The Last September: A Novel

by Nina de Gramont

  “Brett,” she said. “Darling. I’m here to take the baby.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Didn’t Ladd say? Take the baby, your little girl. To our house for a swim. So you can rest.”

  I stepped back from the door so she could enter. As soon as she was in the hall, she put her arms around me.

  “Poor Brett,” she said. “You poor thing.”

  She smelled of sunscreen and expensive shampoo. I had seen Rebecca many times since Ladd and I broke up, and she’d always been understandably cool toward me. It took this, my husband’s murder, to remember her old fondness. I found myself patting her back until she released me and turned her attention to Sarah, who had inched closer, and was now reaching up toward the hat that had been knocked slightly askew during our embrace. Rebecca immediately handed it to her, then knelt down, her long and elegant limbs folding themselves up with ease. She squinted at Sarah, examining her very closely.

  “She looks like her grandmother,” Rebecca said. “Let me take her so you can get some rest.”

  She didn’t have a car seat so I gave her the keys to my station wagon, then walked back through the empty house. Mrs. Duffy was back at her cottage resting, so I was alone there for the first time. And I found myself doing what Sarah had, opening drawers, looking for pictures of Sylvia. Each one was different, a new image of her strong-boned face, brilliant in addition to beautiful. I had applied to Harvard as both an undergrad and graduate student and been rejected both times. It seemed odd to feel jealous of a woman who cut such a tragic figure.

  If I had died instead of Charlie, how would people be taking care of him? Probably they would be bringing him casseroles, lasagnas wrapped in aluminum foil for the freezer, never mind that the main thing he knew how to do was cook. Charlie, it struck me, would have stayed in his father’s house. He would not have pictures of me tucked away in drawers forty years in the future. I opened an envelope, a close-up of Sylvia with her hair brushed off her forehead. Not smiling, she looked almost stern. Why are you thinking of what Charlie would do? What about what you will do? Charlie is the one who died.

  Charlie was the one who died. He was gone. And still I found myself thinking that he didn’t love me enough, not as much as I loved him—instead of thinking about the pictures I had. Would they be scattered in drawers throughout my home decades from now? I thought of the framed wedding picture back at the Moss house, which I had walked right past, even while gathering the things that were most important to me.

  Sometimes in the morning I would wake, and emotion would grip me before the details descended. In my fog, I would feel anguish and loss for a split second before recalling the reason. The same thing had happened in the weeks following my discovery of Deirdre.

  I wondered where Daniel kept his wedding photos and imagined what that day would have been like: here at the beach house, Sylvia looking like a photo out of Town & Country, Daniel looking wholly adoring. Somewhere, there must have been a picture. I strode past the many drawers where Sarah had already made her discoveries and went into his study, opening the door very carefully, even though I knew he wasn’t home. I found three different pictures of Sylvia in his desk, but none of them were wedding photos.

  I headed down the hall, the part of the house I’d never visited. His bedroom smelled of expensive soap, and old wood, and the musty scent that clung to all Cape houses, especially the ones by the water. On the floor lay a worn blue rug with swirly white flowers. I imagined Sylvia picking out the furniture—good oak dresser and nightstands, a blue bureau that looked so heavy you might have to chop it into firewood before ever trying to move it again. My eyes searched all the surfaces as I walked into the bathroom. I should have known there wouldn’t be a picture in plain view. Hadn’t he told me that he didn’t like her face to take him by surprise? He needed to prepare himself before seeing her again. He needed to take a deep breath, decide which image of her he most wanted to see, and deliberately go to the place he’d stashed it.

  I went back to the bedroom and started opening drawers. Both bureaus—I slid open drawer after drawer, each one relinquishing itself without so much as a squeak or whoosh, each one containing neatly stacked and folded clothing. Between the two windows that looked out onto the ocean sat a beautiful antique secretary. It had the good manners to protest with age as I opened the front, but everything was as neatly arranged as the drawers had been. Letter openers and rolls of stamps. Envelopes and stationery plus a small pile of yellow legal pads. I closed the front and knelt, opening the drawers to the desk, finding nothing but files and papers.

