In the end, I didn’t know with certainty why Fritz had disappeared any more than I had a decade earlier. His disappearance was an immutable fact, a stark iron signpost planted deeply and firmly in the middle of my life, compelling me to detour this way and that. I had come to think of it the way I think of natural disasters. Why the hurricane struck your coastal town isn’t as significant as the fact that it did, resulting in a complete upheaval of your life.
Pelham Greer’s story reawakened a fierce desire to know what had happened to Fritz. Because now I had a clue that no one else had: Fritz had come back to the dorm. I couldn’t reveal this to anyone without revealing that I had the medal, that I’d had it all along and kept it secret. But this goad, this inconsistency, prodded me to explain it. I needed to find the narrative that made sense of the facts I had. And so, walking among the giant oak trees of the Lawn in the shadow of Stilwell Hall, I decided that I would do just that.
CHAPTER NINE
The following Saturday afternoon at three o’clock, a dozen boys clambered onto the minibus I would be driving to the mixer at Saint Margaret’s. Despite the three-hour drive, the boys were eager for a chance to escape school and even more so for the promise of girls. Clothing had been chosen for its cleanliness and bold colors, and as such the resulting outfits ranged somewhere between sharp and ludicrous. Aftershave stung the air, sharp as lemon juice. When every student on my roster had boarded the bus, I started her up, swung the door shut with a pneumatic thump, and slowly drove down the Hill.
The drive was long but comfortable, a series of short stretches on two-lane roads before we got on the interstate and headed over the mountains toward Charlottesville and then Richmond. The sky burned blue above us, and the dogwoods and sumac were starting to blush red.
I spent the time behind the wheel doing a good deal of thinking. Surprisingly, perhaps, I didn’t think much about Fritz. I had been thinking about him over the past two days and replaying the conversation with Pelham Greer in my head. I’d spent enough time on it to fall behind on my class planning, so between Blackburne and Richmond, I thought mostly about the upcoming Beowulf unit and how I would teach it. Next week I would try to find Deputy Briggs, the one who had questioned me the night of Fritz’s disappearance, and see if he could—or would—tell me anything. For now, I was content to think about the Anglo-Saxons and Beowulf and its rude, majestic violence. My students would love the whole bit about Beowulf ripping off the monster Grendel’s arm.
Aside from a brief food stop, we drove into the early evening, and by seven o’clock our bus rolled into Tappahannock. The boys shook their heads like young dogs newly awakened and were talking in loud, nervous bursts as I steered the bus onto Saint Margaret’s campus. A series of long, low white buildings spread out on the banks of the Rappahannock River, which hung in the air in scents of mud, marsh, and grass that drifted through the open bus windows. A group of girls in dresses walked across the lawn, talking to one another, their hair long and swinging gently at their backs. One of the girls glanced at our bus and said something to her companions, who all turned to look as we drove past. Then Rusty Scarwood stuck his head out a window and shouted, “Evening, ladies!” which caused a few of them to laugh.
The dance was held in the gym, the walls and ceiling of which were swathed in white sheets contrived to look like a giant tent while softly glowing lights were strategically placed around its edges. Music—a heavy-thumping Gwen Stefani song—played too loudly through hidden speakers, although the small stage up front, apparently for the DJ, was empty save for a stack of stereo equipment and an unmanned mike on a stand. Several Saint Margaret’s girls and boys from other boarding schools had already gathered, mostly clumped together by gender, although a few couples were scattered here and there. I checked in with a white-haired matron by the entrance and made sure the boys heard that the dance was over at ten thirty and that we would be heading out immediately afterward. They nodded dutifully and then gazed over the dance floor, some nervous, others like captains scanning a field of battle.
Terence Jarrar was standing near the wall, chewing a thumbnail and looking morosely at a group of girls nearby. I grinned at him, and then indicated the girls with a nod. “Ask one of them to dance,” I said.
He frowned. “What?” he said, raising his voice over the music.
