The Last September: A Novel (26 page)

“Eli,” I said, longing to break through so that he could tell his story when someone else arrived, and be believed. Instead Eli put his hands over his ears again and roared, loud as an injured lion. A sound from the Serengeti, here in the placid American night. Was there anyone in the neighboring houses to hear? If they did, would they stand and go to their windows to investigate? And then would the innocuous sea air, the comforting sound of the ocean, allay their fears and send them back to bed? As if the sound existed only in their dreams.

Down here on the beach with Eli, there was no immunity to the sorrow that roar contained, for his murdered brother, or his ruined psyche, or both. Eli stood quiet a moment, staring out at the waves, as if he had silenced the voices for at least a moment. I walked toward him and stopped just short of the surf. And then another sound, a voice or echo. Along with the sound of sirens.

“Brett,” someone called, from up above. I took another step backward, toward Eli. I didn’t want anyone to find us, not out here. I needed to be able to intervene, and explain. My hand reached backward, hanging there unanswered for a moment before Eli’s fingers closed around mine.

Once, across many years and miles, Eli told me that if you lay very still in the grass, on a day when the sun shone bright, you could feel the earth spin on its axis. We had walked together to the stretch of lawn behind the library, by Boulder Creek, and lain down under the heat of the day. I remember the sound of water, and every molecule of my back reaching toward the ground, trying to capture the sense of motion. The way it always works when you’re not trying you succeed; as Eli and I stood together on the beach in Saturday Cove, I could feel it, the tilt of the world, so sudden that for a moment I thought I might fall off, plunging out into the universe like a thirteenth-century sailor.

Instead my feet clung fast to the ground. I could see Ladd, standing at the top of the steps, at first his silhouette as the light gathered and then further lit by swirling red-and-yellow lights.

“Ladd,” I called out. “Don’t let them come down. Okay?”

Car doors slamming, I couldn’t count how many. I stepped backward, into Eli. It would look like he was holding me hostage, but at least then they wouldn’t shoot, with my body in front of his. Standing there, I imagined a drama, guns drawn and people running, shouting, bullets and explosions. What happened itself was only Ladd, walking down the steps toward Eli and me, until a police officer called out to him. Ladd stopped, obediently, as officers sidled past, each with a gun in its holster, but none of them drawing. There was no need. Eli just stood there, behind me.

The police officers walked up to us. “Are you Eli Moss?” one of them asked.

When Eli didn’t answer, I nodded, then cleared my throat. “Yes,” I said. “Yes he is.”

Two of them stayed in front of me. Two of them moved behind me. I could feel Eli’s hand wrested from my own, and when I turned, his hands were behind his back, cuffed, as the police—with impressive gentleness—pushed him forward, marching him back toward the house. Eli went without struggling, accustomed to being handcuffed and led away to the hospitals that to him felt just like prison.

I followed. Ladd met me at the bottom of the stairs. He put his hands on my shoulders and stared into my face urgently, examining me, making sure I was all right, and for the first time in weeks I looked back at him. And then we walked up to the grass as the officers helped Eli into the police car, guarding his head with the same care you’d show toward an invalid, as if they already understood—as I prepared to spend the day telling them—that he’d not been caught, but found.

I had crafted a murder mystery where there seemed to be none. The information I’d discovered was not something to be delivered to the police, breaking the case wide open. My role was widow. Not investigator. So I wasn’t aware that the police already knew Eli hadn’t killed Charlie. His fingerprints were all over the scene, along with mine, and a strand or two of our hair. But the blood they found mingled with Charlie’s belonged to a woman, a different blood type than mine. On Charlie’s voice mail and in his deleted email, hundreds of messages from Deirdre, unanswered, anguished, angry. I imagined the emails I might have written him, years ago, if he’d had an account. Or if he’d chosen Deirdre instead of Sarah and me. Maybe they would have been incriminating, too.

Eli was no kind of witness. But he didn’t need to be. What Daniel had said about Eli’s being the only suspect had been true at first. But then this other evidence began appearing. So instead of watching the Moss house, the police had been traveling to Amherst to interrogate Deirdre. To impound her car, and search for traces of Charlie’s blood, which they found, in addition to the leather string Charlie had worn around his neck.

