Ladd didn’t say anything. I studied his face, which tended to flush pink around his cheeks and jawline, especially when he’d been drinking. Part of me wanted to reach out and touch him, reassure him. But I worried that might unlock whatever anger he was trying so hard to hold in. When he finally spoke, it was in that same tone, trying to sound calm but with an edge that threatened to break at any moment.
“Girls always loved Charlie,” he said. Which I didn’t want to hear, any more than I had years before, when Eli had tried to tell me.
Ladd went on, not looking at me. “Remember what Eli said? ‘Another girlfriend in common with Charlie.’ Like there had been a hundred. Really it was just one girl in particular. Her name was Robin. I met her my freshman year at Cornell and she came back here with me for the summer. Then she met Charlie. Need to hear more?”
If I said no, it might sound like Of course she left you for him. I brought my fingers to his cheek, very lightly. He kept his eyes on the artificial blue of the pool water, tensing as if he didn’t want me to touch him. I lowered my hand to pet the dog instead.
“But before that,” he said. “Summers when we were kids. Once we were thirteen or so. Any girl . . . the girls we met. On the beach. Yacht Club dances, that sort of thing. They mostly liked Charlie. They all liked Charlie. You asked why we stopped being friends. I guess that’s mostly why. Robin was the final nail in the coffin. I had to see him, sometimes, because of our families. Obviously I still do. But I never really want to. You know?”
“What happened,” I said, “with Charlie and Robin?”
“He broke her heart. She came running to me. I dropped out of school and went to Alaska instead of taking her back.”
“Oh,” I said. “That girl.”
“Yeah. That girl.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I love you.”
“Do you.”
“Yes. I really do.”
“You know what Robin said when she broke up with me? She said I was too intense. Charlie was playful, she said. He was fun.”
Charlie is unattainable, I thought. Ethereal, beautiful, charming. Nothing I could say about Charlie would be in any way comforting, except the one word Eli had used, way back when.
“He’s a womanizer,” I said.
Finally Ladd turned to look at me. “Yeah,” he said. “A fun and playful womanizer. You know what I think he would do? If he saw his fiancée walking down to the beach holding some other guy’s hand?”
I waited for a moment, raising the wineglass to my lips. Before I could take a sip, Ladd put his hand at the small of my back and pushed me into the pool. The shove was a little too abrupt, too hard, to own the word playful. My glass went flying, erupting in a pale arc of Pinot Grigio until it landed, still a quarter full, to bob beneath the diving board. I treaded water in my red Calvin Klein dress, which had originally cost $400, but which I had bought on sale for $149—the most I’d ever spent on a single garment. I hadn’t yet looked at the care label, but I had a good idea it said Dry Clean Only. The dog jumped in after me, paddling in noisy circles.
Ladd jumped in, too, without even taking off his jacket. He grabbed me by the waist. The water was too deep for me to stand in but not for Ladd; I wrapped my legs around him and he held me, kissing me too hard at first—kissing me angrily. Knowing I had caused this, I let him reclaim me. I didn’t push him away. Until the kissing softened, and eventually we ended up in the shallow end, our wrecked clothes floating on top of the water along with the wineglass.
THE NEXT DAY LADD didn’t say a word about Charlie. We drove north, to my mother’s. She had a different way of operating than Ladd’s family—not given over to loving people so quickly. At the news of our engagement, she smiled at me over the rim of her teacup, and I could see a kind of release in her face. Now I would be taken care of. All these years taking care of me, counseling me, worrying about me. And now her work was done, I would be happy. After dinner, outside in the overgrown garden, I told her about the prenuptial agreement.
“Well,” she said, the old anxiety returning to her face. “You’re going to sign it, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, why not. Right?”
Palpably her mood shifted back to happiness, all those years of single motherhood floating off into the summer air, which—after dark in Vermont—felt light and cool. She never understood how loyal I was, to her way of life, her poems and her gardens and just enough money to get by. In my mind I saw the house where we’d lived together sold, her things packed up, the garden weeded and mowed or even paved over for a patio. Life marching forward, the way it can, when people or responsibilities are shed.
