The Last September: A Novel

Twice a day an ice-cream truck pulled into the beach parking lot and summoned the children away from plastic shovels and boogie boards. Of the three, Charlie probably missed the truck most often, walking out to the very end of the jetty, jumping from rock to rock, waving to the other two when he reached the end, standing out in the thick of the bay. Ladd would have been more civilized, swimming in races, and sailing, playing tennis. Eli played tennis, too, but what he loved most was mountain biking through the trails behind Daniel Williams’s house, balancing in the deep sand, ducking his head under arches of tree branches.

All his life, when Charlie had no place to go, and no plans left, he came to Saturday Cove. When Ladd was finished with his travels, he came back to Saturday Cove. And Eli. The boy who built sand castles out on the rocks at low tide and watched as the ocean swept in around them. The boy who won science grants, and wanted to be a doctor, and laughed with his whole face, and loved to throw parties. That boy had seeped out of his original shell. Where he had gone I couldn’t say. I only knew that the connective tissue between those three men and me was Eli, just enough left of him to come back to this place, to Saturday Cove, like a homing device that someone else had left behind.

Together, we walked down to the beach.

THE SAND STRETCHED FAR out toward the ocean, littered with seaweed and beach glass and pebbles. When I’d first known Eli, he’d carried a citrusy scent, somewhere between lemon and grapefruit. Ever since he’d gotten sick, even when he was medicated—even when he’d just showered, and wore clean clothes—he carried with him an odor of anxiety and decay, as if the lemon had begun to rot. When we got to the bottom of the beach steps, and he stopped just beside me, his sour sweat overpowered even the low tide. Away from the bath of Daniel’s floodlight, it took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust. Grime caked and pooled in the hollow of Eli’s collarbone, his hair was matted. But the clothes he wore, a white T-shirt from the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, an unbuttoned denim shirt, and khakis, were clean. And they were Charlie’s. Eli couldn’t have been wearing them since that day three weeks ago. Maybe as early as this morning, he had been at the house. Maybe he had been there, hiding, when Ladd collected the rest of Charlie’s clothes. There was no writing on the khakis, but Eli’s hand kept moving as if he were scribbling, an imaginary pen clutched in his right hand. I remembered the jeans he’d been wearing the last time I saw him. What would the writing on them reveal to me if I could manage to decipher it?

“Eli,” I said. “Where have you been?”

He didn’t answer but turned and started walking, toward the public beach, the opposite direction from the Moss house. Darkness settled comfortably around us, but I didn’t want to walk too far and let the morning find us exposed, out on the beach, for everyone to see.

“Eli,” I called, to his departing back. I wished I’d thought to grab my car keys—though the noise of the engine might wake Mrs. Duffy or, worse, Ladd. A stream of words tumbled out of Eli, buzzing around his head like a cloud of mayflies. I said, “I’m going this way.”

I jogged toward the rocky stretch of bluff, which we’d have to pick our way across. Eli lurched around, bone-thin and lumbering, all his natural grace gone. As he walked toward me, I tried to imagine where he’d been, how he’d been eating—if he’d been eating—and how he’d avoided getting picked up by the police.

“When did you get Charlie’s clothes?” I said when he reached me. “Where have you been?”

He waved his hand, shooing my questions away. “Are you ready?” he asked as we stood facing the direction of the rocks, the dark, his childhood home.

I presented my beckoning hand outward, toward the bluff, a ladies-first gesture in reverse. The truth was, I didn’t feel afraid. It was Eli. Even now, he only scared me in theory. Even now—in this florid state, incomprehensible, alarming. I was used to him. Which didn’t mean I was willing to turn my back.