The Ferryman

by Christopher Golden

  Annette grabbed his wrist. “Talk to me, Dave,” she commanded. Her eyes ticked toward Lydia. “What happened?”

  “Blade Runner,” Lydia replied calmly, her tone grave, as if those two words were enough to explain it all.

  Oddly enough, they were.

  Annette started laughing. At the table nearest the windows, the other teachers now turned to pay attention to the proceedings. David caught them looking and offered a tiny shrug. Mr. Weaver seemed to chuckle a bit as he pulled a banana out of a brown paper bag. It was an endearing response, and David liked him a great deal more in that moment than he ever had before.

  “I can’t believe Sister Mary lets you get away with that every year,” Annette told him.

  “I just said the same thing,” Lydia noted.

  David raised an eyebrow at Annette, wondering if she was aware of the irony of her questioning the things Sister Mary indulged from him.

  “Look, it’s a legitimate teaching tool. All right, so it’s got some questionable content. But they’re seniors. Seventeen- and eighteen-year-old American kids. I’m pretty sure they’ve seen worse. The first year, Sister Mary dragged me down to the dungeon afterward and read me the riot act. Then I explained what I was getting at, what the lesson was that I was trying to teach about storytelling. She thought about it, and she agreed with me.”

  Lydia put a hand to her mouth, her eyes wide in a scandalized expression that would have been tiresome on most people but was almost precious from the wholesome forty-five-year-old divorcée.

  “You mean Sister Mary has seen the movie?” she asked.

  Clark Weaver cleared his throat noisily, drawing the attention of all those in the room. “Actually, she’s quite the movie buff,” he revealed. “Got a bigger DVD collection than most of the students, I’d wager.”

  “You learn something new every day,” Annette said, a bit awed.

  David sighed. “Unless you’re in Ralph Weiss’s class.”

  “Good comeback, by the way,” Annette noted as she stood and went to get her lunch from a cabinet.

  “Well, you should have heard them at it before you came in,” Lydia replied. Then she also stood. “Almost time for our shift on lunch duty, David.”

  He glanced at his watch.They had a few minutes, but he suspected Lydia was going to visit what the teachers still called “the lavatory” first. There was a bathroom right off the teachers’ lounge, but Lydia never used it.

  David smiled fondly at her. “I’ll meet you down there.”

  After Lydia left, Annette slid into the chair she had vacated. Even when she ate, she did so almost demurely. That, combined with her thin lips and somewhat pointed ears, only added to the otherworldliness of her appearance.All those things had led him to give her a nickname only he and one other person ever called her.

  “So what else is up with you, Elf?” he asked.

  Annette smiled sweetly at his use of the pet name.

  “Not much. We still on for tonight?” she asked.

  They had planned a trip into the North End for dinner, an early celebration of her birthday, which was still a week or so away.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” he told her.

  With a mouthful of peanut butter-and-banana-sandwich and a cup of coffee in her hand, Annette turned to him abruptly, sloshing a few drops of coffee onto the table.

  “David,” she mumbled, her mouth full. “I wasn’t sure if I should tell you this or not, if you’d want to know, I mean.”

  He understood her, though just barely. Annette chewed quickly and then swallowed.

  “I heard from Janine last night,” she said, her expression now serious.

  Janine. The only other person in the world who called Annette Elf. David knew the news was not good. The sparkle had disappeared from Annette’s eyes.

  In his life, David had had many good friends. Somehow, though, they all seemed to slip away. Even those he still cared deeply for were not really a part of his life anymore. Most of his high school and college friends were married and had children, and thus had lives too complicated for such frivolities as a movie or a few beers with an old buddy. Only Vince Piselli still sought him out regularly, but Vince was divorced, and seemed to be trying to recapture the drunken debauchery of their college days.

