The Last September: A Novel (11 page)

“I’m coming to get you,” Ladd said. Finally, with this pronouncement, his voice evened out.

“You can’t.”

“Oh, I think I can.”

“She’s dying,” I hissed. “You can’t storm in here and cause a scene when she’s dying.”

“Then you come home. Right now.”

“Eli drove me. I don’t have my car.”

“I don’t understand,” Ladd said. It was his turn to whisper. His voice might have broken my heart had I not already steeled myself the way a person in my position—a person doing what I did—must. “Who are these people to you,” Ladd went on, “that you have to be there at a time like this?”

It seemed to me that the question answered itself via the posing. So that all I could say was, “I’m sorry. I’ll call you later.” When I hung up, Charlie stood next to me, hands in the pocket of his Baja hoodie.

“Everything okay?” he said.

“Yes.”

I didn’t want to frighten him with how quickly my allegiance had shifted. Already I had removed my engagement ring and zipped it into the inside pocket of my purse. As far as the Mosses, apart from Charlie and Eli, my presence had scarcely been registered. Everything occurring in the house, from their mother’s slow exit to Eli’s disintegration, was so fraught and elemental that all social mores had evaporated. Tonight I would sleep in one of Charlie’s T-shirts, folding the same clothes I’d been wearing two days straight, leaving them on a chair to put on again tomorrow.

“Let’s not go back in just yet,” Charlie said, closing the distance between us the phone call had imposed.

As he stood next to me, I slipped my phone into his back pocket. The two of us faced west. We could see the sun, setting, flooding the red bog with orange light. Steps to the east, the paved road extended upward, toward a hill, so quiet it felt hard to imagine any car had ever driven on it, though I myself had come this way, driving Eli in his mother’s car, barely twenty-four hours ago. As I looped my arm through the crook of Charlie’s elbow, I felt a shiver at the small of my back, not just because a chill descended with the night air but because exactly as the light dissipated a shadow appeared, up where the road started to curve downhill. A tall man, newly thin, walking with long-legged strides. Something wrong about his gait, just slightly lopsided, and carrying with him the noise of conversation, though no one accompanied him. Engaging his voices, a phrase I would learn before the day was over.

Charlie stepped sideways. My arm slipped out of its spot and slapped against my body. As he started to head up the road, toward his brother, I reached out to stop him. Charlie turned back toward me.

“Listen,” he said. “This has to be done quickly. Because he can’t be in there like that. Not now.”

“Okay,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to provoke him. I need you to come with me, all right? So you can be a witness.”

“All right.”

“He’s got to be a threat,” Charlie said. “To himself or others. That’s the only way to get him into the hospital.”

“Okay,” I said again, not caring that Charlie didn’t seem to be factoring my safety into the equation, let alone his own. Charlie was never afraid
of
his brother, only
for
him. As he walked forward, up the hill toward Eli, I followed him.

Something had come over Charlie. A new energy, like an actor who’d stepped into character. “Eli,” he said. His voice was hard and loud enough to break through the monologue and cut it short. “What are you doing? Where are you going?”

“Home,” Eli said. “To see Mom.”

“You can’t see Mom anymore.”

By now I had stopped walking, standing back—close enough to see everything, but far enough to keep myself out of the way. Eli stood there, peering through the dark at Charlie. Silence for a moment, then a burst of laughter over something nobody had said.

“What’s so funny?” Charlie said.

Eli sidestepped to get around him. Charlie blocked his way.

“I need to see Mom,” Eli said. “You need to understand, it’s very important that I be there.”

The sentences sounded reasonable but not the tone, words bleeding together at first and then separate, staccato. Still, I saw Charlie falter, his demeanor slip just the barest bit toward normal. But when Eli started to walk forward, Charlie again gathered up his resolve.

“You can’t be there,” Charlie said. “No entrance for you, Eli. She doesn’t want you there.”

Eli didn’t respond. He just stood there, his brow furrowed. I couldn’t tell if the words had angered him, or he couldn’t understand what they meant. Charlie stepped forward. He reached out and pushed Eli, first on one shoulder, then the next. Eli backed up a pace or two, then turned and started to walk away, back up the steep road.

Charlie ran after him, catching up easily. I stood there, not moving, watching as Charlie shoved him again, a sharp and instigating jab at the shoulder. Eli didn’t respond, just kept walking, head down. Charlie stopped a moment, watching him go, then ran again. He jumped onto his back, placing his hands over Eli’s eyes. For a moment, Eli concentrated on trying to take those hands away; then he shrugged Charlie off, a hard movement. Charlie fell backward—no attempt to brace his own fall, no tension in his body. He just let himself slam to the pavement. I could hear the thwack of his head hitting blacktop.