Meanwhile, Eli had been able to leave the Huber’s kayak at Crosby Landing and walk back along the shore to his father’s house. An innocent madman was not a priority. Why would they look for him at all once the real perpetrator was found? Eli was left to fend for himself, as he’d always been. It was only a coincidence that he turned up to find me the day before they arrested Deirdre.

I didn’t know where in Amherst she lived. Maybe they arrested her there, or walked into the new restaurant where she worked, if she still worked in a restaurant at all. Maybe at some gallery, or a studio where she was working on a portrait of Margaret Garner. Maybe she was studying seriously now, painting more conventional subjects with a better practiced hand. The police would have walked into class, students looking up, a part of Deirdre relieved at being caught, because what must it have felt like knowing that Charlie was gone forever? Whatever happened to her now would work itself out over the coming months or years. Charlie and I had trained ourselves so assiduously not to talk about her. Now all I wanted to do was sit down with him and ask him if he ever realized she might be dangerous. In my mind, she had been so sad, anemic.

Charlie
, I wanted to ask. Sometimes I wanted to ask him gently. Sometimes I wanted to shake him in accusatory rage.
Weren’t you worried about what she might do?

And then I remembered without him answering. Charlie never worried about anything.

LADD, LIGHTFOOT, AND I
returned to Daniel’s house in bright afternoon, a faint chill in the air, along with the thin scent of crab apples. All I wanted to do was collapse on the couch—the nearest spot—but Sarah barreled through the living room with Mrs. Duffy close behind her, throwing her arms around my bone-weary legs. I picked her up and lay down with her sitting on top of me. I waited for Ladd to leave us, but he didn’t.

Outside a car drove up, slowly, and I knew it would be Daniel. I felt myself fill with the longing to see him, his confident stride interrupting the intimacy with Ladd, ready to do what needed to be done, entering the house with an expectation of completing necessary tasks, which in this case meant pouring glasses of whiskey without ice and distributing them. I sat up, one arm tightly wrapped around Sarah, who smelled wonderfully rich and clean, of baby things like diapers and soap, but also the scent that all infants and toddlers carry, a cousin of sweat but so much sweeter. A low-note fragrance, rife with the business of growing. Daniel had left the front door leaning open, allowing a cross breeze to move through the room. I took a deep drink, it tasted dark and medicinal, sending a little shudder through my body, along with a wave of anger at Charlie—that he had never told me about Deirdre’s persistence, that he had brought her into our lives in the first place, that he was brilliant at talking everybody down from ledges except for the women who loved him.

I took another sip, and this time, along with the shudder, came tears. Sarah started a little, and then began crying, too. But instead of silencing me, her tears made me cry harder. Ladd stood up and took her from my arms. I let go easily, watching through a haze as he carried her—peering back at me over his shoulder, her face scrunched and sobbing—into the kitchen. I barely noticed Daniel as he got to his feet and then knelt in front of me.

“And now,” Daniel said, placing his hands on my knees, and looking into my face. “There will be a time of crying. Lots of crying.”

I nodded and then pitched forward, sobbing as I’d needed to sob for these past weeks, in somebody’s arms.

DANIEL WAS RIGHT.
TH
ERE
would be a time of crying, a long time, no doubt more complicated than his had been, all those years ago. When Sylvia died, he didn’t have to take care of a small child or think about the fate of her killer. He didn’t have to blame her, or himself, or worry about Eli, who stayed in the hospital for two months and then went to live in the Cape house, which Bob Moss took off the market. As the years unfolded, there would be more unravelings, more descents, and they would all belong to me. But for now a social worker and nurse came by, once every three weeks, to give him an injection instead of trusting him to take the meds on his own. So that on the one-year anniversary of Charlie’s death, I drove from Amherst to the Cape, and Eli and I walked to the end of the jetty, where we smashed colored bottles as tribute, so that in another year or less they would wash up on shore as the sea glass Charlie loved to collect. Then we took some glass already smoothed over by years and the tide and left it on Charlie’s gravestone in the Blue Creek cemetery while Sarah rearranged nearby flowers from a recent funeral.

