The Last September: A Novel

But this was late summer, and unseasonably warm. You didn’t need to be a dolphin to go swimming, and on Charlie’s last day he had already been in the water by the time Sarah woke up from her morning nap. At eleven thirty, he carried her into the extra bedroom I used as a study. If I’d run my hand through his hair, I would have felt the leftover grit of salt water. But I didn’t run my hand through his hair because I was too angry. I was generally angry at Charlie that fall, and it didn’t help, his tendency to wander into the room where he knew I was trying to work. Sarah still wore nothing but a diaper, and obviously not a clean one. Between jobs since his restaurant failed, Charlie had spent the morning working on reshingling the house, which belonged to his father. Like Sarah, he was half naked; he wore khaki shorts and no shirt. Ignoring my pointed glance, he lay down on the worn, woven rug, crossing his long legs at the ankles. His curly blond head rested on his hands with his elbows pointing toward the ceiling. Sarah squatted about six inches away, her gaze focused on her father, concentrating in that intense toddler way—almost as if she knew these hours constituted her last chance to see him alive. Remembering that look, I like to think of Charlie’s face imprinting itself on her subconscious, the memory as intrinsic as the strands of his DNA. Sarah was a thoughtful child who already had an impressive vocabulary—twenty words that she said regularly, more popping up here and there. But she was slower to walk. She hadn’t begun crawling until past her first birthday; she often stood up on her own, her face scrunched in a grimace as if she were planning to walk, but she had yet to risk a step.

I sat at my desk, reading a collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters to her sister-in-law. My dissertation was on these letters, their hidden code. Charlie had promised to watch Sarah but instead was letting his parenting time spill into mine—lounging with only one halfhearted eye on his daughter. I tried not to move my eyes from the text. If I indulged in my usual gaze out at Cape Cod Bay, it might imply availability. I’d spent the early morning with Sarah and would have her again in the afternoon. Now was the time for Charlie to remove himself and our child from my work space. Staring down with unnatural concentration, I marked a line that I had already underlined many times, grooves surrounding it so deeply that you could almost read a sentence on the next page through the wear. Sue, you can stay or go. I dragged my pen beneath it, drew another large star in the margin, then put down my pen and sighed.

Just as Charlie raised his eyes to mine, Sarah teetered to her feet. She pushed up with one hand on the teepee of her father’s crooked elbow. Then she let go, picked up one bare foot, and stepped closer to him. I pushed my book aside. This was the moment I’d been waiting for, checking milestone charts, harassing the pediatrician.

“Did she just take a step?” I asked, as if I hadn’t seen it myself.

Sarah broke into a smile. Her fat little legs began to shake with the effort. Charlie and I froze as she lifted her foot to step again, then collapsed in a triumphant, diapered heap on his chest.

“Step,” Sarah said, her voice filled with the finality of the achievement, and the prospect of a new world of movement.

Charlie got to his feet and swooped Sarah over his head in one fluid motion, so her white curls grazed the exposed beams of the sloped, second-story ceiling. Two identical pairs of blue eyes smiled at each other. Everywhere Sarah and I went people asked, “Is she yours?” assuming I must be the small, dark-eyed nanny.

With a smile that mirrored his rosy mirror self, Charlie pretended to take a congratulatory bite out of Sarah’s cheek. Not a giggler, she didn’t laugh, but just looked quietly and enormously pleased. Clearly she understood her accomplishment and all that it presaged. She had spent months thinking it through, and finally the road lay passable before her. We cheered, Charlie bringing her down to his chest so I could step in for a family hug. His bare skin felt warm against my forearms. Sarah’s spicy baby scent bonded the three of us into a single entity. We could hear the flutter and chirp of swallows outside our open window as they staged for their journey south. The Saturday Cove church bells chimed the half hour, mingling with the salty breeze off the ocean. Our home’s musty disrepair transformed, as it sometimes did, into something almost magical.

“My God,” Charlie said. “I love you so much.”

He squeezed his hand at my waist, a degree of fervency, as if he had something to prove to me. So I said the only possible thing, reflecting the dominant, if not sole, emotion: “I love you, too.”

Charlie kissed my forehead. And Sarah—who deeply approved of any kind of affection—put one hand on her father’s bare shoulder and one hand on my T-shirted breast. Then she laughed.