The Last September: A Novel (17 page)

TH
E HOUSE WHERE I’D
grown up had been sold and was now inhabited by strangers, the locks changed, my mother’s concerned face existing—watching—only from memory. So I drove to the only other place I owned a key for, the only other place I knew how to get to without a map. I didn’t take anything with me other than a few days’ worth of clothes and a bag of diapers. As I drove toward the shore, the autumn light and leaves bowing through the windshield, betrayal thrummed through my body like a drug. I wondered if Deirdre would stay at the restaurant to work her shift. How had my gift, the pedicure, rearranged itself in Deirdre’s mind, during the walk between the podium and the kitchen? Maybe by the time she got to Charlie she had turned it into a calculated move, an attempt to flush them out. Maybe in the morning she would head over to the Amherst Day Spa and help herself to that peppermint pedicure, without remorse, even with a sense of deserving: the same way she’d helped herself to my husband.

When I got to the Moss house, Eli’s car was parked in the driveway and Lightfoot sat on the lawn, panting. It was dark by then, but the front lights had all been left on. The dog sat just within the bright circle cast on the grass. She looked thin, even for her breed, and agitated. I checked the rearview mirror. Sarah was still tiny enough to need a backward car seat, but even if I hadn’t had a baby mirror facing her, I would have known she was sleeping from the silence. I got out of the car and walked toward the dog, who stood up, very still, an intense look of assessment on her pointy little face, as if she’d been waiting for someone to help and couldn’t decide if I were a likely prospect.

“Hey,” I called. “Hey Lightfoot.”

She ran toward me, full of relief. I knelt to pet her and her ribs felt sharp, alarming, under my fingers. I thought about loading the dog directly into my car and driving away. But where would I go? And could I really leave without checking on Eli? He was both my old friend and my family.

I glanced toward the backseat, where Sarah lay sleeping. A voice rose up in my head, battling the moment of uncertainty.
Come on. Do you think Eli would hurt a baby?
I was so used to Charlie’s rebuttals they arose even in his absence, making me feel silly—selfish—for hesitating. Eli wasn’t some bogeyman who would snatch my baby and swallow her whole. He was just Eli, my friend who suffered from a debilitating disease. Whatever state I found him in, he wouldn’t hurt anyone. Quietly as possible, I clicked the infant seat out of its holder and carried Sarah into the house.

I’d barely crossed the threshold before realizing that talking myself out of my gut reaction had been a mistake if the house was any reflection of what was going on in Eli’s mind. The living room looked ransacked, newspapers and garbage strewn everywhere, books tumbled from the shelves, clothes draped over every piece of furniture and all over the floor. A low-hanging odor of cigarettes and must, possibly urine and feces.

“Come on,” I said to the dog, who had trotted to the middle of the room and stood there, expectant. “Let’s get out of here.” She hesitated, either waiting for me to find her bowl and fill it or else too loyal to desert Eli. “Come on,” I said again, slapping my hip with my free hand. “I’ll get you some food.”

And then Eli appeared in the doorway from the kitchen, completely naked. A cigarette in one hand, his hair greasy and matted. I took another step backward, closer to the door, and moved the baby seat behind my knees, as if I could hide it.

“Eli,” I said. I had to clear my throat to be audible. “Your dog is starving. I’m taking her to get some food.”

He dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out with his bare foot. Then he went back into the kitchen. Still facing the kitchen doorway, I started to back toward the open front door, calculating how fast I could carry Sarah through the screened-in porch and to the driveway. Eli reemerged with an unopened bag of dog food. He ripped into the top and turned it over, the kibble pouring in a loud rush onto the floor. Lightfoot ran forward, her tail wagging, and ate while the two of us stood at opposite ends of the room, watching.

“There,” Eli said. “There you go.”

Standing on the other side of the room, staring at Eli and the ravenous little dog, I felt a rush of very serious anger. At Charlie and Deirdre, yes, but also at myself, and Ladd, and even my father and mother. All the little pieces, the unravelings, that had led me to this exact spot, again and again and again, the only place I had to go.

“Listen,” I said to Eli. “I just have to get something out of the car.”

