The Last September: A Novel

I pictured Charlie. I pictured Charlie. I pictured Charlie.

Once in the fall when I was hugely pregnant with Sarah, Charlie and I walked along the beach from his father’s house to the bluff right below Daniel’s house. He wore these jeans and that flannel shirt. We found a fox, dead on the rocks, its fur a brilliant and burnished orange, its bared teeth gleaming white and perfect. He wanted to pick it up, float it back out to sea, but I didn’t want him to touch it. “Anyway,” I said, “it will just end up back here, won’t it?” Later we called the Audubon Society, and they said it had probably drowned trying to navigate the rocks at high tide. It had already floated out to sea and then returned. In the morning, Charlie walked back out and dragged it up, beyond the rocks, in the dunes where the tide would not be able to reclaim it. I wondered if its bones lay there still, bleached by the sun, the teeth still gleaming, sharp and curved as if they were carved out of marble.

Sometimes I’d thought of our marriage as happy, and sometimes I’d thought of it as troubled. I’d imagined it continuing and ending in both veins, I had felt exalted and I had felt trapped. And in the midst of those pivotal moments—dramatic or tumultuous or romantic—there had been simple everyday pieces of life, lived out beside one another. These were the pieces I couldn’t imagine living without. I couldn’t give them up when I found out about Deirdre. I didn’t see how I could give them up now.

Neither, it seemed, could Sarah. She hung on to his T-shirt all day, mostly pressing it to her cheek, but sometimes just slinging it over her shoulder, much the way Charlie used to cook with a dish towel over his.

AFTER MRS. DUFFY MADE dinner and then went to sleep in the room down the hall, I lay awake for hours, watching the overhead fan rearrange the darkness into regular, swirling patterns. Earlier, I had remembered old photographs of the Lindbergh kidnapping, the ladder leaned against the side of the house, and closed the window. But enough air had entered during the past few days that it still smelled salty and fresh. In the moving shadows, Sarah’s face looked perfectly at rest, a faint smile turning her lips upward, her little fist closed around the collar of Charlie’s shirt. She looked very much like the ultrasound photo I still had, somewhere, perhaps tucked into one of the Emily Dickinson books or perhaps back at the Moss house. A fierce imperative rose in my chest, the same instinct that led me to close the window, as if I needed to protect her not only from imminent danger but my own compulsive reordering of the past.

Because no matter how I arranged things, it felt like my whole life unfolded in a series of interactions with Eli, all of them creating a string of worry beads in my mind. I could roll each bead one at a time between my thumb and forefinger before moving on to the next. Starting with that first day I ever saw him, trying out for the musical, mirroring each other’s movements across the dance studio. Summoning me to the party where I met Charlie, or filling my room with balloons, or rescuing that scraggly kitten. Holding my newborn baby. Pacing the lawn, decorated in Charlie’s blood.