The Last September: A Novel (25 page)

Because no matter how I arranged things, it felt like my whole life unfolded in a series of interactions with Eli, all of them creating a string of worry beads in my mind. I could roll each bead one at a time between my thumb and forefinger before moving on to the next. Starting with that first day I ever saw him, trying out for the musical, mirroring each other’s movements across the dance studio. Summoning me to the party where I met Charlie, or filling my room with balloons, or rescuing that scraggly kitten. Holding my newborn baby. Pacing the lawn, decorated in Charlie’s blood.

Lying there in the dark, listening to the absence of Daniel beneath me, I felt flooded with a clear and certain knowledge that another bead had been added to the string. Maybe it was Lightfoot, who jumped up, skittered to the window, and placed her paws on the sill. Her little tail started to beat, back and forth, slowly at first and then faster. I sat up and placed a hand on Sarah’s heart. Then I took off my nightgown and pulled on a pair of jeans, a bra, a T-shirt—before going to the window and seeing exactly what I knew I would: Eli, making his way down the path between the scrub oaks from Ladd’s cottage, heading toward us.

My purse sat right by my elbow on top of the little desk. I could have reached in and grabbed my phone. But instead I left it there. I picked up my flip-flops but didn’t put them on, one more thing to risk waking Mrs. Duffy. Even with Lightfoot at my heels, it seemed to me I made almost no noise at all, already a ghost.

I could have gone into the kitchen and used the old-fashioned wall phone. Dialed 911, made the world converge here. How long would it take for the police to arrive and arrest him, or worse? I didn’t bother finding out. I just opened the front door, letting the dog burst through and onto the grass. Lightfoot ran down the hill to greet him. I stepped outside, locking the door behind me. The night air stood close and dark, one note of chill amid the dense summer breeze. No, I realized, not summer anymore, but deep enough into September that it had officially become fall. Beach grass swayed beyond the manicured lawn. Eli had bypassed the path to the house and now stood under the eaves of the shed. The sky sat clear and dark above us, the air dry, but Eli’s posture suggested huddling away from rain. I could see him, stringy blond hair hanging down his back, his shoulders hunched. Lightfoot ran in joyful circles around his feet, then stopped to jump up on his legs, stretching toward him, asking for a return greeting. But Eli didn’t bend to pet her. He looked so helpless, a forlorn shadow leaning against the shed. When could he have last eaten, or slept in a bed? I wished I’d thought to grab some food before leaving the house and felt acutely aware, these past few weeks, how well I’d been tended, first by Maxine and then by Daniel and Mrs. Duffy.

“Brett?” Eli said, into the darkness. His voice sounded hoarse and garbled, unpracticed, and still just exactly like himself.

“Yes,” I agreed, loud and clear, no mistaking that he would hear me. “It’s me. It’s Brett.” I left the path to walk across the grass, my arms outstretched before me as if I meant to embrace him. Eli had somehow managed not to trigger the automatic floodlight, but as I walked toward him it detected my movement and washed the lawn with a faint yellow glow.

His face looked wolfish, starving, with a patchy, unsuccessful beard. At the sight of my approaching, he let himself break into a smile. I knew it would just be one moment of the old Eli. But that was enough to let me muster my courage. I dropped one arm but kept the other one in front of me. As I approached he reached out and clasped my hand, and we stood there, facing each other in the eerie slant of light, examining each other’s altered faces, the careful and fascinated way you greet a friend you haven’t seen in a long time—someone you knew when you were very, very young.

In this short Life

That only lasts an hour

How much—how little—is

Within our power

— EMILY DICKINSON

Three boys grew up on a stretch of beach, summer their most important time of year. Each one looking forward, through the drudgery of school, the slushy forever of northeastern winters, to the lush and persistent light of June, widening above sand and shore. The tide pools with crabs and periwinkles. Sea stars clinging to the rocks under the jetty.