He stood there, placid, as I left the house. Crossing the lawn, I gulped in the clean night air. Sarah woke up and started to wail, but I steeled myself against the sound, clicking the seat into its platform and climbing directly behind the wheel. I screeched out of the driveway and drove up the street, less than half a mile before I pulled over. Unsettling as the sight of Eli had been, I wasn’t worried that he would follow me. It didn’t take much distance, to stop being afraid of him. I climbed into the backseat and unbuckled Sarah. Once I had her nursing, I dialed Charlie.

“Brett,” he said. “Where are you.”

“I’m on the Cape. I just went to the house. Eli is there and he’s in bad shape.”

On the other end, an intake of breath, Charlie unsure which upheaval to address.

“I’m just calling to tell you,” I said. “I’m not ready to talk.”

“Are you coming home?”

“What does it matter? You’re coming here.”

“It matters,” Charlie said. His voice sounded a little too devoid of worry, at least over what I would do. I could almost hear him saying,
You will always come back.
He would mean it as a compliment, a nod to my devotion. Maybe that was why he loved me.

But Charlie just said, as if he’d read my mind, “I love you.”

Without thinking I said, “I love you, too,” then hung up and tossed the phone aside.

I looked down at Sarah, her eyes half closed, long lashes like her dad’s skimming the tops of chubby baby cheeks. How could they, I thought, my brain returning to its primary wound. Charlie and Deirdre (even as I thought it, my heart rebelled against the phrase, placing their names side by side like a couple), sneaking around, having an
affair
, while I was taking care of this little baby, maybe while I was pregnant, too.

For a moment, a rising and blinding anger blotted out my fear and sadness. I wanted to kill him. I really did.

“Your timing sucks,” I said aloud. Maybe I was talking to Eli as well as Charlie. I’d come to the Moss house so I could figure out what to do next. If not for the imperative of my child, it would have felt wrong to leave Eli there. But I couldn’t exactly unpack a diaper bag to stay with a naked madman. Find a comfortable spot to nurse my baby and wait for Eli to start monologuing about Billy Shears or whatever his latest delusion was. But I did wish I’d managed to take the dog with me. I thought about Eli’s last dog, Manny, who’d been killed trying to follow Eli across Mass Avenue traffic. And then finally, I thought about Eli. All alone with the torturous workings of his mind.

I closed my eyes, trying not to give into thoughts of
if only.
Once, years before, I’d heard a recording of my father talking and been astonished to learn he had a Brooklyn accent. It wasn’t the way I remembered him.
If only
my father hadn’t gotten lymphoma, how familiar that voice would have been to me. Maybe he would be somewhere, right now, and I could run to him.
If only
Eli hadn’t become schizophrenic, he would have graduated med school by now, be deciding on a specialty. Or maybe he would have changed his mind and become a vet instead. Maybe he’d have a family.
What a great dad he would be.
According to E. M. Forster it was the only tense we could never be sure about: what would have been.

I buckled Sarah back into her seat and climbed behind the wheel. On very dark nights, on deserted country roads, driving can feel like flying. The engine of my car hummed so quietly, the wheels moving imperceptibly over cool, invisible pavement. Leaves, still dark, shimmered through shadows on either side of me. I drove past the long dirt driveway to Daniel Williams’s compound. Ladd wouldn’t be there—he was still in Honduras. And anyway, summer was long over. Daniel himself was probably back in Boston. Still, I found myself making the turn. Off the pavement onto the dirt, so I could feel the earth rumbling beneath the car, feel myself returning and connected to some sort of home. The house came into view sooner than I expected, because lights were on—in most of the downstairs and one upstairs window. A thin line of smoke spiraled up from the chimney. I stopped short of where they’d hear me approaching, wondering if it were just Daniel home or if he had guests.

Sitting there behind the steering wheel, I knew that if I knocked on the door, Daniel wouldn’t treat me as if I were crazy to appear. He might not even ask me the reason. He’d just open the door wider and invite me in. Probably he’d be able to tell I had nowhere else to go and offer me one of his cottages or even a room upstairs.

