The Last September: A Novel (12 page)

“You came back,” I said, not caring what these words revealed.

“Sure,” Charlie said. “I told you I would. Didn’t I?”

I nodded, thinking that perhaps now everything had changed and he always would follow through on stated promises. Maybe it was just the unspoken ones that gave him trouble. Charlie kissed me, and I leaned forward to hug him, my arms around his neck, conscious that I not let my grip be alarmingly tight, or thankful. As I pulled away, he glanced at my left arm, then gently took hold of it for closer inspection. For a six-inch span, a pale brown bruise, punctuated by four ragged purple circles. Charlie held my arm in his lap, his curls falling forward as he inspected it.

“What happened here?” he finally asked. Ladd’s voice would have been sharp, urgent. But Charlie sounded calm.

I shrugged, not wanting any controversy to interfere with his return. My idea of the day stood very clear in my mind. We would go upstairs and make love while more coffee brewed. Then we would carry his belongings from the car to my apartment, establishing him here, my residence now Charlie’s, too.

He ran his fingers very lightly over my injury. “Looks like somebody grabbed you,” he said.

I stared down at my arm, examining it closely for the first time. The sight of the bruises didn’t make me angry. Ladd hadn’t meant to hurt me. But I couldn’t be sure Charlie would see it that way. “It was an accident,” I said.

“Ladd? Did Ladd do this?”

“When I went to give him back his things. And the ring.”

The closest we ever came to discussing my broken engagement. Charlie didn’t look at my face. He kept his eyes firmly glued to my injury. It throbbed dully. I thought of a line from a James Wright poem, “delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.” How easy for Ladd to damage that expanse of skin, with just the slightest loss of attention to his own wounded interior.

“It’s okay,” I told Charlie.

He nodded, then lifted my arm to his lips and kissed it, as if that would make the bruises go away. As if he were apologizing for his own role in what had hurt me. Ladd would have risen to his feet and stormed away, to confront the perpetrator. But Charlie let it go. I didn’t count this for or against him. Nothing mattered except the fact that he’d come back. I couldn’t worry about Ladd, or my wrist, or my own guilty conscience. I was too busy breaking into blossom.

FOR THE FIRST COUPLE
weeks, Charlie didn’t look for work. I would go to class, and the library, and office hours. Charlie had a little money, the security deposit from his place in Maine, and he would shop for groceries and cook dinner. He went for walks. I told him the story of Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law, the unrequited love, and how they lived next door to each other most of their lives. He showed an interest by touring the Homestead and the Evergreens. One day when he got home, there was a package from Ladd waiting on the doorstep, with all the thing I’d left behind at his house, and a short note apologizing for hurting my wrist. Charlie carried the box upstairs and never asked a single word about it.

Another day I came home to find a message from Eli on my answering machine. “Hey, Charlie,” he said. No one in the world would have connected this voice with the one I’d heard weeks ago above the cranberry bog. It was clear and careful, a tiny bit slow, each word separate and precise. “It looks like I can get out of here on Wednesday. If you could get back here or find a way to call me before then . . .” and then the sound of a click. I could picture Charlie, running across the short expanse of my apartment, making sure to get the phone before his brother hung up.

“Is your dad coming?” I asked.

Charlie was in the kitchen, crumbling basil into the blender. Since his arrival, my kitchen had gone from bare bones to fully equipped, every kind of gadget and paring knife tumbled into the cupboards and drawers.

“He can’t,” Charlie said. “He’s not . . . he doesn’t do great with this, when Eli gets sick. My mom usually deals with it. Dealt with it.”

“But,” I said, as if what he’d said hadn’t registered, “are you going to drive him down to your dad’s?”

“Maybe after a couple days. We’ll see.” Our conversation halted for a moment as he turned the blender on to Puree, basil and garlic and olive oil and balsamic vinegar whipping into the vinaigrette that I would never be able to replicate, no matter how many times I followed the steps exactly as Charlie showed me.

“So where’s he going to stay before then?”

Charlie looked up, one of his pointed moments of stillness, then took another moment to just look at me. Since he’d moved in, I’d found myself imitating his style in small ways, rope necklaces, Indian prints, whimsical flourishes. Today I wore a sundress that had been in the back of my closet for years, along with a thick wool sweater, my hair in a loose ponytail tied with a piece of his butcher twine. Charlie smiled and held his arms out. I stepped into them, my lips just even with the U of his clavicle.

