The Last September: A Novel

All his angles had gone soft. A potbelly balanced on top of long, skinny legs. Despite the heat, he wore khakis and a striped oxford shirt, sweat stains visible under his arms. Somehow I knew without asking that he had not gone to med school.

I reached out my hand and Eli took it, then turned my palm over and brought it to his lips. The gesture seemed so natural and sweet that I found myself smiling. Ladd’s eyelids fluttered open and he propped himself up on his elbows, squinting into the sun.

“Hey,” Eli said. “Ladd Williams?”

“Yeah,” Ladd said as Eli’s identity registered. “Hey, Eli.”

It had never occurred to me to ask if Ladd knew the Moss family. How many thousands of people spent summers on Cape Cod? I’d imagined visiting Eli at his summer house, but if I ever knew the name of the town I’d long since forgotten it. Eli pointed at Ladd. The pudgy finger seemed nothing at all to do with the lithe, charismatic boy I remembered.

“You know Brett?” Eli said to him. And then, picking up on the unmistakable currents between us: “Are you, like, with Brett?”

“Yeah,” Ladd said. “How do you know Brett?”

He had directed the question at Eli but clearly meant for me to answer. So I said, “We went to college together.”

“We were best friends in college,” Eli said.

For me, college had lasted four years. But Eli’s time had been cut short. If things had happened differently, we would have stayed best friends. I wanted to tell him that I still had his cat—that at this very moment she was probably sitting on my pillow at home in a patch of sunlight. If he’d seemed more like the old Eli, I would have. But it was a little like running into the identical twin of someone you know very well. He was enough Eli that I thought he might want Tab back, and at the same time he wasn’t enough Eli that I would trust him with her.

“Damn,” he said. “Another girlfriend in common with Charlie. He is going to laugh.”

Ladd turned his head toward me sharply. “You went out with Charlie Moss?”

“Not exactly,” I said, trying to remember if the incident with Charlie ever came up in Ladd’s and my debriefing of past romances. Generally he did not respond well to discussions of other men, so I tended to give him Cliffs Notes only. I put my hand over his.

Eli said to Ladd, “I saw your uncle Daniel last week. He said you went back to school.”

“Yeah,” Ladd said. “Finally.” Ladd had scandalized his family by dropping out of Cornell after some girl broke his heart. He spent six years on a fishing boat in Alaska before he went back to finish at UMass. “That’s where I met Brett. She was the TA for one of my classes.”

I could feel Ladd’s jumpy insecurity pulsing through his fingers and into my palm and knew he wouldn’t go back to normal until we could be alone, and I could fill him in about Charlie. But Eli wasn’t going to let that happen anytime soon. He sat down next to me. I pulled on my T-shirt and asked what he was up to these days.

“Spending the summer with Mom and Dad,” he said. “You’re back in school, huh? Advanced degree? PhD or something?”

“Yes,” I said, with a pang of survivor’s guilt that my brain hadn’t robbed me of that opportunity.

“That’s great,” Eli said. “Really great.” He turned his gaze out toward the bow of the boat, the blue waves, the mainland in the distance. Ladd finally put on a baseball cap, and the three of us rode together all the way to Hyannis.

???

AS THE FERRY PULLED into port, I excused myself and went into the bathroom. I splashed my face with tinny water and stared hard into the warped, filmy mirror. When I came out, the boat had nearly emptied. All the passengers spilled into the parking lot, collecting luggage. Back on land, the day seemed overly infused with color—the blues of the water and sky, the white of the boats, the green lawn, and the reds and yellows and pinks of cheerful summer clothing. By the time I walked down the metal plank, Ladd stood waiting for me with our luggage—his good leather valise and my faded canvas duffel bag.

“Where’d Eli go?” I asked, when I got down to the parking lot.