All We Can Do Is Wait(5)

“When do we leave?” Jason asked.

“June!” Theo said brightly. “Early June. Soon as you kids are done with exams.”

I’m already done with exams, Jason thought, laughing a little to himself.

“There’s a smile,” Theo said happily. “See? We’re going to love it.”

Linda bobbed her head in agreement. “It’s going to be a wonderful summer.”

Not convinced of the plan’s wonderfulness, Jason had a freak-out. He texted Sean and asked how big an order he could place before he left, but Sean replied tapped out sorry and then wanna meet anyway tho? :) and Jason panicked and never wrote back. Jason certainly didn’t know any of the townie dealers on the Cape, and so he was potentially faced with a summer without any of the downers that mellowed him out and put him to bed. It would likely just be weed and alcohol, which didn’t seem like enough.

But as much as Jason was freaking out, he was, he slowly came to realize as May drew to a close, also a little relieved to be leaving Boston for a whole summer, to get away from the vacant, bottomed-out Neiman kids, to maybe reconnect with Brandon and Connor and some of his other old friends who’d drifted off into healthier, more productive lives. They were boring but safe, relatively wholesome. If nothing else, they were easier to pretend with. (Over the year, Jason had a couple of too-close-for-comfort moments with an out Neiman boy named Seth, a troubled, artsy kid from Brookline. There’d been some near-misses at parties, Seth touching Jason’s arm or brushing past him in a hallway, lingering as they pressed by each other, Jason running from the electric pull of it.) He and Brandon and Connor and maybe Fitz, if he was around, would get drunk, steal the golf cart from the club, hang out at the beach. Simple stuff. There were worse ways to spend a summer. Jason at least knew that.

And so in June they went, the Elsings, packing up the new Volvo and the old Saab, Theo letting Jason drive once they got off 495, the cool, blue early June wind blowing in the windows, the deep, satisfying greens of a Massachusetts summer welcoming them as they wended up the thin arm of the Cape. As they approached the house, gravel crunching under the tires, Jason felt a sudden jolt of excitement, maybe even hope. It seemed, that early evening, the sky behind the house purple and dreamy and big, like maybe something was about to change.

? ? ?

“What the hell, Jason?” Alexa planted herself in the center of the ER entrance, her eyes red from crying, her chin trembling.

“Sorry, sorry, I just had to get some air.”

“You’ve been gone for twenty minutes. I didn’t know where you were. I mean, don’t you care what’s happening right now? Do you even know what’s happening right now?”

“Do you?”

“I—no. I mean, yes, I do. They said the first people from the accident are going to be here soon and that we just have to wait. Someone will tell us if they, if Mom and Dad, are brought in. But there’s, like, a million other people waiting in there. I don’t know how they’re going to find us.”

“Mom and Dad?”

“No, the lady, the hospital lady who will tell us if they’re here.”

“Oh. Well. I mean . . . we’ll just . . . be there, right? So she’ll find us.”

“It would really help if we’re both in there, just in case.”

Jason took her meaning. “O.K. I won’t leave again, I promise.”

They walked toward the waiting room, which was full of harried, frenzied people, most of them crowded around the reception desk, pleading with a tired-looking nurse or secretary or someone, who threw up her hands and said, “I can only help one person at a time. Please let me do that.”

“Are they all waiting on people from the bridge?” Jason asked, knowing it was a dumb question as soon as he asked it, but finding it hard to comprehend how all these people—there had to be fifty of them, maybe more—knew someone who’d happened to be crossing the Tobin Bridge, in the middle of the day on a Monday, at the exact moment of the collapse.

Alexa nodded, and then seemed to get annoyed. “It’s really bad, Jason. Like, really bad. I don’t know if . . . They said a lot of people drowned.”

“Who said?”

“Twitter.”

Jason rolled his eyes. There it was. Haughtiness. “No one on Twitter knows what they’re talking about. Remember the Marathon? They were saying, like, a hundred people had died at first, and it was really like two.”

“It was three.”

“Whatever. It wasn’t a hundred. It can’t be that bad. People were in cars. This is just . . . People are just panicking.”

“Aren’t you panicking? Are you even worried about them?”

“Of course I am, Alexa. I just . . . We don’t know anything, do we? So let’s just assume everything’s O.K. Because it probably is.”

Alexa stared at him in disbelief and, then, disgust. “Are you high right now?”

“What?”

“Are you high?”

Jason ground his teeth, looked down at the floor. He wasn’t. He hadn’t taken anything that day, he was pretty sure. But he still felt high. Maybe from the night before. Which scared him, and made him feel like a loser. Haughtiness, gone. “No. I’m not high, Alexa.”

“Because ‘let’s just assume everything’s O.K.’ when there’s been a huge accident involving our parents and we have no idea what’s going on sounds like high talk to me.”