“I thought he could stay here,” Charlie said, his voice a little muffled against the top of my head. “If that’s okay with you. Just for a couple days.”

I wanted to turn and cast a glance at the tiny space, my one-bedroom partitioned from the living room by an open archway, no door. But that would have required moving away from the embrace and, worse than that, the possibility of displeasing him. “I guess he can sleep on the couch,” I said, picturing Eli’s long legs hanging over the armrest. I remembered a tapestry folded into the bottom of my sweater drawer, a dark-red-and-ivory print that Charlie would like. We could hang it in my doorway tonight. Refusing to have Eli here, in my house, would be like refusing to have Charlie.

“You’re the best,” Charlie said, winding his arms around me tighter. “I love you.”

IF IT WEREN’T FOR
Eli, Charlie and I never would have met. Still, over the years it was difficult not to imagine what we could have been without him, the specter of his inevitable comings and goings. “Only the mad will never, never come back,” wrote W. H. Auden, and I found this to be true, although the two new versions of Eli—medicated (bloated, docile) and not medicated (wild, muttering)—did return again and again. But the original Eli, the real one—the boy I’d known in Colorado, the one who’d stayed resolutely beside me when his brother had not—seemed to be gone forever.

“My father’s never been able to deal with it,” Charlie told me again as we drove to pick up Eli in Pocasset. “It doesn’t compute with him, he always just pushed it off to the side and let my mom handle it.”

“Maybe now that she’s gone he’ll have to,” I said. As little as I’d interacted with Mr. Moss so far, I still found it hard to believe he wouldn’t take over his wife’s job as primary caretaker of all things Eli.

Charlie nodded, his hands firm on the steering wheel. Over the years I would learn how it felt to visit or collect someone from a mental hospital; the way you brace yourself for profound and awkward unhappiness. It was especially sad seeing this in Charlie. The only time the weight of the world ever touched him was through Eli. And later, sometimes, me. Charlie talked a little more, telling me about the struggles they’d had with Eli since that night seven years ago when he’d jumped off the roof, jumped from one kind of life—normal and promising—into another.

“Well,” I said, as if no one had come up with this solution yet, “he just has to stay on his meds.”

“The meds suck,” Charlie said. “They turn him into a zombie. A fat zombie. And they make him impotent.”

An image came into my head, Wendy sitting in Eli’s lap around a crowded table at the Rio. I’d run into her a few times after Eli left school. Once outside of Hellems, she’d broken down and cried. “It’s so sad,” she said when I told her I hadn’t heard from Eli. “I always thought what a great dad he would be.”

Back then, when he was dating Wendy, Eli had told me about the chemicals your body produces when you’re in love. Pheromones and oxytocin. Those early days with Charlie, I was living on those chemicals, their fumes surrounding me every second, and I couldn’t even consider the concept of impotence.

“If you could just talk to him,” I said, “and really let him know what he’s like when he’s off his meds.”

“That’s the last thing he needs to hear right now.” Charlie returned his attention to driving. “He’ll already feel like shit about himself. His self-esteem will be at less than nowhere. It’ll only make him feel like we’re against him if we paint a picture of him at his worst.”

I didn’t say anything at all about how I worried Eli at his worst could be dangerous. My hands stayed firmly in my lap, resisting the urge to touch my forehead. Maybe all those years ago he hadn’t meant to hurt me. And Charlie—he had meant to hurt himself more than Eli had done him any violence. I reached over and stroked the back of Charlie’s head, the tiny bumps where his stitches had been ever so slightly detectable beneath my fingertips. And I remembered the way Eli had held his head in his hands, as if measuring the damage.

