The Black Hour (6 page)

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

Joss had offered us a ride back to our end of campus. In the side mirror, I could see Corrine in the backseat staring out the window, idly tapping her finger on the glass. Outside: a steady parade of students against a background of scenic matriculation. The campus flourished, lush and green, almost hurtful in its hopefulness, the colors of the flowers bright and aggressive.

“It’s not like I’m the one he married,” Corrine said.

“You didn’t even mention there was someone.”

“I saw him with a woman at the organic grocery store buying broccoli crowns. How was I supposed to know rings were next?”

Joss said, “I thought you broke it off between you, Amelia.”

We had tried to keep the relationship out of the office, but that was impossible. Everyone knew when he moved in, and then everyone knew when he moved out. And yet I couldn’t help but want to keep what was mine—what had been mine—out of Joss’s mouth.

“Never mind,” I said.

“She did,” Corrine said. “She broke up with him, but she still loves him.”

“Hey.”

“Not that she would admit it,” Joss said. She drove peering over the wheel like an octogenarian who had forgotten her glasses.

“Can we not discuss this like I’m not here?”

“You were discussing it as though Joss wasn’t here,” Corrine said.

“As though I didn’t know what you were talking about,” Joss said, nodding at the windshield.

I felt like opening the door and rolling out, but that seemed a bad idea for someone so recently patched together. We were also several blocks from our building. If I survived the pavement, it was still a long walk. “Forget it.”

“There’s not much you can do anyway,” Corrine said. “Married is married.”

“Tell that to his first wife.”

Joss grimaced at me. “Don’t get yourself mixed up in that.”

“In what?”

“In keeping score. First wife, second wife.”

“You weren’t his wife,” Corrine said.

“Thank you, Cor. I know.”

“You didn’t want to be, if I remember it right.”

“It wasn’t just him.” I wasn’t sure they’d know what I meant. Doyle wasn’t the only thing I couldn’t commit to. My research, gone up in that unfortunate barbecue. But the thing about an academic career was that, every year, I got to start over. And teaching had always been my passion. I could always teach. “I couldn’t—”

“I know,” Cor said. Confirming in my head that she was the only person for whom I’d leap into the void. I smiled at her over my shoulder.

Joss stopped for a light. We all watched the students scramble from one side of the street to the other. Corrine leaned forward on my seat and stared with me.

“They seem so young,” she said.

“They are so young,” I said.

Joss said, “You two talk as though you’re both a foot in the grave.”

I didn’t remind her how close I’d come to the grave, or what it felt like to be teetering on the edge, arms wheeling. I watched one student, a girl wearing a short skirt and kitten heels, flouncing across the road. A lot more stood between that girl and me than fifteen years. After a quick calculation, I had to amend: Twenty years.

But Joss was probably twenty years older again. I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. Her silver hair was perfectly bobbed around her ears, stylish. Her bangles, her careful manicure. Sometimes she came back from a long break with intricate henna designs flowering from her smooth brown fingers up to her wrists. I didn’t know much about Joss, but now I wondered what her life was like and who I could hope to be in a few, rushing years. Did she have anyone at home, or did her publishing record keep her warm? I wanted both. What was wrong with both? And now I had neither.

The light finally changed. We rolled through the crossing as the last of the students jogged out of the way.

“It just would have been nice to know,” I said. “That one of my options was closing up.”

Corrine let it slide. I knew as well as anyone that one of my options had ceased being an option a long time ago, and it had nothing to do with the woman buying broccoli crowns.

“Who’s joining me for a drink?”

“Amelia, for God’s sake,” Corrine said. “What time is it?”

“I’m not teaching today.” Joss shot me a sly smile.

“Last call, Cor.”

“I have prep to do for tomorrow. And so do you.”

“I’m as prepped as I plan to be. Come on. You don’t teach until tomorrow either, right? You have all evening.”

“I have—I can’t.” She sank back and stared out the window.

“Well, I feel like celebrating,” I said. The pain in my pelvis was creeping forward, demure but insistent, reminding me of something. I found the bottle of water Corrine had bought me earlier and dug into my bag for my pill bottle.

“You do?” Joss glanced over her shoulder at Corrine.

“I’m alive, aren’t I? That deserves more than a couple of jelly-filled.” I threw back the pill and the last of the water and sat with my eyes closed until I felt the car swing into the circle drive at the back of Dale Hall.

Corrine got out and slammed her door and, when I still hadn’t opened my eyes, rapped on my window. Joss used her controls to roll it down. “Drinking on top of those pain pills could kill you,” Corrine said.

“Your concern is heartening.” I opened my eyes, the pinpoint of hurt that had been growing wide inside me already receding. “Cor, it’s OK. I went into serious, foreclosure-level debt to save my own life. No plans to do myself in.”

“No need to call the hope hotline on you?”

“I’ll have a virgin daiquiri,” I said. “What’s the hope hotline?”

Corrine laughed, but I hadn’t said anything I considered funny. Maybe my voice didn’t sound the way I thought it did. Or maybe the pills were kicking in, and I hadn’t said what I thought I had. “I was joking,” she said. “But take it easy, OK? I just got you back.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “Except to the Mill. I’ll see you tomorrow. Early.”

She nodded, but the expression on her face said what she wouldn’t—that it might be time to call the hope hotline. Whatever that was.

The daiquiri wasn’t virgin. The daiquiri wasn’t a daiquiri. I ordered a beer and waited for Joss to say something. When she didn’t, I began to wonder if I weren’t providing field research for the next Alberta Joss, PhD, sociological study. Women and prescription dependence. Society and social lubricants. Pharmaceutical crutches of victims of violent crime. The pills had kicked in, so this made sense to me. I might have jotted down notes if I’d had a pen.

