The Last September: A Novel (22 page)

At about 5 a.m. I slipped out of bed, placing a pillow beside Sarah. In addition to the crib, there was a simple table and chair in the room, pressed against the far wall. Yesterday I’d slid my computer onto the table, and now I opened it and turned it on. For a long time, I sat staring at the email Charlie had written. He didn’t have a computer, just borrowed mine once a day to go online. His fingers would have moved over these very keys, in his surprisingly fast hunt-and-peck. I could picture him, sitting in the chair in my makeshift study, maybe with a beer in one hand. He always drank from a glass, never a bottle, and would have perched the glass right next to the laptop, the way he always did, the way that drove me crazy. Maybe, remembering this and conscious that he was trying to make amends, he would have stopped for a moment and pushed it away toward the stack of books I’d left there, one of them still open, the words I’d underlined so angrily, “Sue, you can go or stay.”

My books
. The day I’d gone back to collect my things, I’d only thought about what we’d need to get us through a few days or a week. Clothes and baby equipment. But I’d left all my books behind. Although my old life hovered so close in the past, it was impossible to imagine I’d ever return to any part of it. It only hit me now: I needed my books. Once today began—the sun rising in earnest—I would have to go and get them. Bob Moss may have taken back my keys, but I knew where Charlie had hidden a spare.

Sarah kicked her feet out of the covers, the first sign of approaching wakefulness. I turned back to the computer, like I was a machine myself, programmed to respond one way.
Dear Charlie
, I wrote again, the same words, the only ones I could think of.
It’s okay. Eli can stay as long as he likes. Just please don’t wait for him. Come over to Maxine’s right away. Spend the night with Sarah and me. We miss you so much.

BY EARLY AFTERNOON, DANIEL
was working in his office, the door shut. When I asked Mrs. Duffy to watch Sarah, she accepted the vague word
errands
. As I walked out to the car, Lightfoot trotted after me and hopped in. But when we arrived at our destination, wheels crunching over the seashell driveway, I realized it had been insensitive, thoughtless, to let the dog come along. At the sight of the Moss house, she started trembling and crawled in the back to cower underneath the seats. I rolled down the windows and left her there. Hopefully the cross breeze would keep her from overheating; if not, she could gather up her courage and jump out.

No birds except gulls, flying above. I walked around the house, across the lawn. The swallows must have started their journey south this past week. I wondered if the police officers and detectives had stopped to appreciate the staging, tiny birds practicing their formations, wonderful swoops and swells. From around the rails of the deck, the police tape had been removed, but I could see that the boards where Charlie’s body had lain were gone, either collected as evidence or simply removed for replacement. I knelt down and looked under the deck. Even the dirt looked new, its top layer swept away.

I sat down and lay back. The grass felt wrong, sharp, too groomed. My eyelids fluttered closed, and I stretched out my legs. The sounds I could hear included the waves, the wind, a cardinal’s trill. A car drove by, too fast. The sound of a squirrel’s tiny feet skittered across the rail, then stopped. I lifted my head to confirm: one-eyed Wally, already thinner and more scraggly, as if we’d been grooming as well as feeding him.

“Hey, Wally,” I said.

He twitched his tail, waiting for a nut or bread crust. I wished I had something for him. It felt right, somehow, returning to this, the seminal moment and place, around which everything would always revolve, and around which everything always
had
revolved, whether or not I’d known it. It felt wrong—that I wasn’t cowering, trembling, like Lightfoot.

He’s not dangerous
, Charlie always said. It was just that the only way to get him the help he needed was to provoke him into danger.

According to the coroner, Charlie had been killed by the hammer. A blow to the back of his head. Why would he have turned his back on Eli in the midst of trying to provoke him? Charlie would turn his back on me, on Ladd, even on Deirdre. But on Eli he would have remained focused, watching him, registering his every move. I remembered the way Eli’s hands had come down on Charlie’s head, regretful, after knocking him down. Whoever had killed Charlie with the hammer had also slit his throat, still vengeful.