  So, almost by attrition, Annette had become his best friend. None of which lessened the degree to which he cared for her. Perhaps it was because she was gay and he knew that there could never be anything sexual between them, but David adored her more than almost any other woman he had ever met. One exception was his sister, who lived in California and with whom he spoke at least twice a week. The other was Janine Hartschorn, the woman he had almost married.

  Janine had been teaching mathematics at St. Matthew’s for only a year before David and Annette came along. The three of them had quickly become almost inseparable. Not long after, David and Janine fell in love. For fourteen months it seemed perfect.They talked about the future. Then the past came back to haunt them in the form of Janine’s ex, who had broken her heart not long after college.

  He could still remember the words she had used to tell him the best thing in his life was gone. I love you, she had said, her voice quavering. But if I don’t give this a shot, see what I can make of it, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, and I’d end up resenting you for that.We’d both be miserable.

  With regret, he also remembered his response, the bitter words he still wished he could take back. Yeah. At least this way only one of us is miserable.

  “What happened?” he asked hesitantly.

  “She lost the baby.”

  A twinge of pain shot through his heart and he closed his eyes for a moment. The asshole had gotten Janine pregnant and had left her. Annette had told him that much, had even suggested that he call, but David thought that if Janine wanted to hear from him, she would let him know.

  But this ...

  “How?”

  Annette bit her lip slightly. She dipped her head toward him, then shot a quick glance at the other teachers. When she spoke again, her voice was almost a whisper, intimate and pained. “You sure you want to hear all this?”

  David nodded.

  “Okay, maybe one in ten first pregnancies, women have what’s called preeclampsia. Blood pressure goes way, way up, and circulation to the fetus drops precipitously. It’s dangerous stuff. But for Janine, it was worse. She developed another condition, or syndrome, or whatever. I don’t even remember the name. Anyway, with the blood pressure up, the liver goes into overdrive and starts almost attacking the red blood cells and the platelets, destroying them.

  “The short version of that is that with a really low platelet count, your blood won’t clot.That means they can’t perform a C-section and take the baby without having the mother bleed to death. I’d guess even vaginal birth is dangerous at that point, but the baby’s coming out one way or another. But when the mother’s system goes into distress—and we’re talking critical—so does the baby’s.

  “Janine almost died, but she pulled through.The baby didn’t make it. Now they’ve got her on all this antidepression medication and stuff. She sounded pretty bad.”

  “God,” David whispered, dropping his gaze. He shook his head, unable to understand how things for Janine had come to this. He could not even begin to imagine how devastated she must have been.

  Deeply saddened, he raised his eyes again. “Annette? Do you ... do you think it would be too awkward for her if I went to see her?”

  Annette reached across the table and twined her fingers within his. “I think that’s a wonderful idea.”

  He thought on it for a minute, reluctant but at the same time driven by love and compassion for Janine. What they had might be in the past, but that did not mean he had to stop caring for her, particularly now, when she would need support the most.

  “I’ll go tomorrow afternoon,” he decided. Quickly, he glanced at his watch. “I’m late, though. I’ll catch up with you after school.”r />
  Annette gave him a nod. “Great.”

  As David pushed back his chair and rose, the door to the teachers’ lounge swung open abruptly and Lydia Beal walked in, a stricken expression on her face.

  “Ralph Weiss just had a heart attack in the cafeteria,” she said, her voice strained.

  “He’s dead.”

  It was not sleep. At least, not in any meaningful way; not in any way that would have provided the sort of replenishment of body and soul, the sweet solace of dreams, the retreat to blissful oblivion, that people gave themselves over to each night.

  Ever since she had first regained consciousness in the hospital and seen the despair on the faces of her caretakers, Janine had not had a single moment of the precious sleep that she had once taken for granted. She slept, certainly, but it was a shallow thing, haunted by the voices and rattles and tiny disturbances of the world around her. Yet she retreated to that unsatisfying limbo state again and again, if only to avoid the tears.

  For when she was awake, she wept.