All the houses around us were dark, stars obscured by low-hanging clouds. I stepped forward, not nearly fast enough, as Eli turned to see Charlie, there on the ground. He sunk down over him, straddling his body, and for a moment I thought he would start pummeling him. But he didn’t, he just sat there, with his arms outstretched, covering Charlie’s face with his hands, his fingers spread out so that Charlie could breathe.

“Eli,” I yelled, hoping somebody, somewhere, was close enough to hear. “Eli, get off him. Let him go.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute, didn’t move. Then he withdrew one hand and with the other stroked Charlie’s head, as if he could erase the damage. I knew Charlie was conscious because he lifted his hands and closed them around Eli’s arms, but he didn’t try to push him off. He didn’t try to fight him. Eli started speaking again, muttering, indecipherable words running into each other. The only ones I could make out were “Charlie” and “Mom.”

I wanted to step forward, push him off Charlie. But I was too scared. “Charlie,” I finally said, because Eli seemed so unreachable. “Push him off you.”

Eli’s head snapped away, toward me. Then he stepped off Charlie and stood beside me, docile, hands resting at his side. Charlie sat up, one hand cradling the back of his skull. My eyes had adjusted well enough to see a warm pulse of blood snaking its way through his fingers. I walked around Eli and helped Charlie to his feet. Then I reached into his pocket for my phone. The fall had smashed it into four pieces.

“Go back to the house,” Charlie told me. He pulled off his hoodie, bunched it up, held it to the back of his head. He draped his other arm over Eli’s shoulders. “Call the police. We’ll wait here.”

WHEN I LOOK BACK
now I hardly see Eli. I see Charlie. The different words people (including myself) could use to describe him, all of them true by varying degrees. I see all those qualities, the good and the bad. But in that moment I mostly see a kind of valor, and selflessness, that I was never able to find within myself when Eli needed me.

By now darkness had settled in for the night. I trotted through it, toward the only lit house in the neighborhood, the Mosses’, incongruously cheerful, as if a celebration took place behind those bright windows, instead of all this urgent, if equally intoxicating, sorrow.

Charlie’s mother died the next day. One son at her side, holding her hand. The other in a hospital lockdown ward. That afternoon I borrowed her station wagon to go to the Marshall’s off Route 6 and buy clothes for a few more days, including a dress I could wear to her funeral.

A close encounter with someone in the throes of psychosis creates a very particular state of fragility. Even when the person is removed, the madness stays behind, inflicted. Moving through my errands, that twin sense of guilt and trauma pixelated at my core, making me feel not quite, entirely, flesh and bone. Across the street, the Verizon store stood as a rebuke, but I didn’t replace my shattered phone. My body tensed imagining the messages Ladd must be leaving. Later at the funeral, I hovered beside Charlie as if I were already his wife; people who hadn’t seen him in a long time assumed I
was
his wife. Charlie’s face was drained, his bearing shaky. He needed me, a body, to lean into, and I had become mercenary to all other purposes. Not even Ladd’s parents, filing into their pew and casting their uneasy, questioning glances, could drive me from his side. After the service, Charlie grabbed my hand and pulled me along with him to the receiving line. I stood there next to him, with his father and uncles and a cousin or two, Eli conspicuously absent, mourners too polite to ask my identity as they shook my hand and offered condolences. Charlie’s father still didn’t know my name.

Ladd’s parents emerged from the chapel, starting toward the line and then stopping as they saw me there. Paul put his arm around his wife and pointedly led her in the other direction. “Brett,” Rebecca called, over her shoulder, her face pained and confused. But I didn’t go to her. I just stayed with Charlie.

Daniel Williams didn’t run away from me. He walked straight to the line, shaking hands and expressing sympathy. If Charlie knew there should be some kind of discomfort between the two of them, he didn’t show it. The four stitches in the back of his head were barely visible. He shook Daniel’s hand.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Daniel said, and then moved on to me. “Brett,” he said. He took my hand in both of his and looked me straight in the eye. It was hard to interpret that look, exactly. Not forgiving, but not accusing either.

“Hi,” I said. Probably I didn’t remind him of Sylvia anymore. But maybe I reminded him of himself, the excessive love that both indicted and exonerated me. Daniel let go of my hand, and moved down the line. Ladd’s parents skipped the reception, but Daniel didn’t. As I shadowed Charlie throughout the wine-infused afternoon on his father’s lawn, I would see him occasionally, deep in conversation, or else staring through the crowd at me.

