The Last September: A Novel Read online

  The Last September

  A NOVEL BY

  Nina de Gramont

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2015

  Also by Nina de Gramont

  Books for Adults

  Of Cats and Men: Stories

  Gossip of the Starlings

  Books for Young Adults

  Every Little Thing in the World

  Meet Me at the River

  The Boy I Love

  To Peter Steinberg

  Contents

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  PART TWO

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  PART THREE

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART FOUR

  15

  16

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Algonquin

  PART ONE

  My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —

  In Corners — till a Day

  The Owner passed — identified —

  And carried Me away

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  1

  Because I am a student of literature, I will start my story on the day Charlie died. In other words, I’m beginning in the middle. In medias res, that’s the Latin term, and though my specialty is American Renaissance poetry, I did have to study the classics. Homer, Dante, Milton. They knew about the middle, how all of life revolves around a single moment in time. Everything that comes before leads up to that moment. Everything that comes afterward springs from that moment.

  In my case, that moment—that middle—is my husband’s murder.

  WHEN I LOOK BACK now, it hurtles toward us like a meteor. But at the time we were too wrapped up in our day-to-day life to see it. Charlie and I lived in a borrowed house by the ocean. Our daughter, Sarah, was fifteen months old. September had just arrived, emptying the beaches at the very moment they became most spectacular: matte autumn sunlight and burnished eel grass. Cape Cod Bay was dark enough to welcome back seals but warm enough for swimming, at least if you were Charlie. He made a point of swimming in the ocean at least one day every month, including December, January, and February. I used to joke that he was part dolphin.

  But this was late summer, and unseasonably warm. You didn’t need to be a dolphin to go swimming, and on Charlie’s last day he had already been in the water by the time Sarah woke up from her morning nap. At eleven thirty, he carried her into the extra bedroom I used as a study. If I’d run my hand through his hair, I would have felt the leftover grit of salt water. But I didn’t run my hand through his hair because I was too angry. I was generally angry at Charlie that fall, and it didn’t help, his tendency to wander into the room where he knew I was trying to work. Sarah still wore nothing but a diaper, and obviously not a clean one. Between jobs since his restaurant failed, Charlie had spent the morning working on reshingling the house, which belonged to his father. Like Sarah, he was half naked; he wore khaki shorts and no shirt. Ignoring my pointed glance, he lay down on the worn, woven rug, crossing his long legs at the ankles. His curly blond head rested on his hands with his elbows pointing toward the ceiling. Sarah squatted about six inches away, her gaze focused on her father, concentrating in that intense toddler way—almost as if she knew these hours constituted her last chance to see him alive. Remembering that look, I like to think of Charlie’s face imprinting itself on her subconscious, the memory as intrinsic as the strands of his DNA. Sarah was a thoughtful child who already had an impressive vocabulary—twenty words that she said regularly, more popping up here and there. But she was slower to walk. She hadn’t begun crawling until past her first birthday; she often stood up on her own, her face scrunched in a grimace as if she were planning to walk, but she had yet to risk a step.

  I sat at my desk, reading a collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters to her sister-in-law. My dissertation was on these letters, their hidden code. Charlie had promised to watch Sarah but instead was letting his parenting time spill into mine—lounging with only one halfhearted eye on his daughter. I tried not to move my eyes from the text. If I indulged in my usual gaze out at Cape Cod Bay, it might imply availability. I’d spent the early morning with Sarah and would have her again in the afternoon. Now was the time for Charlie to remove himself and our child from my work space. Staring down with unnatural concentration, I marked a line that I had already underlined many times, grooves surrounding it so deeply that you could almost read a sentence on the next page through the wear. Sue, you can stay or go. I dragged my pen beneath it, drew another large star in the margin, then put down my pen and sighed.

