“And if he were in an accident?” Annie asks.
Sheehy shakes his head. “Truth be told, Mrs. Statler, that’s unlikely. It’s been seventy-two hours, and there’s been no report of any accidents. My men have traveled the route from Sam’s office to your house a few times now. We would have found his car.” He offers a downcast smile, doing his best to appear sympathetic. “I know you’re worried, but rest assured we’re doing everything we can. We’ll call you the minute we hear anything. But the thing you can do, Mrs. Statler, is try to manage those nerves.”
“I’ll do my best,” she says, standing up. “And maybe in return you can try to manage my name. It’s Potter.”
Chapter 29
Sam feels the faint flutter of wings against his cheek and opens his eyes. The moths fade to black and it’s him again. Albert Bitterman, his landlord, standing at the doorway, a blue apron tied at his waist. “Hey there, heartbreaker,” Albert says, pushing a medical cart into the room. “How are you feeling?”
“Confused,” Sam says, trying to sit up. “Why am I at your house?” And why do you have a medical cart?
“I’ve told you already,” Albert says. “You had an accident.” He parks the cart at the foot of Sam’s bed and snaps on a pair of blue latex gloves. “A tree came down as you pulled out of the driveway. Lucky for you, I saw the whole thing from my porch. I ran out as quick as I could.”
“Why am I not at the hospital—”
“Seems you shattered both of your legs,” Albert says, cutting him off. “Don’t worry, though. I fixed them all up. And I’m giving you something to manage the pain.”
The idea seems strange, and yet oddly familiar—two broken legs, a steady stream of pills—but he can’t pinpoint why. “Annie,” he says. “I need to call Annie, my wife. Can I use your phone?”
But Albert ignores him and takes a bottle of pills from the pocket of his apron.
“No,” Sam says. “No more pills. I need to call Annie.”
Sam tries to turn his face away, but Albert is gripping Sam’s chin and forcing three pills into his mouth, holding Sam’s jaw closed with a shaky hand, long enough for the pills to dissolve. The taste is bad, Buckley’s Mixture bad, the stuff his mom used to give him when he had a sore throat. “It tastes awful. And it works” is Buckley’s actual slogan, printed right there on the box, but even that tastes a million times better than these pills, which work impressively quickly, melting his body, summoning the moths, reducing reality to two facts: his head doesn’t hurt anymore, and he is just so very fucked.
Chapter 30
“Hang on, Professor Potter,” the kid sauntering down the center aisle calls to Annie the following day. “Nice job today,” he says, throwing her a smile as she hands him the paper she’d finished grading this morning, barely in time for class, in which he twice put the word “patriarchy” in quotes. “You’re almost starting to convince me I should question the assumptions I make when I read. Almost.”
“Thanks, Brett,” Annie says.
His face reddens. “My name’s Jonathan.”
I know your name’s Jonathan—you’re one of the guys who signed up for this class solely because most of the students are women—but Brett is a prick’s name, and you seem like a prick. “Sorry,” Annie says. “Have a good day.”
She collects her notes and waits for the last students to leave before turning off the lights, unsure how she survived that class. Forty-five minutes in front of a packed auditorium of sleep-deprived college kids, exploring how male authors describe female characters in six works of popular fiction, beginning with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. “‘Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood,’” she read out loud from the front of the room, hoping the students didn’t notice the way the book trembled in her hand. “‘She was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.’” She had gone back and forth a hundred times about canceling the class, but decided this morning not to. She’s going to lose her mind at home, waiting to hear his key in the lock.
She hurries across the quad to the department building, simple and run-down, nothing like Columbia. But this is what she wanted, what she and Sam both wanted: a simpler life. She’d been carrying a heavy load since getting her degree at Cornell, where she stayed on to teach. She was finishing up her next stint, a two-year gig at Columbia, when she met Sam, contemplating what was next. She’d been offered tenure track at Utah State with little expectation to publish, but she turned it down and accepted a visiting scholar position here, at a tiny liberal arts college in upstate New York, following the first man she ever loved.
There’s a small crowd waiting for the elevator, and she decides to take the stairs to her office on the third floor. She’s unlocking the door when Elisabeth Mitchell, the dean of the department, steps out of her office three doors down.
“Annie,” she says. “What are you doing here?”