I didn’t see or hear from Danny at all during that time. I didn’t try to forget him; that was impossible. But I tried to stop hoping, on my birthday and on his, at Christmastime, anytime I saw a little blue car drive by, that he would walk out of the ether and back into my life. I tried convincing myself that those hours in the car were the last we’d ever spend together and that somehow, some way, we’d had a simple, good time. That it was a normal and amicable parting. We were like brothers, I told myself, who lived in different countries, separated only by busy lives and thousands of miles. But Danny haunted me. I should’ve known that he would. I’d always believed his lies more easily than I believed my own. During the years he was gone, rumors about him trickled under my door like the shadows of passersby. I heard he was clean, and I tried not to hope. I heard that he was alive but rotting from the inside out in a Brooklyn shooting gallery. I heard more than once that he’d died: suicide, murder, OD.
