The Ferryman Institute (33 page)

She walked on a few more steps before she realized that Charlie had stopped. He stood where he was, both hands in his pockets, just looking at her.

“Isn't it obvious?” he asked.

She gave a shake of her head.

“You needed it.”

“That's not what I meant,” Alice replied. “What was so special about me that you decided to save me? Or do you save everyone you deal with?”

Charlie hesitated. Not long, but enough for Alice to notice. “No. You're the first one. The only one,” he said.

When he made it clear that was all he was going to say, Alice moved a step closer. Maybe she was high on the leftover adrenaline still racing through her veins, but her mind pushed her on, whispered for her to keep pressing. She was in control of
this—she'd gotten them through the Cartwright fiasco, hadn't she? In fact, now it was time for Charlie to pay up, and the vig was knowing what it was about her that had inspired this quixotic quest of his.

“Why me, Charlie? Why did you stop me?”

“Like I said, you needed—”

“That's not an answer.” Her words were growing bolder with each passing moment. “
Why. Me.
”

He cocked his head slightly, brow furrowed, as she advanced another step, now just in front of him. “You were there and I wanted to save you. Pretty simple.”

“And why did you want to save me? What was the reason?” Learning the answer had grown into an obsession, as if she'd become Dr. Frankenstein. There would be no denying her, not anymore. She'd spent the past year convincing herself that there was
nothing
redeeming about Alice Spiegel—that she was a defective piece of humanity, a waste, an annoyance, a net value below zero. But Charlie's intervention had to mean something. It
had
to.

When his response wasn't immediate, she leaned in a little closer, her voice the pattering of light rain on the windowsill. “Please. Just tell me the truth, Charlie.”

His gaze lingered on her for what seemed like a long while. The jovial spark in his eyes had run away in the dim lighting of the passageway. In fact, he looked almost sinister, standing there in front of her.

“Fine,” he started, but stopped just as quickly, wrestling with himself before ultimately deciding to continue. “Fine. For your assignment, I was given a choice: I could save you or let you play cranium patty-cake. I was so tired of dealing with death that just once I wanted to—
needed
to—see someone get a second chance. You are that second chance.”

She stared at him for a long time before finally speaking. “So it didn't have to be me. I just happened to win the Charlie Dawson lottery and,
poof
, here I am.”

He seemed very surprised by her response. “I'm not sure I'd put it so cynically . . .”

When he trailed off, Alice had her answer. So that was it, then—being “saved” had nothing to do with her after all. All of it was for Charlie, for some asinine reason that she couldn't give two fucks about. She'd only wanted to hear what made her special. Apparently the answer was nothing.

Alice turned without a word and began marching down the passageway toward the exit.

“Hey,” he called out. “Alice, hold up.”

But Alice simply steamed ahead. “Fuck you,” she answered, a perilous calm wrapped around each word.

“Whoa, hang on. Why are you so upset?” His voice remained composed, but his footfalls were coming quickly now as he tried to catch up to her. “You should be proud of that!” As he pulled up next to her left shoulder, she whirled around on him, eyes blazing.

“Proud? I should be
proud
? Why exactly is that, hmm? Because Charlie Dawson wanted to save me? Poor old Alice, down on her luck, lucky to be saved by some heroic shithead with an ego problem? Lucky to have some, some . . .
meaning
given to her lousy excuse for existence? Whoop-de-fucking-doo! God, just when I was beginning to think that maybe you weren't another self-centered piece of shit, you go ahead and erase all doubt that, yes, you are in fact a self-centered piece of shit.”

“Hold on, how does this make me a piece of—”

“Because you saved
me
for
you
, Charlie! My, what an
honor
that is! Am I some medal to you, is that it?” She gave him her patented
look of death and truly meant it. “Do you think it feels good knowing that you didn't save me because
I
was worth saving?!”

The tears were hot on her face, the room spinning. Alice hustled toward the exit now, wishing with every fiber of her being that she was outside in the fresh air. Actually, anywhere she could be alone would do. Why did he have to be such an asshole? Why, when she'd just started to—

His hands were firmly on her shoulders before he spun her around. She struggled against his grip, but he held her firm. “Let go of me!” she half yelled, half whimpered.

“Alice!” he said forcefully, trying to make eye contact she struggled to avoid.

“I said, let go!” she shouted, and with a final, massive pull she wrenched herself free.

The way Charlie looked at her then—calm, cool, collected Charlie—made Alice want to hit him with a bus.

“What I said earlier . . . that's not how I meant it,” he said quietly.

“No?” was all she managed back. She quickly found that words weren't making sense in her head anymore, and even if they were, she wasn't sure they'd come out of her mouth in anything resembling a coherent sentence.

Charlie let his hands drop to his sides and sighed. Alice was teetering on the edge of a breakdown, a stiff breeze away from plummeting into a very final depression. She held on to herself with a gritty tenacity, the one rational part of her brain still fighting to keep the whole ship afloat.

She could make a run for it—if she hit the ground fast enough, she could probably beat him to the exit. Probably get help before he could catch up. Probably . . . but as her body tensed,
ready to bolt, Charlie began speaking, his voice transformed to a gossamer chorus by the echo of the tunnel's walls.

