The Last Good Day of the Year

by Jessica Warman

  “It won’t.” He kisses my forehead, then my nose, and finally my mouth. I can feel the pressure building within his body as soon as we connect. There’s an urgency to his movements. With electricity rippling from his palms, he inches his fingers up my T-shirt, slowly but surely trying to tug it over my head.

  “Remy, wait a minute.” I wriggle out from under him.

  He sits up. “Did I do something wrong?”

  The air is so thick with moisture that it’s a little hard for me to breathe. “No. Maybe I should go home, though.”

  “Oh.” He reconnects the television. The screen is nothing but static. “So … was that not okay?” he asks.

  “No! I mean, yes, it was completely okay.” My gaze falls to his lap. He’s obviously not ready to stop.

  “But you want to leave,” he says flatly. “So obviously it’s not … what you wanted. I mean, I’m not.”

  “That isn’t true.” I pause. “There’s just so much between the two of us. There’s so much background running through my head.”

  He looks dazed. I notice his glassy eyes and sweaty forehead. “You know what I do sometimes, Sam?”

  “What?”

  “I drive to Steven’s house.”

  “Steven Handley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You mean his parents’ house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you do that?” The whites of his eyes are bloodshot from the pot. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person I know who isn’t constantly seeking the next opportunity to muffle their thoughts.

  “His mom still lives there. Did you know that? The business is gone, though, so there’s just an empty storefront. She’s all alone.”

  “I know.” Steven’s dad died a few years ago. Helen had to take a job with one of her competitors in order to support herself.

  “I can’t stop thinking about her sometimes. I feel sorry for her.”

  “Remy, what’s the matter with you? Has she ever seen you there?” I don’t know if I feel sick because of the smoke or because of what he’s telling me.

  “I don’t think so. Calm down, Sam. I’ve never knocked on the door or anything like that.”

  “So what do you do? You spy on her?”

  “I wouldn’t consider it spying.”

  “What do you do there, Remy?”

  “I … do things. A few times last year, I shoveled her driveway after it snowed. It was the middle of the night, Sam. She didn’t see me.”

  I’m shaking. “Remy, you have to stop that. You can never go back there again. It’s a terrible idea.”

  “She doesn’t know it’s me.”

  “That doesn’t matter! What if she figures it out? Why would you do something like this?” I’m so furious that I’m starting to cry.

  “I already told you, I feel sorry for her.”

  “Stop it. There’s nothing you can do for her.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Yes it is, Remy. She doesn’t want your help. She hates you.”

  He nods to himself. “I know. It’s one of the things we have in common. We both hate me.”

  “Shut up.”

  “It’s true.” He stares at the static dancing on the television. I can recognize the sounds of Aerosmith performing “Janie’s Got a Gun” on Saturday Night Live.

  “Sometimes I think I ought to kill her, if I’m ever actually going to help her. She’d be happy if I did it. Don’t you think so? She’d be glad it was all over. That’s all anybody really wants, isn’t it? More than anything, we want it all to be over.” He sighs. He falls onto his back and stares up at me. He doesn’t seem to register my anger; his mind seems galaxies away. He reaches for my hand, weaving his sweaty fingers between mine and squeezing them tight, as though he’s already forgotten that I was getting ready to leave a moment ago. “Imagine that, Sam. Imagine how good that would feel.”

  “I wish I’d never met him.” Those are Gretchen’s first words to me in the common room at her college dormitory, where she’s reluctantly agreed to meet. She hands me a stack of unopened letters. They are all from Steven. He wrote to her twice a week for months after his arrest. “He was a lunatic. He thought we were in love. I never loved him. It was just a stupid crush. I liked the attention more than anything.” Yet she’s hung on to the letters for years, going so far as to bring them with her to college.

  But does she think Steven is guilty? When I ask the question, she doesn’t hesitate with her response. “We all saw him in his stupid Santa Claus suit that night. Sam and Remy saw him in the basement. Who else could have done it?”

  I start to tell her about the numerous studies that have been done on the accuracy of memory. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially when it comes from children. And what about motive? Why would Steven want to harm Gretchen’s sister?