Twice a day an ice-cream truck pulled into the beach parking lot and summoned the children away from plastic shovels and boogie boards. Of the three, Charlie probably missed the truck most often, walking out to the very end of the jetty, jumping from rock to rock, waving to the other two when he reached the end, standing out in the thick of the bay. Ladd would have been more civilized, swimming in races, and sailing, playing tennis. Eli played tennis, too, but what he loved most was mountain biking through the trails behind Daniel Williams’s house, balancing in the deep sand, ducking his head under arches of tree branches.

All his life, when Charlie had no place to go, and no plans left, he came to Saturday Cove. When Ladd was finished with his travels, he came back to Saturday Cove. And Eli. The boy who built sand castles out on the rocks at low tide and watched as the ocean swept in around them. The boy who won science grants, and wanted to be a doctor, and laughed with his whole face, and loved to throw parties. That boy had seeped out of his original shell. Where he had gone I couldn’t say. I only knew that the connective tissue between those three men and me was Eli, just enough left of him to come back to this place, to Saturday Cove, like a homing device that someone else had left behind.

Together, we walked down to the beach.

TH
E SAND STRETCHED FAR
out toward the ocean, littered with seaweed and beach glass and pebbles. When I’d first known Eli, he’d carried a citrusy scent, somewhere between lemon and grapefruit. Ever since he’d gotten sick, even when he was medicated—even when he’d just showered, and wore clean clothes—he carried wit
h him an odor of anxiety and decay, as if the lemon had begun to rot. When we got to the bottom of the beach steps, and he stopped just beside me, his sour sweat overpowered even the low tide. Away from the bath of Daniel’s floodlight, it took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust. Grime caked and pooled in the hollow of Eli’s collarbone, his hair was matted. But the clothes he wore, a white T-shirt from the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, an unbuttoned denim shirt, and khakis, were clean. And they were Charlie’s. Eli couldn’t have been wearing them since that day three weeks ago. Maybe as early as this morning, he had been at the house. Maybe he had been there, hiding, when Ladd collected the rest of Charlie’s clothes. There was no writing on the khakis, but Eli’s hand kept moving as if he were scribbling, an imaginary pen clutched in his right hand. I remembered the jeans he’d been wearing the last time I saw him. What would the writing on them reveal to me if I could manage to decipher it?

“Eli,” I said. “Where have you been?”

He didn’t answer but turned and started walking, toward the public beach, the opposite direction from the Moss house. Darkness settled comfortably around us, but I didn’t want to walk too far and let the morning find us exposed, out on the beach, for everyone to see.

“Eli,” I called, to his departing back. I wished I’d thought to grab my car keys—though the noise of the engine might wake Mrs. Duffy or, worse, Ladd. A stream of words tumbled out of Eli, buzzing around his head like a cloud of mayflies. I said, “I’m going this way.”

I jogged toward the rocky stretch of bluff, which we’d have to pick our way across. Eli lurched around, bone-thin and lumbering, all his natural grace gone. As he walked toward me, I tried to imagine where he’d been, how he’d been eating—if he’d been eating—and how he’d avoided getting picked up by the police.

“When did you get Charlie’s clothes?” I said when he reached me. “Where have you been?”

He waved his hand, shooing my questions away. “Are you ready?” he asked as we stood facing the direction of the rocks, the dark, his childhood home.

I presented my beckoning hand outward, toward the bluff, a ladies-first gesture in reverse. The truth was, I didn’t feel afraid. It was Eli. Even now, he only scared me in theory. Even now—in this florid state, incomprehensible, alarming. I was used to him. Which didn’t mean I was willing to turn my back.

“After you,” I said.

AS I TRAVELED IN
the dark behind Eli, it was impossible to imagine the sun would ever rise. Words from his stream floated back to me in a paranoid staccato. Lightfoot trotted along cheerfully, overjoyed by the midnight outing and the reunion. Out here on the rocks, under the sky that hung low around us, we were surrounded by the detritus of animals that had met timely or untimely ends. Withering skates, and the abandoned husks of horseshoe crabs. Tiny snails crunching beneath our feet as we stepped, and for a moment the oppressive scent of a seal carcass, battered by the tide and sun, now seeping into the air. Eli didn’t seem to register any of it. He kept his shoulders hunched, his voice low and persistent. I had the feeling I could take him by the shoulders and point him in any direction, and he would just maintain this posture, muttering and walking forward like a windup toy.