  Who knows how long Daniel stood in the doorway, watching me root through his things? He hadn’t made a sound entering the house or coming down the hall. And he didn’t make a sound now, not even when I finally closed the last drawer and got to my feet. It was me who made noise, when I saw him, an intake of breath so sharp it sounded like a little shriek.

  Daniel wore khakis and a polo shirt. Maybe he had gone for a haircut, it looked particularly neat and boyish. His face, watching me gravely, looked impassive enough that the only thing I could do was tell him the truth.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling my face turn bright red. “I was looking for a wedding picture.”

  He stood silent a moment, then walked over to the heavy blue dresser. The drawer he chose was cracked just the tiniest bit open from my earlier invasion. It bulged with polo shirts, different colors. Daniel reached under the clothes and pulled out an eight-by-ten-inch silver frame. Then he stood, holding it to his chest. I walked over to the bed and perched on the edge. He sat next to me and lowered the photo into my hands.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “This is the first picture I’ve seen of you two together.”

  “Well. She was the main attraction.” Daniel reached across my lap. He let his fingers graze Sylvia’s face, which smiled underneath an antique veil. On my wedding day, I hadn’t worn a veil, just a white sheath dress, my hair down. Casual compared to these two—despite their youth, with a formality that belonged to another age, a hundred years ago instead of forty. Daniel’s hair was fairer than I would have thought, less like Ladd’s. In his twenties, he hadn’t looked like his nephew but insistently like himself. Handsome, I thought. He drew his hand away from the photo, as if he’d heard the word in my head.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “You’ve been so kind to me, and this is what I do.”

  “No,” Daniel said. “It’s all right. You can’t be expected to behave normally. I understand. We’ve both lost something, you and I.”

  Outside, a car rumbled up over the driveway. We heard a door slam shut, and I stood. Too early for Rebecca to be coming back with Sarah. It could be Ladd, and he could be coming into the house, and I didn’t want him to find me sitting here on the bed with his uncle.

  “I know it doesn’t seem like it,” Daniel said. “And it may take a long while. But it will be better one day. I promise.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I left the door open as I walked out of the room, feeling his eyes on my back—watching me leave.

  SATURDAY COVE WAS NOT brimming with hotels and resorts. There was one bed-and-breakfast, and one small motel—ten or twelve rooms—abutting the post office. The summer population owned homes or rented them. There were two public beaches that required town stickers to park in their sandy lots. From down on Daniel’s beach, I could see one of those beaches, deserted since Labor Day. There was only one couple, walking close enough to the shoreline that they held their shoes in their hands; I watched them until they rounded the far bluff, and once again I had the world to myself. A lone woman, easy to spot, perhaps the first thing an eye would fall to when surveying the view.

  Lightfoot ran out with the waves, then turned and ran back toward me as they swept back in. Low tide stretched far down the beach, and I walked with her out toward the water. She stopped well short of the tide this time, stopping besi
de a high, flat rock. At the moment, the rock had a wide berth from the ocean, but once the tide came in it would be submerged. When I placed my hand on top of it, it felt damp, mossy. Periwinkles itched the inside of my palm. I knelt down and filled both fists with sand, then let it drip onto the rocks, like frosting from a pastry bag, forming small, swirling turrets.

  Those turrets had multiplied by the time Ladd came down to the beach, holding Sarah’s hand. Water had started to approach the rock but hadn’t quite arrived yet. I’d been working as intently as I had on anything in a long while, and by now the castle rose impressively, covering the rock, its towers of different heights and styles.

  “Mommy,” Sarah said, pointing.

  “It’s a sand castle,” Ladd told her. She looked up at him, dubious, not ready to test drive the word.

  “Hi baby,” I said. “Did you have fun swimming?”

  She nodded and let go of Ladd, then walked toward me, stopping short to examine a small tide pool that had formed as the tide came in.

  “Hey,” Ladd said.

  I stopped working and looked over at him. His face looked strained and pale. I waited for Lightfoot to run away, as she had the last two times he’d appeared, but she just kept running along the tide line, prancing through the mild waves.

  Ladd said, “I don’t know what’s going on here.”

