The Last September: A Novel (20 page)

From up above, I heard a car pull into Maxine’s driveway, and turned, putting one hand over my heart. I didn’t know where Eli’s car was now—impounded in Hyannis, it would have become evidence. A door slammed, and in a moment Ladd appeared at the top of the steps. He must have seen us from the road. With Sarah so close to the water, I couldn’t keep my eyes on him as he walked toward us.

“Brett,” Ladd said. He stopped several feet short of me.

I didn’t feel like small talk. “Why didn’t you go?” I asked, still not looking at him.

“What do you mean?” Ladd said. “Go where?” I glanced over as his face shifted, confused.

“To the funeral,” I said, turning my eyes back toward Sarah. “You should have been there.”

“I was. I was there. I promise. I got there just after you, I saw you go to the front with Maxine. I had to stand in the back, it was crowded. You didn’t go to the receiving line. I thought I would see you at the reception.”

A fat cloud blew overhead, white and empty of rain, but for a moment blocking the gathering sun. I stepped back toward Sarah, noticing for the first time that Lightfoot was gone. I lifted my hand to shade my eyes as the cloud wisped away, looking out toward the lake to see if a little black dog was struggling in the water.

“They read the Twenty-Third Psalm,” Ladd said, as if he needed to prove it to me. But don’t they read the Twenty-Third Psalm at every funeral?

“Charlie wouldn’t have cared about that,” I said.

“No,” Ladd agreed.

I knelt down next to Sarah, digging my hand through the little trough she’d made where the water met the soaking sand. “No,” she said, pushing my hand away. “No, Mommy.”

I looked up. A red-tailed hawk swooped in lazy circles, and I wondered if it was the same one that nested in the cranberry bog by the Moss house, less than two miles away. Maybe it was heading back there right now. What sort of activity would it find below if it executed the same meandering wing flutters it did now? Did the house stand empty, yellow crime-scene tape rustling under heavy sun and vague wind? Or did the police have more business there? Was someone stationed, waiting for Eli, in case he came back? Was Bob there, collecting whatever last items he wanted to take with him?

“I told you not to come back here,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on Sarah’s shovel, not wanting to see any kind of expression on Ladd’s face. “I told you to leave me alone.”

“I know,” he said, very quietly. “I know you did. I’m sorry.”

“Did you think I was joking?”

Ladd’s shadow, elongated on the sand, quivered. I spoke to it, refusing to be moved by the way it had brought one hand to rest on top of its head, a characteristic gesture of helplessness.

“I wasn’t joking,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do to help. You are not my
boyfriend
.”

The shadow’s hand came down, its body spilling wider as another cloud moved overhead. Sarah still sat beyond its reaches, concentrating, her hat falling nearly over her eyes. And I finally stated the most obvious thing, which I’d never had the courage to say aloud, to Ladd, not even when I’d left him.

“I don’t love you. I love Charlie.”

The shadow shifted, uncomfortable. Several sharp retorts floated down from Maxine’s house. Ladd, Sarah, and I all turned our heads toward the noise. We saw Maxine, standing at a back window. She held Lightfoot under one arm and lifted her hand to rap on the window again, frantic. Unimpressed, Sarah went back to her digging, but Ladd and I both looked around, obediently, trying to locate whatever had alarmed her so. It took us almost a minute to realize it was just us, out here and vulnerable in the open air.

“I THOUGHT I WOULD
die,” Maxine said.

We were back inside the house, Sarah and I—Ladd having driven away before we gathered ourselves from the lake. I put Sarah down on the floor and an impressive hunk of sand dropped from her bathing suit. Maxine grabbed a broom and started sweeping furiously, still wearing her nightgown, her hair disarranged from sleep. Her salient trait had always been a cool put-togetherness; it was disconcerting, this new impression of utter disarray.

“I woke up,” she went on, “and your bedroom door was open and both of you were gone. Then the little dog is scratching at the door, all frantic. I was almost too scared to open it.”

I could imagine Maxine, mustering up her courage to open the door just narrowly enough to let the dog shoot through. Lightfoot, recovered from whatever fright Ladd had given her, jumped up on a broad leather armchair. With the broom, Maxine reached out and gently shoved her off. “Then I look out the window,” she said, “and there’s this
man . . .
”

“It was just Ladd,” I said, conscious that my voice should sound soothing and not defensive. As far as Maxine knew, Ladd was not upsetting.

