The Last Good Day of the Year

by Jessica Warman

“I want to know why you shovel Helen’s driveway.”

  “Because … I don’t know, because it makes me feel better.”

  “Why does it make you feel better?”

  “Why does it matter?”

  He knows why it matters. He must know, even if he doesn’t realize it yet.

  “I went to see Davis,” I blurt. “This spring, I had a boy drive me all the way to New Jersey. Davis was speaking at a conference in Newark. I saw him, Remy, and he told me something important.”

  Remy shakes his head, refusing to listen. “No. It’s over. Davis wants to make money, that’s all. He’s trying to make something out of nothing.”

  “You know that isn’t true.” I pause, listening to the sounds coming from upstairs, waiting until I’m certain that Remy—and nobody else—can hear me.

  “Why did you lie for me, Remy?”

  The ceiling above our heads creaks with the weight of Susan’s footsteps as she walks around the kitchen, getting breakfast ready for her family. I imagine her brewing some coffee while she watches the Today show on the small countertop TV in the kitchen, sipping Folgers from a cup that says “World’s Best Mom,” oblivious to the universe crumbling at the bottom of her basement stairs.

  “No.” He shakes his head furiously now, even reaching up to put his hands over his ears like a little boy. “I didn’t lie! Why are you saying this to me? I didn’t lie, Sam. I didn’t. We saw him. We saw him,” he insists. His face crumples into an expression that is part terror and part denial as he leans against the nearest wall for support. His knees buckle beneath him, and he slides all the way to the floor with his face buried in his arms, still shaking his head, refusing to confront the awful truth that has gone unspoken for so long. Until now.

  I kneel down beside him and pull his head up, forcing him to look at me. “It wasn’t him, Remy. It wasn’t Steven.”

  His eyes are bursting with horror. “No. You’re wrong.” His head shakes harder—no, no, no, no—as though the motion might dissolve the facts if done with enough force.

  “Maybe you didn’t see him. You can tell me the truth. Were you even awake that night? Did you see anything at all? Or did you say it was him only because I did? It’s okay if you were scared, Remy. We were only kids. We didn’t know what we were doing. People will understand.”

  We are both crying now, huddled together on the floor with Boris between our bodies. Remy’s dad opens the basement door and calls down the stairs to Remy. “What are you doing down there, kiddo? Breakfast is almost ready!”

  “I’m just talking to Sam, Dad,” Remy manages to reply.

  “Hi, Sam!” Mike shouts. “Come on up and eat some breakfast while it’s still hot, you two! Suzie made eggs.”

  “Maybe later,” I shout back.

  There’s a pause. “Suit yourself.” And he closes the basement door. We hear it creaking shut, but I don’t hear the door latch.

  Remy grasps my arm now, his eyes wide with sudden panic. “We have to get out of here. We can’t let my parents see him.” He means Boris.

  “Let’s go to Abby’s house.”

  “Shh. They’ll hear us,” he says. “Oh, God—Sam, what are we supposed to do? We couldn’t have been wrong. I saw him. I remember …”

  “It was the man from the picture,” I tell him. “The same man we saw at the railroad tracks. His name was Frank Yarrow.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong. He worked for Abby’s dad.”

  “You’re wrong, Sam,” he repeats. He seems so certain. How would he know anything about Frank? He barely remembered the day we saw him at the tracks. But then he backpedals, his face tight as he searches his mind for some semblance of certainty about anything at all, and comes up short. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I was awake that night, Sam. I thought it was Steven … I thought it must have been him. I’m so sorry.”

  “Shh.” I wrap my arms all the way around him and hold on as tight as I can. “It wasn’t your fault, Remy. I saw him. I knew it wasn’t Steven. I’m sorry. Oh, my God, I’m so sorry. It’s my fault she’s dead.” The words come out as gasps. “It’s my fault.”

  Chapter Thirty

  January 28, 1986

  It was a Tuesday. My parents didn’t send me to school that day. My mother was asleep, or at the very least in bed. For the next five years, she was either unconscious or so deep into a self-medicated stupor that she barely seemed to cast a shadow. My dad and I watched the space shuttle prelaunch coverage over a breakfast of stale Christmas cookies and tap water while Gretchen lay on the floor nearby, half-asleep under a quilt made from our mother’s old pageant gowns.

