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 each 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.
My first year at UVA, I roomed alone. It seemed wrong to share a dorm room with anyone else. It also seemed to me to be a perfect refuge for Abby when she needed to get away from home. But it was also the beginning of my semiconscious efforts to wall myself off from others. I didn’t want to be a hermit; I tried to join a fraternity, for instance, but it didn’t take. More time for my writing, I told myself, and that was honest, at least. I began a novel that I would eventually burn in a mall parking lot outside of Charlottesville before starting The Unforgiving. But there was a calculated pleasure in staying in my room on the weekends when Abby couldn’t come up, typing on my desktop while my classmates were out partying. It was also, I see now, a self-imposed exile for the crime of making Fritz disappear.
It was hard enough dating Abby long distance, but to be attending classes where I felt Fritz was supposed to be, to walk past the Rotunda or cross UVA’s own Lawn, felt like I had cheated all over again somehow, that I had wrongfully taken Fritz’s place. Part of me, the same part that dimly perceived that, in some eventual future, I might be able to accept that my friend was gone, realized this wasn’t true. But a larger, or at least louder, part of me had the sudden expectation that Fritz would be found, and soon. It had been six months since he had disappeared, and I was having the strangest premonitions. Three crows flew across my path, one after the other, as I walked to class; my dorm bathroom was clean three days in a row; I aced all three tests that I had in the same week. I took it as a sign from the gods, a portent of good news. I kept waiting for my phone to ring, for Abby to tell me tearfully that Fritz had been located, that he was coming home.
Magical thinking is nothing new. But it was all I had. Hitting a series of green lights on the way out of Charlottesville, finding a dollar bill on the hall floor outside my room—everything was a sign that the universe was conspiring to return my friend to me. That I received no phone call from Abby about Fritz did not matter. It was merely a test of patience, of will—of belief that my friend would be found. Abby did call to tell me that her mother was slowly improving, getting out of bed, even seeing visitors one at a time, but I half listened to such news, keeping my ear cocked and ready to hear approaching footsteps, the creak of a door, a sound of greeting.
Christmas break came and went. I had wanted to spend it with Abby but couldn’t because her family had gone to the Keys. I called her the day she got back. I had a plan. “Listen,” I said. “I’ve got a crazy idea. Something we could do this summer.”
Abby yawned. “Sure,” she said. “As long as it doesn’t involve a lot of driving. Mother wouldn’t fly to Florida, so we drove.”
“I was thinking we could go look for Fritz.”
I waited five very long seconds, holding the phone and listening to Abby hold her breath.
“What are you saying?” Abby managed.
“Look, I know it’s crazy, but I’ve got it figured out,” I said, plowing forward. “The police are idiots. They don’t know your brother. You know all the places you’ve gone. On vacation. We go to all the places where Fritz went on vacation. That’s probably where he ran off to, someplace he knows. I know we’ll pick up his trail. I’ve saved up some money—”
“This is insane.”
“It is not. I got a job in a restaurant, and I’ve saved some money.”