All We Can Do Is Wait(74)
She sat at the diner for hours, doing nothing but drinking coffee and looking out the window. She dozed off a few times before being woken by the waitress, asking, in an annoyed voice, if she needed anything else. Morgan shook her head no each time. “Just some more coffee, please.”
At four A.M., the city still and quiet, Morgan decided to leave, saying thank you to the waitress, and walking, both buzzing and tired, out into the night. She retraced her steps, back past the Majestic, past the Common, through the narrow, pretty streets of Beacon Hill. When she got to the other side of the hill, instead of turning toward the hospital, Morgan walked toward the river, finding the Longfellow Bridge and crossing it, over the Charles, into Cambridge, which was even quieter than Boston. She walked quickly, to stay warm and to evade anyone who might be lurking. She crossed the MIT campus, and then down Mass Ave, all the way to Harvard Square.
The square was empty, the traffic signals blinking and changing for no one but her. There was something hushed and dreamlike about it, being the only person walking around this normally bustling place. She walked past Harvard Yard, past the newsstand, and then into the pit by the Red Line entrance. She sat on a step and crouched into a little ball to keep out the cold. It was almost six then, and some light was starting to bleed into the sky. The T would be running again soon, and Morgan finally felt tired enough to go home. She’d get on the Red Line and ride it all the way to Ashmont, and then she’d be there, back where this surreal and terrible day had started.
She looked up and saw a light flickering on in the newsstand across the way. A man was outside stacking up the day’s newspapers. Morgan got up and walked over, wanting to see the front pages of the Globe and the Herald. Of course it was all coverage of the bridge, huge photos of the gaping yawn where the Tobin used to be, headlines saying 46 dead, 125 injured. She wondered where Alexa and Jason’s parents fit in those numbers.
Some part of her hoped to see something about her father, but of course he would never merit the front page, even on a completely uneventful day. The bridge would have to stand in for him. The bigger tragedy representing Morgan’s own relatively small one, somehow. Morgan scanned all the headlines and then walked back to the T, which was open now, early commuters riding the escalator down.
Standing on the platform, Morgan suddenly remembered something she’d forgotten in all the chaos of the hospital. How had she forgotten the envelope, the one with her father’s note inside? She dug around in her bag and found it, a little crumpled, her name scrawled in her father’s familiar handwriting. She looked at it, but did not open it. She was not ready just yet. She felt the tunnel wind of the train approaching and stepped back from the edge, the T coming whining into the station.
Once on board, still holding the unopened envelope, Morgan put her head against the glass of the window and watched as stops went by, people entering and leaving the car. There were so many people in Boston. She wasn’t sure she’d ever really noticed them all before—how many tired moms, how many college kids looking like they were waiting for something, how many solitary men staring into space as they thought about who knows what. Maybe no one was alone, she thought, as long as there were all these people.
The train rattled out of Kendall and then out onto the bridge, and there was the skyline, the Hancock and the Prudential, the slow drone of Storrow Drive. It was such a pretty place, ugly as it was for Morgan just then.
She closed her eyes and imagined what it would be like to go home, to put her key in the lock and open the door and find no one there. Of course she would be put somewhere, maybe with Aunt Jill in Nashua, maybe somewhere else. But that morning, for those minutes or hours, Morgan would be alone in the only house she’d ever known.
Morgan sat on the train and tried to imagine that bit of time, and then tried to imagine life past it. As much as she felt sad, as much as the world felt dark and closed around her, she couldn’t help but also feel infinitely curious. About what might be coming, about where her life could possibly take her. She was so devastated; how heavy that felt as the train rumbled out into the thin early morning light. But she was also relieved, in some deep part of herself, lying under the ruins, that she was still alive.
Everything would be different now. Everything would be strange. But she was still herself, still Morgan, still the girl with bitten nails and purple hair, still in her body, in her skin, still young. Life can end, suddenly. But it can also stretch on and on and on. And there, on the bridge, Morgan felt her future reaching out very far. She would someday beat this sadness, she’d find the end of it and then pass on into something else.
The train arced over the river, and Morgan wished the best for all of them. For Jason and Alexa. For their parents. For Scott. For Skyler and her sister. Morgan doubted that they’d ever see each other again. She had the feeling that morning that she might not be in Boston for much longer, that there was somewhere else she was supposed to be. The adventure would be in finding out just where that was, and what roads and sturdy bridges could take her there. Morgan opened her eyes and there was the sun, beginning to dance on the Charles, the train wheels whistling as they carried her toward whatever was next. Whatever might happen after all of this.