was in a room off the main corridor of the student health services building. It was a narrow spot, not particularly comfortable, with a single desk, three telephones, and a few posters celebrating the schedules of the football, lacrosse, and soccer teams, with pictures of athletes. There was also a large campus map and a typed list of emergency services and security numbers. In slightly larger print, there was a protocol to be followed in the case where the person manning the suicide prevention line became convinced that someone had actually attempted to kill themselves. The protocol explained the steps to take, to call police, and have the 911 operator run a line check, which would trace a call back to a location. This was to be used only in the direst of emergencies, when a life was at stake, and rescue services needed to be dispatched. Ricky had never availed himself of this capacity. In the weeks he’d worked the graveyard shift, he’d always been able to talk, if not common sense, at least delay, into even the most frantic of callers. He had wondered whether any of the young people he’d helped would have been astonished to know that the calm voice speaking reason to them belonged to a janitor in the chemistry department.
Ricky told himself:
A conclusion, he recognized, brought him to a decision. He would have to lead Rumplestiltskin away from Durham. If he was to survive the upcoming confrontation, Richard Lively needed to be safe and remain anonymous.
He whispered to himself: “Back to New York.”
As he was reaching this realization, the phone on the desktop rang. He punched the proper line and picked up the receiver.
“Crisis,” he said. “How can I help you?”
There was a momentary pause, and then he heard a muffled sob. This was followed by a string of disconnected words, that separately meant little, but taken together, said much. “I can’t, I just can’t, it’s all too much, I don’t want, oh, I just don’t know…”
A young woman, Ricky thought. He heard no slurring beyond the sobs of emotion, so he didn’t think there were any drugs or alcohol involved in the call. Just middle-of-the-night loneliness and low-rent despair. “Can you slow down,” he said gently, “and try to fill me in on what is going on? You don’t have to give me the big picture. Just right now, right this moment. Where are you?”
A pause, then a response: “In my dormitory room.”
“Okay,” Ricky said, gently, starting to probe. “Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“No roommate? Friends?”
“No. All alone.”
“Is that the way you are all the time? Or does it just feel that way?”
This question seemed to cause the young woman to think hard. “Well, my boyfriend and I broke up and my classes are all terrible and when I get home, my folks are going to kill me because I’ve dropped off the honors list. In fact, I might not pass my comp lit course and it all seems to have come to a head and…”
“And so something made you call this line, right?”
“I wanted to talk. I didn’t want to do something to myself…”
“That makes eminently good sense. It sounds like this hasn’t been the best of semesters.”
The young woman laughed, a little bitterly. “You could say that.”
“But there are other semesters to come, right?”
“Well, yes.”
“And the boyfriend, why did he say he left you?”
“He said he didn’t like being tied down right now…”
“And this reply made you, what? Depressed?”
“Yes. It was like a slap in the face. I felt like he’d just been using me, you know, for sex, and then with summer coming, well, he figured I wasn’t worth it anymore. It was just like I was some sort of candy bar. Taste me and throw me away…”
“That’s well put,” Ricky said. “An insult, then. A blow to your sense of who you are.”
Again the young woman paused. “I guess, but I hadn’t really seen it that way.”
“So,” Ricky continued, still speaking in a solid, soft voice, “really instead of being depressed and thinking that there’s something wrong with you, you should be angry with the son of a bitch, because clearly the problem is with him. And the problem is selfishness, right?”
He could hear the young woman nodding in agreement. This was the most typical of telephone calls, he thought. She called in a state of boyfriend- and school-related despair, but really wasn’t anywhere close to that state, when examined a little more closely.
“I think that’s a fair statement,” she said. “The bastard.”
“So, maybe you’re better off without him. It’s not like there aren’t other fish in that sea,” Ricky said.
“I thought I loved him,” the young woman said.
“And so it hurts a bit, doesn’t it? But the hurt isn’t because you actually have had your heart broken. It’s more because you feel that you engaged in a lie. And now you’ve had your sense of trust staggered.”
“You make sense,” she said. Ricky could sense the tears drying up on the other end of the line. After a minute, she added, “You must get a lot of calls like this one. It all seemed so important and so awful a minute or two ago. I was crying and sobbing and now…”
“There’s still the grades. What will happen when you get home?”
“They’ll be pissed. My dad will say, ‘I’m not spending my hard-earned dollars on a bunch of C’s…’ ”
The young lady did a passable harrumph and deepened her voice, capturing her father pretty effectively. Ricky laughed, and she joined him.
“He’ll get over it,” he said. “Just be honest. Tell him about your stresses, and about the boyfriend, and that you’ll try to do better. He’ll come around.”
“You’re right.”
“So,” Ricky said, “here’s the prescription for this evening. Get a good night’s sleep. Put the books away. Get up in the morning and go buy yourself one of those really sweet frothy coffees, one with all the calories in it. Take the coffee outside to one of the quads, sit on a bench, sip the drink slowly and admire the weather. And, if you happen to see the boy in question, well, ignore him. And if he wants to talk, walk away. Find a new bench. Think a little bit about what the summer holds. There’s always some hope that things will get better. You just have to find it.”
“All right,” she said. “Thanks for talking with me.”
“If you’re still feeling stressed, like to the point where you don’t think you can handle things, then you should make an appointment with a counselor at health services. They’ll help you through problems.”
“You know a lot about depression,” she said.
“Oh, yes,” Ricky replied, “I do. Usually it is transitory. Sometimes it isn’t. The first is an ordinary condition of life. The second is a true and terrible disease. You sound like you’ve just got the first.”
“I feel better,” she said. “Maybe I’ll get a sweet roll with that cup of coffee. Calories be damned.”
“That’s the attitude,” Ricky said. He was about to hang up, but stopped. “Hey,” he said, “help me out with something…”
The young woman sounded a bit surprised, but replied, “Huh? What? You need help?”
“This is the crisis hot line,” Ricky said, allowing humor to seep into his voice. “What makes you think that the folks on this end don’t have their own crises?”
The young woman paused, as if digesting the obviousness of this statement. “Okay,”
