The summer after Deirdre, I kept asking myself these questions in the future tense: Will my anger ever go away? Will Charlie ever do this again? It was such a difficult time. No matter how hard I tried, how definitely I decided, there was still this strain of uncertainty and of injuries that refused to disappear. All that conspired against us, churning into the day I walked into Ladd’s cottage, the same day Charlie’s heart stopped beating.
If it hadn’t stopped beating. If Charlie had lived. The answers and the memories would have unfolded together into discovery. What would have been: it’s the only tense we can never know.
TO OTHERS, IT MAY have seemed clear that Eli’s life led up to Charlie’s death. But in my mind it didn’t seem that way. Clear. It seemed instead like my life, arriving there, in that first part of September. The time of year technically called summer but which everyone in New England knows is really fall. On that day, the last day of Charlie’s life, I drove over to see Ladd at his uncle’s compound. He’d said he had some books for me. I parked my car—the old station wagon that once belonged to Charlie and Eli’s mother—in the empty space beside the shed.
Ladd could have stayed in the main house. Or he could have used his parents’ house—which was better suited to winter habitation, situated away from the shore’s buffeting winds. But his postcard had said he was staying in the cottage. In fact, there were three cottages on Daniel’s property—two of them oceanfront, built years ago from old Sears kits. But I knew exactly the one Ladd meant. It sat back in the scrub oak woods, out of sight. It was the same one in which, years ago, we had showered and changed, and made love, before going to tell his parents about our short-lived wedding plans.
The path behind the house was overgrown. I wore my long Indian skirt, a pale blue tank top, and leather flip-flops. The soles slapped against my heels, and I stared down at the chipping nail polish on my toes. By now I could see the cottage—in my head it had already become Ladd’s cottage—settled in among the trees. You had to know about this little house to find it—hunched under the taller scrub oak, small and unassuming, like something for children scattering bread crumbs to stumble upon. I saw Ladd through the large window, sitting at a wooden table and staring at a laptop screen. I wondered if the cabin, for all its rustic isolation, had Wi-Fi.
Even though it felt like a creepy thing to do, I stood there for a while, staring through the window, watching Ladd. Seven years had passed since I left him for Charlie. More than two since I last saw him. But he looked exactly the way I always remembered him: tall and ordinary, with a kind, craggy face. After a minute he sensed me there, staring at him. He turned and started, pushing back his chair. I lifted one hand and curled my fingers down one at a time, an overly girlish wave. By the time he’d walked to the front door—only a few paces worth—I was there to meet him.
“Brett,” he said at the same time the door slid open with a rasp.
“Hi Ladd,” I said.
We stood there for a moment, wondering if we should hug and sharing an awkward decision not to. He cleared his throat and said, “Come to see those volumes?”
“You bet.”
Ladd stepped away from his door and held out his hand, gesturing to the threshold. I thought of the brief exchange I’d had with Charlie earlier, about the joking, fantasy make-out session with Ladd. In my mind, I had pictured a rusty teakettle and piles of dusty books, maybe dirty socks in the corner. But Ladd’s cottage was neat—if his bed was unmade, it was politely hidden overhead in the loft. And the teakettle that he immediately turned on was brand-new or recently polished. I’d forgotten that about Ladd, the way he kept order. In one corner of the cottage sat a small pine table surrounded by mismatched chairs. I knew the books the moment I saw them, from across the room, stacked there, waiting for me. The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, by Jay Leyda, both volumes. I crossed the room as he fiddled with boxes of tea bags. Before he could ask me which kind I wanted I brushed my hand over the top cover.
“Look at these. Were you expecting me?”
He poured steaming water into large green mugs. “I thought I might bring them by later,” he said. “That way I could say hi to Charlie, too.”
Since when did Ladd ever want to say hi to Charlie? The books looked ancient, musty, sacred. Funny to see something—solid and right there—that I had been wanting for so long.
I said, “It was really good of you to remember. Thank you.”
