The Last Good Day of the Year (2 page)

By the time the movie ended, we were both in our sleeping bags again. “I don't think I'll go to sleep at all tonight,” Remy said. “I'm not tired.” He was out by the time I bothered to respond. Without him to keep me company, there wasn't much to do besides listen to our parents as they goofed around above us. I heard Remy's dad
shouting from the kitchen: “Sharon, can I eat this cookie dough? You sure? Awesome.”

The one-sided exchange filled me with enough fury to sit up and silently freak out at the ceiling, waving my arms and mouthing my outrage. My mother had clearly forgotten that it was my cookie dough she was so thoughtlessly giving away. I thought about stomping upstairs to remind her, but knew it would get me nowhere. I lay on my side and pouted while I stared into our yard through the sliding glass doors. It was a clear night with a full moon, and it had started to snow a little bit, the flakes swirling in the wind, the cold air whipping past with what felt like purpose, its singular goal to destroy even the tiniest pocket of warmth.

My eyes were shut when I heard the
click
of the backyard floodlight turning on. It had a motion sensor, and I turned my head to look outside, expecting to see a deer. Instead I saw Santa Claus. He was just standing there in the snow, his body so still and calm that I could have mistaken him for a statue if he hadn't begun to sway ever so slightly. He was thinner than any self-respecting Santa ought to be. His wig and beard, which were one piece, rested crookedly on his head.

As I watched him, I felt more curious than anything else. I wasn't scared, not at first. We were safely on the other side of the sliding glass door, and our parents were only a few steps away. Nobody was going to hurt us, especially not this guy. I mean, I knew he wasn't the real Santa. I wasn't even sure Santa existed at all. But a seven-year-old's grasp on reality is fluid at best.
Santa's skinny now? And he's in my yard? That doesn't seem right, but I'll accept it
.

All that time he kept staring at the ground, swaying a little but otherwise not moving. If I had to guess, I'd say he stood there for a full minute like that before he started opening and closing his fists like someone getting himself ready for a fight, the same as I'd seen my dad do only the day before. The stranger in my yard raised his face and started strolling toward my house. I closed my eyes and held them shut for as long as I could stand it, and then took a peek.

He stood with his nose pressed against the sliding glass door, his gloved hands cupped around his eyes as he peered inside.

The fear was swift and crippling, in the sense that I had no control over it whatsoever. Have you ever had a dream or a nightmare in which you're trying to scream but can't force your body to make any sound? It was like that. I felt as if I had no mouth at all, like I was suffocating with fear. I kept my eyes shut, hoping I'd only imagined Santa, but when I opened them he was still there. His hand was on the door handle now, and I knew the door was not locked. I knew he was coming in. I closed my eyes again. I wanted to scream so badly, but I could barely breathe. I couldn't move. All I felt was the cold rattle of panic in my gut and the hard beat of blood in my ears.

The party upstairs suddenly seemed very far away. I heard the door slide open and felt the freezing air rush into the basement, and I knew it was too late to run; he was right here, inside, standing above us. I could hear him breathing. The sound seemed to fill the room, drowning out all other noise. I could smell tobacco on his clothing. He stood there for what felt like forever, although in reality it was probably less than a minute. Then he knelt
down behind us, and I felt the warmth of his breath on my face and heard his clothing moving against his body. I heard him slowly unzip Turtle's sleeping bag and lift her small, sleeping form into his arms, but I still could not force myself to move or scream. I wanted to more than anything, but I couldn't.

I kept my eyes shut as I sensed him carrying her away. She was wearing shoes with her nightgown; she'd gotten a pair of red slip-ons covered in sequins, like Dorothy's in
The Wizard of Oz
, for Christmas and had been wearing them nonstop for the past week. When I was finally able to open my eyes, the first thing I saw was the sliding glass door, which he'd closed, and the dark backyard lit only by the moon. I thought maybe it had all been a terrible nightmare. I reached for my sister, but she wasn't there. Turtle was gone. I didn't know it yet, but she was never coming home.

