The Black Hour (33 page)

On my desk: a stack of quizzes from Sociology 101 awaiting a red pen. Research I needed to start for my methodologies class. An essay I needed to outline, at the very least, before I sat through Dr. Emmet’s next class. I was a week behind, everything considered.

I fanned the projects out. Hard to imagine spending time on any of it, feeling as wrung out as I did. I stared at the pages, remembering the way Dr. Emmet’s hair slid across my arms. Her naked back under my hand.

I didn’t know if I had it in me to finish the semester, let alone the degree. Kendall’s alarm sounded again. I waited for him to reach for it. I’d never get anything done if this kept up.

“Aren’t you missing class?” I walked over and slapped the snooze button again.

His hand hung outstretched from the bed, palm up.

“Kendall, get up.”

I flicked his hand. Nothing.

I flicked it again. Then grabbed it and shook it. His hand was cool and clammy. “Kendall, you’re freaking me out—”

I hauled myself up to look at him.

His face—

I fell back from the bed to the floor. His face was white, his eyes wide.

His lips, blue.

The rain beat down all the way from Lehane-ville back through Chicago and up Lake Shore Drive to my apartment. The whole trip, the pain pills sang their luring song, but I resisted, letting the ache keep me at attention on the slippery roads. The lightning bolt inside me burned. My hands, from gripping the steering wheel or in solidarity with the horror of the rest of my body, froze into claws.

In my apartment’s lot, I dropped my keys twice before commanding the last of my faculties for entry into the building and my front door, for finding the nearest glass, the tap, the pills in my bag. I heard their lovely rattle, took maybe one too many. I had time to call Nath and give him a piece of my mind, but I didn’t have the mind. At some point, I lay down.

I dozed and fumed until I had a speech, equal parts apology and accusation, ready to dispatch. I reached for the phone. The little shit.

My alarm said five something. In the morning? I stared at the clock, making sure. I’d slept through the night, and now it was too early to call. I would call him anyway. It served him right.

But the phone rang into infinity, until the campus operator cut in to tell me to give it a rest. I hung up only to call again. Again. Got up, brushed my teeth, called. Getting dressed, I came across the boot box in the back of my closet. The final resting place of my book manuscript, my career, my self-respect. I should have another barbecue soon.

I called Nath’s number again. The time on the clock embarrassed me now. I’d been dialing the same number for hours. Obsessed? Maybe.

I tried Corrine: home, office, cell. Nothing. I hadn’t been this angry in a while. I hadn’t been this angry since Leo Lehane. Hours passed. I lost count how many phone calls I attempted before I realized I’d have to go roust them out.

I remembered Corrine in the doorway. Her hand over her mouth not from laughing but from alarm. Of course. Of course she’d heard the news and come running. I must have regained consciousness before the EMTs took me away—it made sense now. Maybe I could talk her back to the day with Leo and the other kid. Maybe her memory wasn’t kept so far back on a shelf. I’d ask, just as soon as I’d shaken the Mickey Spillane from Nath.

“The little shit,” I muttered to myself, huffing out of my apartment, down the sidewalk, and onto campus. Far-off sirens carried in the wind.

I’d never visited a student in his or her room and could imagine what Rory McDaniel would say, how he could spin any move I made next into a story. The wrong story. McDaniel wouldn’t be the only person paying attention, much as he liked to think so. I was playing with fire. What was the right story?

I consulted the nearest map kiosk, which didn’t tell me what I needed to know, which was where the hell the kid lived. A quick detour into the nearest building for a glance at the student directory, and I was back on my way across the sloping campus lawns and out into the adjoining community and the not-quite-ramshackle houses the students had taken over.

McDaniel thought Nath was working with me. Working
on
me. I imagined Nath’s guileless face looking up at me from the back row of our classroom—and then his half-closed eyes as I wrenched our mouths apart—and was newly enraged. What game was he playing?

The noise in my head was enormous, and then the sirens cut through. They’d been going too loud for too long. I turned in time to watch two campus cop cars plow across the sidewalk and skid to a stop in front of an apartment building across the street. The black uniforms I knew so well scrambled out and inside. I looked around, finding the address. Nath’s building. Three, four squad cars, and then a fire truck lumbered up to join them, man after man hopping out like clowns from a circus car. In a moment, all the rescue workers had filed inside, leaving the cars to wail the news.

I took a few steps back into the shade of a tree, pulling at a dangling branch. An ambulance, another patrol, more black uniforms racing into the fray. I thought briefly of Nath’s safety, brushing the possibility away along with the branch.

I’d have to track him down later. I turned and headed for Dale Hall.

The campus sidewalks didn’t go anywhere. Sure, students could use them to get from building to building, from one class to another—but not directly, not quickly. The sidewalks curved, offering languid tours of scenery I didn’t care to see. Maybe once I’d been awed by the verdant lawns, the fat tulips every spring, and the tall grasses by fall, by life itself, youthful and bright. I supposed that was the idea. Send the prospective students, their parents, and anyone else who trod upon Rothbert soil the long way round to feed them a true sense of the bountiful land, color and vibrancy kept up with alumni dollars. What a fruitful backdrop for the higher education of tomorrow’s leaders.

By the time I reached Dale’s doors, I felt as though I’d finished a marathon. I stopped to catch my breath, noting the long sidewalk behind me.

