The Last September: A Novel (7 page)

The girl brought her hand to her eyes, as if to shade them. “We did,” she said. I crawled backward, over the roof, and climbed back through the window, heading dutifully if numbly to the place where he landed.

BY THE TIME I
got to the parking lot, the whole street was engulfed in ambulance lights. Everyone knew that I was the girl who’d been up on the roof. I must have looked that traumatized, disheveled. Somebody, maybe the Delta who’d been standing below when Eli jumped, put a blanket around my shoulders.

I watched Eli rumble by on a stretcher, apparently conscious, his eyes opened and unfocused, staring blankly up at the sky. Without turning his head, he reached his hand out toward me. I grabbed it, relieved that his palm felt warm. The stretcher halted for a moment.

“Do you want to ride with him?” the EMT asked.

Remembering what he’d been like on the roof, I shook my head and let go of Eli’s hand. It fell to his side with a sad flop and I immediately regretted saying no. By this time, the university police had arrived, too. The officers approached me as Eli’s stretcher was loaded. I watched the ambulance pull away, already regretful. I should have gone with him. I should have been right there next to him, holding on to his hand.

“We saw the whole thing,” said the valiant frat boy before they could ask a single question. “He was standing alone at the edge of the building and then he just jumped.”

It hadn’t occurred to me until I heard this defense that someone might think I’d pushed him. One officer scribbled on a notepad while the other looked hard at me.

“Was he drunk?” he said. “Acting strange?”

I nodded. The officer’s pencil halted, expectantly, so I cleared my throat and said, “Yes, he was acting strange. Yes, he was drunk.” That last word gave me a second of hope. Maybe that was all it was.

The officer lifted his eyes and squinted at me in the dimly lit parking lot, then reached out as if to push the hair off my face. I stepped back.

“Did he hit you?” the officer asked.

“No,” I said, shaking the hair back in front of my face. “No, I’m fine.”

His features sharpened as he paused, deciding whether to press the issue. Then he said, “Do you know how we can get in touch with his family?”

My opportunistic heart jumped, just for a moment, hovering like a raptor in the air. Then it landed splat on the pavement, worried and confused.

ON THE CAR RIDE
over to Eli’s house, the officers were sensitive and solicitous. Why wouldn’t they be? Here I was, innocent, fragile, and quivering—the embodiment of everything they were assigned to protect. The redheaded officer sat in the back, giving me the front seat so I wouldn’t feel like a criminal. When we arrived, Eli’s house stood dark—his roommates were either asleep or back at Pub Club—but the front door was unlocked. I led the officers up to his room, expecting to find chaos. But when I pushed his door open, the spare order took me by surprise: the bed perfectly made, the floor swept, the walls empty. It looked almost like a military barracks. The one thing not tucked away in a drawer was Eli’s address book, the thin faux-leather kind that banks give away for free. As I picked it up, I caught my reflection in Eli’s mirrored bureau: a dark-haired girl who looked dazed and much younger than nineteen, with a troubling red mark across her forehead.

“Moss,” I said, handing Eli’s address book to the redheaded officer. “His parents are named Moss.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to call?” the officer said. “It might be better if a friend tells them.”

We walked downstairs to the kitchen phone. I dialed 1 and then the number written in neat, slanted handwriting next to the words
Mom and Dad
. I listened to it ring once, twice, three times, not sure if I would prefer a live human being or the answering machine.

“Hello,” said a male voice, too young to be Eli’s dad.

“Mr. Moss?” I said.

I heard an amused pause and could imagine Charlie’s face, wry and smiling. “Sort of,” he said. “Though probably not the one you’re looking for. Can I take a message for him?”

“It’s about Eli.” I tried to pitch my voice lower, so Charlie wouldn’t recognize it. Then I remembered all those weeks and months of silence. Why would he remember my voice after forgetting me so immediately, so resolutely? Something inside me hardened. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but Eli had an accident. He jumped off the roof of a fraternity house. He’ll be okay, but somebody needs to come out here. Right away.” The silence on the other end had stopped smiling. “I’m sorry,” I said again.

Charlie spoke with a faint pause after each word: “Why would he jump off a roof?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He was acting strange. He was acting wrong. I think there’s something wrong.”

“Brett?”

Charlie’s voice suddenly steadied, as if his future self—the one who knew and loved me—had managed to reach backward in time to recognize my voice. “Is this Brett?”

My hand went numb. Maybe Charlie wanted to think this phone call was just a cruel joke, a sick way to get back at him for not loving me. Or maybe he thought I had pushed Eli off the roof. In that moment I felt almost as if I had.

“No,” I said, scrambling for another name. I didn’t want this to be about me and Charlie. Eli needed his family. I had to step back, invisible. In my dorm room, on the bedside table, lay Walter Jackson Bate’s fat biography of John Keats, dog-eared and underlined. “This is Fanny,” I said. “Fanny Brawne.”

