The Last September: A Novel

I deserved that, so I didn’t flinch away from the phone. In this type of situation, even the most contained person said cruel things, and of course all the worst ones would be true.

LADD HAD RENTED A house on Pleasant Street, not far from the one where Emily Dickinson lived for a time, on the other side of the graveyard. According to Richard Sewall’s biography, as a child she would watch funerals from her bedroom window—knowing that she herself would likely be buried there and worrying about when. The Poet may have walked over this same path to Ladd’s front door—what was supposed to be Ladd’s and mine, starting in October. I balanced a cardboard box of his things in my arms. It was embarrassingly light. Usually I stayed with Ladd, not the other way around. The primary object the box held—along with a Red Sox sweatshirt, some Tshirts, and an electric razor—was a smaller box, blue velvet, which he had used to present his grandmother’s engagement ring. I couldn’t bear to hand it directly back to him.

It felt wrong to use my key. Instead I wound it off my key chain and dropped it into the box. I knocked on the screen door. After a minute with no answer, I rang the bell. Then I pulled open the screen door and knocked again. Ladd’s car sat parked in the driveway. He could have walked somewhere, or ridden his bike, but I could see lights inside the house. I turned the knob, and the door swung open.

“Ladd,” I called, from the threshold. “I know you’re here.”

“Then why not come on in,” he called back. “Make yourself at home.”

I paused for the barest second, then stepped obediently inside. It was a classic early-nineteenth-century house, the stairs presenting themselves immediately at the front door, each room contained unto itself, very few closets. Ladd’s voice had come from the living room.

“Can I come in?” I said.

“I already told you. Come in.”

When I rounded the corner, he sat in a wide-striped armchair, the matching ottoman pushed aside, his long legs splayed out in front of him. From his voice, I’d expected a half-drunk bottle of scotch somewhere in the vicinity, but I didn’t see one. His hands gripped the edge of the armrests. Later that summer, Charlie would mix drinks in the evening, Captain Morgan rum and ginger beer. Dark and Stormys. The name of those drinks would always make me think of Ladd.

I sat down in the chair across from him—a stiff wingback—and put the box at my feet. A few moments passed like this, Ladd glowering, and me, sheepish, waiting for the barrage.

“Listen,” I finally said. “Don’t think I don’t know this is the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Because,” I said. Something like tears had begun to gather in my throat, and I worked to control myself.

“Oh, because,” Ladd repeated. “No better explanation than that, Professor?”

“I know,” I said. “I know everything you’re thinking about me and it’s all true. So in the end it’s best. Right? You’re better off.”

“You’re doing me a favor.” His voice wanted to be contemptuous but sounded more anguished. It brought me back, like a sense memory, to that winter after Charlie disappeared without a word. How much worse it must be for Ladd than my schoolgirl heartache over a man I’d barely known twenty-four hours. A man who’d done this very same thing to him already. The other girl, Robin: Ladd had refused to take her back. I’d assumed, coming over here, that he’d already be done with me.