J
eff Blackhawk drove with one hand on the steering wheel. He ate his Baconator with the other hand, kept his gigantic Coke between his knees, and Mira held his carton of large fries within reach for him. As he ate and drove, Jeff also kept up both sides of the conversation for them. It seemed that the difficulty Mira was having holding up her end had become apparent to him after he’d asked her about her childhood (the simple stuff: where had she grown up, what had her parents done) and she’d spluttered something about her mother being a housewife before she’d had to stop talking in order to stifle the sob she knew would be coming if she allowed herself to utter even one more word.
“I fucking hate this state,” Jeff said. “I grew up in West Texas, which everyone makes fun of, but I’ll tell you what—” He chewed on that and his Baconator for quite a while before he continued. “People know how to live in West Texas. You get yourself some land, no trees, for one thing. A trailer. Flat. Flat! And there’s the sky. It’s
everywhere.
”
It occurred to Mira that Jeff Blackhawk’s poetry might be of the super-minimalist variety. He seemed to need a long time to find the words for what he wanted to convey, but when he did, they were the right words.
She could see his West Texas, although she’d never been to it. The trailer. The flat land. A bush far out in the distance.
Blue. Blue.
“Here,” Jeff said, waving his Baconator at the windshield as if to erase the landscape. “Clutter. Junk. Nothing.”
He was nothing like Clark, Mira was realizing. Clark would never have used the word
fucking
in casual conversation, only in anger—and if he’d found himself having to go to Wendy’s for some reason, he would have ordered a chicken breast with lettuce and tomato. If he’d had to eat in his car, he would have eaten in the parking lot before driving off. He would never,
ever
, Mira felt entirely certain, have offered to drive a woman he knew distantly from work two hundred miles away to retrieve her children from her mother-in-law.
“How’s your research going?” Jeff asked Mira, but he didn’t wait for her to answer. “I’ve gotten even more interested in your subject, you know. So, sorry, but you might have some competition from me. Not that I can write prose, so you don’t have any competition
there.
But this whole thing, with the girl. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but a couple of years ago I dated a girl. She wasn’t
my
student”—he turned to look at Mira seriously here, and didn’t look away until she’d looked him in the eyes—“but she
was
a student, and she was in that sorority, the one Nicole Werner was in.
Hoo.
Did she have some stories! She got out when they wanted to put her in a coffin and raise her from the dead, and then they ostracized her so badly she transferred to Penn State. Now,
there’s
something for your sex and death book: sorority girls in coffins.
“She was an incredible girl, really. Hair like”—he swallowed the last bite of his Baconator, but it seemed to be going down with difficulty, as if crossing paths with the simile he was considering—“glass, sheet metal. I don’t date students usually, Mira. I’m well aware of my reputation, but it’s just a lonely man’s reputation, not a Casanova. I have a bad feeling, anyway, these days, that if I decided to cut a swathe through the female student population of Godwin Honors College, it would be more like a square inch than a swathe. But!” He held both hands above the steering wheel and said to the windshield, “There
was a time
! Yes, indeed, there was a day in the life of a lonely man named Jeff Blackhawk. Indeed.”
Mira looked down at his knees. There was a grease stain on his jeans where he’d rested the burger between bites. She realized, then, that the scent that wafted around him in the hallways, the one she’d taken for some kind of masculine emission of heat, was the smell of this car, and Baconators. She resisted an urge to put her hand on the knee and pat it. It was not a sexual urge, and Mira felt certain that he would not have misconstrued it as a sexual gesture—but at that moment he did not have his hands on the steering wheel, and he seemed so excitable that Mira was a little worried they’d end up in the median if she made even the gentlest of sudden movements.
“H
i, Perry.”
“Josie.”
“Haven’t seen you around for a while.”
Perry couldn’t walk around her. She was standing directly in front of him and in front of Karess, who was standing beside him. The only place to go without knocking over one of the two of them was to crawl over a table at which two guys who looked like graduate students sat, passing a page full of calculations angrily back and forth between them, and he couldn’t do that.
