Sliding Past Vertical (25 page)

Chapter 43

Normally, Emerson didn’t mind
the overnights. It could be a little lonely with the patients asleep, no
Charlie to razz him or beat him at checkers, no ladies to fetch and carry for. It
was slow, mindless work: push the mop, write in his head, and daydream.

But that night he couldn’t
stop thinking about Sarah. He continued to berate himself for being too much of
a coward to fight for her. It was little comfort, and a difficult sell, trying
to convince himself that sending her home had taken even greater courage. Like
Bogie in
Casablanca
, stoically
letting Ingrid Bergman fly away.

It seemed a lot easier in the
movies.

He imagined Sarah arriving at
her apartment, unable to tell Rashid it had been a mistake. Backing down,
afraid to hurt him, probably letting him make love to her again.

Five times stirred
counterclockwise.

He couldn’t see the appeal.
Rashid was a nice guy, decent looking, but Emerson knew enough about Sarah to
believe she didn’t love him, and it couldn’t be for the sex. Sarah was
passionate and spontaneous, and this anachronism, this scientist, this almost-boy
almost-man pajama-ironer was a twenty-four-year-old virgin.

Although thanks to Sarah, the
latter descriptive could be crossed off the list.

Emerson took it out on the
poor mop, scrubbing until open-heart surgery could have been performed on the
sunroom floor.

Then he came to a decision.

If Sarah didn’t walk away
from Rashid, Emerson would walk away from her. For good. No love. No
friendship. Nothing.

Maybe it was harsh and
spiteful. But he was getting too old to settle for half a relationship. It
wounded him too deeply to wait until Sarah finished with this latest boyfriend
du jour. No matter who he was. He would take himself off the roster as second-string
guy, shoulder to whine on, and dispenser of brotherly, unheeded advice.

He deserved better.

He deserved someone who would
love him back.

So it wouldn’t be Daisy or
any of her other teenage sisters of mercy. But it could be Sarah. He’d never
fully given up on the idea that one day they’d get it right and be together,
and her sometimes-uninhibited affection the last couple of times he’d seen her
only fueled that pathetic fire. Sarah’s embrace on the lawn burrowed deeper
under his skin than lust ever had. There was a sense of completion he hadn’t
noticed before. Coming from her or from him or something they created together,
he didn’t know, and it felt beyond him to decipher.

Maybe that was the word he’d
been searching for, when he couldn’t describe the difference in their
relationship. Because before it had been missing, word and deed.

Completion.

Done with the sunroom, he washed
the mop and bucket, filled out a supply order, and checked tomorrow’s physical
therapy schedule.

Every time he passed a phone
he wanted to call her.

“Did you feel it before?”
he’d ask. “Did you feel that word?”

She’d think he’d lost his
mind. Or, with his luck, Rashid would answer.

Finally, at seven thirty,
certain she was already awake, he called her.

But as she picked up the
phone, he realized it was Saturday.

“H’lo?” she breathed.

“Sarah...”

“Em...” His name was a sigh
of relief and a distress call all at once and it made him shiver. “It was awful!
I was awful! But I did it, I told him...what I had to tell him. I felt like
some kind of monster.”

“It’s never easy,” Emerson said
softly. He listened while Sarah gave him details, probably sanitized for his
protection.

His heart thumped as he realized
this meant he didn’t have to throw her away, leave her on some rainy runway in
Africa, albeit in a very fetching trench coat.

But then an old ache stirred
in his ribs for Rashid.

“I’m so worried about him,”
Sarah said, echoing his thoughts. “He was just too calm. You know?”

“But he’s always like that.”

“This was different. This was
really scary.”

He let out a long breath as
he imagined Rashid sucking up a fresh kick to the groin and trying to be
gentlemanly about it. The poor guy. Stiff upper lip or not, Emerson knew firsthand
how clumsy Sarah could be.
 

And he was the one who had encouraged
her to do this, to be the first to break Rashid’s heart.

“Look, I’m just about to
clock out,” Emerson said. “I’ll go check on him.”

She hesitated.

“You don’t want me to?”

“Maybe...” Her voice quavered.
“Maybe you’re not the person he wants to see right now.”

After they’d hung up, Emerson
realized that he understood Sarah’s hesitation. The two men hadn’t been
particularly chummy since Emerson let Rashid’s lust for Sarah chew his insides
out. But two years of friendship meant something to Emerson, no matter how
badly it had unraveled.

