The Last September: A Novel (24 page)

Daniel’s face looked so calm and sympathetic. Forgiving me. But I didn’t want to be forgiven. I wanted to know what happened to Charlie. If I told Daniel about the kayak, he would walk into the house and phone the police. One more piece of information, one more thing they knew to look for.

“Look,” Daniel said. “All the evidence, including your own eyewitness. It’s very clear. Who did this.”

“It’s not clear,” I said. “It’s not clear to me.” I thought about mentioning the other possibility, something Deirdre-related, but the thought of Daniel’s knowing about that, Charlie’s betrayal, was too awful.

He stood there, quietly, staring at me, feeling too badly for me to contradict what was obvious to him, what was obvious to everyone. Except me.

“So what happens,” I said, not wanting to argue any further, “when they catch him?”

“I imagine a trial. And then a hospital.”

A hospital
. And what sort of hospital would it be? Even before this—before being accused of a crime—the wide and rolling lawns that Daniel had paid for were far behind Eli. People grow weary of mental illness. The way it rises, again and again. The way it never gets cured, never goes away. I had grown weary of it the day I left Charlie alone at the house. I couldn’t handle the reappearances of Eli, in all his various states, the way we’d martial ourselves to get him hospitalized, to get him well, get him working, only to land in precisely the same spot, over and over again. Eli’s hospitals had already gone from private to state. And now they would end with the only permanent one possible: for the criminally insane. If he landed there, would it feel any different to him, from all the other incarcerations, against his will?
Th
e unspeakable horror
, he once wrote to Charlie, about mental hospitals.

Unless Eli managed to paddle away, to somewhere else. I nodded to Daniel as if I believed him and headed into the house, his hand sliding off Sarah’s head, so that finally he could reach up and smooth his hair back into place.

I PUSHED THE DOOR
to our room open with my hip, the sleeping child draped heavily over my shoulder, to find Ladd there, sitting on my bed, his legs resting sideways to keep his shoes off the covers. This the only indication of politeness—he looked agitated, angry.

“What was that?” he said. “What the hell was that?”

“Shh,” I hissed, waving my hand toward Sarah, though she was out cold.

Ladd swung around, placing his feet on the floor, and I laid Sarah on the bed. “Get me a diaper,” I said to Ladd, jutting my chin toward the bag in the corner.

He stood up obediently while I unsnapped Sarah’s onsesie and peeled off the soaking diaper.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” I said as he handed me a clean one.

“Eli didn’t do it?” Ladd said.

I wondered how he possibly could have heard—through which open window. Had he already been waiting in my room? Or maybe he’d been standing on the deck or skulking in the bushes, watching me.

“Shhh,” I said again. I lifted Sarah and placed her up toward the head of the bed and then built my little barrier of pillows around her.

“That doesn’t seem safe,” Ladd said, his voice shifting to normal. “Shouldn’t you put her in the crib?”

“What the hell business is it of yours?” I all but shouted at him. We both paused, startled, then looked at Sarah. She didn’t stir, her cheeks crimson, her little chest rising and falling.

“Maybe it’s not,” Ladd said in a fierce whisper. “But that other business. You can say it’s not mine all you want, but that doesn’t make it so.”

“You can say Eli did it all you want. Everyone can say it. But
that
doesn’t make it so.”

“Who then,” Ladd said. “If not Eli, who.”

I sat down on the bed, placing one hand on the flushed rise and fall of Sarah. “I don’t know.”

“No suspect?”

I didn’t answer. Ladd should have been able to figure it out, my mental list of possibilities.

“Me?” Ladd said. He pointed to his chest. “Seriously? Have you gone that crazy?”

“No,” I said, knowing full well what crazy looked like. “I haven’t gone crazy, not at all.”

Just at that moment, Daniel appeared in the doorway. I wondered where the dog had gone, probably cowering downstairs under some furniture. Ladd stepped back, away from me, and looked at his uncle.

“Ladd,” Daniel said.

Ladd raised his hands in surrender and stalked out of the room. For a long moment, it was just the three of us, Sarah, Daniel, and me, silent in the scar of Ladd’s angry departure. It hit me then, the isolation there, the lack of neighboring houses. I felt myself longing for Amherst, the reliable rows of residences, people living side by side—strangers, but there if you needed them. To hear, if you should happen to call out for help.

