All We Can Do Is Wait(57)

Chapter Fourteen


    Alexa



IT WAS AS if the hospital, and the whole unfathomable day, suddenly snapped into focus; whatever hazy unknowability had existed was gone. Nothing had quite felt real until then, not even when Skyler got her good news.

None of it had been hard and provable and tangible, until Alexa watched Aimee’s parents, the parents of this stranger she would now never meet, sob in a heap on the floor, knowing now that their daughter was gone, that whatever hope they’d had—driving to the hospital that day, or from the hospital after she was born, or any day in between—was lost, irretrievable in the wreckage of the bridge. Alexa felt heavy and out of breath, like she was being crushed. She forced herself to tear her eyes away from Aimee’s parents, and retreated to a far corner of the room, to catch her breath and try to stop the room from spinning.

Why was she so upset? Of course it was sad that someone was dead, someone so young especially. But she didn’t know Aimee. She’d only learned of her existence a couple of hours before, in a photo from a school dance. It was just so strange to think that that smiling girl, happy and dressed up, was now dead. It was hard to even understand what that word really meant, the finality and severity of it. Alexa found a chair and fell into it, stunned and tired and reeling with ideas about her parents, about how they might be gone too—over, ended, no more life.

Of course, Alexa had known this feeling before, the suddenness and boggling, staggering vastness of it.

An image of Kyle flickered in her head, him at the ice cream store one night, showing her some little choreographed dance he’d made up to a local car dealership’s ad jingle, the two of them laughing like crazy at this stupid thing, Kyle waving a washcloth over his head as he swiveled his hips.

When had that been? June? July? Alexa couldn’t remember anymore. It had just been some silly night, the two of them punchy at the end of a long day. Kyle had probably driven her home, as he did on a lot of nights when they closed together. Maybe they’d listened to some music in the car, maybe they’d talked. Probably they had, speculating about life after summer, after school, after whatever came after that.

Sitting now on the hard chair in the waiting room—Aimee’s parents had been scooped up and led off somewhere deeper into the hospital—Alexa felt an acute and burning pain, missing Kyle so much just then. How could he be gone? How can anyone just . . . go away and never come back?

It had been over a year since Kyle died, and yet it all still felt so raw. Yes, Alexa’s grief had evolved—hardening, focusing itself, lodging somewhere permanently in her. It was once new, almost a surprise, a shock of sadness. But now it was just a fact of her life, mingling terribly with her feelings about Jason, her sorrow and dismay over his regression to the way he was before the Elsings’ summer of happiness and, eventually, doom.

Two months after Kyle’s death, another dark Boston fall setting in, Alexa and Jason had barely spoken about what happened. All Alexa knew was that Jason seemed allergic to her grief. Kyle died, and Alexa’s reaction was too much for Jason, so he backed away, as if the summer and their closeness had never happened. But of course they still had to exist in the same house together, and one night in October, alone in the basement kitchen together, Alexa felt a burning need to say something to her brother, to coax something out of him, some acknowledgment of where they were, and where they had been.

“It’s two months next Tuesday.”

Jason looked up from his cereal, his preferred dinner when Linda and Theo were out, confused. “Huh?”

“It’s two months, to the day. Next Tuesday. Since Kyle . . .”

Her brother’s face slackened and seemed to lose its color. “Oh.”

He returned to his cereal, chewing loudly for a few seconds before looking back up at this sister. “Why would you tell me that?”

“Because I can’t get it out of my head, Jason. Because you knew him too, and you liked him, and he was a part of our lives and now he’s gone and I just want to talk to someone about it.”

“Talk to Mom and Dad, then. Or talk to a therapist. I . . . don’t want to talk about that stuff. I can’t talk about it. I mean, what’s the point anyway?”

“The point is to, like, share what you’re going through with someone else, because it helps? Are you even sad that Kyle died?”

Jason stood up and practically threw his cereal bowl into the sink. “Jesus, Alexa.”

“Are you? Because it’s been two months—almost two months—and you’ve barely . . . I’m sorry if I’m, like, too much for you or whatever, but I’m here, and I’m hurting, and a little support from you would—”

“Would what, Alexa? Would bring him back? Would make you not sad anymore? This is so pointless. You can’t change anything. What happened happened, and we— You just have to deal with it and move on. That’s it.”

Alexa was stung, as if Jason was saying that everything she was feeling was pointless. But maybe he was right. Maybe all this was doing was pushing Jason further from her, not helping her get through a difficult time. Maybe she did need to be more like her brother, detached and unmoved, guarded and self-preserving.

But try as Alexa did throughout the year, she couldn’t shake her feelings. She gradually gave up on Jason, the brother she knew that one summer becoming a memory, a fond one tainted with bitterness and hurt. But she kept Kyle active and present in her mind. She approached school less intensely—not because she was checked out but because she was focused on something else. Alexa held on to everything she’d shared with Kyle, everything she had let herself hope for her life. It took a year—a hard and punishing one, one affected as much by Jason’s absence as it was by Kyle’s—but Alexa finally worked up the courage to tell her parents that she was going to put off college, that she had a different life in mind.