The Last September: A Novel

I nodded and then pitched forward, sobbing as I’d needed to sob for these past weeks, in somebody’s arms.

DANIEL WAS RIGHT. THERE would be a time of crying, a long time, no doubt more complicated than his had been, all those years ago. When Sylvia died, he didn’t have to take care of a small child or think about the fate of her killer. He didn’t have to blame her, or himself, or worry about Eli, who stayed in the hospital for two months and then went to live in the Cape house, which Bob Moss took off the market. As the years unfolded, there would be more unravelings, more descents, and they would all belong to me. But for now a social worker and nurse came by, once every three weeks, to give him an injection instead of trusting him to take the meds on his own. So that on the one-year anniversary of Charlie’s death, I drove from Amherst to the Cape, and Eli and I walked to the end of the jetty, where we smashed colored bottles as tribute, so that in another year or less they would wash up on shore as the sea glass Charlie loved to collect. Then we took some glass already smoothed over by years and the tide and left it on Charlie’s gravestone in the Blue Creek cemetery while Sarah rearranged nearby flowers from a recent funeral.

BUT SO MANY MONTHS before then, the morning of the night without sleep—the day Deirdre was arrested and Eli reappeared, after Mrs. Duffy fed us all—I took Sarah down to the beach, my eyes dry at least for this outing. It comforted me the way Sarah took the wide world in stride, and I picked her up and swung her to my hip. She didn’t protest but let me carry her, one damp little fist closing around the strap of my bathing suit. The tide was high and gentle, turning the bay into the world’s biggest swimming pool. The water felt cold, not summer anymore, but I persevered. Sarah screeched a little as it hit her feet, tightening her grip around me, but I pulled her away, my hands underneath her shoulders. I held her at arm’s length and ticktocked her above the water, letting her feet skim through the surface. She laughed, and I pulled her back to me and continued walking. We had passed the low tide point and my feet sunk into silty ocean sand. I knelt down so that the water surrounded both our bodies, Sarah shivering but knowing it must be safe because she trusted her mother. With my hands pressed against her sides, she paddled and splashed and laughed under a bright afternoon sky. Part dolphin, like her father. We swam for as long as the cold allowed, then trudged back up to shore. I dressed her in a terry-cloth cover up and pulled on one of Charlie’s sweatshirts, and we played in the sand and tide pools for a long time. The blood pumping through my veins felt new, thicker, allowing me to persist clear-headed despite the lack of sleep and everything that had changed since yesterday, and since the first days of September.