The Last September: A Novel

And Charlie would smile—that slow, easy and face-changing expression. “I know,” he would say, taking a nail from his mouth.

I see it clearly as I’ve seen anything in my entire life. I see Charlie, tapping in that nail. The world around him buzzes with seasonal changes—monarchs and birds swirling in migratory preparation, the sun dipping down earlier and farther east. The world around him quietly poised for my uneventful return—fulfilling promises as a matter of course, and utterly lacking violence.

I see this moment, again and again. I try my hardest to will it into being as I go over the past, trying to make things turn out differently, trying to make things lead, instead, to Charlie, alive and smiling on that deck.

BUT I CAN’T. THEY don’t. It never does. No matter how many times I relive it, we always end up—Maxine, Sarah, and I—standing in that upstairs window, staring down at those twirling police lights. While back at the house on the bay, Eli leans over his brother’s bloody and vacated body. He watches Charlie, for how many minutes nobody knows. And then he disappears, escaping on an invisible tightrope wire that leads to the rest of his ruined life, and prevents mine from possibly ever moving forward. Unless I can take all the pieces and unravel them into clear formation, making sense—a pattern, an answer—where none can ever be found.





PART TWO


It’s all I have to bring today—

This, and my heart beside—

This, and my heart, and all the fields—

And all the meadows wide—

—EMILY DICKINSON





4


The first time I saw Charlie Moss I was eighteen years old. A blizzard had just swept through the front range of the Rocky Mountains. I called my friend Eli from the phone booth outside my dorm room. The west-facing window at the end of the hall had lost its view except for a thick, whorled crust of ice.

“Is the party still on?” I asked him.

“What do you think?” he said. I laughed. Eli loved parties. He would never let a mere three feet of snow interfere with a social event, especially one of his own. “You can meet my brother,” Eli said. “He was supposed to leave this morning, but the storm closed down DIA.”

A few hours later, I walked through deserted, unplowed streets. A typical Colorado storm, it had hit fast and furiously and then moved on. The sky above me loomed clear as summer, boasting a thousand stars or more. I felt too warm in my heavy down jacket. Still, there was that sense of reprieve inclement weather can bring. As if all ills—crime, taxes, homework assignments—had been suspended for the sake of the storm. In the forgiving snow-lit night, the ramshackle Victorians—these days rented by destructive and unappreciative students—looked more like the comfortable miners’ homes they’d originally been. Soft lamps shone behind curtains. Wood smoke trailed up from chimneys.

In all that quiet, I could detect the pulse of Eli’s party from a block away. As I headed up his walk, I saw the door was propped open; the thicket of people must have overheated even his drafty old house. The front path was littered with skis, snowshoes, and boots. I entered sideways and slid off my coat but didn’t bother removing my boots. The hallway was already caked with melting ice and snow.