  “I’m building a sand castle.”

  “Brett,” he said, an old and familiar sharpness. “You told me to stay away from you. And then you show up here. Where I happen to live.”

  I let the too-wet sand dribble through my fist, the globules piling onto themselves in a mutant tower. “Your uncle offered to help me,” I said simply. “And I needed help. From someone who isn’t you.”

  “He’s pretty goddamn close to me.”

  I looked over at him, my gaze skimming the top of Sarah’s head as she scooped up a handful of periwinkles. Ladd’s brows reached toward the bridge of his nose in an expression that might have been anger or anguish. Then he knelt to gather up the drier sand at his feet. In a minute he stood next to me, packing it around the bottom where the sand I’d just placed dripped down, staining the rock.

  “It’s a good castle,” he told me, his voice returning to its newer, dealing-with-a-crazy-person tone. “When all the other castles are washed away, this one will still be standing.”

  It was a funny thing to say, especially considering there were no other castles on the beach. I took my hands off the rock and watched Ladd work. Whereas my sneakers were getting soaked, he had the prescience to go barefoot with his cuffs rolled up. I took off my sneakers and threw them up onto the sand past the tide line. Then I rolled up my jeans and set to constructing a new tower.

  We worked for what felt like a long time, Sarah playing in the sand above the tide line, until the water surrounded us, lapping at our cuffed jeans, deep enough for Lightfoot to swim around us in little circles. We sloshed back toward shore and sat, not saying anything to each other but occasionally speaking to Sarah, now the only one of us at work, still digging through the tide pools. By now the water swarmed all around the castle—just like Eli had said, it looked like medieval ruins. The day, in its early-autumn morph toward evening, had turned overcast, that otherworldly flat light. I wished I had a sweater. The water was black beyond the jetty and green closer to shore. Sarah chattered away while she dug, her diaper getting soaked by the salt water, while low gray clouds formed on the faintly pink horizon. The fantastic castle floated amid it all.

  “I should go get a camera,” Ladd said.

  It would have been lovely to photograph. At the same time, I didn’t think a camera could capture the precise magic. And I didn’t want to be left alone. I couldn’t decide—I didn’t seem to know—who or what to be afraid of.

  “Don’t,” I said. And then, startled by the urgency in my voice, added, “Let’s just save it for this one moment.”

  Ladd nodded, his gaze fixed on the rising castle. A part of me hoped that Eli was close, even watching, appreciating—with the pieces of his old mind—this tribute. The thing of beauty that he would recognize, just like the ones he used to make, out on the rocks. If he ever remembered a time, those summers, when his mind belonged to himself, no other voice but his own.

  14

  That evening Ladd, Daniel, and I stood on the back deck staring out at the water where the sand castle still rose. Sarah dropped a tennis ball for Lightfoot, who chased it for several bounces, then caught it and brought it back to her. She shrieked with astounded hilarity—the discovery of fetch. From inside the house, Mrs. Duffy called to us. I picked up Sarah and followed the two men inside. On top of the sideboard sat a white bakery box. When I peered through the plastic, I saw the swirling yellow script, Happy Birthday Brett! Sarah pressed her hand on top of the plastic, smudging the letters. I put her on the floor.

  “Did you forget?” Ladd said. His voice sounded so gentle. It made me want to turn and shove him against the table. “Of course you would forget,” he said in that same careful voice. “With everything that’s going on.”

  Of course I would forget, with no wish for time to move any direction but backward. I lifted up my hands to cover my face. My shoulders shook but still no tears. I could sense both men, standing back, not sure if embracing me would be wrong in some way. Sarah’s hand closed around the hem of my skirt, just above my knee. The room felt weighted heavily with the two of them, not willing to hug me, so I picked up Sarah and wrapped my arms around her. She hugged me back, tightly, and I realized that between swimming and playing on the sand she hadn’t napped. I could put her to bed early. I could escape.

  Mrs. Duffy marched out of the kitchen and put her arms around both me and Sarah.

  “There, there,” she said. “It’s too much, it’s all too much. It’s more than a person can be expected to bear.”

