The Last September: A Novel

“It’s okay,” I told Charlie.

He nodded, then lifted my arm to his lips and kissed it, as if that would make the bruises go away. As if he were apologizing for his own role in what had hurt me. Ladd would have risen to his feet and stormed away, to confront the perpetrator. But Charlie let it go. I didn’t count this for or against him. Nothing mattered except the fact that he’d come back. I couldn’t worry about Ladd, or my wrist, or my own guilty conscience. I was too busy breaking into blossom.

FOR THE FIRST COUPLE weeks, Charlie didn’t look for work. I would go to class, and the library, and office hours. Charlie had a little money, the security deposit from his place in Maine, and he would shop for groceries and cook dinner. He went for walks. I told him the story of Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law, the unrequited love, and how they lived next door to each other most of their lives. He showed an interest by touring the Homestead and the Evergreens. One day when he got home, there was a package from Ladd waiting on the doorstep, with all the thing I’d left behind at his house, and a short note apologizing for hurting my wrist. Charlie carried the box upstairs and never asked a single word about it.

Another day I came home to find a message from Eli on my answering machine. “Hey, Charlie,” he said. No one in the world would have connected this voice with the one I’d heard weeks ago above the cranberry bog. It was clear and careful, a tiny bit slow, each word separate and precise. “It looks like I can get out of here on Wednesday. If you could get back here or find a way to call me before then . . .” and then the sound of a click. I could picture Charlie, running across the short expanse of my apartment, making sure to get the phone before his brother hung up.

“Is your dad coming?” I asked.

Charlie was in the kitchen, crumbling basil into the blender. Since his arrival, my kitchen had gone from bare bones to fully equipped, every kind of gadget and paring knife tumbled into the cupboards and drawers.

“He can’t,” Charlie said. “He’s not . . . he doesn’t do great with this, when Eli gets sick. My mom usually deals with it. Dealt with it.”

“But,” I said, as if what he’d said hadn’t registered, “are you going to drive him down to your dad’s?”

“Maybe after a couple days. We’ll see.” Our conversation halted for a moment as he turned the blender on to Puree, basil and garlic and olive oil and balsamic vinegar whipping into the vinaigrette that I would never be able to replicate, no matter how many times I followed the steps exactly as Charlie showed me.

“So where’s he going to stay before then?”

Charlie looked up, one of his pointed moments of stillness, then took another moment to just look at me. Since he’d moved in, I’d found myself imitating his style in small ways, rope necklaces, Indian prints, whimsical flourishes. Today I wore a sundress that had been in the back of my closet for years, along with a thick wool sweater, my hair in a loose ponytail tied with a piece of his butcher twine. Charlie smiled and held his arms out. I stepped into them, my lips just even with the U of his clavicle.

“I thought he could stay here,” Charlie said, his voice a little muffled against the top of my head. “If that’s okay with you. Just for a couple days.”

I wanted to turn and cast a glance at the tiny space, my one-bedroom partitioned from the living room by an open archway, no door. But that would have required moving away from the embrace and, worse than that, the possibility of displeasing him. “I guess he can sleep on the couch,” I said, picturing Eli’s long legs hanging over the armrest. I remembered a tapestry folded into the bottom of my sweater drawer, a dark-red-and-ivory print that Charlie would like. We could hang it in my doorway tonight. Refusing to have Eli here, in my house, would be like refusing to have Charlie.