The Last September: A Novel (18 page)

Standing in the exact same spot where I’d read Ladd’s letter, I looked up, across the street, to the Homestead. Charlie was my Sue Dickinson. He was my Maud Gonne. And the thing I kept forgetting about those two: they were unattainable, they weren’t
meant
to be attained. I should have known that. I should have walked away.

But I couldn’t. Beyond everything I felt, Charlie was the father of my child. We were married. The adult thing to do was tamp down the rising tide of anger and woundedness. It wasn’t weakness, I told myself, to work on my marriage, instead of just letting it go.

The new dead bolt came off, my defenses went down, Charlie came home.

Winter continued in earnest, and Eli returned to the hospital in Pocasset. Lightfoot came to live with us. Charlie had already broken things off with Deirdre; now he had to fire her. He told me about the conversation in the office of our marriage counselor, looking at her instead of me.

“She says she won’t go.”

I turned to him, trying to keep my voice steady. “She won’t go? How am I supposed to deal with that? You working with her every day, her still in our life?”

“She says she’ll sue me. For sexual harassment.” He shrugged. Helpless.

Later that day, at home, he told me he was letting his sous-chef take over for a few days while he figured out how to handle Deirdre. “One thing we could do,” Charlie said, “is just close it. The restaurant.”

I sat down next to him on the couch. Sarah was napping in the other room, so we both talked in whispers. It seemed ridiculous, to shut down a business because of a jilted mistress. It also seemed like the only thing to do.

“It’s losing money anyway,” Charlie said, like nothing could matter less. “We’ve been getting four, five tables, even on weekends. The truth is, it’s either close it now or close it in the spring. It’s a failure. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. Any sadness I felt over the restaurant’s closing was eclipsed by relief that Deirdre would be ousted, that she couldn’t stay in our lives with a lawsuit—claiming the truth, that we’d shut down the whole enterprise to get rid of her. I examined Charlie’s face closely, for signs of mourning, and saw none. Maybe he felt relieved, too, or maybe this collapse was so closely associated with Deirdre’s exit that he thought it would be tactless to let me see his disappointment. Or maybe it was just Charlie, of the slow smile and easy movements, glad to shelve the ambition that I had foisted upon him.

This way he didn’t have to fire Deirdre face-to-face. He just called a meeting and told the whole staff that the restaurant was closing. I didn’t ask much about it. I didn’t want to talk about Deirdre, or think about her, or remember she existed at all. Because our counseling sessions amounted to one scheduled hour a week to talk about Deirdre, we stopped going. I guess it became our way of coping, to quit everything except each other. At random moments, Charlie would say, “I’m sorry,” and I would reply with a silencing glance, wanting to continue with our plan, of none of this spoken out loud.

The thing about Charlie that I worked on remembering was that family was important to him. I clung to the image of him carrying his mother down to the beach. I thought of how he always came to Eli’s rescue. Now I was his family, too. Whereas Deirdre was just a girl, whom he could abandon as easily as he’d abandoned me back in Colorado. For the first time, that memory gave me comfort.

The name Deirdre became like a ghost, hovering around our interactions, our conversations, but almost never materializing. The person appeared more frequently. I would see her in town, often enough that I learned to avoid the places she might be, the new restaurant where she worked, the coffee shop she liked. She did not take the same approach, and I would see her car, a blue Honda Civic, slowing down as it passed our house, her head turning up toward our window so directly I’d wonder if Charlie ever brought her here. She ran by our house, too, white pony tail whipping behind her, snapping back as she turned her head away from the sight of me on the front porch or as I carried groceries up the sidewalk, parsley spilling out the top of the brown paper bags. As she picked up her pace, I could see her imagining the meal Charlie would be cooking later. Occasionally I would spot her at the university, which was odd because as far as I knew she wasn’t a student. Maybe she had a new boyfriend—a professor or grad student. Whatever the reason, there she would be—spectral as she was in the air between Charlie and me. Hard to believe someone who appeared so insubstantial had managed to do so much harm. Every time I saw her something gathered inside of me, a piece of the anger I fought to subdue, rising and burgeoning, forming a nagging pile of resentment.

