The Ferryman (5 page)

That knowledge pained him, but he could not escape it. A breeze blew into the classroom, strong enough to ruffle the papers on his desk, and he moved a pencil holder over to weight them down. His name was spelled out in gilt letters on the pencil holder: DAVID J. BAIRSTOW. As a kid, he had sometimes been Dave or even Davey, but mostly David. Except to his grandfather, who had always just called him
boy
. His mother had told him that the old man was disappointed David had not been named after him, but David didn't believe that, even back then.

As a child, David had been coddled almost to suffocation by his parents. His father, James, had been an accountant, and his mother, Rita, had stayed at home. A good life, no question. Even without closing his eyes, it was easy for him to bring to mind richly detailed snapshots of his childhood. The trees in the front yard he and his little sister, Amy, had loved to climb, one of which he had fallen from at the age of seven, biting nearly all the way through his lower lip. The tiny hill in the backyard where they had gone sledding in the winter; the way they had shoved their frozen feet under the baseboard heaters to warm up. The weekends—or entire weeks—they had spent with their parents on Cape Cod or up on the coast of Maine, when his father had said, “Damn the cost, it's time for the family, not the clients.”

But too many of those trips to the coast of Maine had been to stay at Grandpa Edgar's in Kennebunk. The old man had been a firefighter in the town for forty-seven years before he had retired to a life of whiskey and cigars and reading the obituaries to find out who wouldn't be showing up to the weekly poker game.

Edgar Bairstow had showered his family with all the love he knew how to give. His gruff manner and rough play had always terrified Amy, yet Grandpa Edgar had loved her to distraction.

He had hated David.

It had taken him forever to stop making excuses for his grandfather. The old man had been dead three years and David had already graduated college when he finally accepted the truth of it. His grandfather had taken an instant dislike to him as a child, and had made no secret of his disdain for his grandson for the rest of his life.

The knowledge made David sad, but it also made him angry. What right, he had thought time and again, did an old man have to stain a young boy's world and self-image with such confusion and doubt? He could look back upon his life and recall all the times when he had found reason to celebrate, and too many of them were eclipsed by the dark cloud of his grandfather's derision.

It may have been that Edgar Bairstow thought his grandson's interest in books and his decided lack of involvement in sports of any kind was a sort of betrayal. David could distinctly remember his mother telling him, with a roll of her eyes, that his grandfather was happy he had a date for the eighth grade dance because the old man had thought David was gay.

Grandpa Edgar had died in his sleep the summer between David's freshman and sophomore years in college, and David had been secretly happy to see him go. That emotion both surprised and disturbed him, which was why he had held it so close. But once his grandfather was dead, David had hated him even more.

Hated him because he still loved him. Despite everything, he had craved the man's affection his entire life, and that had built up a kind of love in him. Edgar Bairstow had been his grandfather, and even after his death he still wanted the man's blessings.

David hated him even more for that. It was an endless cycle of guilt and sorrow, a trap too simple to become mired in, and so he rarely let his mind wander there.

Today, in the aftermath of Ralph Weiss's sudden death, he could not help it.

Down the hall a door slammed and he glanced up to see one of the janitors, Melvin Halliwell, squeaking by with an ancient metal bucket and broom. Broken from his reverie, David reached into the top drawer of his desk and withdrew the book he had scoured the school library for earlier that day.

It was his high school yearbook.

The previous night he had searched his entire house for it but come up with nothing.That morning he had not been able to let the quest slip from his mind, and so had gone to the library. They had an archive of yearbooks from every graduating class since St. Matthew's inception.

David had not had time to look at it before his classes resumed, only shoved it into the desk. Now he studied the cover, the blue cloth and the image of the mustang inscribed there. The school mascot, the mustang.

Surprised to find his fingers hesitating, he forced himself to open the book. He flipped past the early pages at first, went right to the roster of students, the rows of photographs from the eighties that looked so silly now. Though there were a few faces he barely recalled, he was pleased with how many of his classmates' names popped immediately to mind before he had even read the words beneath their images. Lisa Farrelly. Colin McCann. Chris Franzini. Nicole Rice.

A tiny spike of sadness shot through him as he saw a picture of Maggie Russell.

Death, it seemed, was all he could think about today. Too many reminders.Whole months went by without his ever thinking of Maggie Russell, but whenever he did, he still missed her. More than fifteen years gone, and still, when he thought of her, Maggie's smile was fresh in his memory.

David Bairstow did not want to die.

He recognized it as a foolish thought. Certainly it was no breakthrough in human consciousness. Nobody wanted to die. But as he lingered over memories of those close to him who were no longer upon the earth, he could not help but wonder where they were now.

Where he would one day go.

He did not want to go. Not anywhere.

Reluctantly, as to a roadblock, he came to the conclusion that he could no longer avoid the thing for which he had retrieved the yearbook in the first place. Still, he put it off one moment longer, to glance out the window. The sparrows were gone.

David flipped back to the faculty section of the yearbook and quickly found the photograph of Ralph Weiss. He'd been thirty pounds lighter then, and though in David's memory of high school Mr.Weiss never seemed anything less than profoundly aggrieved about some matter or other, in the picture he wore a warm, genuine smile.

Now that Ralph Weiss was dead, it pained David to realize how much simpler it would have been, how much less energy it would have cost him, to just accept the teacher as he was. Ralph Weiss had been officious and barely competent as a teacher, but he had also been a benevolent and lonely soul.

“You had to go and die on us, didn't you, Mr.Weiss?” he said to the fifteen-year-old picture.

With a half smile and a shake of his head, he began to page through the yearbook again. Some minutes later, he was not sure how long, there was a rap on the open door.

David glanced up to see Annette standing just inside the classroom.