NEARLY TWO MONTHS LATER, the day after I went ahead and signed the prenup, Eli showed up at school, out of nowhere, uninvited. Ladd and I had come home from Boston late the night before, after dinner at Sonsie on Newbury Street, and my brain had that particular cider-pressed feeling from too much wine and too little sleep. The law office had looked exactly as I’d pictured it, shining oak and Oriental rugs. Hundred-year-old portraits so thick with oil I thought that if I pressed my finger against one it would still feel wet. At some point, my mother had suggested I have a lawyer of my own look at the prenup, which seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t know any lawyers, didn’t know how to get one. I didn’t know how much it would cost but felt sure it would be more than I could afford. It occurred to me to ask Ladd’s uncle Daniel, but even that seemed too complicated, so much more difficult than just going to the appointment and signing with the Cross pen that was handed to me and then carefully reclaimed.
Of course as things turned out it didn’t matter at all, that signature. What retained significance was Eli. I remember walking out of Bartlett Hall into shocking sunlight. Looking back, it surprises me that I recognized him through the glare, but I did, immediately. He sat on the steps, watching the door as students and professors and TAs streamed out, everyone blinking similarly into the brightness. Although he faced away from the light, and had been watching expectantly for me, I saw him first.
The Eli who waited for me looked much more like the boy I’d known in college than the one I’d seen on the ferry. His hair had grown out, and he’d lost a considerable amount of weight. His skin had lost that pasty pallor. Whereas before he’d looked puffy, lethargic, I could see even from this distance that he’d regained a certain amount of energy. Although I had no idea why he’d be there, the sight of him looking like his old self lifted my spirits. Then I paused for a moment on the steps, feeling exposed in my knee-length cotton skirt. He was your friend, said a voice inside my head, chastising myself for the hesitation. I didn’t like the use of the past tense: Weren’t friends as close as Eli and I had been friends forever after? No matter what strangeness transpired?
I walked over to him. He barely looked up, and for a second I thought he hadn’t actually come to see me. He could have other friends at UMass or he could be taking classes himself, finishing his degree.
“Hey,” I said, sitting down next to him, as if it were something I did every day, as of course it used to be.
“Oh,” he said. Startled. “Brett.”
For a moment, I felt like I’d intruded on something. Maybe I was wrong. From the way he looked ahead, still focused on the crowd, he really could have been waiting for someone else to emerge from the building. He had a pen in his hand, and he wrote something on his pants leg. I squinted, trying to read the tiny handwriting, and Eli put his left hand over it, hiding it from me.
We sat there for a moment, then I fished in my bag for sunglasses. I slid them onto the bridge of my nose, and once I was properly shielded I said, “What are you doing here?” I tried to make the question sound gentle. Along with the pounds, Eli seemed to have shed years. Except for him writing on his clothes, it felt almost normal sitting next to him, as if I had walked out of Bartlett Hall and into a geographical time warp, and now sat outside Hellems in Boulder, Colorado—which would explain the sunlight, way too bright fo
r Massachusetts even in late summer.
“What am I doing here?” Eli said. He turned and looked at me, and I remembered his eyes from that night on the rooftop. It took considerable effort not to bring my fingertips to my forehead.
“Yes,” I said. “Were you waiting for me?”
Something in his face softened. He reached out and closed his hand around mine. His grip felt gentle, and his fingertips chapped. Eli looked so sad. I took my other hand and placed it on top of the two of ours, and we sat there a while, me comforting him for a problem that hadn’t yet been identified.
“I tried to go back to college,” he finally said.
“You did?”
“Yeah. Tried a semester at Manhattanville after I got out of the hospital. But those fucking drugs they put you on, nobody can concentrate. You know how they used to lobotomize mental patients surgically? Now they do it with pharmaceuticals.”
“Oh,” I said, without thinking, almost laughing. “It can’t be that bad.”
