The Last September: A Novel

by Nina de Gramont

  At the bottom of the steps, Charlie’s muscles relaxed the barest bit. Just a few steps more, toward me, and he lowered his mother into the chair. Her arms slid off his shoulders, their cheeks bumping in a way that would have been awkward if it hadn’t been a mother and son. By now everyone else had arrived, except Eli—Charlie’s father and a nurse and a plump woman in a Talbots cardigan. I was still standing between the chair and the water—Mrs. Moss’s feet nearly touched mine, but if she noticed me or wondered who I was, she didn’t give any indication. I wanted to kneel down and take off her slippers, or adjust the afghan that had slipped off her shoulders, but I worried the face of a stranger would startle her or that she would think I’d arrived from somewhere else, to take her away.

  It was Charlie who knelt in front of her, pulling the blanket back over her shoulders and slipping off her moccasins. Her skin seemed so thin I worried it would slide off along with the shoes. Mrs. Moss sighed and edged her feet forward, dipping them into the salt water. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she said. “Thank you, Charlie.”

  He edged around her, next to me, leaning into my shoulder, as if I had been planted in that exact spot for only one reason—to keep him standing.

  AFTER CHARLIE CARRIED HIS mother back up to the house, I finally got around to calling Ladd. I found my purse on the sunporch, walked out to the back deck, and pressed the first number I had on speed dial. My fingers shook slightly as I brought the phone to my ear. Even I wasn’t dishonest enough to tell myself I was comforting an old friend. Charlie and I hadn’t made love, but we’d slept in the same bed, wrapped up together, arms around each other. When he woke, he had propped himself up on one elbow and stroked my head.

  “Thank you, Brett,” he’d said. He had ridiculously long eyelashes. Later he would tell me that when he was a child, heavy snow would clump in those lashes, forcing his eyes shut. That morning I wondered—as I would many times over the coming years—how a man with so many girlish features managed to look not the slightest bit feminine. When Charlie kissed me, I kissed him back. Elated. Opportunistic. Despite everything that should have clamored in my head—the dying mother and the disturbed brother and the abandoned fiancé—elated.

  Now, standing outside at the very edge of the deck, looking out toward the ocean, the day seemed too pretty for words. The gray shingles on the wall behind me were already chipping, fading.

  “Brett,” Ladd said, on the other end of the phone, his voice tinny through faulty cell phone service. “How’s it going? How’s your mom?”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “She needs some help with a research project, they changed her deadline. So I might stay an extra day.”

  On the other end of the line, a pause, and I felt like he could see through the phone lines, all the way to Cape Cod, me here at the Moss house. I wondered if he could hear the change in my voice. Suddenly, already: I belonged to somebody else.

  “Okay,” Ladd said, stretching the word out carefully, over too many syllables.

  Just then Eli banged out of the front door wearing nothing but a pair of maroon boxers, decorated with beagles and bugle horns. I turned my head toward him, sharply enough that any normal person would have read the signal. Go away, please. I need to talk privately. But Eli didn’t seem to realize I was there. He swaggered to the edge of the deck, almost exactly where I stood—close enough that his bare elbow brushed my upper arm. Then he whipped out his penis and started to pee, a broad arc of morning urine gushing out in front of us. I took the phone away from my ear and stepped back. From across the lawn, Charlie emerged at the top of the beach stairs, carrying the chair I’d brought down for his mother. He strode across the grass, his steps slowing again as he got closer, taking in the scene, his face falling. It was an expression I would come to know well, the particular descent of his features when confronted with the change in his brother.

  By now I held the phone down, by my side. “Brett? Brett?” Ladd’s tinny voice called to me, useless, two million miles away.

  “I’ll call you back,” I said, maybe not loud enough for him to hear, and turned off the phone.

  From halfway across the lawn, from across all these fresh disasters, Charlie stared at me. Behind him, daylight widened over low tide, the expanse of beach now littered with wet rocks. Eli, finished, stood between us, swaying slightly, tucking himself back into his beagle-and-bugle boxers. I moved sideways across the deck, stepping off its opposite edge and onto the grass, toward Charlie.