“I know that now,” Maxine said. “But for that one second . . . I thought I would die.” She looked briefly remorseful at repeating that most extreme of expressions, but then, reconsidering, wanting to affect me, she said it again. “I thought I would die.”

“Well, you didn’t,” I said. “Right? Here we are. Alive, still.”

She stopped sweeping and closed her eyes. A buzzing sounded from my purse. At any other moment, I would have ignored it, but grateful for the interruption I hustled across the room. Probably it annoyed Maxine, the way I tossed my purse on the nearest available surface and forgot about it until it was time to leave again. She always hung hers on the coat stand by the front door. Fishing for my phone, I made a mental note to start doing the same.

“It’s Charlie’s father,” I told Maxine before I answered.

“Listen, Brett,” Bob said. Sometimes family can be most evident in a person’s voice. Traces of Charlie and Eli, like living molecules, came wafting in. He said, “I’m heading back to Florida tomorrow and I need to get the keys from you.”

“The keys?”

“The keys to the house. Don’t you have keys?”

“I do.”

“Meet me at the Olde Pub,” he said. “It opens at eleven.”

“He wants his keys back,” I told Maxine when I hung up. Her eyes widened, and I could tell that for a moment she wanted to exclaim over this, the nerve, how could he. But then something shifted, and she kept quiet. I realized that although I’d been staying here in this house for over a week—with no particular plans to go anywhere else—I didn’t have a key. A year ago, my key chain had rattled with our apartment key, and the one to our building, the ones for my office at school. Now, once I handed Bob Moss back his house key, the only key I’d own would be the one to our old car, Charlie’s mother’s car. And quite possibly I’d have no place to drive it.

FOR SO LONG, CARRYING
Sarah everywhere, I’d thought life would be easier once she learned to walk. In the parking lot of the Olde Pub, she squirmed in my arms with much more strength than someone her age and size should possess. The second I put her down she didn’t walk but ran, in the direction opposite the restaurant, toward a patch of grass and a couple Canada geese. The larger one spread its wings in warning, and I sprinted after her.

“Oh no you don’t,” I said, in a singsong voice, scooping her up and biting her cheek. She laughed, a burbly giggle, and a small piece of joy rose up inside me. It shocked me, that joy was still a possibility.

“Hey,” I said, holding her fast. My voice sounded so normal. “I know you just learned to walk. When did you learn to run?”

“Run,” she yelled, a primal yawp.

“We’ll get you some fries,” I said. She nodded and put one finger in her mouth.

Bob was already there, sitting at one of the booths. I put Sarah on the bench opposite him; she walked across it, her feet sticking slightly on the beer-scented vinyl. “You brought the baby,” Bob said. His voice was flat, surprised.

“I thought you’d want to see her,” I said.

When the waitress came to deliver his beer, I ordered fries. Bob leaned forward as Sarah examined the deep grooves in the table. She picked up the butter knife and pressed it into a blackened pair of initials.

“Sarah,” Bob said. “It’s me. It’s your grandpa.”

Knife still in hand, she looked up at him. Bob’s face looked jowly and drained of color. The veins on his hands protruded, and they trembled slightly as he looked at Sarah, Charlie’s face in miniature staring back at him. I waited for him to remark on the resemblance, but he didn’t. His eyes look watery and red.

“Do you have the keys?” he said.

The waitress arrived with Sarah’s fries. She slid them in front of her and I pulled them back. “Hot,” I said as Sarah protested. I reached into my purse and grabbed the keys, which I’d already separated from my key chain. Bob didn’t reach out as I handed them across the table, so after a few seconds I just put them down. Sarah picked them up and I started breaking her fries in half so they’d cool off faster.

“I’m going to sell it,” Bob said, staring at the keys in Sarah’s hands. “Put it on the market right away.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering who in the world would buy it now. Bob looked braced for some kind of response, maybe an objection. As if I’d want to go back and live there, ever again.

