The Last September: A Novel

After Carlo died in 1866, Dickinson’s real reclusiveness began. “I do not cross my father’s ground to go to any house or town,” she wrote. She still gardened but only at night. During the day, she would interact with her family, and sometimes with Sue, but to other visitors, even close friends, she would pass letters from the other side of her bedroom door.

How much safer, and easier, to hide like that. I found myself practicing this position when Daniel came upstairs to check on me, behind the partially open door, sitting at the little desk he’d set up for me in the corner of the room. What I had meant to do was pick up Richard Sewall’s biography and scan the index for Carlo. But I only got as far as resting my hand on the thick paperback before I heard a tentative knock.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m in here.” As Daniel pushed the door open, Lightfoot darted in and jumped up on the bed with Sarah. I had finally taken the flyswatter away from her, trading it for a plastic ring of keys. She lay on the bed, holding them over her head in a prenap stupor, examining their contours and colors one at a time. The dog settled in beside her.

“Brett?” Daniel said, his careful formality just slightly amplified. The door stood between us. I could just see his outline through the crack by the doorframe.

“Hi,” I said. And then, even though he hadn’t asked how I was, I said, “I’m all right.” I turned halfway in my seat and could see Sarah’s eyes starting to droop, preceding her hands, which still sat resolutely in the air above her.

“Good,” he said. “I left a couple boxes for you out here in the hall.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

He paused a moment, held back by a gentleman’s force field that didn’t allow him to cross the threshold of my room. Then he slowly closed the door. Sarah’s arms flopped to the bed, as if commanded by a hypnotist. I stood up and opened the Richard Sewall book to the index, running my finger down the page for mention of Carlo. When I tried to flip the book back to the correct page, instead it opened itself, to somewhere in the middle. A piece of yellow lined paper fluttered to the floor. It had been folded carefully in half, but the flight to the ground turned it open, facing me, lying across my feet so that I could only make out the salutation, in Eli’s slanted handwriting.





13


Dear Charlie.

That’s not how Eli’s letter began. Eli’s letter was for me. I should have taken it directly downstairs. I could hear Daniel and Ladd through the floorboards, talking quietly, probably discussing my behavior. Discussing the problem of me in general, how I had ended up here, and where I would eventually go. Right away, I should have left my sleeping child, carried the letter down to these two men, and handed it over. One of them would have called the police. The detective work would unfold from there. When had he left it? When had he placed it in the book? Where was he now? Where was he now?

Before I had a chance to think any of that, Eli’s letter fluttered from the pages of my book. I bent to the ground, picked it up, read it. The paper felt damply wrinkled, as if an entire season’s worth of seaboard air had seeped into its fibers. I listened to the sound of Sarah’s breathing, the little dog curled up beside her.

I did take the letter downstairs eventually. I hadn’t gone completely insane, only enough to sit down at the desk and start to write a letter of my own. Dear Charlie, I wrote. Then I brought the pen to my lips. It was a good pen, a uni-ball, the kind I used—back when I worked—to underline passages in books (I’d never liked highlighters) and to make notes on pages of my dissertation.