The Last Good Day of the Year (25 page)

Summer 1996

I wake up covered in sweat from a dream in which I'm standing across the street, watching a fire tear through the houses on Point Pleasant. The Souzas' dogs are howling in a window, trapped, pawing at the glass.

It takes me a few seconds to realize that I'm in our living room, not my bedroom. I must have fallen asleep watching television. The running water I hear is coming from the kitchen faucet; in my dream, it was the sound of a gushing fire hydrant.

I recognize Gretchen's footsteps in the kitchen. She lets the faucet run for a long time while she splashes water onto her face.

She opens a nearby cabinet and fumbles in the dark for a glass to fill with water. Everybody else is asleep. It's the middle of the night.

“Hurry,” someone whispers to Gretchen. It's Abby.

My sister starts to cry softly. “I don't think I can do it.”

“Shh.” Abby murmurs something I can't quite hear.

“I can't. I can't, I can't, I can't,” Gretchen babbles, her voice growing dangerously loud. Our mom is a light sleeper.

“We're almost finished.”

“I'm so scared.”

“Don't be. I'm the one who should be scared.”

Gretchen's voice grows raspy and frantic. “I won't let anything happen to you.”

“It doesn't matter. Nothing can hurt me.”

Gretchen gulps down water. She struggles to calm her breathing. The ice maker in our freezer rumbles to life, startling them.

“Let's go,” Abby whispers. “We're going to wake someone up.”

They don't move. Neither of them says a word for at least a minute. I peek over the edge of the sofa and see Abby leaning against the counter. Her arms are wrapped around Gretchen. My sister's face is buried in the space between Abby's neck and shoulder. Abby's eyes are closed. Her makeup is streaked with tears. She reaches up with a trembling hand to touch my sister's short hair.

“Shh,” Abby says again, repeating the sound over and over into Gretchen's ear like a mother trying to calm her fussy child. Then she opens her eyes and looks straight at me. I expect her to yell or to walk over and smack me, but she doesn't react at all. She just closes her eyes, smoothing Gretchen's hair while my sister cries, and it occurs to me that Gretchen might not love any of us as much as she loves Abby.

After the two of them slip out the back door, I count to fifty in my head before slowly getting up and tiptoeing toward the kitchen.
Without turning on the light, I look around the room for any clue to what they might have been doing in here.

My mind understands before my eyes can fully recognize the sight. It swiftly knocks the wind out of me, as if I've been shoved into a deep, dark hole and I'm still falling. Nothing else in the room seems to exist: only the stuffed bear on the table. His eyes are flat and black against his white, furry face. His torn ear is mended with a thick scar of purple thread.

His name is Boris. He was Turtle's teddy bear, and he was in her arms when Steven took her away.

Summer 1996

The sun is finally rising. Light streams through the trees in the forest, casting shadows on the ground all around me. The playhouse in Remy's yard looks alive as the gaps and cracks in the old wooden planks seem to burst into brightness where the sunlight overflows.

I've been awake for hours, uncertain about what to do next. I don't know how Abby and Gretchen came into possession of Boris, but I have a pretty good idea.

On hot nights, Remy likes to sleep with his bedroom window open. I stand beneath it and softly call his name until he appears, still half-asleep. I'm holding Boris behind my back so Remy won't see him right away. “Let me in,” I say in a stage whisper.

He disappears from the window, stumbling into the basement a minute later to unlock the sliding glass door.

“My parents are already up. You could have just knocked on the front door, you know.” Now that we're up close and he's a little more awake, he notices that I'm still wearing the same clothes from yesterday. I'm sure I look awful, but I couldn't care less. After I found Boris, I took him up to my room to get a better look in private. I wasn't going to let my parents discover him in the kitchen like that; the shock might have killed my father. I sat in a corner and studied his fur, which has become more gray than white after so many years. I felt the weight of his stuffing and ran my finger along the tight machine stitches of his seam and then the wider, less precise purple stitches where Mrs. Souza reattached his ear. I was looking for anything at all that might suggest he was a replica, not the original Boris.

It is the same bear. I show him to Remy. “Do you remember this?”

Remy stares at Boris for a minute without comprehending, and then I see the recognition fill his eyes. He barely touches the curve of purple thread with one trembling finger. He seems afraid to actually feel the fabric, as though something awful could be transmitted by prolonged contact with this artifact of tragedy. “Where did you get this?” he breathes.

“From Gretchen and Abby. They came into the house in the middle of the night. I heard them talking in the kitchen. Gretchen was crying. Once they were gone, I found him sitting on the middle of our kitchen table.”

Remy starts to cry. “But that's impossible.”

Yet here we are. While I was waiting for the sun to rise this morning, Davis Gordon's telephone number popped into my head
without any conscious attempt on my part to remember it. I won't call him today, though; I need to talk to Gretchen and Abby first, and then probably my parents.

“Why do you go to Helen Handley's house and shovel her snow, Remy?”

“What?” He wipes his eyes, smearing tears and snot all over his flushed face. “Are you kidding me? Where did Gretchen and Abby get this bear? That's the question you should be asking, Sam—where the hell did they get this?”

“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.”

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.”