“What’s your next book about, Jossie?”

She sipped her daiquiri. Which was a daiquiri but not virgin. It was barely eleven in the morning, so I had to give her some credit for being with me at all.

We sat in a booth at the back of the Mill, which was a dive in the best kind of way. Cheap beer, dark corners, nothing cute or ornamental about any of it. At this time of day we had the place almost to ourselves. The bartender, Joe, greeted us without a bit of surprise—we went way back—and didn’t give us any guff about the daiquiri.

Joss looked up from her drink, made a face, and pushed the glass away. “I have no idea. I always think each book is my last.”

“If anyone gets to be morbid here, it’s me,” I said.

“Not that I’ve run out of time, Amelia, but thank you for the reminder. I’m old, but I’m not that sort of old.” She smoothed her hair. I saw what she meant. She was someone’s cool great-aunt who danced the Hokey Pokey at family weddings and sent mildly raunchy birthday cards. “I just meant that whenever I finish a big project, I feel—empty, in a way. I don’t know where the next beginning is. Not yet. I’ve learned not to panic. Something always starts up.”

I took a deep pull on my beer and thought about the manuscript I’d put on the cooker. What had I been thinking? Years of research soaked in lighter fluid and set aflame. I’d been making a point to Doyle, but now I couldn’t remember which point. That I was wasting my time? That I’d been wasting it with him? A memory came to me: Doyle, pulling me into the tiny berth in his boat.

There’s not room for this, Doyle.

Couple smart people like us? We’ll figure it out.

In any case, I hadn’t had another idea since. What I did have: a secret draft of that book that Doyle didn’t know about, stuffed in a box at the back of my closet. But I considered that book truly burned. Once, I’d had a vision of my future. I would publish, travel, research. I would conquer. That book—it would have been my second—should have been making the conference award rounds right now. If I’d lived the way I’d dreamed I would, Woo’s teaching award might have seemed like a cereal box trinket.

But I hadn’t lived that way. Not really. Not before the bullet, and not since.

I finished my beer in a long drink. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten excited about an idea, the last time I’d thought of something worth chasing down and hog-tying. I was between projects, too, except the last one had been a project of survival. A project successfully completed, but no one would give me a MacArthur genius fellowship for making it back from the light.

“Remember that grave you were sliding into earlier?” Joss said. “You look like someone walked over it. As they say.”

“Thinking,” I said.

“About?”

“Getting shot.”

“What about it?”

I signaled for Joe to bring us two beers. “That it’s like a project I just finished. Not sure what the next one is.”

She waited until Joe had brought the beers and uncapped them for us. I had a history with Joe, but no one would have known it from the silence as he swept the empties off the table and hurried away. Joss watched his hands and then, as he walked away, his ass. Joe, dark-skinned, dark-eyed, and built as though to represent human perfection, was worth watching. What had Corrine said once?
You came all this way, just to hook up with the bartender?

“I’d have thought that you had a backlog of projects, now that this one’s over,” Joss said.

“It doesn’t—”

“What?”

I remembered the feel of the
Rothbert Reader
clipping Corrine had brought to me in the hospital. A nearly whole page of the cheapest of newsprint, for what was normally the thinnest of news, featuring my seven-year-old faculty photo and a headline as wide as the world:
Professor critical, gunman dead.
Next to the headline, a small, dark thumbprint of a face I didn’t recognize. This was the young man who had lain in wait, who’d hidden in the shadows until I’d arrived at an unlikely time, who might have made a sound at the last minute so that I faced him and took the shot head-on, wondering then the same thing I still wondered now. Why me?

The hand like a flower. The hand that wasn’t mine. But—

“It doesn’t feel over,” I said.

Joss threw back her beer like a pro and thumped the bottle down on the table. “He won’t hurt you again. I think everyone’s pretty much in agreement there.”

I saw the dean’s face, quietly outraged that I would return, and Corrine’s, relieved that I had. And Doyle—he already lived somewhere else, and I was no concern of his.

“From everyone else’s perspective, I’m back, so it’s over,” I said. “But that’s not how it feels.”

She nodded long and slow, and reached for my beer. “I’ll drink this, so you can keep your promise to Corrine.”

“I feel like I did die, like I was dead and you all forgot to tell me. And when I came back today, you clapped and smiled, but you looked like—like you’d seen a ghost.” I grabbed the beer out of her hand and sat back in the booth. The pain meds had begun to ebb a bit. I felt sharp, poised. Ready. I wasn’t quite sure what I was ready for. I raised the bottle in a toast. “Ten months lost, Joss. I have a few questions.”

“Like?”

“Like who was that kid?”

“Leonard Lehane.”

I blinked at the sound of it. I’d read it, and I’d heard it from the mouths of police officers and lawyers. But not from someone I knew, not so casually. “No, I know.”

“He wasn’t a sociology major,” she said. “He’d never taken the intro class, not from any of us.”

“Exactly.”

“Doyle checked every record he could think of,” she said. “As far as he could tell, this Lehane chap never had a class with you or near you.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell people.” I flung my hands into the air, beseeching the ceiling. Joe looked up from the bar, ready to deliver another round. I waved him off.

“So the big question you have is—why you?”

“Why me, Joss?” My voice was louder than I realized. The only other customers turned to take a look. I found myself wishing there were more people here. Witnesses. My heart pounded in my throat so that I could barely talk around it. “That’s precisely what I need to know.”

“Well.” She held her wrist to her mouth to cover a ladylike burp. “Sounds to me like you’ve already identified your next project.”