“Ask one of them to dance,” I said loudly just as two of the girls glanced in our direction. Terence blanched and ducked his head. One of the girls raised her eyebrows at me in an expression somewhere between amusement and horror. I waved at her and turned to Terence, intending to tell him to give it the old college try, but he was examining the tops of his shoes, clearly embarrassed. “Hey,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
He shrugged, still looking at his shoes. “It’s okay.”
“Terence,” I said, and he looked up at me. “Really. I’m sorry. Girls are . . .” I paused. Who was I to give anyone advice about girls? The last relationship I’d been in had been a mutual exercise in self-involvement, and after six months it had spiraled into public displays of heartbreak, rage, and reconcilement. I vividly recalled a very public argument in a restaurant, two or three bottles of wine into dinner, with Michele demanding to know when my next book would be finished and me telling her that writing a novel wasn’t like smiling into a camera.
“Mr. Glass?” Terence was looking at me.
“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head clear of the memory. “I just—well, girls are hard enough without your teacher making you feel like a jackass, is all I’m saying.”
He smiled at that. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks, Mr. Glass.” He shook his head. “Girls are . . . well, yeah.”
I laughed and was about to reply when I saw, across the room, two women talking to each other. One of them was short and round, with glasses and a cheerful face framed by straight red hair. The other was Abby Davenport.
AT HER HOUSE THAT January of my senior year, I had asked Abby to the Spring Formal and she’d said yes. Then we realized that my track meets and her concert schedule meant that we would not have a free weekend to see each other until the dance, which wasn’t until the beginning of April. We moaned about such an unfair and empty stretch of time. Maybe spring break? But my parents had planned a trip to Atlanta to visit family over the break, and though I snarled and pleaded and basically acted like an ass, my parents were implacable. Truth to tell, I had been pretty close with my Atlanta cousins when we were younger, and we usually had fun together, but on that trip, I played the romantic martyr to the hilt, sighing and staring outside at the rain that I thought mirrored my soul. My mother said wryly that all I needed was a blindfold and a cigarette to complete the image of a man facing a firing squad.
And then Fritz had disappeared, two weeks before the Spring Formal.
I didn’t see Abby in the terrible days that followed, didn’t call her. I couldn’t. Her brother was missing, and what could I offer her? Faint hope that he was okay? Part of my failure to call was because I was terrified of her father. But I was also numb, disengaging from everyone else as a kind of self-preservation tactic. It’s not a good excuse for how I treated Abby, but it has the relative merit of being honest.
Three days before the dance, Miles Camak knocked on my door after study hall and told me I had a phone call. When he saw the hopeful look on my face—Fritz?—he shook his head sadly. I picked up the phone and heard Abby’s voice on the other end. We spoke awkwardly, perfunctorily. I realized she was calling to say she would not be coming to the Spring Formal. I told her I understood, that I didn’t want to go to the dance anyway. I meant, I would go with her, of course, but— “Yes, yes, of course,” she said. “It just isn’t the right—”
This went on for a little while. I felt both frantic and detached. It was as if, far up in some ivory tower in my mind, somebody else was feverishly planning what I should say next. Whoever it was did a poor job of it, because eventually I realized I was listening to a hollow dial tone. I hung up the phone
and looked at it. Then I went back to my room and lay down on my bed.
Ten minutes before lights-out, I started awake from a light sleep, gasping. I had been in the woods again, Fritz ahead of me. The sky overhead was afire with sunset. Someone was chasing me in the dream, but when I turned around, I saw only Abby, walking away from me toward the lions, just as ahead of me Fritz turned a corner and vanished behind a screen of trees. “Abby,” I had called out, but as I had turned around and taken a step toward her, the ground had opened beneath me and I had fallen into an abyss, waking up just before I was swallowed whole.
I jumped out of bed and went to the hall phone, which was thankfully free, and dialed Saint Margaret’s. After an interminable two minutes, Abby had come to the phone. “Hello?” she said, her voice far away.
