The Black Hour (32 page)

“I am. The daytime load is always light, so I often cover the less-popular shifts. Early Saturday morning is pretty unpopular.”

“They said you sleep here.”

His mouth, twitching, settled on a wry grin. “They were joking,” he said. “They’re high-strung, high-stress. The calls get to them sometimes. I’m aware of the games, the us-versus-him thing. As long as they’re here on time and work well with the callers, I can live with it. It bonds them together, and they need each other. Now.” He tented his fingers under his chin. “Now what you’re doing by bringing up that piece of information is called deflection. The caller needs to talk about himself. That’s one of the reasons we encourage the volunteers not to divulge personal information. It diverts the caller away from themselves, right? Keep the focus on the problem, finding a way to turn the conversation—lightly—toward the caller and away from the called.”

The called? I barely had time to register my dislike of the term before he was back on me. “So what do you do for fun?” Phillip said. “Since you don’t fix things?”

I wanted a chance at pretending to be the called. Pretending to be the caller sucked. “My classes. My assistantship.”

“Right. With Dr. Emmet. How’s
that
working out?”

“Fine.” I felt a layer of sweat on the back of my neck. It was hot in here. Budget concerns on the air-conditioning, too?

“You don’t want to talk about her,” he said.

“No. I mean—I don’t have much to say.”

“She’s not working with you as directly as you’d like.”

That—I couldn’t say that. “We work together well. It’s just—” What was it
just
? I felt the truth of it, as soon as I’d let the word go. I hadn’t even known I felt anything but admiration for Dr. Emmet. Admiration, not to mention desire.

But I did. Frustration? Impatience?

Maybe it was the rejection talking. She’d given up on Leo. And then on me. She didn’t care enough about the truth to go looking for it. She wasn’t what I expected. She wasn’t what I’d hoped. I felt turned inside out. “You must be good at your job,” I said.

Phillip tapped the air with a finger. “Deflection.”

I’d lost the thread of our conversation. I really wanted to scratch at my forearms, the palms of my hands. They
itched
.

“Do you have a crush on her?” he said.

“What? No.” The word
crush
had nothing to do with me, with her. The itch under my skin, however, had everything to do with how I felt. Disgust? Her approach to life disgusted me. Her lukewarm attention to the classroom. She’d just go on with what had been handed to her. She would put up with all their shit. She would let me draw close, and then close me out. Maybe she’d done something just like this to Leo Lehane, after all. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. She was broken. I was broken. And I couldn’t fix things.

“It’s normal if you do,” Phillip said. “She’s a very attractive woman.”

“She’s not my type.”

“You’re gay?”

“She’s not that much not my type. I just—I have—”

“You have a girlfriend.” His face split into a wide grin. “That’s great.”

I hated to tell him that he was no good at this. “We—we broke up.”

The wattage of the smile dropped to nil. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s, well, it’s fine.” And it was. The call to Bryn had settled that life disappointment for good. I didn’t wish for her anymore.

I wished the training would end. I wished that with everything I had left.

Phillip put his mug aside and leaned even closer. “That explains a few things.”

“Not really. I’m OK. Maybe there was a time—”

“When Win told me about the boat incident, I really wondered if I shouldn’t reach out.”

“Wait. The boat—”

“Some people won’t ask for help, but I was encouraged when you came by—”

“The boat thing was Win.” I tried to remember what Win had said to Pixie and the other guy on the day I’d come to trail after him. Trudie. Dammit, that reporter had gotten into my head. That was another thing I could hang on Dr. Emmet, introducing me to that nosy jerk.
Bucked
. The boat had bucked me off, because it didn’t like the look of me. Like the boat was a person, a woman. Like Bryn had
bucked
me off for a new guy. Like Dr. Emmet had—

“It was—a prank,” I said. “Win had his friend turn the boat so that I’d fall.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not—look, it was a joke.”

He nodded sadly. “Win isn’t the most mature student I’ve met. Despite what he thinks or who he spends his time with. Let’s talk about something else.”

God, what else was left? My dog got run over when I was nine—had we peeled that vein open yet? If he’d got hold of my mother’s death, I’d be on the floor by now. I wondered if I could get him to shelve the entire conversation. “Maybe—”

And then all four phones in the room rang.

I jumped. The noise was brilliant, as though God himself were calling.

“Excuse me.” Phillip hopped up and jogged across the room to the nearest phone station. He raised his deflection finger at me to signal the minute he’d be. “Sometimes we get wrong numbers. Hello, you’ve reached the Rothbert University Hope Hotline. How may I help you?”

He listened long enough that I knew it was the real thing. A caller was reaching out to the called. He turned his back on me. “Tell me what’s going on.” At last the talk show host had turned to his next guest.

Relief. I put down the rest of my coffee and got up. I’d seen most of the room already, but I toured the inspirational posters now to stretch and shake off the funk. I took a deep breath, cracked my neck.

Another phone started to ring. I looked over to see what Phillip would do. Could you put a suicide hotline call on hold?

But it wasn’t the hotline. The ringing came from the open office door.

I sidled to the open door, waiting for Phillip to stop me. He murmured into the phone, his back still turned.

With a single step, I was inside, at once scanning the shelves, the desktop, the slightly open desk drawer. Another ring. I grabbed the phone, and gently lifted the edge of some papers on the desk.

