The Ferryman (6 page)

But it wasn't the
only
thing she could feel. Annette had reminded her of that, and she was more grateful than she could ever have put into words.

Though Annette tried to scoot her out of the kitchen, Janine stayed and together they quickly cobbled together a salad to go with the lasagna. Both of them wanted music—Janine especially—but it had to be something uplifting rather than the melancholy songbirds they both often listened to. Janine slipped in Barenaked Ladies' live album,
Rock Spectacle,
and, at odd times during dinner, they both sang along.

A bottle of Corvo Bianco had lain dormant in the fridge for months, and they polished it off between songs and servings of lasagna. Annette never brought up the baby.

After dinner they moved into the living room and Janine put a classical compilation into the CD player. Her violin called to her from the corner as if inspired by the music, but she resisted the temptation to play. There would be time for that. She would rebuild her life one moment at a time.

Janine studied Annette, there beside her on the sofa, and felt a deep and abiding love for her. She had never had a sister, nor in truth any girlfriend in whom she had ever felt she could confide completely. But the day Annette had first come to teach at St. Matthew's, Janine had felt a connection. She had known they would be friends. She cherished the other woman's place in her life, sometimes so deeply as to wish she herself were gay. They had joked about it often enough. And yet somehow, at times to her dismay, she simply could not conjure even the slightest interest in having sex with another woman, even one she loved so deeply.

“Hey,” Annette protested, squirming under the intensity of Janine's examination of her. “Do I have sauce on my chin?”

Overwhelmed by emotion, Janine slid closer to her on the couch and laid her head on Annette's chest, holding her tight. She bit her lip to keep tears at bay and sighed heavily.

“Thanks, Elf,” she whispered. Janine turned her face up toward Annette's, eyes wide, letting all her pain and affection show through.“I don't think I'd be able to survive this without you.”

A kind of uncertainty transformed Annette's face. Her eyelids fluttered a moment, as though she were reluctant to hold Janine's gaze. Then she smiled weakly, and bent to kiss Janine softly on the forehead.

“I love you,” she whispered. “You'll get through.”

Janine basked selfishly in her friend's dedication for a moment; then she sat up. Her fingers twined with Annette's, and they shared a look of deep regret. Though she knew it was arrogant to think it, Janine had the idea that Annette might care for her as more than a friend, and she tried her best never to imply anything she did not feel.

“I love you, too,” she told Annette, her mouth twisted into an expression of the irony she felt.

Annette chuckled softly and shook her head as if erasing something from her mind. “So, what's next?”

“Ben and Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk?” Janine suggested.

“Good answer. But I meant for you. Tom Carlson said you could take the balance of the year off, start up teaching again in the fall, right?”

“Yeah,” Janine replied slowly. Carlson was the principal at Medford High, where she had taught since leaving St. Matthew's. “I'm torn, though. I don't know what I'd do with myself, you know? I think it might be worse, having that much time to think. I'm leaning toward going back, maybe in a couple of weeks.”

“I'm sure your students will be happy,” Annette said.

“You kidding? They think I'm Attila the Hun. I wish I could have even a fraction of the rapport with my students as David always has with his.”

At the mention of David's name, Annette's eyes lit up.

“What?” Janine asked.

A mischievous smile appeared at the edges of Annette's mouth. “I told you Ralph Weiss died?”

Janine was horrified. “That's something to smile about?”

“No!” Annette quickly protested. “It's just that, well, I talked to David earlier, and he wondered if it would be all right if he came over with me after the funeral tomorrow.”

For a moment, Janine could only stare at her. A million thoughts whisked through her mind, leaving her mouth open in a tiny
O
of confusion.
David,
she thought. Her gaze and her memories seemed to ricochet around the living room, resting for only a heartbeat on spots where David had left traces of himself upon her life, a dozen artifacts of their time together.

“Janine?” Annette prodded. “I didn't want to upset you.”