  A FEW HOURS LATER, Charlie walked ahead of me as we picked our way across the rocky bluff. I loved the way his back looked, his thin white T-shirt and Bermuda bathing trunks. When we stepped from the rocks onto the sand, he pulled off his T-shirt. I hadn’t brought a bathing suit—I was still wearing the clothes I’d taught in the day before, the blouse and knee-length skirt, so I just stood there and watched as he trotted into the water. I didn’t know yet about Charlie’s strange faith in salt water. He believed it could cure anything from poison ivy to cancer.

  All the words anyone could use to describe Charlie, my past experience with him—anybody’s past experience—were steadily becoming eclipsed by the kindness and love he showed his mother. By his nearness. By the way he seemed to not just want but need me.

  I stood there on the sand and watched him swim out, much farther than I ever would have dared. And Charlie stopped swimming a moment. I could see him, getting his bearings, scanning the shore, locating me. I waved and couldn’t see—but imagined—him smiling. She beckons, and the woods start. Goose bumps formed on my arms and legs, and they felt like a swelling. Like my body could no longer contain everything that lived inside it, only wanting to burst outward, to join the ocean air.

  A PERSON BETTER SKILLED at deception would have come up with a less verifiable alibi. When I stopped returning Ladd’s calls, he phoned my mother, an even less practiced liar—she didn’t think for a moment to cover for me. Ladd drove by my apartment and saw my car, parked in its usual spot. When I checked my phone again toward evening, the many messages left by him and my mother were fraught with increasing alarm.

  I went outside to call Ladd, so I could shield Charlie from this fallout. If Charlie and I talked about Ladd at all during those few days, I can’t remember it. So much else was happening. Instead of walking toward the ocean, I headed up the road, to the dirt path that lapped the cranberry bog.

  “The Mosses’,” Ladd said when I finally told him the truth. He erupted so loudly I had to hold the phone away from my ear for a moment. “How the fuck could you be at the Mosses’?”

  “Eli came to get me.” Telling him about Mrs. Moss’s illness, I pitched my voice low, trying to inspire him to do the same. It didn’t work.

  “But you lied to me,” Ladd said. “You flat-out lied to me. You stood in one place and told me you were in another.”

  “Because,” I said, my voice almost a whisper now, “I knew you would react this way, exactly this way. I knew you would be angry.”

  “Angry,” Ladd yelled. “Of course I’m angry. You lied! You’re with Charlie fucking Moss!”

  From a dead tree beside the bog, a red-tailed hawk swooped toward the road, landing on prey too small for me to see in this light, the gloaming.

  “Not Charlie,” I said. “Eli. Eli came to get me.”

  “Where are you staying? Whose room?”

  “Nobody’s room. It’s not like that.”

  “It’s not like people are sleeping in rooms?”

  “Ladd,” I said, admonishing. Years later I would see Charlie employ this same technique, responding to my justifiable rage and anguish as if they weren’t caused by his actions, only beneath both our dignity.

  “I’m coming to get you,” Ladd said. Finally, with this pronouncement, his voice evened out.

  “You can’t.”

  “Oh, I think I can.”

  “She’s dying,” I hissed. “You can’t storm in here and cause a scene when she’s dying.”

  “Then you come home. Rig
ht now.”

  “Eli drove me. I don’t have my car.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ladd said. It was his turn to whisper. His voice might have broken my heart had I not already steeled myself the way a person in my position—a person doing what I did—must. “Who are these people to you,” Ladd went on, “that you have to be there at a time like this?”

  It seemed to me that the question answered itself via the posing. So that all I could say was, “I’m sorry. I’ll call you later.” When I hung up, Charlie stood next to me, hands in the pocket of his Baja hoodie.

  “Everything okay?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t want to frighten him with how quickly my allegiance had shifted. Already I had removed my engagement ring and zipped it into the inside pocket of my purse. As far as the Mosses, apart from Charlie and Eli, my presence had scarcely been registered. Everything occurring in the house, from their mother’s slow exit to Eli’s disintegration, was so fraught and elemental that all social mores had evaporated. Tonight I would sleep in one of Charlie’s T-shirts, folding the same clothes I’d been wearing two days straight, leaving them on a chair to put on again tomorrow.

