The Black Hour (36 page)

In the library, the periodical section looked as empty as ever. I passed the desk, the same plushy woman on duty who’d helped me with my research on Dr. Emmet. Only weeks ago, but it felt like years. In some ways, I wished the woman had simply let me fail. Wouldn’t my life be a lot simpler right now if my project on Dr. Emmet had come to an unceremonious halt the second I’d arrived on campus? I’d be in the same place—square one—and maybe not so tangled up in whatever this turned out to be.

There was an empty table off on its own, a painting of a stern matriarch guarding it from the wall. I sat with my back to the portrait and watched the doors until I was sure I’d lost McDaniel. The crumpled note, moist from my fist, fell to the table. I laid the clipping in front of me and looked between them.

Starling, steroids. Kanowski, car. Hightower, Ritalin. The callers.

And Harlan, Win Harlan of the Capitol Hill Harlans, still walking among us. And in the clipping, with my handwriting all over it, there Win stood among the crowd, his arm thrown around a girl as she hid her face from the horror they could only imagine inside. He was only one small player in a broad field, but I’d come to know his specific all-American profile. Rothbert was a small campus, but it seemed to me that the politico’s son managed to pop up in unlikely places. What did I know about him, really, except that he’d decided to throw me off his boat in the middle of the lake, knowing I couldn’t swim? He’d eventually pulled me out. Saved me. I didn’t understand his motives then, and I didn’t understand his motives now. Was it possible, though, that he was cruel enough—

My mind bucked. I was spiraling toward something I couldn’t believe.

A guy who didn’t mind a dirty trick or two. A son who needed his dad to believe a version of him that might not be the real one. A caller, someone who showed up on Phillip’s call list time after time, who had turned around his life to become one of the called.

Maybe former callers who made it through the black hour were the ones best equipped to help others? I couldn’t see it. The training exposed every crack, whatever good that did. I’d barely made it through a two-hour session. How did someone who showed up on the call log fifty, sixty times make it through?

This list didn’t make sense. Why had they had to call in the first place? Football star, fraternity president, student leader, McDaniel had said. Future politician? Good-looking kids, wealthy. Rothbert’s finest—and the ones who’d meant it.

If the call logs from Phillip’s bag were accurate, the ones who meant it did call. They called a lot.

Phillip kept track of the failures. That’s what it was. He kept track of how many calls, when and who and after a certain number of interactions, you made the list that no one wanted to be on? Weeks and weeks of calls, and then a small pencil mark to note an entire life lost.

I imagined Phillip in his little kingdom, the office no one was supposed to enter, hauling out the logs to find the name, hesitating to place the tiny mark. All that work put in, all that sincerity expended. That shiny, colorful room built in honor of the work the group did—and then to lose a student anyway. No wonder he prickled when I joked about James Baker. Losing even a single life must feel like you’re losing the battle as well as the war.

Win Harlan’s name on the list dug at me.

“Your nasty little project isn’t done, then?”

The librarian had recognized me, too. She stood with her fists buried into her sides, fairly twitching from the effort to engage filth like me in conversation.

“Sort of.”

“I’d hoped you’d find enough real work to keep you from borrowing trouble.”

I shuffled the list and clipping together and held them under the flat of my hand.

“This university is a good place,” she huffed. “Bad things happen, but so do the good. But no, you don’t come in looking for our list of Nobel winners, do you? The leaders, the teachers, the humanitarians. A lot of good people have passed this way.” She jutted her chin behind me. I escaped her raw disgust by taking a look. And then another. The stern matriarch in the painting over my shoulder was a serious-faced woman, not as old as I’d assumed, ramrod straight but pretty, golden. She could have been anyone.

She couldn’t have been anyone else.

“A lot of good people. This is a good place—”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

“—it’s not for everyone, and I know sometimes the kids just don’t fit in, bless them—”

The portrait outside Dr. Emmet’s office. That girl appeared much younger, but she had the same flushed-with-health face, the same steady, coy mouth. The same family? A small plaque was set in the wall underneath. I stood to read it.

Dale R. Harlan.

I read it twice, three times.

“—sometimes,” the woman blathered on, “I want to hug them and let them know that it doesn’t have to be this—”

“Who is this?” I said.

The librarian blinked at the portrait. “Dale Jane Rothbert, of course.”

“But who is she? Rothbert? As in—
Rothbert
Rothbert?”

“The Rothberts are the founding family of this university. It is a sad state of affairs when the students take no interest—”

“It says Harlan. Did she marry a sen—a congressman?”

“You’re thinking of someone else,” she said.

I stared at the face on the wall. It wasn’t only that she had to be the same woman in the other hallway. I felt as though I’d met her, could picture her standing at a cocktail party, swirling a drink. Throwing back her blonde head to laugh as though the world was a pearl onion at the bottom of her martini—or the ice cube in the bottom of her White Russian, made with dining hall milk.

I was definitely thinking of someone else.

“That would be her daughter-in-law, I guess,” the librarian said. “Dale Rothbert’s
son
became a politician.”

And her grandson had become a kid on the Hope Hotline list. What did it mean? I held my head in my hands and waited for some magic idea to strike.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said more quietly. “Another student this week. What gets into your heads, I don’t know. You lot—sometimes you break my heart.”

“Leo,” I said, lifting my head.

Her face softened. “Sad boy.”

“You said—you said they got it wrong. What did they get wrong?”

She turned away, her rounded cheeks creating a Hitchcockian silhouette. “Only everything. That boy was lonely, don’t get me wrong. You don’t spend so much time in the library if not. Weekends, early, late. You don’t spend all your time getting to be friends with the periodicals clerk if you—but there was something to him, something that wanted to rise above. I can’t get over the feeling that he never would have—”

She swallowed hard.

