The Last September: A Novel

Charlie and I went outside through the dining room, across the back deck. He showed me where the lawn chairs were stacked underneath it, and as he went back inside I chose the most substantial, least frayed one and carried it down to the shoreline. High tide, the rocks were covered by water, leaving only a small, smooth expanse of sand. I placed the chair close enough that Charlie’s mother would be able to rest her feet in the surf, if she wanted.

When I looked up at the beach stairs, Charlie stood there at the top, cresting the landing with his mother cradled in his arms. She wore a scarf around her head, its edges fluttered against his face, and an afghan wrapped around her shoulders. She couldn’t have weighed more than seventy pounds. Charlie took each step so carefully, his arms grasping her firmly enough that I could see veins and sinews tighten. If ever a moment redeemed someone, this was it. Nobody had ever done anything as carefully, as intentionally, as Charlie carrying his mother down the stairs. For her, the morning fog had cleared, and the sky turned out a gorgeous blue. The day offered up exactly the right notes of summer and autumn—warming sun, cooling breeze. The kind that welcomes you gladly to the world, or sends you off with love.

At the bottom of the steps, Charlie’s muscles relaxed the barest bit. Just a few steps more, toward me, and he lowered his mother into the chair. Her arms slid off his shoulders, their cheeks bumping in a way that would have been awkward if it hadn’t been a mother and son. By now everyone else had arrived, except Eli—Charlie’s father and a nurse and a plump woman in a Talbots cardigan. I was still standing between the chair and the water—Mrs. Moss’s feet nearly touched mine, but if she noticed me or wondered who I was, she didn’t give any indication. I wanted to kneel down and take off her slippers, or adjust the afghan that had slipped off her shoulders, but I worried the face of a stranger would startle her or that she would think I’d arrived from somewhere else, to take her away.

It was Charlie who knelt in front of her, pulling the blanket back over her shoulders and slipping off her moccasins. Her skin seemed so thin I worried it would slide off along with the shoes. Mrs. Moss sighed and edged her feet forward, dipping them into the salt water. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she said. “Thank you, Charlie.”

He edged around her, next to me, leaning into my shoulder, as if I had been planted in that exact spot for only one reason—to keep him standing.

AFTER CHARLIE CARRIED HIS mother back up to the house, I finally got around to calling Ladd. I found my purse on the sunporch, walked out to the back deck, and pressed the first number I had on speed dial. My fingers shook slightly as I brought the phone to my ear. Even I wasn’t dishonest enough to tell myself I was comforting an old friend. Charlie and I hadn’t made love, but we’d slept in the same bed, wrapped up together, arms around each other. When he woke, he had propped himself up on one elbow and stroked my head.

“Thank you, Brett,” he’d said. He had ridiculously long eyelashes. Later he would tell me that when he was a child, heavy snow would clump in those lashes, forcing his eyes shut. That morning I wondered—as I would many times over the coming years—how a man with so many girlish features managed to look not the slightest bit feminine. When Charlie kissed me, I kissed him back. Elated. Opportunistic. Despite everything that should have clamored in my head—the dying mother and the disturbed brother and the abandoned fiancé—elated.

Now, standing outside at the very edge of the deck, looking out toward the ocean, the day seemed too pretty for words. The gray shingles on the wall behind me were already chipping, fading.

“Brett,” Ladd said, on the other end of the phone, his voice tinny through faulty cell phone service. “How’s it going? How’s your mom?”

“She’s fine,” I said. “She needs some help with a research project, they changed her deadline. So I might stay an extra day.”

On the other end of the line, a pause, and I felt like he could see through the phone lines, all the way to Cape Cod, me here at the Moss house. I wondered if he could hear the change in my voice. Suddenly, already: I belonged to somebody else.