The Last September: A Novel

I wanted to step forward, push him off Charlie. But I was too scared. “Charlie,” I finally said, because Eli seemed so unreachable. “Push him off you.”


Eli’s head snapped away, toward me. Then he stepped off Charlie and stood beside me, docile, hands resting at his side. Charlie sat up, one hand cradling the back of his skull. My eyes had adjusted well enough to see a warm pulse of blood snaking its way through his fingers. I walked around Eli and helped Charlie to his feet. Then I reached into his pocket for my phone. The fall had smashed it into four pieces.

“Go back to the house,” Charlie told me. He pulled off his hoodie, bunched it up, held it to the back of his head. He draped his other arm over Eli’s shoulders. “Call the police. We’ll wait here.”

WHEN I LOOK BACK now I hardly see Eli. I see Charlie. The different words people (including myself) could use to describe him, all of them true by varying degrees. I see all those qualities, the good and the bad. But in that moment I mostly see a kind of valor, and selflessness, that I was never able to find within myself when Eli needed me.

By now darkness had settled in for the night. I trotted through it, toward the only lit house in the neighborhood, the Mosses’, incongruously cheerful, as if a celebration took place behind those bright windows, instead of all this urgent, if equally intoxicating, sorrow.





7


Charlie’s mother died the next day. One son at her side, holding her hand. The other in a hospital lockdown ward. That afternoon I borrowed her station wagon to go to the Marshall’s off Route 6 and buy clothes for a few more days, including a dress I could wear to her funeral.

A close encounter with someone in the throes of psychosis creates a very particular state of fragility. Even when the person is removed, the madness stays behind, inflicted. Moving through my errands, that twin sense of guilt and trauma pixelated at my core, making me feel not quite, entirely, flesh and bone. Across the street, the Verizon store stood as a rebuke, but I didn’t replace my shattered phone. My body tensed imagining the messages Ladd must be leaving. Later at the funeral, I hovered beside Charlie as if I were already his wife; people who hadn’t seen him in a long time assumed I was his wife. Charlie’s face was drained, his bearing shaky. He needed me, a body, to lean into, and I had become mercenary to all other purposes. Not even Ladd’s parents, filing into their pew and casting their uneasy, questioning glances, could drive me from his side. After the service, Charlie grabbed my hand and pulled me along with him to the receiving line. I stood there next to him, with his father and uncles and a cousin or two, Eli conspicuously absent, mourners too polite to ask my identity as they shook my hand and offered condolences. Charlie’s father still didn’t know my name.

Ladd’s parents emerged from the chapel, starting toward the line and then stopping as they saw me there. Paul put his arm around his wife and pointedly led her in the other direction. “Brett,” Rebecca called, over her shoulder, her face pained and confused. But I didn’t go to her. I just stayed with Charlie.

Daniel Williams didn’t run away from me. He walked straight to the line, shaking hands and expressing sympathy. If Charlie knew there should be some kind of discomfort between the two of them, he didn’t show it. The four stitches in the back of his head were barely visible. He shook Daniel’s hand.