Summer 1996

I didn't realize how poor we were, not until the fact became an important plot point in the media's approach to my family's narrative. People say the news doesn't care about missing kids unless they're rich, white, and cute. I guess even if you can't claim all three of those, having one of them in spades can still be enough to hold people's attention. When a journalist from National Public Radio did a story on Turtle and our family back in 1990, he described our appearance for listeners by observing that if Hollywood ever made a movie based on us, they'd have a tough time finding actors good-looking enough to play our parts with any accuracy.

But we were poor back then, whether I knew it or not, and we're still poor today. I've been holding on to all these memories of home for ten years, clinging to the version of my childhood that's easiest to manage. Everything about our old house is
sort
of the same
as I remember it, but it's different in a million little ways that add up quick: the ceilings are lower, the windows and rooms are smaller, the kitchen linoleum is a seamy array of ugly black and white squares instead of the shiny checkerboard floor of my memories. It was a dump back then, and it's still a dump now; the only real difference is that it's older. My mind has done its best to Photoshop those early years, to make what was dull and bleak more shiny and hopeful by polishing the memories with so much nostalgic wax.

Our place in Shelocta was at the end of a cul-de-sac. We were the last of a four-unit block of town houses. The Mitchells lived next door; the Souzas were on their other side, followed by Ed Tickle and his daughter, Abby, and Ed's girlfriend, Darla. If Remy was like my brother, then Abby Tickle was Gretchen's sister. They were best friends.

We moved almost a year to the day after my sister was taken, and it always seemed to me that the idea was to never, ever return. I guess plans change. When my dad lost his job in Virginia last winter, my parents couldn't afford to pay our rent anymore. They've never been great with money.

The move back here is supposed to be temporary. It was the only choice we had; we couldn't afford to go anywhere else. Since my parents couldn't manage to sell the house on Taylor Street, even at a steep discount, they've been renting it out for the past nine years. But the last tenant disappeared in January after failing to pay his rent for the third month in a row. On February 1, I woke before dawn to the sounds of my mom's Toyota getting towed away by a repo company. Two weeks later, on Valentine's Day, my father
fell asleep in our old station wagon while it was parked in our garage with the engine still running. The doctor at the emergency room told us he'd nearly died from asphyxiation. My dad insists the whole thing was an accident. Nobody believes him.

So here we are, once again. It's the last place any of us wants to be, and the only place left for us to go.

Mike Mitchell taps on our kitchen window with his beer can while I'm unpacking a box of silverware. The clock on our stove reads 11:39 a.m. I wave him inside and call downstairs to the basement for my parents.

“Look at you, Sammie. All grown up.” His mustache is foamy with Michelob.

“How old are you now?” he asks.

“I'm the same age as Remy.”

“They have the same birthday, you dolt!” My mother gives him a hug; he wraps his arms around her and leans back, lifting her entire body a few inches off the floor. “It's so good to see you.” She looks around. “Where's your beautiful wife?”

“Susie's on her way over—here she comes.” Mike looks disappointed by his wife's arrival at the back door.

“I told you to leave them alone until this afternoon, Mike. I
told
him to leave you alone until later,” Susan explains, giving my mom a quick half hug.

“Don't worry about it. We know how excited he gets.” My mom winks. I wonder if she realizes how awkward other women feel when she starts oozing charm. Even Susan probably doesn't appreciate it.

Susan was always pretty—not beautiful—and I know my mom
will say later that her old friend has “let herself go,” as though it's the worst thing a woman can do. Today, Susan wears a shapeless yellow dress that's seen the inside of a washing machine a few dozen times too many. Her brown hair is starting to turn gray. She's tried to cover it up with a bad dye job—she probably does it herself in front of the bathroom mirror—and there are narrow bands of color starting at her scalp that vary slightly in shade and intensity, like a tree's rings. She still teaches music at the local high school, and looks every bit the part.

