All We Can Do Is Wait - Hardcover

Richard Lawson is the film critic for Vanity Fair and a co-host of V.F.'s Little Gold Men podcast. He has written for The Guardian, The Atlantic Wire, Gawker, and Out magazine, and has contributed to the Dinner Party Download radio show. Though currently living in New York City, Richard was born and raised in Boston.

Prologue
The Bridge

IT WAS CLOUDY when the bridge gave way, about a hundred cars crossing the Mystic River on the Tobin. People who saw it said it just suddenly happened, but how sudden could something like this be? It must have been years of bad maintenance, years of some important part being worn away by rust or stress or time. Really, the only sudden part was the very end.

From far away, it seemed to go softly, one section dropping down, and then another, splashing into the river, dust falling like snow after it. Up close, of course, it was a different matter: a terrible, quick quaking and then the horror of plummeting. It was hard to say who was less lucky, the ones who fell into the water or the ones who fell onto Charlestown, debris tumbling on top of them. Was it better to be swiftly crushed or to slowly drown in your car?

It’s easy to forget, seeing a stream of cars on the highway or stuck in city traffic, that each of them represents a person, or several people, all trying to get somewhere of their own, home or to a meeting or to a funeral or starting out a trip. When the police and rescue teams arrived on the scene of the Tobin Bridge collapse, one of their first jobs was to determine how many people were involved. They needed to know who to look for, how many cars had gone in the water, how many had crashed down onto land and been buried by metal and cement. They needed some idea of the lives involved, of all the people they were searching for.

Kate Vong was driving back from a morning shift at the restaurant where she worked, tired and stressed about school, racing to make an afternoon class, worried about finding parking, thinking she’d love to quit her job and be a full-time student like so many of her friends. She was on the phone with her younger sister, who was complaining about wanting to use the car, a fight they had often. Kate honked at a car that cut her off, and was almost across the bridge when it juddered and broke. The last thing she saw before her car tipped toward the ground and everything went black was a few spatters of rain on her windshield, and she wondered if she had an umbrella.

Theo and Linda Elsing were on the other side, heading to their daughter’s school for a meeting. Theo was on the phone with his office, annoyed that he’d been pulled away in the middle of the day. His wife was reading e-mails on her phone, gently putting her hand on Theo’s arm and telling him to slow down, that they weren’t going to be late. They’d had to take a detour because of traffic, and weren’t even supposed to be on the bridge. Theo slowed the car and told work he had to hang up. He gave his wife an apologetic look, and then the road cracked underneath them, the car sliding to the edge and toppling over the side, Linda saying, “Theo . . .” and grabbing the dash as the car fell.

Aimee Peck was a few cars ahead, out over the water, heading north to Salem on a sort of field trip with her friends, their favorite song blaring. They were laughing about something that had happened at play rehearsal the day before, Aimee’s friend Taissa driving fast, saying she couldn’t believe the show was going up in only a few weeks. Aimee was excited about the trip, and about the play, but she was distracted. She was staring out the passenger seat window when she felt the car shake, heard Taissa screaming as she twisted the wheel and the car went flipping down toward the river. Aimee closed her eyes.

There were many others, nearly two hundred in all. A mother taking her children to her parents’ place in Portland. A lawyer headed home after a frustrating morning in court. A newlywed couple on their way to the airport, suitcases in the trunk packed with warm-weather clothes. There was a woman fighting on the phone with her daughter in Arizona, a man crying about the dog he’d just put to sleep. There were three babies, there was a taxi driver taking a long fare to Revere, there were truck drivers heading north, others heading into the city. There were more.

That’s what they—the paramedics, the police—found when they went looking in the rubble of the bridge, once they’d determined it was safe enough to do so. A whole panorama of lives—people trapped or injured or killed together. They dug people out as carefully and as quickly as they could. They set up triage onsite; they put the direst cases in a phalanx of ambulances, sending them off to the closest hospitals. They sent divers into the water, afraid of what they would find. The attention of the city, the great eye of Boston, swooped down and watched with grief and concern, helicopters whirring overhead, news crews trying to get the best angles.

Slowly, all across Greater Boston, the phone calls began. Loved ones getting word, rushing out of offices and homes and classrooms to make their way to the hospitals, reeling with panic and fear, tearing through a city once again roiling with tragedy. They descended on emergency rooms, pleading for answers, but instead were forced to wait for word of parents and sisters and girlfriends. To find out who, exactly, had just been lost.

