The Last September: A Novel

And what about Charlie and me? Would my forgiveness have succeeded? We moved to Cape Cod as Sarah turned one. I worried over when she would take her first step while Charlie shrugged and said she would do it on her own time. In July Tab was killed at the top of the road by a too-fast driver, and Charlie tended me carefully. I tried to be grateful, and then I tried to focus on mundane annoyances—discrepancy in child care, the debt the restaurant had left behind, Charlie’s lack of a job. My car broke down, and we junked it instead of fixing it. “Do you love me?” I asked him too often, and Charlie always said yes. Looking back, I’m not sure I ever said “I love you” to Charlie in the time between finding out about his affair and finding him dead. I only said, “I love you, too.”


What would that period of time have become if Charlie had lived? Would it have led to the end eventually, a failed attempt at holding our family together? Or would it have just been a period of time we needed to get through, to be solid again, for Deirdre to become a little blip in our history. Would Charlie have learned his lesson, or would he have proved himself to be incorrigible, and years later I’d find myself in just the same spot? Emily Dickinson had decades to become disillusioned with Sue, to forgive her and love her again, and finally turn away. How many times would I have needed to repeat the same process until I’d finally settled into permanent anger? Or would it have been different, with Charlie and me?

The summer after Deirdre, I kept asking myself these questions in the future tense: Will my anger ever go away? Will Charlie ever do this again? It was such a difficult time. No matter how hard I tried, how definitely I decided, there was still this strain of uncertainty and of injuries that refused to disappear. All that conspired against us, churning into the day I walked into Ladd’s cottage, the same day Charlie’s heart stopped beating.

If it hadn’t stopped beating. If Charlie had lived. The answers and the memories would have unfolded together into discovery. What would have been: it’s the only tense we can never know.

TO OTHERS, IT MAY have seemed clear that Eli’s life led up to Charlie’s death. But in my mind it didn’t seem that way. Clear. It seemed instead like my life, arriving there, in that first part of September. The time of year technically called summer but which everyone in New England knows is really fall. On that day, the last day of Charlie’s life, I drove over to see Ladd at his uncle’s compound. He’d said he had some books for me. I parked my car—the old station wagon that once belonged to Charlie and Eli’s mother—in the empty space beside the shed.

Ladd could have stayed in the main house. Or he could have used his parents’ house—which was better suited to winter habitation, situated away from the shore’s buffeting winds. But his postcard had said he was staying in the cottage. In fact, there were three cottages on Daniel’s property—two of them oceanfront, built years ago from old Sears kits. But I knew exactly the one Ladd meant. It sat back in the scrub oak woods, out of sight. It was the same one in which, years ago, we had showered and changed, and made love, before going to tell his parents about our short-lived wedding plans.

The path behind the house was overgrown. I wore my long Indian skirt, a pale blue tank top, and leather flip-flops. The soles slapped against my heels, and I stared down at the chipping nail polish on my toes. By now I could see the cottage—in my head it had already become Ladd’s cottage—settled in among the trees. You had to know about this little house to find it—hunched under the taller scrub oak, small and unassuming, like something for children scattering bread crumbs to stumble upon. I saw Ladd through the large window, sitting at a wooden table and staring at a laptop screen. I wondered if the cabin, for all its rustic isolation, had Wi-Fi.

Even though it felt like a creepy thing to do, I stood there for a while, staring through the window, watching Ladd. Seven years had passed since I left him for Charlie. More than two since I last saw him. But he looked exactly the way I always remembered him: tall and ordinary, with a kind, craggy face. After a minute he sensed me there, staring at him. He turned and started, pushing back his chair. I lifted one hand and curled my fingers down one at a time, an overly girlish wave. By the time he’d walked to the front door—only a few paces worth—I was there to meet him.

“Brett,” he said at the same time the door slid open with a rasp.

“Hi Ladd,” I said.