The Black Hour (5 page)

“My DNA sanded out of the floors.”

“And his.”

We looked away from each other. The barista stood too close. I leaned on the cane and orchestrated a turn toward the door. “I should get back. The mail is four feet high. I’m not quite up to hurdles.”

“What about the meeting?”

“Which? Haven’t even been into my e-mail yet.”

“Faculty meeting in Crane.” She glanced at the clock behind us. “In about fifteen.”

“But . . . we’ve never had a faculty meeting on the first day.” I was staring at the clock, too, and then I realized what she’d said. Located halfway across campus and up an incline, Crane Student Center was more than fifteen minutes away for the likes of me. “Do you even have your classes planned yet? And your copies made?” I suddenly realized how little prep work I’d done for this return. “Why would Jim call a faculty meeting for the first day?” He hadn’t even mentioned it during his retirement campaigning.

“Not a school-wide.” Corrine glanced down at the cane. “We’d better get going.”

“Doyle? He called a faculty meeting for the first day?” It didn’t make sense.

Corrine led us through the lobby and outside, the heat like a door slamming in my face.

“Can you cut across, like, the grass?” she said over her shoulder.

Even with shortcuts, we were going to be late. “Go on without me.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said.

Without me.

Doyle had called a faculty meeting for the first day of the semester. At nine in the morning of the day I returned. I was lamed and riding pain meds and hadn’t taught in almost a year. I was out of practice, and even though we hadn’t talked since his aborted visit to the hospital, he knew me. Knew me well. He would have known I hadn’t sorted through my mail, my e-mail, my voice mail.

He didn’t expect me. I wasn’t invited.

I followed after Corrine like a stray dog.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

I stopped to catch my breath. We had come to the shore of the man-made lagoon, a stagnant little pond populated by ugly fish. I turned my face toward the wide blue expanse of Lake Michigan beyond for the bare breeze it offered. We were close. I could see the rise to Crane’s front doors. Steeper, of course, than I remembered.

Hurt? I wished I had the words to explain it to her, but I didn’t even have the lung capacity to try. I nodded, leaning heavily on the cane to pivot the broken half of my body around for another few inches of progress.

“I could go see if they have a—”

“Don’t say wheelchair.”

“—golf cart?”

“That is not the entrance I want to make, Cor.” I had offered her the chance to go on without me, but now I was gratified that she hadn’t. Embarrassed to walk my Frankenstein’s monster lurch in front of her, it was still better than making the trip alone. Also, she couldn’t blow my cover. We’d walk into the room of our colleagues together, and I could catch them before anyone gained command over their surprise. They didn’t want me or expect me, but I wouldn’t allow them the pleasure of pretending otherwise. “Let’s just go slow.”

There was no other way to go, but she nodded and matched my pace. “Are you sure you want to go over there?”

I pictured them. Doyle, his hair too shaggy for a man of his age, looking as though he’d just stepped off his boat. Baz and his big theories and big hand gestures, Caldwell meek and trying to sit as far as he could from other humans. Caldwell took the social out of sociology, Doyle liked to say. Joss, bangles on her wrists rattling with every movement. She’d be promoting yet another book. A seriously boring book, if her last four served as models. And then the three wise men of methodology, tenured before I was born, who never bothered to show up at staff meetings anyway. And Woo. Woo and his elbow patches.

And Corrine. And me. That was our department, our merry little band, each drumming our own tune.

“Of course I don’t want to go there,” I said. “But what else can I do?”

“Not go?” she said.

“That would be giving him what he wants. He’s clearly making a point.”

“Doyle?” she said. “I didn’t think he was the clearly-making-a-point kind.”

Why did that stupid curl smashed into his hair come back to me again? Doyle was just Doyle. Brilliant but oblivious. Slow to anger, slow to judgment, slow to decisions. Handsome but rumpled. A right mess that I had stepped into, but not the sort to plan intrigues or even put up with them. How understanding, how supportive had he been when my research project had fallen apart? That day when I’d decided two years’ work was derivative and too similar to another book just published by a colleague at another university, and Doyle trying to tell me to give it time, give it air.

Before I could stop it, the image came to me from deep memory: a barbecue grill grate, my manuscript, fire. I sucked in a breath.

Corrine looked over. “You OK?”

I nodded. I’d almost forgotten what I’d done, how the pages curled, turned black. My name was the last bit of text I’d read before the flames found purchase. My career, up in smoke. I had far more to recover than my mobility.

The student center rose steeply before us. Students poured in and out of the front doors, oblivious to the precarious angle of the hill. Not a thought, but then I doubted I’d ever noticed the hill before, either. We watched, while I tried to gather myself.

“I’m not sure I can do it,” I said finally. There was pride, and there was stupidity. I wanted to beat the odds but not take up mountain climbing.

“There has to be a door at ground level. What about fires?—Look.”

Corrine had found the building’s other entrance, a basement-level entry to the dining center where students got their pizza slices and smoothies. The door was unlocked. It seemed a miracle to me, but it had probably always been there, probably always been unlocked. I hadn’t needed a miracle until now.

The dining center stood empty at this hour. Another miracle. We passed through the grab-and-go grocery for a bottle of water. Corrine negotiated the sale with the cashier and looked away while I guzzled it. I grabbed a fistful of paper napkins to wipe the sweat off my face and neck. I continued to pat at myself in the elevator, letting Cor guide me completely. I had begun to reconsider the golf cart.

At a closed door, Doyle’s muffled voice. We were late.

I mopped my brow a last time. Corrine gave me a bucking-up smile, which I appreciated.

“Do you—I’m not sure what you need,” she said.

“A seat, Cor.”

