The Last September: A Novel

IS IT POSSIBLE, IN memory, to go back to a place that means so many different things? I know that on this particular day, the first time I saw the Moss house, it was dark by the time Eli and I arrived. But my mind provides floodlights with the strength of day, as if my first glimpse took place at noon rather than past sunset. It includes all the details that would have been invisible to me. As the two of us walked through the front door, the whole house smelled sour and antiseptic, like death and sorrow. Eli added the incongruous odor of sweat and cigarettes.

Hospice had been set up for their mother, and I felt not only like an interloper myself but for delivering Eli—his disturbed and disturbing energy—to a sick woman’s bedside. I couldn’t see the ocean view through the dark windows, and I didn’t notice the brine scent off the ocean, overshadowed as it was by the one thing on earth that’s more primal. We only had to take a few steps into the house to see through the open doorway of the downstairs guestroom, now converted to a stage for a last exit. Several people crowded into that room around a bed, but my eyes fell immediately on the back of a head with blond ringlets, the sort of blond ringlets you’d expect to see on a toddler—the sort I would see on a toddler, his toddler, not so far off in the future. And it suddenly felt awful, appearing at the most private scene imaginable.

At the same time I thought: Turn around, Charlie. Turn around and see me.

Charlie turned around. His face looked pale and stricken. For the first time, I noticed a small circle of colorless moles, just above his right jawline. His cheeks looked puffy, his eyes faintly swollen.

“Brett,” Charlie said.

He stood up and walked out of the room, toward me. I could see his discombobulation, his grief, giving way to a moment of relief. Someone had arrived who could hold him. He must have noticed Eli, standing behind me. Clearly Eli was the reason I’d come, to support my friend, to bring him here (though of course he only needed to be brought because he’d come to get me). But Charlie, who seemed to think I’d come for him, gathered me up in his arms, pulling me in tight as humanly possible. He pressed his forehead into the crook of my neck. His hands tightened on my back, the fingers that already felt so familiar and familial, shaking there, taut and possessive and completely within their rights, asking me for everything.

HAD THIS BEEN ELI’S plan? To bring me to Charlie? He’d always wanted to keep me away from Charlie. But maybe I was one small gift before their mother departed and Eli himself went completely off the rails. Or maybe that reasoning was just mine, trying to piece together logical motives where none ever existed.

All I know is this: Charlie needed someone. Eli, by design or coincidence, delivered someone to him in the form of me. And I played along. Did Eli disappear, or did I desert him? I barely remember him that evening, what he did or where he was. Instead I concentrated on his brother. When the time came to go to sleep—the guest room already given over to their mother—I went upstairs with Charlie, my phone buzzing away, unanswered, in the purse I’d left on the sunporch. And it wasn’t that I didn’t feel pangs of guilt and conscience toward Ladd. It was just that the pangs I felt toward Charlie were that much stronger.

In the morning, we came downstairs together, Charlie and I. Mr. Moss stood in the kitchen, pouring coffee for himself and a nurse. If he wondered about my presence or identity he didn’t say anything. His wife was days away from dying, and he couldn’t think about anything else.

“She wants to sit out by the water,” Mr. Moss said to Charlie.