All I held as fact were the sand and rocks and debris beneath my feet. The sky above my head, and the ocean traveling its way all those thousands of miles east. A million worlds surrounded me, and the only one I cared to know occurred weeks ago, less than a mile in the direction we now headed.
What happened?
Maybe if I listened hard enough, the answers would spill out from Eli. Maybe they already had, in some nonsequential order, and I’d missed them.

By now, we’d crossed over the rocks and alighted on a clear stretch of sand. Eli stopped—not just moving but talking. It startled me, the sudden cessation of that voice. He turned toward the water, staring out toward the tide, and I stopped walking, too.

“Brett?” he called in a long and questioning syllable. As if he couldn’t see me through what little darkness stood between us.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m right here.”

And then the words started spilling out again. Words that peppered and repeated. Important words like
Charlie
and
blood
, and my own name, jumbled together with enough other words that I couldn’t begin to put them all together.

“Eli.” I walked forward, right next to him, and put my hand on his shoulder. He jerked his head sideways, toward me, and shrugged my hand away.

“Brett,” he said, his voice newly sharp and clear.

Just behind him I could see the roof of his house rising above the bluff. I stepped back to give him room. This would happen sometimes. A break in the stream. Moments of conversation, like logic had broken through the flood. It wouldn’t last long. Above us, the slightest shift in the dark sky, the fading of stars, a hint toward gathering light. I needed to get him inside before morning.

“Why did you kill Charlie?” Eli asked.

“Me?” I pointed to my chest, feeling a flood of relief. Finally someone was accusing me of the thing I had done. And here we stood, out on the beach alone, nobody in the world even knowing enough to look for us or to worry about me. Sarah lay sleeping, safe upstairs, far down the beach. Would Daniel keep her if I never came home?

“Eli,” I said. “Let’s go up to the house.” And then, thinking he must have some sense of being pursued to have remained undiscovered so long, I added, “We can hide there.”

He nodded and ducked his head, then brushed past me. I followed him up the stairs and across the lawn. He marched straight to the deck, bypassing the low stairs to step directly onto it, then put his hands on his hips, surveying. I stopped on the lawn. In the days since I’d last been there, someone had started to rebuild the deck. To the north lay a pile of the discarded boards, dark gray, replaced by fresh slats, their pale brown color visible even in the darkness, the scent of fresh wood settling around us. Eli stopped at the precise spot Charlie had fallen. He knelt and pressed his hand to the boards.

“Here’s where he died,” he said. Then he stood and walked to the rail. He leaned forward, crossing his elbows, and dropping his head on top of them, exactly the way I’d imagined Charlie, braced for the first blow.

“Here’s how he stood,” Eli said. His voice should have been muffled, pressed against his arms, but it came out clear. “Just before you got him with the hammer.”

I walked up onto the deck. A wintery breeze blew in from the direction of the discarded boards. It would leave a film of dew on every leaf, and then the light would come. Not impossible to imagine the scenario, me killing Charlie, so much more directly than I ever could have imagined. I was still so hurt, and so angry. Maybe I’d done it in my sleep. Maybe I’d used these past few weeks to rearrange all memories in favor of myself, forgetting this unspeakable act.

“I should have stopped you,” Eli said.

“Where were you?” I asked. I almost wanted to add,
I didn’t see you there.

“Just over there. With the dog.” He looked down at his feet as if seeing Lightfoot for the first time. She wagged up at him and he knelt to pet her. “Hey,” he said, the lucidity gathering. “Hey Lightfoot.” She put her paws on his knee and licked his chin.

“Charlie was surprised,” I said. “By that first blow.”

Eli looked up. “He fell sideways. He lifted up his hands. But he didn’t want to hurt you. Neither of us wanted to hurt you.”

