The Last September: A Novel

“You’re the best,” Charlie said, winding his arms around me tighter. “I love you.”


IF IT WEREN’T FOR Eli, Charlie and I never would have met. Still, over the years it was difficult not to imagine what we could have been without him, the specter of his inevitable comings and goings. “Only the mad will never, never come back,” wrote W. H. Auden, and I found this to be true, although the two new versions of Eli—medicated (bloated, docile) and not medicated (wild, muttering)—did return again and again. But the original Eli, the real one—the boy I’d known in Colorado, the one who’d stayed resolutely beside me when his brother had not—seemed to be gone forever.

“My father’s never been able to deal with it,” Charlie told me again as we drove to pick up Eli in Pocasset. “It doesn’t compute with him, he always just pushed it off to the side and let my mom handle it.”

“Maybe now that she’s gone he’ll have to,” I said. As little as I’d interacted with Mr. Moss so far, I still found it hard to believe he wouldn’t take over his wife’s job as primary caretaker of all things Eli.

Charlie nodded, his hands firm on the steering wheel. Over the years I would learn how it felt to visit or collect someone from a mental hospital; the way you brace yourself for profound and awkward unhappiness. It was especially sad seeing this in Charlie. The only time the weight of the world ever touched him was through Eli. And later, sometimes, me. Charlie talked a little more, telling me about the struggles they’d had with Eli since that night seven years ago when he’d jumped off the roof, jumped from one kind of life—normal and promising—into another.

“Well,” I said, as if no one had come up with this solution yet, “he just has to stay on his meds.”

“The meds suck,” Charlie said. “They turn him into a zombie. A fat zombie. And they make him impotent.”

An image came into my head, Wendy sitting in Eli’s lap around a crowded table at the Rio. I’d run into her a few times after Eli left school. Once outside of Hellems, she’d broken down and cried. “It’s so sad,” she said when I told her I hadn’t heard from Eli. “I always thought what a great dad he would be.”

Back then, when he was dating Wendy, Eli had told me about the chemicals your body produces when you’re in love. Pheromones and oxytocin. Those early days with Charlie, I was living on those chemicals, their fumes surrounding me every second, and I couldn’t even consider the concept of impotence.

“If you could just talk to him,” I said, “and really let him know what he’s like when he’s off his meds.”

“That’s the last thing he needs to hear right now.” Charlie returned his attention to driving. “He’ll already feel like shit about himself. His self-esteem will be at less than nowhere. It’ll only make him feel like we’re against him if we paint a picture of him at his worst.”