The Black Hour (19 page)

I hadn’t brought anything to read except the handout from the mob bus tour, the text of which I’d already studied while everyone else ducked to recorded machine gun fire. They’d included the same photo from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre I had on my wall. Poor-quality printing. And they’d cropped out the spilled brains.

“You’re the guy who broke up my poker game.”

“Sorry?” I recognized the student immediately this time. My mouth full of garlic bread, the word came out
surly
. That’s exactly who he was: the bored, impatient kid from the suicide brigade.

“You broke up my poker game last month,” he said.

“I guess. Were you down much?”

“I’m never down. I enjoy the sport.” He had a glass of milk with ice, swirling it as though we’d run into each other at the Playboy Mansion.

“I never thought of poker as a sport.”

“You have to lose in order to break a sweat.”

This guy looked like he’d never produced a drop of perspiration in his life. A walking catalog ad: striped oxford, creased khaki pants. Before I came to Rothbert, I hadn’t known that real people dressed like this. Blond hair that flipped just so. I hadn’t known that people like this really existed. “Natha—Nath Barber.”

“Winston R. Harlan. The second.”

The way he said it, I felt as though I should have heard of him. “What’s your major?”

“That’s a pick-up line if I ever heard one.”

“What?” I realized my mouth, still full, was hanging open. “I mean, sorry—”

“Relax, Nath. It’s a joke. I think the what’s-your-major question is the what’s-your-sign of our generation. We’ve all crammed into the nation’s higher education institutions to get the pedigrees.” He waved his free hand toward the door in a sweeping gesture. The campus outside, his empire. “The master’s is the new bachelor’s. We’re all in competition for jobs that don’t exist. You’re simply trying to triangulate me in the universe of the university, see where I stand.”

I swallowed but couldn’t think of a thing to say. “Sociology,” I said.

“Political science. Call me Win.” He swirled his drink again. The ice clinked against the glass. “You friends with that Baker guy?”

“No.”

“Weirdo, right?”

“I was his teacher. Sort of.”

Win took a sip of his drink. “Huh. That’s cool. You’re a—”

“I’m a PhD candidate. A teaching assistant.” I didn’t feel like getting into the whole thing about Dr. Emmet right now. “Anyway, James dropped the class, so I guess I’m not anything to him now.”

“Lost cause.”

He sounded like Kendall, talking about me. “Maybe it’s too early to write him off.”

“He’s not going anywhere. Phillip’s wrong. He can’t stand being wrong, but James? That dude couldn’t be bothered to kill himself. He’d have to order someone to come do it for him.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. I’d gotten the picture in my head: James dialing for the suicide delivery service. Ordering the usual.

Win sat down. “So what does your father do?”

What’s your sign? What’s your father do? Had I time traveled? “He’s—he manages a manufacturing outfit.” That was fairly close to the truth—he managed two other greasy-fisted men on the factory maintenance crew.

“Mine, too. Ways and Means Committee. How’s the spaghetti?”

“You mean—in Congress?”

“I can’t believe you’re eating that.”

I’d heard that the next generation of power went to Rothbert, but I hadn’t met them until now. Of course I hadn’t interviewed any of them the way Win grilled me now. Maybe Kendall’s parents served with the United Nations. Or Ryan’s parents had stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I hadn’t taken an interest. Or maybe I was trying to avoid
triangulating
myself too well. “What does your mom do?”

“Spends money. That’s what my dad says when the microphones are off. Yours?”

For a moment I imagined Rory McDaniel meeting this kid, the polished pennies in his shoes, the swirling cup of milk. McDaniel had the wrong idea about who I was, but he’d be able to see right through this guy. “Tragically deceased. Having your nightcap?”

“I wanted a White Russian, but we didn’t have any milk.”

Over Win’s shoulder, a security guard had his feet up on an extra chair. Even students who could legally drink weren’t allowed to do it on campus. I didn’t know the punishment but imagined it severe.

Win jerked his head toward the guard. “Don’t worry about him. We pay their salaries, and our dads pay for their welfare state.”

How exactly a working man benefited from welfare, I didn’t ask. Win probably had conservative sound bites for all the rules he wanted to break. I watched the drink swirl. I’m pretty sure I’d never tasted a White Russian. “Are you in Smith?”

“I eat in the dining hall here a lot, but I live at the Castle. Bought it at recession rock-bottom prices. Three bed, two bath, hot tub. The only way to live.”

“You bought a castle?”

“Not Her Majesty’s Service or anything. Rothbert Manor. That stone tower downtown. Our grocery service is usually spot-on, but I guess I need to yank up the order on milk if Dutch is going to eat that much Cap’n Crunch.”

I couldn’t help it. I liked him. He had absolutely no clue what he sounded like. A douchebag, born and bred. But he and the others like him—weren’t they the true heirs to Rothbert? I was an interloper, but they—they were the DNA of the university. Their forebears got the land grant, put up the capital, sent their sons and their sons’ sons. Sometimes, standing on the front porch back at home, I got a little misty over land, tradition. But who was I kidding? I wasn’t a farmer. I had no mechanical or electrical or anything-ical talents. My legacy, if you could call it that, would die with me; I couldn’t carry it and probably wouldn’t carry it on. “That’s your roommate? What’s Dutch short for?”

“Ver Hoegen,” he said. “We throw good parties.”

“Throw down the moat,” I said.

“You should come by.”

“—let the peasants come pay duty,” I said.

“People usually just bring a bag of chips or something, sure.”

We grinned at each other.

“Seriously,” he said. “Stop by sometime and have a beer. Dutch and I play a lot of video games and watch a lot of porn. Just not Thursday nights.”

Porn. With another guy? What happened when—I had to leave that train of thought. “What’s Thursday night?”

“That’s my night on the hotline.”

“The—oh.”

