The Last September: A Novel (19 page)

“You know, Brett,” he said. “I’m glad you came by, before I saw you and Charlie. I don’t even know if you ever told him about that letter I wrote.”

It surprised me that he would bring this up so quickly. I shook my head. All of a sudden it became very apparent, this close space hidden in a thicket of trees, the intimacy of the two of us, here together. Would Charlie mind? Or was his trust in my adoration so complete that he wouldn’t give it a second thought?

“I’ve been embarrassed for two years and counting,” Ladd said.

It would have been appropriate to take time and weigh my response. I wondered, again, if anyone had told Ladd about Sarah. Probably this would be a good time to tell him myself. But at that moment, for whatever reason, my field of vision had narrowed to these four wooden walls and the crooked floorboards. And I felt like just me, a person, instead of a mother and wife.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” I said, remembering how I’d ripped it into pieces. “I love that letter. It meant a lot to me. It still does.”

Ladd tilted his head to one side. I noticed gray at his temples. On the other side of the room, my corporeal lines blurred a little bit, and while I didn’t exactly step out of body I became acutely aware of a sort of dreamlike quality, a sudden out-of-timeness. Who could have known, when I woke up that morning, that the two of us would be standing here together, in this small enclosed room, with nobody watching. I thought of Eli, heading toward Cape Cod, and Charlie, nailing in shingles as if I hadn’t even left. Then I thought of that Fourth of July seven years before and wondered what my life would have been like if I hadn’t agreed to sign on the dotted line or followed Charlie through the crowded party.

“So,” Ladd said. “How’s the dissertation coming?”

“Slowly.” I didn’t want to talk about my dissertation. What I wanted to do was tell Ladd something I hadn’t told anybody aside from Maxine and our marriage counselor; I wanted to tell him about Deirdre.
You were right,
I wanted to say.
Charlie broke my heart.

“A lot’s happened since you went away,” I said. It occurred to me that he was just back from an adventure, a life-changing experience. I should have asked him about that. But I was too full of my own life-changing experience. So I said something else, something for which I must never be forgiven: “Charlie had an affair with the hostess at his restaurant. So we had to come here for a while to get away from all that.”

Ladd leaned against the sink, his fists behind him closed around the edge of the counter. I remembered those same fists closing around my wrists and guessed that he did, too. That same flush of anger came over his face. At first I thought it was directed at Charlie. Then I realized it was at me, for confiding in him.

“Why are you telling me this?” he said.

“I don’t know. Why did you write me that letter?”

Ladd pushed away from the sink and walked toward me, but he didn’t make it all the way across the room. Instead he took a seat in an ancient armchair. This cottage had been built in 1920, and the chair—with its unraveling weave and tired springs—looked like it had been there from the beginning. Everything as old and worn as the pain that Charlie had caused me, and the echoes I had stirred here with Ladd. I felt like I should step back a little, retreating from what I might have just set in motion. But I couldn’t get any closer to the table without moving around it, toward the far wall, which I felt would call too much attention to myself. As it was, Ladd hadn’t taken his eyes off me. He watched me like something he was studying, and when he spoke, his voice was careful, considered.

“What am I supposed to say now?” he asked. “Something about how I thought of you while I was in the jungle?”

“I guess you could say I told you so.”

Ladd blinked, letting up his gaze the tiniest bit. “I always wanted to ask,” he said, “if you left because I made you sign that thing. Because if that was the reason, you could have told me. Christ, you could have done anything in the world except run off with Charlie.”

So long ago and far away, that day in the Boston lawyer’s office. Clearly the point of that day was not to expect anything as a gift. It would all be on loan—the man, the marriage, the family fortune, the good pen. Dependent on my good behavior.

“Charlie Moss,” Ladd said. “Of all people in the world.”

That name, even or especially then, like a fist closing around my heart. And I was so tired of feeling that way. As usual, I thought of Deirdre, her wounded, icy-blonde face.