If you look at them side by side, my mom and Susan don't seem like they could ever be friends. My mom has always been a high-maintenance kind of woman when it comes to her looks. She was an honest-to-goodness beauty queen in her younger days. She won the title of Little Miss Pittsburgh at age twelve; at seventeen she was Miss Pennsylvania; and by nineteen she was a top-ten finalist at the Miss America pageant. She went right from appearing at local supermarket openings and corporate ribbon-cutting ceremonies to marrying my dad. That wasn't the order in which she'd planned to do things—she'd wanted to go to college, then get married, and then have kids, which was the way everyone was supposed to do it. But things don't always go according to plan; crazy how that works, isn't it? She got pregnant, got married, and had Gretchen three months later. She liked being a mom so much that she hung up her sash and tiara for good, but her looks stuck around. Even now, she's a knockout at forty-eight, prettier than I could ever dream of being. Men still stop her on the street sometimes and say, “Has anyone ever told you that you look just like Christie Brinkley?” She loves the attention. She'll bat her eyelashes and pretend
to get flustered, but she doesn't let them get the wrong impression: “That's so sweet. My husband says the same thing all the time.”

“Oh. My. God. This cannot be Sam,” Susan says, clapping a hand to her mouth. “Little Samantha? Is that really you?” When she goes to smooth my hair with her fingers, I instinctively duck away.

“Sam, honey, don't be shy.” My mom then talks about me as if I'm not even in the same room. “Samantha is our little misfit right now. She's very underwhelmed by adolescence. She was such an early bloomer—”

“
Mom
!”

“Ha! And she's so shy! I don't know where she gets it from. She spent the entire car ride with her nose buried in a book. She loves to read. Don't you, Sam?”

“Sharon. You're embarrassing her.” My dad gets it. He never does much about it, but he gets it.

“Aw, relax, Sam.” Mike Mitchell slings an arm around my shoulders. “You can't be shy around us! Hell, I've seen you naked!”

“
Michael
. Jesus. Could you not?”

“Susie-Q. Gimme a break. She's a gorgeous young woman.” He takes a step back to get a better look at me. “We all get older, Sam, but not everyone gets better. You've got yourself a winning lottery ticket when it comes to looks, though.”

“Ha, ha, ha!” My mom actually tosses her head back as she laughs, showing everyone her mouth full of silver fillings. “You're so bad!”

“Mike, you're acting like an ass.” Susan rolls her eyes, but it's
all for show; she knows it, Mike knows it, and my parents and I know it. Mr. Mitchell has always been this way—loud, inappropriate, goofy—and Susan has always pretended to be
this close
to fed up with him.

“Is Remy home?” I ask, trying to change the subject.

“Remy?” Mike shakes his head. “Who the hell knows what he's doing? Probably knocking off a 7-Eleven right about now.”

“He's out with friends,” Susan says, “but he'll be home soon. He's excited to see you, Sam.”

I'm sure he can't wait.

From her place beneath the kitchen table, my little sister, Hannah, taps my leg. I kneel down to meet her at eye level. “What are you doing down here?”

“Hiding.” Hannah is five. She's charming and beautiful, my mother's new everything. Next January, Hannah will compete in her first beauty pageant. We may not have money to pay our rent every month, but somehow my mother finds room in our budget for as many dance lessons and sequined costumes as Hannah's pursuits require.

My parents call her their miracle baby. That's one way of putting it, I guess. They've always used little euphemisms to explain the wide age gaps between some of their children: Gretchen was their “oops” baby; I was their “pleasant surprise.” Out of their four children, only Turtle was planned. Hannah wasn't an accident, but I wouldn't call her “planned” as much as I'd call her … I don't know. Something else.

“Come on up. Everybody is nice, I promise.”

She pops a thumb into her mouth and shakes her head. She's
not supposed to be sucking her thumb. Mom has tried to break her of the habit by wiping her nail with acetone to make it taste bad.

“Why are you being shy?”

She shrugs and removes her thumb just enough to speak clearly. “I want to go home.”

“We are home. Come on, you'll be fine.” Before I have a chance to stand up, she scoots past me and goes running down the hallway. The Mitchells barely get a glimpse of her ruffled yellow dress and black patent leather mini-heels before she disappears into the dining room. For the briefest moment, I catch a look of horror on Susan Mitchell's face, and I know exactly what she's thinking. I mean, she knew my parents had another child after Turtle disappeared, but I guess seeing her in the flesh really drives home the point: Hannah is their do-over.