“Night shift, once a week. I get a lot of homework done.”

“Nobody calls?”

“Wouldn’t say that. People call. Slimeballs hoping to talk to college chicks. Girls calling to complain to someone when their friends go on dates.”

The overhead lights dimmed and rose quickly. “Finish up, there,” the security guard called. Win downed his drink.

“Does anyone ever call—upset?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes one of them will be a crier. When there’s real trouble, we’re supposed to keep the person talking until the pros take over. Want to know the truth?”

That trill raced up my spine again. I didn’t care what he told me or that his truth might be different from my own. For the first time in a while, I felt honest curiosity. “What?”

“Some people call and pretend it’s a wrong number. I’ve taken a lot of pizza orders.”

I waited for the punch line. “I don’t get it.”

“To hear another person’s voice,” he said. “One girl called and pretended she was talking to her sister. For an hour.”

I got it. “How do you handle that? Like, all the time?”

“One night a week. It’s strict, or else you’d end up talking to the same people every night, getting to be somebody’s security blanket. That’s tricky. Even if they’re not calling to kill themselves, they’re tedious. I’m not stocked for boring, you know?”

My mind went back to the morning under the bronze statue when Win had laughed at me. When I’d said I would call, and Phillip and Trudie had agreed: such a good idea. But hadn’t Phillip already seen through me? Had they meant I should come in to volunteer, or that I should come in to get help? Which idea, exactly, was such a good idea? I stood to deposit my tray, Win trailing along after me. He left his glass on the table. I grabbed it and put it through the chute with my dirty plate.

“The other thing,” he said.

“There’s more.”

“They only call between three and four in the morning.”

“You sit on shift all night and the phone only rings between three and four?”

“Three is when the bars close. Remarkable, right?” He slapped the shoulder of the security guard on the way past. “Phillip won’t let us call it rush hour.”

“I can see why.”

“It’s a rush, though.”

Outside, the air was cool. Kids passed us wearing Rothbert-red sweatshirts, their hoods pulled up and their hands in their pockets. “What do you call it, then?”

“Nothing around Phillip. He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.”

“About suicide.”

“About anything.”

I’d seen this, and now I owed that humorless dick a beer. I hated owing anyone anything.

Win pointed out to the lake. “Been out there yet?”

“On the lake path?”

“No, on the
lake
. Take the skiff out, turn off all the lights, let the skyline light the way back. Bottles of tequila in the hold, of course.”

I shook my head. “You have a boat.”

“Out there, you can’t believe how dark it is. You can actually see a few stars. But it’ll freak you out, that kind of dark.”

“Yeah?” Stargazing was one thing home had over this place. You could see every star from my dad’s porch. His
skiff
, all the lights out.

That dark night after Bryn sent me home, that’s what had saved me. I hadn’t called anyone, hadn’t ordered a fake pizza to hear another human’s voice, but I also hadn’t found a sharp knife or anything in the medicine cabinet that would have done any work for me. I found the front door, the porch. I felt like climbing the giant oak in our yard to the smallest branches until something snapped beneath my weight. I wanted to tear my clothes off and run down the gravel road until I met a set of headlights. Just for a moment, I considered climbing into the attic crawl space and hiding myself where no one would ever find me.

Instead I found the sky and stars and lay down on the boards to keep an eye on them as they spun overhead.

My dad had been on overtime that night, a big muck-up at the plant, he’d said later, home the next morning. That’s where he found me: curled into a ball on the porch, the stars hidden by the dawn. Always a dawn. I’d made it, and something inside me that had seemed broken was—not fixed, but not quite as ragged.

If Win wanted to know what could freak someone out, I knew a few things.

“Always darkest before the dawn,” I said. My dad, with the same words, knowing or not knowing what he’d been saying to me that morning.

“That’s it,” Win said.

“What?”

“It’s always darkest before it’s light. That’s why we call it the black hour.”

That—

—I remembered the feel of the porch planks under my back and the effort it took to press myself there, just there, until the tide pulled back again—

That was the best name for it I’d ever heard.

I’d planned to skip the president’s reception, but Corrine started her buddy system campaign an hour earlier than I expected.

“Not all of us have tenure, Melly,” she said. “Come kiss some ass with me.” She’d worn a nice outfit, left her hair out of the ponytail. I recognized effort.

My chair squealed as I turned to face her. “If we go, I’m having wine.”

“At least I’ll know what to tell the emergency room.”

“I’m going to need wine. Or bourbon. Is Joss coming?”

She chewed on her lip, ruining the gloss she’d gone to the trouble to put on. “How is it that you and Joss are best friends now?”

“You’re still my one true love. Have you seen her drink? I want her at my elbow to say all the things I want to say.”

“And when did you start to censor yourself?”

“Today,” I said. “Or if Joss isn’t there, tomorrow.”

“What’s the big deal?”

“What do you think?”

“So? He’ll be there.”

“And so will she.”

I’d given the matter some thought. Sooner or later, Doyle would introduce the little lady around. Tonight’s reception, hosted by the university president and his wife and attended by our colleagues from across the campus, seemed a likely debutante ball. I had responded to the invitation with a resounding
no
a week ago. But I’d taken a little care with myself today, too. Just in case.

“An even better reason to go,” Corrine said.

“How do you figure?”

“You don’t want her to think she’s won, do you?”

“Cor. He married her. She’s won.” But Corrine knew how to get me thinking. If I didn’t show up, I’d go down as the housebound invalid Doyle used to live with. If I showed, looking good, best foot—ha—forward, and let the campus take a look at me, I was the brave survivor Doyle used to live with. The courageous fighter with great breasts and shiny hair that Doyle used to live with.

If I were her, I guess I’d be hoping I didn’t show up.

Which made my decision for me. I couldn’t win, but I could prevail.