“You want to try my Clozaril?” He turned his head toward me sharply, with such an air of rebuke that I drew my hands back.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“And then community college. Remember how I was going to go to Harvard Med? How that was the plan? And I end up dissecting kitty cats at Westchester Community College. Not that I could handle that, even. Dropped out after six damn weeks.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But maybe you could still go back? Ladd did. People do all the time.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Eli said. “Once these drugs are out of my system, that’s what I’ll do.” He spoke a little too loudly, a few people walking by turned their heads. He didn’t notice, the decibels rising when he said, “Look. My mother’s dying. I want you to come see her.”
“Me?” I said. Then I absorbed the first part of his sentence. “Eli,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Are you sure?” I remembered seeing her just a few months ago. She’d looked fine.
“Am I sure? Is the fucking hospice turning our house into a death scene? Does she weigh like fifty-eight pounds?”
“I’m really sorry,” I said again. It must have come on very fast. “That’s terrible.”
“Terrible,” he echoed. “Terrible, terrible, terrible.”
“But Eli, she doesn’t know me. Why would she want me there?”
“I want you there,” Eli said. “It’s what I need. What I want. I can’t explain everything.”
The words came out too fast, too loud, running into each other. I felt a little afraid of him. Also afraid that if I went, Ladd would be furious.
“Is Charlie there?”
“His mother’s dying. Where else would he be?”
I glanced down at Eli’s hand, still covering whatever he’d written, more indecipherable words surrounding it.
“Please,” Eli said. Sorrow strangled the word. “Please Brett.”
I remembered that Colorado night, Eli carried away on a stretcher. Do you want to ride with him? And what had I done, that time, but nothing? So rare that life presents an opportunity, another chance, to do something better.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”
ELI ASKED ME TO drive his car—or rather, his mother’s car. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, and I would have asked him to stop except that it seemed to calm him. So I just buzzed down my window. We were driving south on I-495 before he spoke.
“So you’re studying,” he said. It was a pattern I would learn, an early sign, his concerted effort to punctuate moments with questions, expressions, that might seem normal. “What are you studying, Brett?”
“American literature,” I said. “Mostly American Renaissance.”
“Oh yeah? We had one of those, too?”
It sounded like something he would have said—the person I’d come to think of as the real Eli. So I smiled. I told him a little bit about what I’d just started to study at the time. How Emily Dickinson fell in love with Sue Gilbert, who broke her heart but stayed close by marrying her brother, Austin. Eli lit another cigarette and stared at the roadside trees. My words hung in the air with the smoke, and I stopped talking and rolled my window down a little farther.
When my phone rang, I said, “It’s probably Ladd. Could you get it for me? But don’t answer it.” Eli fished through my purse, then handed me the phone.
“Where are you?” Ladd said, without any kind of a greeting. I had left him a message, telling him that I was going to spend the night with my mother.
“Didn’t you get my message?” I glanced at Eli, who had his eyes closed, resting his head against the passenger’s window. Hopefully he wouldn’t speak. He took one last drag of his cigarette and lofted the butt out the window. Nicotine-stained fingers drummed restlessly on the dashboard. I wondered if he’d exhausted his supply.
“You’re still driving?” Ladd said.
“Just taking the exit to Randall now,” I said, measuring the words, testing for believability. I didn’t have much practice as a liar.
“Well,” he said, “tell her hi for me. You think you’ll be back tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I said. “Tomorrow. I’ll call you in the morning. Okay?”
“Okay,” Ladd said. “Drive safe.”
“I will.”
“You know, I can get in the car right now. I can meet you there.”
“No, no,” I said. “I mean, you don’t have to.”
He paused another second, then said good-bye and “I love you.” I did the same, then tossed my phone into my purse at Eli’s feet, slowing the car into the rotary before the Sagamore Bridge. I waited for Eli to comment on the way I’d lied to Ladd, but he didn’t say anything, just stared out the window, looking—I finally realized—as if he were listening to something else entirely.