 
Chapter One
Jason

THOUGH HIS PARENTS could be dead, lost to him forever, there was only one voice Jason wanted to hear just then. As he stood outside the hospital, the day darkening and surreal around him, Jason reached for the familiar, comforting talisman of his phone and opened a voice mail.

“Hey, you. I’m driving to Laurie’s, wanted to say hi. I know you hate voice mail, so I don’t know why I’m leaving you one. But—” There was a little pause, the rumble of the car going over a pothole, a faint bit of melody from whatever song had been turned down to make the call. “This is corny, but I think about you all the time. And right now is part of ‘all the time,’ right? So, I’m thinking about you now. Does that make sense? I hope it does. Anyway, as Carly Rae says, I really like you. O.K.? O.K. This is embarrassing. Goodbye! I like you! Goodbye.”

Jason took the phone from his ear, tempted to restart the message. But then an ambulance siren blared next to him, jolting him out of the warm world of the voice mail, and Jason remembered where he was: standing outside Boston General, five p.m. on a Monday in November, waiting to find out if his parents were still alive. Jason could, he realized for maybe the hundredth time in the last hour, be an eighteen-year-old orphan. His parents were missing, or unaccounted for, like so many other people. Surveillance cameras had captured their car inching up the bridge in midday traffic, and then it disappeared with everything else when first one section, and then another one, gave way. Jason had seen the footage, somehow already leaked online, small and black-and-white and fake-looking. His sister, Alexa, had found out first, of course—and now here they were, along with all the other clueless, crying loved ones, waiting to find out just how much the world had suddenly changed.

But Jason couldn’t even really begin to think about his parents, about where they might be and in what condition, if they were just bodies in bags somewhere, if they were hurt and bleeding, if they’d asked for their children. That was all too much to comprehend, to even consider processing, so Jason found himself reaching back, not dwelling on tangled metal and crumbled concrete but instead on the ski slope of a boy’s nose, his gravity-defying hair, the way his mouth drooped down just a little on one side, into a pout or a sneer depending on his mood. He missed him all the time, of course, but now that ache felt profound—physical, elemental, molecular. This was what it was to love someone, Jason figured, but there was nothing to be done about that now.

Except, maybe, to listen to the voice mail one more time. He tapped the arrow button and pressed the phone in close, losing himself again in the melodic, confident voice, twinged with that bit of giddy nerves, saying to Jason what Jason wanted so much to say back. The voice mail ended and Jason began to feel himself emptying out again. The high of the message was quick, lasting only a few seconds before the realities of the day came crashing, thudding, screaming back in.

Jason looked up and saw the beginnings of chaos. People on phones—or clutching spouses or children—were hurrying toward the emergency room doors. Nurses and doctors were waiting expectantly for the first wave of ambulances from the site.

I’m too young for this, Jason thought. Most of the time, Jason tried to assert a worldliness, a cultivated jadedness. It was a pose he struck at school. (Or rather, schools—he was on his third school in as many years.) It was probably how Alexa would say he treated her. Jason suddenly remembered a brief conversation he’d had—tense and a little sad—with his mother, a year or two before.

They were in the library, what Jason’s mother called the sitting room or parlor at the front of the house. Jason was sitting there in some fog, fiddling on his phone, when his mother came in, saying goodbye on her way to some event or other. She looked at him with that half-concerned, half-bored look of hers for a moment and then turned to leave, before remembering that, oh right, this was her teenage son, being left home alone, and she should probably make sure he wouldn’t burn the house down.

“You’ll be all right?” she asked, fastening a tasteful gold earring to an earlobe.

Jason looked up at her, gave her one of his withering looks. “Will you?”

His mother seemed a little stung, and was certainly annoyed. “You know,” she said, her eyes cold and piercing, or as much as they could be from behind their usual glassiness, “you’re awfully haughty these days, aren’t you?” She said it in such a way—that word, “haughty”—that Jason thought there was something behind it; he had a suspicion about what kind of boys, what kind of young men, Jason’s mother found to be “haughty.”