“Hey, Elf.”

“Penny for your thoughts?” she ventured, her brow furrowed in an expression of grave concern.

“Pretty morbid, I'm afraid,” he revealed.

“Just wanted to say good-bye. I'll see you at the funeral tomorrow, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Maybe we can get something to eat after?”

Annette pushed a stray lock of hair behind her pointed ears. “Maybe. Janine's sort of on her own starting this afternoon, and I'm going to be spending a lot of time with her in the next week or so.”

David raised his eyebrows. “She's home already?”

“I'm actually heading over to the hospital to pick her up now, bring her home.”

A lengthy silence ticked past. A lone sparrow alighted upon a branch just outside the window and peered in, as if David's earlier scrutiny had driven them off and this solo bird had been sent to see if he'd left yet.

“Do me a favor?” he asked.

“Anything.”

“Ask her if she'd like some more company tomorrow. Maybe I'll ride over with you. If she wants me to.”

Annette smiled a bit sadly.“I'll ask, but I'm sure she'll be more than happy.”

David nodded, pleased with his decision, and with Annette's reaction. She walked over to him and slid onto his lap to stare into his eyes.

“You're a sweet guy, Bairstow. Don't let anyone tell you different.”

“Thanks, Elf.” He gave her a short, sweet kiss, and amused himself by wondering what Melvin the janitor would think if he spotted Mr. Bairstow with the cute, blond science teacher on his lap.

The good feeling spurred within him by this musing dissipated quickly, however, as his thoughts turned back to Janine Hartschorn, and the baby she had lost. Both of them had been touched by death, though Janine's recent loss was far more tragic and intimate than the death of a colleague. Death was suddenly omnipresent.

David knew there was no way to escape it, but he hoped he would soon be able to return to the bubble of denial most people lived their lives in. The only way to combat the looming inevitability of death was to live.

Just live.

B
y the time Annette turned the car into Janine's driveway, it was after four o'clock. The day had already grown long, but the sun's rays still streamed through the trees whose branches hung out over Winthrop Street. Janine had her window cracked a few inches, and the scents that were carried to her on the breeze were delicious. The landscape of the world seemed to have changed in the week she had spent in the hospital. Spring had truly arrived.

As best she could, she tried to grasp and hold on to the hope the season always provided.

Annette pulled into the small lot beside the rambling old white house and parked. “Home again,” she said, and offered her friend a sweet smile before turning off the engine.

“Yeah,” Janine agreed. “Home.”

To her great surprise, the word resonated in her.This was not really her home. Her father had been born in Medford, but Janine had been raised in Elmsford, New York. That was home. Not her stepfather's house in Scarsdale, and not really her current apartment. Still, ever since college, the Boston area had seemed to wrap its arms around her, to cradle and comfort her in a way that New York could never seem to after her father had died.

Janine stepped out of Annette's weathered SAAB holding the cup of Starbucks cappuccino her friend had so thoughtfully provided, and stared up at the house. It had been used as offices once. A dentist and a doctor, brothers. The idea that they had shared the space seemed wonderful to her, so very New England. The family still owned the property, but it had been converted to apartments, one on each of the three floors.There was an enormous barn in back—left over from the home's earliest days—and Dr. Feehan, the landlord, had a million stories about playing in the barn when he was a child.

A warmth spread through Janine as she stared up at the house, and she felt a smile beginning to light up her face. Her heart was heavy with the pain of her loss, and she knew it would not leave her soon, if ever. But for the first time she believed that there was room in her heart for other feelings, other emotions. Home, at least, was something she could hold on to. In so many other ways, she felt cast adrift. Over the course of her pregnancy she had come to mentally identify herself as a mother. Now, without the baby, she wasn't sure
what
she was.What her life was supposed to be now.

“You coming, Janine?”

Annette had paused at the front steps of the apartment house and turned to watch her. With a nod, Janine followed her into the foyer and they walked upstairs together.

Her apartment was on the second floor, a two-bedroom with a small but serviceable kitchen and a lovely living room with high windows that caught the sun from three different angles all day long. When she turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open, Janine felt a rush of relief. The sunlight gleamed off the hardwood floor and the windows were open a crack, letting in the spring breeze.

Inside, she dropped the small bag she had brought home from the hospital and just wandered around the place for a moment. All her plants had been watered, and somehow that seemed important to her. In the corner of the living room, where she could look down upon the trees and the barn in the back, her music stand waited for her. On an antique bench beside it, her violin case lay open, the instrument resting inside.

Home,
she thought again.

As if sensing she wanted a few moments to herself, Annette had gone into the kitchen. She could be heard banging about in there, and after a short time Janine became both curious and a little concerned.

“Hey.What's going on in there?” she called.

“Dinner. Or it will be.”

Janine's eyebrows shot up in alarm. With an ironic grin, she hurried into the kitchen to find Annette on her knees rifling through a cabinet full of pots and pans.

“Stop right there,” Janine ordered. “Not that I don't appreciate your help, but let's face it; in the kitchen, you're a danger to yourself and others.”

Annette turned and sat on her butt on the linoleum floor. She shot a baleful glance at Janine. “You know, that whole thing about lesbians not knowing how to cook? It's a myth.”

“You make it true,” Janine said bluntly.

With a sigh, Annette relented. “My mother made lasagna, okay? I just need a pot to heat up the extra sauce.”

“Whew,” Janine replied. “You had me scared there for a second.”

They shared a bittersweet moment together then, both of them aware that it was likely the first time Janine had smiled in days, the first glimpse of sunlight breaking through the black cloud of her grief. Janine grimly accepted the knowledge that it was only a momentary reprieve, that the numbness she had felt would likely be her regular state for quite some time.