WHEN I FINALLY WENT
downstairs, Mrs. Duffy handed me a glass of sun-brewed iced tea with a sprig of mint. The glass felt cold and alien in my hand. So strange that all these cheerful substances insisted on continuing, existing, expecting me to enjoy them. I carried it out to the deck. From where I stood, I could see Daniel’s car was gone, and I could also see Ladd, out on the beach, sitting in a lawn chair and reading a book. How long had it been since I’d known he was back from Honduras? More than two weeks, and I hadn’t yet gotten around to asking him what it had been like or what he planned to do next. Ladd was the same age as Charlie, after all, and hadn’t managed to get himself any more situated in a career. I guess I’d never thought about that much, partly because Ladd had enough money of his own to stay afloat, even if he only ever wafted from one adventure to another. Or maybe I’d just never thought about it because I wasn’t married to him.

I saw exactly what happened.
What had Eli meant? And why could I never stop trying to attach meaning and sense to the things he said when by now I should know better? My mind cataloged the things that Eli could and could not have seen. He couldn’t have seen me climbing into Ladd’s lap and kissing him. But he could have seen someone lowering the hammer. Did Eli think it was me? Years ago he had tried to warn me. Maybe he thought that now, not heeding his warning, I had reached my breaking point and killed Charlie myself.

Whatever Eli saw, or imagined, or hallucinated. The day Charlie died, he arrived before sunset. The two of them could have walked down to the water. Afterward Charlie might have sent him upstairs to shower, and maybe that’s when Eli wrote his letter, slipped it into my book. I closed my eyes. Most likely it was a coincidence that he would accuse me of something on the very day I’d committed a crime. If he had even written it that day. Misfiring synapses for once getting lucky.

Out on the beach, Ladd turned a page, his long pale legs stretched out in front of him—they might be sunburned when he came back up to the house. I thought of his aspirations of being a great good man, and how I managed to get in the way, even all those years after leaving him. Upstairs, he had declared himself a suspect by denying that possibility. And I understood the impulse, both of us guilty.

Ladd closed his book and stood to fold the beach chair. I went back into the house and hurried up the stairs, out of sight.

OVER THE NEXT FEW
days, pictures of Sylvia began returning to frames and tabletops. Sarah discovered the first one on a side table in the living room. She picked it up in both hands and frowned, deeply disappointed to find the lady in a place where anyone in the world could see her. After returning the picture very carefully to its spot, she opened the drawer beneath it. The little leather envelope remained, but Sarah closed the drawer, then toddled toward the sliding glass door, Lightfoot click-clacking behind her. Sarah placed her hands against the wide pane, staring out at the deck and scrub oak abutting the bluff—too small to see over the dunes and down to the beach. The dog stood beside her, staring out in the same direction, her tail wagging, not understanding why anyone would leave such a door closed.

A loud voice from Daniel’s study made Sarah turn away from the glass door and I took a moment to study my daughter’s face. She looked a little like Eli just then, with the little dog at her heels and the expression of surprise squinching her eyes at the corners. When I first knew Eli, he had reveled in the unexpected. He’d been so unafraid and so kindhearted.

Sarah’s hand traveled from the glass to rest on the top of Lightfoot’s tiny black head. My fingertips lingered on the frame. This house, without insulation, was meant for summer habitation, the walls and floorboards mere partitions. Sound carried so easily. I could hear Daniel talking on the phone in his study.

“It’s preposterous,” he said now. “We’re talking about one man, who can’t string a coherent sentence together. How can it be that he’s still at large?”

A moment later, Daniel called to me from his study. I walked down the hall. The door was open, and he sat at his desk. “Come in,” he said, gesturing at the chair opposite him as if I’d arrived for a business meeting. Sitting down, I noticed another framed picture of Sylvia, perched on the desk.

“I’m going into Boston,” Daniel said, “to meet with a private investigator. The police obviously aren’t accomplishing anything. This guy will look for Eli full-time. Then you can get on with your life.”

I nodded, wondering what that would entail. Returning to Amherst and finishing my dissertation? Applying for teaching jobs? Or staying here, with Daniel? I pictured an eternity within these walls, on this beach, traveling back and forth between the two houses, never venturing beyond appointed ground.

“I’m going to spend the night there,” Daniel said, “and take care of some business I’ve been neglecting. Mrs. Duffy can stay here at the house if you’re not comfortable being alone. Or Ladd can.”

Was it my imagination, or was this last offer a test, some faint challenge in the moment before he blinked? “No,” I said. “We’ll be fine.” And then, picturing the empty house, just me and Sarah, I amended. “Maybe, if Mrs. Duffy doesn’t mind staying, that would be better.”

