The Last September: A Novel (6 page)

“Well, then. We don’t have to do this.”

“No. I want to.”

Charlie stroked my hair away from my face, staring at me long and hard before kissing me softly, gently. It was all I could do not to say
I love you, I love you, I love you
, over and over again. It never occurred to me that he wasn’t employing the same struggle. His face, his eyes, his tenderness—completely absorbed and entirely believable.

LIKE THE GENTLEMAN HIS
brother wasn’t, Eli persisted in our friendships with phone calls and invitations. When he started dating Wendy, she didn’t object to our continued friendship, but it made me sad to be around them sometimes—Eli was a sweet and solicitous boyfriend, pulling out chairs and picking up checks.

“You can ask me about Charlie, you know,” Eli said. “If you want to.”

A Saturday, the two of us were in a classroom in Muenzinger. I had my own core curriculum worries and couldn’t pass Psych 101 until the rat I’d been assigned learned to get through a maze.

“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m trying to leave it behind me. You know?”

“It’s a good plan,” Eli agreed. He scooped up the rat gently, repositioning it midway in the maze. “If he can remember from here,” Eli said, “then maybe he’ll remember from the beginning.”

“Wait,” I said. “Which is the good plan?”

“Leaving it behind you. But I think the rat would do better if you gave him a name.”

“The rat doesn’t know if he has a name or not,” I said as the rat found himself faced with yet another tiny wall.

“Maybe he does,” Eli said. He picked the rat up and returned him to the middle. “I think you should try it.” As I was about to speak, he said, “And don’t name him Charlie.”

I laughed. “Fine. How about Templeton?”

“Something less expected,” Eli suggested. “Something smarter.”

“Templeton was smart.”

“Something nicer.”

“What’s Latin for rat?”

Eli cradled the animal and raised it to his nose. Its whiskers twitched, and its long, furless tail wound around his hand. I shuddered a little.

“Julien,” Eli said, feeding him a piece of the cheese we’d placed at the finishing point. “It’s a good, smart name.”

He put Julien back at the beginning of the maze, installed a new piece of cheese at the end, and let him go. Newly christened, Julien executed the maze once, twice, three times. So of course I had no choice but to write Eli’s term paper on the homicidal fickleness of Count Vronsky. In fact, on the day Charlie died that very paper lay upstairs in a box in their father’s house, its edges curled and yellow, its print faded except for the clear, red, encircled A.

AT SOME POINT THAT
spring, Eli and Wendy broke up, and I acquired a boyfriend named Franc, a Swedish chemistry major who dressed, I would realize years later, like Charlie—in batik T-shirts and crinkly Indian button-downs. I told myself that I didn’t think about Charlie anymore, but truthfully his disappearance lived on—tucked somewhere between my ribs as a palpable and continuing ache. Although Franc had a jealous streak and often objected, Eli was still my main friend, the person I spent the most time with when I wasn’t studying. Eli was quick to laugh but also willing to be silent; the two of us could walk for miles together without ever saying a word, and at the same time, when we wanted, we could talk about anything. Only the topic of Charlie was a strange blank between us—Eli careful since that day in Muenzinger to omit his brother’s name when discussing future plans, or telling me stories about his past.

“You don’t have to pretend he doesn’t exist,” I said one day in April. We were playing hooky to ski on the last day of the season at Monarch. On the chairlift, our legs dangled heavily as we rode up over the slopes, rocks peeking treacherously through the snow that remained.

“Who?” Eli said, and we both laughed. Then he said, “It’s too bad, though. If it weren’t for all that, you could come to the Cape this summer for a visit.”

He’d told me about his house there, right on the bay, the summers sailing and swimming and building sand castles. “I like to build them out on the rocks at low tide,” he said, “and then watch the water swarm around them, so they look like they’re floating. They look like ancient ruins.”

“Sounds beautiful.”

I was half hoping he’d invite me anyway. Maybe if he did, Charlie would realize that he loved me. The chairlift slowed down and we glided off, slightly different directions, before turning our skis and meeting at the top of Ticaboo. Eli did not mention the Cape again—not that day or any other time. I understood that he didn’t want to exclude me but protect me.