He might have been left over
and left behind by the dozen or so foreign students who had come and gone, but
Emerson McCann couldn’t bear to let anyone go away angry because of something
he had done.

By the time he arrived home, Rashid’s
sedan and the Jordanians’ sports car were both missing from the driveway.
Inside, Emerson found nothing out of the ordinary, upstairs or down. The room
next to Sarah’s was its usual monument to the Indian mother who’d raised her
son to make no extra work for the servants or his future wife. In the kitchen,
his wet mug gleamed in the dish drainer, the teabag rest beside it. A note in his
painfully tidy handwriting read that he was sorry to have used the last of the
sugar.

Five times stirred
counterclockwise.

Emerson called Sarah. “He’s
not even here. I think he went to the lab.”

“Yeah,” she said, sounding
miles away. “Probably.”

That was what Emerson would
have done. What he had done. When Sarah had torn him up at a tender eighteen,
he’d signed up for as many shifts in the dining hall as legally allowed, working
until his feet and back ached, until he had steam burns up and down his arms.
After his mother had brought him home, it had taken weeks to get the smell of
cooking grease out of his hair.

Rashid was probably doing the
equivalent, up to his elbows in platelets and glass slides. Sarah might have
unwittingly inspired a cure for cancer. It would certainly be a nobler gift to
the world than what Emerson had offered following his heartbreak: clean dishes
for a bunch of ungrateful college students, and Dirk Blade.

“Maybe I should let him be
for a while,” Emerson said.

“Yeah,” Sarah replied. “Maybe
that’s a good idea.”

His stomach complained. The
last time he’d eaten was a bag of potato chips from the vending machine about
four hours ago. And he really wanted to see Sarah, partially to reassure
himself he was no longer eighteen and it had been someone else she’d just
dumped, not him.

“Can I buy you breakfast?”

She accepted, but he told her
he wanted to shower first. They agreed on a time and place to meet. He washed
his hair (thinking he could still smell the cooking grease), shaved, and soaped
away the antiseptic aroma of an overnight shift.

As he was getting out the
telephone rang.

“Can someone get that?” Then remembered
there was no one home. He contemplated letting it go, but it might be Sarah, changing
their plans, so he padded dripping and towel-wrapped into the hall.

For his trouble he got a
jumble of incomprehensible words in his ear. He’d heard enough of the languages
currently spoken in his house to be able to identify them, but the speech was
too rapid. He could only glean that the speaker was male, fairly young, and
very excited about something.

“Wait, slow down.” Emerson couldn’t
remember the Hindi or Arabic words for either of these requests. The man took a
wheezing breath and began again. Eventually Emerson recognized a couple of
words.

“You want to speak with Rashid?”

“No. Rashid won’t listen to
me,” the man said, in slow, careful English. “I need Emerson.”

“That’s me.”

“Please. It’s very, very
important. You must come now to the laboratory.”

Chapter 44

Emerson yanked the previous
night’s clothes over his still-damp skin. He tried to reach Sarah but got her
machine and left a rushed message telling her he’d be late. Two traffic lights
and several stop signs later, his Honda rattled over the paving stones at the
quad’s south gate. He parked illegally next to Rashid’s sedan in the
permit-only lot adjacent to the biology lab.

A rangy figure in a white
smock galloped out to meet him. Emerson figured this was his caller and tagged
him as the doltish Indian student Rashid had regretted agreeing to sponsor.

“You are Emerson?”

He nodded.

“Jagadhish,” the lad said.

“Where is he, what’s—?”
From the continued upward darting of the young man’s rabbit-like eyes, Emerson drew
his own conclusions and cursed under his breath. “The roof?”

“On the other side. He tells
me go away, he is there to be jumping off. Come down, I tell him, don’t be
foolish, you will make your mother cry, but he will not move. You are his
friend, you must help.”

Emerson looked up. Seven stories,
crowned with a marble ledge. He swallowed, growing dizzy and rubbery in the
knees. “Show me how to get there.”

