Hope Never Dies

by Andrew Shaffer

  But I had hope.

  Finn had had hope.

  “He talked about you all the time,” I told her. I wanted to believe Darlene could process what I was saying. The odds, of course, were slim. “I’ve never known someone so in love with his own wife. I can only imagine you felt the same way about him. It breaks my heart, what’s happened. It breaks my heart. Your husband was a good man.”

  Behind me, a toilet flushed. I turned to see a middle-aged man exiting the restroom. His long black hair was slicked back into a ponytail. It took him a moment to notice me, and then he froze.

  “Sorry, I didn’t know anyone was here,” I said.

  “No worries,” he said, striding past me to the other patient’s bedside. He had great long legs and stood a good six inches taller than me. The sleeves of his flannel shirt were rolled up, revealing a tattoo of a grinning skull with diamonds in its eyes. Back in my day, the only people who got tattoos were sailors. I had to remind myself that we weren’t back in my day anymore.

  The man lifted a red leather-bound book off the woman’s bedside table.

  I rose from my chair. “If you want to be alone for a few minutes, I can leave and come back. These curtains aren’t much, are they?”

  He looked me up and down. He was either trying to place me or size me up.

  “Sorry to hear about her husband,” he said finally. “Read about the accident in the paper.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say, so that’s all I said.

  I lingered at the edge of the curtain for a moment, watching this man and the sleeping woman. I examined the book in his hand more closely. It was a Bible, the kind you find in hotel rooms. A Gideon Bible. The way it was beaten and worn told me it was well-used.

  “Is that your mother?”

  He looked at me, then at the woman in the bed. He shook his head. “I minister to the patients here. The forgotten ones. Their families may forget, but God never does.” He checked his watch. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize the time. If you’ll excuse me.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder on his way out. “It’s Joe, by the way.”

  “Reggie.”

  We shook hands, and he left.

  It was also time for me to say goodbye to Darlene. I told her I’d pray for her. I was also planning to donate what I could to make sure she got the care she deserved—a room of her own would be nice—but there wasn’t any way I could magically make her better. Once the doctors are done with you, it’s between you and God.

  I was turning to leave when I spied the red leather Bible on the bedside table. The minister had accidentally left it behind.

  I picked it up and started after him. The long-legged man wasn’t in the hallway, so I stopped by the receptionist’s desk near the elevators. She was busy tapping on her phone.

  “There was a man here, ministering to the patients. Did you see which way he went?”

  “A minister?” she said, without looking up. She had fair skin with freckles and strawberry-blonde hair. “We have a minister, but he’s only here Sundays.”

  “This was a tall guy, with long hair.”

  “On this floor? I think I’d have noticed.”

  Her head was still buried in her phone.

  “I didn’t just dream him up. He was real.” I waved the Bible. “This is real.”

  She looked up with a little half frown that highlighted her dimples. “You might try the front desk downstairs. Everyone that comes in the building has to check in.”

  The front desk was empty. I poked my head outside, but didn’t see the man. I returned to the desk. While I was waiting for the receptionist to return, I glanced at the visitor’s log. Nobody by the name of Reggie had signed in all day.

  After a few minutes, the receptionist exited the women’s restroom. When she saw me waiting at the desk, she hustled over and took her seat. “Sorry about that, Mr. Biden.”

  I handed her the Bible. “A man left this upstairs. Can you make sure it gets to the lost and found?”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Anything for you, Joe. Can I call you Joe?”

  “Everybody does,” I said, flashing my trademark grin. “Do you have security around here, by any chance?”

  “There’s a camera up there,” she said, pointing to a black half sphere mounted on the ceiling. “But it’s not hooked up. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  As soon as I thanked her and turned for the door, I dropped my smile. I didn’t know who the long-legged man was, but he wasn’t there ministering to the patients. I doubted that he’d be back for the Bible. It was just a prop.