  “Let’s not go back in just yet,” Charlie said, closing the distance between us the phone call had imposed.

  As he stood next to me, I slipped my phone into his back pocket. The two of us faced west. We could see the sun, setting, flooding the red bog with orange light. Steps to the east, the paved road extended upward, toward a hill, so quiet it felt hard to imagine any car had ever driven on it, though I myself had come this way, driving Eli in his mother’s car, barely twenty-four hours ago. As I looped my arm through the crook of Charlie’s elbow, I felt a shiver at the small of my back, not just because a chill descended with the night air but because exactly as the light dissipated a shadow appeared, up where the road started to curve downhill. A tall man, newly thin, walking with long-legged strides. Something wrong about his gait, just slightly lopsided, and carrying with him the noise of conversation, though no one accompanied him. Engaging his voices, a phrase I would learn before the day was over.

  Charlie stepped sideways. My arm slipped out of its spot and slapped against my body. As he started to head up the road, toward his brother, I reached out to stop him. Charlie turned back toward me.

  “Listen,” he said. “This has to be done quickly. Because he can’t be in there like that. Not now.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to provoke him. I need you to come with me, all right? So you can be a witness.”

  “All right.”

  “He’s got to be a threat,” Charlie said. “To himself or others. That’s the only way to get him into the hospital.”

  “Okay,” I said again, not caring that Charlie didn’t seem to be factoring my safety into the equation, let alone his own. Charlie was never afraid of his brother, only for him. As he walked forward, up the hill toward Eli, I followed him.

  Something had come over Charlie. A new energy, like an actor who’d stepped into character. “Eli,” he said. His voice was hard and loud enough to break through the monologue and cut it short. “What are you doing? Where are you going?”

  “Home,” Eli said. “To see Mom.”

  “You can’t see Mom anymore.”

  By now I had stopped walking, standing back—close enough to see everything, but far enough to keep myself out of the way. Eli stood there, peering through the dark at Charlie. Silence for a moment, then a burst of laughter over something nobody had said.

  “What’s so funny?” Charlie said.

  Eli sidestepped to get around him. Charlie blocked his way.

  “I need to see Mom,” Eli said. “You need to understand, it’s very important that I be there.”

  The sentences sounded reasonable but not the tone, words bleeding together at first and then separate, staccato. Still, I saw Charlie falter, his demeanor slip just the barest bit toward normal. But when Eli started to walk forward, Charlie again gathered up his resolve.

  “You can’t be there,” Charlie said. “No entrance for you, Eli. She doesn’t want you there.”

  Eli didn’t respond. He just stood there, his brow furrowed. I couldn’t tell if the words had angered him, or he couldn’t understand what they meant. Charlie stepped forward. He reached out and pushed Eli, first on one shoulder, then the next. Eli backed up a pace or two, then turned and started to walk away, back up the steep road.

  Charlie ran after him, catching up easily. I stood there, not moving, watching as Charlie shoved him again, a sharp and instigating jab at the shoulder. Eli didn’t respond, just kept walking, head down. Charlie stopped a moment, watching him go, then ran again. He jumped onto his back, placing his hands over Eli’s eyes. For a moment, Eli concentrated on trying to take those hands away; then he shrugged Charlie off, a hard movement. Charlie fell backward—no attempt to brace his own fall, no tension in his body. He just let himself slam to the pavement. I could hear the thwack of his head hitting blacktop.

  All the houses around us were dark, stars obscured by low-hanging clouds. I stepped forward, not nearly fast enough, as Eli turned to see Charlie, there on the ground. He sunk down over him, straddling his body, and for a moment I thought he would start pummeling him. But he didn’t, he just sat there, with his arms outstretched, covering Charlie’s face with his hands, his fingers spread out so that Charlie could breathe.