It didn’t occur to me until after he’d driven away that I should have thanked him. In these last, long days I’d come to accept everything he did for me as a matter of course.

SARAH AND I WERE
downstairs watching
Blue’s Clues
when I heard a car pull into the driveway. Sarah sat on my lap, damp blonde curls tickling my chin, her hands resting on mine as she stared intently at the TV. The door banged open awkwardly, and in walked Ladd carrying a large cardboard box. He dropped it in the doorway between the foyer and the living room. The top flaps yawned open, revealing a mound of clothes, and instantly I recognized the collar of a white linen shirt. I put Sarah on the couch beside me, then got up and walked toward the box and knelt beside it, opened the flaps still wider.

“Daniel said you wanted his clothes,” Ladd said. “I figured I better go by there and get them before they start clearing the place out.”

I didn’t think to ask how he got in. The clothes, such basic day-to-day items only a few weeks ago, felt like remnants from a long lost time. They weren’t carefully folded or neatly stacked. Instead they lay in a tumble, as if they’d been grabbed from drawers and off of hangers, and thrown in carelessly. The way Charlie himself would have packed them.

Charlie! A scent that had been lost to me these many days rose from the box: of sandalwood and garlic and rosemary and sawdust. I plunged my arms into the box, cradling the garments, each sleeve and pant leg and button delivering a particular image, a particular day. There were the scrubs they’d given him at the hospital when Sarah was born. His Aran sweater, the one my mother sent him, itchy and damp with lanolin, his face across the table, ladling out Portuguese fish stew. For the first time, I realized that I didn’t have his wedding ring, which was also my father’s wedding ring.

Sarah slid off the couch and walked over to inspect the box herself. She pulled out an old Herring Run T-shirt worn to silken thinness, with a fine line of holes stretching from one shoulder blade to the other. She examined it for a moment, then pressed it to her cheek like a security blanket. I heard Ladd retreat, closing the door behind him. I kept my face buried in the clothing and didn’t picture Ladd walking across the lawn, to the path between the scrub oaks, back to his cottage.

I pictured Charlie. I pictured Charlie. I pictured Charlie.

Once in the fall when I was hugely pregnant with Sarah, Charlie and I walked along the beach from his father’s house to the bluff right below Daniel’s house. He wore these jeans and that flannel shirt. We found a fox, dead on the rocks, its fur a brilliant and burnished orange, its bared teeth gleaming white and perfect. He wanted to pick it up, float it back out to sea, but I didn’t want him to touch it. “Anyway,” I said, “it will just end up back here, won’t it?” Later we called the Audubon Society, and they said it had probably drowned trying to navigate the rocks at high tide. It had already floated out to sea and then returned. In the morning, Charlie walked back out and dragged it up, beyond the rocks, in the dunes where the tide would not be able to reclaim it. I wondered if its bones lay there still, bleached by the sun, the teeth still gleaming, sharp and curved as if they were carved out of marble.

Sometimes I’d thought of our marriage as happy, and sometimes I’d thought of it as troubled. I’d imagined it continuing and ending in both veins, I had felt exalted and I had felt trapped. And in the midst of those pivotal moments—dramatic or tumultuous or romantic—there had been simple everyday pieces of life, lived out beside one another. These were the pieces I couldn’t imagine living without. I couldn’t give them up when I found out about Deirdre. I didn’t see how I could give them up now.

Neither, it seemed, could Sarah. She hung on to his T-shirt all day, mostly pressing it to her cheek, but sometimes just slinging it over her shoulder, much the way Charlie used to cook with a dish towel over his.

AFTER MRS. DUFFY MADE
dinner and then went to sleep in the room down the hall, I lay awake for hours, watching the overhead fan rearrange the darkness into regular, swirling patterns. Earlier, I had remembered old photographs of the Lindbergh kidnapping, the ladder leaned against the side of the house, and closed the window. But enough air had entered during the past few days that it still smelled salty and fresh. In the moving shadows, Sarah’s face looked perfectly at rest, a faint smile turning her lips upward, her little fist closed around the collar of Charlie’s shirt. She looked very much like the ultrasound photo I still had, somewhere, perhaps tucked into one of the Emily Dickinson books or perhaps back at the Moss house. A fierce imperative rose in my chest, the same instinct that led me to close the window, as if I needed to protect her not only from imminent danger but my own compulsive reordering of the past.