The Black Hour (4 page)

Woo’s eyes flicked down and back behind his glasses. “You’re looking really well.”

“The intestinal surgery diet is highly effective.” I was pleased to see him flush pink again, and a little angry at myself. Woo needled me, but he didn’t deserve this. He was here to welcome me back, when Corrine, Doyle—none of them had made the effort.

“How’s the semester looking?” I said.

He gave up a half-smile of relief. “Better than any semester we’ve ever had, if you believe President Wolitzer. Really busy, if you listen to the chatter.”

The chatter. This was what I needed. At Rothbert, there was a low-level buzz of speculation among the competitive. Who would get tenure? Who was up for which association award? Whose project would the dean anoint with his discretionary funding? Only among colleagues could you hear the truth. Who was headed for divorce? Who drank too much? Who slept with his students?

The answer to this last one was always Trotter, from Anthropology. We called it his field research.

“Ben,” I said. “What’s the chatter on me?”

His face took on the faux cheerfulness of the girl in the portrait on the wall. “Oh, everyone’s just glad you pulled through.”

“Is no one in this place capable of a good lie?” I said.

He deflated, the fake smile replaced by authentic chagrin. “Glad to see you’re still you.”

I twisted the cane to see the light run up and down the shaft. I wasn’t sure I was still me, but at least one person here could pull off a lie, if it came to it. “What did they say?”

“Truth?” he said. “There was so much of it, it was hard to sort out.”

“Lots of theories?”

“Should you even worry yourself with this?”

“They all think I must have done
something
.”

He checked the hallway behind him. Right. He probably thought I’d done something, too.

“They’re all sorry it happened,” he said. “They just . . .” He glanced up at the girl in the frame as though she might jump into the conversation and save him.

“What?”

“They want to understand it.”

I could see them. Clustering up around the coffee pots in the kitchenette. Pausing in front of their departmental mailboxes to compare junk mail. The ten minutes before faculty meetings, lingering over the dry dining service cookies. Exchanging glances, checking to see if someone among them had the story. What had I done? What did they have to do, or not do?

Woo would have been in the thick of it.

“Some of them,” Woo said to the girl in the frame. “They’re shitting their pants.”

“Trotter,” I said.

He smiled. “Yeah.”

“Doyle?”

His mouth dropped open. “But I thought—does Doyle date the students?”

“So that’s the going theory? That I was screwing that kid?”

Poor Woo. A fine researcher but a weak subject. He’d told me what I needed to know.

“Maybe it’s better to let it go,” he said. “Get back to normal.”

He looked so uncomfortable I turned to the girl in the painting. The problem with normal was that normal had been shot through. Normal wasn’t possible. Normal hadn’t even been that great. None of this would I admit, least of all to him.

“Sure,” I said. “Normal.”

Woo made his excuses and slinked away.

I was armed. My nerves steeled with pain-fighting medication, I knew now what I had only guessed before. Nothing had changed, but I felt more daring. More—to borrow a concept from Woo—myself. I fetched my bag from where Nathaniel had stowed it, wrestled my door closed, and took the elevator to the lobby. The front desk receptionist had arrived. She looked pointedly away.

There were security cameras in the building now. I wondered how much of my triumphant return she’d seen. I punched the button for the automatic door with my cane. I needed coffee.

Normal. I didn’t think they’d let me get back to it, and by
they
, I meant the faculty, the dean, the press. But I also meant the students. I meant the faces that turned to follow my progress as I tapped down the walkway and through the courtyard to the next building. I meant everyone.

Outside it was so hot that I reconsidered my need for coffee. But once I stepped into the cool lobby of Smith Hall, up to the coffee hutch outside the dining room doors, and through the coffee server’s surveillance, once I felt the paper cup in my hand, I was steadier. Excited, actually. I was back. On campus, having coffee in Smith Hall, listening to the thunderous voices inside the dining hall where students talked around their cereal spoons and gained strength from their own cups. The first day of a new semester, everyone nattering and hopeful. I felt almost normal, almost like nothing had changed. Coffee in Smith before prepping for classes—that was something familiar, something the old Professor Amelia Emmet would have done. Corrine and I had come here three days a week for most of last fall. The two months I’d been here, anyway. I’d been here that last morning, as a matter of fact.

Except you never knew when you faced the last of anything. That was a universal truth I wished I didn’t understand. That ridiculous curl on Doyle’s forehead came back to me.

I chose a spot on a lobby bench by a sunlit window and sipped, wishing Corrine were here. I had a million questions for her. And I wanted to walk back into Dale Hall with someone by my side. Someone by my side who was on my side.

There were so few options. Lying in a hospital bed for a few months was a precision tool for counting true friends. Cor visited all the time, kept me in contraband chocolate and gossip. But she was the only one. Even Doyle had only come by once.

I could definitely remember things I didn’t want to, or I would have blocked out Doyle’s visit.

That day, I hadn’t been able to figure out if he’d come in an official capacity—he was the chair of the department—or on a real visit, remorseful and concerned. He kept passing along regrets from people we both knew, until I imagined that he’d been elected to come so that everyone else could stay away.

Corrine had reported the colleagues who’d come to the hospital in the early days but hadn’t been allowed to see me. Some of them left cards and flowers. Very few came back. Cor, of course. Joss, the only other woman in our department. One of the lecturers from creative writing had come by to ask what it was like to get shot. He was writing a crime novel.

Woo showed up to make a lot of sympathetic noises about how I should take my time getting well. He’d come to my apartment during spring semester, too, long after I needed visitors or wanted them. He’d won a Rothbert Medal, a teaching award from the university, and wanted to make sure I knew it. He knew what to say that day. I wondered that he hadn’t had the medal pinned to his chest this morning.