  “Eli,” I yelled, hoping somebody, somewhere, was close enough to hear. “Eli, get off him. Let him go.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, didn’t move. Then he withdrew one hand and with the other stroked Charlie’s head, as if he could erase the damage. I knew Charlie was conscious because he lifted his hands and closed them around Eli’s arms, but he didn’t try to push him off. He didn’t try to fight him. Eli started speaking again, muttering, indecipherable words running into each other. The only ones I could make out were “Charlie” and “Mom.”

  I wanted to step forward, push him off Charlie. But I was too scared. “Charlie,” I finally said, because Eli seemed so unreachable. “Push him off you.”

  Eli’s head snapped away, toward me. Then he stepped off Charlie and stood beside me, docile, hands resting at his side. Charlie sat up, one hand cradling the back of his skull. My eyes had adjusted well enough to see a warm pulse of blood snaking its way through his fingers. I walked around Eli and helped Charlie to his feet. Then I reached into his pocket for my phone. The fall had smashed it into four pieces.

  “Go back to the house,” Charlie told me. He pulled off his hoodie, bunched it up, held it to the back of his head. He draped his other arm over Eli’s shoulders. “Call the police. We’ll wait here.”

  WHEN I LOOK BACK now I hardly see Eli. I see Charlie. The different words people (including myself) could use to describe him, all of them true by varying degrees. I see all those qualities, the good and the bad. But in that moment I mostly see a kind of valor, and selflessness, that I was never able to find within myself when Eli needed me.

  By now darkness had settled in for the night. I trotted through it, toward the only lit house in the neighborhood, the Mosses’, incongruously cheerful, as if a celebration took place behind those bright windows, instead of all this urgent, if equally intoxicating, sorrow.

  7

  Charlie’s mother died the next day. One son at her side, holding her hand. The other in a hospital lockdown ward. That afternoon I borrowed her station wagon to go to the Marshall’s off Route 6 and buy clothes for a few more days, including a dress I could wear to her funeral.

  A close encounter with someone in the throes of psychosis creates a very particular state of fragility. Even when the person is removed, the madness stays behind, inflicted. Moving through my errands, that twin sense of guilt and trauma pixelated at my core, making me feel not quite, entirely, flesh and bone. Across the street, the Verizon store stood as a rebuke, but I didn’t replace my shatte
red phone. My body tensed imagining the messages Ladd must be leaving. Later at the funeral, I hovered beside Charlie as if I were already his wife; people who hadn’t seen him in a long time assumed I was his wife. Charlie’s face was drained, his bearing shaky. He needed me, a body, to lean into, and I had become mercenary to all other purposes. Not even Ladd’s parents, filing into their pew and casting their uneasy, questioning glances, could drive me from his side. After the service, Charlie grabbed my hand and pulled me along with him to the receiving line. I stood there next to him, with his father and uncles and a cousin or two, Eli conspicuously absent, mourners too polite to ask my identity as they shook my hand and offered condolences. Charlie’s father still didn’t know my name.

  Ladd’s parents emerged from the chapel, starting toward the line and then stopping as they saw me there. Paul put his arm around his wife and pointedly led her in the other direction. “Brett,” Rebecca called, over her shoulder, her face pained and confused. But I didn’t go to her. I just stayed with Charlie.

  Daniel Williams didn’t run away from me. He walked straight to the line, shaking hands and expressing sympathy. If Charlie knew there should be some kind of discomfort between the two of them, he didn’t show it. The four stitches in the back of his head were barely visible. He shook Daniel’s hand.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” Daniel said, and then moved on to me. “Brett,” he said. He took my hand in both of his and looked me straight in the eye. It was hard to interpret that look, exactly. Not forgiving, but not accusing either.

  “Hi,” I said. Probably I didn’t remind him of Sylvia anymore. But maybe I reminded him of himself, the excessive love that both indicted and exonerated me. Daniel let go of my hand, and moved down the line. Ladd’s parents skipped the reception, but Daniel didn’t. As I shadowed Charlie throughout the wine-infused afternoon on his father’s lawn, I would see him occasionally, deep in conversation, or else staring through the crowd at me.