“Did you get my message?” Mira said, bursting into the apartment. “I’m so—”
Jeff raised a hand to silence her. He was sitting cross-legged on the shabby Oriental rug on the floor of the apartment. Andy was at one of his knees, Matty at the other. They glanced at Mira, and then back at Jeff. “Listen,” Jeff said, and Mira could hear the intensity in his voice, so she stopped, although what she had to tell him hardly felt like something that could wait.
Slowly Jeff lifted one finger of the hand that was raised, and moved it in front of the twins’ eyes.
“One,” Andy said.
Matty nodded. “One.”
Jeff didn’t look up at her. If he had, he’d have seen her stagger backward, a hand to her mouth. Mira had never heard either twin speak a recognizable word. Not Mama, not Papa, not one single word.
Then, like a magician preparing for a trick, Jeff put the hand behind his back and brought it around again with two fingers raised.
“Two!” the twins shouted in unison.
“Oh, my God!” Mira cried, holding her face in both hands.
This time there was no goofing around. Jeff raised the third finger, and before they even saw it, they screamed out, “Three!” and he turned to Mira, laughing. “Mira, they can get up to ten, no problem. I don’t know what language you guys have been teaching them, but they have no problem with mine.”
It took Mira a long time, a lot of hugging of the twins on her knees, and the repetition of the trick over and over, up to five, up to eight, up to ten, before she had the heart to set the blocks out for them and say, “Mama will be right back.”
Jeff stood up, grunting a little as he did (clearly he’d been sitting crossed-legged on the living room floor for a long time) and followed her into the kitchen, where, as soon as she was sure the twins couldn’t see, Mira turned and threw her arms around his remarkably large, soft torso (how was it she’d always thought he’d looked so solid? In her arms he felt plump and pliable) and hugged him with her face pressed into his over-warm chest as he patted her sweetly between her shoulder blades. Mira could have stayed like that forever, breathing in the tavern and car and fast-food cologne of him. She would have liked to stay like that, and maybe have wept, and maybe taken him afterward to her bed, where she would have slept for hours in his arms, but she had to tell him what had happened. Still with an arm around him, she led him to the table, sat down, and began:
First, the morgue.
She had been trying to reach the office of the dean, to return his call, in a panic about what his indecipherable voice mail message to her could possibly have been about. She’d been pacing in the alley, punching numbers, holding the fucking phone to her ear, and every time his secretary answered, either the secretary couldn’t hear Mira or Mira couldn’t hear the secretary, or they were simply, abruptly, cut off. Mira had been inching away from the building, closer to the street, hoping to get better reception, but also afraid to stray too far from her class, when she heard the morgue door open, and turned to see Perry running into the alley in his mint green booties and scrubs, ashen-faced.
“Professor Polson, Professor Polson, Lucas is in the—”
She’d been alarmed by his expression, although she didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her. She’d dropped the phone into her bag and followed Perry back, and hadn’t bothered with the booties and scrubs, just burst through the doors, passing Kurt, who said to her as she passed, “You knew of this student?”
And, indeed, there he was—poor, sad, scroungy, familiar Lucas laid out under a sheet up to his shoulders, with what might have been a rope burn around his neck, his eyes closed.
“You knew of him,” Kurt repeated, and Mira, fighting the urge to bolt from the room, could not even manage to nod. She put a hand to her mouth, and stifled what might have turned into an actual scream if she hadn’t. Except for Perry, the other students had already left the room, thank God, but they were still out there stripping off scrubs, putting scrubs on, some still waiting to get their chance to see the autopsy room.
“Jesus Christ,” Jeff said. “Lucas?”
They talked for a while about Lucas and how, if there had been a most-likely-to-hang-himself award on campus, Lucas might have won it. The drugs. The posture. The delusions. The nihilistic books and music. All that world weariness carried around in his hemp backpack. Still, Mira couldn’t help but ask, “Do you think it had to do with Nicole Werner, with—”
“Shit yes,” Jeff said. “A kid thinks he’s had sex with a dead girl? Either he was mentally ill beforehand or he would have been after.”
Mira told him then about the cryptic, urgent call from the dean.
“I haven’t called him back yet,” she said. “It’s something urgent. What do you think he wants?”
“Nothing,” Jeff said. “Staples—you’re missing a couple. Or he wants to know if you need more. I know you don’t have tenure yet, Mira, and I’m familiar with all the fantasies a person without tenure has, but, believe me, Dean Fleming is just calling to ask you if you like his new tie or something. Go in and see him. The sooner you get it over with the better.”
Mira felt such a rush of warmth again she was afraid she’d melt into tears. She’d desperately missed—without even knowing it—having an adult male tell her that everything would be okay. How direly she’d needed a man who, despite the obvious flaws in his personality, seemed competent, and sane, and full of goodwill toward her. All Mira could manage was to stare at him in wonder, and gratitude, and then Jeff was standing up, handing Mira the purse she’d dropped on the table.
“Go,” he said. “Get thee to the dean. I have two hours before your little urchins destroy me with the secret linguistic and mathematical knowledge I was so foolish as to impart to them.”
“Oh, Jeff.”
“ ‘Oh, Jeff’ nothing. Go.”
He pulled her up from her chair by the arm and pointed her toward the door.