That summer, living at home in Randall, Vermont, I waited tables at the new French bistro and did some research work for my mother. An old high school friend and I drove to Maine to hike up Mount Katahdin. On the way back, when we stopped on the rocky coast, the water was too cold to contemplate swimming, and I wondered how it was on Cape Cod this time of year, if Eli and Charlie were swimming. I got a few emails from Eli but none inviting me to visit and none mentioning his brother. I wondered if they talked about me at all or if my name was something to be carefully avoided.

In the fall, Franc and I picked up more or less where we’d left off, and for the first couple months of school so did Eli and I—to the extent that Franc could bear it. “He hovers too close to you,” Franc would say, and he wasn’t a fan of Eli’s birthday gesture, filling my room with balloons. I tried to explain it wasn’t romantic, just whimsical, but with the language barrier I had a hard time explaining the difference between the two words. It became easier to spend time away from Eli, who was very busy anyway, with the work he had to do for his BURST grant. So by late October, when I ran into him at a Pub Club, it didn’t seem strange that we hadn’t seen each other for nearly two weeks.

“Brett,” Eli called to me from across the room just after I’d poured my first beer. Franc was back in his off-campus apartment, studying for a sociology exam. I turned toward the sound of Eli’s voice. The sight of him startled me. Two weeks didn’t seem nearly long enough to justify his physical change. He had shorn his blond hair into a buzz cut and lost a considerable amount of weight, making his jaw appear pronounced and razor sharp. I remember thinking that the only way to lose so much weight so quickly would be to stop eating altogether.

“Eli,” I said. “Your hair. And you’re so skinny.”

“Brett,” he said again, intense and happy. He slammed his red plastic cup into mine, a toast that made my beer slosh onto my shoes. We both looked down at the amber liquid, sinking into my white sneakers. Then Eli did it again, laughing. This time I didn’t have enough beer left to spill. I stepped backward, attempting to smile, which ended up more as a grimace. On his jeans, which hung from his hips on the verge of falling, were scribbled words in different color pen.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “You look so different.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I just need another one of these.” He reached for my empty red cup. “Looks like you do, too.”

“I’ll get them,” I said, escaping sideways into the crowd. As I waited in line for the beer, I glanced back over my shoulder. Eli stood, still watching me. I saw him take his sunglasses out of his pocket—Ray-Bans now, he must have lost the Vuarnets—and slip them onto the bridge of his nose.

I walked back and handed him his cup. He held it in his hand, not saying anything, just staring at me hard through his dark sunglasses.

“Why are you wearing those indoors?” I said.

Eli didn’t answer. I lifted my hand and tapped lightly on one lens. Still no response. I decided to play along, staring back, until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“What?” I finally said. I punched him lightly in the solar plexus.

Eli grabbed my sleeve and said, “Come up to the roof.” His voice sounded so furtive I almost worried he planned on making a pass at me.

“Why the roof?” I said. “Let’s just stay here at the party.”

“Come on,” Eli said. “I have to tell you something about Charlie.” The buzz of the party seemed to halt for a moment. For so long, he had been careful to avoid that name. Now Eli and I stood in this private little bubble of my too-intense feelings.

“Why can’t you tell me here?” I said. My voice sounded deeper. Grim. I didn’t want anyone telling Franc I had gone up to the roof with Eli. And I told myself that I didn’t want to know anything about Charlie, though at the mention of his name my focus had instantly sharpened. Worse, I felt like I wasn’t talking to Eli, my careful friend, but to someone new, and not careful at all.

“The roof,” Eli whispered, leaning in too close. His breath smelled muddy and acrid, as if he’d stopped brushing his teeth. I couldn’t help scrunching up my nose. “The roof,” he said again. “It’s safe up there.”

“It seems pretty safe down here.”

Eli closed his fist tighter around my sleeve and pulled me through the crowd. I followed him, my friend after all. Truthfully I was curious. He was going to tell me something about Charlie. We climbed up the winding, beer-sticky stairwell to the third story, then pulled ourselves through a window to scale the sloping eaves until we reached a flat expanse. Settling next to Eli, my brain slightly fuzzy with beer, I felt glad I’d come. The sky hung heavy with stars, but the air tasted light in my lungs. That thin, high-altitude air—like diet air, not so full of oxygen. I sipped it in, my head clearing ever so slightly.

Eli scrunched his brow as if he were squinting into the night through his sunglasses.

