The Black Hour (17 page)

“If there’s a magic question, I don’t know it.” One more try at Joe. I held up my hand, ready to wave, as I watched him scan the room. And then, beyond him, Nath’s eyebrows shot behind his floppy hair. He’d seen me.

My hand hung in the air. Did I want Nath to come back here or did I want him to stay where he was? It didn’t matter. Nath had Joe’s attention. He pointed back to us and began making his way through the crowd.

“My student,” I said.

“That’s what I asked,” Rory said.

“No—this student.”

Nath stepped up to the table, Joe just behind with three beers.

“I thought you’d be in bed,” Nath said to me.

Everyone froze. Finally Joe set the beers down. “I’ll put these on your tab.”

Nath’s face glowed neon.

“Your students are very attentive, Dr. Emmet,” Rory said, his voice as greasy as a butter knife. “Is that—typical?”

Nath, eyes shifting all around, struggled for his footing. “I meant—you should take care of yourself. Dr. Emmet.”

“Nathaniel is my teaching assistant,” I said. “He had to witness my—accident.” The word didn’t come easily. “Today.”

“Indeed.” Rory slid deeper into the booth, making room. “Won’t you join us? Nathan, was it?”

This was too much. “Wait—”

“Nath.” The kid swung his backpack under the table and plopped down across from me.

“Rory McDaniel.”

They shook hands, McDaniel amused. Nath’s jaw squared. If he hadn’t wanted to join us, he could have stayed at the bar. I wished he’d stayed at the bar. How had I let this get away from me? “OK, look—”

“So what happened today, Nath?” Rory took one of the beers and held it out. Nath took one of the bottles still on the table and handed it to me, then grabbed the last for himself and drank. Rory was left holding his own beer.

“Dr. Emmet led a terrific lecture on beginning sociologic theory.”

“And then?”

“McDaniel,” I said.

Nath didn’t look in my direction. “Her cane got caught up and she fell and hit her head.”

I liked the way Nath told the story. I tried to retrieve the memory, but all I came up with was the red carpet of Dale Hall rushing at me. I had no highlight reel from today. I’d been unconscious before I hit the ground.

“That must have hurt.” Rory turned to me now. The smirk was invisible, tucked away in his voice.

My hand shot to the back of my head. I hadn’t needed stitches, but, yes, it hurt. “Is that funny to you?”

He shot a sideways look at Nath. “Some things are funny.”

I put my beer down.

“Dr. Emmet,” Nath said. “Are you OK?”

Not OK.

Nath leaned across the table. “Do you need to go home?”

I did. I needed to go home, before I’d agreed to come here, before I’d had a single word with Rory McDaniel. And come to think of it, if we were choosing moments to return to in order to choose another way, how far back would I go? To the evening I’d gone into the office for a late errand and stumbled into Leonard Lehane’s troubled life? To the day I’d sent Doyle on his way, his key ring one key lighter? To a moment so far behind me I couldn’t remember, when I’d chosen this left instead of that right, and had ended up being this Amelia Emmet instead of another? I’d always thought myself lucky to have found the right path, the right version of myself, but now I wasn’t sure. I was no longer the person I was lucky to be.

“Yeah, Dr. Emmet, maybe Nath here should take you home.”

“I can get home on my own. Nath, I’m sorry to take you away from your friend.”

Nath blinked. “He’s—no friend of mine.”

“That’s good to hear,” Rory said. He grinned at us, tipped his beer back and emptied it, watching to make sure he had our attention.

“What?” Nath said.

“Good to know you’re not hanging out with that crowd, is all,” he said. “A guy hangs out with that group too much, sometimes he takes them up on it.”

Nath’s mouth opened and closed, opened again. “Leo.”

“Leo, is it,” Rory said.

I was lost. “Someone?”

Both men turned to me, but Rory had the advantage. He wanted to tell me. Nath clearly didn’t.

“Nath’s drinking buddy runs the suicide watch on campus. He had a rather big setback last year.”

I looked at Nath. So did Rory, and in the split second I had with Nath over the table, I shook my head. One, two almost imperceptible shakes, but he saw me, understood enough to close his mouth and tuck his surprise away. He sat back in the booth. “Is that his deal?” Nath said, his voice gone smooth. “The guy kept trying to give me a pamphlet.”

If sociology didn’t work out, he had a future on the stage. Or as a con man.

Rory checked us both. “I’m a reporter, kid. I pay attention. You weren’t talking to that guy? For a half hour?”

“He was really persistent.”

I hardly heard what Nath said. My mind raced ahead. If Leonard Lehane had been under the suicide watch, what did that mean? What did that group know? And how could I get them to tell me?

Nath shot me a confused look from under his hair. He gave me an idea. “We shouldn’t make light of it. Depression. It’s a—serious issue. Nath. You should maybe—maybe you should take the pamphlet.”

“I should?”

“Next time you get a chance. Get some help with your—situation.”

Nath swept at his hair and glanced uncertainly at Rory.

“Nath. Friend. Are you having sad times?” Rory waved his hand in the air to fetch Joe’s attention. “Will a brewski cure it?”

“Brewski,” I said. “And you work with words?”

“And you work with people?”

“I study people.”

Across from me, Nath leaned over the table.

“Through a long-range scope?” Rory said.

“Clearly, you have more people skills.”

Joe came to the table with bottles hanging from between his fingers. “Another round?”

“I think I’ve had enough,” I said.

“I think,” Nath said. He swallowed hard, raised his eyes to me. “I think I’m going to kill myself.”