Eli didn’t say what happened next. Two, three. And then I turned the hammer around for the fourth blow, the one that finally killed him, but it wasn’t enough. Because how could he have done it, when I loved him so much, and when I’d tried so hard? I didn’t know Eli was watching. By now, the dog must have fled, already cowering under the front porch. I went inside, got the knife, brought it back, and slid it across Charlie’s throat. The blood flowed slowly, arteries no longer pumping.

“Except,” I said.

Eli’s window of clarity was closing, his words starting to spill forth again. The dog backed away as he got to his feet and started pacing.

“It wasn’t me,” I told him. “I didn’t do that. I wasn’t here. I was at my friend’s.”

If Eli heard me, he didn’t give any indication. In front of my eyes, shifting in his capabilities, the outside world registering or not. And who was there left to protect him? Charlie was dead, the blood-soaked boards already replaced, the world moving forward with brash insensitivity. I thought of Charlie’s wedding ring and wondered what Bob had done with it. I had to get it back from him, for Sarah. I had to figure out a way to deliver Eli to help, to safety. I had to find a way to live, and continue, and survive.

In a way, it would be easier to believe I could have been here, that I could have killed him—and let them take me away. No more decisions or responsibilities. Nothing but penance to pay.

I sat down and pressed my back against the wall. Lightfoot trotted over and plopped down in my lap. Eli stopped again, and came to sit next to me. When I saw his hand reaching out, toward me, I couldn’t help it. I flinched. But he only grasped a strand of my hair, his fist closing around it, but not ungently.

“Your hair,” he said. “It wasn’t like this.”

It seemed like morning should have arrived by now. But it hadn’t, nothing close, not even the light from the millionaire’s flagpole. He must have given up, or else the bulb had died. Eli closed his eyes, done speaking for the moment. Maybe I’d miscalculated the hour, because even this time of year, birds should have stirred as the gloaming approached. Eli didn’t say anything more about what my hair
had
been like, the night I’d killed Charlie. But I knew it had been long and fine and very blonde.

“It wasn’t me,” I promised Eli.

But he wasn’t there to hear, not really, his eyes open now, but staring off toward who knows where. While I understood exactly what had happened, and could press my face against my knees, seeing it all, until the first signs of light arranged themselves in the sky, and I managed to blink into the world around me. Eli was gone.

A LITTLE WHILE BEFORE—PERHAPS
an hour, perhaps less—Sarah reached out for her mother in the searching nighttime way she had. I can picture her exactly, the way she would have sat up in bed, accustomed enough to the dog to be additionally affronted by her absence. “Mommy,” she called into the darkness. It would not have occurred to her to climb out of bed. She expected prompt and attentive service. “Mommy,” she called again, and then once more, before bursting into anguished and indignant sobs.

From down the hall came Mrs. Duffy in her nightgown. “My heart stopped when I saw you gone,” she told me later. She picked up Sarah and gave her a kiss, bounced her for a moment, then carried her through the upstairs, opening every door, even the wide closet. I imagine Sarah still holding on to Charlie’s shirt, pressing it to her tear-swollen face, because that’s what she did for the next few years—held on to that shirt, cuddled it and clung to it, until it was frayed and worn to near transparency.

Sarah was too sleepy and upset to object to Mrs. Duffy’s carrying her, with one careful hand on the railing, walking down the steep steps, and then peering into every downstairs room. In the kitchen, Mrs. Duffy dialed Ladd’s cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail. So she called the police and then took a flashlight from the utility drawer and walked outside in the predawn, down the path to Ladd’s cottage, where she found the light on, Ladd unable to sleep, sitting at the table composing a letter he never did manage to send me.

I WALKED ACROSS THE
grass, now damp with dew. Lightfoot was nowhere to be seen. When I crested the top of the beach stairs I could see them, down by the rocks, Eli pacing barefoot in the surf, writing on his pants with that imaginary pen, while the little dog gamboled around his feet as if it were a game. When I got down to them, she took a break to run and greet me, her face ecstatic, a family reunited. Whereas Eli didn’t seem to register me at all, his eyes on the ground, muttering and pacing in an increasingly smaller circle, until he was practically pivoting on one leg.