“Yeah,” he said to Josie, and looked around her showily in the direction of the Starbucks counter, trying to make it clear that he was on his way
past
her, that he didn’t plan to linger here
with
her. But Josie had never been one to take her cues from other people. “Are you living with Craig?” she asked him. “Because that’s the rumor.” She glanced at Karess, head to toe, and seemed to dismiss her before turning back to Craig again.
“Why do you want to know?” Perry asked.
“Because I want to know,” Josie said.
“Look. Josie, I’ve—”
“Excuse me,” Karess said, sounding meekly polite as she squeezed between Perry and Josie. When she reached the counter she turned and gestured for Perry to follow, but he couldn’t, because Josie was still standing in front of him.
“Who’s that?” Josie asked, jerking her head in Karess’s direction. “You’re dating a hippie chick?”
“Josie—”
“Look,” Josie said. “I want you to tell Craig something for me.”
Perry looked at the ceiling. He waited.
“I want you to tell Craig ‘fuck you’ for me.”
Perry continued to stare at the ceiling—although, out of the corner of his eye he could see that Karess was still waving her pale hand at him, a bit more frantically now. Her bracelets seemed to catch the light, which danced around on the ceiling. He tried to concentrate on that even as he saw (as if, suddenly, he had panoramic vision and could take in all of Starbucks without taking his eyes off the ceiling) Josie’s equally pale hand rise up and rush toward him, colliding with his face.
The smacking sound was oddly muffled to him because, along with his cheek, Josie had struck him in the ear, but it was clear to him, even in his shocked state, that everyone else in Starbucks had heard it, because they all turned to stare at him at once as Josie’s little black shoes snapped away, back to the corner she’d come from, sounding like claws or talons tapping across the linoleum as she went.
“Oh, my God!” Karess cried out, and rushed toward him as if she thought he’d been shot. She grabbed his arm and body-slammed him toward the door, pushed him out into the street. “Oh, my God!” she screamed again. “That girl slapped you!”
S
helly turned at the sound of a slap to see Josie red-cheeked and openmouthed, heading back toward their table, the boy she’d apparently slapped and his girlfriend careening back out the door into what now seemed to be an actual blizzard.
The same feeling of surrender, defeat, with which she’d sat back down when Josie told her to came over Shelly when she realized she was going to have to walk home in that blizzard wearing only a dress and a thin sweater. Maybe Josie would slap her, too, before she had to go back out there.
Josie tossed herself down in the chair across from Shelly, and the whole room erupted in cheers and laughter, as if the home team had just scored a touchdown. Two scholarly-looking guys at a table near the door high-fived each other. There were a few whistles, and a girl alone at a table in the corner looked up from her laptop, pumped her fist in the air. “You go, girl!” the cashier behind the counter shouted. The guy who was making cappuccinos and lattes stabbed a thumbs-up into the air, and even the mother with the toddler in the stroller who’d followed Shelly in from the cold and spoken to her so kindly was smiling.
Had something been said that Shelly hadn’t heard—something for which the boy deserved to be slapped? And if he
had
said something, could so many have heard it? Shelly herself hadn’t heard a thing until she’d heard the sound of the slap, and the girlfriend’s alarmed exclamations, and some of those hooting with approval had been sitting even farther from the scene than she was.
Of course, had that boy slapped Josie he would have been tackled by the very guys who were high-fiving one another now. The police would have been called. The boy would have been taken out of Starbucks in handcuffs.
Josie was pink-cheeked, her lips parted. She wasn’t smiling, but neither did she look particularly upset.
“What happened?” Shelly asked, trying to sound more concerned than she felt, more alarmed. What she wanted was to get out of there.
“Fucking asshole,” Josie said. “He lives with somebody I hate.”
“Who?” Shelly asked, and Josie muttered a name. Shelly leaned forward and asked again. “Who?”
“Craig Clements-Rabbitt,” Josie said, exasperated, as if Shelly had been badgering her about it for days. “He’s this jerk who—”
“The boy who was in the car crash,” Shelly said—and as she said it, her own voice sounded to her like someone else’s. A narrator’s voice. The distant voice of a storyteller. An omniscient narrator. A narrator who’d known all the facts all along but had chosen to reveal them slowly. “Craig Clements-Rabbitt,” she repeated, not to Josie, but to herself. “You knew him.”
