“He started talking about college,” I blurted out, my words stumbling over one another. “About not—not getting in. He w-worried about it—worries about it, all the time.” Realizing that I had spoken about Fritz in the past tense made me start to cry again. “I told him . . . I told him to shut up about it, Mr. Davenport. I’m so sorry. I told him you would get him into school, you and his uncle. I said you’d get him in. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” And I cried, standing there in my room, in front of Fritz’s father. I turned away, my face hot and slick, and I covered my face with my hands.
When I heard a rustle of movement, I didn’t know if he was stepping back, or reaching out a hand to touch my shoulder, or just picking up his suit jacket. All I know is that, after a moment, Mr. Davenport walked out of the room without a word, leaving the door open behind him.
THESE STORIES USUALLY HAVE a dramatic, definitive end. A member of the search party, taking a quick leak behind a tree, sees a hand protruding from a nearby bush, blood on the frozen fingers. Or someone in a diner in Pennsylvania realizes the boy sipping coffee in the next booth over looks an awful lot like the picture of the runaway on the news. Or the missing person shows up safe and sound, a miscommunication having led people to jump to conclusions.
This story did not end in any of those ways. Fritz Davenport ran into those woods and it was as if he never came back out. There was no body found, no evidence of foul play. No ransom note was ever delivered to Fritz’s parents or the school. A thousand tips were called in, people claiming to have seen Fritz in West Virginia, Idaho, Texas, Maine. None of them panned out. The state police posited that Fritz may have run away, pointing to his having withdrawn several hundred dollars from an ATM at a mall in Charlottesville the previous weekend, when a van had taken Blackburne kids in for dinner and a movie. Seeing as students weren’t allowed to have cars at Blackburne, they figured someone may have helped Fritz to get away. This led to several uncomfortable interviews with school employees, particularly the maintenance and kitchen staff. Fritz’s disappearance spared no one.
And all of this came to nothing, a void that grew around the hole that Fritz had left behind him, a hole that exerts its pull on us still.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I did not intend to start looking into Fritz’s disappearance. I’m not a detective or an investigative reporter; I’m a novelist, and novelists are given to flights of imagination, to what-ifs and conjecture and spinning tales. Writing stories is a game I play with myself, an enjoyable one. At least, it used to be. But it isn’t real, not like Fritz’s disappearance was real. Poking around the meager facts would be hard enough nearly a decade later. I had simply come to believe that many things in the world did not make sense. They happen and we are left in the aftermath to deal with the new reality in which we find ourselves.
In retrospect, dating Michele had been my aftermath, my deliberate decision to break with the past. I had tried to bury Fritz as I tried to bury any secret—sealed him off in my heart with a thousand distractions. In college and grad school, it was easier to erect a barricade of books and essays and novels to write than it was to forge relationships. And then Michele. She didn’t know me before Fritz disappeared. She knew me only afterward, and so I could reinvent myself for her as a cool brooding author. The problem was, I couldn’t entirely fool myself. I was attracted to Michele not just because she was gorgeous and good in bed, but because of what she represented: a life of drifting through New York, cocktail glasses in hand, with beautiful people who were all apparently famous in fashion and who all promised to read my novel. We thought we were in love—and maybe we were, but more with the idea of ourselves than the reality. The truth is that we were both damaged people incapable of sustaining each other. I had run away from Fritz, but I couldn’t run away from my own dysfunction. That was my narrative, for better or worse. And now I had come full circle and returned to the start of my story, to Blackburne, which I had never really left behind after all.
AFTER MARCHING MY FOURTH formers through our first text, Oedipus Rex, I was about to start teaching a short poetry unit, and as an introduction I had assigned some Anna Akhmatova. It was clear that many of them had little to no experience with poetry, outside of waiting for the teacher to tell them what a poem meant, as if it were a secret code, and then writing that down and later regurgitating it on a test. I had suspected—and a subsequent conversation with Sam Hodges confirmed my suspicion—that it might be better for me to guide them toward figuring it out on their own. I had always enjoyed reading poetry, although it’s a very different thing to teach others how to read it. My students felt that poets were weird, which had actually been true of some of the poets I had known at NYU. They had scared me a little, to be honest—at parties, the poets were the ones swinging from the light fixtures and trying to get the faculty, or their spouses, into bed, whereas we fiction writers leaned against walls, drank early, and snuck glances at our watches. That hadn’t kept me from sleeping with two of the poets. Beth was blond and warm and wrote Whitmanesque verse about rivers; Giselle was dark haired and dark spirited, with fingernails bitten to the bone, and wrote tight, acidic poems about death and betrayal, as if she were the love child of Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. Beth said I was a lost soul while Giselle called me a fucking asshole, both of which, when you think about it, are pretty much the same thing.
Now I arranged my class of fifteen boys into a circle, and they looked down dubiously at the photocopies of Akhmatova’s “The Muse” as I read it aloud:
All that I am hangs by a thread tonight
as I wait for her whom no one can command.
Whatever I cherish most—youth, freedom, glory—
fades before her who bears the flute in her hand.
And look! she comes . . . she tosses back her veil,
staring me down, serene and pitiless.
“Are you the one,” I ask, “whom Dante heard dictate
the lines of his Inferno?” She answers: “Yes.”
After I finished reading, silence held for a few beats. Stephen Watterson seemed to be bowing his head over his photocopy out of respect. Paul Simmons blew his nose loudly into a tissue. I frowned at him and he raised his eyebrows—who, me?—before tossing his used tissue into the trash can.
“Okay,” I said. “So what do you think?”
“Kinda crazy,” Rusty Scarwood said, one hand in his curly yellow hair.
“I like the muse,” Stephen Watterson said. “It just sort of shows up. Like the Greeks thought the Muses did.”
Terence Jarrar looked at the poem like a man considering how to remove a stump. “What’s a muse?” he asked.
Stephen answered. “It’s like your own personal goddess who inspires you. The ancient Greeks thought the Muses were the source of knowledge.”
Paul Simmons, who was slouched in his chair so his legs stuck far out underneath his desk, glanced at Terence as if he were about to say something, but he saw me looking his way and went back to staring out the window.
“Okay,” I said, “so how does the speaker here seem to feel about the muse?”