The Last September: A Novel (3 page)

But on this other September day, New England’s sunlight shone dimmer, more nuanced than Colorado’s, and the years had rendered Eli a less welcome sight. At the same time, he was so familiar that in person I didn’t feel afraid of him. I left my keys in the ignition as I waved broadly. Without Sarah, my mother-lion hackles receded. Eli and I had been young together. We had climbed Long’s Peak. We’d eaten pancakes at midnight in cheap diners. He had filled my room with balloons on my nineteenth birthday, and given me away at my wedding.

Eli’s blond hair, bright and unfaded like Charlie’s, hung past his shoulders. He wore a white T-shirt with a funky batik design—more like something that would belong to his brother—and faded jeans that were covered with his tiny, slanted handwriting, rows and columns that looked almost like Asian characters. There was a pen in his right hand, and for a moment he stopped to scribble something new onto his jeans. Then began pacing again. The last time I saw Eli he’d been wearing his animal-control uniform, a khaki polyester blend that stretched over his medication-bloated stomach. Now he looked gaunt, lean, and agitated—almost like a second entity, broken loose from the foggy bulk of compliance. I’d seen him in this state often enough to know that up close his eyes would be a clear, electric blue, echoing the boy I’d known in college. But I’d also see deep grooves in his brow. Elaborate lines spiderwebbed around his eyes. If the two brothers had been standing together, Charlie would easily have appeared the younger of the two.

“Eli.” I waved my arms over my head. “Hey.”

He stopped short, then held his palm up toward me like a crossing guard. “Stop, Brett,” he said. “Stop right there.”

I walked a few steps closer. And then I stopped, but not because of his gesture or command, but because I was close enough to see that Eli’s shirt did not actually have a funky design. It was just plain white, spattered with what looked like brick-colored paint. Lots of it. I tried to remember where such a color would come from, what he and Charlie would have been painting. The only project I knew of were those pale brown shingles, which would soon enough fade to gray in the salty Cape Cod air.

“What’s on your shirt?” I said to Eli.

“Stay back,” he said. “It’s not safe here.” The words sounded anguished and completely sincere. As if the old Eli—somewhere inside this pacing madman—called out to me in warning.

“Where’s Charlie?” My voice seemed to come from somewhere involuntary: behind me, or above. I could feel my throat constrict, and despite one instant of wondering, I knew that this was not a dream. In a dream, I wouldn’t have been able to speak at all.

Eli lifted one arm, wraithlike, and pointed to the back of the house. “Charlie’s right where he’s always been,” he said, his voice rising, not making any sense. Eli never made any sense when he was like this.

I have never been good at dealing with agitated people. Charlie, on the other hand, was excellent at conferring his own self-possession. He had a knack for calming people in distress. As I walked around the house, obediently following Eli’s still-outstretched point, I found myself desperately wishing for my husband to step forward and intervene.

Because I knew already that he couldn’t. Although my back was to him, Eli’s aged and bloodless face loomed clearly in front of me. And I knew that Charlie wouldn’t walk out of the house to help. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it or explain my exact thoughts as I headed toward the back deck. My emotions had gone AWOL. I forgot to be frightened of Eli or worried for Charlie. I didn’t even think about Sarah. I just floated across the lawn, my eyes flitting habitually out toward the water. I squinted at a cluster of cormorants on a tall rock, holding their wings out to dry, then turned my eyes back to the house. And if I had paused in that moment and closed my eyes, I think I would have been able to conjure up exactly what waited for me.

Everything in my life so far had led to this point. If I’d done one thing differently—slept an hour later last Sunday, voiced a complaint I’d suppressed four years before, worn my hair up instead of down on a Friday night. If I hadn’t picked up those books yesterday afternoon, or made love to Charlie the first night I met him. Certainly if I’d never known Eli: this morning would have played out differently, if it had ever occurred at all.

TH
E FIRST THING I
saw were the bottoms of his feet, close together but flayed out in V formation. They looked calloused and dirty—Charlie’s long, bony feet, tough enough to traverse the rocky bluff without sandals.

Behind me, a spectral and disturbing noise: Eli, beginning to weep. My flip-flops thwacked across the deck. A chickadee let out its seven-note cry. My body operated in jerky, oafish movements and I tripped over Charlie’s hammer. I looked down to see blood and hair caked on its claw and kicked it aside with instinctive revulsion.