Charlie didn’t say anything. What twentieth-century person is named Fanny? I wondered if he recognized this name from a class where he’d sat listening, not having read the text, or if he just computed the oddness. More likely he hadn’t even heard me. I pictured Charlie holding the receiver and realized that I couldn’t remember his face, not exactly, only its outline, and the color of his eyes: a dim reflection of Eli.

I gave him the name of the hospital where Eli had been taken, repeating the number that one of the officers recited. Then I said good-bye and hung up. The officers stood staring at me. One of them reached out to pat my shoulder, but to me the gesture didn’t feel comforting. This was the first time I would experience it, the particular sense of trauma, Eli’s madness still thrumming just below my skin.

But if Eli’s family was now marshaling to come for him, this could be my only chance to see him again without running into Charlie. “Hey,” I asked the officers. “Can you give me a ride to the hospital? So I can see how he’s doing?”

“Sure,” they said. “But they probably won’t let you see him. Only family, I’d guess, at this point.”

Which let me off the hook, an immediate combination of relief and disappointment. I remembered both ways Eli’s hand had felt—slapping across my forehead and sliding out of my grip.

Over the next days and weeks and months, when Eli left Colorado and never returned, I tried to write a poem about that moment when he leapt off the roof and out of my life. Although it never materialized properly, it started to form in my head before we even left his house, the first lines interrupted by a creaky and mournful meow. Peering from behind a beat up armchair was the scraggly gray kitten, now a cat, brushed and plump under Eli’s care. The officers gave me a moment to search for a cat carrier and supplies. I left the house with Tab and kept her with me for over a decade, till she died under the wheels of a car, just up the road from the Mosses’ summer home.

For a while I tried to email Eli, to update him on Tab and find out if he was ever coming back to school. But he never answered. After a month or so went by, I helped his roommates pack up his things to ship back to his parents’ winter house in New York.

“He’s in some swanky hospital outside Boston,” one of the roommates told me. “It’s called McLean.”

I knew about McLean from studying poets and listening to James Taylor. In my mind, it was like a boarding school with rolling green lawns and maybe even a swimming pool and tennis courts. I imagined Eli lying on a grassy hillside under a broad, blue sky, writing poetry in a spiral notebook. That image comforted me, even as the years unfolded without ever hearing from him. Eli went away. He had treatment. He was cured. Maybe when he got out he enrolled in a different college, went on to med school, got married. I pictured an understanding wife who he could be solicitous of the way he’d been with Wendy. My imagination restored him, created the life he should have had.

Which left my own life to unfold. I finished my BA and then waited tables in Randall for a couple years before entering the PhD program at Amherst. Where I met Ladd, who asked me to marry him and then—unwittingly—returned me to the Mosses.

IT HAPPENED LIKE THIS.
Seven years after I saw Eli loaded into that ambulance, Ladd and I rode the Hy-Line ferry from Nantucket to Cape Cod. I hadn’t been wearing his engagement ring a full twenty-four hours, and it felt new and heavy and noticeable on my finger. Ladd and I sprawled out on the life vest container at the stern. I wore a bikini top and shorts—at twenty-six, still too young to take skin cancer or premature aging seriously. Through the haze of early July—sunlight and milling passengers—I thought I heard someone call my name. Not sure if I made out the words correctly, I decided I didn’t want to run into anyone, so I kept my eyes shut tight. Those days I felt happiest wrapped in a cocoon with just Ladd. Other people had become, by definition, intruders.

“Brett Mercier,” the voice said again, insistent and determined.

Whoever it was, he lacked the social finesse to know he was being avoided. I peered to one side. Ladd lay asleep next to me. He and I both had dark hair, but in this bright sunlight, on the water, his skin revealed its northern European roots as opposed to my southern by getting redder by the minute. Ladd had thick eyebrows and narrow eyes, making his face look stern, almost craggy. Unlike Charlie’s, it wasn’t a face that everyone in the world would consider handsome. But I did. I knew I should wake him and tell him to put on sunscreen, a hat, something. I sat up, squinting into the sun, my hand coming down to rest on Ladd’s bare leg.

It took several seconds to recognize Eli. In my mind, he had separated into two different people: the great friend who’d always had my back and the scary stranger who’d appeared one night, and then disappeared, taking the original one with him. Now there seemed to be a third one, barely recognizable across these distant years and miles. Not that I wasn’t happy to see him; I just felt like it
wasn’t
him, not exactly. Eli stood in front of me, blinking under blinding sun on a quiet Atlantic ocean. The most striking similarity to his old self—that last self, anyway—was his hair, cut very short.

He looked dejected that I wasn’t more excited about this chance meeting. Involuntarily, I touched my forehead with the tips of my fingers. Eli was the only person in the world who’d ever hit me. For the first time in ages I found myself wondering again, if it had been an accident.

