The Black Hour (37 page)

I had to know. I’d lost everything else. She could live with her gray areas, but I couldn’t.

I thought again of home, of standing on my dad’s porch with no clue what to do next. This might be the last time I was certain about anything.

“I’ll meet you at the rocks,” I said. “Dutch is probably drunk already, right? You’ll need a third.”

By the time the door of the Mill slammed behind me, I knew walking to campus that day had been a mistake. My gut had passed through the threshold of pain into numbness, taking my bad leg with it. Lack of sensation I could handle, but the leg wouldn’t lift. My heel scraped the sidewalk monstrously. I kept my head down. Everyone must be staring.

I hated that everyone-must voice in my head. The same one I’d struck out of my life over and over. I’d expected adulthood to be different, but in some ways nothing had changed. Everyone else had a private school degree. Everyone else drove a better car. Everyone else had already written another book, had a better office, took their boat out on the lake. Everyone else had already found the right person to start a life, a family. Everyone, everyone.

Corrine knew what I meant. We’d spent hours turning the issue over. Philosophizing. Scheming. What did we want? How could we get it? What if we had to settle?

I’d have settled right then for being home. I wanted a bath. I might get into the tub, but I’d never get out. I’d have to settle for a shower, another pain pill or two. I wanted to talk to Corrine, but I could be talked down to an early bedtime and waiting for tomorrow.

“Hey.”

I wanted the voice to be talking to someone else, but I would have settled for it not being McDaniel.

“Amelia,” he called.

I didn’t turn around. “I’ve had a long day and it’s hardly the afternoon. I beg you.”

“Where’s Nath?”

“I left him with you.” We’d reached the door to my building.

“Has he been looking into that group, the hotline?”

“He’s all yours. I have no idea.”

McDaniel ran his fingers through his hair and made a noise in his throat. “Something’s not right. This business with the kids who—”

“Not interested. I’m only interested in ending this day. Another stellar day in the life of Amelia Emmet.”

“You’re only interested in yourself.”

I imagined all the people he’d misquoted in his lifetime. But yes. Where was the harm in that? “That’s true of most people.”

“Maybe.” He blinked at me. “Who wants to be most people, though? I won’t believe that about you. Look, he’s in trouble. He’s carrying around this
list
—”

“He’s his own man.” That was the only way to get at Nath. I didn’t understand him. I didn’t understand him, and now I didn’t have to try.

“He’s a kid, and he’s digging himself into a bad spot,” McDaniel said.

He reminded me of Nath just now. Big eyes wide, always needing something, always hoping that I’ll turn out to be a better version of myself. I dug my keys from the depths of my bag. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

He reached out and grabbed my elbow.

“Tell me that you don’t care about what happens to that kid,” he said. “Tell me I’m completely wrong about you.”

I took a shaking breath and concentrated on not slapping him away. I slipped out from under his touch. A hot spot on my skin in the shape of his hand. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know—dammit, I know enough.”

One long step, and he’d reached for me and pressed his mouth hard to mine. He held me tight. Not as though I might break. My hands, held down by his embrace, grabbed at the thighs of his jeans. He held the back of my head, scraping my mouth with his five o’clock shadow. The lightning bolt through me lit up, and my mind zapped blank. When he relaxed his grip, I turned my face and gasped for breath.

“This isn’t—” I said.

“It might be.”

“You don’t have to—” I knew what I meant, but he stared. Big eyes wide. I pictured Joe’s face, morphing into horror. Doyle’s, turned to apathy. Nath’s. “I’ve resigned myself.”

“Are you telling me you’ve given up sex?” His voice, low and gruff.

“I—I haven’t decided. Maybe.”

“Decide later.”

I took a breath and stood back, shaking the feel of his body off mine. It wouldn’t go away. I felt heavy with it, like I knew something about myself now that I hadn’t before. “This isn’t me. I mean, this isn’t who I am. Anymore.”

“I like you. This you. Whoever you are right now.”

“I’m nobody. Nothing.”

“Wow. Nath isn’t the only one who needs to be calling the—” He frowned. “Don’t pretend like you believe that about yourself.”

“I used to believe—” I pictured the manuscript on Doyle’s grill, the page edges rolling and turning black. I’d had to poke the title page through the grate. The last thing I’d seen was my name. Amelia Emmet, PhD. Even then, I’d believed I’d find a way back to the person I should have been. Even then. Hadn’t I stowed away another draft? “I’ll show you,” I said.

McDaniel followed me into my apartment. His eyes roved over the place. Picking details for the story, I supposed. “Wait here.”

I hobbled past him to my bedroom and threw open the closet. I dropped my cane and dove in. Shoes, purses, a dry-cleaning bag fallen and never picked up. When I finally had the box in my hands, I felt only surprise and pride at how heavy it was, how much work had gone into this doorstop.

I crawled backward out of the closet, my hair pulled by jacket buttons, to find McDaniel in my door. I sat the box on my bed. “This is what I used to be. I had goals. I worked hard. I was on my way.”

“On your way where?” He nodded at the name on the box. “Marshall Field’s closed a few years ago.”

I teased the box top open. I had imagined that I might retrieve my book someday, but not with an audience. Not with this audience. Maybe I’d imagined Doyle, his hand swiping dust from the lid, making a quip about the boot box. He would have understood what the box, hiding it and getting it out again, cost me. What was Rory McDaniel waiting for? Nothing but a headline. Nothing but an
angle
, and maybe a wedge into my unmade bed.