  Just as Charlie raised his eyes to mine, Sarah teetered to her feet. She pushed up with one hand on the teepee of her father’s crooked elbow. Then she let go, picked up one bare foot, and stepped closer to him. I pushed my book aside. This was the moment I’d been waiting for, checking milestone charts, harassing the pediatrician.

  “Did she just take a step?” I asked, as if I hadn’t seen it myself.

  Sarah broke into a smile. Her fat little legs began to shake with the effort. Charlie and I froze as she lifted her foot to step again, then collapsed in a triumphant, diapered heap on his chest.

  “Step,” Sarah said, her voice filled with the finality of the achievement, and the prospect of a new world of movement.

  Charlie got to his feet and swooped Sarah over his head in one fluid motion, so her white curls grazed the exposed beams of the sloped, second-story ceiling. Two identical pairs of blue eyes smiled at each other. Everywhere Sarah and I went people asked, “Is she yours?” assuming I must be the small, dark-eyed nanny.

  With a smile that mirrored his rosy mirror self, Charlie pretended to take a congratulatory bite out of Sarah’s cheek. Not a giggler, she didn’t laugh, but just looked quietly and enormously pleased. Clearly she understood her accomplishment and all that it presaged. She had spent months thinking it through, and finally the road lay passable before her. We cheered, Charlie bringing her down to his chest so I could step in for a family hug. His bare skin felt warm against my forearms. Sarah’s spicy baby scent bonded the three of us into a single entity. We could hear the flutter and chirp of swallows outside our open window as they staged for their journey south. The Saturday Cove church bells chimed the half hour, mingling with the salty breeze off the ocean. Our home’s musty disrepair transformed, as it sometimes did, into something almost magical.

  “My God,” Charlie said. “I love you so much.”

  He squeezed his hand at my waist, a degree of fervency, as if he had something to prove to me. So I said the only possible thing, reflecting the dominant, if not sole, emotion: “I love you, too.”

  Charlie kissed my forehead. And Sarah—who deeply approved of any kind of affection—put one hand on her father’s bare shoulder and one hand on my T-shirted breast. Then she laughed.

  I hope I’m not just being charitable toward myself but am remembering correctly, because it seems to me now that in that moment, I thought: if Charlie left for work every morning in a coat and tie, we might have enough money to pay our bills or move out of his father’s summer house. But we wouldn’t have been in the same room, all together, to witness Sarah’s long-awaited first step.

  And that moment is what should have remained of the day—happy and indelible, an entry in a pale pink baby book. If the phone hadn’t rung two hours later, I never would have known to regret using up our luck so early. When I think about the rest of that day, and how it unfolded, there are too many stretches of time that would require rewriting, if ever the chan
ce presented itself: to do everything over again.

  2

  I was at the post office when Eli called Charlie. All traceable moments were carefully detailed later, in police reports, so I know that at the precise instant the phone rang back at the Moss house, I was standing in the vault of mailboxes staring at a postcard from Ladd Williams. Sarah had one sticky hand wound into my hair and she stared down at the note intently, as if she could read it, too. Ladd had funny, distinctive handwriting—all sharp angles and cubes. I recognized it without having to look at the signature.

  I turned the card over. On the front was a picture of a toucan. Honduras, it read, under the bird’s otherworldly green, red, and blue beak. Todo Macanudo. Ladd had gone there with the Peace Corps, but apparently he was back—the card was postmarked Saturday Cove. The note, which I’d already memorized, read: Dear Brett. Staying at my uncle’s cottage. He has some books you used to want, you can stop by to borrow if you like. Best wishes, Ladd.

  I closed our box, leaving the rest of the mail—bills we couldn’t pay—untouched. As I pushed through the door into the sunlight, Sarah plucked the postcard out of my hands. “Cat,” she said, looking at the bird. Cat was her standard word for anything new. Then, as if she knew this wasn’t quite right, amended, “Kitty.”

