“Is that so bad?” I said, stopping behind her. Abby hesitated, and before she could speak, I rushed in. “It gives me a chance to apologize. I’m sorry for acting like an asshole at the Game, Abby. I—maybe part of it was because of . . . what happened, the weekend before, but that’s no excuse. You don’t deserve that. It was wrong and I’m sorry.”
Abby turned around, and her eyes fixed on me so that I was conscious of my own breathing. Her face was pale, though her cheeks were tinged with red, whether from the cold or something else, I wasn’t sure. “Apology accepted,” she said, a bit stiffly. Then she moved off to the edge of the parking lot, head swiveling from left to right like a sentry. I hesitated. Should I go ahead and apologize for what I had said years ago when she wouldn’t come with me to look for Fritz, when I had said she must not love her own twin? I kept quiet and followed her.
Abby walked through a gap in the hedge and onto the first tee. I came through the gap and stood beside her, an arm’s length away, looking up at the night sky and the stars in their fixed orbits.
“I’m sorry about Juilliard,” I said carefully, not looking at Abby. “I know how much you wanted to go.”
I heard Abby draw in a breath, release it. “I did go,” she said flatly. “To Juilliard.”
“What? But you said—”
“I know what I said.” She wasn’t angry, just matter-of-fact. “After we . . . broke up, I went. And I was back home by Christmas.” She stood stiffly as if holding her breath; then she looked at me with a tight, sad look. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t play. It just didn’t—work. I practiced more, even hired a tutor outside of school, but it wasn’t any good. My professors were nice about it, but I was a failure. It was like being the one kid in the choir who can’t sing. People started avoiding me, not wanting me to rub off on them. So I quit.” She shrugged, tried a smile. “Things change.”
Quietly, I said, “I’m sorry about that, too.”
We both stood there, looking up into the night. It struck me that we were standing in the same place where Ren Middleton had talked with me about killing off the inertness of the fourth formers. I was annoyed that whatever rapprochement I might gain with Abby was taking place on the same spot.
Abby spoke quietly. “It was terrible, at first. Not going to Juilliard. I just . . . I couldn’t leave home again, not right then. My mother was happy to have me home, and . . . I told myself it would be a semester, maybe a year, there were other schools and conservatories I could apply to. I took classes at American, part-time, and, long story short, I never left.” She paused. “It used to be you went to a place like Saint Margaret’s, or Blackburne, and then you could do anything. Anything.”
I risked a glance at her. She was looking down the fairway, toward the bank of trees at the edge of campus where I’d last seen her brother. They lay in utter darkness beyond the lit security booth and gate.
“I’m sorry,” I said, struck—not for the first time—at how empty, how unhelpful that phrase sounds.
“It’s all right,” she said bracingly. “I got my degree in French, which I’ve always enjoyed, and now I’m teaching near home and can see my mother whenever I want.”
I didn’t ask about her father; I assumed he was still chained to his office at NorthPoint. “So, do you play at all anymore?” I asked, thinking about my own writing, or lack thereof.
Abby stiffened, and I cursed myself for my blunt stupidity. But calmly she said, “No, I don’t. Simple as that. I once played cello and now I don’t. Like I once had a brother and now I don’t.”
Her words stung me. “You have a brother,” I said unsteadily.
She looked at me with a pained expression. “It’s been almost ten years, Matthias. Ten years. Fritz is gone. He’s been gone for a long time.”
“You’re talking about him like he’s in the past,” I said, my voice rising. For a moment I was furious, ready to shout at her. What the fuck is wrong with you, I thought. With difficulty I restrained myself. “He’s not in the past. He’s right now.”
“Who are you to decide that?” Abby said, and the unvarnished pain in her voice put my anger in check. “You can’t imagine what it was like to have him declared dead. It was like closing the lid on his coffin. I had to convince my mother it was the right thing to do. My father cried when the court issued Fritz’s certificate of death. So don’t tell me he’s not in the past.”
I stood there, transfixed, Abby before me in her grief and anger like some terrible divinity, beautiful and remote as one of the stars overhead. I could barely breathe. And then tears welled in her eyes and spilled over, and before I knew it, I had stepped toward her and opened my arms, and then I was hugging her, the scent of her hair like lavender and some undercurrent of peppery spice. She trembled slightly, resisting. Then she sighed as if releasing her grief and quietly cried into my shoulder as I stroked her back and murmured into her ear, telling her it was okay. We stood there, holding each other on that freezing hillside, and about the time I felt her breath on my neck, my hands had found the small of her back. She tilted her face up to mine, her eyes a gray-blue through a wash of tears. Then, somehow—did I move first or did she?—I was kissing her. Her lips were soft and insistent, her scent wrapped around me like a lover, and my God, I had no idea how much I’d wanted this, wanted her. Desire rose in me with the force of a sun, my heart and breath thrumming to it. My tongue met hers, and I pressed her body to mine. Even through our coats I could feel the curves of her buttocks, her breasts against my chest, the heat of my lust burning so fiercely that I thought I might combust and consume us both.
She broke off and took two steps back, staggering slightly. Her beret slipped off and fell to the ground, and she bent with a jerk to pick it up, her black hair mussed, her eyes wide, lips parted as if she had just witnessed something shocking. I stood there, tranquilized, her scent still hovering in the air, tantalizingly close.
“That,” Abby said thickly. She swallowed. Her eyes were huge and all-encompassing. “That can’t happen again,” she said.
“Abby,” I managed to say. My brain was like the overhead light in my classroom—it had been turned off for a few moments, and now it was taking an inordinately long time to flicker back on.
Abby turned and hurried away, walking to the gap in the hedges. Stepping through it, she vanished from sight.
MAYBE IT WAS THIS frustrating encounter with Abby Davenport that led to my inane behavior the following week. Lucky at cards, unlucky in love, they say, and as I’d proven pretty unlucky in love, I thought I’d test the other half of the expression. Which, of course, proved foolish.