The Last Good Day of the Year (3 page)

“Is she okay upstairs by herself?” Susan's gaze lingers on the empty hallway as Hannah's footsteps fade above us.

“She's not by herself,” I say. “Gretchen is up there, too, but I think she's in the shower.”

My mom's smile always seems genuine, even when it's not. It's a skill she picked up as a teenage beauty queen. “Why don't you go check on her?” She beams at me. Her eyes sparkle, but her jaw is clenched.

“Okay.” I pause. “Do you mean Hannah? Or Gretchen?”

“She means Gretchen.” Mike winks at me. “Go make sure she doesn't already have a boy up there in her bedroom.” He winces as the words are still leaving his mouth. “Christ, that's not what I meant. I'm sorry.”

My mom pretends he didn't say anything that would require an apology. “You've been getting some sun, Mike. You look great.”

My dad hands him a fresh beer. “Have something to wash your foot down.” Beads of sweat are gathered along his hairline, even though the house is cool. A fat vein pulses on the side of his neck. “Drink up, buddy. It's five o'clock somewhere, right?”

Gretchen is on the floor in our parents' bedroom. Her hair is wrapped in a towel, and she's wearing a ratty old bathrobe that used to belong to our mother. She holds a red plastic Solo cup between her knees, silently running an index finger along the rim.

I don't know my sister that well. Once she left for college in Texas, she rarely came home to visit. We weren't even invited to her wedding. I remember overhearing lots of heated phone calls as a kid, my mom crying and begging her to come home. My parents were more worried about her than angry or upset. They worried when she dropped out of college and moved in with one of her professors, a Dr. M. Paul Culangelo. They worried when she called to inform us she'd eloped in Maui. They worried when she finally brought him home to meet us, because he was kind and seemed to genuinely adore her. His first name, we learned, was Michael. Think about it for a second. I didn't expect to like him, but I did. He was only six years older than Gretchen, so not quite the middle-aged predator my parents had expected. It was nice for a while, but their visits—three of them in the space of four months, which was more than I'd seen my sister in the past
ten years—always had a twinge of desperation, as though they were an attempt to paste together a family from scraps. We hoped the sense of togetherness would last, but knew it wouldn't.

I have no idea why Gretchen left him. When Ed Tickle had a stroke last January, Gretchen came back to Shelocta to help Abby take care of her father. She's been here ever since; according to our mom, things are strained in Gretchen's marriage at the moment, but it might not be over for good. I'm not convinced she knows what she's talking about. I can't imagine Gretchen sharing that kind of detail with any of us, least of all our mother. My dad is the only one she has much of a relationship with. She was always his favorite, even after everything that happened with Turtle.

I can tell Gretchen is trying to be as close to invisible as possible when I'm around. She spends a lot of time in her bedroom with the door closed. She goes to bed early and gets up late. But how can she not expect me to be fascinated by her? She is impossibly beautiful—even more so than our mother—and her looks are so startling, so unnerving, that I can't imagine ever feeling comfortable being in the same room with her. She must know what she has, right? That classic, all-American look that girls everywhere struggle for—blond hair, blue eyes, clear skin, impossible hip-to-waist proportions—comes so easily to Gretchen. Even though I haven't seen her use it, she must be aware of the power that comes with her kind of beauty, the Helen-of-Troy implications that will follow her throughout her life. Even Hannah already knows damn well that being pretty makes everything easier.

Gretchen doesn't acknowledge me as I stand in the doorway. She just stares at the cup.

“Gretchen?”

The cup goes flying as she flinches, then scrambles to regain her grasp. She tucks the cup into the folds of her bathrobe, as if she's trying to keep me from seeing it.

“The Mitchells are downstairs.” I take a few tiny steps forward, inching my way into the room.

She barely reacts. “Okay,” she says, staring at the wall behind me, unwilling to make eye contact. Neither one of us says anything for a moment.

“Are you going to say hi to them?” I ask.

No answer.

“I could, uh … I could tell them you're still in the shower. I could tell them you're busy.”

She finally looks at me. “Why would you do that?”

Most of our conversations have been like this recently: tentative and agonizing. “Is Remy here, too?” she continues.

I shake my head.

“Have you talked to him lately?” I think I detect the slightest hint of accusation in her voice, but can't be certain. Gretchen has lived in Texas for the past ten years, and she's developed a heavy southern accent. Its effect is unnerving for two reasons: first, when I talk to her, I feel like I'm speaking to someone who is almost my sister, but not exactly; it's like she's Bizarro Gretchen. Second—and far more disturbing—I know her thick drawl is mostly an act. Her speech couldn't have changed so drastically in one decade. So why is she faking it?

Before I can escape, she stares at me with milky blue eyes that don't blink as she pats the space beside her on the floor. “Sit with me for a minute.” Sensing my hesitation—those eyes have a way of unnerving me like nothing else—she says, “Please? Not for long, I promise.” She has these occasional bursts of interest in me that come out of nowhere, small explosions of tenderness that she shrinks away from before they blossom into anything meaningful. When she tugs the towel from her hair, the smell of strawberry shampoo settles around us, rippling every time she turns her head. Her skin is translucent. She was never going to take the beauty queen route with her looks. She's a jeans and T-shirt kind of woman, always has been.

