The Black Hour (29 page)

If the people who called didn’t really want to die, then people who made repeated calls wanted to live even more. Leo. Leo hadn’t wanted to kill himself. But he had. He was special, Trudie had said. In the parlance of science, that made Leo an outlier, mucking up the experiment.

Or—

I stopped at the front door of the student center to let the thought collect itself. It had started to rain. Dr. Emmet and the night before felt far away. A pair of girls bustled by outside with umbrellas held against the wind.

Or maybe Leo wasn’t an outlier. Maybe he’d been exposed to another, unseen variable.

My mind raced. Most people who called didn’t want to die, but this kid had, and did. What had happened to Leo Lehane? He was special. He was special
to them
. And he’d done the one thing they tried to prevent.

What did it mean when your pet turned and bit you, precisely and for the kill?

Friday morning, with the entire weekend wide before me, I lay in bed and let myself wander back to the hall, the candle, the scrawled insult, rest in peace. The warped, browned nameplate outside my door, which I would never be able to explain. Was that the damage they’d meant to do?

It should have been you.

They’d done more damage than a little singed plastic, whether they meant to or not. How could I go back to my classrooms now, knowing that any one of my students could have been in the candlelight vigil outside my office for Leonard Lehane?

And then Nath. Nath.

I’d been in bed since Doyle left. The phone had rung a few times. I imagined Doyle calling, letting it ring, hanging up. Each time, the fantasy grew brighter, and less likely.

It might have been Nath.

What was the protocol here? Should I call? Apologize?

He didn’t want apologies. Which didn’t leave me with much.

The phone began to ring again.

Corrine. If I were lucky.

I wasn’t lucky, so it would be Nath. Or Doyle, really, but to dress me down for more rumors. Some of which had sailed past rumor into truth.

I’d canceled class that day, of course, but if I was honest with myself, I didn’t need a day. Or a weekend. I needed—something. A new start. A new identity. A new country?

I’d only had eight credit hours of a foreign language, but people learned, right? Or maybe that woman from Toronto I’d met at the conference a few years ago might pass along my resume. Maybe I could get a tenured spot. It would have been easier with a book, but I could still teach—

My gut flipped.

I’d managed to stand in front of my students after the fainting episode, to explain and apologize. But every time I’d thought of facing the students after that note, after Nath, my stomach had taken a top-of-the-roller-coaster plummet. If I was being honest with myself, I wasn’t certain I’d ever be a good teacher again.

I had decided not to be honest with myself. I flipped onto my back and threw my arm over my eyes to keep out the day.

Maybe the calls were from Dean Jim Perry, calling with a pink slip after a talking-to from the president for letting me teach again.

Or a student who’d talked my home number out of the dean’s office.

Or the student who’d left the note, making sure the message had come through.

Or—the problem with not getting up to answer the phone was that I could spin every ring into the end of the world.

The phone went silent. A group of people walked by outside, their voices as near as if they stood in my room. Students, probably. I pulled my elbow off my eyes and found the clock. Or office workers on their way to lunch. Another pair hurried by, laughing. I trailed them by their mirth all the way to the corner and out of range. When was the last time I laughed with a friend? Had fun? The last time I’d felt like my life belonged to me, that I didn’t fill it out like a hand-me-down suit jacket. I sat up and peered through the blinds, checking for the yellow Jeep. Even McDaniel had given up on me.

Two days off my hip had proved restful. I left the cane against my bedside table and stood, putting weight on my left side. For a moment I saw myself walking to campus, getting a jump on midterms while I had some energy.

A twinge through my gut sat me back down. Joe’s horrified eyes flitted through my memory, then Nath’s profile as he tested the tub’s water temperature. I forced them to keep me company. Imagining again and again the moment when Joe’s pity turned into something even more sour. In Joe, at last, I’d seen myself. In the way Nath wouldn’t look at me, I’d seen the life that would be my punishment. Stares, surreptitious or not, the whispers that followed in my wake from students in the halls, strangers. With people I knew, I could count on careful conversations, sharp glances away when I said something that didn’t fit, somehow, this new person I’d become.

That new person—I hated her. I hated that I was expected to be her. This wasn’t my choice, and yet I was supposed to be changed. Better.

I wasn’t better. I was worse.

Much worse. The new Amelia Emmet was someone I’d never hoped to be, and it felt itchy and insufferable. I could see everyone’s point, actually. Leo, troubled but young, his life ahead of him. He might have recovered. He might have come through the other side better.

Me. Her. Why was she still here, if this was all she’d ever be?

It should have been her. It should have been me.

But it hadn’t been, and for that I would be punished.

For that, I would punish myself.

Doxley, Illinois, lay more than two hours to the west of Chicago. A burgh, if that term still signified, far enough off the interstate that I realized too late a stranger pulling into town might draw attention. That I might be making a mistake.

I hadn’t meant to go.

In the mess of my clothes on the bathroom floor, I’d found a shred of paper in the pants pocket. The note. I threw it away, then reached in and took it back, tore it up, and flushed it down the toilet.

The other pocket crinkled, too. The sticky note from Doyle’s desk with the address I had no reason to know. I stared at it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s been to your office.
I waffled between anger and something fluttering against the inside of my ribs. I picked up my cane and walked the length of my apartment. Twice. Three times. Time stretched out ahead of me. I couldn’t go to my office. I couldn’t go to the Mill.