  Depression, the nurses called it. A doctor had prescribed a drug called Zoloft for her. It was meant to regulate her mood. Janine took the pills they gave her and the drug did seem to dull her mind, to numb her ever so slightly. But it could not relieve her of the burden she bore. Perhaps if it really were depression, the drug might have had another effect. But it was not that at all.

  It was grief. Bone-deep, heart-wrenching, soul-searing grief.

  How could they not know that? she had thought at one point.

  But slowly she came to understand the truth. They did know, of course, but they talked their way around her grief because there wasn’t a pill for that.

  Even the therapist or psychiatrist or whatever she was that the hospital sent in to speak with her seemed to know the truth of it. She talked about grief, clinical observations about spiritual agony, statistics and analogies and recovery forecasts worthy of a spreadsheet, or at the very least a display of augury more appropriate to such predictions, such as a throwing of the bones or a glance at a crystal ball.

  Talk. All talk.

  Grief had no cure.

  Her body recovered more quickly. Though she had been through a massive physical trauma, the nurses seemed pleased to find no sign of long-lasting effects. No stroke, no brain damage, no need for a replacement liver or kidney.

  Janine did not see the doctors much.

  Rest, they told her. All she needed now was rest.

  She laughed at that one, but nobody seemed to get the joke. They seemed not to understand that the periods of time she spent with her eyes closed were more like a trance than actual sleep. Rest played no part in it at all.

  At least she stopped crying, however. By the end of the third day after her own body had killed her baby, she had run out of tears. She had even begun to make phone calls to a few close friends—all of whom she had badly neglected during her catastrophic reunion with Spencer.They were good friends, though. Not one of them reminded her that they had warned her; not one brought up what a stupid bitch she had been to fall for him again.

  Not that she needed reminding.

  There was a merciless, unforgiving voice in her head that seemed to be with her all the time, crucifying her for allowing herself to be swept back into Spencer Hahn’s vortex.

  And, of course, there was her mother.

  Mother.

  On Friday morning, four days after Janine Hartschorn had nearly died, she lay in that limbo state, not deep enough for dreams but not awake, and her subconscious mind became aware of an intrusion. The soft hiss of panty hose scraping together, the rattle of the blinds being opened, the slight redistribution of weight as someone sat on the end of the bed.

  Her eyelids lazily parted once, twice, a third time.Then she frowned. At the end of the bed sat her mother, Ruth Vale, in a dark jacket and skirt that might have been an advertising executive’s power suit or mourning clothes.

  “Mom?” she rasped, stretching weakly. “I didn’t expect you so early.”

  Ruth had once had hair as raven black as Janine’s own, but when it had begun to gray she dyed it auburn and almost always wore it up in a severe braid. Power suit. Power hair to match.

  “It isn’t early, Nina,” her mother corrected, hazel eyes surrounded with lines of disapproval. “It’s nearly ten.You did say that lesbian girl was going to pick you up this afternoon, didn’t you?”

  Right, Janine thought. Today’s the day they send me home. The thought left her with an even hollower feeling, and she was grateful that Annette was going to be there with her.

  “Her name’s Annette, Mom,” Janine replied, growing even more tired, as though her mother were sucking the life out of her.“Yes, she’s picking me up.”

  “Good,” her mother said with a tiny nod, as though marking something off on some mental checklist.

  She stood and brushed imaginary lint off her skirt, then straightened it. “I have a meeting later today, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to catch the shuttle right away.”

  Janine frowned, her mouth open just slightly, the air traveling in and out drying her lips. Her mother had been just as inept at comforting her these past days as the doctors and nurses, even more so, in fact. But simply having her there had at least given Janine something to hold on to.

  “I’ll be back for the service, of course,” Ruth Vale added hurriedly, as though she knew she had to apologize for something but was not quite sure what. “Larry and I will both be here.”

  Larry. Janine’s father, a pharmacist, had died young. Two years later, when Janine was only ten, her mother had married LarryVale, another exec at the ad agency in Manhattan.