  How like Ladd, I thought, not to include a phone number or tell me the titles of the books. If I wanted to know, I’d have to show up on his doorstep. The last time I’d heard from him was just before he left the country, a little more than two years ago. He’d written a sort-of love letter intimating that I was the reason he needed to go away. But it was a convoluted piece of writing, filled with erasures and apologies and semisarcastic jokes, and I didn’t know how seriously to take it, or if I’d interpreted it correctly in the first place. I’d also never mentioned it to Charlie.

  Sarah brought the postcard to her lips, nibbling delicately on one corner. Part of me wanted to take the bait immediately and drive over to his uncle’s compound. I wondered if anyone had told Ladd that I’d had a baby. I buckled Sarah into her car seat and pried the soggy postcard out of her grip. Instead of putting it in my pocket, I just tossed it onto the backseat, where Charlie could find it if he had any interest, which he probably didn’t. Charlie never got jealous.

  And that’s what I thought about on the short drive home: a postcard from an ex-boyfriend. My husband’s general lack of jealousy, and how it was probably founded. If Ladd could see me now—with my hair unwashed and sweatpants doing nothing to camouflage the still-leftover pregnancy pounds, not to mention the child all but sewn to my hip—he probably would not be writing cryptic love letters.

  What did I know about the way my life would change in a matter of hours? Absolutely nothing. Murder. It’s a word out of potboilers and film noir. It leaps from the TV screen during police dramas or the evening news. It doesn’t sound real. It’s nothing you ever think will have to do with you.

  AT HOME, THE HOUSE smelled rich with wine and garlic. I walked into the kitchen and plopped Sarah on the floor, then opened the lid on the stock pot and breathed in the damp steam. Coq au vin, to celebrate Sarah’s first step. Charlie would let it simmer all day so that it would be falling off the bone by the time we sat down to dinner. Which was lovely, but he had also left the kitchen a wreck. The sauté pan still sat on the stove with olive oil burnt into its copper bottom. The cutting board was exactly where he’d used it, with a garlic-encrusted knife next to it on the counter. I saw the hours of my day tick away with child care, errands, and now this toppled kitchen. I pictured my study upstairs—compromised enough with the baby accoutrements that spread into every room in the house—and decided to go outside and ask Charlie to attend to his appointed parenting duties.

  I followed the sound of the hammer to the back deck. Charlie’s father planned to come for Thanksgiving; reshingling the house was a surprise for him. In a week of laboring—the stop and start tempo of our life—only one wall had been completed.

  “Hey,” Charlie said, barely looking back at us.

  Seeing her father, Sarah lifted up her arm as if it were an elephant’s trunk and trumpeted. “Arrrooo,” she said. “Arooo.” Charlie laughed and turned, then did the same. Thanks to Babar, Sarah was fascinated by elephants, and this was their customary greeting.

  “I got a postcard from Ladd,” I said. “He’s back in Saturday Cove.”

  Charlie still hadn’t put on a shirt. Broad freckles speckled his fair shoulders and sinewy back. His stomach sloped outward, a healthy and muscular version of distention. In a typically strange but successful act of vanity, he’d tied a leather shoelace around his neck. My resolve to confront him weakened, and I thought—as I often had in the years since I first kissed him—that he was put together exactly right.

  “Ladd’s home?” Charlie said. “Seems like he just left.”

  “I guess it’s been two years. He says he has a book I might be interested in.”

  Charlie turned his head half toward me, raising an eyebrow, but the response was more reflexive than agitated. “That’s good,” he said. “Are you going over there?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Oh yeah? Think he’ll show you his etchings?”

  “Sure,” I said. And then added, in the baiting tone a marriage counselor had recently warned me against: “Then we’ll make out on his chaise longue while Sarah takes a nap on his bed.”

  Charlie was better at following the counselor’s advice. He put down his hammer and turned toward us, reaching out to touch the top of Sarah’s head, then mine. He let his palm stay there for a moment, cradling my skull, conferring the warmth of apology, instead of saying anything.