  I was eating the last pizzelle when Abby’s dad came by to drop off a new dead bolt for our basement door. (By the end of the season, he had single-handedly replaced every lock in our house with superior ones from his hardware store. I figured it made him feel useful.)

  “You two going to watch the Challenger launch? Darla bought me a forty-eight-inch television for Christmas. You oughta see the picture it gets.” He noticed the tray of cookie crumbs sitting between us.

  I think Ed and my dad could have been friends if my mom hadn’t been so determined to snub Darla when Gretchen and Abby were small. It was all so stupid and petty.

  “When was the last time you went outside, Sam?” he asked me. “This morning? Yesterday?”

  I shook my head.

  “Darla got up at five to start pork and sauerkraut in the Crock-Pot, and there’s no way the three of us will finish it all. And it’s a sunny day, believe it or not. Why don’t you two come over?” He didn’t mention Gretchen even though she was in the room, because her eyes were closed and she seemed to be sleeping. For some reason I thought she was pretending. I saw that her eyes were open as I headed out the door.

  There were woolly bear caterpillars crawling up the walls in Ed Tickle’s house. We’d seen them all over the place that fall. Supposedly it meant that the coming winter would be brutal. They mostly disappeared when the weather grew colder, but Darla and Ed couldn’t get rid of them for some reason.

  I counted eleven caterpillars inching up the walls of the Tickle living room. It seemed as though they were all trying to get to the same place.

  “I can’t stand to kill them,” Darla told us apologetically, “so I go around the house once or twice a day and scoop them all into a bowl and dump it outside. Ed says it doesn’t hurt them much when they freeze to death. It’s like falling asleep.”

  The kitchen table was cluttered with paperwork and Mary Kay makeup samples. Ed brought us plates of pork and sauerkraut to eat while we watched his new TV. It was so big and deep that it took up more than half the room. A clock in the lower corner of the screen counted down to the launch, which was less than a minute away. My father and Ed were sitting together across the room. Ed held a bottle of champagne to open when the shuttle launched. I could hear my dad speaking in a whisper, telling Ed something about the search for Turtle.

  “… depends on the evidence they find, and how the weather is going.”

  Darla noticed me eavesdropping and turned up the volume on the TV. “Pay attention, you two,” she told my dad and Ed. She beamed at me. “Can you believe this, Sam? You’re about to witness history right here in our living room.”

  “Anyway,” my father finished saying to Ed, “we’re hoping the stars will align soon.”

  Through the Tickles’ living room wall, which they shared with Mr. and Mrs. Souza next door, I could hear the old couple’s German shepherds howling at something.

  We watched the shuttle climbing toward space, leaving behind thick white ribbons of smoke to unravel in the atmosphere. Ed popped the cork on the champagne. While the bottle was still overflowing with bubbles, he poured a little into three plastic cups, passed one to Darla, and raised his glass to toast with my dad. “To the stars aligning.”

  A caterpillar dropped from the ceiling and landed on my plate. I was watching it squirm around in my mashed pot
atoes when Mrs. Souza began to holler at her husband in Portuguese next door. Their dogs started barking their heads off.

  Darla covered her eyes and turned away from the TV screen, foamy champagne sloshing over the side of her cup and onto the carpet. “Turn it off, Ed.”

  He was still holding a mouthful of champagne. He stared at my father and swallowed. “Did that just happen? Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God.”

  “There’s a caterpillar in my food.”

  My father and Ed looked at me, their expressions puzzled and horrified.

  “The shuttle exploded, Sam.” My dad looked like he was about to cry.

  Abby hadn’t been watching with us, but now she was standing in the doorway to the basement. She was breathless from running upstairs in such a hurry. She picked up my plate and took my hand, leading me into the kitchen.

  “Is it true? Did it explode?”

  “Yes,” Abby said. She hooked her finger around the caterpillar on my plate. It was covered in buttery mashed potatoes, damp and wriggling in her palm. She wet a sponge and dabbed at the caterpillar’s fur, but it wouldn’t keep still long enough for her to get it clean.

