The Last September: A Novel

The baby did a startling kick, followed by a roll. I put my hand on my belly, trying to locate the foot, feeling protective and guilty at the same time.

CHARLIE CALLED HIS FATHER, who didn’t offer to go up to Boston. “Keep me posted,” Bob Moss told him. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me: for Eli, it was us or no one. Charlie and I went to visit him in the lockdown ward at Beth Israel. They had to buzz us through a series of glass doors. When we finally got inside, all the patients’ eyes turned toward me, my swollen belly a lightning rod of possibility, normality, voodoo. I waited for someone to call out, predict the baby’s sex or more, but no one came close, or spoke, except for Eli. His nicotine-stained fingers hovered just above my belly, not yet quivering from the meds and not quite willing to make contact, just testing the force field that emanated from his little niece—almost but not quite in the world with us.

We sat down with him at a table in one of the visiting rooms. Eli drummed his fingers on the tabletop.

“How are you doing?” Charlie asked.

Eli glanced at him angrily. “How am I supposed to be doing?”

I thought he was going to complain about his hospitalization—his incarceration—but instead he launched into a theory about how Paul McCartney had died in a car crash in 1967 and Billy Shears had taken over his life. “It’s the most successful case of identity theft in human history,” Eli said. His voice sounded fast, lower pitched, each word spilling into the next.

“Oh, Eli,” I said. Charlie looked at me, his face fallen the way it always did when faced with this version of his brother.

“What is this preoccupation,” Eli said, “this obsession with orgasm?” He waved his hand at my belly as if it represented the entire problem. “Because that’s not the thing, right? That’s not the peak moment. It’s the moment before that’s the whole point. That’s why I shouldn’t be rushed along, when I’m the one who’s paying, I shouldn’t be forced to indulge in the cheapness, the ending. There’s the reason they call it the little death, you know, it signifies the end of pleasure, the end of feeling.”

“Can I get you anything?” Charlie said. “Do you want coffee or anything?” I wondered if they were allowed to have hot liquids, but Eli didn’t seem to have heard him anyway.

“It would be a very different world,” Eli said, “if the sexual revolution had gone the way it was supposed to. If Paul McCartney had lived. Or if they’d just left well enough alone and not brought in that asshole Billy Shears, with his fucking violins and trombones.” He lifted his arms and pounded the air as if playing an invisible drum set. “Aw,” Eli sang, in a sharp, angry voice. “ ‘How do you sleep? How do you sleep at night?’ ”

We sat with him for a minute after that, none of us speaking, until Eli turned to me and said, in an almost normal tone, “They took my dog. Can you see if you can find her for me?”

That night, Charlie and I had an infant CPR class at the EMH. We drove back to Amherst and spent the evening practicing resuscitation on fake babies with open mouths and collapsible necks; a nurse walked us through the various situations of peril we might expect to encounter. By the time we finished, it was dark. We walked outside, the summer air heavy on our shoulders. Charlie placed his hands on my stomach, which had swollen well past the point of no return.

“I don’t think we can do this,” Charlie said. In another frame of mind, this statement might have worried me. But I just leaned my head into his chest. I felt exactly the same way.