The Black Hour (43 page)

Above me a white flotation ring dropped. Then one of the orange vests. Still under, I kicked off my boots and used my arms and a dolphin kick, the only thing I could think of, my hip and gut crying out. When I hit the surface, I was beyond the life preservers. Raindrops bounced off the lake and up into my face.

“There she is!”

“Melly, please.”

“Oh, no, Corrine. You’re staying right here—”

A scuffle rose up behind me as I paddled toward the other boat. A hundred yards I might have guessed on deck, but what did a hundred yards feel like in the water, in heavy clothes and half my body dead weight—

Nath, hitting the water like a stone.

I paddled harder, stretched my strokes, tried the dolphin kick again, and ignored the white-hot rage of my gut.

This is why.

The words came to me. This is why.

Why I—survived.

Why they’d stitched me back together around the lightning bolt, why I’d escaped the black room and then the white, a leaner, sharper tool by which to cut this black spot away—for this, for this alone and to hell with what happened to me.

Nath—young, earnest Nath deserved better than this, than me. But what came to me was McDaniel, idiot McDaniel and his kiss like its own lightning, its own light and heat and fire racing through me and striking, striking home like nothing else had in months, in years, in my lifetime.

I wanted more of it, and I wanted it for everyone I knew: Doyle and Joss and Joe and Nath—most of all young, young Nath, at the beginning, only just the very beginning.

I was almost to the boat when it made a turn in the wind.
Ladykiller
. I reached up and grabbed the low area near the engine. Somewhere near, a cough.

I let go, sinking until I got control of myself, rising to the surface with my own cough. I hung from the back of the boat again and, hand over hand, dragged myself to port. Someone clung to the side of the boat with both hands, gasping.

“Nath,” I choked.

He turned, eyes familiar and wide. Not Nath. I couldn’t see him well in the fading light. “I’m hurt,” he said. “My shoulder.”

“Where’s Nath?”

He checked over his shoulders, panicking, coughing. Rivulets of rain ran down his face. “I think—I think he shot him.”

He
shot
him
. “How many of you?”

“He went crazy. Oh, Christ. I should have seen the signs.”

“Phillip? Is that—what are you doing here?”

“Nath had a bad feeling, and I came along. Oh, God. I wish—”

“OK, OK. Win shot Nath—” My voice caught. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“And me. I couldn’t stop him—”

“You’re hit?”

“My shoulder, the pain—”

“Familiar with it. Do you think you can climb into the boat?”

He considered his hands, high above his head. “Not from here.”

“Can you come this way? Don’t let go. There’s a ladder in the back. Hand over—just like that, just like that.”

He slid closer, one hand then the other, inch by inch, his face contorted in agony every time he had to move his left arm. He reached my side, a groan coming through clenched teeth. I watched for Nath and Win over his shoulder.

“You’re going to have to go around me. Don’t let go. Here, I’ll move my hand. One hand between mine—exactly. Now the other and cross over—”

We faced each other, hanging like meat in a butcher’s window, and at the last minute before he passed, our eyes met—

Maybe I’ll have all the answers.

—and I saw that he had only one answer, and it looked like bottomless loathing and disgust. Not just for me—but especially me, right now. He was impatient to be breathing the same air as someone as useless, someone as pathetic. For just a blink, I saw the vast black room that Phillip lived in, always and every day.

I hardly had the time to wonder how I’d ever missed it. He put his hands on mine and held me there. His fingers ground into mine. A whimper escaped me. My fingers already slipping in the rain, I couldn’t hold on.

“Professor,” he said.

One chance at a breath. I took it and sank into the dark water. A hand cupped the top of my head, fingers encircling like a crown.

I flailed and kicked and scratched. Even with his injury—did he really have an injury?—I had so little left to me.

I realized I had stopped kicking and jacked at him with both legs again, my lungs bursting. The last thing—

I thought of my parents, long gone, the old house and that long driveway with the woods and the pond I should be a better swimmer and a roomful of students waiting to hear what I’ll say and that kiss that kiss that kiss.

I reached up, finding air with my hands, and felt for Phillip’s face, his neck, alighting here and there but not grasping, not yet, until I found the shoulder the bullet wound the weakness and dug in deep with two fingers and everything I had and anything I could borrow from the lightning bolt inside me.

The scream, underwater, satisfied.

He let go, and I surfaced, gasping and heaving.

“Help! Doyle, Joss. Over here.”

I clawed at his shoulder with everything I had, wrapping one leg around his waist to better dig in. He grabbed a handful of flesh with his good hand—my left leg, numbness had its benefits—and pushed me away with the elbow of his injured arm.

He had me. He reached with his good hand around to my good leg, letting me burrow at his wound, until I realized that I felt, in the crook of my knee, the object that would end this all, one way or the other.

In my next breath, I had the gun. I had it, horrible, black, gun rising from the dark, only this time it’s my hand, my gun. He reached for it and pulled it and me down with it.

Trigger.

Trigger. He grabbed my wrist and forced my arm down. My other fingers remembered their job and mined deep into his flesh. He crowed in pain and loosened up on me.

Trigger, gunshot.

A scream, close.

“Amelia, stop—please stop waving that around.”

Someone grabbed my wrist and pried the gun away.

“Now what do I do with this?” Joss said. Someone, Woo, probably, wretched over the side of the boat.