Josie snorted, and rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I knew him,” she said. “He’s a liar and a womanizer and he deserves everything that’s coming to him—and, believe me, it will be bad, what’s coming to him.”
“You think he killed your roommate,” Shelly said. “Nicole. Your friend.”
Josie didn’t deny it, although she’d yet to tell Shelly that she’d been the dead girl’s roommate. And in all that had passed between them since, Shelly had never asked.
But now, if there’d ever been a reason to deny it, there was no longer any reason, and no more denying it. Josie shrugged, and said, “Yeah. That’s part of it.”
It was a dismissal.
Yes, he might have killed her friend, but there was something even worse he’d done.
“What did he do, Josie?”
Josie waved her question away, and said, “It doesn’t matter now. He’s going to pay
.
”
“He’s already paid,” Shelly said, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “I was at the scene of the accident. I saw what happened. And what
didn’t
happen.”
“Everybody pays in the end,” Josie said, and then she laughed without the slightest hint of joy.
“Is that how you feel about me?” Shelly asked her.
Josie looked genuinely surprised at the question. Her eyebrows disappeared under her bangs.
“No,” Josie said, after considering it for what seemed like an eternity. She then uttered one more sharp, strange laugh, and left her mouth hanging open afterward, still looking at Shelly in surprise. “Don’t you get it by now? This has nothing to do with
us.
And it’s not some stupid hazing thing like you think. I mean, I wouldn’t degrade myself for something like that, and Omega Theta Tau would never ask me to!
God.
The thing with us has to do with that: You were at the scene. They want to get you out of here.”
Josie leaned back against her chair and regarded Shelly as if from a very great distance. She had the expression of someone who had just dotted the last
i
on a writing assignment, stapled the pages, and handed it in:
There you have it, what do you think?
Shelly could do nothing but stare back.
“I
wouldn’t have offered if it was a problem,” Jeff said. “I think your kids are cute, and you’ve got this library full of Camille Paglia. Who
wouldn’t
want to babysit here?”
“They like you,” Mira said, more out of surprise than as a compliment. Andy and Matty each sat on one of his loafers as he bounced his feet. Jeff was sprawled out on the couch as if the apartment were his, and he’d placed his coffee cup on the floor, where it was sure to be knocked over, but this carelessness somehow made his presence even more beneficent, more welcome. “Thank you,” she said again. “I’ll be back in time for you to get to your class. I swear.”
“Hey, my students never expect me on time anyway, and you can’t run out of the morgue without saying good-bye. Take your time. We’ll just be reading feminist literary theory here and smearing graham crackers all over ourselves.”
“I hope you don’t have to change a diaper,” Mira said. “But—”
“
Butt?!
Jesus, I hope not too. But, yeah, it’s all fine. Little secret: I took a Red Cross babysitting course when I was in middle school, hoping to make some extra money for dope, and I did great in the class, but somehow no one would hire me to watch their kids. Until now! Still, I remember that whole thing about diaper changing. Not to worry.”
Mira waved good-bye to the boys, who squealed, holding tightly to Jeff’s pale, hairy ankles, exposed between his socks and the frayed cuffs of his khaki trousers.
It was unpleasantly cold out, and the clouds were sinister blue things skimming low over the buildings. The students hurrying past her on the sidewalk on the way to class had their heads buried in their parkas, although a few still mysteriously, or brazenly, wore flip-flops. A bicyclist tore through the damp street, tires making the sound of hissing snakes. A man stood in a front yard pounding a stake into the lawn.
A For Rent sign, Mira supposed.
She supposed, too, that soon she’d have to start reading the classifieds and looking at the posted For Rent signs, looking for an apartment, and the thought of this filled her eyes with tears before she even realized she’d thought it.
Clark.
Jesus Christ.
Up in Petoskey, his mother had actually, physically, tried to keep Mira from leaving the house with the twins.