“I think we need to get away for a while,” I told Charlie, as the school year spooled to its end. We were both in the tiny bathroom, me perched on the edge of the tub while Charlie showered. He’d gone back to his odd jobs, and his legs and arms were caked with white paint. When he pulled the curtain aside, I could tell from his face that he had also seen the way she watched us. Charlie’s comings and goings were less regular than mine. To find him, she would have had to skulk in produce aisles. I thought about asking if he’d heard from her but worried it would sound too much like an accusation. And anyway, I had stopped counting on him to tell me the truth.

“Maybe we can go to the Cape,” he said. “My father was talking about staying in Florida this summer. We can have the place to ourselves. We can even stay on if we wanted. You can work on your dissertation.”

“What will you do? For work?”

Charlie paused, then pulled the curtain back. The stream of water shut off with a heaving sigh. Sometimes I thought his affair with Deirdre was a way of showing me what would happen if I pushed him in directions he didn’t want to go. For so long, there had been a sacrosanct element to my love for Charlie, and it almost seemed like I was the one who’d muddied it, by trying to turn him into a married worker bee.

Just when I thought he wouldn’t answer he said, “You know. This and that.” From the next room, Sarah began to cry. I went to pick her up, and carried her into the kitchen to make some rice cereal. She was on my hip, hand closed into my hair, when Charlie emerged, wearing nothing but khaki shorts, still dripping. I noticed a splotch of paint he’d missed on his forearm.

“We’d have to give up this apartment,” I said.

He shrugged. “We could always find another one. If we wanted to come back.”

I stared into the filmy white baby food, stirring it unnecessarily. It felt sad to give up this place, where I could stare out the window toward the home of the Poet, where I could walk across the street and stand in her garden. This was the first place I’d lived with Charlie, the first place we’d brought Sarah home. For so many days, she’d retained that newborn scent, of someone who had been living in the most primal, underwater world. Were Charlie and Deirdre having their affair then? Did he leave me that very night we brought Sarah home, on some fake errand, to meet her? It seemed like I would never, ever stop thinking about it. I poured rice cereal into a bowl to cool, holding the pot at a distance so Sarah couldn’t reach out and grab it.

Charlie stepped closer and eased Sarah out of my arms, calmly stating his case. My coursework was finished. I had a little fellowship money. We wouldn’t have to pay rent.

“There’s Eli,” I said.

“He’s okay now,” Charlie said. “He has his own place to live.” Released from Pocasset, Eli had reclaimed Lightfoot and was back in Boston working at Angell.

“For now,” I said.

“Look,” Charlie said. “We won’t live there forever. Just for a little while.”

He sat down at the kitchen table with Sarah on his knee. I sat down across from them, blowing on every spoonful before offering it to my baby, who waved her hands excitedly between each bite, oblivious to everything that went on between Charlie and me.

AFTER PEOPLE DIE, YOU’RE
expected to speak for them. What would your mother do? What would Charlie say? As if I had ever been able to predict the thoughts and actions of those people while they were living. Sometimes I try to imagine my mother coming to Amherst after Sarah was born, to help, which would have given her a front row seat to everything that happened with Deirdre. But it was hard to reconcile this projection with the mother I remembered. Maybe she would have come for a visit, and then gone back to Ireland. I would send her pictures over email, making our life seem perfect. She would check in once or twice a week by phone.

And what about Charlie and me? Would my forgiveness have succeeded? We moved to Cape Cod as Sarah turned one. I worried over when she would take her first step while Charlie shrugged and said she would do it on her own time. In July Tab was killed at the top of the road by a too-fast driver, and Charlie tended me carefully. I tried to be grateful, and then I tried to focus on mundane annoyances—discrepancy in child care, the debt the restaurant had left behind, Charlie’s lack of a job. My car broke down, and we junked it instead of fixing it. “Do you love me?” I asked him too often, and Charlie always said yes. Looking back, I’m not sure I ever said “I love you” to Charlie in the time between finding out about his affair and finding him dead. I only said, “I love you, too.”

What would that period of time have become if Charlie had lived? Would it have led to the end eventually, a failed attempt at holding our family together? Or would it have just been a period of time we needed to get through, to be solid again, for Deirdre to become a little blip in our history. Would Charlie have learned his lesson, or would he have proved himself to be incorrigible, and years later I’d find myself in just the same spot? Emily Dickinson had decades to become disillusioned with Sue, to forgive her and love her again, and finally turn away. How many times would I have needed to repeat the same process until I’d finally settled into permanent anger? Or would it have been different, with Charlie and me?

