Mira had never shared anything about her personal problems with a colleague before. Even in graduate school when her fellow students regularly wept late into the night in one another’s arms over their breakups and their breakdowns, Mira had kept a close check on what she told others about herself.
One of her best friends, Tessa, another doctoral candidate in anthropology, had told Mira about the years of incest abuse she’d endured as a child by a much older half-brother, and then had reacted with bitterness that seemed to border on rage when Mira told her, many years into their friendship, about her mother’s death.
“You never told me your mother was dead.”
“She died years ago,” Mira tried to explain. “I was an undergraduate. You and I hadn’t met.”
“But we’ve discussed your mother on about five hundred occasions,” Tessa had said as Mira recognized in her friend’s eyes a dawning apprehension, a withdrawal, a dismissal that heralded the end of their friendship, “and you never once indicated that your parents weren’t both still happy and healthy and living in Ohio. I told you all about my father’s death. It seems like that might have been a good time to mention that you, too, had a parent who’d died.”
Mira hadn’t intended to shrug. She knew that a shrug indicated that either it didn’t matter or she couldn’t comprehend the big fuss. But she’d felt herself doing it anyway—and, as she shrugged, she felt as if something shawl-like (her friendship with Tessa?) was slipping off her shoulders, discarded behind her.
So it was that much more surprising to find herself now weeping into her hands as Jeff Blackhawk sat across from her, watching, rubbing his knees with his palms. She could not suppress the sobs.
Truly, Mira had meant to tell him only that she was in a hurry because she had to rent a car, that her husband had theirs, that she was going to drive up north to get her children from their grandmother. But the second she uttered their names (Andy, Matty) her lungs had seemed to fill instantly with tears, and she’d found herself choking, gasping, spluttering. Finally, after what must have seemed to him to be an alarming amount of time, Jeff said, “Mira,” the way you might call a dog that was running toward the road, and she looked up, and the expression of doomed embarrassment on his face snapped her back.
Mira turned around quickly in her chair and grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on her desk, and hurriedly began to wipe her eyes and nose, her cheeks, her lips. God only knew what she must look like, she thought, or what the condition of her eye makeup might be, but she finally managed to take a deep, trembling breath, and speak.
“Jeff,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry. I haven’t slept and—”
He waved his hand as if to clear the air of smoke or tear gas. “No,” he said. “You don’t have to apologize, but I’d like to know what I can do to help. Certainly you’re not in any shape to drive up north, are you? Let me call someone for you. Or, I don’t really have anything to do until I teach on Thursday, except read bad student poetry. I could take you in my car. I like kids. I’d like to meet yours.”
“Oh, that’s so—” Mira felt the shame of her relief in that moment like an implosion. “But I—”
“Just let me, okay, Mira. They’re predicting the first snowfall of the year today. Or tonight. It might even be a big one. The roads’ll be slippery, and in your condition?” He held up his hands at the obviousness. “You owe it to your kids not to get killed on the road. Let me—”
“Okay,” she said.