“Eli came to get me.” Telling him about Mrs. Moss’s illness, I pitched my voice low, trying to inspire him to do the same. It didn’t work.
“But you lied to me,” Ladd said. “You flat-out lied to me. You stood in one place and told me you were in another.”
“Because,” I said, my voice almost a whisper now, “I knew you would react this way, exactly this way. I knew you would be angry.”
“Angry,” Ladd yelled. “Of course I’m angry. You lied! You’re with Charlie fucking Moss!”
From a dead tree beside the bog, a red-tailed hawk swooped toward the road, landing on prey too small for me to see in this light, the gloaming.
“Not Charlie,” I said. “Eli. Eli came to get me.”
“Where are you staying? Whose room?”
“Nobody’s room. It’s not like that.”
“It’s not like people are sleeping in rooms?”
“Ladd,” I said, admonishing. Years later I would see Charlie employ this same technique, responding to my justifiable rage and anguish as if they weren’t caused by his actions, only beneath both our dignity.
“I’m coming to get you,” Ladd said. Finally, with this pronouncement, his voice evened out.
“You can’t.”
“Oh, I think I can.”
“She’s dying,” I hissed. “You can’t storm in here and cause a scene when she’s dying.”
“Then you come home. Right now.”
“Eli drove me. I don’t have my car.”
“I don’t understand,” Ladd said. It was his turn to whisper. His voice might have broken my heart had I not already steeled myself the way a person in my position—a person doing what I did—must. “Who are these people to you,” Ladd went on, “that you have to be there at a time like this?”
It seemed to me that the question answered itself via the posing. So that all I could say was, “I’m sorry. I’ll call you later.” When I hung up, Charlie stood next to me, hands in the pocket of his Baja hoodie.
“Everything okay?” he said.
“Yes.”
I didn’t want to frighten him with how quickly my allegiance had shifted. Already I had removed my engagement ring and zipped it into the inside pocket of my purse. As far as the Mosses, apart from Charlie and Eli, my presence had scarcely been registered. Everything occurring in the house, from their mother’s slow exit to Eli’s disintegration, was so fraught and elemental that all social mores had evaporated. Tonight I would sleep in one of Charlie’s T-shirts, folding the same clothes I’d been wearing two days straight, leaving them on a chair to put on again tomorrow.
“Let’s not go back in just yet,” Charlie said, closing the distance between us the phone call had imposed.
As he stood next to me, I slipped my phone into his back pocket. The two of us faced west. We could see the sun, setting, flooding the red bog with orange light. Steps to the east, the paved road extended upward, toward a hill, so quiet it felt hard to imagine any car had ever driven on it, though I myself had come this way, driving Eli in his mother’s car, barely twenty-four hours ago. As I looped my arm through the crook of Charlie’s elbow, I felt a shiver at the small of my back, not just because a chill descended with the night air but because exactly as the light dissipated a shadow appeared, up where the road started to curve downhill. A tall man, newly thin, walking with long-legged strides. Something wrong about his gait, just slightly lopsided, and carrying with him the noise of conversation, though no one accompanied him. Engaging his voices, a phrase I would learn before the day was over.
Charlie stepped sideways. My arm slipped out of its spot and slapped against my body. As he started to head up the road, toward his brother, I reached out to stop him. Charlie turned back toward me.
“Listen,” he said. “This has to be done quickly. Because he can’t be in there like that. Not now.”
“Okay,” I said. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to provoke him. I need you to come with me, all right? So you can be a witness.”
The Last September: A Novel
Nina de Gramont's books
- The Bourbon Kings
- The English Girl: A Novel
- The Harder They Come
- The Light of the World: A Memoir
- The Sympathizer
- The Wonder Garden
- The Wright Brothers
- The Shepherd's Crown
- The Drafter
- The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall
- The House of Shattered Wings
- The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel
- The Secrets of Lake Road
- The Dead House
- The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen
- The Blackthorn Key
- The Girl from the Well
- Dishing the Dirt
- Down the Rabbit Hole
- Where the Memories Lie
- Dance of the Bones
- The Hidden
- The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady
- The Marsh Madness
- The Night Sister
- Tonight the Streets Are Ours
- The House of the Stone
- Last Bus to Wisdom
- In a Dark, Dark Wood
- Make Your Home Among Strangers
- A Spool of Blue Thread
- H is for Hawk
- Hausfrau
- It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War
- See How Small
- A God in Ruins
- Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
- Dietland
- Orhan's Inheritance
- A Little Bit Country: Blackberry Summer
- Did You Ever Have A Family
- Signal
- Nemesis Games
- Lair of Dreams
- Trouble is a Friend of Mine
- A Curious Beginning
- What We Saw
- Beastly Bones
- Driving Heat
- Shadow Play
- Cinderella Six Feet Under
- A Beeline to Murder
- Sweet Temptation
- Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between
- Dark Wild Night