My car was outside. For the second time in one day, I handed Nath the keys. McDaniel sauntered past us to his own car, the imp’s grin still playing at his lips. I watched him open the door to a bright yellow Jeep. A Peter Pan complex, on top of everything else.

I waited until he was gone. “You were playing the game in there, right?”

Nath walked to the driver’s side, holding the keys up to the streetlight.

“Nath,” I said. “You don’t really—”

“Of course not.” A bit snappish. He had the car open, the lock undone for me. I held my breath to slide in. My apartment lot was hardly a quarter mile away, but I’d driven and was grateful I had. The concierge service I’d come to expect from Nath embarrassed me. I couldn’t walk a quarter mile? A thousand nights like this, I’d taken the long way home, on foot, trying to find a spot between the bar and my apartment where the light pollution didn’t block out the stars. The rocks. The rocks at the lakeshore were best, and if I’d had enough beer or a little too much, I often walked past my neighborhood and around campus to the lake. The water, black, whispered upon the shore.

The dark water had been the companion of my recovery, from my hospital room, late at night when I should have been resting. But I rested all day. At night, I lay awake. On hard days, I found myself charting out an academic article on suicide practices. Self-immolation, seppuku, the new-fangled assisted sort. So many hard days.

Luckily I’d already passed my own darkest hour.

I’d never told anyone about it. I didn’t have the right words to explain what I’d come to think of as the black room. The white room was where I finally woke up, but before that—the black. No windows, no doors, no visitors, no cards from emerging feminists. It wasn’t even a room, but a box, a sack, a skin. No light, no air, and the only thoughts I had were sharp. Could I even call them thoughts? I wore them, breathed them. They clawed their way out of my mouth in the form of a scream and wrapped around me, until that was all there was. It wasn’t hell. And when I woke up in the white room, that wasn’t heaven. Both seemed to me now like real places I’d visited, although I only had proof of one. The hand, in the white room. The heavy hand on my chest that held me to the earth. A real hand, a real room. The other place—I hated to admit it, but I thought I knew where I’d been. If I had even been
I
—the soul of Amelia Emmet, the anima that separated me from the proverbial clay. Given the chance to sink into itself, the piece of me that made me myself had gone to ground. Minutes? Hours? Days? I don’t know how long I stayed there, locked inside the black room, where the worst pieces of myself lived.

That room had been death itself, and I’d made it out. I’d never choose to go back. As hard as my recovery since the black room had been, I’d never had an authentic suicidal thought.

“Did you know that guy at the bar or not?” I said.

“James Baker is dropping your class.”

I glanced at his profile, lit from the dashboard. He looked tired for someone so young. “How many new friends did you make today?”

“Like, eight. But they won’t be calling.”

“James is in with the watch, as well?”

“It’s like they’re trying to recruit him. To kill himself.”

I think I’m going to kill myself.
Nath and I had understood each other in the bar, but did we really? I wasn’t sure I understood what we were doing myself. I had no idea what happened to a Rothbert student who voiced suicidal thoughts. What had I imagined? That we’d go undercover in the suicide watch, he and I? Who did the watching, and what did they watch for?

“How far are we taking this?” I said.

We had come to my lot. Nath, the chauffer, already knew where to park. He killed the engine, pulled the keys, and handed them to me. “I’d like to stop before the trigger pull, if that’s OK with you.”

“Not funny.” I thought of my mother, my father, beloved people who had died real and complicated deaths too early. What was I courting? I’d faced death once, and once was enough. I said, “Let’s just forget it—”

“He never said anything about working with Leonard Lehane,” Nath said. “That’s weird, right?” He tapped his hand on the wheel. “Or is that, like, professional courtesy? Don’t bring up your failure rates while talking to a new customer?”

How had we even come this far? “Listen. Let’s stop this. James Baker is out of the class. That’s all I needed. The rest of it—I might have to live with a certain amount of ambiguity.”

Nath shook his head.

“You have better things to do, for one thing,” I said.

He got out of the car, so I followed. My body creaked, stiff and complaining. I should have been in a hot shower, in bed. Instead: a late night, a bar, and nothing had come from it but the end of the line.

“Better things, sure,” he said.

“Right, Nath? We have a class to run, and you have enough to do. Classes, research. I could put together a reading list for you.”

For a moment, Nath seemed not to know where he was. “Reading list.”

“And friends, Nath. Girls. Or—it’s not all about reading and study. You didn’t come here for this. You’re a young man, smart and attractive.” He blinked away. One or both of us might have been blushing. “And young. Your life is wide open. God, you don’t even know it. That’s how young you are.”

“Sometimes,” he said. “I wish I could skip over this part.”

“Which part?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Never mind.”

Youth was wasted, et cetera. “You should be having the time of your life.”

“I’m not, though,” he said. “That’s—that’s the part. All the parts where I’m almost, not quite, not—”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and scuffed a tennis shoe back and forth on the concrete. The noise satisfied an itch, brought us back to this moment. Here we were: alive. The kid didn’t even know how tenuous a grasp we had on all this, all the parts he wanted to leapfrog over.

But I had to admit—I’d been where he was. Life being so short, if you knew where you wanted to be, who wouldn’t want to skim a bit for the action scenes?

“It’s been the weirdest day,” I said. “I just need to sleep.”

He stared at the ground.

“Promise me, OK, Nath? Let’s forget about the suiciders and get back to our healthy, normal, pedestrian bleak thoughts.”