The Last September: A Novel

“I’m sorry” was one of the few phrases I understood clearly. “I’m so terribly sorry to be telling you this.”


I hung up and dialed Charlie’s phone, which rang from upstairs, the whistling ring he’d programmed for me. I followed the sound of it in a daze and pulled on a pair of shorts. Then I headed out to the beach to try to find Charlie. Barefoot, I picked my way over the rockiest bluff, the direction of his most usual walk. He would alternate looking out toward the sea and collecting sea glass for his mother’s grave. I passed the steps that led up to the Huber’s beach house. Mr. Huber kept a kayak stashed beneath his deck. Sometimes in the winter Charlie snuck up and borrowed it; I hoped he wasn’t so unreachable as out on the ocean. I didn’t realize I was heading in the direction of Daniel Williams’s house until I saw Daniel, out for a walk on the beach, coming toward me.

“Brett,” Daniel said. “What’s wrong?”

“I think my mother’s dead.” A very small voice, left over from childhood.

“What do you mean, you think?”

I told him about the phone call, the Irish accent, the way it made no sense.

“She hasn’t been sick,” I said. “I can’t remember her ever being sick.”

My mind went to Charlie’s mother, the way we always described her illness and death as quick. Still time enough, though, to carry her out to the shoreline. Still time enough to say good-bye.

Daniel placed his hand at the small of my back and pushed me forward the slightest bit, enough to give me the head start, the power, to follow him back to his house.

THE LAST TIME I saw my mother was at my wedding. She had tried so hard to support me, even though I was breaking my promise marrying Charlie. Instead of complaining or pointing it out, she flew back from Ireland, interrupting her semester. She bought a mother-of-the-bride dress, split the bill with the Mosses, and never said a word about Charlie’s disappearing act at the altar. She even gave Charlie my father’s wedding ring.

But it had been a wedding, with a swirl of people, and no time to really sit down and talk. And the smiling facade made her seem not really like herself. My mother had always been such a serious person—or maybe she’d just become so after my father died. Maybe it was just being a single mom with a career that made her seem so stoic.

“I love you very much,” she said to me the day after the wedding when I drove her to the bus stop in Barnstable. From there, she’d take a bus to Logan airport and a plane back to Ireland. Such a long trip to honor a marriage she didn’t approve of.

“I love you, too,” I said, hugging her good-bye.

What would I have done differently if I’d known that would be the last time I’d ever see her? Maybe breathed in the scent of her hair a little more fully. Maybe I would have thanked her again, for making the trip, stayed in her embrace a little longer. Mom.

At Daniel’s beach house, I sat across from him as he made phone call after phone call at his beautiful oak desk. I ran my fingers over the carved inlay at the edges, wondering when I’d start crying, wondering how he knew all the right numbers to dial. By the time he walked around the desk and knelt in front of me, gathering up my hands, we both knew I’d figured out everything from listening to his side of the various conversations. But he told me anyway, in a careful and measured tone. That she hadn’t shown up for a day’s worth of classes. That the school secretary had found her at her apartment. It looked like an embolism.

“She can’t have felt any pain,” Daniel promised. “It would have been immediate.”

“But she wasn’t even sick,” I repeated, the same dead, childlike voice I’d used before.

“That’s how these things happen,” Daniel said. “I’m so sorry.”

I nodded. Still holding on to my hands, he offered to take care of things. “Make arrangements,” he said. “To have her brought back here. For burial.”