The Black Hour (20 page)

“I’ll go. I heard they hired four new tenure-track profs in the film department. At least one of them has to be Hollywood cute. And straight. Maybe we can give some campus tours.”

Corrine turned back to her computer without comment, reminding me of that weird phone call she’d had. A boyfriend? Maybe we weren’t searching for good-looking tenure-tracks anymore. For her, anyway. High time I considered myself single. I just wished I were off the tripod already. The cane gleamed at me from the floor.

“Cor, tell me the truth. The cane. I mean, you notice it, right?”

“It’s hard to miss. Especially—”

“What?”

“Well, it’s not like anyone’s going to ask you what happened, are they? They know.”

“People see me differently with the cane.”

“People?” she said.

“
Men.
Joe.”

She cut her eyes at me. “Mel, you’re on
medication
. What are you doing at the Mill?”

“Met a—student.”

She nodded, but I had the feeling she stared through me. She probably could tell I was lying, but she’d never guess the truth. Even I couldn’t believe I’d gone to meet that McDaniel guy. I’d been thinking about that night ever since. What a waste of time. I didn’t need him and his mobility. I was mobile and, more than that, I could work smart. Who was handicapped in that department? Not me. “Cor, I’ve been thinking about that kid. Did you go to the service?”

Her eyes focused. “Which—oh, Mel, leave that kid alone.”

“Well. He’s dead. I’m simply curious. I think I’m allowed to be. Did you go?”

She shifted her attention back to her computer and clicked through her e-mail. “They had a little thing out by the lake. The funeral was somewhere else. Somewhere downstate.”

“Who else went to the lake thing?”

“Mostly students, but—it was small. Administration types. Jim went. Doyle.”

Of course. Doyle would have gone to show that, even if the kid had shot one of his people—the woman he’d loved—he held that all people were good at heart. He believed in second chances. Third. Fourth.

I tried to imagine a clutch of people standing at the rocks overlooking the lake, the wind roaring. Jim Perry and his round belly hanging out of his good suit, Doyle listening with his head tilted. I was wrong about the debutante ball—apparently I’d already missed the party of the year.

“Was she there? With Doyle?”

“It wasn’t really the sort of thing you bring a date to. The whole thing was a waste, start to finish. His parents made a mess.”

Parents. I hadn’t really given the parents any thought. Chastened, I turned back to my own computer screen. Nothing there seemed worth the time. I called up an e-mail from a student in my introductory course but couldn’t understand what she wanted. Leo Lehane had parents. I’d already encountered his mother, quoted in a news story, but I hadn’t really thought it through. Sociologically speaking, people who were alone, or felt alone, committed suicide more often. But Leo had people. Someone out there mourned him.

And not just his parents—who else missed him? Students in the hallway who watched me pass and said nothing? Or the faculty and staff I didn’t know who suddenly seemed to know me enough to bounce a curt nod in my direction. Of course they knew me, now that the
Rothbert Reader
had resumed coverage.

Cor had never let me near most of what had been printed last year. I’d missed some critical knowledge about Lehane. McDaniel said he didn’t have many friends, not much of a life. But he’d come from somewhere. Now, no matter who he’d been before, he couldn’t be anybody but the shooter.

“What did they do? The parents.”

“Amelia.” Corrine sounded tired. Exhausted, really, and she was the one who wanted to go to a party instead of grabbing some student center pizza before night class. “What do you think they did?”

They must have cried and wailed and fallen to their knees. The things people did when there’s nothing to do. I’d done them. Everyone had. “Did they blame the school?”

“No.”

I sat with that. But the lawsuit and the subpoenas I’d been able to deflect—having a hole in your gut offered exactly one benefit, and that was getting out of stuff you didn’t want to do.

And then I knew. They hadn’t blamed the school. They’d blamed me.