The summer after Deirdre, I kept asking myself these questions in the future tense: Will my anger ever go away? Will Charlie ever do this again? It was such a difficult time. No matter how hard I tried, how definitely I decided, there was still this strain of uncertainty and of injuries that refused to disappear. All that conspired against us, churning into the day I walked into Ladd’s cottage, the same day Charlie’s heart stopped beating.

If it hadn’t stopped beating. If Charlie had lived. The answers and the memories would have unfolded together into discovery.
What would have been
: it’s the only tense we can never know.

TO OTHERS, IT MAY
have seemed clear that Eli’s life led up to Charlie’s death. But in my mind it didn’t seem that way. Clear. It seemed instead like
my
life, arriving there, in that first part of September. The time of year technically called summer but which everyone in New England knows is really fall. On that day, the last day of Charlie’s life, I drove over to see Ladd at his uncle’s compound. He’d said he had some books for me. I parked my car—the old station wagon that once belonged to Charlie and Eli’s mother—in the empty space beside the shed.

Ladd could have stayed in the main house. Or he could have used his parents’ house—which was better suited to winter habitation, situated away from the shore’s buffeting winds. But his postcard had said he was staying in the cottage. In fact, there were three cottages on Daniel’s property—two of them oceanfront, built years ago from old Sears kits. But I knew exactly the one Ladd meant. It sat back in the scrub oak woods, out of sight. It was the same one in which, years ago, we had showered and changed, and made love, before going to tell his parents about our short-lived wedding plans.

The path behind the house was overgrown. I wore my long Indian skirt, a pale blue tank top, and leather flip-flops. The soles slapped against my heels, and I stared down at the chipping nail polish on my toes. By now I could see the cottage—in my head it had already become
Ladd’s cottage—
settled in among the trees. You had to know about this little house to find it—hunched under the taller scrub oak, small and unassuming, like something for children scattering bread crumbs to stumble upon. I saw Ladd through the large window, sitting at a wooden table and staring at a laptop screen. I wondered if the cabin, for all its rustic isolation, had Wi-Fi.

Even though it felt like a creepy thing to do, I stood there for a while, staring through the window, watching Ladd. Seven years had passed since I left him for Charlie. More than two since I last saw him. But he looked exactly the way I always remembered him: tall and ordinary, with a kind, craggy face. After a minute he sensed me there, staring at him. He turned and started, pushing back his chair. I lifted one hand and curled my fingers down one at a time, an overly girlish wave. By the time he’d walked to the front door—only a few paces worth—I was there to meet him.

“Brett,” he said at the same time the door slid open with a rasp.

“Hi Ladd,” I said.

We stood there for a moment, wondering if we should hug and sharing an awkward decision not to. He cleared his throat and said, “Come to see those volumes?”

“You bet.”

Ladd stepped away from his door and held out his hand, gesturing to the threshold. I thought of the brief exchange I’d had with Charlie earlier, about the joking, fantasy make-out session with Ladd. In my mind, I had pictured a rusty teakettle and piles of dusty books, maybe dirty socks in the corner. But Ladd’s cottage was neat—if his bed was unmade, it was politely hidden overhead in the loft. And the teakettle that he immediately turned on was brand-new or recently polished. I’d forgotten that about Ladd, the way he kept order. In one corner of the cottage sat a small pine table surrounded by mismatched chairs. I knew the books the moment I saw them, from across the room, stacked there, waiting for me
.
Th
e Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson
, by Jay Leyda, both volumes. I crossed the room as he fiddled with boxes of tea bags. Before he could ask me which kind I wanted I brushed my hand over the top cover.

“Look at these. Were you expecting me?”

He poured steaming water into large green mugs. “I thought I might bring them by later,” he said. “That way I could say hi to Charlie, too.”

Since when did Ladd ever want to say hi to Charlie? The books looked ancient, musty, sacred. Funny to see something—solid and right there—that I had been wanting for so long.

I said, “It was really good of you to remember. Thank you.”

“They’re Uncle Daniel’s,” Ladd said. “They belonged to his wife.” He dropped tea bags into the mugs and handed me mine. I closed my hands around its lovely warmth, the steam rising up around my face.