  “To get back at my dad? Who knows? Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I can tell she’s already tired of my questions, but I’m not ready to leave just yet. I ask her if she thinks Steven deserves to die for his crime, and Gretchen goes quiet.

  “What do you think he deserves?” she asks.

  I tell her I’m not sure.

  “Neither am I.” She hesitates. “I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it.”

  Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, p. 191

  Chapter Eighteen

  1985

  In a former life, my parents used to go out almost every weekend with Mike and Susan and leave Turtle and me—along with Remy—in my older sister’s care. Abby usually came over to keep her company, but she left what minimal childcare was required to my sister. Gretchen had never been much of a babysitter before she met Steven; our evenings with her mostly consisted of us occupying ourselves upstairs while she and Abby watched TV in our basement. Occasionally my sister would holler up the stairs to make sure the three of us hadn’t accidentally killed ourselves. My parents knew Gretchen was no Mary Poppins: they usually left money for pizza so she wouldn’t have to cook, and my mom always got us changed into our pajamas before she and my dad left, in order to make sure my sister’s workload was as near to weightless as possible. And things usually went okay; we never found ourselves in any real danger because of Gretchen’s negligence. The worst thing she ever did was to let us watch any movie we wanted on cable. Off the top of my head, I remember seeing Children of the Corn, Creepshow, and The Thing all before my sixth birthday.

  But it was different once Gretchen started seeing Steven. Because here’s the thing: even though she never paid much attention to me and seemed almost unaware of Turtle’s existence, we worshipped her. How could we not? She was so beautiful and so smart (at least she seemed that way to us), so wise to the ways of the grown-up world. She cursed in front of our parents all the time, and when they told her to watch her mouth, she only laughed. She was never mean to us; on the contrary, she let us do pretty much whatever we wanted as long as we left her alone. She didn’t even get mad when we would spill a two-liter bottle of diet soda on the kitchen floor or get nail polish all over the coffee table. My point is this: all three of us loved and looked up to Gretchen. We didn’t want to get her in trouble. So when she did things around us that we knew she probably wasn’t supposed to be doing, we kept our mouths shut. In return, she always told our parents that we’d been perfect angels throughout the evening.

  At first, Abby and Steven would both come over to hang out in the basement with Gretchen. As the weeks went by, we saw less and less of Abby. Gretchen said it was because Abby didn’t want to get in the way. I thought maybe she didn’t like Steven. But Remy, Turtle, and I liked him very much. Even now, I remember how cool he’d seemed at first. While Abby and my sister had always pretty much kept to themselves in the basement, Steven actually appeared to enjoy being around kids.

  “I have little cousins,” he told Gretchen. “They’re a lot of fun. Kids are great; you can be as much of a jackass as you want, and they think it’s funny.”

  M
y sister was annoyed by his enthusiasm about us. “I rented us a movie to watch downstairs.”

  “Later,” he said, “after they’re in bed.”

  It was Steven who taught me how to play War with a deck of cards. He stood in our kitchen and concocted bile-colored beverages that he called “zombies,” which were just a mixture of whatever sugar-based drinks were on hand: Pepsi, orange juice, ginger ale. They were disgusting, but we drank them all the same. It was an elementary-school version of the kind of experimental mixing of adult beverages that I’d seen my dad and Mike Mitchell do so many times before. We tilted our heads back and held our noses as we gulped down our drinks with the enthusiasm of frat boys. We laughed so hard that, on more than one occasion, liquid shot from Remy’s nose.