TH
E MOSS HOUSE NEEDED
to be closed up for the winter. I needed to get back to Amherst, to resume my classes and officially break Ladd’s heart. Before his mother got sick, Charlie had been living in Maine, painting houses and doing odd jobs. I can’t remember how we formulated a plan for what would happen next, I only remembered what happened: We drove to Amherst in his mother’s car. He dropped me off and then headed north to collect his things. My apartment was on the top floor of an old Victorian house that had been divided into four units, across the street from the Homestead, the yellow brick house where Emily Dickinson lived almost her entire life. When I walked into my living room, the place smelled sourly of overused cat litter. I’d left Tab with several overflowing bowls of cat food. She chirruped furiously across the living room and jumped into my lap, alternating rubbing against me with grateful passion and scolding me for my desertion. I stroked her back and stared across the room, at the rickety side table and the telephone that perched on top of it. No longer reprieved by the broken cell phone, I had to face the process of disentanglement. I wanted it done before Charlie came back.

“Brett,” Ladd said. His voice sounded flat and hard.

“Hi,” I said.

“I hear condolences are in order.” Dripping with sarcasm, none of the usual attempts to squelch emotion. I tapped my bare fingers on the table, noting the line where his ring had been worn all summer.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We need to talk.”

“So I hear. Go ahead and talk.”

By now, Tab had calmed down and lay in a large furry heap in my lap. She purred so loudly I guessed Ladd could hear on the other end of the line through his stubborn silence.

“Not over the phone,” I said. “In person. I need to come get my things, and give you yours.”

An intake of breath on the other end, like I’d just told him something he didn’t already know.

“Seriously?” he said, no anger now, just incredulous hurt. “You’re really doing this?”

“I am,” I said. “I’m so sorry. But I really am.”

“Because I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it at all.”

I nodded at the phone. The reason Ladd couldn’t believe it, I’d never told him about Charlie and the feelings I had for him. If I had, it would all make perfect sense.

Ladd said, “This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done in your life.”

“I realize that,” I said, and then—not wanting to doom myself with the admission—I amended: “I realize that it might be.”

“You know he’s just going to break your heart.”

I deserved that, so I didn’t flinch away from the phone. In this type of situation, even the most contained person said cruel things, and of course all the worst ones would be true.

LADD HAD RENTED A
house on Pleasant Street, not far from the one where Emily Dickinson lived for a time, on the other side of the graveyard. According to Richard Sewall’s biography, as a child she would watch funerals from her bedroom window—knowing that she herself would likely be buried there and worrying about when. The Poet may have walked over this same path to Ladd’s front door—what was supposed to be Ladd’s and mine, starting in October. I balanced a cardboard box of his things in my arms. It was embarrassingly light. Usually I stayed with Ladd, not the other way around. The primary object the box held—along with a Red Sox sweatshirt, some T-shirts, and an electric razor—was a smaller box, blue velvet, which he had used to present his grandmother’s engagement ring. I couldn’t bear to hand it directly back to him.

It felt wrong to use my key. Instead I wound it off my key chain and dropped it into the box. I knocked on the screen door. After a minute with no answer, I rang the bell. Then I pulled open the screen door and knocked again. Ladd’s car sat parked in the driveway. He could have walked somewhere, or ridden his bike, but I could see lights inside the house. I turned the knob, and the door swung open.

“Ladd,” I called, from the threshold. “I know you’re here.”

“Then why not come on in,” he called back. “Make yourself at home.”

I paused for the barest second, then stepped obediently inside. It was a classic early-nineteenth-century house, the stairs presenting themselves immediately at the front door, each room contained unto itself, very few closets. Ladd’s voice had come from the living room.

“Can I come in?” I said.

“I already told you. Come in.”

When I rounded the corner, he sat in a wide-striped armchair, the matching ottoman pushed aside, his long legs splayed out in front of him. From his voice, I’d expected a half-drunk bottle of scotch somewhere in the vicinity, but I didn’t see one. His hands gripped the edge of the armrests. Later that summer, Charlie would mix drinks in the evening, Captain Morgan rum and ginger beer. Dark and Stormys. The name of those drinks would always make me think of Ladd.

I sat down in the chair across from him—a stiff wingback—and put the box at my feet. A few moments passed like this, Ladd glowering, and me, sheepish, waiting for the barrage.

“Listen,” I finally said. “Don’t think I don’t know this is the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Because,” I said. Something like tears had begun to gather in my throat, and I worked to control myself.

“Oh, because,” Ladd repeated. “No better explanation than that, Professor?”

“I know,” I said. “I know everything you’re thinking about me and it’s all true. So in the end it’s best. Right? You’re better off.”

“You’re doing me a favor.” His voice wanted to be contemptuous but sounded more anguished. It brought me back, like a sense memory, to that winter after Charlie disappeared without a word. How much worse it must be for Ladd than my schoolgirl heartache over a man I’d barely known twenty-four hours. A man who’d done this very same thing to him already. The other girl, Robin: Ladd had refused to take her back. I’d assumed, coming over here, that he’d already be done with me.

“Ladd,” I said. “Even if I came back now, why would you want me, after what I’ve done?”