TH
E FIRST THING ELI
wanted was a pack of cigarettes. The second was to see their mother’s grave. She was buried in the Blue Creek cemetery, a bucolic piece of land despite its proximity to a busy street. Even the whoosh of constant cars took on a calming rhythm, like the wind soughing through the maple leaves and the crash of the waves from over the hill. The mound of earth over Sarah Moss’s grave—swollen and fresh a few weeks ago—had already been tamped down by rains. Somebody had left a white plastic flowerpot, meant to look like a wicker basket, leaning against the stone, dried and wilted calla lilies poked into sodden Styrofoam. I picked it up and stood back. Charlie knelt and placed a little bottle filled with colored sea glass where the arrangement had been. He stood again, the two brothers shoulder to shoulder, staring at the grave as if the inscription were long and involved, not just a name and dates. Finally Eli broke the stillness by lighting a cigarette. He curved a tremoring hand around his lighter to block it from the wind. The smoke settled in around us, a defeated and outlaw scent. Eli’s hair looked faded, almost brown, as if his time in the hospital had drained it of its brightness. It flopped across his forehead as he leaned into the cigarette, and I wondered if his mother had been the last person to cut it.

“It’s crazy,” Eli said, the emotionless voice I would come to find comforting. “It would be easier to believe she was there, down under my feet, if I’d seen it. You know? Seen her die. Seen her buried.”

“I’m really sorry,” Charlie said.

“Crazy,” Eli said again. He flicked the ash from his cigarette. I waited for it to land on the grave, but it didn’t, just blew toward the road, fading out to invisibility on its way.

“You want to walk down to the beach?” Charlie said.

“No. I think I’ll sit here a while. You guys go ahead, I’ll meet you.”

Charlie took my hand and we headed toward the spot where the road turned into a brambled beach path. October now, with leaves and beach plums mulching into a cidery scent that mingled with the approaching ocean, both of us in sweaters and sneakers, I didn’t think Charlie would swim. I didn’t know yet, how he swam one day every month, and in order for it to count he had to dive under the waves at least three times.

“I want to say thank you,” Charlie said, as he started taking off his clothes. “Because you’ve been right here whenever I need you. Loving me.”

A kind of glow washed over me, as if I’d stumbled on a key so naturally. That was all I had to do—love him—and everything would be all right.

“You’re my rock,” Charlie said.

He kissed me and then ran off to dive into the frigid waves. By the time Eli lumbered down to join us—a shuffling, Frankenstein gait that had nothing to do with his old self—Charlie was bundled back into his clothing, his hair still wet, freezing Atlantic seawater beading at the base of his neck and dampening the collar of his sweater. I moved in closer when he put his arm around me, hoping I could transfer a little warmth. Eli walked down the shoreline wearing Charlie’s field coat, smoking and looking out across the water. I kept waiting for the stream of voices to begin, to make their way across the rocks and sand to us; but whatever went on inside his head, for now it all stayed quiet.

BEHIND THE RED-AND-IVORY TAPESTRY
in my bedroom with Charlie, the air persisted, still hanging thick with oxytocin and pheromones. On the other side lurked Eli, the cigarettes he wasn’t supposed to smoke in the apartment, my lavender soap operating as a low base note after he showered, but beaten down within hours by the sour, sickly scent—a kind of ruined sweat—that clung to him in every temperature. Mostly Eli slept, shirtless in the living room, my mother’s itchy nylon afghan sliding off over his belly—growing almost like a pregnancy, as if the enforced sanity were something that had to incubate. Despite promises from Mr. Moss to collect him, Eli stayed on my couch till the weather turned too cold for a throw, and it was an old down sleeping bag that failed to cover his nakedness when I crept out of my room in the morning. I could hear him snoring as I made coffee and showered, as I tried to be quiet as possible. He seemed less like an old friend than a convalescing stepchild. Meanwhile, Tab had abandoned me within days of his appearance, joining me in the kitchen only for her morning can of Fancy Feast and then immediately returning to her spot on his chest.

Was I afraid of Eli, during those days? Never once, never at all. Even in his heavily tranquilized sleep he would lift a hand to stroke the cat. I thought about his theory, human hands, as the cat’s eyes glazed, her lids at ecstatic half-mast, and I felt sad that he couldn’t ever be a vet, let alone a doctor. Then I would close the door quietly behind me with my hair damp, because I didn’t want the blow-dryer to wake anyone, and return toward late afternoon with a bag full of groceries for Charlie to prepare our dinner.

“JUST PROMISE ME YOU
won’t marry him,” my mother said.

We sat across from each other at the Black Sheep coffee shop, the rich chocolate cake she’d insisted on buying sitting untouched between us. I sipped my coffee to avoid answering, and she handed me her fork. “Eat,” she said. “You look thin.”