“You think that?” The twist of jealousy that knotted in my gut surprised me.
“Who knows?” he said. He sounded less certain now. He cleared his throat. “I’m just saying . . . You know, you said you two weren’t exactly kicking it anymore, so why bother with her? You’re better off without her at your side. You need to know you have people there you can count on.”
“Yeah.” I stared at our ceiling. A long, narrow crack ran through the plaster, bisecting the room; it needed to be painted. “I was hoping maybe you could come up for a few days. You can crash here. I don’t know what’s going to happen next with this suspect. Like you said, it would be nice to have someone here, someone who’s on my side.”
Buster was silent. I waited.
“Well, you know,” he said, “I can’t exactly just break away at a moment’s notice. I’m working and everything.” He cleared his throat.
“Just a couple of days . . .”
“Why don’t we wait and see how this plays out,” he said. “If you get big news or a break in the case, let me know. I’ll come up.” I heard someone talking in the background, a woman. Then the sound was muffled, like his hand was over the phone. I heard his voice but couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then the sound cleared, and he was back on the line. “Okay?”
“Are you dating someone?”
“Here and there,” he said, his voice low. “So we’ll keep in touch and see what happens. Right?”
“Yeah. Right. I guess I need to work on my book.”
“Right. Idle hands and all that. Did I ask you what it’s about? Is it Melville?”
“Hawthorne. Remember?”
“Cool. The Scarlet Letter. Man, I hated that book.”
I heard the voice again in the background.
“Okay, okay,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or someone else. “Okay, Tom, I’ve got to run.”
“Okay,” I said, but he was already off the phone.
Chapter Fifteen
I went to my office in the English department—more out of obligation than anything else—but I couldn’t concentrate on anything. When I sat down at my desk, it felt as though I were sitting behind an unrecognizable wooden block, a piece of furniture whose purpose I no longer remembered or understood. The whole room felt that way. It smelled funny—different—and the proportions and angles of the walls seemed off, as though it had been years and not weeks since I’d been there. I made a halfhearted attempt to sort through the mail. I placed it into two piles: things I knew I would throw away and things I would probably throw away.
I turned on my computer and listened to it whir and grind as it booted. Occasionally a group of students passed in the hallway, their voices sounding like the chirps and calls of exotic birds. It was a mistake to come, I decided. There was no work I could do.
I checked my e-mail. More than eighty messages waited, most of them departmental and university announcements. I scanned the subject lines: Health Fair. Estate Planning. Sandy’s Baby Shower. Spring Teaching Schedules. I didn’t bother to go through them. They’d still be there later, and if anyone needed anything important from me, they could call. I might not answer, but they could call.
I looked at my overcrowded bookshelves. At eye level sat a pile of research materials for the Hawthorne book. I rolled my chair over and picked them up. The top page was dusty, so I wiped it off with the back of my hand. ThenI flippedthrough.A couple of photocopied articles and some notes I’d made on a legal pad. I knew it was my handwriting, but the thoughts on the page didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t remember what I was trying to say. “Wakefield,” it read, and the word was underlined three times. “Opacity.” It was underlined three times as well.
Someone knocked on the door, quick, tentative taps. I decided to just ignore it. But they knocked again, louder and more insistent.
“Shit,” I muttered.
I put the Hawthorne notes away and opened the door.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Stuart?”
“Yes?”
Something about her face seemed vaguely familiar, and at first I assumed she was a student from a previous semester, one of the anonymous multitudes who flew under the radar in an American Lit survey, knocking out the requirement with the same joy and gusto usually reserved for doing laundry. But then I noticed the limpness of her hair, the tiredness of her eyes. It registered.
“Tracy,” I said. “I’m sorry. Out of context, I—”
“You don’t expect to see a girl like me here on campus.”
I stepped back. “Come in. Sit down.” She looked uncertain. Her eyes roamed the room as though she were across a boundary and into another world. She settled into my extra chair, the one where students usually sat. I took my seat behind the desk. “Are you a student here?”
Her laugh possessed a bitter edge. “Yeah, I’d have to rob a bank and not just take off my clothes to pay for this. I didn’t even finish high school.”