All We Can Do Is Wait(67)

“Maybe,” Alexa muttered, arms still crossed, looking sad and wary, wounded.

“I don’t know.” Skyler sighed. “I don’t know you guys. I don’t mean to butt in. It’s just, if something happens to your par—”

She caught herself, but too late. Jason and Alexa both flinched. “I’m sorry,” she stammered, “I just meant . . .”

“It’s O.K.” Jason shook his head. “It’s fine. You’re right.” He looked at his sister, who wasn’t meeting his gaze. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Alexa, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry I shut down after. I just . . . I didn’t know how to be in my head. So I ran from . . . all of it, I guess.”

Alexa ran a hand through her hair. Let out a deep breath. “I mean, I can’t imagine what that must have felt like for you. I just wish . . .” She fell silent.

Jason nodded. “Yeah. Me too.”

Skyler was sure she was intruding now and was about to excuse herself, but then she felt a tap on her shoulder and turned around. There was Dr. Lobel, her gray hair spiking off in different directions.

“Ms. Vong?” she asked. Skyler felt a sudden surge of fear. What if something had happened, what if they’d been wrong earlier, what if Kate wasn’t O.K.?

But Dr. Lobel put a hand on Skyler’s arm and gave it a squeeze. “Your sister is awake,” she said. “She asked for you.” Skyler’s heart lifted back up. “Normally we wouldn’t do this, but would you like to go back and see her before we have to prep her for surgery?”

Skyler looked to Jason and Alexa, who both gave her small, encouraging smiles. She waved to them, not sure if it was goodbye or what, and followed Dr. Lobel through the swinging doors and into the hallways of the hospital.

She felt strangely scared. What if things with Kate were different? They were both altered now, weren’t they? What if they couldn’t connect with one another anymore? What if they had nothing to say? Skyler thought about her grandparents, so far away, probably panicking, trying to get back to Boston as quickly as they could. Even though Skyler had told them to stay put, she couldn’t wait for them to get there, for her little family to be back together. For everyone to be in the house again, same as it had been for years.

She thought about her mother, wondered where she might be at that moment. Skyler wondered if maybe her mother had felt something, when Kate was in the accident. People said that parents have an extra sense like that. Maybe Lucy had been in the middle of some desert in California, or on a rocky, lonely beach, and had felt a sudden stab of panic and dread and had missed her daughters just then. Had worried about them. But maybe it didn’t matter, either way. Maybe what Skyler had, what she and Kate had, was enough.

Dr. Lobel guided Skyler around a corner and into a small room. “Kate,” she said, “you have a visitor.” Skyler walked in and saw her sister, bruised and bandaged and surrounded by beeping machines. She had so long to go before she was better. Still, as she walked in, she saw that Kate was smiling, looking happy and relieved to see Skyler, to see someone she could count on. To see her sister, crying and scared and grateful all at the same time, there in the room with her, ready to help her through.





Chapter Eighteen


    Jason



JASON WATCHED SKYLER leave with the doctor and felt a prickliness, the knowledge that he and Alexa were now alone, and that he’d have to face her again, would have to live with all of his secrets out in the open, the ones he’d held so long and so bitterly. So intensely.

Ambulances were arriving more slowly now, the local anchors on the TV saying that most of the injured victims had been removed from the scene and were at or were on their way to area hospitals. Investigations were under way, the mayor promising that a cause would be determined and if there were parties responsible—he kept saying “negligence”—they would be brought to justice. But still no word on Jason’s parents, if they were just bodies in the rubble or if they were on their way, injured but alive. He and Alexa were among the few people left, waiting for news, for closure, for some bloom of hope.

He looked at Alexa, her eyes still fixed on the door where Skyler had disappeared. She had a lot to think about, he figured. A lot to process. He had hoped he would feel lighter after he told his sister everything, but the space between them only felt heavier, more charged with hurt and confusion. Maybe he had made everything worse, as he always seemed to do, eventually. He and Alexa hadn’t said a word since Skyler left, Alexa staring at the door like she was trying to see through it to something else, Jason watching his sister and trying to figure out what she might do next.

Jason never would have guessed that Alexa would turn to him, her voice even and familiar, and ask, “Do you have any cigarettes?”

Jason blinked at her, not sure he’d heard her right. “Any what?”

“I know you smoke sometimes. Do you have any?”

“I—you don’t smoke.”

“You don’t know everything about me. Sometimes I do.”

“Oh. Well . . . Um, I don’t. Morgan had one of those e-cigarette things. But she’s . . . I don’t know where she went.”

“Maybe she’s outside. Let’s go outside.”