“Abby,” I said. “Listen to me, okay? I love you. Do you hear me? I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t say it earlier, I don’t know why I didn’t. And I’m sorry about earlier, on the phone, I—”
“Matthias?”
“And I want to make it work, seriously. I mean, I’ll be at UVA, but we can visit, I can take a bus up to New York, or you can come to Charlottesville—”
“Matthias,” she said again, and I stopped at the sound in her voice. “I’m not going to Juilliard.”
“You—what? You mean, they didn’t . . . You didn’t get—”
“I deferred,” she said, her voice still far away but determined. “I can’t go away to school now. Not like this. Mother is—she’s bad, Matthias. She’s really bad.” Abby started crying softly, almost as if she were hiccupping into the phone. “I can’t leave her, too,” she managed.
“Shhh,” I said, sliding down the wall to sit on the floor. “It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. Don’t worry. I can help. If you stay at home, I can help. I can come over from school—it’s no big deal. Whatever you need, Abby. You want me to come over and cook breakfast, I can do that. Okay? Whatever you want. Fresh fruit. Hot chocolate. Big stacks of pancakes.”
There was another hiccup on the line. It sounded like she was laughing a little. “I hate pancakes,” she said.
“Who hates pancakes?” I said. “You seriously hate pancakes? Okay, no pancakes.”
She said something as I was talking. “What?” I said. “I couldn’t hear you. I’m sorry. What?”
“I said,” she managed, with a teary sigh, “that I love you, too.”
“That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. Say it again.”
“Ha.”
“I’m serious. Say it again. Please.”
“It.” I swore I could hear her smiling.
“Fine. Pancakes for you, then. Every stinking day I’m driving over there and making you eat pancakes.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said. “I love you, okay?”
I held the receiver, my eyes closed. “It’s more than okay.”
And it was, for a time. That summer, I went to Fairfax twice to see Abby. My parents offered to put me up in a nearby hotel, but Wat Davenport, who had by now become a sort of majordomo of the Davenport household, handling much of their day-to-day business, wouldn’t hear of it and had me stay in a guest room, which was down the hall from Abby and next to Fritz’s old room. Mrs. Davenport remained cloistered in her bedroom both times I was there. Mr. Davenport seemed to be living out of his office, which was fine by me—the memory of his rage as he screamed in my face was still raw.
This left Wat to chaperone me and Abby. He made excellent dinners for us, risottos and steak au poivre and a chicken stir-fry in ponzu sauce that was to die for. He even gave us each a glass of wine with dinner. “Don’t drive anywhere tonight,” he would say, lifting an eyebrow at me.
On both of those visits, Abby and I didn’t go anywhere much, didn’t even talk much, really. We were simply content to be in the other’s presence. We hugged a lot, or we sat pressed next to each other on the couch as if trying to permanently affix ourselves to each other, create an indelible mark. When we did talk, we were tentative, exploring neutral topics—books we had read, movies, music. We did not talk about college, or her parents, or Fritz. And yet they all hung about us like ghosts, refusing to leave the premises.
Near the end of my first visit, Abby was downstairs, making popcorn, while I was changing out of my swimsuit. When I dressed and stepped into the hallway, I found myself looking at the door to Fritz’s room, as solid and closed as it had been all week. I hesitated, glanced down the empty hallway, and then crossed to his door. After another moment of hesitation, I placed my hand on the doorknob.
