The Last September: A Novel

My mind sifted through possible answers. I didn’t know what was going on. My eyes fell on that hammer and then the knife—the two murder weapons, still here, still handy. I wondered how many seconds it would take Eli to stride across the lawn and use them on me. And instead of fearing for myself, I had the most primal vision of being gone forever, following Charlie, the clouds overhead parting to let us both through. From my perch, far up above, I could see Maxine walking Sarah through the gorgeous, sterile rooms of her house while my child screamed with anguish and loss, having no idea these emotions would become permanent. For a child to lose her father was horrible, awful. But for a child to lose her father and her mother: nothing could be worse, an orphaned grief that would stretch through the end of her days.

I let go of Charlie and slipped out of my flip-flops to crawl across the deck, my hands and knees smearing his blood across the unstained wood. When my hands touched the stones of the driveway, I stood up like a toddler, pushing up off the ground. Then I ran. Shells and stone bit into the heels of my feet, nowhere near as conditioned as Charlie’s to take the beating. Behind me, I could hear Eli’s footsteps on the deck. I could hear him scream—as if this were his first glimpse of Charlie. And I thought for a minute that perhaps someone else had done it, that Eli had arrived and found Charlie murdered. Maybe he had leaned over him, the same way I had, and that’s how the blood had managed to decorate his shirt.

But my body wouldn’t take that chance. It hurtled away fast as possible and threw itself into the car and locked the door. It gunned the motor and flew out onto the road—leaving the past, and flesh of its flesh—behind, and cold, forever.

SARAH’S CRIES CAREENED THROUGH the windows as I ran toward Maxine’s house, a steady stream of, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.” I threw open the front door.

“Hey,” Maxine called from the kitchen. Her usually perfect hair flew in every direction, bouncing my distraught child on her hip. “Are we glad to—”

When she stepped into the hallway, her relieved smile disappeared.

“Brett,” she said, pulling Sarah closer to her as she stopped crying and reached out for me. “Jesus Christ. What happened to you?”

I looked down at myself. Blood dried and caked in the cracks of my palms. It soaked my T-shirt and my shorts. Behind me, my bare feet had left prints on her wood floor. I pulled off my shirt and bent over to wipe them clean.

“God, don’t worry about that,” Maxine said. “Tell me what happened, Brett. Are you hurt?”

I pictured Charlie’s mortal injuries. His unblinking blue eyes. Before today, I hadn’t even known the definition of hurt. Now I didn’t know what to say. I had made my modest academic career out of a reverence for the power of words. So I knew that the second I said it aloud—engineering the metamorphosis from trauma to statement—the events would become permanent. If I said, “Charlie’s dead,” he would be dead. The world would have no choice but to continue without him.

“Mommy,” Sarah said, shaking her arms insistently.

I looked down again at my shirt—my arms, hands, knees, feet. What Sarah saw was my not reaching back toward her, and the cries began again. I lifted my arms to hold her, then pulled them back. How could I hold my baby when I was soaked with her father’s blood?

“Maxine,” I said. “We have to lock all the doors. We have to call the police.”

She nodded and began to hand Sarah to me—then stopped, equally unsure how to cope with the blood. “Should we hose you off?” she asked.

“Not outside,” I said, hearing—more than feeling—the panic in my voice as it occurred to me for the first time that Eli could have followed me in his car. My strongest impulse, running from the Moss house, had been to get to Sarah. I remembered a story I’d found in my research, of a nineteenth-century Amherst mother who’d accidentally lit herself on fire with a kerosene lamp. As the fire engulfed her, she’d reached for her infant in a reflexive, protective grab, and they’d both gone up in flames. What if the killer had followed me. I turned around and bolted the front door shut.

“What else,” I shouted at Maxine. “Show me all the doors.” She followed me to the back door, while Sarah wailed in her arms. We dead bolted the door to the cellar.

“I think that’s all of them,” Maxine said. We ran up, into her bedroom. “What should I say?” she asked, picking up the phone.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just tell them to come here.”

“Not to your place?”