And now, as I rolled into the tiny town, I had a bottle of water, my pain pills, and the address for the kid who’d tried to kill me. Going into enemy territory, unarmed in every sense.

Doxley sat under a heavy sky. A grocery, a family-name pharmacy, a bank. Each building was a box of bricks unto itself, unneighborly, broad faces frowning toward the line of cars and trucks parked at angles into their sidewalks. A gas station with full service, an auto-parts store. The town seemed like a movie set, where something horrific could rip through the calm façade any second. I saw a single person walking along the sidewalk, human tumbleweed. I tried to look purposeful behind the wheel.

Somewhere there would be a school where Leo learned his way into Rothbert. Somewhere among the quiet streets, a house where his mother had marked the progress of his height against a door jamb.

I swung down a side street. The town seemed ridiculously small, a narrow channel hulled out of farmland, but big enough that I had to drive up and down the streets looking for the right name, then the right number. I found the school, the library, and a hundred perfectly normal homes before, finally, the perfectly normal home that had housed Leo Lehane’s childhood.

I passed the house and parked, watching it in the rearview through the swaying branches of an elm in the front yard. It could have been any house on the block. The color, the shape, the neat yard—none of it told me a thing about Leonard Lehane or his family. Maybe only that he’d come from a respectable town, from a family who took pride of ownership in their honest and, considering what Rothbert cost a year, modest surroundings. An American flag flapped from a post mounted to the front porch. I checked the rest of the street; each house flew one.

I knew places like this. My own was hundreds of miles away. No one I loved lived there anymore, which left no reason to visit, though I hadn’t done that enough when they’d been alive, either. No time. School, more school, then the academic treadmill I couldn’t step from for a moment. Or—maybe there was more to it than that. My house had never been the one on the flag-flying street, never the one with a tidy lawn and a front porch swing. Not the kind of place you brought friends to, not after you’d been to their homes.

Small towns caught and trapped regret and disgrace like corners gathered dust. They gave me the hives.

A curtain in the nearest house flicked. My cue.

I lifted my foot off the brakes and continued up the street and to the corner.

Straight into the path of a yellow Jeep.

Shitohshit.
The odds were bad, but I turned my face away. The Jeep stopped, blocking me.

“I knew it,” the familiar voice yelled at my rolled-up window. “Grading quizzes, my ass.”

No use. I’d been good and caught, and I couldn’t go anywhere unless I gunned my sedan over the curb and into some nice Doxley family’s box hedge. I rolled down the window and peered up into McDaniel’s open-sided Jeep. For once he wasn’t wearing the big brother jacket but a blue dress shirt open at the throat. The shirt appeared to be his own. He slapped his steering wheel with the flat of his hand and grinned at me. I hated him nearly as much as I hated myself. “What’s this about quizzes?”

“Don’t even try. Nath said you weren’t up to anything, but the two of you didn’t fool me for a second.”

“Nice day for a drive.” My face burned. The day was turning gray, the horizon roiling. The flags all along the street behind me would be blown flat by the wind. If he’d pull forward two inches, I could get away from him and ahead of the storm. “I was curious, all right? You can’t blame me for that.”

“I encouraged your curiosity, Professor. I just wanted in on it, but you and the wonder boy had to have your fun.”

It hadn’t been fun. I felt the dark edges of my own sorrow too keenly now to believe I’d ever once thought we might send Nath into a fake suicide spin to get inside that group. Nath. I’d let him down so hard. I wondered what the call center students would do if a faculty member called in.

Maybe Doyle was right. Maybe it was time to see a shrink.

“I’m not really operating under any plan,” I said. “Can you move your car?”

McDaniel glanced down the street. “I could. Or you could back up and go see the Lehanes with me.”

A wave of revulsion washed over me. “What would that accomplish?”

“Well, she wants to get a look at you, and you’re—curious, was it? I wouldn’t mind a front-row seat. Take a few notes, got my camera right here—”

“No way,” I said. “I’ve been in the news enough. And I’m not going to sit for forgiveness portraits.”

“She’s not forgiving you anytime soon.”

“I didn’t
do
anything.”

“Then you have nothing to fear, right?”

I feared everything. That was what I couldn’t tell him. Or Doyle, a psychiatrist, or even some anonymous hotline operator. I would never be able to explain how brittle my bones felt, how the lightning bolt of ache through my gut served as a constant reminder not just of the attack but of every failure of my own before and since. I’d come here for punishment, but I didn’t need the help. I wore the only punishment I needed on the inside of my body. My body, which had always been hollow, always felt broken.

“I can’t go into their house.”

McDaniel looked queasy. “Good point. I don’t think she’d want to go to Main Street with you, either.”

The grid of the town played itself in my head. “The library.”

“Maybe. This is up to her, you know.”

“It’s up to me, too.”

“Will you be at the library, if I let you go?”

“Are you prepared to keep me stuck here? All I have to do is back up—” I threw my car into reverse and rolled back.

He pulled forward to keep our windows close. “Fine. You’re free. It’s all up to you. Please be at the library.”