The Last September: A Novel

But he wasn’t there to hear, not really, his eyes open now, but staring off toward who knows where. While I understood exactly what had happened, and could press my face against my knees, seeing it all, until the first signs of light arranged themselves in the sky, and I managed to blink into the world around me. Eli was gone.

A LITTLE WHILE BEFORE—PERHAPS an hour, perhaps less—Sarah reached out for her mother in the searching nighttime way she had. I can picture her exactly, the way she would have sat up in bed, accustomed enough to the dog to be additionally affronted by her absence. “Mommy,” she called into the darkness. It would not have occurred to her to climb out of bed. She expected prompt and attentive service. “Mommy,” she called again, and then once more, before bursting into anguished and indignant sobs.

From down the hall came Mrs. Duffy in her nightgown. “My heart stopped when I saw you gone,” she told me later. She picked up Sarah and gave her a kiss, bounced her for a moment, then carried her through the upstairs, opening every door, even the wide closet. I imagine Sarah still holding on to Charlie’s shirt, pressing it to her tear-swollen face, because that’s what she did for the next few years—held on to that shirt, cuddled it and clung to it, until it was frayed and worn to near transparency.

Sarah was too sleepy and upset to object to Mrs. Duffy’s carrying her, with one careful hand on the railing, walking down the steep steps, and then peering into every downstairs room. In the kitchen, Mrs. Duffy dialed Ladd’s cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail. So she called the police and then took a flashlight from the utility drawer and walked outside in the predawn, down the path to Ladd’s cottage, where she found the light on, Ladd unable to sleep, sitting at the table composing a letter he never did manage to send me.

I WALKED ACROSS THE grass, now damp with dew. Lightfoot was nowhere to be seen. When I crested the top of the beach stairs I could see them, down by the rocks, Eli pacing barefoot in the surf, writing on his pants with that imaginary pen, while the little dog gamboled around his feet as if it were a game. When I got down to them, she took a break to run and greet me, her face ecstatic, a family reunited. Whereas Eli didn’t seem to register me at all, his eyes on the ground, muttering and pacing in an increasingly smaller circle, until he was practically pivoting on one leg.

“Eli,” I said, longing to break through so that he could tell his story when someone else arrived, and be believed. Instead Eli put his hands over his ears again and roared, loud as an injured lion. A sound from the Serengeti, here in the placid American night. Was there anyone in the neighboring houses to hear? If they did, would they stand and go to their windows to investigate? And then would the innocuous sea air, the comforting sound of the ocean, allay their fears and send them back to bed? As if the sound existed only in their dreams.

Down here on the beach with Eli, there was no immunity to the sorrow that roar contained, for his murdered brother, or his ruined psyche, or both. Eli stood quiet a moment, staring out at the waves, as if he had silenced the voices for at least a moment. I walked toward him and stopped just short of the surf. And then another sound, a voice or echo. Along with the sound of sirens.