  “Let’s go home, Sam.” Behind me, my dad put his hands on my shoulders.

  “Wait. Abby is saving the caterpillar.”

  “No, I’m not. It’s too late.” She dropped it into the sink and turned on the water, rinsing it down the drain. All that work to save it, and she just gave up. She flicked the disposal switch beside the sink, and I heard the blades spinning, grinding the caterpillar into pulp. That’s when I started crying. I’d witnessed the deaths of seven people on live television minutes earlier and felt nothing, but when Abby killed the worm in my food I cried.

  We thought Gretchen had been asleep the whole time we’d been gone, so we assumed she hadn’t seen the explosion. When we got back to our house, my dad turned off the television and went upstairs to check on our mom. I stayed downstairs with Gretchen. I was trying to crawl under the blanket with her. Our faces were almost touching when she opened her eyes to stare at me.

  “Did you see it?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “They’re all dead.”

  “Abby killed a caterpillar.” I started crying again. “She ground it up in the sink.”

  “Shh. Come here.” My sister pulled me beneath the blanket and put her arm around my shoulders. Our house was so quiet that I could still hear the Souzas’ dogs barking all the way over in their yard.

  “She tries to save them,” Gretchen said. “She kills them only if she knows they’re going to die anyway.” She held me so tightly that her fingernails dug into the flesh on my ribs. “She tries to save them,” she repeated, “but she doesn’t want them to suffer. Sometimes she has to kill them in order to help them, Sam. Sometimes it’s the only thing to do.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Summer 1996

  Abby is unusually calm as she leads Remy and me into her living room. “Gretchen is upstairs,” she says with her back to us. “She’ll be down any minute.” She pronounces each word so carefully that I feel certain she’s on something: Xanax or Valium or Klonopin. I’ve seen enough people on heavy meds to recognize the signs.

  The caterpillar infestation might be gone, but the Tickle house is still a cluttered mess, which doesn’t surprise me at all. Neither Abby nor Gretchen has ever been the domestic type.

  “Who do you have there?” Abby’s lazy gaze settles on Boris, whom I’ve placed on the sofa between Remy and me. “Oh.”

  “We know what you and Gretchen did,” Remy says to her. “Sam heard you both in the kitchen. Where did you get the bear, Abby?”

  She doesn’t answer the question, or even look him in the eye. “Maybe we shouldn’t have done it that way. But we’re running out of time.” She seems to be speaking more to herself than to either of us.

  We hear the stairs creaking, and Gretchen walks into the room, stopping in the doorway when she sees us on the sofa.

  “Is he still awake?” Abby asks. She means her father.

  Gretchen nods. “He’s having a lot of trouble breathing.”

  I look at Abby, expecting her to say something or to go upstairs to help Ed, but she doesn’t seem the least bit concerned. She’s still looking at Boris.

  Remy gives me an uncomfortable glance. I know he doesn’t want to be here; he wanted to skip the visit altogether and go straight to his parents, or the police, to admit what we’d done and show them the bear. He thinks we should let someone else figure things out from here, but I’m not so sure. It didn’t go so well the last time. “Is your dad okay?” he asks Abby.

  “He’s suffering terribly.” She pauses. “But he’s still alive.”

  Gretchen stares at us. “You two shouldn’t be here. Go home, Sam. Take the bear with you. Mom and Dad need to see him for themselves.”

  “Why?” I demand.

  “Because it’s the only way they’ll listen.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ll know soon enough.”

  “We need to tell you something. It’s important.”

  “Not now. You both need to leave.” She tries to wipe something from her fingers with a dirty napkin that’s been balled up in her fist and nearly shredded to damp bits.

  “Come on,” Remy says, tugging me up by the elbow. “I knew this was a bad idea.”

  “Wait a minute.” Abby steps in front of him. “Where will you go now?”

  “To the police.”

  “To tell them what?”

  I glance at Remy. He shrugs. “Gretchen wants us to leave. We’re going.”

  “If Gretchen doesn’t want to know, you can tell me.” Abby stands with her arms crossed, her face tight with impatience. She’s sweaty and exhausted, not at all pleased to see us even though she’s trying to convince us to stay.

