The Last September: A Novel

And I know what you’re thinking. How I used up my husband’s last heartbeats in so unforgivable a way. And I do relive those moments with excruciating guilt, but the truth is, not so much more than anything else. Because I relive every moment of all those years with the same emotion—the same overwhelming regret. In my head, it plays over and over again, and it plays like a death march.

For example, the real and true beginning. The day I met Eli. We were trying out for a play, a musical. In the dance portion—downstairs in the studio, the far wall lined with mirrors—we had to pair up and imitate each other’s movements. The crowd paired off before I had a chance to turn around, and there stood Eli. He was wiry and blond—straight hair that hung to his shoulders. Round blue eyes that I didn’t yet know were just like Charlie’s. We stood facing each other, and I let him take the lead. He spiraled his arms in wide strokes. Everything he did was broad, the expression on his face mock serious, so that I kept breaking down in laughter. Neither of us got a part in the play. But we became friends. As Eli told Ladd on the ferry that day: best friends.

THE DAY AFTER I found Charlie dead—once his body had been removed to the coroner’s—a female police officer escorted me back to the house so I could collect enough of Sarah’s and my things to last a few days, a week. The two of us tromped in and out, carrying suitcases and bags of diapers. As I rolled the stroller over the wood floor of the sunporch, from below my feet I heard something jump and skitter.

Maybe if death hadn’t felt so close, hovering all around the house, I wouldn’t have reacted to the sound. But when I heard it, I thought so immediately of Tab. Maybe the portal through which Charlie had left still gaped open, giving Tab the opportunity to return. I let go of the stroller and walked outside, kneeling in the same spot I always did, to coax her out before sunset, and keep her safe from the coyotes that sometimes crossed the distance between salt marsh and shore.

“Tab,” I said, squatting down and peering under the porch. That skittering sound again, and along with the scent of dusty mold—the underneath of things—an even more distinct odor, the kind that can only rise off skin and fur. My eyes adjusted to see a small black form pressed against the cement foundation of the house, her shivering so contained that the small metal tags on her collar didn’t make a sound. Lightfoot.

I called to her and called to her, but she wouldn’t come toward me, not even when the police officer brought sliced turkey from the refrigerator. Finally I had to slither under the porch on my belly and drag her taut, quivering form across the pebbly dirt, her nails dragging in protest, wanting to remain pressed against the far wall.

Outside in the sunlight, I gathered the dog in my lap and brushed the dust away. Defeated, she went ahead and ate a slice of turkey. She weighed twelve pounds, composed of bone and tremble under short, coarse fur. Once I’d pushed away the thickest layer of dust, I found myself searching for any sign, any splatters, of blood. But of that her coat was clean.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves. It’s not a poem I’ve studied seriously. The right part of the right century, but I specialize in American poetry. Still, from time to time, Wilde’s lines will leap into my head. They leapt into my head that day, as I studied the dog, her quivering ears flat back against her head. Because I knew myself to be a coward. Because I’d supplied the kiss and let someone else wield the sword.





PART THREE


I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does of the burying ground, because I am afraid.

—EMILY DICKINSON





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