The Last September: A Novel (4 page)

“Will they ring the bell, do you think?” I asked, after a few minutes.

“I guess so.” The words were barely out of her mouth when the doorbell rang.

“God,” I said. “How do we know it’s them?”

“I’ll go to the front window and look down,” she said. She stood up and unlocked the bathroom door, then turned back toward me, obviously afraid to go alone.

“We’ll come with you,” I said. Maxine handed me the plaid flannel robe from a hook on the door. I tied it around Sarah and me. From the upstairs hall window, we looked down at her front door. A police cruiser parked in the driveway, its lights blinking.

“What can I do for you?” Maxine whispered as we turned to go downstairs.

Nothing, of course. But instead of brushing the request aside, I did the oddest thing. I lifted my free hand and touched Maxine’s cheek. As my palm pressed against her skin, I noticed a small, rust-colored smear staining the back of my wrist.

I said, “Tell Charlie I love him.”

Relief fell across her face like color returning after a shock. “I will,” she promised. “Of course I will.”

Underneath Maxine’s robe, Sarah’s head rested—almost asleep—on my shoulder. I closed my eyes, existing for a moment in the warm breath against my neck. And then I pictured Maxine: standing on our deck, her hair tousling in the autumn breeze. Charlie perched on his rickety ladder, the unblemished hammer in his hands.

“Brett loves you,” Maxine would say.

And Charlie would smile—that slow, easy and face-changing expression. “I know,” he would say, taking a nail from his mouth.

I see it clearly as I’ve seen anything in my entire life. I see Charlie, tapping in that nail. The world around him buzzes with seasonal changes—monarchs and birds swirling in migratory preparation, the sun dipping down earlier and farther east. The world around him quietly poised for my uneventful return—fulfilling promises as a matter of course, and utterly lacking violence.

I see this moment, again and again. I try my hardest to will it into being as I go over the past, trying to make things turn out differently, trying to make things lead, instead, to Charlie, alive and smiling on that deck.

BUT I CAN’T.
TH
EY
don’t. It never does. No matter how many times I relive it, we always end up—Maxine, Sarah, and I—standing in that upstairs window, staring down at those twirling police lights. While back at the house on the bay, Eli leans over his brother’s bloody and vacated body. He watches Charlie, for how many minutes nobody knows. And then he disappears, escaping on an invisible tightrope wire that leads to the rest of his ruined life, and prevents mine from possibly ever moving forward. Unless I can take all the pieces and unravel them into clear formation, making sense—a pattern, an answer—where none can ever be found.

It’s all I have to bring today—

This, and my heart beside—

This, and my heart, and all the fields—

And all the meadows wide—

—EMILY DICKINSON

The first time I saw Charlie Moss I was eighteen years old. A blizzard had just swept through the front range of the Rocky Mountains. I called my friend Eli from the phone booth outside my dorm room. The west-facing window at the end of the hall had lost its view except for a thick, whorled crust of ice.

“Is the party still on?” I asked him.

“What do you think?” he said. I laughed. Eli loved parties. He would never let a mere three feet of snow interfere with a social event, especially one of his own. “You can meet my brother,” Eli said. “He was supposed to leave this morning, but the storm closed down DIA.”

A few hours later, I walked through deserted, unplowed streets. A typical Colorado storm, it had hit fast and furiously and then moved on. The sky above me loomed clear as summer, boasting a thousand stars or more. I felt too warm in my heavy down jacket. Still, there was that sense of reprieve inclement weather can bring. As if all ills—crime, taxes, homework assignments—had been suspended for the sake of the storm. In the forgiving snow-lit night, the ramshackle Victorians—these days rented by destructive and unappreciative students—looked more like the comfortable miners’ homes they’d originally been. Soft lamps shone behind curtains. Wood smoke trailed up from chimneys.

In all that quiet, I could detect the pulse of Eli’s party from a block away. As I headed up his walk, I saw the door was propped open; the thicket of people must have overheated even his drafty old house. The front path was littered with skis, snowshoes, and boots. I entered sideways and slid off my coat but didn’t bother removing my boots. The hallway was already caked with melting ice and snow.

“Hey, Brett,” Eli shouted.

He was leaning in the arched doorway to the living room. Three other roommates lived here, but Eli was the one who positioned himself to greet every guest, gregarious and mannerly, with too-long hair and a beer buzz already evident at first glance. Not wanting to distract him from his hosting duties, I waved and continued toward the kitchen, where I knew the keg would be. I planned to get a beer and then go station myself beside Eli. That was my standard strategy at parties, to let him do all the talking, laughter the only noise I’d have to make. In the kitchen, my Sorrels skidded slightly across the crooked, snow-muddied wood floors. And there was Charlie: standing by the stove, stirring something in a large, warped tin pot, his lean form haloed by steam. A few girls sat at the table, talking loudly and throwing back their hair—probably for his benefit. I didn’t recognize him as Eli’s brother, though I would have if I’d looked carefully. They shared the same angular jaw, fair hair, and round blue eyes. Charlie’s handsomeness registered in the crowded room as a matter of course, so intrinsic as to be almost secondary. He looked too old to be here, and I wondered what he was cooking.

