The Last September: A Novel

“Okay,” Ladd said, stretching the word out carefully, over too many syllables.

Just then Eli banged out of the front door wearing nothing but a pair of maroon boxers, decorated with beagles and bugle horns. I turned my head toward him, sharply enough that any normal person would have read the signal. Go away, please. I need to talk privately. But Eli didn’t seem to realize I was there. He swaggered to the edge of the deck, almost exactly where I stood—close enough that his bare elbow brushed my upper arm. Then he whipped out his penis and started to pee, a broad arc of morning urine gushing out in front of us. I took the phone away from my ear and stepped back. From across the lawn, Charlie emerged at the top of the beach stairs, carrying the chair I’d brought down for his mother. He strode across the grass, his steps slowing again as he got closer, taking in the scene, his face falling. It was an expression I would come to know well, the particular descent of his features when confronted with the change in his brother.

By now I held the phone down, by my side. “Brett? Brett?” Ladd’s tinny voice called to me, useless, two million miles away.

“I’ll call you back,” I said, maybe not loud enough for him to hear, and turned off the phone.

From halfway across the lawn, from across all these fresh disasters, Charlie stared at me. Behind him, daylight widened over low tide, the expanse of beach now littered with wet rocks. Eli, finished, stood between us, swaying slightly, tucking himself back into his beagle-and-bugle boxers. I moved sideways across the deck, stepping off its opposite edge and onto the grass, toward Charlie.

A FEW HOURS LATER, Charlie walked ahead of me as we picked our way across the rocky bluff. I loved the way his back looked, his thin white T-shirt and Bermuda bathing trunks. When we stepped from the rocks onto the sand, he pulled off his T-shirt. I hadn’t brought a bathing suit—I was still wearing the clothes I’d taught in the day before, the blouse and knee-length skirt, so I just stood there and watched as he trotted into the water. I didn’t know yet about Charlie’s strange faith in salt water. He believed it could cure anything from poison ivy to cancer.

All the words anyone could use to describe Charlie, my past experience with him—anybody’s past experience—were steadily becoming eclipsed by the kindness and love he showed his mother. By his nearness. By the way he seemed to not just want but need me.

I stood there on the sand and watched him swim out, much farther than I ever would have dared. And Charlie stopped swimming a moment. I could see him, getting his bearings, scanning the shore, locating me. I waved and couldn’t see—but imagined—him smiling. She beckons, and the woods start. Goose bumps formed on my arms and legs, and they felt like a swelling. Like my body could no longer contain everything that lived inside it, only wanting to burst outward, to join the ocean air.

A PERSON BETTER SKILLED at deception would have come up with a less verifiable alibi. When I stopped returning Ladd’s calls, he phoned my mother, an even less practiced liar—she didn’t think for a moment to cover for me. Ladd drove by my apartment and saw my car, parked in its usual spot. When I checked my phone again toward evening, the many messages left by him and my mother were fraught with increasing alarm.

I went outside to call Ladd, so I could shield Charlie from this fallout. If Charlie and I talked about Ladd at all during those few days, I can’t remember it. So much else was happening. Instead of walking toward the ocean, I headed up the road, to the dirt path that lapped the cranberry bog.

“The Mosses’,” Ladd said when I finally told him the truth. He erupted so loudly I had to hold the phone away from my ear for a moment. “How the fuck could you be at the Mosses’?”