  Steven taught us how to play Bloody Mary in the first-floor bathroom. He showed us how to cover the staircase with pillows and blankets to turn it into a slide, which we barreled down headfirst. He brought us handfuls of the miniature peppermint patties that his mom kept beside the register at her dry-cleaning store. When Steven was around, even Gretchen seemed to enjoy our company, at least more than she usually did. Maybe she just didn’t want Steven to think she was a shitty big sister. She’d tousle my hair or give Turtle a spontaneous hug for no reason. She called us sweet, made-up names like “Cuppycake.” Because of this overall improvement in the quality of our Saturday nights, Turtle, Remy, and I began to look forward to them with an enthusiasm that pleased our parents even as it aroused their suspicions. More than once, my mom pseudocasually asked me, “What’s so great about Gretchen all of a sudden? I thought she and Abby didn’t play with you very much.” (Abby was allowed to come over while my parents weren’t home, because she was a teenage girl. As an adult male, it went without saying that Steven’s presence would have been frowned upon.)

  Over the years—especially in the weeks and months after Turtle’s kidnapping—I have been given countless opportunities to sit down with a number of Caring Adults to discuss Steven’s behavior when he came to our house on all those Saturday nights. A social worker once gave me a stack of blank sheets of paper and a box of crayons and asked me to draw the games we’d played with him or “anything else that might have happened.” I made poor sketches of myself, Remy, Turtle, and Steven (Gretchen hadn’t cared to participate) playing Bloody Mary; the social worker asked me if we played any other “bathroom games.” My first therapist (there were several), Miss Russo, gave me a naked Raggedy Ann doll and told me to point to anywhere I might have been touched. I shrugged and handed the naked doll back to Miss Russo, explaining that I didn’t remember Steven touching me anywhere, not even on the arm. A hypnotist did his best to relax me with his dull monotone before asking me what animal I thought Steven most resembled. I compared Steven to a grasshopper because of his long, skinny arms and legs. Even though all the Caring Adults claimed to be relieved by what I shared with them, I could tell a part of them was always just a little disappointed. I wasn’t giving them the answers they were looking for, not exactly. They didn’t want to hear that Steven had been friendly and funny, more so than Gretchen or Abby ever were. As much as they were glad Remy and I had been spared any abuse, they wanted confirmation that Steven was a monster. They wanted what had happened to Turtle to make some sense. In a world where all is right, nice men don’t kidnap four-year-old girls in the middle of the night. They certainly don’t murder them. They don’t hang their heads and sob in court, pleading their innocence. But they also don’t sleep with seventeen-year-old girls. So there’s that.

  My sister must have known that it was only a matter of time before our parents caught on to her lies about Steven, which were stacking up into a pretty impressive piece of fiction. In the end, it was Mike Mitchell who made the crucial discovery when he swung by our house in the middle of the evening to pick up the wallet he’d left on our kitchen counter earlier that day. He didn’t knock or ring the doorbell, he just let himself in through the front door and strolled into the living room, where the five of us were watching Gremlins. Gretchen and Steven were cuddling under a blanket on the sectional sofa while Remy, Turtle, and I sat on the floor eating popcorn. Mike didn’t get angry or act surprised; he just said hello to all of us, introduced himself to Steven, retrieved his wallet, and left as quickly as he’d arrived. I thought there was a chance he wouldn’t even mention anything to my parents. But the next morning at breakfast, when I saw Gretchen glaring puffy-eyed at our mother over a bowl of Rice Krispies, I knew we’d been busted.

  All these things happened in relatively quick succession during the last six weeks of the summer of 1985. Had Gretchen’s relationship with Steven ended that Saturday night in August like it was supposed to, my memories connected to that summer would be quite different from what they are now. The older guy who’d dated my sister for a few weeks would be a distant memory, barely a footnote in an otherwise ordinary childhood. There were so many other, more significant events that took place during that decade: IBM introduced the first desktop; MTV premiered at 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981; the Senate confirmed Sandra Day O’Connor as the first female Supreme Court justice; the CDC announced its discovery of a new strain of deadly pneumonia, thought at first to affect only gay men. “Small-town teenage girl sneaks around with older guy” was hardly newsworthy, even to our neighbors. And it might have stayed that way; the relationship likely would have faded into nonexistence even in our memories. Years later, Gretchen, Turtle, and I might have reminisced while out to lunch somewhere about the guy who used to come over when our parents went out. “What was his name?” Turtle might have asked, unable to recall any details from that time in her life. Gretchen might sigh, her gaze rolling toward the ceiling in thought. “Sean? No, that’s not right. But I’m sure it was something that started with an S.” Then maybe she’d shrug, losing interest in the matter. “I don’t remember. It isn’t important.” And we’d go back to doing whatever it was we’d been doing: getting our nails done, the three of us seated in a row at a busy salon; chatting softly in a movie theater during the previews; lying on a beach. We’d be all grown up. Turtle, with her long, silky hair and big eyes, freckles across her nose and cheeks as though someone had pitched a fistful of brown confetti at her face, would have been the most beautiful of the three of us. I think about these things sometimes, and what I feel is not quite sadness as much as abstract curiosity, a distant yearning that never quite gets too painful to tolerate, but never goes away completely.

