All We Can Do Is Wait(6)
“Jesus, Alexa, I’m not high. But I am sick of you bitching at me. I’m here. I’m staying. I’m sorry I went outside. I’ll find the lady and ask her if she knows anything, O.K.? What does she look like?”
“She’s got blond hair.”
“That’s really helpful, Alexa, thanks.”
Alexa looked like she’d been slapped. “Fuck you, Jason. Honestly, fuck you.” She turned from him and stalked off into the crowd of people, disappearing around a corner by some chairs. Jason stood there, feeling dumb, his face hot from something like shame. His hand itched for his phone.
He wanted to hear his voice again. He wanted his voice to take him back, to last summer, to all that possibility. When his parents, his imperfect but good parents, were intact, accounted for. When he was just a seventeen-year-old fuckup, not whatever he was now. An orphan, maybe. Whose sister hated him. He knew that all he had to do was talk to Alexa, to tell her why things had been so tense and sad between them for the past year, why he’d gone down another rabbit hole after a short summer when things had cleared up, when he was bright and alert again. But he couldn’t find the words. Not then, not ever.
Not since Labor Day a year ago. Jason closed his eyes and thought of the boy in the voice mail. The boy who loved him, and had first said so while calling from a party in Provincetown late one summer night. In the magical, lost time before everything in the world seemed to crumble and fall apart.
Chapter Two
Skyler
THE BUS FELT impossible. Though she took a city bus to school every day, and home from school too, in that moment, as Skyler struggled to hold her bag while cradling her phone with her chin and trying to get her CharlieCard out of her wallet, for a second all she could focus on was how impossible it was to just get on this bus so she could get to where she needed to be.
Where she needed to be. After miraculously not dropping anything, and finding a seat toward the front of the bus, the horrifying fact of where Skyler was going rushed back in like cold into a room. The phone, still cradled on her shoulder, was making a weird purring, chirping sound, telling her that the call she was trying to make wasn’t going to go through. Or no one was answering. What time was it there, anyway? She was trying to call her grandparents in Phnom Penh, where they were spending a month. But as she did the math she realized that it was four in the morning in Cambodia, and though her grandparents were light sleepers, they would, on principle, refuse to answer the phone that early. Because they didn’t like to be bothered, but also, Skyler suspected, because they knew, more than most people, how bad the news on the other end of the line could be.
As the bus lurched down Summer Street, Skyler listened to the brrrp-brrrp, brrrp-brrrp a few more times before hanging up and throwing the phone in her bag. She sighed, tried to calm herself down, leaning her head back against the cool glass of the bus window and closing her eyes. What good would calling her grandparents really have done, anyway? They were thousands of miles away and realistically couldn’t just up and rush back. They were old and slow, and changing their flight would cost too much money. They weren’t due home for weeks. Skyler was alone. She knew that.
Skyler had been on the phone with her sister, Kate, when everything went wrong. They were talking—well, they were arguing, really, about the stupid car and who was going to use it on Saturday—when Kate said, “Wait, something’s happening. Oh my God, I have to—” There was a clattering, an awful crunching sound, and then the phone went dead. Then there were Skyler’s few seconds of blind panic, then the frantic calling of 911, then the waiting, and now this, heading on a bus to the hospital to wait some more. To find out if her sister was crushed inside that stupid car on her way home from a job she hated. Or if she’d drowned. Or if she was alive and things would go back to being . . . if not perfect, at least not this.
Traffic was bad, a combination of rush hour and the broader madness of the accident tangling up the city. Horns were blaring, and Skyler thought about her grandparents, about the streets of Phnom Penh, choked with mopeds and scooters and tuk-tuks. She’d hated visiting there as a kid, the place her grandparents had fled years before so strange and foreign and inhospitable, too noisy and bright, nothing like their quiet enough street in plain old Jamaica Plain, where nothing much ever seemed to happen.
Skyler wished her grandparents were back, but she also knew that she’d hate to see them distraught, dealing with all this horror, real and potential. What if what Skyler was convinced she knew was actually true? What if Kate was dead, swallowed up by a random accident—it was an accident, wasn’t it? Do terrorists blow up bridges?—and that was it? What the hell was Skyler going to do? The only person in the world who she could really talk to, who understood what Skyler had been through in the past two years, was her sister, her calm and resourceful and usually reasonable sister. It didn’t make any sense that this could happen to Kate. This kind of calamity was supposed to befall Skyler—she was the messy one, the fragile one, the one who always needed scooping up after some disaster. Kate, solid, good, boring Kate, she was the rock. Kate was the one who would inevitably hold their small family together after their grandparents were gone. But now it was entirely possible that she had been ripped out of the world and that Skyler would have to sort out her life on her own.
Which was not the point, of course. The point was Kate. The point was whether or not she was O.K. It didn’t matter then, maybe it wouldn’t ever, if Skyler could manage her life on her own. What a selfish thing to even think. Skyler chided herself and bit a nail, the bus lurching as it stopped and started, stopped and started. She felt nauseated. She hadn’t eaten much of anything that day, really, a yogurt before school and then nothing else. Not because she was too busy—Skyler was not exactly a model student—but because she’d been feeling unsettled all day, since the night before, when she’d gotten a text message from a number she didn’t know. All it said was Hey, but it filled her with dread, knowing that it was probably him.