The Last September: A Novel (10 page)

When my phone rang, I said, “It’s probably Ladd. Could you get it for me? But don’t answer it.” Eli fished through my purse, then handed me the phone.

“Where are you?” Ladd said, without any kind of a greeting. I had left him a message, telling him that I was going to spend the night with my mother.

“Didn’t you get my message?” I glanced at Eli, who had his eyes closed, resting his head against the passenger’s window. Hopefully he wouldn’t speak. He took one last drag of his cigarette and lofted the butt out the window. Nicotine-stained fingers drummed restlessly on the dashboard. I wondered if he’d exhausted his supply.

“You’re still driving?” Ladd said.

“Just taking the exit to Randall now,” I said, measuring the words, testing for believability. I didn’t have much practice as a liar.

“Well,” he said, “tell her hi for me. You think you’ll be back tomorrow?”

“Yes,” I said. “Tomorrow. I’ll call you in the morning. Okay?”

“Okay,” Ladd said. “Drive safe.”

“I will.”

“You know, I can get in the car right now. I can meet you there.”

“No, no,” I said. “I mean, you don’t have to.”

He paused another second, then said good-bye and “I love you.” I did the same, then tossed my phone into my purse at Eli’s feet, slowing the car into the rotary before the Sagamore Bridge. I waited for Eli to comment on the way I’d lied to Ladd, but he didn’t say anything, just stared out the window, looking—I finally realized—as if he were listening to something else entirely.

IS IT POSSIBLE, IN
memory, to go back to a place that means so many different things? I know that on this particular day, the first time I saw the Moss house, it was dark by the time Eli and I arrived. But my mind provides floodlights with the strength of day, as if my first glimpse took place at noon rather than past sunset. It includes all the details that would have been invisible to me. As the two of us walked through the front door, the whole house smelled sour and antiseptic, like death and sorrow. Eli added the incongruous odor of sweat and cigarettes.

Hospice had been set up for their mother, and I felt not only like an interloper myself but for delivering Eli—his disturbed and disturbing energy—to a sick woman’s bedside. I couldn’t see the ocean view through the dark windows, and I didn’t notice the brine scent off the ocean, overshadowed as it was by the one thing on earth that’s more primal. We only had to take a few steps into the house to see through the open doorway of the downstairs guestroom, now converted to a stage for a last exit. Several people crowded into that room around a bed, but my eyes fell immediately on the back of a head with blond ringlets, the sort of blond ringlets you’d expect to see on a toddler—the sort I
would
see on a toddler, his toddler, not so far off in the future. And it suddenly felt awful, appearing at the most private scene imaginable.

At the same time I thought: Turn around, Charlie. Turn around and see me.

Charlie turned around. His face looked pale and stricken. For the first time, I noticed a small circle of colorless moles, just above his right jawline. His cheeks looked puffy, his eyes faintly swollen.

“Brett,” Charlie said.

He stood up and walked out of the room, toward me. I could see his discombobulation, his grief, giving way to a moment of relief. Someone had arrived who could hold him. He must have noticed Eli, standing behind me. Clearly Eli was the reason I’d come, to support my friend, to bring him here (though of course he only needed to be brought because he’d come to get me). But Charlie, who seemed to think I’d come for him, gathered me up in his arms, pulling me in tight as humanly possible. He pressed his forehead into the crook of my neck. His hands tightened on my back, the fingers that already felt so familiar and familial, shaking there, taut and possessive and completely within their rights, asking me for everything.

HAD THIS BEEN ELI’S
plan? To bring me to Charlie? He’d always wanted to keep me away from Charlie. But maybe I was one small gift before their mother departed and Eli himself went completely off the rails. Or maybe that reasoning was just mine, trying to piece together logical motives where none ever existed.

All I know is this: Charlie needed someone. Eli, by design or coincidence, delivered someone to him in the form of me. And I played along. Did Eli disappear, or did I desert him? I barely remember him that evening, what he did or where he was. Instead I concentrated on his brother. When the time came to go to sleep—the guest room already given over to their mother—I went upstairs with Charlie, my phone buzzing away, unanswered, in the purse I’d left on the sunporch. And it wasn’t that I didn’t feel pangs of guilt and conscience toward Ladd. It was just that the pangs I felt toward Charlie were that much stronger.