I watched him take another sip of beer. He reached out and took a fry from Sarah’s plate. He bit into it, then returned it to the edge of her plate. I slid it off and hid it under my unused napkin. And although I didn’t want my daughter to eat his half-gnawed food, I couldn’t be mad at him. I recognized the expression on his face, the one staring back at myself from the mirror. He was here, breathing the oxygen, making stabs at eating, for one reason only: he had a living child. So he had to stay in this world, because sooner or later Eli would return. As far as I’d witnessed, Bob had never been much of a parent. He wasn’t enough of a parent now to stay here, on Cape Cod, and look for Eli, or even wait for him to show up. But still a parent. As I stared at him across the knotty pine table, the smell of beer and fried food thick around us, all I could think of was everything he’d lost. His first wife. Both his sons. Any kind of peace of mind, or happiness, ever.

What can a person do when one child murders the other? Murders the other and then disappears—not only into the vast, unknown world but the more unknowable recesses of his mind? I guess you do what Bob Moss did that day at the Olde Pub, right before my very eyes. You turn pale, and frail, and very old. You wring your hands and forget your grandchild. You don’t think to reach out to the daughter-in-law, almost equally ruined, sitting there across the table, except to take the keys from her and say good-bye.

•••

SARAH FELL ASLEEP IN
the car. When we got there, a police cruiser was parked in front of the house. I parked beside it and got out, leaving the door open so the sound of it slamming wouldn’t wake Sarah. Inside, the same police officer who’d escorted me back to the Moss house, a young woman, stood in the front hall talking to Maxine. The sight of her back, rigid and official, made me tense. When she turned, I almost expected her to draw her gun, or cuff me.

Maxine nodded toward the counter. “She brought your computer back.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I felt deflated, as if they were making a mistake, and felt another rush of insult at being so easily dismissed as a suspect. They had taken my laptop because Charlie used it, too, and it now sat on Maxine’s counter with the cord wrapped around it. Beside it sat a gallon zip-top plastic bag, filled with everything they’d collected from our station wagon. I could see Ladd’s postcard, the bright toucan’s bill, pressed against the clear plastic. Apparently that wasn’t worth keeping as evidence. I walked across the room and picked up the bag, then threw it away in the garbage bin under Maxine’s sink. Lightfoot clicked across the room to greet me, and I knelt to pet her, then stood to get the computer.

“I can walk you out,” I told the officer. “I’m just going to sit outside a while, my daughter’s asleep in the car.”

On Maxine’s stoop, after the officer had driven away, I turned on my computer. I hadn’t checked email in over a week. My account was clogged with messages from Lands’ End and Old Navy, Planned Parenthood, and the NRDC. Notices from the university, and colleagues checking in. I went down the page, marking them all for deletion. And then I saw it, several pages back, already opened and read by the police. Charlie Moss.
Your Dinner
was the subject heading. The time next to it, 7:30. An hour or two left for him to live.

Hey
, Charlie wrote
. I guess I’ll have to feed Eli your coq au vin.
Th
en I’ll tell him he needs to leave in the morning. Please give Sarah a kiss for me. Love, Charlie.

A few feet away, Sarah stirred in her car seat. She lifted her hands off her knees and let out a great sigh, as if she had read the message, too. Then she returned to stillness.
Your coq au vin.
All the tastes Charlie created, now gone forever. I remembered that pot of food, still sitting on the stove when I went back to get my things. If only I had stopped, to spoon it into my mouth, no matter how spoiled it was, the last thing Charlie ever cooked.

I brought my eyes back to the screen for a long minute, then hit the Reply button.

Dear Charlie
, I wrote,
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.

Up above, a great flutter as a flock of gulls rose into the air and headed out across the lake. For a moment, the sound could almost convince me I had turned back time and even now Charlie was walking across all the miles and endless days that stretched out over this past week. Headed home to us.

“LISTEN,” MAXINE SAID AFTER
Sarah had gone to bed. “I have to get out of here.”

I sat in the leather armchair, holding a wineglass as Maxine filled it. She marched the bottle back into the kitchen, filled a glass for herself, and started to return the bottle to the refrigerator. Instead she closed the refrigerator door, filled her glass a little fuller, and left the bottle on the counter.