The Last September: A Novel (14 page)

Eli reached into his pocket and handed Charlie their mother’s ring to slide onto my finger. We were pronounced husband and wife, and we kissed, and then Eli kissed me on the cheek—his hand tremoring at my shoulder—before Charlie and I walked back down the aisle together. Nobody ever said a word about that moment, at least not to me. And what did it matter? In the end, he said “I do.” Of everything I’d ever wanted, this was what I’d wanted most.

In the American Renaissance class where I met Ladd, the professor was an eccentric and entertaining lecturer, given to innuendo and non sequiturs. But she was a tough grader. Or rather, she insisted that I, as her TA, be a tough grader, since she didn’t read the papers herself. There were nearly a hundred students in the class, and I generally sat in the back row—sometimes grading while she lectured. So I might never even have come into contact with Ladd if Professor Keith hadn’t told me to take five points off for every grammatical error on every paper. Midsemester Ladd walked into my office hours, holding the paper he’d written on
Sister Carrie.
It was folded back to the last page so the first thing I saw was the C+ I’d written in green ink because I’d lost my red pen. I didn’t recognize Ladd when he walked into the huge office I shared with ten other TAs—our own little areas partitioned with filmy screens—but I recognized the apologetic note I’d written. It had been a good, sensitive paper on Carrie’s theatrical ambitions and Hurstwood’s lovelorn downfall. But Ladd had an unfortunate tendency toward subject-pronoun disagreement, and the mistake had cost him.

“I’m not a bad writer,” he said, settling into the chair across from me. “Just trying to be gender-neutral.”

“That excuse won’t fly with Keith,” I said, letting myself off the hook. “It’s one of her pet peeves.”

In the next cubicle, a girl was crying. Ladd and I could not only hear her, we could see her shadow, repeatedly laying her head on the desk, then lifting it up to speak.

“Don’t worry,” Ladd said. “I’m not going to start crying.”

I laughed. Looking at Ladd, I also steeled myself. Professor Keith had an uncanny memory for every student, and if I changed his grade she’d suspect I’d either been intimidated or seduced. Before the semester started, she’d lectured me about favoring the white males in the class, a common pitfall, she said, for young teachers, especially young female teachers. I leafed through the paper, showing him the mistakes I’d circled and explaining Keith’s grammar policy, my finger tapping the paragraph where I’d already written all this down. Ladd suggested that since it was the same mistake repeated I should only count it as one.

“It doesn’t work that way,” I told him.

He sat there, looking at me very intently. So intently I started to suspect he’d done this on purpose, thrown his grade so he could come in and complain to me about it. I wished I could remember his previous papers.

“You could go to the Writing Center next time,” I said. “They’ll read the paper over with you, catch these kinds of mistakes.”

Ladd sat with one broad hand on each knee. He had a kind face, sincere and listening. I found myself not wanting him to leave just yet.

He said, “Maybe you could read it for me first. Next time.”

I blinked at him, trying to think what I’d said that made him think such a request was appropriate. Maybe he felt like he could ask because he was older than me? Or maybe he could tell I liked him. I looked down at my stack of papers, hoping the warmth at the back of my neck didn’t mean I was blushing.

“Or not,” he said, sounding sincerely apologetic. “I’m sure you’re really busy.”

I paused, not wanting to be a pushover but also not wanting to disappoint him. Or embarrass him. So I said, “Maybe I could just once. Next time.”

I looked up at him. His brows were raised, worried that he’d offended or compromised me.

“You sure?” he said. “It won’t be too much trouble?”

“It’ll be fine,” I said, trying to sound definite, which I ruined by adding, “Don’t spread it around, though.” If Professor Keith found out she would kill me.

“No,” he said. “I won’t. Your secret is safe with me. Thank you, Brett. I really appreciate this.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, and smiled.

IF LADD HAD NEVER
grabbed me the day I left, if he had never hurt me, I would have been forever etched as the villain in our history. Anything good between us would have been erased by my treachery, so much so that we might never have communicated again.

But he felt so awful; it leveled something between us, and created a kind of matching regret, each of us with this knowledge—each having done something to the other we wouldn’t have thought ourselves capable of. So that over the years when the chance summer meetings occurred in Saturday Cove—in restaurants or grocery stores or on the beach—they occurred with an awkward kind of carefulness, an examination of faces. How much we wished things had unfolded differently. I sometimes resisted going to Saturday Cove in the summer, with the inevitability of running into Ladd, or his parents, or his uncle Daniel. All that pageantry of decorum, with the memory of everything that had been so base, so uncivil, just below the surface.