“Hey,” he said to me, as I took my place in line for the keg. “Bring that cup over here. This is better suited to the weather.”

At eighteen, I was nothing if not obedient. I walked over and held out my red plastic cup. He filled it with what looked like hot cocoa, but the steam smelled thickly of rum and Frangelico. I saw a box of Ghirardelli chocolate squares on the counter. I’d never seen anyone make hot chocolate out of anything but powder. I lifted the cup to my face, bathing my skin in the fragrant steam. I drank the hot liquid while chunks of snow melted and dripped toward my ankles.

Over the years, I would ask Charlie repeatedly: why did he single me out in that moment? He always gave the same, unsatisfying answer. “I just happened to look up, and there you were.”

What I remember is Charlie’s curly blond head, bent in concentration over his steaming brew. Without particular design or awareness, I stepped into the only place available, waiting to get a beer. And true to his own recollection, just at that moment Charlie looked up. And there I was. That day, the first day I ever saw him, he had three days’ worth of stubble. He wore a thin black thread around his neck, beaded with a smooth lapis stone that matched the color of his eyes. When I looked at him, his lips slid upward at the corners. My heart lurched. I don’t know why. It just did. It lurched toward him and refused—stubbornly—to ever lurch away.

“I’m Brett,” I said.

“Brett,” he repeated, instead of telling me his name. He added a cheerful, staccato sound to the
t
’s, making them really sound like two. “Like Lady Brett Ashley.”

I stared at him. “That’s who I’m named after,” I said. “My parents were English professors. It was either that or Claudine, after the Colette novels.”

His face went slightly blank, and I knew I’d lost him but I kept on talking. “Mom wanted to be a writer. She said that Colette’s husband used to lock her in a room until she’d written however many pages he wanted. That’s how the Claudine books got written.”

“So your mom wanted to be locked in a room?”

“I think she just wanted to be encouraged. Have you read a lot of Hemingway?”

“No,” Charlie admitted. “I didn’t even read
Th
e Sun Also Rises
, to tell you the truth. I just listened to them talk about it in class.”

I laughed. If I were him, having already impressed me with the reference, I would have lied. In fact, because I wanted a point of commonality, I lied in the opposite direction. “I haven’t read it either,” I said, and he smiled.

It should have bothered me that Charlie hadn’t actually read the book. My mother was an English professor. My father had been, too. The little house I grew up in had book-lined walls in every single room. What’s more, I’d just finished a course on the Victorian novel that had electrified me. Fresh from a high school career that had gravely disappointed my mother, I wasn’t used to getting excited about anything academic. As a freshman, I imagined my primary focus in college would be exactly this: standing on a sticky floor in a crowded kitchen. Drinking beer and talking to a cute boy. But last semester, I had actually foregone parties to stay in my room and read through the thick paid-by-the-word novels. I had slogged dutifully through subplots and unfamiliar language. I had forgiven the coincidence in Dickens and aspired to the moral imperatives of Eliot. In other words, I had lost myself in the
stories
, falling asleep every night anticipating the next evolution a book would bring.

Charlie’s intelligence, I would discover years later, lay more in the realm of the physical. He had an intuitive and sometimes uncanny understanding of what would feel good, taste good, look good. My mother used to say he dressed like a European, with small flourishes that should have looked feminine but never did. He could glean obscure details about people just by looking at them.

That first night, after telling me he was Eli’s brother, Charlie asked me my last name.

“Mercier,” I told him.

And he said, “Ah, French.”

“Mais oui
,
”
I said, very nearly the only two words I spoke of the language.

Charlie touched my jaw with the underside of his knuckle. “I should have known,” he said. “I studied cooking in Paris. This curve here: very, very French.” We stood on the back porch now, still wedged between everyone else’s shoulders. Our breath spiraled upward like the wood-smoke trails.

“You know, it’s too bad,” Charlie said, “to waste this night crammed in such a mob scene.”

I laughed, recognizing a come-on when I heard one. Still, that heart stayed lurched—affixing my feet exactly next to him. “Where else would we go?” I asked. “In case you didn’t notice, there’s three feet of snow out here.”

“Which makes it perfect for a moonlight ski,” he said. “Eli’s got plenty of equipment in the garage.”

We worked our way around the side of the house and opened the garage door. A pile of equipment tangled itself together in one corner. I had to jam the inserts of my Sorels into the smallest pair of boots to make them fit. Charlie wore Eli’s gear.

“Where’s your coat?” he asked. Pathetically, this small moment of concern made the inside of my chest swell open. He cared about me! I thought of my thick down coat, tossed over Eli’s banister. “It’s too warm,” I said, though all I had on was a skimpy lamb’s-wool cardigan. “We’ll just keep moving.”

Charlie dug into an old barrel and found a musty oatmeal-colored scarf and mittens for me, a moth-eaten wool cap and mismatched leather gloves for himself. As I wound the scarf around my neck, the door from the house struggled open, casting a slant of light and a burst of noise into the garage. Eli stood on the landing.

“Hey,” he said. “What are you two doing?”