Doyle’s visit had come too late for an official visit and even later for a friendly one. He sat with his elbows on his bouncing knees. His graying hair curled around his ears. “Well, you’re coming around, aren’t you?” he’d said, shooting for cheerful.

“You can go,” I said. I’d come through the emergency surgery, the freezing-cold recovery room, the intensive care unit, another surgery, and having all my bodily fluids on an input/output system hanging from the side of my bed for the world to see. I’d ascended to one of the bright rooms on an upper floor, with a window facing downtown Chicago and a ledge on which to display all the get-wells that came in. My ledge made a respectable showing because one of the student groups at Rothbert had adopted me and sent me a series of handmade cards signed by people I didn’t know. The feminists. I wasn’t their faculty sponsor or anything. Apparently they didn’t like to see a sister get shot through her center of feminine power.

On the day Doyle finally showed up, I was sitting up for the first time. I must have seemed like some talking-doll version of myself. Sitting up, blinking my eyes. Since he’d left my place the last time—it would have been a good five months at that point—we’d barely spoken at all, and then just about work. A problem student, a conference we were both considering, something from a journal article. In the hospital, hooked up to every wire in the place, I must have looked like the ghost of someone he’d forgotten he’d known.

I’m the one just coming out of shock, I wanted to say. Ask me something. Tell me something.

When he left that day, it was because I asked him to. When he’d left my apartment the spring day we broke up, I’d asked him to. He’d almost always done what I asked.

Now I wished I’d asked him for more.

My coffee was gone. I wasn’t supposed to be taking in that much caffeine, but a second cup couldn’t kill me. A bullet hadn’t.

I tapped across the room to the barista-boy.

The kid, blushing, waved my money off. I dropped it into the tip jar. He’d have a story to tell.

“Dr. Emmet,” a man’s voice said. “Welcome back.”

As I turned, I hoped my memory would hold up again. But it didn’t. This guy—burnished to a high gleam, wearing a collared Rothbert-red golf shirt and khakis ironed to a ruler’s-edge sharpness—didn’t seem familiar at all. University staff. Nobody would wear that shirt if they weren’t paid to. “Thanks,” I said and sipped my coffee for time.

“You don’t know me,” he said. “Phillip Carrington-Wells, from the Office of Psychological Services.”

“I know who you are.” Not really. I remembered the name from the business card I’d found outside my office. Though we might have crossed paths before now, too. The year before, a student in my intro class—I couldn’t remember the girl’s name, either—had displayed some troubling behavior. Erratic, isolating behavior in the classroom, strange calls. I’d turned her over to the campus services, Phillip here, and that was the last I’d heard of her. A blip in a semester that grew much more complicated shortly afterward. “Whatever happened to—”

“Can’t really talk about it,” Phillip said.

“Ah. Thank you. For that. I mean, I know it’s what you do—”

“It’s what we do. How are
you
doing?”

He had the gentle, probing voice of the ICU. The doctors, the nurses, everyone down to the woman who collected the hospital room trash used that same deferential tone. “I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.”

“Good for you, sincerely,” he said. “You had us all worried there for a while.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“If you ever need someone to talk to,” he said. “Someone impartial, you know, let me know.”

He dug for his wallet and produced another card stamped with the regal Rothbert seal, slipping the card under my fingers on the coffee-holding hand. He had never once glanced down at the cane or my bad leg.

“Thank you.” I had no intention of calling, of needing to call, but found myself feeling grateful for the offer. Grateful, at least, that he wasn’t staring. “Thank you, Phil.”

“Phillip,” he said, smiling. “I was never cool enough for a nickname.”

“Melly!”

I turned. Corrine stood in the doorway to the dining hall, a paper cup held high and her hand over her mouth. For the blink of an eye, I saw her standing in our office door, her hand just like that. Laughing.

Now she came at me at full speed. When she collided with me, I grabbed her and held on. Together, we managed to keep our coffees and selves upright.

“Holy shit, you’re back.” She let me go slowly so I could regain my footing.

“I was hoping to see you,” I said. I looked around, but Phillip had gone. “Before I completely
lost
it.”

Relief washed over me. She looked just right, standing there with her loose skirt and blousy shirt to hide what she called her spare doughnut. Her cheeks were pink and freckled from the sun, her hair pulled back into a flip of a ponytail. Just right, and she looked as pleased as I felt. “This place has been hell, just hell without you,” she said, taking in the cane, the high heels. “You look great.”

“Having the whole office to yourself—”

“Shut up,” she said. “You know how I hate that haunted house.”

“Looks like it’s been haunted by an interior decorator.”

She scoffed and glanced back at the dining hall doors. “You wouldn’t believe how long that took. They wouldn’t let me use my office for three weeks this summer.”

I nodded. Three whole weeks?

Her hand shot to touch my arm. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine. I know.”

She let her hand drop, looking suitably sorry for herself. We sipped our drinks. The card Phillip had given me dropped to the floor. Corrine picked it up, glancing at the name. “That guy,” she said. She looked at my skirt and my hands full of coffee and cane, then tucked the card into her own pocket.

“Or maybe Dale Hall is haunted by that co-ed,” I said. “The one in the painting? Kind of creepy in a Doris Day kind of way.”

“She’s . . .” Corrine’s mouth twisted.

“What?”

“A historical figure or something.” A group of students emerged from the dining hall. Corrine watched after them, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I think she’s pretty.”

“Won’t argue it,” I said.

“Does it feel weird? To be here?”

“So weird,” I said. “I thought I’d lost my mind when I saw the hall. The paint.”

“The lighting,” she said, rolling her eyes. “The rug.”