  The man had mentioned Darlene’s husband’s accident, so he wasn’t in the room at random. If Finn had been on drugs—and that was a big if—the man could have been a fellow hophead. Maybe he’d been there to toss the room, looking for something to sell so that he could score.

  I’d spooked him, though.

  Chances are he wouldn’t risk a return visit.

  I called Dan and left a message, telling him what had happened. “You’ll want to get in touch with their daughter, see if anything was stolen. My guess is no, but Grace would be the one to ask. The security at this place has more holes than a pound of Swiss cheese. Let me know if I can help.”

  Dan didn’t call back that night, so I went to bed thinking he didn’t need me. Nobody seemed to want my help anymore. I got the impression that some people just thought I was too old. That I’d retired from public office and joined the Geezer Squad over at Earl’s. I might have had an enlarged prostate, but I wasn’t ready to sit around all day in a diner bitching about it. There were still a few miles left in this old clunker.

  6

  I wore my best black suit for Finn’s service. The suit had seen far too many funerals over the years, but it did its job without complaining too much. When you reach my age, the endless succession of funerals becomes a blur. The only thing that ever changes is the name on the program.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the afternoon sky for the graveside service. A real crop duster of a thunderstorm had come through overnight. The air was still sticky, but it had cooled down a few degrees. It was baseball weather. A perfect day to sit by the lake and sip a virgin piña colada and really enjoy my semiretirement. Invite the family over. Fire up the George Foreman.

  Instead, I was at the Wilmington and Brandywine Cemetery. Jill had her Friday summer class, so I was flying solo. She’d dropped me off and would pick me up on her way back home.

  Besides Finn’s daughter, there wasn’t another familiar face among the two dozen mourners. I didn’t recognize anyone from the years I’d spent riding the train. Not that you’d expect commuters to come out for a conductor’s funeral. Not these days.

  I took a seat in the very last row. This was about Finn, not former vice president Joe Biden.

  The priest listed in the program was Father O’Hara. I’d met him once. Years ago. He’d been a young man then, and I suppose I had been too. The priest making his way to the head of the crowd was noticeably grayer. He walked with a slow gait, almost as if he carried some great burden on his back. It was difficult to believe he was the same man. As he took the podium, he nodded at me with recognition.

  After Father O’Hara’s opening remarks, Finn’s sister delivered a short eulogy. A train rumbled past on the elevated tracks outside the cemetery. Not loud enough to drown her out, but distracting. It might have even been the same train that took Finn’s life. Everyone else had to be thinking the same thing. Finn’s sister sped up her delivery, plowing through her tears like they were nothing but light drizzle.

  Father O’Hara retook the podium. As he ran through his rehearsed lines—the Corinthians, the Psalms, the verses I recognized from too many other funerals—my attention waned. Father O’Hara wasn’t known for his brevity of wit (nor his brevity, nor his wit
). My eyes drifted to the nearest gravestones, searching for familiar names. Senator Richard Bassett, signer of the U.S. Constitution, was buried in the cemetery somewhere. So were a handful of other Delaware dignitaries from centuries past. War heroes, governors. Congressmen. Their weathered tombstones jutted at odd angles from the damp ground, making the cemetery look like a crooked smile filled with busted teeth. Despite its pedigree, the aging cemetery wasn’t the proper burial place for a proud man like Finn. With its overgrown weeds and rusted gates, it wasn’t the proper burial place for anyone anymore.

  When a cemetery dies, where do you bury it?

  After the service, I waited for the crowd to thin before approaching Finn’s daughter. We’d never met in person, but I felt like I’d known her forever. Finn wasn’t a storyteller, but he loved to show off photos of his family. The pictures did the talking for him. I’d watched Grace grow up through the years—from the hospital to kindergarten and finally high school graduation—all through the lens of a devoted father. Finn’s wallet eventually became so thick with photos of his wife and daughter that he couldn’t sit down on the damn thing.