We did go to Saturday Cove, though, because Charlie loved it. That’s where we were when my mother died in Ireland, three summers after our wedding. Charlie and I had come down the week before his father arrived. Our second day there, I’d woken up around nine thirty to find Charlie gone. My phone rang while I was making coffee, still wearing Charlie’s Herring Run T-shirt. The woman, a secretary from the University of Cork, was crying a little herself, and her Irish accent was so thick. It was very difficult to understand her.

“I’m sorry” was one of the few phrases I understood clearly. “I’m so terribly sorry to be telling you this.”

I hung up and dialed Charlie’s phone, which rang from upstairs, the whistling ring he’d programmed for me. I followed the sound of it in a daze and pulled on a pair of shorts. Then I headed out to the beach to try to find Charlie. Barefoot, I picked my way over the rockiest bluff, the direction of his most usual walk. He would alternate looking out toward the sea and collecting sea glass for his mother’s grave. I passed the steps that led up to the Huber’s beach house. Mr. Huber kept a kayak stashed beneath his deck. Sometimes in the winter Charlie snuck up and borrowed it; I hoped he wasn’t so unreachable as out on the ocean. I didn’t realize I was heading in the direction of Daniel Williams’s house until I saw Daniel, out for a walk on the beach, coming toward me.

“Brett,” Daniel said. “What’s wrong?”

“I think my mother’s dead.” A very small voice, left over from childhood.

“What do you mean, you think?”

I told him about the phone call, the Irish accent, the way it made no sense.

“She hasn’t been sick,” I said. “I can’t remember her ever being sick.”

My mind went to Charlie’s mother, the way we always described her illness and death as quick. Still time enough, though, to carry her out to the shoreline. Still time enough to say good-bye.

Daniel placed his hand at the small of my back and pushed me forward the slightest bit, enough to give me the head start, the power, to follow him back to his house.

TH
E LAST TIME I
saw my mother was at my wedding. She had tried so hard to support me, even though I was breaking my promise marrying Charlie. Instead of complaining or pointing it out, she flew back from Ireland, interrupting her semester. She bought a mother-of-the-bride dress, split the bill with the Mosses, and never said a word about Charlie’s disappearing act at the altar. She even gave Charlie my father’s wedding ring.

But it had been a wedding, with a swirl of people, and no time to really sit down and talk. And the smiling facade made her seem not really like herself. My mother had always been such a serious person—or maybe she’d just become so after my father died. Maybe it was just being a single mom with a career that made her seem so stoic.

“I love you very much,” she said to me the day after the wedding when I drove her to the bus stop in Barnstable. From there, she’d take a bus to Logan airport and a plane back to Ireland. Such a long trip to honor a marriage she didn’t approve of.

“I love you, too,” I said, hugging her good-bye.

What would I have done differently if I’d known that would be the last time I’d ever see her? Maybe breathed in the scent of her hair a little more fully. Maybe I would have thanked her again, for making the trip, stayed in her embrace a little longer. Mom.

At Daniel’s beach house, I sat across from him as he made phone call after phone call at his beautiful oak desk. I ran my fingers over the carved inlay at the edges, wondering when I’d start crying, wondering how he knew all the right numbers to dial. By the time he walked around the desk and knelt in front of me, gathering up my hands, we both knew I’d figured out everything from listening to his side of the various conversations. But he told me anyway, in a careful and measured tone. That she hadn’t shown up for a day’s worth of classes. That the school secretary had found her at her apartment. It looked like an embolism.

“She can’t have felt any pain,” Daniel promised. “It would have been immediate.”

“But she wasn’t even sick,” I repeated, the same dead, childlike voice I’d used before.

“That’s how these things happen,” Daniel said. “I’m so sorry.”

I nodded. Still holding on to my hands, he offered to take care of things. “Make arrangements,” he said. “To have her brought back here. For burial.”

“What I need right now,” I said, tears finally threatening at the thought of my mother, buried, “is Charlie.”

Daniel let go of my hands and stood. “Of course,” he said. “We’ll find him for you.” As if he had a security team at his disposal, waiting for just such a task. Which for all I knew, he did.