“Eli,” I finally said, to his goofy and increasingly awkward grin.

All his angles had gone soft. A potbelly balanced on top of long, skinny legs. Despite the heat, he wore khakis and a striped oxford shirt, sweat stains visible under his arms. Somehow I knew without asking that he had not gone to med school.

I reached out my hand and Eli took it, then turned my palm over and brought it to his lips. The gesture seemed so natural and sweet that I found myself smiling. Ladd’s eyelids fluttered open and he propped himself up on his elbows, squinting into the sun.

“Hey,” Eli said. “Ladd Williams?”

“Yeah,” Ladd said as Eli’s identity registered. “Hey, Eli.”

It had never occurred to me to ask if Ladd knew the Moss family. How many thousands of people spent summers on Cape Cod? I’d imagined visiting Eli at his summer house, but if I ever knew the name of the town I’d long since forgotten it. Eli pointed at Ladd. The pudgy finger seemed nothing at all to do with the lithe, charismatic boy I remembered.

“You know Brett?” Eli said to him. And then, picking up on the unmistakable currents between us: “Are you, like,
with
Brett?”

“Yeah,” Ladd said. “How do you know Brett?”

He had directed the question at Eli but clearly meant for me to answer. So I said, “We went to college together.”

“We were best friends in college,” Eli said.

For me, college had lasted four years. But Eli’s time had been cut short. If things had happened differently, we would have stayed best friends. I wanted to tell him that I still had his cat—that at this very moment she was probably sitting on my pillow at home in a patch of sunlight. If he’d seemed more like the old Eli, I would have. But it was a little like running into the identical twin of someone you know very well. He was enough Eli that I thought he might want Tab back, and at the same time he wasn’t enough Eli that I would trust him with her.

“Damn,” he said. “Another girlfriend in common with Charlie. He is going to laugh.”

Ladd turned his head toward me sharply. “You went out with Charlie Moss?”

“Not exactly,” I said, trying to remember if the incident with Charlie ever came up in Ladd’s and my debriefing of past romances. Generally he did not respond well to discussions of other men, so I tended to give him Cliffs Notes only. I put my hand over his.

Eli said to Ladd, “I saw your uncle Daniel last week. He said you went back to school.”

“Yeah,” Ladd said. “Finally.” Ladd had scandalized his family by dropping out of Cornell after some girl broke his heart. He spent six years on a fishing boat in Alaska before he went back to finish at UMass. “That’s where I met Brett. She was the TA for one of my classes.”

I could feel Ladd’s jumpy insecurity pulsing through his fingers and into my palm and knew he wouldn’t go back to normal until we could be alone, and I could fill him in about Charlie. But Eli wasn’t going to let that happen anytime soon. He sat down next to me. I pulled on my T-shirt and asked what he was up to these days.

“Spending the summer with Mom and Dad,” he said. “You’re back in school, huh? Advanced degree? PhD or something?”

“Yes,” I said, with a pang of survivor’s guilt that my brain hadn’t robbed me of that opportunity.

“That’s great,” Eli said. “Really great.” He turned his gaze out toward the bow of the boat, the blue waves, the mainland in the distance. Ladd finally put on a baseball cap, and the three of us rode together all the way to Hyannis.

•••

AS THE FERRY PULLED
into port, I excused myself and went into the bathroom. I splashed my face with tinny water and stared hard into the warped, filmy mirror. When I came out, the boat had nearly emptied. All the passengers spilled into the parking lot, collecting luggage. Back on land, the day seemed overly infused with color—the blues of the water and sky, the white of the boats, the green lawn, and the reds and yellows and pinks of cheerful summer clothing. By the time I walked down the metal plank, Ladd stood waiting for me with our luggage—his good leather valise and my faded canvas duffel bag.

“Where’d Eli go?” I asked, when I got down to the parking lot.

Ladd gestured sideways with his chin. “Disappeared into the crowd.”

“Oh,” I said. “I wanted to say good-bye.”

“Small world, huh?” A slight edge to Ladd’s voice, as if it might be my fault, the size of the world.

I shrugged, and not just because I didn’t want to take responsibility. In my experience, the world was infinite. Only this very particular world, of summer homes and private schools, could accurately be considered small.

“I never knew Eli very well,” Ladd said. His voice had gone back to normal. Ladd rarely stayed angry long. Typically a flash would rise, visible, and he would squelch it himself before it could fully erupt. I always found the process—the effort to protect me from his negative emotions—touching. Several months before, Ladd and I had gone to an exhibit of Marsden Hartley’s paintings, mostly landscapes of Maine. But for a long time Ladd had stood in front of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The title of the painting was
Th
e Great Good Man
, and I knew Ladd well enough to understand: that was what he aspired to be. A Great Good Man.