I stood up and walked around to the garage to retrieve the hidden key, then let myself into the house through the side door. Upstairs, the books I’d left out on the desk had been moved back to the shelf.
Rowing in Eden. Open Me Carefully. Master Letters.
Th
e Life of Emily Dickinson. Austin and Mabel
. There were too many to carry at once, so I made a couple trips to the car. Then I went into the kitchen and started collecting all of Charlie’s good pots and pans. His wood knife block, minus the one the killer had used. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was trespassing. And stealing. But I wanted Charlie’s copper pots. Never mind that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cooked anything more complicated than instant oatmeal or scrambled eggs. I carried them to the car a few armloads at a time, the metal conducting particles of Charlie into my bare skin.

But before I left, I went back to the house and walked through each room, looked under every bed, and opened every closet door. Just in case Eli was there hiding. When I got back into the car, Lightfoot had moved to the floor of the front passenger’s seat, rolled into a little black pile like a roly-poly, quivering. I leaned forward and stroked her back.

“It’s okay, baby,” I said. “It’s okay.”

She unzipped herself in one quick motion and jumped into my lap. I backed out of the driveway. The dog’s trembling slowly subsided as we made our way past the cranberry bog, away from the house. And I couldn’t believe the dog would feel so afraid—still so afraid—if she’d only arrived late at night with Eli to find Charlie already dead. I felt sure that she had seen it happen, that she had been there. Which meant that one way or another, Eli had been there, too.

BY THE TIME DANIEL
knocked quietly on the door of my bedroom, I had stacked the books on the desk in the corner. Sarah sat on the floor, surrounded by her father’s pots and pans. Daniel stood on the threshold, staring at her, his brow furrowed, and for a moment I worried he thought I’d stolen them from his kitchen.

“I went over to the Moss house,” I said, hoping my voice sounded calm and not defensive. “The pots belong to Charlie.”

Daniel nodded. “Of course,” he said, as if nothing could make more sense than a pile of good copper cookware in an upstairs bedroom. “Would you like a box for them? You can store them in the garage if you like. Or in the hall closet, I don’t think there’s much of anything in there.”

He turned to walk down the hall and I followed him. The wide closet was almost as big as my study at the Moss house had been. There were rolls and rolls of toilet paper and paper towels, and a carton filled with cleaning supplies, along with miles of empty floorboards.

“See?” Daniel said. “Plenty of space in here. Unless . . . you’d rather keep them in your room?”

He seemed not only poised and ready but forgiving in advance for any grief inspired lunacy. Perhaps he pictured me sleeping with the pots, the smallest sauce pan clutched to my chest like a teddy bear.

“No,” I told him. “The closet would be fine.” And then I added, more to myself than Daniel, “I need to get his clothes, too. At some point.”

We walked outside to the garage, where he thought there was a collection of boxes. Sarah toddled after us. Daniel leaned over to pull up the door with a graceful and effortless arc of his back. As soon as the door disappeared overhead, Sarah darted underneath it. A small red wheelbarrow sat toward the front, filled with plastic beach toys, but Sarah bypassed it in favor of a yellow flyswatter, which she picked up and began swishing at the air.

“Do you want me to take that from her?” Daniel asked as I stepped around a lawn mower.

I waved my hand, dismissing the germs from decades of smashed flies. “She’s fine,” I said. “It’s keeping her busy.”

He nodded in the way of nonparents, disapproving but ceding to my greater involvement. Sarah waved the flyswatter, laughing at its plastic springiness as if it were a miracle of modern invention.

“Here,” Daniel said, bending over a stack of boxes in a corner. “I think some of these might be empty.”

I walked over to the wheelbarrow and tested its weight. Maybe if Sarah saw me carrying it, she could be tempted out of the garage. It felt light enough to carry, so I balanced it carefully—hoisting it over the lawn mower and rakes and lobster pots—and deposited it on the driveway. Sarah bopped over, still clutching the flyswatter but willing to investigate the new loot. As she sifted through the toys, one-handed, I heard a car turn in from the road. It was Ladd, driving the old dented blue truck.

“Crab,” Sarah said, holding up a plastic mold.

“Ladd,” Daniel called, from the back of the garage. “Dinner’s at seven.”