“You have to understand something about me, Alice. If it were physically possible, I would have killed myself years ago. I've never admitted that to anyone, but it's true. I didn't want to be here anymore. My entire life revolved around people dying and I just couldn't stand it. Ironic, I know. I discovered quickly that nobody's happy when they die. I feel like the best I get is someone who accepts it without too much fuss. Seeing that over and over again . . . it eats at you. I've been told more times than I care to count that those feelings would pass, that I'd go numb to it eventually. Two centuries later, and I'm still waiting for that to kick in.

“I had an assignment not too long ago, a kid by the name of Jeremy Bradley. Young kid, rock climber. He was free-climbing in the Badlands when he fell. Broke both of his legs before he tumbled into a tucked-away crevice at the base of the mountain. There was nobody around for miles, and . . . you can probably guess where this is going. I'm not sure what got him first, the infections or the dehydration, but I watched it drag on for days and I couldn't do a goddamn thing. No—
didn't
do a goddamn thing. Do you know what I thought about, standing there for his last moments? I wondered what it would be like for his family and friends, each one of them having to accept that he was dead but never truly knowing, never fully getting closure, always hoping that one day, weeks or months or years down the road, he'd show up, bag in hand, and they'd hug and cry and he'd regale them with how he survived against all the odds. How hard must that be for them? How unfair? I'd had assignments like that before, but that one . . . that one just broke my heart. I almost stayed out in the Badlands and never came back.”

He ran his fingers through his hair, briefly turning his gaze back the way they came.

“Then I get your case—special, top secret orders that I don't even get to read until you were about thirty seconds away from oblivion, which is crazy in and of itself. I open the envelope up and read the instructions and I can't believe what they say. Do you know why?”

Alice shook her head.

“Because they gave me a
choice
. And for two hundred and fifty years, that's all I've ever wanted. But here's the kicker: just because I wanted to stop you doesn't mean I could just do it. It had to come from both sides. You give me hope, not because I saved you, but because
you let me
save you. Because you're still letting me, whether you want to admit it or not. Maybe you're right. Maybe I didn't stop you because of who you are. But in some weirdly cyclical way, I think everything that's happened since then has proved how much you deserved to be saved. Fucking hell, Alice . . . you're the girl who lived, and corny as it sounds, maybe you just saved me.”

Alice wiped her nose.

“You're right,” she said, her voice still quivering a bit. “That was really corny.”

Charlie's eyes found hers, and after two heartbeats, he laughed. “I'll admit, it sounded much better in my head.”

“I can tell,” Alice replied. “And
the girl who lived
? What am I, Harry Potter?”

He looked slightly hurt at that remark. “That's not what I—”

But he never finished, because she interrupted him with a kiss. It wasn't even remotely close to a good one: it was too short, she didn't meet his mouth flush on, his eyes were still open, and his lips were still moving as he tried to speak. Frankly, she didn't care.

There was something special about the way Charlie spoke, something Alice had trouble pinning down. Maybe it wasn't one
thing, necessarily, but some combination that when blended together exceeded the sum of its parts. There existed a spellbinding cadence in his words—yes,
spellbinding
, that was the right word, because what was it if not magic?—an understated rhythm that undressed the world, exposed it as nothing more than an illusion. He was the magician in reverse, the man who demonstrated with a flourish that his act was real—it was her pain and suffering, her
reality
that was the cheap trick she'd failed to see through.

His voice enveloped her in a tapestry of woven words while his eyes orchestrated the ebb and flow of his inflections, a conductor flicking the baton in seemingly careless strokes, yet driving a masterful symphony with them. Though doubt and fear and sadness all lingered in the back alleys of her psyche, his voice bore her back in time, back to when she was a child capable of believing in impossible things. And in the dying moments of that first kiss, Alice believed in them anew.

She pulled away. Charlie looked at her, speechless. “You know,” he finally said, “you are a very unpredictable girl.”

All too quickly, the mesmerizing trance he'd placed her in evaporated, leaving her naked in self-consciousness. Suddenly, she felt more than a little embarrassed by her forwardness.

“Sorry,” she said quietly. She once again turned to the exit, now only just ahead. “I just didn't want you to ruin the moment by saying something stupid.”

A few steps later, Charlie caught up to her. “What I meant to say,” he said, “was thank you for protecting me from my own stupidity.”

Alice looked over at him. “Sure,” she said, “somebody has to.” Then she opened the door at the end of the passageway and they stepped outside, together.

W
hen Cartwright had implied that the apartment he was sending them to was old, Charlie had suitably lowered his expectations. At least, he thought he had.

Calling 58 West Thirty-Sixth Street a holdover from an earlier era was a generous assessment several orders of magnitude deep. The building didn't stand so much as unwillingly slump between the two newly erected twenty-story hotels on either side of it. The nauseating yellow exterior made it seem like the narrow four-story building was suffering from severe jaundice, while twelve decrepit windows were crammed together on the front face, three windows to a floor. The paint of both the facade and molding was sloughing off in large flakes. Neither adjacent hotel came far enough forward to be flush with the apartment, revealing the previously hidden bleached and discolored brick of the sidewalls.

Yet somehow the room on the fourth floor, though mostly bare and rather spartan, looked and smelled clean. Its layout was that of a large studio, though, in context, closets were considered modest housing arrangements in New York. The only separate room was a bathroom in the far left corner of the rectangular main
room. An outdated kitchen stood to their right, two unassuming wooden chairs lazily waiting just in front of what was probably the dining area. Other than a coffee table piled high with old magazines and a new bed in the far right corner, there was no other furniture to speak of.