapsed, to not have anyone dead, anyone sisterless, anyone orphaned. He wanted Aimee in Salem with Taissa and everyone else, he wanted things the way they had been not that long ago.
When Scott was in third grade, his parents had spent the better part of the year fighting. Business at the store was bad, and money was tight. But there was something else happening too, some worse problem in his parents’ relationship, that at eight or nine years old Scott couldn’t understand, and certainly couldn’t fix. But he tried, praying fervently every night that his parents would stop fighting, that they wouldn’t get a divorce, that things would just go back to how they had been, when things were simpler and happier.
Scott’s mom was always saying things like “What happened to my little baby?” So much so that Scott began to feel guilty for growing up. Of course, he knew now that his mother hadn’t meant it, that she knew he couldn’t actually go back to being a baby, and didn’t really want him to. But back then it had wracked him. He felt sad and guilty all the time. A teacher at school noticed that his behavior had changed and spoke to his parents about it, and they stopped fighting in the house so much, and eventually things got better and everyone seemed to move on. Scott never forgot that feeling, though, that desperate wish that things could just be easier.
He felt it now, a yearning to go back to when life was less complicated, when it wasn’t so difficult and frightening. But what could he do? He could only hope that Aimee was alive, that she’d be all right, and that things would eventually get better, like they were supposed to.
Alexa sniffled and pulled back from his hug a little. “Sorry, ugh, I’m sorry. I just feel so bad for her. I mean, I feel bad for all of us. But . . . I don’t think that was good news. It didn’t look like good news.”
Scott nodded, then looked up and saw Jason and Morgan walking in from outside. They were laughing about something, but they quickly stopped as they caught sight of Scott and Alexa hugging, and Alexa’s red and tear-streaked face. Jason quickened his pace, his eyes looking a little sharper now, more focused.