“Thanks,” Ladd said. He slammed the car door shut and ran a hand through his hair, looking at me and then at Sarah. She picked up the crab and held it up in the air, showing it to Ladd—the newcomer—and toddled toward him.

“Crab,” she said, proud of the word, announcing the correctness of it. Ladd stood, frozen, as if it were Godzilla coming toward him instead of a toddler. He looked pained. He looked guilty.

Sarah’s little head bopped on toward Ladd—her head that still smelled like a baby’s, with her father’s curls. In my mind an image formed, those same curls stained and matted by blood.

I could kill him
. Had Ladd said that when I told him about Deirdre? Or had I? An amalgam of memories burst at the same time, like a water balloon or something squeezed too tight.

“Sarah,” I called. I pitched forward with quick steps and scooped her up, then stepped back, away from Ladd. Finally he had to look at me, a startled glance.
Are you crazy
.

Sarah dropped the crab and closed one hand into my hair. The flyswatter bobbed, grazing my nose, but I didn’t move to push it away. I gave up on speaking and headed toward the house. It took a great amount of effort to walk quickly, Sarah bouncing awkwardly on my hip rather than breaking into a flat-out run. Lightfoot wasn’t running behind me. She must already have gone into the house when I wasn’t looking.

“Brett,” Daniel called. I didn’t turn back to see him but could tell from the sound of his voice he’d returned to the open air. “Are you all right?”

My voice wouldn’t answer. I lifted one hand as I walked, hoping it looked nonchalant, fine,
Yes, I am all right.
But I had one target, the front door.

Time did a funny sort of leap. It’s not exactly that I couldn’t remember reaching the house and going up the stairs. Just that it happened in very thick fog, my vision dull and murky, as if I swam to the house, and through it, rather than walking. Sarah and I hit the bed the same moment the bedroom door slammed shut. My breath returned only at that moment, sucking through my lungs in great, insistent relief, like an asthmatic reunited with her inhaler.

WHEN EMILY DICKINSON WAS
a girl—when she first fell in love with Sue—she lived out in the world with the rest of Amherst. She went to parties, she worked in her garden. She loved to take long walks in the hills above town—so much so that her father bought her a Newfoundland for protection. “My shaggy ally,” she called him. His name was Carlo, after a dog in
Jane Eyre
, her favorite novel.

After Carlo died in 1866, Dickinson’s real reclusiveness began. “I do not cross my father’s ground to go to any house or town,” she wrote. She still gardened but only at night. During the day, she would interact with her family, and sometimes with Sue, but to other visitors, even close friends, she would pass letters from the other side of her bedroom door.

How much safer, and easier, to hide like that. I found myself practicing this position when Daniel came upstairs to check on me, behind the partially open door, sitting at the little desk he’d set up for me in the corner of the room. What I had meant to do was pick up Richard Sewall’s biography and scan the index for Carlo. But I only got as far as resting my hand on the thick paperback before I heard a tentative knock.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m in here.” As Daniel pushed the door open, Lightfoot darted in and jumped up on the bed with Sarah. I had finally taken the flyswatter away from her, trading it for a plastic ring of keys. She lay on the bed, holding them over her head in a prenap stupor, examining their contours and colors one at a time. The dog settled in beside her.

“Brett?” Daniel said, his careful formality just slightly amplified. The door stood between us. I could just see his outline through the crack by the doorframe.

“Hi,” I said. And then, even though he hadn’t asked how I was, I said, “I’m all right.” I turned halfway in my seat and could see Sarah’s eyes starting to droop, preceding her hands, which still sat resolutely in the air above her.

“Good,” he said. “I left a couple boxes for you out here in the hall.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

He paused a moment, held back by a gentleman’s force field that didn’t allow him to cross the threshold of my room. Then he slowly closed the door. Sarah’s arms flopped to the bed, as if commanded by a hypnotist. I stood up and opened the Richard Sewall book to the index, running my finger down the page for mention of Carlo. When I tried to flip the book back to the correct page, instead it opened itself, to somewhere in the middle. A piece of yellow lined paper fluttered to the floor. It had been folded carefully in half, but the flight to the ground turned it open, facing me, lying across my feet so that I could only make out the salutation, in Eli’s slanted handwriting.