“Mira, Clark left them with
me.
He’ll be back tomorrow, I’m sure. What am I going to tell him?”
“You’ll tell him that their mother, his wife, came to get them. That she’s taken them home.”
“But, Mira, you can’t just—”
But by that point Mira already had the diaper bag packed. She’d buttoned the twins’ jackets up over their sweaters, and was carrying one child on each hip like two sweet bags of groceries. They’d been so excited to see her that they’d begun to scream, and now, on either side of her, they were patting her cheeks as if to check that they were the real thing. It stung, the patting, but Mira loved it.
Clark’s mother took hold of the sleeve of her sweater and said, “Don’t go
,
Mira. I’ll have to—”
“You’ll have to what?” Mira asked. She was careful not to raise her voice, which would have alarmed the twins, who, after all, adored their grandmother. “What will you have to do, Kay? Call the police? Tell them the twins’ mother came and picked them up? Or call Clark? I’ve tried that myself. A hundred times. He doesn’t have the cell phone turned on, or he doesn’t have it with him, and what good would that do, anyway? We’ve all got to go home eventually, and the boys need to be with their mother.”
In defeat, it seemed, Clark’s mother let go of Mira’s sleeve, and Mira felt sorry for her. Her hair was grayer than Mira remembered, and it was all combed to one side of her head, leaving a bare patch of scalp exposed. She was wearing a ratty
KEY WEST
sweatshirt, a place Mira was certain Kay had never been. It broke Mira’s heart, really. Clark’s mother had never been anything but kind to her, and loving to the twins. But she had to go. She had to have her children with her, and she had to work, so she had to take them home.
“I’m sorry, Kay,” Mira said. “And so grateful to you for keeping them, for taking such good care of them.”
Kay swallowed, nodded solemnly, and then kissed each boy, and then she kissed Mira, too, on the cheek, with the same silly smacking sound she’d used on Andy and Matty.
“I love you
all
!” she said loudly, voice cracking, chin quivering, and Mira found herself crying then, too, and the twins were looking at her tears, wiping at them, seeming sober and astonished, looking from Mira to their grandmother, who walked Mira to the door then and looked out.
Jeff had stayed in the car so as not to be in the way. He had the engine running, and it was making guttural noises, blowing blue smoke out of the tailpipe. He appeared to be, possibly, singing to himself, or reciting something, while staring at his lap.
“Who is that?” Kay asked Mira. “Who is that man?” She said it as if she’d seen a ghost.
“His name is Jeff Blackhawk,” Mira explained. “He’s my colleague at the college. He offered to drive me because, you know, I don’t have the car. Because Clark has the car.”
Clark’s mother nodded slowly at this, as if that all made a peculiar kind of sense, and then she said under her breath, “Is he an Indian?” as if he might be able to hear her.
“I don’t think so,” Mira whispered back. “I haven’t gotten that impression.”
Clark’s mother nodded as if, at least, there was this bit of good news, and then she grabbed Mira’s sleeve again and said, “Bring the babies back as soon as you can. And be careful getting home. Work things out with Clark. I love you, darling.”
“I love you, too,” Mira said, and she looked at Clark’s mother for a long time before she turned with the twins to the door, to the car.
B
ack at the apartment, after the long drive home, and after Jeff had helped her carry the twins up the stairs (leaving with the tip of an imaginary cap, and a little bow), Mira was feeling so solaced by their return that she hadn’t even thought of Clark. The relief of having the boys in her arms, nursing them, kissing them, smelling their hair and the napes of their necks, was complete, as if she’d been held hostage those days without them, and had just been released. Tears ran down her cheeks and into their hair as she rocked back and forth on the couch and they sucked greedily until they finally fell asleep. Then, she lifted them, put them in the cribs (a difficult feat with two limp toddlers, but they were sound asleep) and then lingered a long time afterward in the nursery, looking down at them in their cribs. Home.
I
t wasn’t until she was on her way up the stairs to Godwin Hall to meet her class for their field trip to the morgue that Mira realized, fully, that a new part of her life had started, and would continue to be starting, whether she wanted it to or not.