“So you’re not going to say it?”

“What?” Ladd said. “I told you so? Would it make a difference now?”

“I doubt it.”

“You know,” Ladd went on, “that day you left my house, when I didn’t come after you, I thought I was doing what I had to, what I was supposed to do. Respecting your wishes. I felt so horrible. Charlie never did one thing to deserve you and you married him anyway. Lately I’ve been thinking about it, all the time I’ve spent doing what I’m supposed to do. Every second and minute when I’ve been obedient and responsible and considerate. What would be so bad about taking one minute to myself, to just do what I want?”

The last time I’d broken a rule—really, seriously misbehaved—was when I left Ladd for Charlie. I thought of all the time I’d spent since then being faithful, and the work I had done trying to forgive him, to stay with him. And before and after that, just the simple wifeliness of my days. Even in the end, the failure of the restaurant, and Deirdre—the way we’d gone back to what life would have been if it had all never happened. Day after day, for as long as I could remember, just being faithful and devoted. The great good wife, standing by while Charlie did what Ladd said he would do, what he had always done: broken my heart.

I stared back at Ladd and recognized him as full of something, in regard to me, that Charlie had always lacked. Not love, exactly. Because Charlie did love me. I knew that. Maybe what I saw instead was simple longing. Why would Charlie ever have had to long for me when I’d always been so immediately there?

“Ladd,” I said. “Do you know what I’d do? If I could take one single minute of my life? To just do what I wanted?”

His face lost the smallest amount of color. I crossed the room to where he sat in the ancient armchair. Somewhere in those few strides my feet lost their flip-flops as I walked my way over to Ladd and crawled onto the chair, my knees on either side of him, pressing into the worn springs. I placed my hands against his face and cradled it there for a moment, taking in his features, the face I used to know—not beautiful to everyone but even now beautiful to me. I pressed my lips to his forehead and then his cheek. My hands moved down to rest on his shoulders as I made my way, in a circle, kissing his face.

It took up the whole minute I had granted us. A long and very pregnant minute, during which Ladd sat frozen, his eyes closed. When it ended, they fluttered open. I sat back a little. Ladd studied me with an expression almost like sternness, and I thought he was about to accuse me of something.

“Just one minute,” I said, “out of all these days and hours.”

“Let’s make it thirty,” Ladd said. And then kissed me on the lips.

After another few minutes, I amended. “Let’s make it an hour.”

IT DIDN’T LAST AN
hour, not quite, and it could have been worse. Our clothes stayed on. Our hands didn’t wander, not much, and even when Ladd reached beneath my skirt he only let his hand rest above my knee, holding me there, while we kissed and kissed. Perhaps the worst thing was the way Ladd looked when we said good-bye, a kind of expectation that this would continue, whereas by the time I got to my car, I had already returned to thinking about Charlie.

Driving back to Maxine’s, an overhead cloud obscured and flattened the sunlight. My hands shook on the steering wheel. I knew how this would all play out, the same way it had hundreds of times before. My anger with Charlie would fill to capacity and then burst, its remnants floating away on the ocean air, leaving me with the simple fact that I adored him. My husband was an elusive, inscrutable will-o’-the-wisp, which was why he drove me crazy and why I never could manage to walk away. I blinked back tears, thinking that the secret to marriage did not lie in compatibility, or even commitment, but the willingness to endure heartbreak. I, for example, had loved Charlie well enough to paste my heart back together a hundred times or more since the day I first met him.

Retreating from Ladd’s, I had no confidence at all in Charlie’s willingness to repair his heart on my behalf. My chest filled with fears that would soon be rendered entirely irrelevant.

And I know what you’re thinking. How I used up my husband’s last heartbeats in so unforgivable a way. And I do relive those moments with excruciating guilt, but the truth is, not so much more than anything else. Because I relive every moment of all those years with the same emotion—the same overwhelming regret. In my head, it plays over and over again, and it plays like a death march.

