The Last September: A Novel

Ladd raised his hands in surrender and stalked out of the room. For a long moment, it was just the three of us, Sarah, Daniel, and me, silent in the scar of Ladd’s angry departure. It hit me then, the isolation there, the lack of neighboring houses. I felt myself longing for Amherst, the reliable rows of residences, people living side by side—strangers, but there if you needed them. To hear, if you should happen to call out for help.

WHEN I FINALLY WENT downstairs, Mrs. Duffy handed me a glass of sun-brewed iced tea with a sprig of mint. The glass felt cold and alien in my hand. So strange that all these cheerful substances insisted on continuing, existing, expecting me to enjoy them. I carried it out to the deck. From where I stood, I could see Daniel’s car was gone, and I could also see Ladd, out on the beach, sitting in a lawn chair and reading a book. How long had it been since I’d known he was back from Honduras? More than two weeks, and I hadn’t yet gotten around to asking him what it had been like or what he planned to do next. Ladd was the same age as Charlie, after all, and hadn’t managed to get himself any more situated in a career. I guess I’d never thought about that much, partly because Ladd had enough money of his own to stay afloat, even if he only ever wafted from one adventure to another. Or maybe I’d just never thought about it because I wasn’t married to him.

I saw exactly what happened. What had Eli meant? And why could I never stop trying to attach meaning and sense to the things he said when by now I should know better? My mind cataloged the things that Eli could and could not have seen. He couldn’t have seen me climbing into Ladd’s lap and kissing him. But he could have seen someone lowering the hammer. Did Eli think it was me? Years ago he had tried to warn me. Maybe he thought that now, not heeding his warning, I had reached my breaking point and killed Charlie myself.

Whatever Eli saw, or imagined, or hallucinated. The day Charlie died, he arrived before sunset. The two of them could have walked down to the water. Afterward Charlie might have sent him upstairs to shower, and maybe that’s when Eli wrote his letter, slipped it into my book. I closed my eyes. Most likely it was a coincidence that he would accuse me of something on the very day I’d committed a crime. If he had even written it that day. Misfiring synapses for once getting lucky.

Out on the beach, Ladd turned a page, his long pale legs stretched out in front of him—they might be sunburned when he came back up to the house. I thought of his aspirations of being a great good man, and how I managed to get in the way, even all those years after leaving him. Upstairs, he had declared himself a suspect by denying that possibility. And I understood the impulse, both of us guilty.

Ladd closed his book and stood to fold the beach chair. I went back into the house and hurried up the stairs, out of sight.

OVER THE NEXT FEW days, pictures of Sylvia began returning to frames and tabletops. Sarah discovered the first one on a side table in the living room. She picked it up in both hands and frowned, deeply disappointed to find the lady in a place where anyone in the world could see her. After returning the picture very carefully to its spot, she opened the drawer beneath it. The little leather envelope remained, but Sarah closed the drawer, then toddled toward the sliding glass door, Lightfoot click-clacking behind her. Sarah placed her hands against the wide pane, staring out at the deck and scrub oak abutting the bluff—too small to see over the dunes and down to the beach. The dog stood beside her, staring out in the same direction, her tail wagging, not understanding why anyone would leave such a door closed.

A loud voice from Daniel’s study made Sarah turn away from the glass door and I took a moment to study my daughter’s face. She looked a little like Eli just then, with the little dog at her heels and the expression of surprise squinching her eyes at the corners. When I first knew Eli, he had reveled in the unexpected. He’d been so unafraid and so kindhearted.