“You didn't,” Janine promised, glancing shyly away.

“Do you want me to tell him no? I can. He'd understand, you know.”

Janine shook her head, a flutter in her chest. “No. No, please tell him I'd love to see him.”

The intensive-care unit was quiet, save for the steady beep of monitors and pumps. Not that there was generally a lot of noise in ICU beyond the conversations between doctors and nurses, but often enough, there would be the sounds of despair. Stefanie Harlow was always relieved when she could finish a shift without losing a patient or hearing someone sob. Though she had chosen the ICU, and she believed that she brought some comfort to all her patients, both those who survived and those who did not, it was a constant drain on her emotions.

Two days earlier she had heard a teenage boy singing softly to his unconscious mother. An hour later the woman had died. Stefanie still could not get the song out of her head.

But this evening it was quiet. That was always good.

Then, almost as if summoned by her thoughts, an alarm went off on one of the monitors.

“Damn it,” she hissed.

Mr. Haupt was a cancer patient. He had been undergoing radical chemotherapy and had had a heart attack that put him into a coma. Less than two days had passed, and hope for his recovery had dwindled to almost zero. His wife and children had gone home for dinner and a shower, and were due at eight, less than half an hour away.

Stefanie wondered if perhaps he hadn't just grown impatient. Despite all they had done for him, she knew that he must be in a lot of pain.

Chaos erupted in the curtained-off unit around Mr. Haupt as nurses and doctors rushed in. With one look at the patient—and without any need to look at the monitors—Stefanie knew that the man had had another cardiac episode. She also knew that it would be his last.

It's not fair,
she thought.

Dr. Pulaski glanced at the monitors, studied Mr. Haupt for a moment, and then held up one hand.

“Don't,” he said. “He has a DNR order.”

As if a switch had been thrown, the chaos dissipated. Though the monitors still showed the man's fast decline, the alarms were shut off. Stefanie knew that with a do-not-resuscitate order there was nothing more they could do for the man. It just seemed so wrong that his family—who had spent two days in vigil at his bedside—had gone home for a few hours only to return and find him dead.

The others milled around, beginning in advance the work that would need to be done once Mr. Haupt was dead. Stefanie thought it in exceptionally bad taste. She sat on the edge of the bed and held tight to Mr. Haupt's limp hand as the old man's life slipped away.

“Don't go,” she whispered to him. “Wait for them, just a little longer.”

“Did you say something, Stefanie?” one of the other nurses asked.

“Just a shame they won't get to say good-bye,” she admitted.

“It always is,” the other woman replied.

On the monitor, Mr. Haupt's pulse flat-lined. Stefanie did not need to see it to know the man was dead. His cold hand had twitched once, squeezing her fingers as though trying to send her a signal.Then it had been still.

Almost instantly, at least it seemed to her, his skin had taken on the waxy sheen of dead flesh. No longer was the thing before her a human being, but a dried husk, a hollowed-out shell.

Tenderly, Stefanie reached her fingers up to touch the man's cheek. When she did, she hissed and pulled her hand away. The dead man's skin was not simply cold; it felt icy, frozen.

“Karen?” she said, softly at first. Then louder. “Karen, could you come over here?”

The other nurse approached. Even as she did, Stefanie watched in horror as Mr. Haupt's skin began to change. He had been drawn and pale at the end, of course, but now his flesh began to look mottled.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don't know,” Karen said quickly, alarm in her tone. “Could be some sort of virus or something.”

For the dead man's skin had lost its mottling, but now had become even paler, with the webbing of blue veins beneath the surface clearly visible.

Like marble,
Stefanie thought.

Mr. Haupt's right hand darted up, snakelike, and locked in a vise around her wrist. His eyes opened wide and stared up at her.The irises were huge and almost completely black, ringed with burning halos. It was as though the dead man's eyes were a window, and something was peering through from the other side.

Stefanie screamed.