In the morning, we came downstairs together, Charlie and I. Mr. Moss stood in the kitchen, pouring coffee for himself and a nurse. If he wondered about my presence or identity he didn’t say anything. His wife was days away from dying, and he couldn’t think about anything else.

“She wants to sit out by the water,” Mr. Moss said to Charlie.

Charlie and I went outside through the dining room, across the back deck. He showed me where the lawn chairs were stacked underneath it, and as he went back inside I chose the most substantial, least frayed one and carried it down to the shoreline. High tide, the rocks were covered by water, leaving only a small, smooth expanse of sand. I placed the chair close enough that Charlie’s mother would be able to rest her feet in the surf, if she wanted.

When I looked up at the beach stairs, Charlie stood there at the top, cresting the landing with his mother cradled in his arms. She wore a scarf around her head, its edges fluttered against his face, and an afghan wrapped around her shoulders. She couldn’t have weighed more than seventy pounds. Charlie took each step so carefully, his arms grasping her firmly enough that I could see veins and sinews tighten. If ever a moment redeemed someone, this was it. Nobody had ever done anything as carefully, as intentionally, as Charlie carrying his mother down the stairs. For her, the morning fog had cleared, and the sky turned out a gorgeous blue. The day offered up exactly the right notes of summer and autumn—warming sun, cooling breeze. The kind that welcomes you gladly to the world, or sends you off with love.

At the bottom of the steps, Charlie’s muscles relaxed the barest bit. Just a few steps more, toward me, and he lowered his mother into the chair. Her arms slid off his shoulders, their cheeks bumping in a way that would have been awkward if it hadn’t been a mother and son. By now everyone else had arrived, except Eli—Charlie’s father and a nurse and a plump woman in a Talbots cardigan. I was still standing between the chair and the water—Mrs. Moss’s feet nearly touched mine, but if she noticed me or wondered who I was, she didn’t give any indication. I wanted to kneel down and take off her slippers, or adjust the afghan that had slipped off her shoulders, but I worried the face of a stranger would startle her or that she would think I’d arrived from somewhere else, to take her away.

It was Charlie who knelt in front of her, pulling the blanket back over her shoulders and slipping off her moccasins. Her skin seemed so thin I worried it would slide off along with the shoes. Mrs. Moss sighed and edged her feet forward, dipping them into the salt water. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she said. “Thank you, Charlie.”

He edged around her, next to me, leaning into my shoulder, as if I had been planted in that exact spot for only one reason—to keep him standing.

AFTER CHARLIE CARRIED HIS
mother back up to the house, I finally got around to calling Ladd. I found my purse on the sunporch, walked out to the back deck, and pressed the first number I had on speed dial. My fingers shook slightly as I brought the phone to my ear. Even I wasn’t dishonest enough to tell myself I was comforting an old friend. Charlie and I hadn’t made love, but we’d slept in the same bed, wrapped up together, arms around each other. When he woke, he had propped himself up on one elbow and stroked my head.

“Thank you, Brett,” he’d said. He had ridiculously long eyelashes. Later he would tell me that when he was a child, heavy snow would clump in those lashes, forcing his eyes shut. That morning I wondered—as I would many times over the coming years—how a man with so many girlish features managed to look not the slightest bit feminine. When Charlie kissed me, I kissed him back. Elated. Opportunistic. Despite everything that should have clamored in my head—the dying mother and the disturbed brother and the abandoned fiancé—elated.

Now, standing outside at the very edge of the deck, looking out toward the ocean, the day seemed too pretty for words. The gray shingles on the wall behind me were already chipping, fading.

“Brett,” Ladd said, on the other end of the phone, his voice tinny through faulty cell phone service. “How’s it going? How’s your mom?”

“She’s fine,” I said. “She needs some help with a research project, they changed her deadline. So I might stay an extra day.”

On the other end of the line, a pause, and I felt like he could see through the phone lines, all the way to Cape Cod, me here at the Moss house. I wondered if he could hear the change in my voice. Suddenly, already: I belonged to somebody else.

“Okay,” Ladd said, stretching the word out carefully, over too many syllables.