“They’re Uncle Daniel’s,” Ladd said. “They belonged to his wife.” He dropped tea bags into the mugs and handed me mine. I closed my hands around its lovely warmth, the steam rising up around my face.
“You know, Brett,” he said. “I’m glad you came by, before I saw you and Charlie. I don’t even know if you ever told him about that letter I wrote.”
It surprised me that he would bring this up so quickly. I shook my head. All of a sudden it became very apparent, this close space hidden in a thicket of trees, the intimacy of the two of us, here together. Would Charlie mind? Or was his trust in my adoration so complete that he wouldn’t give it a second thought?
“I’ve been embarrassed for two years and counting,” Ladd said.
It would have been appropriate to take time and weigh my response. I wondered, again, if anyone had told Ladd about Sarah. Probably this would be a good time to tell him myself. But at that moment, for whatever reason, my field of vision had narrowed to these four wooden walls and the crooked floorboards. And I felt like just me, a person, instead of a mother and wife.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” I said, remembering how I’d ripped it into pieces. “I love that letter. It meant a lot to me. It still does.”
Ladd tilted his head to one side. I noticed gray at his temples. On the other side of the room, my corporeal lines blurred a little bit, and while I didn’t exactly step out of body I became acutely aware of a sort of dreamlike quality, a sudden out-of-timeness. Who could have known, when I woke up that morning, that the two of us would be standing here together, in this small enclosed room, with nobody watching. I thought of Eli, heading toward Cape Cod, and Charlie, nailing in shingles as if I hadn’t even left. Then I thought of that Fourth of July seven years before and wondered what my life would have been like if I hadn’t agreed to sign on the dotted line or followed Charlie through the crowded party.
“So,” Ladd said. “How’s the dissertation coming?”
“Slowly.” I didn’t want to talk about my dissertation. What I wanted to do was tell Ladd something I hadn’t told anybody aside from Maxine and our marriage counselor; I wanted to tell him about Deirdre. You were right, I wanted to say. Charlie broke my heart.
“A lot’s happened since you went away,” I said. It occurred to me that he was just back from an adventure, a life-changing experience. I should have asked him about that. But I was too full of my own life-changing experience. So I said something else, something for which I must never be forgiven: “Charlie had an affair with the hostess at his restaurant. So we had to come here for a while to get away from all that.”
Ladd leaned against the sink, his fists behind him closed around the edge of the counter. I remembered those same fists closing around my wrists and guessed that he did, too. That same flush of anger came over his face. At first I thought it was directed at Charlie. Then I realized it was at me, for confiding in him.
“Why are you telling me this?” he said.
“I don’t know. Why did you write me that letter?”
Ladd pushed away from the sink and walked toward me, but he didn’t make it all the way across the room. Instead he took a seat in an ancient armchair. This cottage had been built in 1920, and the chair—with its unraveling weave and tired springs—looked like it had been there from the beginning. Everything as old and worn as the pain that Charlie had caused me, and the echoes I had stirred here with Ladd. I felt like I should step back a little, retreating from what I might have just set in motion. But I couldn’t get any closer to the table without moving aro
und it, toward the far wall, which I felt would call too much attention to myself. As it was, Ladd hadn’t taken his eyes off me. He watched me like something he was studying, and when he spoke, his voice was careful, considered.
“What am I supposed to say now?” he asked. “Something about how I thought of you while I was in the jungle?”
“I guess you could say I told you so.”
Ladd blinked, letting up his gaze the tiniest bit. “I always wanted to ask,” he said, “if you left because I made you sign that thing. Because if that was the reason, you could have told me. Christ, you could have done anything in the world except run off with Charlie.”
So long ago and far away, that day in the Boston lawyer’s office. Clearly the point of that day was not to expect anything as a gift. It would all be on loan—the man, the marriage, the family fortune, the good pen. Dependent on my good behavior.
“Charlie Moss,” Ladd said. “Of all people in the world.”
That name, even or especially then, like a fist closing around my heart. And I was so tired of feeling that way. As usual, I thought of Deirdre, her wounded, icy-blonde face.