BUT SO MANY MONTHS
before then, the morning of the night without sleep—the day Deirdre was arrested and Eli reappeared, after Mrs. Duffy fed us all—I took Sarah down to the beach, my eyes dry at least for this outing. It comforted me the way Sarah took the wide world in stride, and I picked her up and swung her to my hip. She didn’t protest but let me carry her, one damp little fist closing around the strap of my bathing suit. The tide was high and gentle, turning the bay into the world’s biggest swimming pool. The water felt cold, not summer anymore, but I persevered. Sarah screeched a little as it hit her feet, tightening her grip around me, but I pulled her away, my hands underneath her shoulders. I held her at arm’s length and ticktocked her above the water, letting her feet skim through the surface. She laughed, and I pulled her back to me and continued walking. We had passed the low tide point and my feet sunk into silty ocean sand. I knelt down so that the water surrounded both our bodies, Sarah shivering but knowing it must be safe because she trusted her mother. With my hands pressed against her sides, she paddled and splashed and laughed under a bright afternoon sky. Part dolphin, like her father. We swam for as long as the cold allowed, then trudged back up to shore. I dressed her in a terry-cloth cover up and pulled on one of Charlie’s sweatshirts, and we played in the sand and tide pools for a long time. The blood pumping through my veins felt new, thicker, allowing me to persist clear-headed despite the lack of sleep and everything that had changed since yesterday, and since the first days of September.

TH
AT NIGHT AS I
finally slept, my body contained the rhythm of the ocean, waves rising and falling beneath me. And I dreamt I was at a carnival. The light was insanely bright, nearly blinding, and the rides and people were festooned in festive hues of blue, red and yellow. Best of all, Charlie was beside me. Happiness doesn’t begin to describe the emotion I felt when I saw him. Because he was
there
. He was so vivid, so exactly as he had been all those years I lived with him. Exactly as intoxicating as the first time I’d seen or kissed him. And he was so happy to see me, in his old Charlie way, picking me up off the ground as he hugged me. I could feel the teeth of his smile against my bare shoulder. Charlie was alive, and he loved me, and I loved him so much that for once I couldn’t be bothered, measuring amounts against each other. He was here. My husband was back.

Charlie lifted his face from my shoulder and looked at me a while. There was still the air of a smile about him, but his expression had become serious. He looked intent, as if he wanted to make sure he committed everything about me to memory. So I looked back at him, realizing this might be my last chance. I took in the fair stubble across his chin, and the round blue eyes, and the unruly blond curls. More than that, I took in the Charliness of him, the aspect that transcended his features, and I realized with a rush of comfort that I didn’t have to memorize him. That was already done, everything about him having long ago taken up residence in the system of tunnels between my brain and heart.

Charlie kissed me. The carnival noise swelled all around us. I smelled the ocean, and cotton candy. Girls screamed from a roller coaster. Bad music blasted from speakers, the first chords of “Smoke on the Water.” While Charlie and I kissed and kissed. It went on forever, his lips on mine, the sense of beyond-joy rising rather than abating, until finally the crowd began jostling us apart.

I held on as long as I could. Charlie did, too. But before long we’d been separated so that only our fingers touched. I watched his face ride away on the sea of people, wanting to call out to him, and knowing I should feel sad, but still relishing this, the last moment I would ever see him.

“Charlie,” I finally called out.

He didn’t have a chance to call back to me. By now, I stood beside a low wall that bordered a river. Charlie stood a good hundred feet away. People of varying heights stepped in front of him, all around him. He kept moving backward. I got one last glimpse—clear as the last time he’d really stood in front of me. But this time I knew to appreciate the moment, to keep it and cling to it, for as long as I could.

And then the crowd closed in, and Charlie was gone.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Peter Steinberg, who has worked so hard for me and has been such a trusted advocate from the very beginning.

Kathy Pories has been so smart and patient with this book. More than an editor, she’s been a friend and collaborator, and I could not be more grateful, or feel more blessed.

Thank you, Chuck Adams, for helping me reshape my ideas about this story. Thanks to everyone at Algonquin, including Elisabeth Scharlatt, Brunson Hoole, Brooke Csuka, and Jude Grant.

Danae Woodward, as usual, read first and offered endless encouragement. Thanks to second readers, Abby Jones and Tara Thompson.

Thank you everyone in the Creative Writing Department at UNCW.

And thanks to David and Hadley, for everything, always.