All We Can Do Is Wait(9)

Her phone buzzed again, and Skyler thought about the turbulence on those plane rides to Cambodia, the little dips and sudden jolts, the steady drone of the engines sometimes interrupted by piercing whines or roars. “The plane’s just readjusting,” Kate would say when Skyler tensed in her seat. “That’s all that’s happening. Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s wrong.”

Skyler would nod and try to believe what Kate was telling her. But then the plane would bump again and she would instinctively reach for her sister’s hand, knowing then, at least, that she still had that to hold on to.





Chapter Three


    Alexa



LONELY IN A crowded room. That phrase—something the school counselor, Ms. Reeve, had said a few times during their meetings over the last year—was running through Alexa’s head as she stood in the ER waiting area, huddles of distraught people talking nervously, frantically typing on phones, pacing back and forth as much as they could in the cramped, fluorescent-lit room. Alexa was alone, and she felt it, a familiar empty feeling, a confusion and a resignation. Jason would be no help, it seemed. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise, not when he’d been so distant, so caught up in his own moodiness, for over a year.

Wasn’t it supposed to be the older sibling who took care of things? Wasn’t Alexa, the younger sister, the one who should be freaking out and bratty, not left to handle all the heavy, practical worry? This seemed unfair. Which Alexa knew was childish, to think that anything on a day like this should have any sense of fairness about it, but there she was, standing by herself in a mass of strangers, wishing that just this once, things would work the way they were supposed to.

Looking around, Alexa assessed that she was probably the youngest person in the waiting room, save for two babies who were being clutched close by their wild-eyed mothers, maybe waiting on news of husbands or wives or, Alexa realized with a jolt of dread, maybe other children. Noise seemed to come in waves, no phones at the reception desk ringing and then, all of a sudden, all of them going off at once. That’s when the talk in the room would swell back up to a din and the crowd would start moving its way toward the desk and the doors to the outside, looking to see if someone was being brought in from the scene of the accident. But then nothing would change.

Alexa got close enough to a blond woman to see that she was wearing a nametag. “Mary Oakes,” it read. And beneath that, “Patient Relations.” So she wasn’t a doctor, just some sort of spokeswoman or something. Still, when Alexa looked at her sharp nose and little line of a mouth, it looked like she knew more than she was letting on, like there was a crucial bit of information she was calculatingly keeping from all these panicked people.

Alexa stood near Mary Oakes, tall and pale with hair the color of the white corn you could buy at farm stands on the Cape in the summer, as a timid, tired-looking woman walked away from Mary and toward a man who had just arrived. They were older than Alexa’s parents, the parents of someone in college, or grad school, maybe. The man looked panicked as he asked his wife what was happening.

“He was on the bridge,” she told him. “He was driving on the bridge.”

“Where?” the man asked.

“On the bridge, the Tobin Bridge, when—” the woman stammered.

“I meant on what side, Eveyln. Northbound? Southbound?”

The woman looked annoyed suddenly, less tired from grief and more from years of frustration, maybe. “North, Howard. He was driving to see you . . .”

“I didn’t know,” the man, Howard, said quietly.

“Yeah, well . . .” Evelyn trailed off.

“Is north good?” the man asked after a small, freighted pause.

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” the woman yelped, bursting into tears. Her husband—or maybe ex-husband, from the sound of it—awkwardly put his arms around her.

The couple seemed so tiny and scared in the middle of the hospital’s frenzy. Alexa pulled herself away, feeling nosy and intrusive.

It went on like this. Mary Oakes would disappear for a minute or two behind some swinging doors but then return, standing on the edge of the room with her arms crossed, making herself available for questions but never really answering anything. Eventually the room would ebb back into nervous quiet, which made Alexa feel restless and even more alone, like a little girl in a place full of grown-ups where she wasn’t supposed to be. She found a seat—most people seemed too anxious to sit down—and tried to calm herself. She wanted Jason there with her, but also suspected that he’d just frustrate her if he was, as he had been doing pretty steadily since the summer before.

? ? ?

Like her brother, Alexa was wary of her parents’ plan for a family bonding summer. But the truth was that a summer in Boston didn’t really seem much better. Alexa had a few friends, girls she ate lunch with and would occasionally see on the weekends, but they always seemed like best friends with each other and not with her. She did a number of extracurriculars—she ran on the cross-country team in the fall, worked as the copy editor for the school paper, painted scenery for the theater club’s productions—but she never found the community that others seemed to. A lot of what she did was lonely by design, solitary work that Alexa could focus on without the interference—welcome or otherwise—of other people.