Ladd moved forward in his chair, the storm clouds in his eyes breaking up just slightly, with this glimpse of opportunity. Before he could speak, I stood up. I knew I had to face him, and at the same time there was nothing to be said. By now Charlie had piled whatever belongings he had into his mother’s car. He’d be heading back toward me by tomorrow at the latest. I wouldn’t allow myself to think that he might evaporate again, unreachable. He would come back to me this time, and he would stay, because I had lucked into a window of opportunity, the one moment in time he really needed someone, and found himself possessable. Given my specialty in late-nineteenth-century literature, I should have known better than to think of it as fate, but that’s exactly what I did. It seemed like proof that we were meant to be together.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Ladd. “But I think I’d better go.”

“But you know, I
would
take you back,” Ladd said, his voice cracking. He stood up. “If you wanted me to.”

The ceilings in the house were low and close. Trying to avoid eye contact, I noticed a water stain just above Ladd’s head. Someone, years ago, had let a bathtub overflow, and no one had ever painted over the stain. He stepped forward, closing the distance between us. The only way to reimpose it would be to sit back down, which felt rude. So I stayed where I was, lifting my chin to look up, toward if not directly at him, granting him whatever came next as his due. The cruel things he had a right to say—about Charlie’s breaking my heart or whatever aspersions he could cast on my character, so obviously lacking. My only excuse was being in love, and I couldn’t tell Ladd that.

“Stay,” Ladd said. His voice shocked me with its softness. He reached out and closed his hand around my wrist. The grip felt gentle, more plea than demand.

“I can’t.”

Anyone could have told me, and I knew even as I moved forward: This whole thing was a mistake. A disastrous mistake. Charlie had already rejected me once. And now I was leaving Ladd, breaking off my engagement, for a man who hadn’t even said he loved me and maybe never would. Charlie was scattered, penniless, jobless. Who knew what he even aspired to, as far as character, as far as life? Whereas this man in front of me wanted to be great and good. Ladd loved me. Even after what I’d done to him, he was prepared to forgive me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go. Maybe one day we can talk about this, but not right now.”

“Who decides that?” Ladd said. His grip became slightly less of a question. “Who decides all of this?”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I wish it were different. I wish I felt differently. But I don’t. And I have to go.” I tried to step sideways, but Ladd’s fingers tightened. When I pulled my hand toward myself, away from him, he pulled it back.

“Ladd,” I said. My voice sounded tinged with humor, it seemed so preposterous, that he would use force. “Let me go.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ladd said, tightening his grip. “Is this not playful enough for you?”

The two of us stood there for a long time, me trying to step back, away from him. Ladd holding me there, his body rigid, his jaw set.

“You’re hurting me,” I said, but still he held on while I understood that the physical pain with its increasing sharpness was nothing compared to what I’d done to him.

Finally, Ladd must have seen himself and what he was doing—perhaps in the blood I could feel draining from my face. With a step backward he let go. I snatched my hand—myself—back. As I ran out the door without collecting any of my things, I could hear Ladd falling back into his chair. I knew him well enough to understand he would shift from anger at me to despair over what he’d done. I had come to his house to end things, and Ladd—ever the gentleman—had finished the job for me.

TH
E REST OF THE
day, I tended to business. Replaced my cell phone. Renewed my lease. Replenished groceries, enough for two, remembering Charlie was a chef, buying things like fresh parsley and cilantro. Not just food, but ingredients. I didn’t allow myself to consider the possibility that he wouldn’t come back, not until night descended and I lay in bed holding an ice pack against my throbbing wrist, my landline and cell phone silent. Tab, grateful for my return, positioned herself on my chest, the weight and fluff keeping my heart firmly in place, perhaps the only reason I got to sleep that night at all.

She was still there when I woke, stubbornly unmoving. Sunbeams slanted through the plastic slats of the window blinds and I tried to stretch, my spine sore from having been pinned so long in the same position. The ice pack had fallen to the floor, and my wrist still throbbed. Tab let out an indignant “mep” as I pushed her off of me. For the first time since last April, the boards felt cold against my bare feet. When I peered through the blinds, I saw the car, the wood-paneled station wagon, one of the last of its kind, parked across the street, packed full to the brim.

It took a minute to fish my robe from the back of my closet and would have taken even longer to find slippers, so I just put on flip-flops. I had the presence of mind to brush my teeth and hair. When I got downstairs, there he was, sitting on the front stoop, wearing a khaki field coat with a dark corduroy collar, drinking coffee from a take-out Starbucks cup. As I opened the door, he turned and smiled, his face breaking open with pleasure at the sight of me. I hadn’t yet seen him smile this way at anyone else. I smiled back, feeling overjoyed when I saw a second cup perched beside him. He handed it to me and I sat down next to him.