The Last September: A Novel

Sitting there behind the steering wheel, I knew that if I knocked on the door, Daniel wouldn’t treat me as if I were crazy to appear. He might not even ask me the reason. He’d just open the door wider and invite me in. Probably he’d be able to tell I had nowhere else to go and offer me one of his cottages or even a room upstairs.

But the thing was: I did have a place to go. Because whenever his brother needed him, Charlie would go. Immediately. No matter what. When I got back to our apartment, it would be empty because Charlie would already be on his way here. So I backed the whole long way out of Daniel’s driveway, returning to paved roads and the sensation of flight. I arrived at our deserted apartment well past midnight, and instead of sleeping in our bed—too fraught with the scent of Charlie—I collapsed on the sofa. Sarah perched on the floor beside me, still in her car seat, my hand resting on the rise and fall of her little belly. In the morning, I called a locksmith to come and install a deadbolt.

THE NEXT DAY, WE woke to heavy snowfall. Everything was canceled. In the evening, Maddie watched Sarah while I pulled on my boots and trudged over to the Homestead. Next door was the house her brother, Austin, built for his wife—the object of E.D.’s unrequited affection living right next door.

I walked through the snow, toward the Evergreens, thinking that I would never entirely escape Charlie, even if I left him. For the rest of my life, we would share a child, and every time I saw his face—every time I handed her off, or met with a teacher, or went to a school event—my heart would fall, willing victim, the way it always had. He beckoned and the woods started. I would never, ever, get away.

My breath billowed out in front of me, glimmers of illumination moving through the air despite the hour, and I tried to imagine how very dark evenings must have been in the nineteenth century, with no electric lights from houses and no streetlamps. The world Emily Dickinson inhabited did not contain a glare from cities the world over, reflected back in the sky. Nights like this, the Poet would sit at her bedroom window, staring across the snowy lawn, toward Sue’s, trying to believe her beloved pined back.

But her beloved married someone else, I reminded myself. Charlie married me.

My eyes blinked against the falling snow. If it hadn’t been for Sarah, would Charlie have followed me back to our apartment and said that he wanted to be with me? Would I ever be enough, to fend off the revolving door of infatuated women? And how had my thinking already shifted, from determination to leave him—to wishing I could kill him—into the old worry, about how I could keep him?

The world stood dark and quiet. For a moment, I could believe that cars and headlights existed in the distant future. That electricity ran not through wires above my head and under the ground but in the current of possibility between these two modest and imperial plots of land. I lifted my hand and waved—a sad lover’s gesture. Entirely appropriate to feel yearning, and hopeless, looking up through the snow at that west-facing window.