D
ear Charlie
.

That’s not how Eli’s letter began. Eli’s letter was for me. I should have taken it directly downstairs. I could hear Daniel and Ladd through the floorboards, talking quietly, probably discussing my behavior. Discussing the problem of me in general, how I had ended up here, and where I would eventually go. Right away, I should have left my sleeping child, carried the letter down to these two men, and handed it over. One of them would have called the police. The detective work would unfold from there. When had he left it? When had he placed it in the book? Where was he now?
Where was he now?

Before I had a chance to think any of that, Eli’s letter fluttered from the pages of my book. I bent to the ground, picked it up, read it. The paper felt damply wrinkled, as if an entire season’s worth of seaboard air had seeped into its fibers. I listened to the sound of Sarah’s breathing, the little dog curled up beside her.

I did take the letter downstairs eventually. I hadn’t gone completely insane, only enough to sit down at the desk and start to write a letter of my own.
Dear Charlie
, I wrote. Then I brought the pen to my lips. It was a good pen, a uni-ball, the kind I used—back when I worked—to underline passages in books (I’d never liked highlighters) and to make notes on pages of my dissertation.

Dear Charlie.

Apparently Daniel liked uni-balls, too. He had outfitted my desk with four. I held the pen to my lip and thought of all the things I wanted to say. For instance, how to describe the weirdness of where I was, in the home of Ladd’s uncle, with Charlie’s copper pots waiting to be piled into a box and stored in an upstairs closet. Things. The people they belong to, and whether they survive. Where they end up. At the Moss house, I had grabbed the most obvious possessions of Charlie’s, but what else remained there? Whisks and slotted spoons. His ancient paperback of
Riddley Walker
, dampened and wrinkled by the same air as Eli’s letter. Photographs. Tennis trophies. I thought, if I can write this letter, I can ask him what else he wants me to retrieve, what he wants Sarah to have. I pressed the pen to the page, but the words I scribbled—as if my hand were guided by some Ouija spirit—had nothing to do with my intentions.

Dear Charlie. It’s okay. Eli can stay as long as he likes. Just please don’t wait for him. Come over to Maxine’s right away. Right now. Spend the night with Sarah and me. We miss you so much.

I imagined opening my bedroom door the barest crack. Passing the letter to the other side. Where Charlie would be standing, not pressing the door open, but respecting my wishes to stay hidden. He might carry the letter halfway down the hall before unfolding it. At the top of the steps he could read, nodding quietly. Heeding my words for once in his life, strolling back into the past, and returning to us all.

I MUST HAVE BEEN
very quiet, coming down the stairs. Ladd used to complain about it, my lack of audible footfall. He didn’t like being sneaked up on.
I wasn’t sneaking
, I’d say.
Just walking
.

Daniel and Ladd sat in the living room, Ladd on the couch—his back to the doorway—and Daniel on the wide leather chair, leaning forward, a tumbler of scotch in his hand. Already cocktail hour. I waited for the same alarm to overtake me, but it didn’t, the continued and unreasonable swings of my reactions. The two of them were talking intently, quietly, the lights dim. I felt like a little girl in a nightgown, padding downstairs after bedtime.

Then Daniel noticed me. He put his tumbler on the coffee table and stood up. I walked forward, out of the doorway and into the heart of the room. The letter sat steady in my hands, and both men looked down at it. I guess I could have just explained, to both of them, but my feeling in that moment was that I had to hand it to one. I had to choose. Both faces stared, concerned in the proprietary way of a certain kind of man—the kind who considers himself in charge. And I don’t recall making a conscious choice. I just gave the letter to Daniel. As he started to read, I realized he’d first expected that I had written the letter. The two of them both thinking I had reached a point where I would go upstairs, write a letter, and then come down to give it to them.

The reality did not provide any relief. I watched Daniel’s face as he began to understand what the letter was, what it said, who had written it.

Dear Brett.

I hesitate calling you dear because you should know that I can see you wherever you are. A hundred years ago you would have been chattel. Before 1967 you would have been a prostitute. Charlie’s slave and he never even knew. You were my discovery and I saw exactly what happened. Society isn’t crumbled yet, we still have rules. You and I need to talk.