“Hello?” someone said on the other side.

“Oh, right. Hello. I mean. You’ve reached the Rothbert University Help—Hope Helpline. Hotline. What can I help you with?”

“Probably nothing.” It was a guy, young. A voice I recognized, but not Win’s. “Who are you? Where’s Phillip?”

“He’s on the other line.”

“I thought I called the office.”

“He’s taking a call. You know. A call.”

“Nobody kills themselves on Saturday morning. Is this that new guy? What’s your name?”

My foot hit something under the desk. A black bag, hanging open. I sat at the desk and rifled inside the bag as silently as I could. “I’m not supposed to give out personal information.”

“You can give your name, jerk. Put Phillip on.”

“He’s on a—” If the kid hung up, I had no reason to be in the office, and now I had every reason to stay. Inside the bag, a thick sheaf of papers clipped together. There were no headings, no clues, but the columns were divided into names, long numbers, short numbers, more information than I could process with this kid yapping in my ear.

“He’ll be a minute,” I said.

“Why are you in Phillip’s office?”

The long numbers were ten digits—phone numbers. In the column of shorter numbers, none of the entries went higher than 2400. Time of day, in military code. I held the pages on my lap and flipped through them. There was a column for date of call, and the log went backward, slowly, week by week, day by day. I hit a page with a small mark in pen. The name of the caller was Jazz Starling. The name repeated several times, but I didn’t see another mark.

“I said, why are you in Phillip’s office? He doesn’t like anyone in there.”

“The phone rang,” I said.

“Definitely the new guy.”

I skimmed page after page, ten pages or more, until another mark, another name. Summer Hightower. And then William Kanowski. Many names repeated a few times, sometimes for a half-page or more. The marks were rare.

“Don’t do that,” Phillip’s voice said.

I dropped the manuscript and looked to the door. He was still in the other room.

“Don’t count yourself out so fast,” he was saying to the caller. “You have to give yourself a chance to fail.”

I spent the next minute picking up the papers and returning them to a tidy pile, listening for the click of a phone in its cradle.

“He’s going to kill you,” the kid on the phone said. I could picture him now. One of the called, to use Phillip’s mythic language. The one Win had chased away the other night.

“I’m, uh. I’m trying to help.”

“Look, tell Phillip to call me on my cell—”

“Oh, was that him hanging up? Hold on.”

A page near the front of the stack had a crinkle on the edge that wouldn’t smooth. I pulled it out and tried to roll the wrinkle flat. And then I didn’t care about anything but what I read. The sheet was filled with exactly one name. I put the page back in place, checking the pages on either side. More calls, the same name.

“Well, is he?” said the kid on the phone.

“Is who what?”

The dates changed, the times changed, but there were thirty or forty calls from one caller, one name I hadn’t expected.

“Stop wasting my time,” the kid said. “Tell Phillip I’m running late, OK? That’s all I wanted.”

“Wait—”

He hung up. I put down the phone quietly and grabbed a notepad from Phillip’s desk. Listening for Phillip’s approach, I flipped through the log, copying down the names with marks.

In the other room, Phillip said, “Are they there now?”

I stuffed that note into my pocket and hurried for another sticky note and wrote the quickest thing I could think of. I crumpled that note into my other pocket. I still had the pen in my hand when Phillip came to the door.

“A few ground rules,” he said. The talk show host was gone.

“Sorry. The phone rang, and it seemed like you might be a while.”

“Had to call campus police for her,” he said. “Can’t be too safe.”

“Totally. The call was that student from the other night—I’m really bad with names.”

He sighed. “Another thing to work on. It doesn’t help to forget someone’s name while they’re contemplating suicide.”

“Zach, that’s it. He’s going to be late.”

He took in the pen in my hand. I put it down, shoved my hands in my pockets for the note, only to realize I couldn’t remember which pocket held which note.

“I already have one pain in the ass on the volunteer staff,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to use your help.”

“Win,” I said.

He rubbed his face. He looked tired. “How’d you guess?”

“You said earlier—”

“Win is a fine person, and I’m sure he’ll do Rothbert proud. As his forebears have done for many generations.” He managed to catch hold of the soothing voice again to add, “He’s distracted by his own agendas. Normal stuff.”

“Why do you keep him, then?”

He swiped at the air in a never-mind gesture. “Come out of there, please. Did Zach leave any other information?”

I extracted one crunched note out of my pocket and held it out. Phillip pulled it open and read the large letters: LATE—CELL. He looked up, shook his head. “Today’s a loss, I think. Maybe you should—OK, if you want to try this again, we can.”

Try again? I wasn’t sure I could survive it. I wasn’t sure I could avoid it.

“OK,” I said, because I had to leave my options open.

The call log, instead of offering answers, had led me to a new question.

How was Win Harlan both a dedicated member of the called and a repeat offender caller, worthy of an entire page?

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I need to come back.”

It was almost noon by the time I got back to my room. Kendall’s arm hung from his bunk, and his alarm rang loudly enough to vibrate the room.

“Serious alcohol abuse, Kendall.”

He didn’t stir. At least he’d stopped the window-rattling snoring. I hit the snooze button for him, but that only gave him three minutes or so.

I went to my drawer, took out the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre photo, and tacked it back in place. There. The room was half-mine, end of story.