Now as I slipped my arm through his, he said, adding to his previous thought, “But Charlie and I were friends when we were kids.”

“Are you still friends?”

“We still run into each other here and there. But no, I wouldn’t say we were friends.”

“Why not?”

Ladd didn’t answer, just moved his arm out of mine and placed his hand at the small of my back, drawing me into his body. I felt his chin against my forehead as I stared out into the crowd and saw Eli getting into the passenger’s seat of a wood-paneled station wagon. The driver was a lean, middle-aged woman with pale curls like Charlie’s.

Ladd and I walked over to the Raw Bar for chowder, and when we sat down he said, “Why don’t you tell me about you and Charlie?” He kept his eyes on the menu, his body falsely still.

“There’s not much to tell,” I said.

“Eli said you went out with him.”

“I didn’t. Stayed in with him. Just once. One time.”

“Really?” Finally he returned his eyes to me. “I have a hard time imagining that, you having a one-night stand.” He didn’t say this in a judgmental way. He wasn’t thrown by my loose morals, it just didn’t jibe with his perceptions of my emotional capacity, and of course he was right.

“Well,” I said, “I was only eighteen. And I didn’t exactly mean for it to be just that one night.”

Ladd nodded, jutting his chin toward me and then abruptly away. “Typical Moss,” he said. His voice was angry, but I felt my shoulders relax, knowing the anger was toward Charlie, not me. I wanted to ask him about the other girlfriends he and Charlie had in common but decided to save it for later.

“What about you?” I said. “You spent summers with them here? In the same town.”

“Yeah. My family has been friends with the Mosses for a long time. You know about my uncle Daniel’s wife, Sylvia?”

“The one who died?”

“She was Charlie and Eli’s au pair, in the summers. That’s how Daniel met her. Did you know Eli went to McLean?”

I nodded.

“Daniel paid for that,” Ladd said. “Because of Sylvia. She really loved Eli.”

I nodded again, as if this were something any ordinary person could do, though I couldn’t even imagine what that must have cost. The wealth of Ladd’s family alternately perplexed and embarrassed me.

“So,” I said. “Do you know what was wrong with him? When he went away?”

“Schizophrenic, I think.”

“But he’s better now.” As if my words could make it so. “The Mosses, they couldn’t afford it? The hospital?”

“Who knows,” Ladd said. “Eli’s father has always had strange ideas about what to spend his money on.”

I felt a little flare of defensiveness. Ladd had no idea what it was, not to afford something. But I stayed quiet.

Ladd’s face settled back into its regular ease, and he raised his hand to signal for the check. I could almost see the mental gesture, a broom in his mind, pushing the Mosses aside.

WE DROVE WITH THE
top down in Ladd’s convertible Saab, through the dingy streets of Hyannis, on our way to tell his family about our engagement. The seafood restaurants with lobster traps on the roofs gave way to the grassy, shore-scented highway of Route 6, and then off the highway, passing the increasingly wide lawns, houses farther and farther back from the road until each driveway became its own dusty dirt road. Ladd drove past the one that led to his uncle’s compound, and I found myself turning around in my seat, staring, feeling newly connected to the place.

“Maybe one of these days we can stay with him,” I said. “Your uncle Daniel.”

Ladd looked over at me. The skin across the bridge of his nose looked singed from the boat ride. He placed his hand, palm up, on my lap. I gathered it up in both of mine, regretting my T-shirt and cutoffs.

“Hey listen,” I said. “Can we actually turn around and sneak into one of those guest cottages? I wouldn’t mind changing before we get to your parents.”

Ladd checked his watch—the clock on his dashboard didn’t work—then turned the car around, and we drove back to Daniel’s. There were no cars at the main house other than the blue Chevy pickup that lived there permanently. Preparations for the annual Fourth of July party Daniel would be throwing that Saturday had begun—the round tables and folding chairs had been delivered and were stacked against the detached garage. We parked behind the Chevy and carried our bags down the path to the smallest guest cottage.

We passed an hour or more inside before finally attending to our original mission—showering and changing—so that by the time we walked back down the path the sun had sunk low but was still stubbornly bright in the sky. Refreshed, the two of us were combed and dressed and festive; my engagement ring sat snug in the pocket of Ladd’s Nantucket Reds so as not to give anything away before we could tell his parents. As we headed across the lawn to the car, Ladd’s uncle Daniel called to us from the deck.

The Williams family owned several houses in Saturday Cove, and although Daniel was years younger than his brother he had inherited the best one. It sat on a hill overlooking a beachside bluff. The summer before, when Ladd and I spent a week at his parents’ house, nearly every day found us at his uncle’s, which had its own long stretch of private beach. Now Ladd and Daniel shook hands, and Daniel bent to kiss me on the cheek.

“I left my phone in the car,” Ladd said after greetings had been made and drinks offered. “I just need to go inside and let my parents know where we are.”