For example, the real and true beginning. The day I met Eli. We were trying out for a play, a musical. In the dance portion—downstairs in the studio, the far wall lined with mirrors—we had to pair up and imitate each other’s movements. The crowd paired off before I had a chance to turn around, and there stood Eli. He was wiry and blond—straight hair that hung to his shoulders. Round blue eyes that I didn’t yet know were just like Charlie’s. We stood facing each other, and I let him take the lead. He spiraled his arms in wide strokes. Everything he did was broad, the expression on his face mock serious, so that I kept breaking down in laughter. Neither of us got a part in the play. But we became friends. As Eli told Ladd on the ferry that day: best friends.

TH
E DAY AFTER I
found Charlie dead—once his body had been removed to the coroner’s—a female police officer escorted me back to the house so I could collect enough of Sarah’s and my things to last a few days, a week. The two of us tromped in and out, carrying suitcases and bags of diapers. As I rolled the stroller over the wood floor of the sunporch, from below my feet I heard something jump and skitter.

Maybe if death hadn’t felt so close, hovering all around the house, I wouldn’t have reacted to the sound. But when I heard it, I thought so immediately of Tab. Maybe the portal through which Charlie had left still gaped open, giving Tab the opportunity to return. I let go of the stroller and walked outside, kneeling in the same spot I always did, to coax her out before sunset, and keep her safe from the coyotes that sometimes crossed the distance between salt marsh and shore.

“Tab,” I said, squatting down and peering under the porch. That skittering sound again, and along with the scent of dusty mold—the underneath of things—an even more distinct odor, the kind that can only rise off skin and fur. My eyes adjusted to see a small black form pressed against the cement foundation of the house, her shivering so contained that the small metal tags on her collar didn’t make a sound. Lightfoot.

I called to her and called to her, but she wouldn’t come toward me, not even when the police officer brought sliced turkey from the refrigerator. Finally I had to slither under the porch on my belly and drag her taut, quivering form across the pebbly dirt, her nails dragging in protest, wanting to remain pressed against the far wall.

Outside in the sunlight, I gathered the dog in my lap and brushed the dust away. Defeated, she went ahead and ate a slice of turkey. She weighed twelve pounds, composed of bone and tremble under short, coarse fur. Once I’d pushed away the thickest layer of dust, I found myself searching for any sign, any splatters, of blood. But of that her coat was clean.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves.
It’s not a poem I’ve studied seriously. The right part of the right century, but I specialize in American poetry. Still, from time to time, Wilde’s lines will leap into my head. They leapt into my head that day, as I studied the dog, her quivering ears flat back against her head. Because I knew myself to be a coward. Because I’d supplied the kiss and let someone else wield the sword.

I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does of the burying ground, because I am afraid.

—EMILY DICKINSON

There had not been a murder in Saturday Cove since 1980, when a summer resident killed his wife and two children, and then himself. It shook people up, of course, but the suicide let the police off the hook. It didn’t give them any practice. For such a long time, law enforcement only dealt with the occasional winter break-in, shoplifters, drunk drivers. There was no homicide department. To investigate Charlie’s murder, they borrowed detectives from Hyannis, scarcely better practiced, who arrived to interview me. They took my computer. They searched my car, collecting the messy depths of our station wagon into zip-top plastic bags of various sizes, even the empty coffee cups and candy wrappers. They cataloged pacifiers and teething rings. The postcard from Ladd, its corner bent and crinkled where Sarah had chewed on it. They searched for blood, DNA.

If they had asked me to retrace my steps of the day before, to tell them everything I’d done and everywhere I’d been, I would have. The hour I spent with Ladd sat heavy on my brain, every molecule of my body protesting against it. But they didn’t ask. Because I wasn’t a suspect, they accepted the bare bones of my movements: I’d brought my baby to my friend’s house because Eli was coming. In the morning, I’d gone to check on Charlie and found him dead and Eli bloody. They wanted to know everything about that morning, what Eli had done and said. I told them how I’d leaned over Charlie and tried to pick him up. How I’d run away.