“Brett,” Eli yelled from the lawn. “Is he still there?” The question, his voice, was still tinged with weeping. And I knew I would have to answer eventually, because we were in this together. The three of us.

Charlie’s eyes stared wide, a glassy and expressionless blue. Not surprised or wounded—simply vacated. His jaw had fixed into a rodentlike and grossly uncharacteristic overbite. Blood and what may have been bone matted his curls against the left side of his head. But what caused the most blood—still wet enough to soak through the knees of my jeans as I knelt beside him—was an injury I didn’t understand: his throat, slit wide open. For a moment, I mistook the gash for the leather shoelace he’d tied there yesterday; but the makeshift necklace was gone, in its place this crude and horrible injury.

Charlie
. I pressed my hands over the wound on his neck as if I could staunch the blood, but it was cold as yesterday’s coffee. I scrunched my nose against the scent of minced garlic.

“Brett,” Eli called again. “Do you see him?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised at the clear, unshaking way my voice carried. “He’s still here.”

“Is he dead?”

I couldn’t answer, I couldn’t say it. It must have been shock. Even in that moment, the word formed in my head,
shock
, and I knew it as the cause of this strange emptiness. I also knew my responsibility as first person to arrive on the scene. Charlie had no carotid artery left, so I pressed my thumb against his wrist, searching for a pulse.

“He’s alive,” I lied, my voice raised in that unnatural calm. “You better stay back.”

I looked down to Charlie’s feet and then to his shoulders, trying to ascertain whether I could pick him up and carry him to the car. I put one hand under his ruined neck, one hand under his waist. We used to joke about my being strong enough to piggyback him. He would climb up onto my back and I would pitch forward, staggering under his full weight. Once I hurt my knee, hauling him up a slope on Mount Washington. When we got back to our hotel, Charlie had fixed me a drink and an ice pack. I’d elevated my knee on his lap, and we laughed at the ridiculousness of my injury. Now my hand sloshed against the slickness under his neck, and his head slapped against the deck as if I’d broken something. My body let out a noise—a whooshing gust of air. The sound of panic surprised me; my brain hadn’t yet recognized my body’s terror.

“Brett,” Eli called again, his voice agitated but oddly normal, as if I were taking too long bringing him a beer. “What’s going on?”

My mind sifted through possible answers. I didn’t know what was going on. My eyes fell on that hammer and then the knife—the two murder weapons, still here, still handy. I wondered how many seconds it would take Eli to stride across the lawn and use them on me. And instead of fearing for myself, I had the most primal vision of being gone forever, following Charlie, the clouds overhead parting to let us both through. From my perch, far up above, I could see Maxine walking Sarah through the gorgeous, sterile rooms of her house while my child screamed with anguish and loss, having no idea these emotions would become permanent. For a child to lose her father was horrible, awful. But for a child to lose her father
and
her mother: nothing could be worse, an orphaned grief that would stretch through the end of her days.

I let go of Charlie and slipped out of my flip-flops to crawl across the deck, my hands and knees smearing his blood across the unstained wood. When my hands touched the stones of the driveway, I stood up like a toddler, pushing up off the ground. Then I ran. Shells and stone bit into the heels of my feet, nowhere near as conditioned as Charlie’s to take the beating. Behind me, I could hear Eli’s footsteps on the deck. I could hear him scream—as if this were his first glimpse of Charlie. And I thought for a minute that perhaps someone else had done it, that Eli had arrived and found Charlie murdered. Maybe he had leaned over him, the same way I had, and that’s how the blood had managed to decorate his shirt.

But my body wouldn’t take that chance. It hurtled away fast as possible and threw itself into the car and locked the door. It gunned the motor and flew out onto the road—leaving the past, and flesh of its flesh—behind, and cold, forever.

SARAH’S CRIES CAREENED THROUGH
the windows as I ran toward Maxine’s house, a steady stream of, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.” I threw open the front door.

“Hey,” Maxine called from the kitchen. Her usually perfect hair flew in every direction, bouncing my distraught child on her hip. “Are we glad to—”

When she stepped into the hallway, her relieved smile disappeared.

