The Ferryman Read Online Free PDF

unable to understand how things for Janine had come to this. He could not even begin to imagine how devastated she must have been.
    Deeply saddened, he raised his eyes again. “Annette? Do you ... do you think it would be too awkward for her if I went to see her?”
    Annette reached across the table and twined her fingers within his. “I think that’s a wonderful idea.”
    He thought on it for a minute, reluctant but at the same time driven by love and compassion for Janine. What they had might be in the past, but that did not mean he had to stop caring for her, particularly now, when she would need support the most.
    â€œI’ll go tomorrow afternoon,” he decided. Quickly, he glanced at his watch. “I’m late, though. I’ll catch up with you after school.”
    Annette gave him a nod. “Great.”
    As David pushed back his chair and rose, the door to the teachers’ lounge swung open abruptly and Lydia Beal walked in, a stricken expression on her face.
    â€œRalph Weiss just had a heart attack in the cafeteria,” she said, her voice strained.
    â€œHe’s dead.”
    Â 
It was not sleep. At least, not in any meaningful way; not in any way that would have provided the sort of replenishment of body and soul, the sweet solace of dreams, the retreat to blissful oblivion, that people gave themselves over to each night.
    Ever since she had first regained consciousness in the hospital and seen the despair on the faces of her caretakers, Janine had not had a single moment of the precious sleep that she had once taken for granted. She slept, certainly, but it was a shallow thing, haunted by the voices and rattles and tiny disturbances of the world around her. Yet she retreated to that unsatisfying limbo state again and again, if only to avoid the tears.
    For when she was awake, she wept.
    Depression, the nurses called it. A doctor had prescribed a drug called Zoloft for her. It was meant to regulate her mood. Janine took the pills they gave her and the drug did seem to dull her mind, to numb her ever so slightly. But it could not relieve her of the burden she bore. Perhaps if it really were depression, the drug might have had another effect. But it was not that at all.
    It was grief. Bone-deep, heart-wrenching, soul-searing grief.
    How could they not know that? she had thought at one point.
    But slowly she came to understand the truth. They did know, of course, but they talked their way around her grief because there wasn’t a pill for that.
    Even the therapist or psychiatrist or whatever she was that the hospital sent in to speak with her seemed to know the truth of it. She talked about grief, clinical observations about spiritual agony, statistics and analogies and recovery forecasts worthy of a spreadsheet, or at the very least a display of augury more appropriate to such predictions, such as a throwing of the bones or a glance at a crystal ball.
    Talk. All talk.
    Grief had no cure.
    Her body recovered more quickly. Though she had been through a massive physical trauma, the nurses seemed pleased to find no sign of long-lasting effects. No stroke, no brain damage, no need for a replacement liver or kidney.
    Janine did not see the doctors much.
    Rest, they told her. All she needed now was rest.
    She laughed at that one, but nobody seemed to get the joke. They seemed not to understand that the periods of time she spent with her eyes closed were more like a trance than actual sleep. Rest played no part in it at all.
    At least she stopped crying, however. By the end of the third day after her own body had killed her baby, she had run out of tears. She had even begun to make phone calls to a few close friends—all of whom she had badly neglected during her catastrophic reunion with Spencer.They were good friends, though. Not one of them reminded her that they had warned her; not one brought up what a stupid bitch she had been to fall for him again.
    Not that she needed