The Last September: A Novel

For a while I tried to email Eli, to update him on Tab and find out if he was ever coming back to school. But he never answered. After a month or so went by, I helped his roommates pack up his things to ship back to his parents’ winter house in New York.

“He’s in some swanky hospital outside Boston,” one of the roommates told me. “It’s called McLean.”

I knew about McLean from studying poets and listening to James Taylor. In my mind, it was like a boarding school with rolling green lawns and maybe even a swimming pool and tennis courts. I imagined Eli lying on a grassy hillside under a broad, blue sky, writing poetry in a spiral notebook. That image comforted me, even as the years unfolded without ever hearing from him. Eli went away. He had treatment. He was cured. Maybe when he got out he enrolled in a different college, went on to med school, got married. I pictured an understanding wife who he could be solicitous of the way he’d been with Wendy. My imagination restored him, created the life he should have had.

Which left my own life to unfold. I finished my BA and then waited tables in Randall for a couple years before entering the PhD program at Amherst. Where I met Ladd, who asked me to marry him and then—unwittingly—returned me to the Mosses.

IT HAPPENED LIKE THIS. Seven years after I saw Eli loaded into that ambulance, Ladd and I rode the Hy-Line ferry from Nantucket to Cape Cod. I hadn’t been wearing his engagement ring a full twenty-four hours, and it felt new and heavy and noticeable on my finger. Ladd and I sprawled out on the life vest container at the stern. I wore a bikini top and shorts—at twenty-six, still too young to take skin cancer or premature aging seriously. Through the haze of early July—sunlight and milling passengers—I thought I heard someone call my name. Not sure if I made out the words correctly, I decided I didn’t want to run into anyone, so I kept my eyes shut tight. Those days I felt happiest wrapped in a cocoon with just Ladd. Other people had become, by definition, intruders.

“Brett Mercier,” the voice said again, insistent and determined.

Whoever it was, he lacked the social finesse to know he was being avoided. I peered to one side. Ladd lay asleep next to me. He and I both had dark hair, but in this bright sunlight, on the water, his skin revealed its northern European roots as opposed to my southern by getting redder by the minute. Ladd had thick eyebrows and narrow eyes, making his face look stern, almost craggy. Unlike Charlie’s, it wasn’t a face that everyone in the world would consider handsome. But I did. I knew I should wake him and tell him to put on sunscreen, a hat, something. I sat up, squinting into the sun, my hand coming down to rest on Ladd’s bare leg.

It took several seconds to recognize Eli. In my mind, he had separated into two different people: the great friend who’d always had my back and the scary stranger who’d appeared one night, and then disappeared, taking the original one with him. Now there seemed to be a third one, barely recognizable across these distant years and miles. Not that I wasn’t happy to see him; I just felt like it wasn’t him, not exactly. Eli stood in front of me, blinking under blinding sun on a quiet Atlantic ocean. The most striking similarity to his old self—that last self, anyway—was his hair, cut very short.

He looked dejected that I wasn’t more excited about this chance meeting. Involuntarily, I touched my forehead with the tips of my fingers. Eli was the only person in the world who’d ever hit me. For the first time in ages I found myself wondering again, if it had been an accident.

“Eli,” I finally said, to his goofy and increasingly awkward grin.