But the thing was: I did have a place to go. Because whenever his brother needed him, Charlie would go. Immediately. No matter what. When I got back to our apartment, it would be empty because Charlie would already be on his way here. So I backed the whole long way out of Daniel’s driveway, returning to paved roads and the sensation of flight. I arrived at our deserted apartment well past midnight, and instead of sleeping in our bed—too fraught with the scent of Charlie—I collapsed on the sofa. Sarah perched on the floor beside me, still in her car seat, my hand resting on the rise and fall of her little belly. In the morning, I called a locksmith to come and install a deadbolt.

TH
E NEXT DAY, WE
woke to heavy snowfall. Everything was canceled. In the evening, Maddie watched Sarah while I pulled on my boots and trudged over to the Homestead. Next door was the house her brother, Austin, built for his wife—the object of E.D.’s unrequited affection living right next door.

I walked through the snow, toward the Evergreens, thinking that I would never entirely escape Charlie, even if I left him. For the rest of my life, we would share a child, and every time I saw his face—every time I handed her off, or met with a teacher, or went to a school event—my heart would fall, willing victim, the way it always had. He beckoned and the woods started. I would never, ever, get away.

My breath billowed out in front of me, glimmers of illumination moving through the air despite the hour, and I tried to imagine how very dark evenings must have been in the nineteenth century, with no electric lights from houses and no streetlamps. The world Emily Dickinson inhabited did not contain a glare from cities the world over, reflected back in the sky. Nights like this, the Poet would sit at her bedroom window, staring across the snowy lawn, toward Sue’s, trying to believe her beloved pined back.

But her beloved married someone else, I reminded myself. Charlie married
me.

My eyes blinked against the falling snow. If it hadn’t been for Sarah, would Charlie have followed me back to our apartment and said that he wanted to be with me? Would I ever be enough, to fend off the revolving door of infatuated women? And how had my thinking already shifted, from determination to leave him—to wishing I could kill him—into the old worry, about how I could keep him?

The world stood dark and quiet. For a moment, I could believe that cars and headlights existed in the distant future. That electricity ran not through wires above my head and under the ground but in the current of possibility between these two modest and imperial plots of land. I lifted my hand and waved—a sad lover’s gesture. Entirely appropriate to feel yearning, and hopeless, looking up through the snow at that west-facing window.

AFTER A DAY OF
canceled classes, the roads were cleared and I went back to school. On the way home I drove down Main Street, slowly, trying to see if Deirdre manned her hostess podium, but I couldn’t see through the window because of the glare. I thought about driving into the alley behind the restaurant to see if Charlie’s car—his mother’s old station wagon—was parked there, but didn’t, because I knew it wouldn’t be. He was on Cape Cod, trying to take care of Eli.

That night I made my own dinner for the first time since I could remember. I probably wouldn’t have bothered if I’d been on my own—but I had to stay strong for Sarah, had to nourish my body so that it could nourish hers. As I cracked two eggs into the bowl, my phone rang. I knew it was Charlie. I drizzled milk into the eggs and picked up a fork, battling the urge to answer. Would he beg for forgiveness or launch into a report on Eli’s well-being?
Let Deirdre worry about your crazy brother
. As those words formed in my head—filling me with regret and loss and self-loathing—I finally started to cry. I wept as I scrambled and cooked so that by the time the eggs were done all I could do was scrape them into the garbage. Still crying, I gave up and slept in our bed. With Sarah beside me, I breathed in the scent of Charlie all night long, thinking about what my life would be like if I never let him come home. A single mother, like mine had been, but relinquishing my baby for weekends and vacations. Watching Charlie walk away on a regular basis. The great love of my life—I had been so sure of it—now in the past.

The world is hardest on people who believe in the way it’s supposed to be.
My basket holds—just—Firmaments,
the Poet wrote.
Th
ose—dangle easy—on my arm. But smaller bundles—Cram.

The bundle Charlie had left me with crammed so painfully, it felt impossible to continue. Still. When I got home from school the next afternoon, there was a letter in our mailbox, postmarked Saturday Cove.

I think about staying on the Cape
, Charlie wrote,
and I think, I’d rather be with Brett. I think about going back to Amherst alone and I think, I’d rather be with Brett. I think about my life and I think, I’d rather be with Brett.