I felt a whisper of a breath against my face as hands, so many hands, brought me out of the water, cradled me in something soft. A beach towel. I heard Doyle speaking roughly to Phillip, still hanging on the side of the boat.

When I opened my eyes, Corrine searched my face, then the water. “Where is he? Where’s Win?”

I had no idea what she meant, and then I remembered—

I scrambled to my feet, throwing off the towel. “Nath!”

I hit the water, already forgetting.

Under. I remembered.

I remembered this dark, this midnight.

Nothing else—

But a man. I remembered the man. The man would want me to hold my breath.

I held my breath.

The man would want me to open my eyes.

I opened my eyes.

A boat, like a whale, a giant white whale sat belly-deep in the water above me. Capone’s men, sitting on rum, guns cocked. What would the man want me to do?

Dad. The man’s name was Dad.

He would want me to swim to the boat and grab on. He wanted me to take my chances, grab the boat and hang on for dear life.

He never grabbed for a thing, never tried, never let himself try. Not in the cards. But the man would want me to try.

He wanted me to try.

The man would want me to breathe.

I fumbled at the boat until I found a spot to clutch with slippery hands. Hang on, breathe in. Hang on, breathe out.

I heard voices. The ghosts of a hundred of Capone’s men and enemies lying beneath the black lake. I didn’t want to be one of them.

Voices and splashing—

An explosion that might have torn through the boat. I held on. So slippery. I lost track of the surface, water everywhere. I was underwater again, but found the air and the boat and held on.

“Nath,” someone screamed.

Me. My name was Nath.

The man would want me to say something. Dad. Dad would want me to say—

“Here.”

“Here, he’s up here!” They’d spotted me, a castaway.

I held on. Rough hands pulled me in. Everything hurt. I thought of the man who survived the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, only to die off the postcard. Poor bastard, and just as dead.

“He’s hurt, too.”

Hands pressed me down to the earth. I didn’t want to be on the postcard. I didn’t want to look at the postcard.

“How many bullets were fired total?”

“Win,” I said. The man didn’t know anything about this, but I did. “Win didn’t.”

The woman. The woman’s name was Amelia.

I didn’t remember why, but I was glad to see her. So glad.

“I know, Nath,” she said. “Hold on.”

The man would want me to say thank you.

Thank you to Amelia for her voice and the name she called me. Thank you to the people who covered me in warm things and said my name. Thank you to the rain. I licked my lips. Thank you to the lighthouse that lit us. Except the lights were all over, and red and white, and they caught me in a spotlight. A fish, hooked through the gut.

“Phillip,” I said.

“We know, Nath, hold on. Here they come.”

On the first day of the new semester, I arrived early and sat at my desk with a Smith Hall coffee cup warming my hands. The old windows leaked horribly. I could see my breath. Out on the lake, the waves had frozen the shoreline into odd shapes.

It was still early when someone knocked on my door.

It could be anyone—exactly who I didn’t want to see.

“
Rothbert Reader
.” A fist pounded on the glass. I heard laughs.

I went to the door and tugged. Always tight, but I would get someone in to sand it down a millimeter, I truly would.

Doyle stood in the door, laden with a box. Joss waved a newspaper over his head. “You’re top news again,” she said. “If you get a Rothbert Medal out of this, I’m totally getting myself shot
and
drowned next year.”

I snatched the paper from her.

Three months later, and they were still running the same grainy enlargement of me, hair wet and stringy across my face, being carted away from the tie-up and into the back of an ambulance. Again. “I’d been waiting for a picture like this to start online dating.”

“Come on,” Joss said. “I saw the photos of you that Scottish lad put into his paper. You don’t need to start online dating anytime soon.”

Doyle pretended not to hear. “Where do you want this?”

Today’s top headline featured Win, actually, the story writing itself, though not the way McDaniel had predicted. The Rothbert heir, barely escaping with his life, had transferred to another university.

“Poor kid.”

“Maybe it’s not a bad idea to study somewhere they didn’t try to kill you,” Joss said, shrugging. “And where your dead ancestor’s statue doesn’t wave at you every day.”

At the bottom of the page, they’d included the same line-up of campus ID photos they’d been shuffling and replaying since the incident: Nath, Phillip, Win, the students we’d long come to know as the sacrificial lambs of Phillip’s early career. The snapshot of Leo, this time the photo his mother had protected so carefully.

Here was an action shot of Corrine, carrying a box out of Dale Hall with a scowl. It still hurt.

Doyle cleared his throat. “This is rather heavy.”

I looked up. “Good grief, Doyle, I really don’t need the whole series. I’m not making a scrapbook here.”

“These aren’t newspapers.” He duck-walked the box to the nearest flat surface. Corrine’s desk, empty. Doyle glanced over his shoulder. “This OK?”

“Nothing had better jump out at me.”

“It’s not a stripper in a cake, Mel. It’s your book.”

My book. I tipped the box flaps open and peered inside. The manuscript, yellowed at the edges, seemed otherwise pristine.
Silent Witness: The Sociology of Violence in the American Midwest.
Maybe a little on the dramatic side, but still—a viable title, a viable book. Just in time, because the editor who’d called wanted to see anything I had. An updated edition, he’d said, as though there’d already been a first. I imagined a nice foreword that would explain a few things or some small notation in my author’s bio. Or maybe no mention of any of it would be best.