She took a deep breath. As though she were the one about to return from somewhere far and long ago. As though this had much to do with her at all. For a fleeting moment, I wished I’d not run into her, that I’d had the chance to miss the meeting. And then I was back from where I’d gone, and it didn’t matter that the situation made Corrine nervous, too. Of course it did. How many conversations had she had about the shooting? About me? While I was on my couch, she’d spent a lot of time serving as the buffer between my recuperation and general curiosity, listening to my office phone ring and ring as the reporters and lawyers and cranks tried to find a way in. All the help she’d given me without my having to ask. Life had changed for her, too.

She pulled back the door and held it for me.

Doyle, first. He stopped speaking and turned his head. He didn’t look surprised to see me at all. “There you are,” he said.

And then the table of them rose to their feet, applauding.

I stood in the doorway. They looked like people I knew, but also like strangers. Baz’s hands boomed together; Joss clasped her hands together under her chin, a strange maternal expression on her face. Even the three wise men had deigned to attend, and now I’d have to try to remember their names. Behind me, I heard Corrine joining in.

I didn’t move, but they came to me. I was hugged and patted on the shoulder, petted on the back. I couldn’t keep up with all the platitudes. A banner of computer-printed pages taped together hung on one wall:
Welcome Back!
Under it, a table laden with doughnuts, a coffee urn, a bowl of cut fruit. Cut fruit was evidence of advanced planning. I glanced over my shoulder at Corrine, who shrugged. Ambushed.

“We were beginning to think you weren’t going to make it to your own party,” Woo said. The tweed, the hair gel. He was undergoing some sort of prescribed physical transition to senior faculty member. I hoped I hadn’t missed all of it.

“I found her in Smith getting coffee,” Corrine said. “Like normal.”

They laughed and jollied carefully against me until Doyle cleared a path with his voice. “Why don’t we let Amelia sit down?”

I grabbed the nearest empty chair while they settled back to their positions. Cor sat next to me. Woo brought an extra chair to my left side. “In case you want to put your leg up,” he said.

“No,” I said, glancing at the paper plate of pastries and fruit sliding across the table toward me. “That would hurt.”

Woo finally set the chair down and circled the table to his own spot. They settled in around me, satisfied with themselves and the doughnuts.

“I didn’t get shot in the leg.”

They went quiet. One of the wise men—he looked crusty and presidential, so the name that came to mind was Van Buren—paused, cheeks stuffed like a chipmunk, a dusting of powdered sugar ringing his mouth.

It was the cane. A cane was a simple thing. I was up and walking, talking, shrinking uncomfortably from human contact—Amelia Emmet, PhD, pretty much as they remembered me. Like normal, Corrine said. Except for the cane, and a cane could be ignored. It could also be misread.

I’d predicted I’d be forced to talk about it, but now I could see why I wanted to. They didn’t understand. I needed one of those Zapruder film diagrams.

“The bullet—”

“We know, Amelia.” This from Doyle. There was something uncomfortable about him. He seemed stiff. Reserved. Not the Doyle who’d slept in my bed for two years, the Doyle who captained a 45-foot sailboat up and down the lake coast like he’d been born at sea, but also not the Doyle I’d worked for after we’d broken up. If it had been anyone else giving me the shut-up, I would have talked right over him. But if Doyle didn’t want me to ruin the surprise party by supplying any surprises, I would keep quiet. Maybe they did know everything there was to know. The
Rothbert Reader
had probably published info-graphic illustrations.

“That’s what I did with my summer vacation. How about you guys?” I shoved an outsized chunk of pineapple into my mouth.

There were exchanged looks down the table. All I cared about was Doyle. We regarded each other.

“Van Meter and I gave invited talks in Slovakia in May,” one of the wise men said.

Van Meter. Not Van Buren. I didn’t care.

Van Meter managed to swallow the lump of doughnut packed into his jaw. “It was really quite a good time.”

“Slovakia’s probably never seen the like,” I said. “What about the rest of you? I didn’t see anyone else on the intensive care unit, so you must have something to share.”

“Amelia,” Corrine whispered.

“Correction,” I said. “Dr. Talbot
was
there. She could work as a registered nurse at this point.”

Woo leaned forward on his stately elbow patches. “I had the good fortune—”

“Next. What about you, Doyle?”

“Joss had a book out in July,” he said, gesturing down the table. “I’m sorry, Joss, I don’t remember the title.”

I laughed. Corrine poked me in the side, and everyone turned to stare.

“Are you OK?” said Caldwell or Baz; I couldn’t tell.

“Am I crying?” I wiped at my face. It was dry.

Corrine put her hand on my arm. “Are you in pain?”

I was, but not yet the way I’d been in my office. This was worse in a way, because I wasn’t sure there was a pill I could take. What did insanity feel like?

“Do you need some water?” Joss said. She hopped to her feet. I already had a full glass in front of me. Caldwell jumped to help her. Baz or someone else came to stand behind me in case some chore could be assigned. I waved away the glass that was placed in front of me, then changed my mind and gulped it down.

Over the glass’s rim, I stared at Doyle. He sat back in his chair, watching the room as though he’d never met a single one of us. I wasn’t crazy. I’d been gone for ten months, and in that time, something had shifted. Around the table, the others leaned in, awaiting instructions.

“I’m fine,” I said. I could feel a tiny pinprick of white hurt deep in my belly. I’d have to get out of there before my entire department got a show they hadn’t paid for. But first. I looked back at Doyle. “You were saying, Nicholas?”

Near my ear, Corrine coughed. She tugged on my sleeve.

Doyle didn’t blink. “Since I have the floor,” he said and stood.

When he finally turned to face the group, I knew. How did I know? Because it was exactly what I’d told him to do.

“This summer,” he said, raising his coffee mug in a toast to himself. “I got married.”