I love you. Eli

Daniel looked up at me, a tense sort of preaction expression tightening his features. “Where did you find this?” he said.

Ladd stood and took it from Daniel’s hands. I didn’t want to look at him as he read what Eli had written, so I kept my eyes on Daniel as I explained about the book. I could see, peripherally, that Ladd had finished. He dropped his hands to his sides, his grip crumpling the edges of the letter. I suppressed the urge to snatch it back from him. Despite its salutation, the letter didn’t belong to me anymore. Unlike the postcard Ladd had written to me, this letter now belonged to the State of Massachusetts. Evidence.

NONE OF THE LETTERS
Emily Dickinson received survived, not a single one. Her sister burned them shortly after her death. It was a common enough practice, in those days, burning the correspondence of the deceased. So it is our good fortune to have so many of the letters Dickinson wrote. The day Charlie died I was reading from a book of those letters, half a correspondence:
Open Me Carefully
, the ones she wrote to Sue.

Two weeks ago, the Richard Sewall book where Eli hid my letter would not have been at the top of my stack when he walked into my study. I was working almost exclusively with the letters. The biography would have been on the shelf beside the table. I remembered what happened very clearly. Sarah took a step, I pushed the book aside. I didn’t deposit it on top of a pile of other books. I recalled the motion exactly—closing the book and then sliding it across the table before standing and walking over to embrace my family, the clock ticking. Late morning. Charlie with less than twelve hours to live.

How and when had Eli delivered the letter? Had he arrived at the house and gone upstairs while Charlie puttered in the kitchen? Had he sat down and written to me, with my own pen, then pulled out the fat biography and tucked it into its pages? Unlikely that he could have written it any time in the hours after Charlie died. Eli had been covered in blood. There was no residue of blood on the letter, or anywhere upstairs.

My fingerprints, Daniel’s, Ladd’s. All sullying the letter now. The detective dropped it into a zip-top plastic bag, frowning.

“Maybe he came back,” Ladd said. “Maybe he’s somewhere close.”

I imagined Eli living in the scrub oak woods, perhaps in the dunes by Crowes Pasture, or somewhere beneath the bluff, in a cave, like the bank swallows. Or maybe he was camping out in one of the hundreds of homes, abandoned till next summer. How many empty houses, September on Cape Cod? Even if they could search all of them, Eli would only need to move from one to the other, making his way from Saturday Cove to Provincetown and all the way back to Sandwich. He could live all winter that way.

As the detective left, I stayed in my chair, imagining Eli walking up the rickety beach stairs to his house, walking across the lawn, unseen. Making his way upstairs, he might have let his hand rest on the railing. Then in my study—his old childhood room, summers, though according to Charlie he’d rarely used it, the two brothers instead staying together—he would have sat down at the desk, flipped through my yellow notepad for an unused sheet, taken the pen that had rolled from my fingers, and written to me. There was no question that Eli had written the letter in the house. The page was from my yellow pad—faint indents were visible, of notes I’d jotted on the page above it. He used one of my pens. Reaching for the Sewall book, the fattest choice, inserting the letter, and then sliding it back onto the shelf.

TH
E NEXT DAY SARAH
continued her search for photographs. I followed her groggily from room to room as she opened and discovered the little leather frames. “Lady,” she would say, while searching and upon discovery. She would slide a drawer open, reach her hand in to fish inside it. If there was not a photograph she would say in a distinct tone that sounded almost British: “No lady.” When she did find one, she would hold it above her head and declare “Lady!” before dropping it back into the drawer.

In the midst of her scavenger hunt, someone knocked gently, just loud enough for me to hear, on the front door. Since my arrival, it no longer stood open as it had for years. When Daniel had left an hour before on some unnamed errand, he had shut and locked it behind him, as propriety would dictate, when a killer was on the loose. Still, I didn’t peer through the glass at the side of the door, but just swung it open, while Sarah and Lightfoot stood a foot or two back.

It was Rebecca, Ladd’s mother, looking pale, her eyes full of water and sympathy. She wore a bathing suit and cover-up, and a wide-brimmed straw hat.