When would I cease to be surprised? And while we were on the topic of time healing nothing at all, when would other people stop rearing back when they saw me? Nearly six weeks into the semester: I taught, attended meetings, sat on committees, held office hours. I adjusted. It was the only thing I could do. I wasn’t supposed to wallow anymore, and good thing—I didn’t want to. But other people were allowed to feel how they wanted for as long as they wanted. The gossips, the bug-eyed starers, the mouth-breathing photo hounds from the
Reader
. They got to make the rules, and I had to live by them.

“You and Joss should go without me,” I said.

“What?”

“I’ll just slow you down.”

“That’s self-pity. You should be ashamed.”

“I can’t keep up with all the things I’m supposed to feel bad about.”

“Screw them. Who cares?” She lifted her chin, her tough gesture, but she still looked like someone’s kid sister, brought to the party but left on the porch. She’d given up swearing at some point, which didn’t help.

“I do,” I said. “I mean. I don’t. But you don’t know how hard this is.”

“You’re not the only one this has been hard for.”

“I know, I know.” Except—who else had come back from it with a limp, I wanted to ask. Who else kept a bottle of orange pills near to hand in order to keep her body from disintegrating into white, nuclear pain? I sighed. “I feel like everyone’s staring at me all the time.”

She looked away, down, found a spot of dust on her shoe to brush away.

“Is that the truth, Cor, or is that just how it feels?”

“Maybe—maybe it’s a little of both.”

“Then how the hell am I supposed to stand around a punch bowl with half the campus faculty and let them stare?”

“No way,” she said. “They’ll be lucky to get ten percent of the faculty.”

“Funny. Tell the ten percent I said hello.”

“Come on, Mel. I’ll make it worth the trip.”

“You just want to park with me in the close spots. You’ve been eyeing that wheelchair parking pass all semester.”

“I hadn’t considered that. Now you have to take me. I swear we’ll have a good time.”

“How?”

She rolled her eyes toward the windows and chewed on her lip gloss. “OK. When I meet Doyle’s wife, no matter what she looks like, I’ll ask her if she taught second grade in Winnetka in 1978. What a coincidence, I was a
student
—”

“Even if she’s younger than we are.”

“Especially if she’s younger.”

“Get Joss. The bar lines will be long.”

There were no disabled parking spots. We parked three blocks away and inched through the neighborhood to join the line of people waiting to be seen through the front door. From the back of the pack, I heard the president greeting his guests. “So glad,” he said.

The Wolitzers were a tidy couple with tidy, college-aged children, trim, small people who ran marathons and stalked across campus with the flush of health upon them. Mrs. Wolitzer, an academic with her own pedigree, taught journalism and listened to everyone who spoke to her as though she might be asked to follow up with an investigation. President Wolitzer owned at least seven sweater vests in Rothbert red and jangled with energy.

I had hoped to slip in unnoticed. As if slipping in unnoticed was something I could still do.

“A receiving line,” I said to Corrine. “Like it’s a wedding.”

“Sort of an anniversary party,” she said. “Another year, zis boom bah.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to have another year.”

“Put on the happy face.” She already had hers, and it hardly looked fake.

The line lurched forward on the flagstone walk as another group found their way past the pleasantries. “Cor, what am I going to say?”

“He’ll probably ask you one of the questions you get all the time.”

“I only have rude answers for those,” I whispered. The line moved forward. Corrine shot me a here-we-go look and turned to greet our hosts.

“Thank you so much for coming,” Mrs. Wolitzer said, pulling Corrine through the door and propelling her forward. “I’m sure you’re having a busy semester.”

Before her sentence had even finished, the hostess had dropped Corrine’s hand and reached for mine. My hand rested on my cane. I fumbled to rearrange, but the damage was done. Her rhythm broken, Mrs. Wolitzer’s face opened in surprise before she could help it. And then that expression dissolved and she mustered a new one. “Hello,
dear
,” she said, grabbing my left hand but letting me make my own momentum forward. “How
are
you?”