“Take those off,” I told him, tapping a lens again. “I don’t know how you can see anything.”

“I don’t want to see anything,” Eli said. “I can’t stand the glare.”

“What glare?”

“Shh,” Eli said. “Just be quiet. Just shut up now.”

I tried to laugh. He had to be joking. We sat there, silent, me waiting politely—as if I weren’t allowed to say Charlie’s name out loud even though Eli had used it to lure me up here. I swear that ten minutes passed, the two of us, just sitting. When my eyes had adjusted to the semidarkness, I tried but failed to decipher the garbled scrawl across his pants. The noise of the party pulsed through the roof, vibrating slightly. Arriving voices and slamming car doors traveled up to us from the parking lot.

“Eli.” I finally spoke. “You said you were going to tell me something about Charlie.”

He pitched forward, placing his forehead between his knees, and pressed his hands over his ears.

“Eli?” I said.

“Shh,” he said. “Shut up. Don’t say that name.”

“Which name? Yours or his?”

He lifted his head and snatched off his sunglasses. I heard my own intake of breath; he looked so upset, so wired. His eyes were disturbingly beautiful even in this partially lit night; it made a kind of sense that he’d wanted to hide them.

“Eli,” I said, my voice a whisper. “Are you all right?”

Another minute passed, maybe two. We stared into each other’s faces. I thought how lackluster my own dark-eyed face must look in comparison to his. Then he turned in a jerky, agitated movement and slapped me across the forehead with the back of his hand. I couldn’t tell if he’d done it on purpose or if it happened because he wasn’t in control of his movement. Either way, the blow stunned me into a weird sort of calm—as if he’d smacked me right out of my body and now I could stand to the side, just watching whatever happened next.

“Shut up,” he whispered fiercely.

I hadn’t said a word. Eli stood, his eyes filling with water. I brought my hand to my forehead, which stung sharply. I pictured a quick, hand-shaped welt that would indeed take shape by the time I had a chance to look in a mirror. Eli drew his hand back to his own forehead and smacked it twice, harder even than he’d smacked me. The Ray-Bans flew out of his hand, skittered across the roof, and fell down to the parking lot.

“Eli,” I said, regaining my voice, sharply aware of the distance between us and the ground. The trust required for me to come up here—in my own footing, in my companion—evaporated into the thin air. “Stop it,” I said. “Stop it.”

I could hear voices three stories below, halting. “Who’s up there,” a male voice yelled. I imagined him kneeling to pick up the expensive sunglasses that had clattered to his feet. Eli covered his face with his hands.

“Goddamn it,” Eli said. “Don’t you see what he’s turned you into? Don’t you see what he’s making me do?”

“Who?” I said, though I knew exactly. I slid back a little, the tar shingles rough beneath my blue-jeaned thighs. I tried to calculate the distance and slope to that open window below. Eli moved his hands frantically across his head, as if discovering the lack of hair for the first time. He balled his hands into fists, and I thought he would start pummeling himself again. But instead he threw his arms out wide, like bird wings. The sky around us darkened in an elegant bow. Eli did a strangely graceful little hop, then ran down to the eaves with his arms outstretched and catapulted into the air. I swear that for a moment he hovered. It happened just after his feet grazed the gutters—his body hung flat, arms outstretched like a raptor about to swoop down on prey. But then that silhouette evaporated, and in less time than he’d been still, he crashed through the air to the pavement.

I heard male and female screams below, but I stayed silent. My arms hugged my knees close to my chest. A warm Chinook wind blew my hair off my sharply stinging forehead. I crawled down to where he’d lifted off, and peered over. Down below, three people—two girls and a guy—stood over Eli’s body. He lay on his stomach, his arms splayed out, still like wings, though they would tell me later he’d managed to land on his feet before crumpling to the ground.

He’s dead, I thought. Eli’s dead. Then I remembered the kitten he’d rescued, how sure I’d been she couldn’t possibly survive.

One of the girls looked up at me. “Are you all right?” she yelled, as if I were a victim instead of an accomplice.

“Is he alive?” I said, my voice such a froggy croak I didn’t expect she would hear it.

But she called back. “Yeah. He’s alive.”

“Call an ambulance,” I yelled back, my voice so loud and sudden it set off a little pulse behind my eyelids.