The Last September: A Novel

We walked downstairs to the kitchen phone. I dialed 1 and then the number written in neat, slanted handwriting next to the words Mom and Dad. I listened to it ring once, twice, three times, not sure if I would prefer a live human being or the answering machine.

“Hello,” said a male voice, too young to be Eli’s dad.

“Mr. Moss?” I said.

I heard an amused pause and could imagine Charlie’s face, wry and smiling. “Sort of,” he said. “Though probably not the one you’re looking for. Can I take a message for him?”

“It’s about Eli.” I tried to pitch my voice lower, so Charlie wouldn’t recognize it. Then I remembered all those weeks and months of silence. Why would he remember my voice after forgetting me so immediately, so resolutely? Something inside me hardened. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but Eli had an accident. He jumped off the roof of a fraternity house. He’ll be okay, but somebody needs to come out here. Right away.” The silence on the other end had stopped smiling. “I’m sorry,” I said again.

Charlie spoke with a faint pause after each word: “Why would he jump off a roof?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He was acting strange. He was acting wrong. I think there’s something wrong.”

“Brett?”

Charlie’s voice suddenly steadied, as if his future self—the one who knew and loved me—had managed to reach backward in time to recognize my voice. “Is this Brett?”

My hand went numb. Maybe Charlie wanted to think this phone call was just a cruel joke, a sick way to get back at him for not loving me. Or maybe he thought I had pushed Eli off the roof. In that moment I felt almost as if I had.

“No,” I said, scrambling for another name. I didn’t want this to be about me and Charlie. Eli needed his family. I had to step back, invisible. In my dorm room, on the bedside table, lay Walter Jackson Bate’s fat biography of John Keats, dog-eared and underlined. “This is Fanny,” I said. “Fanny Brawne.”

Charlie didn’t say anything. What twentieth-century person is named Fanny? I wondered if he recognized this name from a class where he’d sat listening, not having read the text, or if he just computed the oddness. More likely he hadn’t even heard me. I pictured Charlie holding the receiver and realized that I couldn’t remember his face, not exactly, only its outline, and the color of his eyes: a dim reflection of Eli.

I gave him the name of the hospital where Eli had been taken, repeating the number that one of the officers recited. Then I said good-bye and hung up. The officers stood staring at me. One of them reached out to pat my shoulder, but to me the gesture didn’t feel comforting. This was the first time I would experience it, the particular sense of trauma, Eli’s madness still thrumming just below my skin.

But if Eli’s family was now marshaling to come for him, this could be my only chance to see him again without running into Charlie. “Hey,” I asked the officers. “Can you give me a ride to the hospital? So I can see how he’s doing?”

“Sure,” they said. “But they probably won’t let you see him. Only family, I’d guess, at this point.”

Which let me off the hook, an immediate combination of relief and disappointment. I remembered both ways Eli’s hand had felt—slapping across my forehead and sliding out of my grip.

Over the next days and weeks and months, when Eli left Colorado and never returned, I tried to write a poem about that moment when he leapt off the roof and out of my life. Although it never materialized properly, it started to form in my head before we even left his house, the first lines interrupted by a creaky and mournful meow. Peering from behind a beat up armchair was the scraggly gray kitten, now a cat, brushed and plump under Eli’s care. The officers gave me a moment to search for a cat carrier and supplies. I left the house with Tab and kept her with me for over a decade, till she died under the wheels of a car, just up the road from the Mosses’ summer home.





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