I told them about Deirdre, too, about her affair with Charlie, and the way she used to watch us. They nodded and took notes, asked a couple questions about the timing, and the last time I’d seen her. Just going through the motions, not particularly interested. As far as I could tell, in this killing there was only one suspect.

But they couldn’t find him. Eli seemed to have evaporated into the late-summer air or flown away with the migrating bank swallows. Maybe if I’d been able to dial 911 as soon as I’d left the house, the police would have been there in time to catch him. One thing we knew, Eli hadn’t driven away, at least not in his own car, which still sat in the driveway when the police arrived. But he didn’t leave any small personal items behind, not an overnight bag, not even a toothbrush.

Maybe Eli had swum out to sea, shoes and all, and drowned himself. But then: wouldn’t his body have washed up on shore? The police scoured the tide line, the cranberry bogs, the lakes, the scrub oak woods. According to all evidence Eli had come to Saturday Cove, killed his brother—and then vanished.

That didn’t stop me from expecting him to return at any moment. The evening of the day I found Charlie dead—when uniformed police officers and swirling lights and sirens had finally dispersed—Ladd showed up on Maxine’s doorstep. When he rang the bell, Maxine and I both jumped, grabbing on to each other. Sarah looked up from the floor where she sat stacking red plastic cups, her hand stalling in midair, staring at us.

“It can’t be him,” Maxine said, meaning Eli. There was a patrol car stationed in her driveway. Anyone who made it to the front door would have been vetted by those officers. Still, Maxine wouldn’t step forward, and I wondered if she’d ever be able to open her door again, to anyone. She hadn’t even seen Charlie dead, and she was wrecked by it all, the proximity to so much violence. I started to move and she pulled me back.

“It’s okay,” I said, twisting my arm from her grip. As I headed toward the door, she walked to the counter to grab her phone, and stood there, watching me—her fingers poised, even though the nearest officers sat just a couple yards from her front door, and we could probably call them faster just by screaming.

I looked through the peephole. It was Ladd, his dark head bent, his shoulders tense. I turned toward Maxine and told her, “It’s only Ladd.” The bell rang once more, and I looked through the peephole again. In the triangulated glare of the motion-detected porch light, Ladd looked determined, like a man running to his lover in her time of need. When I opened the door, he stepped forward toward me, ready to gather me up in his arms. The movement I made—stepping back, my hands rising the barest bit—stopped him just short of the threshold.

The police officers had gotten out of the car. They stood there, watching us, the sound of their radio crackling into the evening. They must have spoken to Ladd, cleared him for visiting, but still they kept careful eyes on us. It made me wonder if I was a suspect. Shouldn’t I be a suspect? Wasn’t the spouse, always? Sarah toddled over to my side, gripping my pants leg and staring up at Ladd. He started at the sight of her, this indelible bit of proof—of my real life.

“Brett,” he said, recovering. He made a motion with his hands, almost but not quite opening his arms, still expecting me to fall into them. “I have to know if you’re all right.” Realizing the ridiculousness of this statement, he amended. “Tell me what I can do.”

Tell me what I can do
. Charlie had only just died. I had found him that morning. And I had not touched my phone all day. My mother no longer existed for me to call. Yet here Ladd stood, frantic with knowing. For a moment, the air radiated with the news, spreading in its small town way.
Charlie Moss murdered. Can you believe it? I just saw him yesterday
. The words from every house in town gathered around our heads, buzzing. I didn’t want to stand out here, exposed.

“You can go away,” I said. “Please. Go away and leave me alone.”

And I closed the door, turning the dead bolt as soon as the latch clicked. Then I scooped up our baby—Charlie’s and mine—and held her close, breathing in her skin, her scent, as if it might erase everything that had happened these past forty-eight hours.