  The battered old squirrel we called One-Eyed Wally scrambled across the deck’s rail and stood up on its back legs. Sarah pointed and said, “Wally.” The squirrel was the closest thing we had to a pet since my cat had been hit by a car in July. Even during Tab’s reign, Wally used to sit on the deck’s railing waiting for the birdseed or bread crusts we fed him in spite of ourselves. Sarah reached her hand closer to him; instead of running away, he skittered a little closer.

  “Shoo,” I said mildly, waving my hand at him. “Get away from here.”

  Charlie climbed off the ladder and headed inside, motioning with his head for me to follow. I adjusted Sarah on my hip and trailed into the kitchen, where Charlie lifted the lid of his simmering pot and stirred. His brow furrowed as he stared into the garlic-scented steam.

  “Eli called,” he said.

  I’d started to put Sarah on the floor—giving her a chance to repeat the earlier steps—but instead picked her up and held her closer.

  “How did he sound?” I asked. Last time we saw Charlie’s brother, he’d dropped an enormous amount of weight and begun scribbling notes on his jeans and forearms.

  “He wants to come by tonight,” Charlie said. “Get out of the city for a couple days.”

  “Did he sound like he’d been taking his meds?”

  “He didn’t sound too bad.”

  Charlie brought the wooden spoon to his lips and tasted his sauce. I stood there, balancing Sarah on one hip. In my whole life, there had never been anything in the world I wanted more than a home with Charlie. Not so long ago I wouldn’t have cared if that home were borrowed from his father, or if the sink were piled with dishes, or if Eli lived there permanently. I would have lived with Charlie in a cave, or a tepee. I would have followed him anywhere.

  “I told Eli it would be okay,” Charlie said.

  “But Charlie,” I said. “If he’s off his meds.”

  “His roommates kicked him out,” Charlie said. “He’s got nowhere else to go.”

  I started to nod and then stopped, not wanting Charlie to interpret the gesture as agreement that Eli should come to us. Every other year or so, these phone calls would begin. Sometimes they’d come from Eli or from the animal-control office where he worked. Sometimes the calls would come from his roommates, or new friends—people who’d only know
n him since his latest recovery and couldn’t understand the change.

  “Do you know why they kicked him out? Did he do something? Were they frightened?”

  “No,” Charlie said. “They weren’t frightened. They kicked him out because he’s behind on the rent.”

  “That’s what Eli says.”

  “True,” he admitted, still stirring, not looking at me.

  “If he can’t pay rent, does that mean Kathy put him on leave again?” Kathy was Eli’s supervisor at the Angell Animal Shelter. “Have you called her?”

  “I left her a message,” Charlie said.

  “Well, why don’t you talk to her before you let him come here?”

  Charlie let his shoulders tense. He turned toward me and leaned against the stove. I worried about hot liquid spattering onto his bare back. “What are you saying?” he asked. “You want me to tell him he can’t come?”

  “You know I’m always happy to see Eli. Except when he’s off his meds.”

  “But Brett,” Charlie said. “That’s when he needs us most.”

  The words worked, for a moment at least. Guilt silenced me. But the weight of Sarah in my arms let me recover. “It’s different now,” I said. “It’s not just us.” Charlie didn’t respond—his form of shouting. So I kept talking. “We told him the rules when we moved in here. No visits unless he’s medicated.”

  “It’s Eli’s house as much as mine,” Charlie said. Infuriatingly. It had been his idea to move to his father’s house, in the eighth year of my PhD—when my teaching appointment had run out and my last possible fellowship could barely cover our expenses even if we lived rent-free. I had foreseen this moment—Eli’s encroachment—since Charlie first formulated the plan. Charlie had sworn it would never be an issue.

  “You promised,” I reminded him.

  He turned his gaze out the window and crossed his arms, the wooden spoon still in his hand, warm sauce dripping to the floor. Sarah squirmed, anxious to practice her new stepping skills. “Down,” she insisted. I tightened my grip and she let out a squawk of protest.