“You can go,” I said.

“What’s in Geraldo Rivera’s vault there?”

“My point,” I said. “But I don’t feel like making it anymore.”

He glanced at the box, at my hands quivering at the lid. “Is that the missing tome? The point was that you used to be great, because you wrote a book that never got published?”

For a wordsmith he often chose the wrong phrasing. How many books had he written? “My point was that—”

That I was damaged goods. That I’d shut a few doors behind me that mattered, doors I didn’t have any keys for.

“If you were great before, it probably wasn’t because of whatever’s in there. Is that a shoe box? You put yourself in a shoe box.” He picked a magazine off my bedside table, something sensational Cor had brought me, put it down. “I heard you were a great teacher. You must still be. Nath thinks you’re great. But, for my money, that jury’s still out because what I’ve noticed is that one of your students is out there getting into trouble.
Your
trouble.”

A great teacher. Maybe I could have said that once. I remembered Nath’s face going slack when I told him to go home. When I told him to give up his dreams. What a teacher I was, destroying my most ardent student—so that we matched? So that I somehow gained the upper hand? So that he couldn’t crush me with everything he knew? But I was already crushed.

I pushed the box across the bed and sat down. “Tell me then. Why are you so worried about Nath?”

McDaniel didn’t know much, really. A list of students, all but one dead by their own hands. Or so it had seemed. I listened until McDaniel had sputtered out of facts.

“Where’d he get the list?” I asked.

“Don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t we worry about the kid on the list who’s still alive?”

“Exactly,” McDaniel said, lighting up. “Made a call. That kid turns out to be a legacy. A real one—not just a Rothbert student, but a Rothbert kid.”

“I don’t know what to do with that.”

“Are you kidding? That’s a story I could write. Front pager. Rothbert heir arrives on campus,” he intoned, blocking out the headline with his hand. “Bodies start piling up. Best
seller
. Change a few names, give it a cover with bloody knife—”

“A knife?” I hadn’t heard about any blood other than Leo’s. And mine, though Leo and I both seemed beside the point.

“You know what I mean.”

“If you’ve already written the tell-all, shouldn’t we call the police?”

“My buddy on the campus force would love this collar.”

“Collar? You’re out of control. Let’s go.”

I walked him to the door and out into the hall before he realized I was not going with him.

“Wait,” he said. “When—what are you doing? Later?”

“No,” I said.

He blinked away. “And Nath?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

He rolled his head back and looked up at the ceiling. “This is the you that’s still you, right? Because I don’t want to have to go through this again with the you that isn’t still you.”

I closed the door on him.

Finally alone, I dragged myself back to my room. That kiss. I couldn’t even think about that kiss.

The boot box sat on the edge of the comforter.

I played with the lid. The rituals we prescribed to our everyday lives, the importance we assigned to mere paper and ink. I’d expected a drum roll, a trumpet blast. Something.

I popped the box open.

Gone.

In the place of my manuscript sat a thick dictionary. Embossed title on the cover, gilt pages, a real tome.

For a moment I felt relieved. It was over. I thought I’d stuffed it here, but it was gone. I’d burned the last copy after all. I could start over, just like Dean Perry had suggested.

The moment passed, and another feeling rose. I thought I’d put it here. I thought I’d always have a chance.

And then anger. I
had
put it here.

I pawed at the book. Gold letters pressed into faux leather, the most mocking text I’d ever seen. I opened the cover.

From the library of Nicholas Doyle
, it said, in his handwriting.

Fury hurled me out of my place and once again to campus. I found him in his office, behind his desk. So comfortable with himself and his life. So settled and smug.

Doyle looked up as I walked in and closed the door. “Hey, I tried calling you,” he said. “Tonight—what’s wrong?”

A week ago, maybe even a few days ago, my answer would have been different. Now his office seemed overstuffed, close, hot. Not the warm sanctuary that I’d always thought. The sight of him didn’t stir regrets, except for the months of my life I’d pined away.

“Where’s my book?”

He leaned back in his chair and smiled. Any other reaction—confusion would have been the best—and I could have given him the benefit of the doubt.

“You took it?”

“You weren’t using it.”

“Doyle.”

“Took it when I moved out. Didn’t want you to use it for kindling.”

“It’s not your job—”

“Yes, it is.” He swept his arm to encompass his desk, his office. “It is my job to encourage you, to see you through a bump in the road. That’s exactly what my job is. It wasn’t my job—the other stuff.”

The other stuff. That’s what we were calling our love affair now. And my attack we were calling a bump. “I’d like it back.”

“I was waiting for you to say that. Over two years, actually, I waited for you to want it back.”

“Protecting me from myself? I didn’t need a daddy, Doyle.”

“You needed a friend.” He leaned across his desk and put his hand on my forearm. His touch, which I had enjoyed and then coveted. But his hand was just a hand, heavy, solid—

My memory snapped to the white room, a hand heavy on my chest.

Doyle, of course. Not the attentive nurse who stopped in for game shows but the man who’d tried to love me even when I hadn’t let him know who I was.

He hadn’t waited weeks, then made an official visit. He’d been there all along. I made it through the darkest hours to find his steady hand holding me to the earth.

And now, again.