I had. I had done the equivalent of a marathon, for me. I’d completed a full tour of campus, up and back, while my car and its little blue wheelchair hangtag sat back at my apartment building. The last time I’d walked to work, I’d been carried off campus on a stretcher. Today, I’d returned to a place in my head that was pre-attack, pre-Lehane. No—post-attack, post-post-Lehane. A place so angry that I’d had fuel enough for the journey.

And here I was. By the power of my own two feet.

Finally: a foot cliché I didn’t mind using.

I took a quick inventory. I was tired, physically used up, but I didn’t feel as though I’d fall down. Not as though I couldn’t make it back. No taxis needed to be called, no emergency pick-ups—which was lucky, since I’d seduced and then rejected the valet—and no pills since the night before. I felt tired but amazing.

“Dr. Emmet, why, my goodness.” Jim Perry emerged from Dale’s doors, his hamster-sized eyebrows raised in wonder. Why was it such a surprise that I kept showing up where I worked? “Let me get the door for you.”

“I was leaving, actually.” I didn’t want to go up to my office and grow creaky and sore in my chair. I wanted to take another lap around campus, or take my time getting home and give Corrine a call with the news. I didn’t care as much about finding Nath. He’d turn up, and I’d have to ask him some questions. Calmly. Without judgment. Without violence. But later.

“Fine day for a walk,” he said, and then blustered and coughed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Not at all. That’s what I’m doing. Walking.”

“Oh? Excellent, excellent. I was just thinking of you, in fact. Funny running into—” His face dropped into mild dismay.
Running
. Other people could still stumble over feet and legs and all the other words they weren’t supposed to say around me. I had walked to campus today. I gave him a benevolent nod.

“Uh,” he said, looking all around for a root by which to pull himself back up from the cliff. “Was doing the class schedules—you know how far in advance we have to sort it all out—but that got me thinking. Why couldn’t we add a Sociology of Disability course next fall? A study of all the angles, taking on issues of ability and disability—taking apart
normal
ism, if you will.”

The word disability pinged me, but I’d heard of courses like this. “Johns Hopkins has an entire program, I think.”

His hopeful look grew into a wide smile. “A social, political, economic, and cultural issue. Disability must have its own life. Its own history, its own biography.” A little spit had gathered on his bottom lip, he was so excited. “A new field of inquiry, I’m sure, but think of the opportunities.”

It wasn’t a new field of inquiry. Like I said: Johns Hopkins, to start a list. That quivering saliva on his lip made me stop and think—opportunities for
whom
?

“Who would teach it? Oh, you’re kidding me.”

“You’d be great. Think of it. The
press
, Amelia.” The spittle flung. I took a step back. “At last you could use your—celebrity, however unfortunate it’s been—to your advantage. You’d be a shoo-in for grants, fellowships. Doyle and I could kick in travel stipends for your book tour—”

“I’m writing a book?”

“It’s time you found the silver lining,” he said. “An expert in violence and in disability, who has a disability caused by violence? Forget the academic market and go for the book-of-the-month club.
Good Morning America
. That Letterman fellow.”

Jim Perry had never seen a
Letterman
episode in his life, my guess. I imagined my walk across the stage, the silver cane shooting the glare of stage lights back into the audience. “Do you know what people think of me?” I said. “I’m not writing a book. That book, anyway. My manuscript—”

“Your manuscript,” he said, the bushy eyebrows dipping forlornly, “is gathering a little dust. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s time to move on from the barbecue. Oh, yes, I heard about it. Dr. Doyle was quite concerned about your state of mind, you see.
Quite
concerned, and so was I. Your dissertation was a beautiful piece of work. Your tenure materials—superb. The manuscript, I believe, could have found a publisher. I’m sure many would have been all too happy—but let’s begin from where you are. You need to start over, and you have the opportunity. Who do you want to be?”

The manuscript had found a publisher, but I’d missed deadlines, sidelined edits. I’d had it under control once, juggling everything. Teaching, researching, committee work, the life of an academic. Then something had changed and the book wasn’t finished—still, yet. Never
deliverable
, as my editor put it, as though my life’s work fit into a couple of Chinese food containers.

It would have fit into a single container, after the fire.

But the balance of my life had teetered long before Leo and the gun. Long before my ten months of isolation and physical therapy, the dark room still far in the future. Long before Doyle flipped his keys and left—

Doyle.

I’d lost track of my book about the time Doyle started proposing.

Doyle, whose love was so rich and full and filling, like a dessert I couldn’t finish. I saw us now as I never had. Doyle, so generous, so giving. Giving and giving until I couldn’t take on everything he had to give and still carry the load I had come in with. Doyle, whose life had begun long before mine, was fully formed. He needed nothing from me and had no room for anything I had or was.

Who did I want to be? Only myself.

I couldn’t even blame him for it. When I’d walked onto the campus of Rothbert that first fall, fresh from grad school, I was not young, but still naive. By reaching Rothbert, I’d imagined that I’d made it, that I’d crossed some invisible line in the sand. The folks back home would never know me. And yet that’s what I felt about the people I met at Rothbert. They would never know me. I would never let them.

I hadn’t been myself for a good, long while. The first Amelia Emmet I’d ever killed was the true one.

“Maybe Joss would want to give the study of disability a try,” I said.