  “I told you, I don’t know if I’m going to do a ... a memorial.”

  Ruth sighed. “Whatever you think is best.”

  When her mother bent over the bed to kiss her forehead, the way she had always done when Janine was sick as a girl, it was all she could do not to scream at the woman for being such a coward, too afraid of her daughter’s pain to share the burden.

  Then she was gone.

  Like a phantom limb, Janine felt the weight against her body where she would have been holding the baby if he had lived. Her breasts ached with milk she would never provide.As she sat there in the sterile hospital bed, gray light filtering through the industrial windows, she held her arms up as if cradling the child. David Hartschorn, that would have been his name.

  She had wanted to name him David.

  On Friday afternoon, two days after Ralph Weiss’s untimely death, David sat behind his desk and stared out the window. The bell had rung only a handful of minutes before, but the exodus of his students had been swift and he had been left completely alone.

  At the moment, alone was good.

  The pleasure he usually took as he watched his seniors march toward their final days at St. Matt’s had been drained from him as though he had worked up a decent beer buzz and was coming down. His eyes burned a little and his head ached. Yet this was no hangover.

  Several swallows adorned the branches of the tall oak just outside the window of his classroom, and David watched them hop nervously about, whistling to one another as though each were on sentry, eternally vigilant. They seemed inelegant, those birds. Almost ridiculously anxious. They reminded him of people. All his life David had felt that way, always worried about where the next turn in the road would lead, always running on nerves, not instinct.

  That knowledge pained him, but he could not escape it. A breeze blew into the classroom, strong enough to ruffle the papers on his desk, and he moved a pencil holder over to weight them down. His name was spelled out in gilt letters on the pencil holder: DAVID J. BAIRSTOW. As a kid, he had sometimes been Dave or even Davey, but mostly David. Except to his grandfather, who had always just called him boy. His mother had told him that the old man was disappointed David had not been named after him, but David didn’t believe that, even back then.

  As a child, David had been coddled almost to suff
ocation by his parents. His father, James, had been an accountant, and his mother, Rita, had stayed at home. A good life, no question. Even without closing his eyes, it was easy for him to bring to mind richly detailed snapshots of his childhood. The trees in the front yard he and his little sister, Amy, had loved to climb, one of which he had fallen from at the age of seven, biting nearly all the way through his lower lip. The tiny hill in the backyard where they had gone sledding in the winter; the way they had shoved their frozen feet under the baseboard heaters to warm up. The weekends—or entire weeks—they had spent with their parents on Cape Cod or up on the coast of Maine, when his father had said, “Damn the cost, it’s time for the family, not the clients.”

  But too many of those trips to the coast of Maine had been to stay at Grandpa Edgar’s in Kennebunk. The old man had been a firefighter in the town for forty-seven years before he had retired to a life of whiskey and cigars and reading the obituaries to find out who wouldn’t be showing up to the weekly poker game.

  Edgar Bairstow had showered his family with all the love he knew how to give. His gruff manner and rough play had always terrified Amy, yet Grandpa Edgar had loved her to distraction.

  He had hated David.

  It had taken him forever to stop making excuses for his grandfather. The old man had been dead three years and David had already graduated college when he finally accepted the truth of it. His grandfather had taken an instant dislike to him as a child, and had made no secret of his disdain for his grandson for the rest of his life.

  The knowledge made David sad, but it also made him angry. What right, he had thought time and again, did an old man have to stain a young boy’s world and self-image with such confusion and doubt? He could look back upon his life and recall all the times when he had found reason to celebrate, and too many of them were eclipsed by the dark cloud of his grandfather’s derision.

  It may have been that Edgar Bairstow thought his grandson’s interest in books and his decided lack of involvement in sports of any kind was a sort of betrayal. David could distinctly remember his mother telling him, with a roll of her eyes, that his grandfather was happy he had a date for the eighth grade dance because the old man had thought David was gay.