  “Tell me where you got the bear,” I repeat.

  She looks from me to Gretchen, then back to me. “You go first.”

  I’m not sure how to start. “I did something wrong the night Turtle got kidnapped. I lied about something.”

  “We both did,” Remy adds.

  My words are enough to crack through the hazy veneer of whatever drug is running through Abby’s bloodstream. “What was the lie, Samantha?” She glances at Gretchen again, and the two of them exchange a series of quick, indecipherable thoughts with their eyes.

  “I told the police I saw Steven take Turtle from the basement. I was so scared, and I knew everyone wanted an answer so badly.” My mouth is so dry that I can’t even force myself to swallow in the heavy silence that follows. I want Remy to say something, or at least to try to comfort me somehow, but he’s too busy keeping himself calm to bother with anyone else. He’s started crying again, and I can tell he’s embarrassed to be so emotional in front of my sister and Abby, which is crazy.

  “I saw a man dressed up in a Santa costume. That much is true. But it wasn’t Steven.” I pause again, managing to swallow once before I look Gretchen in the eyes. “I’m sure of it.”

  My sister can barely speak; her voice comes out as a hoarse whisper. “What makes you so certain it wasn’t him?”

  “His teeth.” It’s Remy who says it. “It was his teeth,” he repeats. He seems as stunned as any of us by the revelation. “He had straight, perfect teeth. That’s right—isn’t it, Sam?”

  I nod. Until this moment, I wasn’t sure whether Remy had been awake that night, despite his insistence. Right from the beginning, I’d suspected he hadn’t seen the man’s face at all, and had only echoed my accusation of Steven because he trusted me.

  “I had my eyes closed for most of it, but when he bent over to pick Turtle up off the floor … I knew something bad was happening, and I was too afraid to scream. I was afraid he’d kill us.” Remy stares at the drab, gray carpet. He doesn’t want to look any of us in the face. “I peeked out of one eye when he was leaning over beside me. His beard was hanging down below his mouth as t
hough it didn’t fit him right. The room was dark except for this tiny sliver of light across his face. He was opening and closing his mouth, wiggling his jaw while he adjusted the beard, and I saw all his teeth.” His whole body trembles. “That’s when I pissed my pants,” he whispers.

  Any traces of Abby’s stupor are completely gone. “What about you, Sam? Did you see his face?”

  “No,” I admit, “not the whole thing. He was wearing the beard, and it was dark—but there were other things. There were little things about him that weren’t like Steven.”

  “Like what?”

  “He didn’t walk the same way Steven did. And he seemed older somehow … and it was as if he breathed differently.” I look helplessly at Gretchen—my big sister!—whose palm is pressed against her stomach as though she might throw up any second.

  “You could have helped him,” she says. A look of puzzled horror creeps onto her face. “Why did you lie to everyone, Sam? What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know! It was like … like Steven’s name was just there, in my head. He was someone Mom and Dad hated. Dad had been getting into all those arguments with him and trying to get him in trouble, and when I said his name out loud, it felt like the whole world stopped moving. I can’t explain it, Gretchen. I panicked. It just happened, and the minute I said it, I wanted to take it back. But I couldn’t—I didn’t. I was so scared, Gretchen,” I say, crying. “And then everything started happening so fast. Steven got arrested, and it made sense that he’d done it. Everybody believed it. What was I supposed to do? The longer it went on like that, the harder it was to imagine telling anyone the truth. I kept telling myself I really had seen Steven. I told myself for so long that eventually I believed it, with all my heart. It was as if my memories had managed to correct themselves so they would fit the narrative: when I thought about that night, I saw Steven’s face in my mind. It was as real to me as anything else.”

  It’s the honest-to-God truth. I believed it for years. We moved away, and Steven went to prison. Gretchen went to college. She dropped out and got married, and she seemed to be doing okay for a while. Our parents survived after Davis Gordon’s book came out and broke their hearts all over again. Hannah was born. Life went on, as much as it could, and every new day took me farther and farther away from that night. The truth got smaller and smaller until it eventually vanished. At least I had thought so.