  “Thank you,” I said, not looking at any of them, Mrs. Duffy’s arm still protective across my shoulders. The cake sat there, its writing smeared, its festiveness awful. “But I’m just so tired. I think I’ll go upstairs.”

  “Brett,” Ladd called after me. His voice sounded impatient, maybe even angry. I didn’t turn around, just kept climbing the steps, and he called out again.

  “Leave her alone,” Daniel said. By now I was in the upstairs hall, but his voice was sharp enough that I could hear it. “You can’t know what she’s going through.”

  I closed the door behind me, wishing it had a lock. Ladd was going through something, too. I’d seen it on his face, beyond what had happened, beyond concern for me. Regret, washing over his every movement. But I couldn’t worry about that, only about what had happened, and who remained out there, in the world, waiting to be caught.

  CHARLIE WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN working on the back deck anymore when Eli arrived. Probably he was in the kitchen, stirring. He had this ability to stand over the stove, endlessly tending, steam rising up around him. It might have been where he felt happiest. What did he think about, staring into the pot? Lost in dreams of spices and temperature? Or was the concentration less complete than it sometimes seemed? Was there room, perhaps, for thoughts of me?

  Eli will be here any minute. Maybe when Eli showed up, Charlie was upstairs, composing his email. Maybe he meant to write more but heard Eli’s tires in the driveway and hastily typed Love, Charlie. Then walked downstairs to tell Eli he had to leave in the morning.

  Once at a dinner party I heard Charlie trying to explain unmedicated Eli to a friend. “It’s not that the logic doesn’t add up,” Charlie said. “It’s that logic doesn’t exist at all. Two plus two doesn’t equal five. Two plus two equals motorcycle.”

  If I pictured anybody else killing Charlie, the thought seemed crazy. But I was familiar enough with crazy to go ahead and think it anyway.

  THE DAY AFTER MY birthday, I let myself into the Moss house. A home that’s been uninhabited for days and then weeks: the silence piles up on itself from one hour to the next.

  “Eli?”
I called, and then stopped to listen for footsteps, or a returning voice. I stepped as quietly as I could through the rooms, peering under every bed, looking in every closet.

  Downstairs in the living room, photo albums jammed the bottom shelf of the bookcase. I pulled out the fattest one and leafed through it, the plastic covers on each page curling, the sticky backings striped an ancient umber. When Charlie’s mother was dying, he and I had sat together on this very couch, him pointing out his favorites, like the one of two wiry blond boys, one with curls, both with round blue eyes and smiles that twitched the right side of their mouths, before expanding, brightening their entire faces. After that night on the roof, I never saw Eli smile like this again. But Charlie—thousands of times, maybe even millions.

  He would have had a hard time smiling at Eli, in the condition he must have been in. At some point, the two of them would have stood out on the deck together. Just up the street from the Moss house, directly across the bluff, a man who’d made a fortune with some sort of computer-related invention had built a house so large that it looked like a Carnival Cruise ship riding the night sky. He wouldn’t have been here in September, but the floodlight he’d installed to light his American flag shone year round, damaging the view of the stars. Charlie might have complained about this, pointing out to Eli the new difficulty locating the Milky Way. Or he might have gotten to business directly. “Eli,” he might have said. “We said you couldn’t stay here unless you were taking your meds. It’s obvious you’re not, so you need to leave in the morning.” Just then Eli, his rage stoked, might have seen the long-handled hammer, left on the plank of the ladder. Charlie never put anything away.

  I turned the page of the photo album. There was a photograph of the two boys sharing some kind of drink, a soda or a milkshake, their heads pressed together—Charlie already a lanky child, Eli still with the chubby limbs of a toddler. Here was the era of Sylvia, pictures of her smiling, usually with Eli in her arms. In later pages, the brothers posed with trophies, tennis for Eli, sailing for Charlie. Charlie was taller than Eli, and stronger. That day on the lawn Eli’s skin had looked pasty and white, his muscles slack from disuse, whereas Charlie’s skin was brown from the sun, and fine sinewed muscles pulled taut along his arms. If Eli had come straight at him, Charlie would have stopped the hammer.