“Brett,” she said. “Darling. I’m here to take the baby.”

“Excuse me?”

“Didn’t Ladd say? Take the baby, your little girl. To our house for a swim. So you can rest.”

I stepped back from the door so she could enter. As soon as she was in the hall, she put her arms around me.

“Poor Brett,” she said. “You poor thing.”

She smelled of sunscreen and expensive shampoo. I had seen Rebecca many times since Ladd and I broke up, and she’d always been understandably cool toward me. It took this, my husband’s murder, to remember her old fondness. I found myself patting her back until she released me and turned her attention to Sarah, who had inched closer, and was now reaching up toward the hat that had been knocked slightly askew during our embrace. Rebecca immediately handed it to her, then knelt down, her long and elegant limbs folding themselves up with ease. She squinted at Sarah, examining her very closely.

“She looks like her grandmother,” Rebecca said. “Let me take her so you can get some rest.”

She didn’t have a car seat so I gave her the keys to my station wagon, then walked back through the empty house. Mrs. Duffy was back at her cottage resting, so I was alone there for the first time. And I found myself doing what Sarah had, opening drawers, looking for pictures of Sylvia. Each one was different, a new image of her strong-boned face, brilliant in addition to beautiful. I had applied to Harvard as both an undergrad and graduate student and been rejected both times. It seemed odd to feel jealous of a woman who cut such a tragic figure.

If I had died instead of Charlie, how would people be taking care of him? Probably they would be bringing him casseroles, lasagnas wrapped in aluminum foil for the freezer, never mind that the main thing he knew how to do was cook. Charlie, it struck me, would have stayed in his father’s house. He would not have pictures of me tucked away in drawers forty years in the future. I opened an envelope, a close-up of Sylvia with her hair brushed off her forehead. Not smiling, she looked almost stern.
Why are you thinking of what Charlie would do?
What about what
you
will do? Charlie is the one who died.

Charlie was the one who died. He was gone. And still I found myself thinking that he didn’t love me enough, not as much as I loved him—instead of thinking about the pictures I had. Would they be scattered in drawers throughout my home decades from now? I thought of the framed wedding picture back at the Moss house, which I had walked right past, even while gathering the things that were most important to me.

Sometimes in the morning I would wake, and emotion would grip me before the details descended. In my fog, I would feel anguish and loss for a split second before recalling the reason. The same thing had happened in the weeks following my discovery of Deirdre.

I wondered where Daniel kept his wedding photos and imagined what that day would have been like: here at the beach house, Sylvia looking like a photo out of
Town & Country
, Daniel looking wholly adoring. Somewhere, there must have been a picture. I strode past the many drawers where Sarah had already made her discoveries and went into his study, opening the door very carefully, even though I knew he wasn’t home. I found three different pictures of Sylvia in his desk, but none of them were wedding photos.

I headed down the hall, the part of the house I’d never visited. His bedroom smelled of expensive soap, and old wood, and the musty scent that clung to all Cape houses, especially the ones by the water. On the floor lay a worn blue rug with swirly white flowers. I imagined Sylvia picking out the furniture—good oak dresser and nightstands, a blue bureau that looked so heavy you might have to chop it into firewood before ever trying to move it again. My eyes searched all the surfaces as I walked into the bathroom. I should have known there wouldn’t be a picture in plain view. Hadn’t he told me that he didn’t like her face to take him by surprise? He needed to prepare himself before seeing her again. He needed to take a deep breath, decide which image of her he most wanted to see, and deliberately go to the place he’d stashed it.

I went back to the bedroom and started opening drawers. Both bureaus—I slid open drawer after drawer, each one relinquishing itself without so much as a squeak or whoosh, each one containing neatly stacked and folded clothing. Between the two windows that looked out onto the ocean sat a beautiful antique secretary. It had the good manners to protest with age as I opened the front, but everything was as neatly arranged as the drawers had been. Letter openers and rolls of stamps. Envelopes and stationery plus a small pile of yellow legal pads. I closed the front and knelt, opening the drawers to the desk, finding nothing but files and papers.