This was one of the questions for which I had only rude answers. I nodded my head, hoping that the slight inclination of my chin suggested humility and perseverance and good-natured getting-on. I was as stalwart as a Roosevelt. Corrine passed through the handshake with President Wolitzer and spun out from the line as though released from a do-si-do. He turned, his hand already out, to find my slot in the works empty. The Mrs. still had me. “We’re so pleased you could make it,” she said. “Shall we find you a seat? Malcolm.”

The president broke out of formation to reach for the hand his wife finally released. He stood half a foot shorter than I and had the softest hands I’d ever encountered. “Dr. Emmet. How are you faring?”

No nod would save me now. “Holding up, sir. Glad to be back in the classroom.”

The gentle handshake slowed. “I hadn’t realized—Excellent to hear, Dr. Emmet. We’re thrilled to have you here this afternoon. May I—” He gestured into the party. Past Corrine’s crossed-arm impatience, the rooms roared with sunlight and voices.

“Oh, no,” I said, hearing my horror too late. “I mean, I can find my way. You should greet your guests. But thank you. Thank you”—another nod toward Mrs. Wolitzer, the line of people backed up behind me—“for having us.”

I tapped past Corrine at a clip. “What was that?” she hissed at my back.

“My new life.”

One half of the first floor of the presidential home was a long ballroom set with elbow-height tables and low seats along the outside walls. The two bars, stocked but backed up, lay across a sea of people I couldn’t begin to ford.

“I can’t go in there,” I said.

“What do you want to drink?”

“I need to go.” I could feel the pinprick of sweat at my temples and the back of my neck. I’d taken my pill, but so had I the day I’d fallen in class. If I had a repeat performance here, in front of all these colleagues, I’d never be able to set foot on campus again. Any campus. “I need to get out of here.”

“How am I supposed to get back?”

“Joss is coming later.”

“Look, you made it past the guards at the gate,” she said. “Let’s get a drink and find a less crowded spot outside.”

The people who’d been in line behind us poured around the island we’d formed. No one bumped or jostled me—there was my leprosy to consider, after all—but I could feel the room tighten, the oxygen thin. I looked longingly at the sets of French doors opened to the covered patio and, beyond that, an expanse of carefully trimmed lawn. “I’ll take a—a water,” I said, and launched myself toward daylight.

All the faces outside were unfamiliar. One set of eyes after another glanced up and away. The tent ended, the patio. My cane found the soft grass, but I kept going until I’d reached the high brick wall that enclosed the estate. Above, the leaves of an imposing oak stirred. I forced myself to feel the breeze, to take in the air. Ivy hung off the wall, and I concentrated on one perfect, nodding leaf. Corrine would be back soon with my water, and I’d make her understand how delicate I was. The back gate? Would it be open?

I turned to find Doyle coming across the lawn, his arm around a woman.

He was right. I didn’t know her.

When they reached me, he hesitated, a blink of pleading eyes that I would behave myself. “Nancy, this is Dr. Emmet. Nancy Chambers, uh, Doyle.”

Mrs. Nicholas Doyle looked soft. Chubby through the waist, dark hair that fell in fat, dark curls, a gray cardigan from which an aura of angora threads floated. I had an itch to reach out and poke her with my cane. She was thick, but had skinny legs and wore high heels she didn’t seem used to. She’d already noted the cane and didn’t offer her hand. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Emmet.”

“Call me Amelia.”

“Amelia.” She smiled. Nothing. My name meant nothing to her.

“Or Melly. My closest friends do.”

Doyle shot me a look, but Mrs. Doyle didn’t blink. “Melly, then. You teach in Nick’s department?”

Nick
. In the second of shadow that played across his face, I could see the new persona Doyle had adopted to lasso and land this tottering lamb of his. Doyle wasn’t Doyle. Not the man I’d loved or refused to marry, but a revised edition. God, what had he worn to the singles mixer where they’d met? Or was she a teacher at the kids’ school? She might be a few years older than I was, but she was still much younger than Doyle. I found myself suddenly incurious, except in regards to where Corrine had gone and when my drink would come. I already regretted the drink being only water. “I do. Teach there. In Nick’s department.”