I had been in here before, on my first visit to Fritz’s house. Still, my breath caught in my chest when I swung the door open and saw the same bed with the cream-colored comforter and pillows, a watercolor of a beach in Bermuda over the headboard, a dark fan hanging motionless from the ceiling, Fritz’s blond-wood desk tucked into the front dormer window. Slowly I walked into the room. I kept glancing at the bed as if Fritz were there, just about to pull the covers off his head and sit up, grinning. Fooled you! he would have said. There was nothing on Fritz’s desk except a ballpoint pen with a chewed cap, a first-place trophy for riding, and a set of Harry Potter books lined up neatly at the back. The books were what got me first. There were only the four of them at the time, Sorcerer’s Stone through Goblet of Fire. Fritz had loved those books, as I did. Now he would never read the next ones in the series, or learn what happened to Harry and Ron and Hermione. I stopped, shocked at my own train of thought, thinking of Fritz as if he had died. I had attached myself to the idea that Fritz had run away, because I just couldn’t stand the alternative, but now, standing in his abandoned room, I was struck by the morbid thought that I would never see him again. “No,” I said, low but aloud. He wasn’t dead. I refused to believe it. To the left of his desk, his closet door was open enough to reveal shirts and pants hanging neatly. They’re waiting to be worn again, I thought firmly. Then I saw the poster tape on the walls, left over from all those movie posters Fritz had had up in his room and then taken to Blackburne and put up in our room: Unforgiven, Tombstone, The Usual Suspects. I had no idea where those posters were, now. The Davenports must have thrown them away. Suddenly terrified that Abby would find me in here, I tiptoed to the door and shut it behind me.
The whole first week I visited Abby, we barely kissed out of some sense that it would be indecent. On the last day, two hours before Uncle Wat was supposed to drive me to the airport, Abby was helping me gather my clothes and pack when we both bent over my suitcase at the same time, almost bumping heads. We stopped just in time and looked up, our faces three inches apart, Abby’s mouth slightly open as if she were dazed. Without thinking, I kissed her, and then we were kissing frantically, as if trying to reach something deep within the other. Her hands were clumsy around my belt buckle; my hands were under her shirt, clawing at her bra. She pulled back suddenly, gasping. “Wait,” she managed, and she left me with my pants half-unzipped to cross the room to a linen closet and grab a faded beach towel, which she threw over the bedcover. “Lock the door,” she said as she began pulling her shirt off. We had sex for the first time on top of that guest bed, me fumbling with the condom wrapper, Abby whimpering into my shoulder even as she clutched me to her and crossed her calves over the back of mine, me managing half a dozen awkward thrusts before I came, and both of us lying stunned in the aftermath.
Leaving was awkward. We were both silent as Wat chatted away from behind the wheel of the car. I couldn’t look Abby in the eye. It wasn’t that I felt I had done something wrong, but more that I had not done it right. I’d had vague notions of getting a hotel room with Abby one day, a bottle of champagne in a bucket, a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. Now that first time—our first time—was gone. I stared out the window until Abby tapped my knee. I turned to see her looking at me, her eyebrows quirked together in a question, until a slow smile played at the corners of her mouth. Something eased and opened in my chest, and I smiled back. We were okay. Of course we were. We loved e
ach other.
The next time I visited, we were able to plan ahead to when Wat would be attending some business function in D.C. We went down to the home theater armed with pillows and blankets, put on a Dave Matthews CD and turned down the lights, locked the door, and slowly explored each other. The second time we had sex that night, Abby was on top. Suddenly her breath grew ragged and her movement faster until she orgasmed with a loud, gasped “Oh!” In my shock at what I had helped to bring about, I felt like I had just discovered the answer to a mystery other men had died for.
Love can be a hell of a draw, the emotional holy grail. But love also exposes our flaws, can even draw out the worst in us. People want to perform heroic deeds, commit flagrantly dramatic acts for love. What they don’t realize is that the daily grind is what is required. Instead of a single extraordinary act—slaying the dragon, throwing yourself in front of a bus—it is the repetition of small gestures over a course of years that makes love work. And if I am terrible at anything, it is that sort of consistency.
The problem wasn’t that I became too used to Abby, too easily persuaded that there might be something better. The problem wasn’t her. It was the person who was supposed to be there, who had been swallowed up by that belt of trees surrounding Blackburne, who in his absence had become the dark matter in my personal universe, mysteriously exerting his effect on me in ways I hadn’t thought possible.
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