  “Suddenly everyone’s a detective. Give me a break. We investigated plenty. The other suspects? Eliminated every last one of ’em. Look, it was pretty simple: you have a suspect, two eyewitnesses, and a dozen other people who can corroborate. What reason do any of those kids have to lie? And what about the threats he made to her father? There were half a dozen more witnesses in the ice cream aisle at the supermarket when it happened. It was the morning before the crime! Paul Myers was grocery shopping when he ran into Steven. Sharon had found something in Gretchen’s room a few days earlier—Polaroids. They weren’t the kind of pictures any dad wanted his daughter posing for. He knew she and Steven were still sneaking around behind everyone’s backs, so they had a few words. Things got heated. You know what Steven said to him? He yelled it, actually—like I said, there were half a dozen people who heard him. ‘I’m going to destroy you.’ That’s what Steven said to Paul. ‘I’m going to ruin your life.’ He promised. If I had any doubts … Well, I don’t have them. Steven Handley murdered that little girl the same night. I’d bet my career on it.”

  Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, p. 201

  Chapter Nineteen

  Summer 1996

  It takes me almost eight weeks to finish clearing out the Mitchells’ basement. Now that I’ve gotten rid of all the clutter, Susan is moving forward full speed with her renovation plans. The next step is to put a fresh coat of paint on everything. At least I’m not working alone now; Remy is helping.

  While we’re pushing all the remaining furniture
away from the walls, I find a few more boxes of old photos underneath his grandmother’s bed. Remy doesn’t seem bothered when I sit down to look through them while he’s doing all the painting prep. He tries to be nice to me in little ways like that—ways that are more like how a boyfriend might act, instead of a boy who’s only a friend. I’ve never been treated this way before, not by Noah or anyone else. It’s better than I could have expected.

  Remy whistles at me. “You know you’ve been staring at the same picture for about a year, Sam?”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. You’ve been spaced out. Let me see that.” He tugs the photo from my grasp to have a look. It’s from our fifth birthday party. We’re seated at the round picnic table in my backyard. My mom stands nearby, holding Turtle on her hip. Young Remy’s chubby cheeks are smeared with cake and icing. Beside him, I look like I’m about to fall asleep in my party hat.

  “Your mom sure is rocking those shoulder pads.”

  I don’t laugh. I don’t say a word.

  “Come on. That was funny.”

  “Who’s this man in the picture?”

  Our dads are standing next to an open cooler filled with ice and cans of beer. Remy’s dad, with his white shorts and pink collared shirt, looks like he just stepped away from the set of Miami Vice. There is a lit cigar in his mouth, its smoke winding into the sky in thick, blurry loops. Behind him and off to the side, a strange man is lurking at the edge of Remy’s yard, watching the festivities. He doesn’t seem like a guest at the party; more like an uninvited outsider. His clothing is ragged, yet almost formal looking: he wears a white collared shirt and black pants, which are odd choices for what was obviously a warm day.

  “Are you talking about this guy?” Remy presses his thumb against the man’s face as if he’s trying to squash his head.

  “Yes.” His outfit looks like it came from the Salvation Army; his shirt is too big for his body, the sleeves too long, but his pants are a few inches too short. He has a full head of curly black hair. His face is pale and so slender that his cheeks have visible hollows even from so far away; it’s less a face than it is skin stretched over a skull.