I remembered Kendall’s pale face, his lips turned blue. He never would have tried to kill himself. Never.

The problem with you, Kendall would have said, is that you believe what other people tell you.

“He never would have killed himself,” I said.

She shook her head, the barest movement. “Something bad got in.”

They got it wrong. I reached for the list and clipping and crumpled them both into my pocket. I thought I knew what she meant. Something bad had gotten in years ago.

In the hospital lobby, I realized I’d come empty-handed. No flowers. No get-well card. The magazines in the gift shop were too tame for Kendall’s tastes. The tastes I thought he might have. It occurred to me again how little I knew him. I understood James Baker a little better. An odd spot to be in, to be the person standing to the side of something as large as death.

I felt a weird quiver up my back. The creeps. It had been a long time since anything had given me the shivers. Not that I hadn’t gone looking for them.

Negotiating the white halls, my shoes squeaking against the floor, I couldn’t help glancing into open doors. I expected my mother in each bed.

At the door to his room, I peered in. Kendall reclined in the far bed, chopping the air with a remote control. A TV in the corner of the room skipped from image to image.

“Hey,” I said.

He glanced over, took a double, and threw down the remote. “Finally. Someone I actually know.”

I stepped inside to see he already had visitors. Two of them, sitting on the other bed. Win, his legs swinging, and Phillip.

I stopped short. “What are you doing here?”

Win winked. “We’re bringing the good news of the Lord—”

“Just visiting,” Phillip said. “Like you.”

“Except he’s my roommate,” Kendall said. “My friend. You guys are strangers cutting into my cartoon time.”

I hadn’t known Kendall and I were friends. For some reason, I thought he might be mad at me. Mad at being saved, if he’d really meant to take pills. Or if someone had—my mind bucked again. Bucked, like
Ladykiller
throwing me.

“Taking the hope to your door,” Win said. “This is something we do. Apparently.”

Kendall looked like he might throw the remote at Win’s head. “I didn’t try to kill myself, douchebag.”

“Technically,” Phillip said. “You did. Mixing alcohol and pills is a fatal error. You got lucky—”

“I didn’t take any pills. I told them already.”

“They found a trace of some serious painkillers,” Phillip said. “Can’t remember the name, but they’re orange. The big guns—”

Orange. “How do you know that?” I saw an orange pill drop into Dr. Emmet’s palm, her certainty that she should have another.

“Kendall was referred to us through the official channels,” Phillip said. He had that brochure-photo look about him. He was here to
care
. “The university takes this sort of thing seriously and calls on us to make sure—”

“Get out,” Kendall said. I had never liked him more. “I’m not suicidal. I’m awesome, OK? Lesser beings go that route, but not me.” He glanced at me meaningfully.

“Kendall probably needs to rest,” I said, clearing a path to the door.

Win hopped up and threw the patient a jaunty salute. Phillip slid off the bed with a long look at me, then Kendall. “I hope you know that you can give us a call anytime—”

“I have my own friends,” Kendall said. “Real ones.”

Phillip must get this reaction everywhere he went. I gave him a what-can-you-do smile and walked them out.

In the hall, Win spun on me. “Look, Night Sail is in just a few—”

“No.”

“You said you’d help.” He turned his back on Phillip. In a lower voice, he said, “Was hoping to talk to you, clear some things up.”

“I’m not all that interested in maritime travel these days. I’d be no help, anyway. All I remember about my sailing lesson is how to drown.”

He grimaced. “You don’t have to do anything. Dutch and I will handle the vessel. We could use the bodies. The rules say we have to have a full crew. For my boat, that’s at least three—”

“I’ll help,” Phillip said.

Win stepped back and took in Phillip, licking his lips. “You will? Yeah, OK.”

“Rules? Is it a race?” I said.

“Not officially,” Win said.

Phillip snorted. “Another fine Rothbert tradition—”

“Not everyone has boats,” Win said.

“Very few people have boats, actually,” Phillip said. “The rest of us crawl into steerage and try not to take up too much air.”

“Ballast,” I said.

Phillip shot me a smile. Win scowled between us.

“Everyone goes,” Phillip said to me. “This is Rothbert at its best. This year, I’d like to see it from the water.”

“Be my guest,” I said.

“You should come along.” This from Phillip, who made the invitation sound as though it was his boat. Win watched him from the corner of his eye.

“You weren’t there the first time. When I was on
Ladykiller—
” I saw the word as though for the first time. How had I never really heard the word?

“
Ladykiller
,” Phillip said. “Someone thinks highly of himself. Or has some explaining to do.”

“Maybe both,” Win said. “Do you know where the tie-up is?”

Phillip did. They settled terms to meet and parted. I turned for Kendall’s room, but before I’d gone too far, Phillip called to me. Win had gone.

“What now?”

“Please come tonight. I could use—the company. I don’t know what I mean, but Win—”

“He’s acting weird?”

He studied me long enough that I almost said the thing I couldn’t say. I found that the words wouldn’t quite form.
Win
. It didn’t make sense. And now the orange pills. Was that a coincidence? Was someone trying to tell me something? Or was it more than that? Maybe those pills hadn’t been meant for Kendall to begin with.

What made sense to me now was how tired Phillip seemed, how weary. I didn’t know how he did what he did. I’d only lost a few hours of sleep and had bad things happen near me. How did someone do that every day?

The image of two orange pills falling into my own palm came to me. My mom, near the end, had required bigger doses than that. And then I knew. I had given Kendall the pills. But how had the bottle gotten into our room in the first place?

Go home, Nathaniel.

Well, I would. We were all in this stew together: me, Leo, Kendall, Phillip, Win. Dr. Emmet seemed peripheral, as though this had never touched her. She could kick me out of the program, but she couldn’t kick me out of town. Until my assistantship money ran out. Until I knew what I wanted to know.