The Ferryman Institute (12 page)

She stared at him a moment longer, and he stared back, eyes unwavering. Finally, she looked away, her eyes pulled to the ground. “That's horrible,” she said quietly.

All at once, Charlie wasn't worried about completing the assignment anymore. No, Maria would be just fine—she'd made the connection between her own situation and his, just as he'd hoped. What he was worried about now was keeping his own composure.

“What would you tell your husband to do if he were in your shoes right now?” he asked.

Her eyes were back on his, and he could see the genuine sadness in them, floating just beneath the surface. Yet somewhere along the way, they'd picked up hope.

“I'd tell him to meet me on the other side,” she said, her voice low.

Charlie smiled feebly. “And he'd listen, because that's what all good husbands do. Assuming he had the good sense to ask for directions first, obviously.”

It was, by every human standard, a horrible joke, but she humored him with a small grin anyway. It was a pitiful excuse for one that disappeared as quickly as it came, but Charlie had seen it and that was enough. Without saying another word, he made the few steps to the door and pulled it open. Dazzling brightness tumbled out as the door swung around on its invisible hinges. Charlie stepped away from the opening as the luminescence flowing out began to pulse with a steady throb.

“It's time to go, Maria,” he said.

After she took another set of ungainly steps toward the door, she stopped and looked at Charlie, studying him. “Good-bye,
Charlie. If you ever see my family, please tell them I'm waiting.” Then, she put one foot in front of the other and slowly, painfully, walked to the entrance of the door and beyond. The light enveloped her, and Maria was gone. The door closed soundlessly behind her.

Charlie stood alone again as he placed his key back in his pocket, the only sound coming from the idling engine of Maria's car. From inside his jacket, Charlie pulled out the Ferryman form he'd been given by Campbell. He stared at it, his eyes gravitating toward that one line—
Assignment successfully ferried
—the blank box next to it suddenly filling itself with Charlie Dawson's customary checkmark.

“Sure,” he said to no one, “I'll tell them.” And maybe one day he would, when Maria's husband or daughter drew their last breaths. Maybe it would be his assignment, and he'd be standing there, watching their final moments, key in hand, just waiting for them to die. Because that's what he always did, and always would do. That was Charlie Dawson.

He ripped the form into a hundred tiny pieces and tossed them to the sky. He watched as each fragment vanished almost instantly after leaving his hand, like the small cloud of paper was nothing more than a cheap trick of filtered moonlight.

As he kept his face turned to the obscured sky, Charlie realized that, for once, Dirkley was wrong. Charlie wasn't a martyr.

Martyrs only had to sacrifice themselves once.

With that thought firmly entrenched in his mind, Charlie's palm found his key, and he headed back to the Institute.

A
lice Spiegel wanted it all to end.

A week had passed since the meatloaf incident, and her mental stability was only getting worse. She looked at the grim expression staring back at her in the mirror. Her eyes, swollen and puffy from crying, were encircled by rings that also betrayed a lack of sleep. Her skin seemed to be paler than ever (no surprise, really, given how infrequently she left the house these days).

She was tired of it all.

Alice looked away from the small vanity positioned on the edge of her desk and focused her attention on the sheet of paper in front of her.
Write down how you think other people view you on the left side, and how you currently see yourself on the right
, her therapist had said. If it weren't for her respect and genuine fondness for the doctor, Alice would have patently ignored the idea outright. Still, she had nothing better to do—a recurring theme of late.

She began to write. On the left:
Bright, intelligent, witty, compassionate, funny. Miserable, depressed, demoralized, cowardly, broken
on the right.
Alice Spiegel in ten words
, she thought glumly.
Actually, I can probably cut that down to five.
She summarily crossed off the entire left side of the paper.
There, much better.

Alice violently shook her head. With a grunt of disgust and frustration, she crumpled up the paper and stuck it in her mouth. She chewed on it gamely for a few seconds, then spit it out abruptly when she started tasting ink.

My God, what is wrong with me?

That was the worst part: she knew she was a functioning mess, but it was disturbingly evident how hard it was to uphold the
functioning
part of that equation. She couldn't help it, though—her brain just wouldn't turn off. It was such an easy thing to be told,
Well, don't think about it
, but nobody ever told you what to do if that was impossible. What if she physically couldn't stop thinking? What then? It was like her mind had become this horrific carousel where her thoughts spun in endless circles until their familiar melodies warped and distorted into some sort of Stephen King–inspired nightmare.

She could feel it starting again as her brain began to twirl around with her strapped into the ride, helpless. It wasn't one single thing that had so derailed the course of her life. Far from it. However, she had come to believe that the whole chain of events had been set in motion by a single error. That's where the carousel ride picked up, as it usually did.

It was an innocent enough mistake, really; a senior in college, aged twenty-two, Alice had made the tragic blunder of tempting Fate. Sitting at her desk, having just read an e-mail from her parents, she had looked over at Marc, her boyfriend of more than two years, with his sort of lopsided but still handsome smile, and said, “My life is perfect.”

