The Last September: A Novel

He put Julien back at the beginning of the maze, installed a new piece of cheese at the end, and let him go. Newly christened, Julien executed the maze once, twice, three times. So of course I had no choice but to write Eli’s term paper on the homicidal fickleness of Count Vronsky. In fact, on the day Charlie died that very paper lay upstairs in a box in their father’s house, its edges curled and yellow, its print faded except for the clear, red, encircled A.

AT SOME POINT THAT spring, Eli and Wendy broke up, and I acquired a boyfriend named Franc, a Swedish chemistry major who dressed, I would realize years later, like Charlie—in batik T-shirts and crinkly Indian button-downs. I told myself that I didn’t think about Charlie anymore, but truthfully his disappearance lived on—tucked somewhere between my ribs as a palpable and continuing ache. Although Franc had a jealous streak and often objected, Eli was still my main friend, the person I spent the most time with when I wasn’t studying. Eli was quick to laugh but also willing to be silent; the two of us could walk for miles together without ever saying a word, and at the same time, when we wanted, we could talk about anything. Only the topic of Charlie was a strange blank between us—Eli careful since that day in Muenzinger to omit his brother’s name when discussing future plans, or telling me stories about his past.

“You don’t have to pretend he doesn’t exist,” I said one day in April. We were playing hooky to ski on the last day of the season at Monarch. On the chairlift, our legs dangled heavily as we rode up over the slopes, rocks peeking treacherously through the snow that remained.

“Who?” Eli said, and we both laughed. Then he said, “It’s too bad, though. If it weren’t for all that, you could come to the Cape this summer for a visit.”

He’d told me about his house there, right on the bay, the summers sailing and swimming and building sand castles. “I like to build them out on the rocks at low tide,” he said, “and then watch the water swarm around them, so they look like they’re floating. They look like ancient ruins.”

“Sounds beautiful.”

I was half hoping he’d invite me anyway. Maybe if he did, Charlie would realize that he loved me. The chairlift slowed down and we glided off, slightly different directions, before turning our skis and meeting at the top of Ticaboo. Eli did not mention the Cape again—not that day or any other time. I understood that he didn’t want to exclude me but protect me.

That summer, living at home in Randall, Vermont, I waited tables at the new French bistro and did some research work for my mother. An old high school friend and I drove to Maine to hike up Mount Katahdin. On the way back, when we stopped on the rocky coast, the water was too cold to contemplate swimming, and I wondered how it was on Cape Cod this time of year, if Eli and Charlie were swimming. I got a few emails from Eli but none inviting me to visit and none mentioning his brother. I wondered if they talked about me at all or if my name was something to be carefully avoided.

In the fall, Franc and I picked up more or less where we’d left off, and for the first couple months of school so did Eli and I—to the extent that Franc could bear it. “He hovers too close to you,” Franc would say, and he wasn’t a fan of Eli’s birthday gesture, filling my room with balloons. I tried to explain it wasn’t romantic, just whimsical, but with the language barrier I had a hard time explaining the difference between the two words. It became easier to spend time away from Eli, who was very busy anyway, with the work he had to do for his BURST grant. So by late October, when I ran into him at a Pub Club, it didn’t seem strange that we hadn’t seen each other for nearly two weeks.

“Brett,” Eli called to me from across the room just after I’d poured my first beer. Franc was back in his off-campus apartment, studying for a sociology exam. I turned toward the sound of Eli’s voice. The sight of him startled me. Two weeks didn’t seem nearly long enough to justify his physical change. He had shorn his blond hair into a buzz cut and lost a considerable amount of weight, making his jaw appear pronounced and razor sharp. I remember thinking that the only way to lose so much weight so quickly would be to stop eating altogether.