“So you’re not going to say it?”
“What?” Ladd said. “I told you so? Would it make a difference now?”
“I doubt it.”
“You know,” Ladd went on, “that day you left my house, when I didn’t come after you, I thought I was doing what I had to, what I was supposed to do. Respecting your wishes. I felt so horrible. Charlie never did one thing to deserve you and you married him anyway. Lately I’ve been thinking about it, all the time I’ve spent doing what I’m supposed to do. Every second and minute when I’ve been obedient and responsible and considerate. What would be so bad about taking one minute to myself, to just do what I want?”
The last time I’d broken a rule—really, seriously misbehaved—was when I left Ladd for Charlie. I thought of all the time I’d spent since then being faithful, and the work I had done trying to forgive him, to stay with him. And before and after that, just the simple wifeliness of my days. Even in the end, the failure of the restaurant, and Deirdre—the way we’d gone back to what life would have been if it had all never happened. Day after day, for as long as I could remember, just being faithful and devoted. The great good wife, standing by while Charlie did what Ladd said he would do, what he had always done: broken my heart.
I stared back at Ladd and recognized him as full of something, in regard to me, that Charlie had always lacked. Not love, exactly. Because Charlie did love me. I knew that. Maybe what I saw instead was simple longing. Why would Charlie ever have had to long for me when I’d always been so immediately there?
“Ladd,” I said. “Do you know what I’d do? If I could take one single minute of my life? To just do what I wanted?”
His face lost the smallest amount of color. I crossed the room to where he sat in the ancient armchair. Somewhere in those few strides my feet lost their flip-flops as I walked my way over to Ladd and crawled onto the chair, my knees on either side of him, pressing into the worn springs. I placed my hands against his face and cradled it there for a moment, taking in his features, the face I used to know—not beautiful to everyone but even now beautiful to me. I pressed my lips to his forehead and then his cheek. My hands moved down to rest on his shoulders as I made my way, in a circle, kissing his face.
It took up the whole minute I had granted us. A long and very pregnant minute, during which Ladd sat frozen, his eyes closed. When it ended, they fluttered open. I sat back a little. Ladd studied me with an expression almost like sternness, and I thought he was about to accuse me of something.
“Just one minute,” I said, “out of all these days and hours.”
“Let’s make it thirty,” Ladd said. And then kissed me on the lips.
After another few minutes, I amended. “Let’s make it an hour.”
IT DIDN’T LAST AN hour, not quite, and it could have been worse. Our clothes stayed on. Our hands didn’t wander, not much, and even when Ladd reached beneath my skirt he only let his hand rest above my knee, holding me there, while we kissed and kissed. Perhaps the worst thing was the way Ladd looked when we said good-bye, a kind of expectation that this would continue, whereas by the time I got to my car, I had already returned to thinking about Charlie.
Driving back to Maxine’s, an overhead cloud obscured and flattened the sunlight. My hands shook on the steering wheel. I knew how this would all play out, the same way it had hundreds of times before. My anger with Charlie would fill to capacity and then burst, its remnants floating away on the ocean air, leaving me with the simple fact that I adored him. My husband was an elusive, inscrutable will-o’-the-wisp, which was why he drove me crazy and why I never could manage to walk away. I blinked back tears, thinking that the secret to marriage did not lie in compatibility, or even commitment, but the willingness to endure heartbreak. I, for example, had loved Charlie well enough to paste my heart back together a hundred times or more since the day I first met him.
Retreating from Ladd’s, I had no confidence at all in Charlie’s willingness to repair his heart on my behalf. My chest filled with fears that would soon be rendered entirely irrelevant.
And I know what you’re thinking. How I used up my husband’s last heartbeats in so unforgivable a way. And I do relive those moments with excruciating guilt, but the truth is, not so much more than anything else. Because I relive every moment of all those years with the same emotion—the same overwhelming regret. In my head, it plays over and over again, and it plays like a death march.