* * * * *

“Today he is different,” the
student huffed over his shoulder as they ran up the stairs. He seemed only
slightly calmer with Emerson on the scene, his English comprehensible, in
context. “Doesn’t say ‘good morning’ or teach me new American words. Then tells
me there is something he must do but I am to take care of the laboratory. He
gives me a paper, very, very important, it is for Emerson but for later. Soon I
have a question about platelets and I go to find him, maybe he went for a
coffee and I see him up there and he will not come down and then I call for security
and no one is home—”

Jagadhish was getting
flustered again, English peppered with Hindi and whatever local dialect they spoke
in his goat-farming homeland. Emerson stopped the lad before he could
hyperventilate. “You have this paper?”

“Yes, yes!” He stopped,
fumbled in his pockets, and pulled out a folded note, in the same
excruciatingly perfect handwriting as the one about the sugar.

Tell
Sarah I’m sorry and this is not her fault.

Jagadhish read over Emerson’s
shoulder. “I do not understand.”

“I do,” Emerson said. “Keep
going.”

* * * * *

The door creaked open onto a
plane of pebbled roof. Jagadhish pointed to a familiar profile in the distance.
Emerson froze, one hand worrying rust off the cold metal, the other on the
younger man’s shoulder. Rashid, oblivious to his surroundings and his audience
or pretending to be, stood on the far side of a short railing, on what Emerson
assumed was the marble cornice he had seen from below. His hands were clasped
in front of his belly, brown tweed jacket over beige sport shirt and neat brown
slacks, like he’d just stepped out of the cabin of his yacht for a breath of
fresh air.

Rashid was separated from the
two of them by a shallow-pitched, tiled gable. With a nod, Emerson left the
student behind. Eyes averted from the edge of the roof only a few feet away, he
inched up one pitch of the gable and down the other, only to find more pebbles,
a recessed walkway, and then the marble outcropping.

Afraid of startling him,
Emerson stayed on his side of the gap and came no closer. He brushed wet,
windswept hair out of his eyes and willed his legs to stop shaking as he fought
off the nausea of knowing what lay mere inches beyond Rashid’s perfect brown
loafers. Nothing. Then seven stories down to a brick patio.

He waited.

But only Jagadhish, cringing
on the other side of the gable, got passing notice.

“He shouldn’t be here.” Rashid’s
voice was as mild as always.

“He’s worried about you,” Emerson
said.

“He should be more worried
about leaving our experiments unattended. They could be ruined or someone could
get hurt.”

Emerson beckoned the young
man to the other side of the gable. “I call security again?” Jagadhish
whispered. “Maybe someone will be home now?”

“We don’t need them.” Ten
years ago, a university security officer had “helped” Emerson out of his
dormitory window, threatened to arrest him, and generally blustered around
making everything worse. Nobody needed that kind of help. “Just go back to the
lab and sit tight, okay?”

The boy disappeared down the
staircase.

“He’s going to watch over
things downstairs,” Emerson told Rashid.

“I don’t trust him to do even
that unsupervised.”

“He gave me your note,”
Emerson said.

Rashid frowned. “He was
supposed to have waited.”

Until
the body was found.
A chill shot through Emerson. He folded his arms across his chest. Looking toward
Rashid and the drop below made him nauseated and dizzy, so he focused on his
own feet. He curled his toes into the pebbles, digging them into the worn soles
of his sneakers. In his haste to dress he’d forgotten his socks. The stiff
breeze needled his legs in the spots where his jeans were still wet from the
shower.

Rashid didn’t have as much as
a scuff on his shoe.

How
could he look so completely fucking normal,
Emerson thought. Like he was running off to teach his
class.
Did I look like that when I took
all those pills? A study in preternatural calm?

“She’s not worth it,” Emerson
said finally, needing something to say. “No woman is worth it.”

The slightest look of sarcasm
flicked across Rashid’s face. “Is that what they told you? When you were
hanging from the window? When they were pumping out your stomach?”

Emerson remembered the feel
of the tube in his throat, the guilt, and the pain on Sarah’s face. “They
didn’t have to tell me. I figured it out myself.”

“Maybe I am not that smart.”

“But you will be! You’ll get
through this.”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Yes, you will. There will be
other women, and you’ll forget about Sarah.”

It was the first thing he’d said
that brought measurable emotion into Rashid’s voice. “But I don’t want—”

Abruptly the younger man
turned toward Emerson. His shoe caught on the railing.

Emerson’s stomach lurched,
but Rashid found his balance and stood still, the calm returning. “I don’t want
to forget about Sarah!”

“She’s not that great,” Emerson
said. He wanted to make a list for him, but at the moment none of her negatives
came to mind. “She’s not worth this.”