To be fair, it certainly seemed that way at the time. A steady guy, plans for a trip to Disney World in the works, a successful college career nearing completion in just a few short weeks, a couple screenplays in the works. After much deliberation, Alice had
decided to move home after graduation, with her parents' blessing, to pursue her dream of writing for the silver screen (though, worst come to worst, she'd also settle for a few prime-time comedies). It was admittedly a long shot, but her professors universally admired her work, and in the microcosm that was her small liberal-arts-fueled bubble, that was more than enough validation for her. It would also provide her an opportunity to reunite with her mother and two younger sisters, Carolyn and Kaitlin, whom Alice had seen far too little of during her college years. From there, the sky was the limit. A family with Marc, sunny California, the world of movies and celebrities, puking from the edge of the Hollywood sign after one too many appletinis with Jennifer Lawrence—it would be perfect.

What Alice had failed to realize in that truly wonderful moment was that Fate happened to be a grumpy and vindictive old bastard. Now, that's not to be confused with fate as a collective, which is a somewhat neutral thing—a little good here, a sprinkling of bad there, and off you go.
Fate
, though—the one with an ominous capitalization that generally bespoke terrible and nasty things . . . now
it
was one nasty motherfucker.

Having heard the overflowing contentment in Alice's voice as she spoke those four accursed words—
My life is perfect
—Fate realized it had to act quickly before too many good things happened. And so, just a few weeks later, after graduation, the cracks of Alice's undoing began to open.

It was Memorial Day, just after dinner. Alice's parents told her and her siblings that they had something important to talk about, maybe it would be best if they all sat in the den. Seated on the family couch that Alice had gravitated to since they bought it twenty years ago, they broke the news of the divorce. It had been in the works for a while, apparently; it was a testament to her
mother and father that they had revealed nothing of it to their children the whole time. It was the first blow to Alice's perfect little world—the parents she so adored, whom she was so proud of, the people she held up to the world and said,
This is the example of love and marriage I aspire to achieve in my life!
 . . . gone.

But Alice wasn't averse to a bit of adversity. It took her a few days, but she adjusted. Heck, she even began taking the new reality in stride. It was difficult, but she tried to help both her mom and dad as best she could.
Everything will be fine
, she told herself, so much so that it became her mantra:
Everything will be fine, everything will be fine.
Over and over, ad infinitum.

Though Alice was doing rather well given her somewhat introverted sense of personal responsibility, Marc provided support when she needed a bit of propping up. He seemed permanently affable and easygoing, even at the worst of times, and had an innate sense for when Alice needed someone to pry a little bit, forcing her to open up about things she would otherwise bury inside. It was a fairly symbiotic thing—Alice occasionally venting about the frustrations that built up around the edges of her family life, Marc listening and playing the role of pseudo psychologist that he so enjoyed. But when August rolled around, he was off again to school, settling in for the second and final year of his master's in mathematics at the University of Connecticut.

Since she'd spent the past four years going to school in Connecticut herself, it took her a while to adjust to not living in the same state as Marc anymore. Thankfully, her writing schedule at least allowed her the ability to visit for a short stretch of time once every so often. Sure, the drive from New Jersey was a little pricey on gas, and sure, Connecticut drivers on I-84 drove like half-blind grandmothers in a blizzard, but it was worth it. It was an escape for Alice, as her parents were starting to openly display the vitriol
that had apparently been flying behind the facade of their perfect marriage. Alice and Marc played house together, in a sense, using Marc's tidy apartment as a sandbox to test what a future life together would be like. She would bring her laptop and write while he was gone, either at class or TA-ing. They would cook and clean together, watch
Jeopardy!
, spend inordinate amounts of time snuggled on the couch. Lord, did it feel good.

Fate, however, had apparently been biding its time, waiting for that opportune moment to reintroduce itself into Alice's life with a bang. After Christmas, in late February, just when Alice was beginning to think things really
were
going to be all right, it snuck in the dagger blow.

Her mother, now living with Alice and her two sisters after Dad had moved to a condo of his own, came home from a routine physical that she'd been putting off for months. Too busy taking care of her girls, she'd said. She felt fine, she'd said.

Cancer
, the doctor had said.

Caught a month earlier and her chances would have been great. Unfortunately, it was not a month earlier. The cancer had rapidly metastasized, the word
aggressive
repeated with a frequency Alice didn't care for. The twist of the knife, however, was the X-ray of her mother's chest: Christine Spiegel's lungs, once the pivotal organs of a five-time New York City Marathon finisher, were littered with bright spots, like a brisk New England snowfall. That, Alice learned quickly, was bad. Very bad.

Still, Alice plugged on. She had a completed screenplay and was actively revising it. She immersed herself in it, trying to block out the real world with one of her own devising. Marc read through the script several times, offering good advice and notes along the way. But every time he read it, he seemed to finish a little less interested. Alice kept revising, adhering to a wholly unrealistic level of
perfectionism. When Marc suggested Alice shop it around, she flinched, and began revising the script again, from the top.

Marc, meanwhile, was making moves of his own. Several weeks prior to his graduation, he accepted a position at the IRS just outside of Washington, DC. It wasn't anything particularly glorious, but it was money—a fact he pointed out to Alice, who wasn't exactly swimming in cash—and a start to a career. She was excited for him, but when he made the not-so-subtle suggestion that she come join him, even offering her a potential place of employment at a family friend's small law firm as an office assistant, she reluctantly refused. No, the time wasn't right yet. She just needed a few more months, just a bit more time to help out her mom, her sisters, her dad. That was all it would be, she promised, a few months. They'd talk again in September. It was May, and she watched proudly as he graduated, thinking,
He'll make a great father one day
, and believing it wholeheartedly.