IS IT POSSIBLE, IN memory, to go back to a place that means so many different things? I know that on this particular day, the first time I saw the Moss house, it was dark by the time Eli and I arrived. But my mind provides floodlights with the strength of day, as if my first glimpse took place at noon rather than past sunset. It includes all the details that would have been invisible to me. As the two of us walked through the front door, the whole house smelled sour and antiseptic, like death and sorrow. Eli added the incongruous odor of sweat and cigarettes.
Hospice had been set up for their mother, and I felt not only like an interloper myself but for delivering Eli—his disturbed and disturbing energy—to a sick woman’s bedside. I couldn’t see the ocean view through the dark windows, and I didn’t notice the brine scent off the ocean, overshadowed as it was by the one thing on earth that’s more primal. We only had to take a few steps into the house to see through the open doorway of the downstairs guestroom, now converted to a stage for a last exit. Several people crowded into that room around a bed, but my eyes fell immediately on the back of a head with blond ringlets, the sort of blond ringlets you’d expect to see on a toddler—the sort I would see on a toddler, his toddler, not so far off in the future. And it suddenly felt awful, appearing at the most private scene imaginable.
At the same time I thought: Turn around, Charlie. Turn around and see me.
Charlie turned around. His face looked pale and stricken. For the first time, I noticed a small circle of colorless moles, just above his right jawline. His cheeks looked puffy, his eyes faintly swollen.
“Brett,” Charlie said.
He stood up and walked out of the room, toward me. I could see his discombobulation, his grief, giving way to a moment of relief. Someone had arrived who could hold him. He must have noticed Eli, standing behind me. Clearly Eli was the reason I’d come, to support my friend, to bring him here (though of course he only needed to be brought because he’d come to get me). But Charlie, who seemed to think I’d come for him, gathered me up in his arms, pulling me in tight as humanly possible. He pressed his forehead into the crook of my neck. His hands tightened on my back, the fingers that already felt so familiar and familial, shaking there, taut a
nd possessive and completely within their rights, asking me for everything.
HAD THIS BEEN ELI’S plan? To bring me to Charlie? He’d always wanted to keep me away from Charlie. But maybe I was one small gift before their mother departed and Eli himself went completely off the rails. Or maybe that reasoning was just mine, trying to piece together logical motives where none ever existed.
All I know is this: Charlie needed someone. Eli, by design or coincidence, delivered someone to him in the form of me. And I played along. Did Eli disappear, or did I desert him? I barely remember him that evening, what he did or where he was. Instead I concentrated on his brother. When the time came to go to sleep—the guest room already given over to their mother—I went upstairs with Charlie, my phone buzzing away, unanswered, in the purse I’d left on the sunporch. And it wasn’t that I didn’t feel pangs of guilt and conscience toward Ladd. It was just that the pangs I felt toward Charlie were that much stronger.
In the morning, we came downstairs together, Charlie and I. Mr. Moss stood in the kitchen, pouring coffee for himself and a nurse. If he wondered about my presence or identity he didn’t say anything. His wife was days away from dying, and he couldn’t think about anything else.
“She wants to sit out by the water,” Mr. Moss said to Charlie.
Charlie and I went outside through the dining room, across the back deck. He showed me where the lawn chairs were stacked underneath it, and as he went back inside I chose the most substantial, least frayed one and carried it down to the shoreline. High tide, the rocks were covered by water, leaving only a small, smooth expanse of sand. I placed the chair close enough that Charlie’s mother would be able to rest her feet in the surf, if she wanted.
When I looked up at the beach stairs, Charlie stood there at the top, cresting the landing with his mother cradled in his arms. She wore a scarf around her head, its edges fluttered against his face, and an afghan wrapped around her shoulders. She couldn’t have weighed more than seventy pounds. Charlie took each step so carefully, his arms grasping her firmly enough that I could see veins and sinews tighten. If ever a moment redeemed someone, this was it. Nobody had ever done anything as carefully, as intentionally, as Charlie carrying his mother down the stairs. For her, the morning fog had cleared, and the sky turned out a gorgeous blue. The day offered up exactly the right notes of summer and autumn—warming sun, cooling breeze. The kind that welcomes you gladly to the world, or sends you off with love.
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