“You don’t understand. It
isn’t her specifically I don’t want to forget about.” Rashid paused a moment,
seeming to puzzle over the syntax of his last sentence. “It isn’t even that she
doesn’t care for me after all this time pretending that she might. Well. Yes, I
want to forget about that. But being in love. This is the feeling I don’t want
to forget about.”

Emerson forced himself to
look across the chasm between them. He focused on a space behind Rashid’s head,
on the tennis courts across the parking lot from the biology building. Doing
this decreased the nausea and the perception of height. Or he cared about them
less.

“You’ll be in love again.”
Emerson took a step forward, right to the edge of the walkway. “You’re getting
married. You’ll fall in love with your wife.”

Rashid’s shoulders sagged as
he surveyed the land stretching out in front of him, as if he’d given it his
all and found it an utter disappointment. “Up until a few months ago I thought
this might actually happen. Now that I know it’s not something you make happen
but something that happens to you, I can’t take the chance on it never happening
again. Why ruin two lives?”

“So don’t marry her. Find
someone you love.”

“Find someone you love,” he
repeated in a mocking tone. He turned on Emerson, shaking a finger. “This is
easy for you to say. You have love enough to toss aside if it doesn’t please
you. But who will have me? Ten women my parents have found for me in the last two
years, claiming they are perfect matches. All have rejected me. Except for this
one Indian girl who agreed to a marriage before even meeting me face to face. I
can’t disgrace my family by turning her away.”

“And they would have liked
Sarah better? An American girl?”

Rashid sighed. “Love makes
one do crazy things.”

“Like coming home in a body
bag,” Emerson said under his breath.

Jagadhish slunk through the
roof door, head bowed, pleading something in rapid-fire Hindi.

“Get him out of here!”

The force of Rashid’s tone froze
Emerson with panic. For a second he could only stare but then shook it off.
“Go,” he said to the young man without looking back, eyes trained on Rashid’s
footing. He convinced himself that only constant vigilance would keep his
housemate rooted in place. Vigilance Emerson couldn’t give a five-year-old boy
two thousand miles away eleven years ago. “Please.”

Jagadhish didn’t move.

Rashid looked tired. Decades
older.

He shuffled a foot against
the marble ledge.

The wind picked up. Something
creaked beneath them.

Emerson’s heart was about to
leap out of his chest. “Look, Rashid…this is stupid,” he said, throwing out his
hands. “You won’t be proving some point, you’ll just be hurting your friends
and family. And I should know. Please. Let’s get out of here. Let’s get a cup
of coffee and talk.”

Rashid looked at Emerson for
a long moment, eyes hopeful, still wanting to trust. Then he said, “No. You are
only trying to fool me with your psychology.”

A bank of clouds began to
overtake the sun. Rashid seemed unaffected by the chill. Emerson curled his
arms tighter around his chest. “No. I’m only trying to help you.”

“By keeping me alive so I may
die a slow and tedious death elsewhere. This is not helping me.”

A perfect loafer slid another
inch toward the edge of nothing.

Emerson didn’t know what else
to say. Except one thing but it would be a dirty trick, one that absolutely
would have worked on him if someone had the presence of mind to use it instead
of bodily yanking him from the window. And he would have hated whoever had said
it, but at the moment he didn’t care.

“What about Sarah?”

The trick seemed to work. Rashid
wasted no time hating him. Dark eyes scored Emerson from aft to stern. “What
about Sarah?” he snapped. “She’ll have you. If you are not too stupid to see
how much she loves you.”

The bottom dropped out of
Emerson’s stomach.

Focus,
he told himself.

“She’ll still think it’s her
fault,” he said. “No matter what you put in that note. You know how badly this
will hurt her? She’ll carry it around for the rest of her life.”

The younger man appeared to
be thinking it over. Emerson waited, shivering in the cold. Rashid’s eyes grew
moist. He blinked hard, turning his head away. When he spoke again it was with
gravity, each word carefully polished.

“You will tell her I am
sorry.”

“No.”

“No?”

“You’ll have to tell her
yourself.”

This time he didn’t sound so
sure. “This I am prepared to do. If you go get her and bring her here.”

“And leave you alone? I don’t
think so.”

Rashid smirked. “Jaga will
stay and keep me from jumping to my certain death.”

When he glanced over, the boy
averted his headlight-stunned eyes. “No,” Emerson said. “I have a better idea.”