  Grace sported the same curly red hair I remembered from her high school photos. And the same toothy grin. The ivy tattoo peeking out of the neck of her pilgrim dress was new. Even though she’d done some growing up, she was still too young to be an orphan, with her father taken too soon and her mother all but gone.

  As I approached, she whispered something to her aunt, who stepped aside to give us space. A motorcycle roared to life and tore out of the parking lot. It was loud enough to wake the dead, though the dead didn’t seem to mind.

  I reached out a hand to shake Grace’s. “I was a friend of your father’s,” I said. Before I could say any more, she fell into my arms. I patted her back as she sobbed into my chest. “It’s okay,” I said, over and over. “It’s okay.”

  Eventually, we broke apart. She wiped her eyes with a black handkerchief.

  “How you holding up, kiddo?” I asked.

  “He still has your bumper sticker on his car. He was so proud of you.”

  “Proud of me?”

  “You were vice president.”

  I gave her a dismissive wave. “There’s this old joke: A man had two sons. One went out to sea, and the other became vice president. Neither were heard from again.”

  She didn’t laugh, but I caught the corner of her lips curling up slightly.

  “What I’m trying to say is your dad was a train conductor. That’s real responsibility right there. Never heard him complain once, in all the years I rode that train. I’m a better man for knowing your father. If he was proud of me, well, it goes both ways.”

  “It’s nice to hear that,” she said.

  “I’m sorry about your mother, too. I stopped by to see her yesterday. If I’d known sooner…”

  “Dad wanted people to remember her as she was, not what she’d become. He visited her every day, first in the hospital, and then when they moved her to the facility. He felt terrible moving her there, but he couldn’t afford to keep her at home.”

  I gave her shoulder a squeeze. The road to recovery for stroke victims was long and uncertain. For a woman Darlene Donnelly’s age, the road was even more perilous.

  “I offered to drop out of college, to get a full-time job and contribute so we could bring her home, but Dad wouldn’t hear of it.”

  Amtrak employees were supposed to have the best healthcare, straight from the United States government. Amtrak was a pseudo-private company, but I’d been one of the senators who’d fought for them to have the same healthcare plans other government employees had. Yet somewhere along the way, things had been diluted. It was no surprise that hospitals were booting patients out the door. The whole damn country’s healthcare infrastructure was falling apart—everything Barack had built. Everything we’d built.

  I placed a hand on Grace’s shoulder. “Look at me,” I said. Her tears were welling up again. “This isn’t your fault.”

  Without meeting my eyes, she said, “It didn’t matter how many hours of overtime he worked. In-home care was never going to be something he could afford. I’m not a finance major—I’m an English major—but even I knew it was a lost cause. Still, Dad believed until the end that he could swing it. There was a ray of light, however…”

  “A ray of light.”

  “It’s kind of funny, in a sick way. I thought there was a chance Dad’s life insurance payout would cover the cost to bring Mom home. He had a small Amtrak policy that was enough to pay for the funeral. But he took out another policy on himself shortly after Mom’s stroke. A million dollars. The lawyer my aunt hired is already saying the insurance company is trying to hold up the claim. They’re looking for some way to prove that he took his own life. That he did this on purpose.” Grace looked around the cemetery. “Who would do this on purpose?”

  The lawyer was right, of course: the insurance company was going to fight the family’s claim tooth and nail. The family would be forced to sue to get them to pay out. The insurance company would come back with its own findings—findings that could run counter to the medical examiner’s report. I wondered, for the first time, if maybe Finn hadn’t laid down in front of that train on purpose, to leave his family the life insurance money. It was just plausible enough…

  Except that didn’t explain everything. If he’d been planning to kill himself, why had he printed directions to my house? And why was there heroin in his pockets? The puzzle still had lots of missing pieces.

  My mother had been big into puzzles.

  I’d never had the patience for them.