Jason’s mother was right, though. About the haughtiness, about what that haughtiness might mean. Trying so hard—for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate, even to himself—to cover up a fundamental part of himself led to Jason projecting this air of betterness, of knowing, talking to his parents like they weren’t his parents at all. He liked how it felt: detached and mature and, despite all his messes, self-possessed.

Still, it hurt when his mother made her subtle implications about what she might know, in such a pointed and disapproving tone. Jason remembered feeling stung there in the library, listening to his mother’s heels clack out of the house. All he wanted to do was chase after her and tell her the truth and have her hug him. But he didn’t, and the haughtiness, his remove, eventually returned, as it always did.

But now all this . . . he was definitely not old enough for this. He felt small and panicky, a swell of fear rising up in his chest. He’d need another. Just one more, before he collected himself and went to deal with the present. He found a favorite message, a short one. The sound of a party, one voice breaking through, drunk and happy, yelling, “You should’ve come with me toniiiiight! I love you! I mean, shit, I’m drunk! I’m drunk! I gotta go!” Then a laugh, a blare of music, and the click of the phone hanging up. I love you. It was one of the few times someone who wasn’t his parents had ever said that to him.

His parents. The hospital. Here. He had to be here. It was beginning to rain, the sidewalk pavement getting darker in splotches. Jason knew he should go inside, find Alexa, stay with her as long as it took to make sure everything was going to be O.K. It had to be O.K., didn’t it? How much bad stuff could happen to one kid in a year?

His voice mail ritual done, Jason put his phone back in his pocket and ran his hands through his hair. The rain was picking up quickly, and it was cold. The clocks had been set back an hour the day before, and this was the first really dark afternoon of the year. So it was dark, and cold, and raining, and yet Jason still felt rooted in place, unable to turn around and go find his sister. Because he didn’t know what was left of his life inside. Though, to be fair, he didn’t know what was left of his life out there, either, standing on a street corner, listening to year-old voice mails.

*

“The whole summer?”

Jason was sitting at the dining room table with his parents and Alexa. May of the year before. Jason’s face felt hot, indignant, like he’d just been slapped while being told he was going to jail.

“We think it would be good. For all of us,” Jason’s father, Theo, said, giving a hopeful little glance toward Jason’s mother, Linda. “To get away, as a family. And you kids love it out there.”

“For a weekend, I guess, when we were kids,” Jason whined. He could hear the brattiness in his voice, could feel childish tears of frustration stinging in his eyes. Normally he would never show that much emotion in front of his parents, but right then he didn’t care. They had just told Jason and his sister that they’d be spending the entire summer, the whole three-month expanse of it, at the family’s vacation home in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod. Just the four of them. Together. Alone. All summer.

“You’re still kids,” Linda said, a little chiding, a little wistful.

“Alexa?” Jason turned to his sister. “Are you going to say anything about this?”

Before she even did it, Jason knew that Alexa was going to take their side. Even though Jason was sure Alexa didn’t really want to go, that there was no way she was thrilled about being shipped off to the Cape with her fucked-up family until Labor Day, Jason knew his sister would say and do the right thing, the good thing, the responsible thing. Sure enough, she did.

“I don’t mind,” Alexa said. “I mean, I’ll get a job. I dunno. It could be fun.”

Fun. There were many things a summer in the beach house with Theo, Linda, Jason, and Alexa and no escape could be, but fun was not one of them. Jason rolled his eyes at his sister and turned back to his parents. They barely had any control over him then, and frankly barely monitored what he did. But this, here, this seemed serious. Like maybe Jason couldn’t wriggle out of it. They were going, and there was no way they were going to leave him at home. Maybe he could run away. But where would he go?

Jason lived in the Back Bay, a beautiful old section of Boston full of well-appointed town houses, home to many of the city’s wealthy and well-connected. It being Boston, the wealth there wasn’t ostentatious, but it was certainly there. Jason and Alexa grew up in the thick of it, their mother the descendant of a long family line that could trace its roots back to the Mayflower. Not needing to work for money, Linda spent most of her time organizing and hosting benefits, for the Parks Department, for the Gardner Museum, for the Huntington Theatre. Everyone knew Linda Elsing. Jason’s father, Theo, worked as a consultant or something, making lots of money by making even more money for other people.

So, in the material ways, Jason’s life was comfortable. He’d gone to fancy private schools. Spent winter weekends at...