“Going skiing,” Charlie said. For a second, I worried he’d ask Eli to come along, and I realized how much I wanted to glide away from the crowd, just the two of us, Charlie and me.

“Skiing,” Eli repeated. As if we were both crazy. He closed the door behind him to block out the noise. “When did you two even meet?”

“In the kitchen,” I said. “Charlie made hot chocolate.”

Eli’s usually animated face looked quieted, dismayed. Not that he was jealous—Eli and I were strictly friends. I recognized a kind of protectiveness, but it was already too late to turn back, so I didn’t consider the possible reasons.

“Brett’s one of my best friends,” Eli said to Charlie, the slightest note of warning.

“Cool,” Charlie said. “I’ll take good care of her.”

Dismissed, Eli sidled back into the house as we put on skis. I could tell he was trying to catch my eyes, to communicate something, but I didn’t want to communicate with him just then. I wanted to follow Charlie, so that’s what I did. Once we had stomped through the footsteps leading to Eli’s party, we hit pristine, glistening snow. We didn’t talk, just glided and shuffled through the back streets, heading uphill until we reached Chautauqua. The snow shimmered, untouched, over the rises that led up to the flatirons. I had loved Colorado since I first arrived—the day I stepped off the plane to start college and walked out of the airport to the immense and jagged vista of the Front Range. My hometown in Vermont had close green hills. Endless winter snowfall and clear, starry nights. Here, living closer to the sky made it seem all the more far away—thin, exhilarating air. The ground beneath us felt flat despite the slopes, so much nearer than the closest mountaintop, towering whitely against the night’s clear backdrop.

Charlie leaned on his poles and admired the untouched hilly between us and the Bonnie Blue trailhead. “Perfect,” he said. We broke trail, the snow collapsing through its crust into sifted granules. Charlie glided between the trees first. The scarf itched my neck and I could feel my ears burning red. The fabulous night silence—our labored breath and our skis whooshing through the snow.

Charlie saw the bear first, sitting just above the entrance to the Mesa Trail, only fifteen feet from us. I heard his breath draw in. “Stop,” he whispered. “Bear.” As if my survival instinct were duller than my curiosity, I skied closer so I could see. I let one ski slide to the inside of Charlie’s and linked my arm through his elbow. The material of my sleeve was thin enough that I could feel the lanolin squeak of his fisherman’s sweater, and for the first time that night I felt cold. No grizzlies lived in Colorado, so despite the darkness I knew it was a black bear. He sat chewing on a stick with animal absorption. I couldn’t tell whether he’d seen us.

“Shouldn’t he be hibernating?” Charlie asked. I shrugged. There was the bear, wide awake and in our path, whether he should be hibernating or not.

“I don’t know anything about bears,” I whispered.

“What are we supposed to do?” Charlie asked, as if he hadn’t heard me. Our only light was the glare off the snow, but I saw the bear’s ear twitch.

“I think we’re supposed to wave our arms and make ourselves look taller,” I said, remembering something I’d read on a forest service sign.

“Doesn’t that seem like flagging him down? I don’t think he’s even seen us yet.”

“I just know we’re not supposed to run.” I slid back, untangling my skis from his.

“Shit,” Charlie said. We both slid backward a foot or two. The bear didn’t move.

“I’ll race you,” Charlie whispered. We turned away from each other with fluid synchronicity. I skated a few strokes, then curled myself into a tuck. Freezing snow flew up to plaster my face as I whooshed too fast to wobble. I could hear Charlie panting behind me, but no thundering ursine footsteps.

I kept going—gliding across Baseline Road without looking for traffic, continuing down Ninth Street—until I couldn’t hear Charlie behind me anymore. When I tried to stand, I lost control and smashed into a snow-banked curb—snow packing itself into my sweater, my jeans, my ill-fitting ski boots. Charlie glided to an elegant stop beside me while I lay on the ground, poles flailing.

“I win the speed prize,” I said as he extricated me from the snow, “but you get points for grace.”

“You’re soaked,” he said. “You’re shivering.”

The itchy scarf crackled with ice as he unwound it from my neck. Then he pulled me in and kissed me, almost as an act of charity—a Good Samaritan performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I could feel my blue lips returning to pink against his; I could feel a raspberry stain, pixeled from the cold, spreading across the base of my collarbone. I could feel the tug of the future—even if in that moment, all the future meant was a place to curl in closer.

A WEEK LATER, ELI
and I met for breakfast at Dot’s Diner. He ordered a Belgian waffle, which took a good thirty minutes to arrive at our table. We talked about his party and his Russian Literature seminar.

“Goddamn core curriculum,” he said. Eli was premed, acing bio and chem classes but struggling with the written word. The opposite of me. I offered to help him write his term paper.

“Could it come to that?” he said, digging into the finally arrived waffle. “A freshman writing my papers?”

“
Helping you
with your paper,” I corrected, not out of any particular moral high ground; I just didn’t want to write an entire twenty-page essay. We split the bill and stepped outside into high-altitude sunlight. A warm stretch had hit, and dingy, hardened clumps of snow huddled against the curb—the only remnants of the storm. Eli slipped on Vuarnets, but I could tell from his brow he was still squinting.