As we walked down the hall from his office, back to the living room, Ladd came in through the front door. He looked happy. A pretty girl edged in beside him, with wonderful copper curls and a sweet, open face.

“Brett,” Ladd said. “What are you doing here?” And then, “What’s wrong?”

“My mother died.” This time I sounded more like myself, definite, and with the pronouncement the tears erupted. Ladd stepped forward and hugged me. I wept into his chest.

“She really loved you,” I told him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, his hand rubbing my back in broad, concentric circles, while Daniel and the girl stood back, politely, forgiving the intimacy of this, a moment of grief. When he let go of me, I felt calm enough to gain the smallest presence of mind. Drumcliffe was several hours from Cork but so much closer than Randall, Vermont. My mother was far too pragmatic to think such a thing could ever have happened for a reason. But she couldn’t always have been, because look who she’d chosen to study.

“Don’t bring her body back here,” I said to Daniel, partially over my shoulder. Ladd still had one hand at my hip, his girlfriend the most patient woman in the world. “Yeats,” I said. “He’s buried in Drumcliffe cemetery. That’s where she’d want to be.”

Daniel nodded. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

IF THE NUTS AND
bolts of an emergency were Daniel Williams’s specialty, Charlie excelled at navigating the emotional fallout. He drove me up to Randall for the university’s memorial service and even wore a coat and tie. I watched him shake hands, that smile of his, held back slightly because of the somber circumstances, but still warm enough to comfort. Everyone who shook Charlie’s hand remembered that life hadn’t ended yet, not for the rest of us. I can’t explain how he managed this. For the past year in Amherst, he’d been volunteering for a suicide hotline and had so much success they suggested he train as a 911 operator. But he didn’t want to turn this gift into a stressful career; he only wanted to offer it for free. Charlie knew how to talk people off ledges. He also knew how to nurture a person suffering through grief. With tea and toast in the early stages. Meals and drinks of increasing richness. He always knew what to feed me.

It was Daniel who advised me not to let my mother’s tenants renew their lease and to put her house on the market as soon as they moved. The timing was good, at the height of the housing market even in sleepy Randall, Vermont, and my mother had very nearly paid off her mortgage. The rest of her estate was modest — she had cashed in her life insurance policy to pay her share of my wedding—but thanks to the sale of the house, I had a healthy chunk of money for the first time in my life. It seemed like a cruel substitute. I would much rather have had the house waiting for me, the scent of vinegar Mom always cleaned with, her books cramming the built-in shelves. And most of all her, sitting at the kitchen, ready to brew a pot of coffee whenever I showed up. I wanted her, and the house. Not the money. Maybe that explains why I was so willing to throw it all away.

I GOT LADD’S LETTER
in early September.
Dear Brett.
Standing on the front stoop in Amherst, our mailbox still open with the keys hanging from it, I read the whole rambling thing. He told me that he and Sheila, the girl he’d been with the day I’d seen him at his uncle’s house, had broken up.
I should be mourning the loss of Sheila. But I keep thinking of you.

It was a sort of love letter, not a full-fledged one. There was no praise in it, and no proclamation. Just a kind of intimate urgency.
How can I leave the country without telling you?
By the time I’d closed and locked the mailbox, I decided not to show it to Charlie. But I didn’t keep it, either. Good wife, good girl, I ripped it into pieces and threw it away downstairs, not even bringing it up to our apartment.

“I could help you start a restaurant,” I said to Charlie, a few hours later. We sat at the kitchen table, eating braised Brussels sprouts and sole meunière. Charlie smiled as if I’d made a joke.

“No, really,” I said, taking a bite of the rich fish, meltingly delicious and nourishing. Charlie refilled my wineglass, even though I’d only taken a few sips. I didn’t want him to act this way, reluctant. I wanted him to be excited, grateful, at this gift I was offering.

“But won’t we be leaving here,” Charlie said. “Eventually. For you to teach somewhere?”

Something fluttered in my chest, irritation that he would resist, when here I was handing over my inheritance. Offering him something so huge. I wanted to ask him if he had any particular life’s plans. If Charlie’s mother’s voice found its way into his head after she died, inspiring him to marry me, maybe this was how my mother’s voice made its way into mine. I was suddenly frustrated by Charlie’s lack of direction. A person didn’t use talent like his just cooking for his wife. A person parlayed it into a career. The way I was parlaying my interests into a career.