“Brett,” she said, pulling Sarah closer to her as she stopped crying and reached out for me. “Jesus Christ. What happened to you?”

I looked down at myself. Blood dried and caked in the cracks of my palms. It soaked my T-shirt and my shorts. Behind me, my bare feet had left prints on her wood floor. I pulled off my shirt and bent over to wipe them clean.

“God, don’t worry about that,” Maxine said. “Tell me what happened, Brett. Are you hurt?”

I pictured Charlie’s mortal injuries. His unblinking blue eyes. Before today, I hadn’t even known the definition of hurt. Now I didn’t know what to say. I had made my modest academic career out of a reverence for the power of words. So I knew that the second I said it aloud—engineering the metamorphosis from trauma to statement—the events would become permanent. If I said, “Charlie’s dead,” he would be dead. The world would have no choice but to continue without him.

“Mommy,” Sarah said, shaking her arms insistently.

I looked down again at my shirt—my arms, hands, knees, feet. What Sarah saw was my not reaching back toward her, and the cries began again. I lifted my arms to hold her, then pulled them back. How could I hold my baby when I was soaked with her father’s blood?

“Maxine,” I said. “We have to lock all the doors. We have to call the police.”

She nodded and began to hand Sarah to me—then stopped, equally unsure how to cope with the blood. “Should we hose you off?” she asked.

“Not outside,” I said, hearing—more than feeling—the panic in my voice as it occurred to me for the first time that Eli could have followed me in his car. My strongest impulse, running from the Moss house, had been to get to Sarah. I remembered a story I’d found in my research, of a nineteenth-century Amherst mother who’d accidentally lit herself on fire with a kerosene lamp. As the fire engulfed her, she’d reached for her infant in a reflexive, protective grab, and they’d both gone up in flames.
What if the killer had followed me.
I turned around and bolted the front door shut.

“What else,” I shouted at Maxine. “Show me all the doors.” She followed me to the back door, while Sarah wailed in her arms. We dead bolted the door to the cellar.

“I think that’s all of them,” Maxine said. We ran up, into her bedroom. “What should I say?” she asked, picking up the phone.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just tell them to come here.”

“Not to your place?”

“No,” I said. “I want them here first.” Maxine dialed obediently, awkwardly, as Sarah struggled in her grip, reaching her arms out to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, my sweet. But Mommy has to take a shower.”

Maxine jutted her chin toward her bathroom. “There’s an emergency,” I heard her say as I turned on the hot water to full blast. I wondered how they would hear her over Sarah’s crying. In the next room, I could only just make out her explanation as tears started to grip her voice: “I’m not sure. But it’s bad. It’s very bad. My friend is covered in blood.”

She hung up and came into the bathroom as I rasped a loofah over my bloodstained knees and feet. The stream of hot water scalded my back. Charlie’s blood poured off me, eddying in spirals before fading and disappearing into the drain. I dropped the sponge and pulled the shower curtain aside.

“Lock the door,” I told her, and she pressed in the doorknob’s button—a flimsy apparatus designed for avoiding embarrassing intrusions, not keeping out murderers. I turned off the water and wrapped a towel around myself. Finally, I took my sobbing daughter from Maxine and sat down against the wall. The Spanish tile felt cool and soothing on my parboiled back. Sarah’s cries subsided into wounded hiccups. Finally in my arms, exhaustion took over. Her tired little eyelids blinked as warm water dripped off my shoulders and onto her face.

“Did you call them?” I asked Maxine, though I knew she had.

“They’re on their way.” She sat down next to me, and I saw tears standing in her eyes.

“Brett,” she said. “Please tell me what happened.”

“I can’t.”

Maxine nodded and placed one hand on my knee. We listened for a while to Sarah’s snuffling breaths, waiting for the police to arrive. Years ago, Charlie and I met with a family therapist for help in navigating his brother. At the time, Eli had been in one of his worst states—manic and unreachable. I asked the therapist what we should do if he seemed dangerous. “Just dial 911,” she had said, with a blithe wave of her hand. “They’ll be there before anything can happen.” Sitting in Maxine’s bathroom, I could feel the minutes tick away, and I wondered how many times someone could have killed Charlie—could have killed any of us—in the time it took for the police to appear.