For example, the real and true beginning. The day I met Eli. We were trying out for a play, a musical. In the dance portion—downstairs in the studio, the far wall lined with mirrors—we had to pair up and imitate each other’s movements. The crowd paired off before I had a chance to turn around, and there stood Eli. He was wiry and blond—straight hair that hung to his shoulders. Round blue eyes that I didn’t yet know were just like Charlie’s. We stood facing each other, and I let him take the lead. He spiraled his arms in wide strokes. Everything he did was broad, the expression on his face mock serious, so that I kept breaking down in laughter. Neither of us got a part in the play. But we became friends. As Eli told Ladd on the ferry that day: best friends.
THE DAY AFTER I found Charlie dead—once his body had been removed to the coroner’s—a female police officer escorted me back to the house so I could collect enough of Sarah’s and my things to last a few days, a week. The two of us tromped in and out, carrying suitcases and bags of diapers. As I rolled the stroller over the wood floor of the sunporch, from below my feet I heard something jump and skitter.
Maybe if death hadn’t felt so close, hovering all around the house, I wouldn’t have reacted to the sound. But when I heard it, I thought so immediately of Tab. Maybe the portal through which Charlie had left still gaped open, giving Tab the opportunity to return. I let go of the stroller and walked outside, kneeling in the same spot I always did, to coax her out before sunset, and keep her safe from the coyotes that sometimes crossed the distance between salt marsh and shore.
“Tab,” I said, squatting down and peering under the porch. That skittering sound again, and along with the scent of dusty mold—the underneath of things—an even more distinct odor, the kind that can only rise off skin and fur. My eyes adjusted to see a small black form pressed against the cement foundation of the house, her shivering so contained that the small metal tags on her collar didn’t make a sound. Lightfoot.
I called to her and called to her, but she wouldn’t come toward me, not even when the police officer brought sliced turkey from the refrigerator. Finally I had to slither under the porch on my belly and drag her taut, quivering form across the pebbly dirt, her nails dragging in protest, wanting to remain pressed against the far wall.
Outside in the sunlight, I gathered the dog in my lap and brushed the dust away. Defeated, she went ahead and ate a slice of turkey. She weighed twelve pounds, compose
d of bone and tremble under short, coarse fur. Once I’d pushed away the thickest layer of dust, I found myself searching for any sign, any splatters, of blood. But of that her coat was clean.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves. It’s not a poem I’ve studied seriously. The right part of the right century, but I specialize in American poetry. Still, from time to time, Wilde’s lines will leap into my head. They leapt into my head that day, as I studied the dog, her quivering ears flat back against her head. Because I knew myself to be a coward. Because I’d supplied the kiss and let someone else wield the sword.
PART THREE
I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does of the burying ground, because I am afraid.
—EMILY DICKINSON
11
There had not been a murder in Saturday Cove since 1980, when a summer resident killed his wife and two children, and then himself. It shook people up, of course, but the suicide let the police off the hook. It didn’t give them any practice. For such a long time, law enforcement only dealt with the occasional winter break-in, shoplifters, drunk drivers. There was no homicide department. To investigate Charlie’s murder, they borrowed detectives from Hyannis, scarcely better practiced, who arrived to interview me. They took my computer. They searched my car, collecting the messy depths of our station wagon into zip-top plastic bags of various sizes, even the empty coffee cups and candy wrappers. They cataloged pacifiers and teething rings. The postcard from Ladd, its corner bent and crinkled where Sarah had chewed on it. They searched for blood, DNA.
If they had asked me to retrace my steps of the day before, to tell them everything I’d done and everywhere I’d been, I would have. The hour I spent with Ladd sat heavy on my brain, every molecule of my body protesting against it. But they didn’t ask. Because I wasn’t a suspect, they accepted the bare bones of my movements: I’d brought my baby to my friend’s house because Eli was coming. In the morning, I’d gone to check on Charlie and found him dead and Eli bloody. They wanted to know everything about that morning, what Eli had done and said. I told them how I’d leaned over Charlie and tried to pick him up. How I’d run away.
The Last September: A Novel Page 17