The Ferryman Institute (13 page)

Two weeks later, just before Memorial Day, Marc started the move down to DC. He was oddly radio silent most of the time as he got set up down there, but Alice chalked it up to the move. He finally texted on Thursday and asked to see her the next day. She already knew what was going to happen—it was burning in the back of her mind when she went to bed that night.

Fate wouldn't have it any other way.

When he showed up at Alice's house, she climbed into the passenger seat of his hybrid SUV, but he made no effort to drive anywhere. He looked at her, his eyes no longer affable and friendly, but sad and perhaps a touch spiteful, and confirmed her worst fears.

We're just heading in two different directions
, he'd said.

The brave smile she had grown accustomed to lugging out over the past year was adopted again, frayed at the seams though it was. She understood; she was upset, but she'd manage. Busy with
Mom and helping out her sisters and all that. Good luck, God bless. And then, he was completely gone from her life, almost exactly one year to the day of her parents' divorce announcement. Fate loved coincidences like that.

It became evident almost instantly that Marc had been not only her boyfriend, but also her best friend and primary confidant. Alice was, for better or worse, the receiver of grief from most of her admittedly small circle of friends. Now that Alice was single, she found that she felt remarkably uncomfortable sharing her own feelings of anger and sadness to anyone who wasn't Marc. To make matters worse, she certainly couldn't vent to her mother, the only other possibility. Despite Mrs. Spiegel's brave face and apparent optimism, the woman was an absolute wreck between chemo sessions, physically and mentally. Alice's dad was there for support, but her mom rarely let him come around, despite his wishes to the contrary, and Alice was too wrapped up in herself to go over there, either. There were Carolyn and Kaitlin, but they were both struggling with the crumbling of their collective family life, with varying degrees of success. In that sense, Alice couldn't burden them with even more baggage courtesy of her own problems. Her father urged her to see a therapist, but that was another idea she rejected out of hand.
I'm tough
, she told herself,
and that's what my family needs right now. I'll be the rock. Everything will be fine. I'll be the rock.
Over and over again in her head.

But, like a cat who's found the end of the ball of yarn and run away with it, things were already unraveling. She couldn't work on the screenplay anymore—it reminded her too much of Marc. There were days that fact drove her to a near-frenzied rage, and others where it simply sapped the life from her. Her eating habits deteriorated, and she found solace in food. Her mom wasn't cooking anymore, too tired from extended trips to the hospital. Alice
imagined having poison pumped through your body was one way to quickly ruin a day. To compensate, McDonald's and Ben & Jerry's were often nearby and, in addition to a new lethargy that was invading her lifestyle, it began to show. Her once toned soccer body stopped fitting so nicely into dresses, then jeans, then even sweatpants. Size two became four, then eight. She watched with a detached dismay as her rear ballooned out behind her, her hips widened, her muscular thighs atrophied and began to touch, her arms jiggled ever so slightly when she found the willpower to actually write, her newfound potbelly occasionally poking her desk.

There was money, too, to be aware of. Agents weren't exactly knocking down her door to read her script, partially because she refused to show it to anyone, and typing out words didn't translate to money in the bank. To compensate, she coached soccer in her free time, then supplemented that with some freelance copywriting for websites. It was enough to live off of, even if her parents were still paying the majority of her bills.

Four months later, though, and her parents were no longer paying her bills. Just her parent, singular.

Her mother had fought to the bitter end, all the doctors had assured her. They had done everything they could. She had given it her very best, they had given it their very best—everybody under the sun had given it their very circle-jerking best, apparently. If only they'd caught it sooner. If only, if only . . .

In the end, Fate won. Alice was a wreck. She moved in with her dad to his cramped three-bedroom condo in the middle of New Jersey. Her appetite disappeared, slowly but surely, as did the pounds she'd put on, until she weighed less than she ever had in her adult life. She finally agreed to start seeing a psychiatrist at her father's behest and was diagnosed in short order with situational depression. A prescription for Seroquel followed—a small dose,
just to even her out and help with her newfound insomnia—but after a few weeks, Alice began flushing the pills down the toilet. Sure, they took the edge off her lows, but they took the edge off
everything
—she felt emotionally inferior to their toaster when she was on her meds. The talking helped, which was nice, but it only acted like an emotional Advil—it would dull the pain for a while, maybe a day or two, but the emptiness always came back.

Such was her desperation that she briefly tried confiding in her father, but it was a short-lived experiment. Jonathan Spiegel was a kind man—Alice would never suggest otherwise—but he was aloof to a fault. There was bread to be won, especially as a single parent, a fact Alice sometimes suspected served as a convenient excuse for him to stay away. Who could argue with a few late nights at the office? Not that she blamed him—her mother had always been the one truly immersed in the lives of her girls. For her father to suddenly have to inherit that . . . well, talk about a stranger in a strange land.

Yet even if his emotional contributions were lacking, financially he continued to support Alice and her sisters, just to differing degrees. Kaitlin, the youngest, was still in college, but putting herself through with scholarships (naturally, Alice had opted to attend the ridiculously expensive private liberal arts college that offered little in the way of financial aid), while Carolyn had just accepted a job as a sales associate at a small ad tech firm in Manhattan. It wasn't much by way of money, but it was a salary and benefits—enough to provide her with, aside from living arrangements, self-sufficiency.

