The Black Hour Read Online Free Page B

hadn’t been able to figure out if he’d come in an official capacity—he was the chair of the department—or on a real visit, remorseful and concerned. He kept passing along regrets from people we both knew, until I imagined that he’d been elected to come so that everyone else could stay away.
    Corrine had reported the colleagues who’d come to the hospital in the early days but hadn’t been allowed to see me. Some of them left cards and flowers. Very few came back. Cor, of course. Joss, the only other woman in our department. One of the lecturers from creative writing had come by to ask what it was like to get shot. He was writing a crime novel.
    Woo showed up to make a lot of sympathetic noises about how I should take my time getting well. He’d come to my apartment during spring semester, too, long after I needed visitors or wanted them. He’d won a Rothbert Medal, a teaching award from the university, and wanted to make sure I knew it. He knew what to say that day. I wondered that he hadn’t had the medal pinned to his chest this morning.
    Doyle’s visit had come too late for an official visit and even later for a friendly one. He sat with his elbows on his bouncing knees. His graying hair curled around his ears. “Well, you’re coming around, aren’t you?” he’d said, shooting for cheerful.
    “You can go,” I said. I’d come through the emergency surgery, the freezing-cold recovery room, the intensive care unit, another surgery, and having all my bodily fluids on an input/output system hanging from the side of my bed for the world to see. I’d ascended to one of the bright rooms on an upper floor, with a window facing downtown Chicago and a ledge on which to display all the get-wells that came in. My ledge made a respectable showing because one of the student groups at Rothbert had adopted me and sent me a series of handmade cards signed by people I didn’t know. The feminists. I wasn’t their faculty sponsor or anything. Apparently they didn’t like to see a sister get shot through her center of feminine power.
    On the day Doyle finally showed up, I was sitting up for the first time. I must have seemed like some talking-doll version of myself. Sitting up, blinking my eyes. Since he’d left my place the last time—it would have been a good five months at that point—we’d barely spoken at all, and then just about work. A problem student, a conference we were both considering, something from a journal article. In the hospital, hooked up to every wire in the place, I must have looked like the ghost of someone he’d forgotten he’d known.
    I’m the one just coming out of shock, I wanted to say. Ask me something. Tell me something.
    When he left that day, it was because I asked him to. When he’d left my apartment the spring day we broke up, I’d asked him to. He’d almost always done what I asked.
    Now I wished I’d asked him for more.
    My coffee was gone. I wasn’t supposed to be taking in that much caffeine, but a second cup couldn’t kill me. A bullet hadn’t.
    I tapped across the room to the barista-boy.
    The kid, blushing, waved my money off. I dropped it into the tip jar. He’d have a story to tell.
    “Dr. Emmet,” a man’s voice said. “Welcome back.”
    As I turned, I hoped my memory would hold up again. But it didn’t. This guy—burnished to a high gleam, wearing a collared Rothbert-red golf shirt and khakis ironed to a ruler’s-edge sharpness—didn’t seem familiar at all. University staff. Nobody would wear that shirt if they weren’t paid to. “Thanks,” I said and sipped my coffee for time.
    “You don’t know me,” he said. “Phillip Carrington-Wells, from the Office of Psychological Services.”
    “I know who you are.” Not really. I remembered the name from the business card I’d found outside my office. Though we might have crossed paths before now, too. The year before, a student in my intro class—I couldn’t remember the girl’s name,