Just then Eli banged out of the front door wearing nothing but a pair of maroon boxers, decorated with beagles and bugle horns. I turned my head toward him, sharply enough that any normal person would have read the signal.
Go away, please. I need to talk privately
. But Eli didn’t seem to realize I was there. He swaggered to the edge of the deck, almost exactly where I stood—close enough that his bare elbow brushed my upper arm. Then he whipped out his penis and started to pee, a broad arc of morning urine gushing out in front of us. I took the phone away from my ear and stepped back. From across the lawn, Charlie emerged at the top of the beach stairs, carrying the chair I’d brought down for his mother. He strode across the grass, his steps slowing again as he got closer, taking in the scene, his face falling. It was an expression I would come to know well, the particular descent of his features when confronted with the change in his brother.

By now I held the phone down, by my side. “Brett? Brett?” Ladd’s tinny voice called to me, useless, two million miles away.

“I’ll call you back,” I said, maybe not loud enough for him to hear, and turned off the phone.

From halfway across the lawn, from across all these fresh disasters, Charlie stared at me. Behind him, daylight widened over low tide, the expanse of beach now littered with wet rocks. Eli, finished, stood between us, swaying slightly, tucking himself back into his beagle-and-bugle boxers. I moved sideways across the deck, stepping off its opposite edge and onto the grass, toward Charlie.

A FEW HOURS LATER,
Charlie walked ahead of me as we picked our way across the rocky bluff. I loved the way his back looked, his thin white T-shirt and Bermuda bathing trunks. When we stepped from the rocks onto the sand, he pulled off his T-shirt. I hadn’t brought a bathing suit—I was still wearing the clothes I’d taught in the day before, the blouse and knee-length skirt, so I just stood there and watched as he trotted into the water. I didn’t know yet about Charlie’s strange faith in salt water. He believed it could cure anything from poison ivy to cancer.

All the words anyone could use to describe Charlie, my past experience with him—anybody’s past experience—were steadily becoming eclipsed by the kindness and love he showed his mother. By his nearness. By the way he seemed to not just want but need me.

I stood there on the sand and watched him swim out, much farther than I ever would have dared. And Charlie stopped swimming a moment. I could see him, getting his bearings, scanning the shore, locating me. I waved and couldn’t see—but imagined—him smiling.
She beckons, and the woods start
. Goose bumps formed on my arms and legs, and they felt like a swelling. Like my body could no longer contain everything that lived inside it, only wanting to burst outward, to join the ocean air.

A PERSON BETTER SKILLED
at deception would have come up with a less verifiable alibi. When I stopped returning Ladd’s calls, he phoned my mother, an even less practiced liar—she didn’t think for a moment to cover for me. Ladd drove by my apartment and saw my car, parked in its usual spot. When I checked my phone again toward evening, the many messages left by him and my mother were fraught with increasing alarm.

I went outside to call Ladd, so I could shield Charlie from this fallout. If Charlie and I talked about Ladd at all during those few days, I can’t remember it. So much else was happening. Instead of walking toward the ocean, I headed up the road, to the dirt path that lapped the cranberry bog.

“The Mosses’,” Ladd said when I finally told him the truth. He erupted so loudly I had to hold the phone away from my ear for a moment. “How the fuck could you be at the Mosses’?”

“Eli came to get me.” Telling him about Mrs. Moss’s illness, I pitched my voice low, trying to inspire him to do the same. It didn’t work.

“But you lied to me,” Ladd said. “You flat-out lied to me. You stood in one place and told me you were in another.”

“Because,” I said, my voice almost a whisper now, “I knew you would react this way, exactly this way. I knew you would be angry.”

“Angry,” Ladd yelled. “Of course I’m angry. You lied! You’re with Charlie fucking Moss!”

From a dead tree beside the bog, a red-tailed hawk swooped toward the road, landing on prey too small for me to see in this light, the gloaming.

“Not Charlie,” I said. “Eli. Eli came to get me.”

“Where are you staying? Whose room?”

“Nobody’s room. It’s not like that.”

“It’s not like people are sleeping in rooms?”

“Ladd,” I said, admonishing. Years later I would see Charlie employ this same technique, responding to my justifiable rage and anguish as if they weren’t caused by his actions, only beneath both our dignity.