BOB MOSS CAME UP
from Florida with his second wife, to arrange the funeral. They stayed in a hotel and managed everything with barely a word to me. All I had to do was show up. Maxine loaned me a dress and found a babysitter to stay with Sarah. The church was already packed when we arrived. As I walked down the aisle, I felt an illogical longing for Eli. After all these years, I still barely knew Charlie’s dad. Both my parents were gone, and now my husband. I remembered the way Eli had brought Charlie back to the altar on our wedding day.

I let my eyes roam up each aisle. I saw family friends and friends of mine from grad school; even a couple of professors had made the trip. But I didn’t see Ladd. Daniel Williams was there—he nodded at me as my eyes fell upon him—and so were Ladd’s parents. Why wasn’t Ladd sitting with them? When I had told him to leave me alone, I certainly hadn’t meant that he shouldn’t come to the funeral. He must have realized that. After all. He and Charlie had grown up together, summers here in Saturday Cove. They were practically cousins. Ladd lived just down the road from this church, close enough to ride his bicycle or even walk. Of course he shouldn’t be banging on my door, wanting to see me alone. But if he didn’t come to Charlie’s funeral, everyone would know the only possible reason: he had been with me the day before, the two of us betraying Charlie with only hours left of his life. Before the funeral even began, everyone would know.

And then my eyes stopped cold on a familiar figure in the second row, precisely behind the spot they’d saved for me. Deirdre Bennet, sandwiched between the Saturday Cove librarian and Charlie’s aunt Marian—not as she should have been (if she had to come at all) with the rest of the crew from the Sun Also Rises, who were sitting in the back. My feet halted, and I stared at her, and she stared back with her pale, watery eyes, as if she’d been crying nonstop for days. Her dress was yellow, too cheerful, with long sleeves. The color and weight were wrong for the day; she should have been sweating. Around her neck she wore an owl pendant. At first I thought it was on a leather string, and I pictured her, spattered with blood, leaning over Charlie, removing it from his neck and tying it onto hers. After a second, I realized it wasn’t leather but a slim black ribbon. The way she brought her fingers to her neck, just short of touching it, made me wonder if it had been a gift from Charlie. Or maybe it was just because of the way I was staring.

“Come on,” Maxine said gently. She still didn’t touch my arm. “Let’s sit.”

The two of us sidled down the row, squeezing into the one spot reserved for me next to Bob. I could feel Deirdre’s eyes, intent on the back of my head, and I sat still as possible, not wanting to give her even the slightest movement. As the service began, I found myself wishing again for Eli. In fact as the minutes ticked by I became more and more convinced that he would show up. Because how could he miss it? His own brother’s funeral?

I barely listened to the verses that were read or the people who spoke. Charlie never cared about things like that, about ceremonies. About poems. But he would have wanted his brother to be there. The past few days I had cowered in Maxine’s house when what I should have been doing was searching for Eli. Not so he could face any kind of justice. But so he could be here, with us, attending Charlie’s funeral as he had not been able to attend their mother’s. As I sat in the front pew, what I saw in my mind was not the pastor—a stranger—but Eli rushing down the aisle in a coat and tie, late for the seat we should have saved for him.

I could hear the sound of people trying to muffle their crying. I could hear Deirdre, behind me, and Maxine, next to me. But Bob and I, neither of us cried, we just sat there, carved from stone, waiting for the service to end. Which it finally did. People stood, began shuffling out. I stood. The back of the pew separated Deirdre and me. She reached forward and I flinched, but she was only returning the hymnal.

Outside, afternoon sun had shifted to its widest, most unflattering filter; it sifted into the church even through the stained glass, and I could see the places in Deirdre’s translucent skin where small veins had broken and pores had muddied. I thought of our twin griefs—having been left by Charlie once when he rejected us. And now. How could he be gone? Standing there between Bob Moss and Maxine, staring rudely and unstoppingly at Deirdre while she refused to look back at me, I could feel the realization like something hovering, a hand raised to hit me full force, as it had not yet, not even when I’d knelt beside his body and tried to lift it. Charlie dead. Gone. Never coming back.