Alice, on the other hand, was the true leech, relying on her dad to pay her bills, her insurance, her rent. She felt like a failure, and every day that her writing fell short of earning her a living felt like one more pound of weight placed on her weakening shoulders. It
was crushing her, try as she might to hold on. The happiness, the laughter, the optimism she showed the outside world was all empty bravado, a ruse to fool the masses and perhaps even herself.

Fate had won, all right, a cruel and uncompromising victory. She felt like a defenseless boxer being pummeled against the ropes, and despite the resounding, sickening blows that Fate continued to deal her, the ref refused to stop the fight.

As Alice flopped onto her bed, the taste of ink still ruminating annoyingly in her mouth, it dawned on her, with a strange and sudden clarity: there really was only one thing left to do. She had flirted with the idea, but now she understood instinctively that it was time to throw in the towel. Time to make the ref stop the fight. Lugubriously, Alice raised herself off of her bed and sat quietly in front of her desk again.

Tonight
, she thought.

She didn't want to face tomorrow. Not when tomorrow marked 365 days since her mother's death.

Tonight.

She took a blank sheet of eight-by-eleven paper from the loading tray of her printer, grabbed a pen from the zombie mug that adorned her desk, and placed the sheet on top of her desk. Then, she began writing.

Dear Friends and Family,

This note will be labeled something I'm not all that comfortable calling it. Instead, I would rather call it my final “thank you” letter to you all . . .

Tonight
, she thought as the blueprint assembled in her head. The pen glided across the paper in effortless strokes, hardly making a sound.

I
don't know, Cartwright. Two hundred and fifty years is a long time.” Charlie was lying on his back, letting his feet dangle over the cliff while the sun once again sank below the Mojave's horizon.

“Well,” Cartwright began, “that is relatively speaking, of course. I suppose for a normal human lifespan your supposition has merit. However, if we imagined ourselves as the bit of rock we're sitting on, then no, a quarter of a millennium would be but the blink of an eye. Quicker than that even—extraordinary, if you think about it. The marvels these specks of dirt must have borne witness to . . . But to be able to share in a fraction of those memories!”

Charlie rolled his head slightly so that he was looking at Cartwright instead of straight into the sky. The British gentleman cleared his throat. “Of course, relatively speaking, I would concede that it is a long time, yes.”

It had been a week since Charlie's last case, and he'd spent most of that time doing exactly what he was doing now: thinking about that night.

CHARLIE RETURNED
to the Institute with no fanfare, no bustling crowd waiting to burst into applause at another remarkable performance. The employees in the immediate area were going about their business in typical worker-bee fashion, blissfully ignorant of the events that had just transpired. There was the odd side-glance or discreet whisper—something Charlie had gotten used to from the teams in his vicinity—but nothing he would consider out of the ordinary. The only indication that anything unusual had just happened were the people milling about his area—Jen Smalling was staring at the floor, shaking her head slowly, Melissa was firing accusations at Campbell, and Dirkley was sitting on the corner of his desk in the middle of it all, arms across his chest. He was the first to notice Charlie's reappearance, immediately getting to his feet as Charlie shuffled out of the doorway.

“Well?” he asked as he hurried over.

Charlie, for his own part, had spent the majority of his return to the Institute distracted by his own thoughts and, as such, was caught completely off guard by the question. “Well, what?” Charlie asked. The other three were following close behind.

A beat passed before Dirkley said, “Did she cross?”

Charlie nodded dumbly.

“Thank God,” Dirkley said, then, before Charlie could react, wrapped him in a bear hug. “Are you all right?” Dirkley asked as he broke the embrace. “You don't look all right. Jesus, Charlie, I've seen craps that look better than you. No offense.”

“Stop, you're making me blush,” Charlie replied in a complete monotone. He sighed. “In all seriousness, I'm fine. A little unnerved, mostly relieved, but otherwise fine.” He himself was somewhat surprised at the unexpected candor of his response.

The clacking of Melissa's heels preceded her arrival. She
looked abnormally flustered. “Charlie, are you okay?” She turned sharply toward Dirkley. “Is he okay?”

“Does he look okay?”

Her eyes narrowed. “No, that's why I'm asking you.”

“Guys, I'm standing right here.” Charlie's mood was darkening at the same rate his patience was running out.

Melissa released Dirkley from her gaze and turned back to Charlie. “You sure you're all right? How are you feeling? Should I get someone from the medical team over here?”

He inhaled sharply through his teeth. “No,” he replied. “Again, I'm fine.”

But Melissa pressed him further. “Are you sure? A quick exam couldn't hurt.”

“I don't want to be examined, and I don't
need
to be examined. The case is over, nobody died that wasn't supposed to, everybody's happy, the day is saved, hip-fucking-hooray.”

Both Melissa and Dirkley seemed taken aback by Charlie's harsh tone, which he immediately regretted. “Sorry, that was uncalled for,” he said. “I'm just . . . tired.”

“Of course,” Melissa said. Charlie caught her shooting a quick glance over at Dirkley. It wasn't hard to guess the unspoken message between them. “Leaving aside the numerous protocol violations along the way, which for once weren't really your fault”—she paused to shoot Campbell an icy glare—“you did amazing. You really did. We're very proud of you—everyone is very proud of you.
You
should be proud of you.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said softly. He looked around the room. A pack of employees still lingered around their team's area. He could feel more eyes on him now, some nearby Ferrymen undoubtedly wondering what the minor fuss at his station was about. He never
asked for the attention—he really just wanted to be left alone. But when did Charlie ever get what he wanted?

“She's right, Mssr. Dawson.”
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Another remarkable job.”