  What I really wanted to do was absorb Grace’s pain, but I knew it was an impossible task. Our pain is ours, and ours alone. All others can do is mitigate the damage.

  And that’s what I would do for her: mitigate the damage.

  Grace didn’t deserve to live with question marks surrounding her father’s death. The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, but sometimes the universe needs a little help. It was the reason I’d gone into public service. Now I felt a similar tug. Some grave injustice seemed to be brewing. I didn’t have the faintest idea what I would do, but I couldn’t just watch from the sidelines.

  “Your father was a good man,” I told Grace. “The insurance claims administrator didn’t know him. Your family lawyer didn’t know him, I’d bet. Not like you did. Not like I did.”

  I looked her in the eyes. Hopefully, she couldn’t hear the traces of doubt in my voice. I was beginning to think that none of us knew the real Finn.

  “I’m going to find the truth about your father,” I promised. “I’m giving you my word as a Biden.”

  7

  On the way to the parking lot, I passed two caretakers in green jumpsuits taking a break from their work. They were leaning against a great oak tree, chugging a couple of tall energy drinks. Nearby was a large hole in the earth and a pile of dirt. I nodded at them, and they returned the greeting. Once they finished, they’d probably take their shovels up the hill to bury my friend.

  I pulled out my phone to call a car service. The cemetery was full of bad memories, and I didn’t want to stay a second longer than I needed to. Too many souls, taken much too soon.

  Before I could launch the app, I spied two men stepping out of a minivan. As we neared each other on the cemetery walkway, I could see they were both dressed in navy-blue Amtrak uniforms. One was the size of a water buffalo; the other was as thin as a railroad spike. The water buffalo was the Wilmington station manager, Grant. We’d been tight once upon a time. In my Senate days, if I’d been running late for the train, I would give him a call and, magically, the 7:46 a.m. Acela would be held up until I arrived.

  The railroad spike I didn’t know.

  “How’s it going, Grant?” I said, shaking his hand.

  “Helluva lot better than it’s going fo
r Finn.”

  “It’s awful, just awful,” I said.

  The skinny guy glanced away. There were beads of sweat on his upper lip. Finn was Amtrak—part of my “extended family,” as I liked to say. For these guys, though, Finn was family. Finn Donnelly’s membership in the railworker brotherhood ran deep. His grandfather had been a railworker, dynamiting canyons and laying rail for the old Trans-Atlantic Coast line during the Great Depression. Finn’s father had been a railworker as well, working the yards in Chicago for thirty-five years.

  I looked up the pathway, following it with my eyes to the tent propped up over Finn’s coffin. “The service was at two. It’s over now, but there’s some family left up there.”

  “We’ll wait until they leave,” Grant said. “Don’t want to cause a scene.”

  “I’m sure it won’t be a problem—”

  “We’ll wait.”

  I nodded. Grant probably knew Finn’s family mostly through Finn’s stories. When you know somebody secondhand, it can be a shock to the system to meet them in person. Especially if the link between you has been severed.

  The skinny guy whispered something to Grant that I couldn’t make out, and then he returned to the van. Grant didn’t say anything.

  “Your friend, he’s…”

  “An engineer,” Grant said quickly. “Al.”

  Al. Alvin…Alvin Harrison. The engineer who’d been driving the train that hit Finn, according to the follow-up story I’d read in the News Journal earlier that morning. No wonder they wanted to avoid the family.

  “How’s he taking it?” I asked.

  “How would you take it?”

  I stared back at the man in the passenger seat of the minivan. Alvin looked broken, haunted. Even though he hadn’t been responsible for Finn’s being on the tracks, he was being put through the wringer just the same. It was impossible to say how many test tubes of blood had been drawn from him, how many interviews he’d been submitted to. While the rest of us were trying to cope with losing Finn, Alvin was trying to cope with life under the microscope. I knew a little something about living under a microscope. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, it’s easy to start believing you were somehow to blame.