My head was whirling. I’d heard that description before, about one’s head whirling, but this was the first time I had fully experienced it—a sense of vertigo, the ground seeming to lift and rotate beneath me, the air itself thin and hard to breathe. “Wait,” I said. “Wait a minute. You told me you hadn’t gotten any mail that day. We were by the lions. You said you’d gone and looked in your mailbox and there was nothing.”
“There wasn’t anything when I looked at first,” he said. “Mail came late that day. I was literally about to walk down the Hill and leave that night when I had to check one more time. And there it was.”
I stared down at the acceptance letter, and then back at Fritz. “You weren’t stressed about getting into college, were you?” I said slowly. “You were planning to leave the whole time.”
Fritz closed his eyes as if in prayer. “You have to understand, it didn’t seem real, running away,” he said. “It was like a game I played with myself, seeing how far I could plan. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I couldn’t tell anyone.” He opened his eyes to look at me. “I couldn’t tell you.” He shook his head, sighed. “You knew I was upset, that I couldn’t sleep. Everyone else was freaking out about college, so it was easy to let everyone think that I was, too.”
“But you could have gone to college,” I said. I held up his acceptance letter. “You . . . We could have gone together. You’d have been out of your father’s house. You wouldn’t have had to see your uncle again . . .”
Gently, Fritz took the letter out of my hand, refolded it, and replaced it in his wallet. “I keep it to remind me of that,” he said. “But I couldn’t have gone, Matthias. Not without them. They both went to UVA, they would have come to visit, professors would have said, ‘Oh, aren’t you Wat Davenport’s nephew?’ I just—I needed to get away. In fact, you helped me do it.” He looked at me, the honesty and pain in his face so raw, I was transfixed. “When you told me you had cheated, I—I felt betrayed. It hurt. But it was the final push I needed to go. And I had to go. I almost shot my uncle. If I hadn’t run away, I guarantee I would have gone to get that gun again. And I might have shot myself, too. So I had to leave. And the only way to do that was to leave you and my sister and my mother and . . . everything. I’m sorry.”
You think sadness is a feeling that you experience on a continuum, that even though it can be slight or strong, it is essentially a fixed emotional state. But what I felt then was a grief that swelled around me, isolating me from the rest of the world even as it seemed to encompass me, Fritz, that rodeo lot, the sky itself, and the distant stars beyond. I felt caught in a tidal grip of loss and despair almost too great for tears, and all I could do was bow my head before it.
“Me, too,” I muttered, wiping my eyes. “I’m sorry, Fritz.”
We sat there in the awkward silence.
“So,” Fritz said, as if we had just discovered that we were standing in a chilly rodeo lot in Wyoming. “Now what?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
NorthPoint’s headquarters in Arlington was a sleek, black chrome-and-glass structure that looked as if an award-winning architect had mated a bunker with a modern art museum. The glass entrance doors were massive and yet opened at a touch, swinging silently inward. The atrium was an immense, open space—even the sound of my shoes striking the marble floor was swallowed up in the emptiness. I approached a curved information desk that looked like a bridge console from Star Trek. A corporate blond fembot behind the desk smiled. “May I help you?” she asked politely.
“Frank Davenport,” I said.
Not a flicker of doubt. “Do you have an appointment?”
“He’ll want to see me.” As she drew breath to speak, undoubtedly to deny me access, I said, “It’s about his son, Fritz.”
A security guard in blazer and gray flannels, standing impassively behind the fembot’s shoulder, gave me his full attention. I ignored him.
“Your name, sir?” the fembot asked, touching two screens on her console.
I told her and then looked across the atrium at a waterfall, its sound somewhere between a gentle rain and a rushing brook. The security guard continued to gaze at me. I winked at him, considered winking at the fembot, and then decided against it—she was pressing two fingertips to her jaw and talking quietly into an earphone, her glance flickering over me once.
Presently, two more security guards arrived. “This way, sir,” said one of them, gesturing to a nearby wall of elevators. They escorted me into an open elevator and remained with me as we rode up. Then the elevator came to a stop, and the door opened to reveal a semicircular waiting room with another fembot—this one a redhead—behind a round leather-paneled reception desk. “Mr. Glass,” she said, and she stood, tall and elegant as a porcelain vase. “Right this way.” She led me past the desk and into a short corridor with muted lighting and oil paintings—probably the originals—that I knew I could find in an art history textbook. The two security guards continued to flank us like an honor guard. At the end was a set of doors that towered over us, like the gates to some corporate Valhalla. The redhead turned the handle on one door, opened it inward, and extended her hand toward the doorway, palm turned upward as if serving something exquisite. “Please, go in,” she said. I glanced behind me at the two security guards, who clearly were following me no farther. I nodded to them and stepped through the doorway, the redhead pulling the door shut behind me.
The office was the size of an aircraft hangar. Fully half the back wall, which curved outward, seemed to be glass, although it was dimmed somehow to a smoky color that filtered the sunlight. The floor was dark, polished wood. Before me were various armchairs, side tables, a couch, and a desk that anchored an enormous oriental rug. To the left was a conference table with leather-backed chairs, the wall behind it taken up by what looked like the world’s largest flatscreen. Behind me on either side of the massive doors were built-in mahogany shelves holding thick red and blue binders. The ceiling was high, and recessed lights washed the room in a soft glow.
Mr. Davenport was seated at his desk, writing. A lamp cast a brighter circle of light upon his desk, and he bent over his writing as if to shield it from the light. I stood there, watching him hunched over his papers, his pen moving as if it were a blade with which he was parrying an unseen foe.
“One minute, Matthias,” he said without looking up.
I reached for the pen I had in my shirt pocket, unclipped it, and with an underhand motion tossed it onto his desk. It landed with a satisfyingly noisy clatter, right on the piece of paper on which Davenport was writing. Then it rolled toward the edge of the desk, stopped only by Davenport’s free hand. He put down his own pen and picked mine up, examined it, and then looked at me. The bags under his eyes were dark as charcoal.
“I gave you this pen,” he said, a rasp in his voice. “For Christmas, when you were in school.”