The Last September: A Novel

“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 beside 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.”