Mr. Haupt sat up and tore the tube from his throat with a gagging noise and the sound of tearing as the tape came away from his face.

“Janine,”
the dead man rasped in a heavily accented voice. It sounded as though he were speaking on a bad telephone line, tinny and far away.
“Where is Janine?”

Out of reflex, she reached out a hand to try to stop him from standing. Those black eyes like dying planets bore down upon her, and Stefanie fell backward and sat heavily upon the floor. A chill raced through her that seemed to come both from without and within.

Her breath fogged the air in front of her face.

In her peripheral vision, she saw the cardiac monitor. It still showed nothing but a flatline.

With a single thrust of his outstretched hand, he propelled her face into the monitor, shattering both glass and bone.

 
“Come on, come on.”

Shane Dowling bounced a little on the balls of his feet as the elevator creaked slowly upward. At six-foot-seven and two hundred and sixty pounds, he made the ancient contraption sway unsteadily with just that motion.

“Shoulda taken the goddamn stairs,” Shane grumbled. He ran an enormous hand over the black, gleaming skin of his shaven scalp. “Told you, Noah.”

Beside him, Noah Levine was the picture of calm. He was more than half a foot shorter than Shane, and thin, but he was strong and quick. The only similarity between the two men was the dark blue security uniform each of them wore.

“Fourth floor, Shane. Stairs wouldn't be much faster, and we'd be winded, then. Got to conserve energy in a crisis.”

“
You'd
be winded,” Shane retorted, a wry grin on his face. “Crisis, my ass. We don't even know what we're dealing with yet.”

“My point,” Noah replied.

Their conversation ended abruptly when the elevator dinged and the doors slid open on the fourth floor.Without a word, the two guards hustled out into the corridor and sprinted toward the ICU. Shane held a hand on the billy club attached to his belt as he ran.

The scene in the corridor ahead of them was not one of chaos, but of aftermath. Nurses and orderlies darted into the ICU, though some milled about in the hall, attempting to get a look at what was going on inside. No one seemed frightened, however, which meant that whatever had happened, it was probably already over.

Shane was disappointed.

Noah took the lead slightly, and Shane let him. Though he loved his job, loved being associated with the hospital, he relished the few times when they were actually called in to do more than intimidate some poor sap who wanted to visit a patient outside visiting hours.

His huge rubber soles squeaked on the linoleum as he slowed down. An aging, withered nurse stood in the hall outside the ICU, her eyes wide with voracious fascination as she tried to get a better view. The arrival of the security guards seemed to excite her even more.

Noah pushed past those lingering around the door and into the ICU. Staff members pressed themselves against the walls like spectators at a marathon. Shane followed without enthusiasm, his gaze drifting toward the old nurse; she reminded him of a vulture, circling for prey.

“In there!” she told him.

No shit, lady. I'm not blind,
he wanted to say. Instead he offered a thin smile and followed his partner.

The ICU was a shambles. Most of the units had curtains drawn around them, though Shane could clearly see figures moving within, likely doctors and nurses checking on all the patients. One of the units had been thoroughly trashed, monitors shattered, a crash cart overturned, tubes and things scattered on the floor. Even as Shane glanced at it, the light in that unit was turned out.

The cleanup would have to wait until after the police had a look at it, he knew.

In the main traffic area, things were even uglier.A doctor with thinning hair and round glasses with one lens cracked was having stitches sewn into his lip while another doctor checked his left arm and wrist for bone damage.

The worst was the nurse, though. A cute little thing Shane had noticed plenty of times around the hospital, she lay unconscious on a gurney while Nelson Ramos, a doctor Shane knew, plucked small shards of glass from her face.

“What the hell ...” he began.

But Noah had already questioned the doc with the stitches in his mouth. The man had been a real sourpuss, but Shane could not blame him. Those stitches had to hurt like a son of a bitch. The nurse tied off the stitches, and the doc turned to them, his brow furrowing with anger.