I sat back down in the pew. Was it possible that once upon a time, Deirdre’s face represented the most pain I had ever experienced? Was it possible to feel the weight of this loss and ever stand again? A hand came down on top of my head, its palm flat. Thinking that it was Deirdre, I jerked away, then looked up to see Bob, staring down.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice gnarled as the scrub oaks that lined his property. He nodded and then turned away. I looked up to where Deirdre had been standing. The row was empty.

“Do you know that girl?” Maxine asked.

“That’s Deirdre,” I said. Maxine sat down, and I added, “I wonder if she’ll go to the reception.” Bob had hired a private room at a local restaurant. Obviously he couldn’t have it at the house.

“If she does,” Maxine said, “I can tell her to leave.”

“Or I could just not go. Do you think I have to go?”

“No,” she said. “I think people will understand. But you know. If you want to go. You should.”

“The only thing in the world,” I said, “that would make me strong enough to go to that reception would be if Charlie were there, too.”

“Because of her?”

“Because of Charlie,” I said.

Sitting next to me, equipped with hat and handkerchief, Maxine did what I couldn’t. She cried. I put my hand on her knee, my eyes still facing forward. All the noise had shifted to the back, a receiving line, where I was expected to be, shaking hands, accepting condolences. A pair of soft soled footsteps approached, polite steps.

“Brett,” Daniel Williams said, stepping into and blocking out that intrusive shaft of light, placing us in his shade. “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”

“Thank you,” I said.

For some reason, it was easier to meet his eyes. He kept his hands in his coat pockets, his straight shoulders at ease. Unlike everyone else—even Maxine—he didn’t seem to be braced for my hysteria. I wondered if he was still staying on the Cape, his summer spilling into the fall, or if he’d come down from Boston especially for the funeral.

“If there’s anything I can do,” Daniel said. He removed one hand from his pocket and gestured outward, a graceful and elbow-driven movement, indicating the church, the neighborhood, the wide world. “Anything at all.”

“Thank you.” I hoped I sounded sincere enough to convey that I knew: while other people said this, Daniel meant it.

He nodded, and then turned to walk back down the aisle. With his having paved the way, other people moved from the back to offer their hands and their sympathies. Until finally the church emptied out, and Maxine and I sat there, alone, the only mourners left.

TH
E NEXT MORNING SARAH
stirred, as always, with first light. She sat up, delighted to find Lightfoot lying between us once again, and set immediately to examining the dog’s ears, prodding her fingers into the exposed cartilage. Lightfoot woke and must have remembered everything she’d seen, because she set immediately to trembling.

“Gentle,” I told Sarah as she pitched forward to press her face against Lightfoot’s, one hand still clutching a pointy ear. Sarah scrunched up her brow and looked at me reproachfully. Then she slid off the bed and marched to the window. Maybe if I’d remembered to close the blinds, she would have slept later. Sun poured in with increasing speed. Outside, it reflected off the lake in small explosions, gathering itself for the day. It would be hot, another stretch of Indian summer.

“Pool,” Sarah said. “Pool.”

I dressed us both in our bathing suits and we headed downstairs. Maxine had set the coffeepot to brew automatically, so I poured a cup and hoisted Sarah to my hip, not quite ready to let her practice walking on the steep slate steps to the water. I put her down where pebbly dirt met sand, and dumped our towels. Lightfoot rushed forward, touching the top of the water with one delicate paw. A pink plastic shovel rested near the bottom of the steps, making up for my absentmindedness in forgetting to bring toys, and I handed it to Sarah. She knelt in the inch or two of water, scooping up the silt and watching it plop back through the wavelets. She babbled to herself, some words recognizable and some not. It felt so strange that something so devastating could have occurred without her knowing.