“Do you hate me, Samantha? You can tell me. I won't be mad.”

How does a person respond to such a question? “I'm your sister.”

She drags her fingers through the old shag carpet beneath us to create patterns in the worn-out fibers. They remind me of crop circles. I imagine our parents' bedroom as a tiny universe within our larger reality, whole civilizations of microscopic dust mites surrounding us.

“Gretchen. I love you.”

“Mom hates me.”

“That's not true.” It might be true, though—at least a little bit. Especially of
our
mother, if only because her efforts to be kind and loving to her oldest child are so transparently forced. I'm sure she loves Gretchen plenty. Of course she does. All mothers love their children. But I know, too, there's a tiny splinter of hate in her soul for my sister. I don't see how there couldn't be. Maybe it's very small,
so small that a person wouldn't notice it even if they took a hard look, but it's still there. It's not the worst thing in the world; a person can feel love and hate at the same time for the same individual. It's easier than you might expect.

When something terrible happens, everybody wants someone to blame. It's natural human behavior; years of therapy have taught me that much. In the case of Turtle's abduction, there was plenty of blame to go around. I've come to think of the events surrounding that night as a line of dominoes. And depending on how carefully you examine the situation and exactly where you choose to mark the beginning of the story, there's a case to be made that Gretchen was the first domino to tip. In a way, everything that happened started with Gretchen.

My sister holds the red Solo cup close to my face. “Do you see these?” she asks, pointing at a crooked row of indentations running along the rim. “This was Turtle's cup. It's the cup she was drinking from that night. Those are her bite marks, Sam.”

If what she's saying is true, the cup is over ten years old. Where has she been keeping it? How does she even know it was Turtle's? Gretchen wasn't home that night; she was three doors down, at Abby's house. By the time anyone thought to wake her up, our sister was long gone.

I'm barely breathing as I run a finger over the marks, imagining my little sister chewing on the edge as we sat on the living room sofa that evening, bored, watching the grown-ups in our lives behave like teenagers, shining examples of the “do as I say, not as I do” style of parenting. It was too early for them to send us to bed, so they tried to ignore us as much as possible. The three of
us—Turtle, Remy, and I—were drinking orange soda, which was a huge deal at the time; we were almost never allowed sugary drinks. I tilt the cup and see a mess of tiny fibers and minuscule shreds of lint and dust stuck to the inside. The white plastic has a dull, orange tint. It hasn't been rinsed, not once in ten years.

“Where did you get this?” Somehow the cup makes me feel different than I do when I'm looking at a photograph of my long-lost sister or holding a stuffed animal that belonged to her. Her mouth sipped from this very edge, probably leaving behind DNA. Her baby teeth made the marks in this plastic. It's more than something she once held; it's an artifact.

“I should put it back,” Gretchen says, taking it from my hands. She puts it in our mother's top dresser drawer.

“Has it always been there? Ever since it happened?”

She nods. “I think so. Every time I've checked.”

“How did you find it?”

Gretchen shrugs. “How does anyone find anything? I was going through Mom's stuff. You know, snooping around. You've never done that?”

“Not really, no.”

My sister stands in the doorway, her blond hair spilling over her shoulders in thick, wet pieces. Her robe is knotted so loosely that it's coming apart, revealing a sliver of her naked body, which doesn't seem to bother her one bit. The sight causes me to tug my shirt more tightly closed and pull my knees up against my chest, as though I'm the one who's exposed.

Gretchen presses an index finger to her lips as she stares at me. From downstairs, we hear the screechy sounds of our mother
laughing about something with Mrs. Mitchell, just like old times—almost.

“You and I, Samantha,” my sister says, “are very different kinds of people.”

She's right. I'm seventeen, and I've never even officially had a boyfriend. By the time she was my age, Gretchen had already gone through more than her share of boyfriends. The boys she liked were always older, always getting her into some kind of trouble. One of them—I don't remember his name—burned a hole in our new sofa when he dropped a cigarette. Another one, Mike, rode a motorcycle without a helmet. Ross Daniel, her junior year prom date, brought her home the morning after the dance so drunk that she couldn't get out of bed for the rest of the weekend.

I know about all these boys, and their relationships with my big sister, mostly because they've been assembled into a catalog of sorts in the bestselling nonfiction book
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt
. Early in chapter 4, author Davis Gordon devotes a few paragraphs to summarizing these teenage romances, and what they might say about Gretchen, as a lead-in to the book's real person of interest: Steven Handley.

Steven was the last guy Gretchen dated before she left for college. He was older, and he was much worse than any of the others. My parents couldn't stand him, which only made Gretchen like him more. The relationship lasted a few months. It ended badly when Steven was arrested for killing Turtle.

 

New Year's Day, 1986

Remy's pants were all wet. When he opened his eyes, I could tell just from looking at him that he'd been awake the whole time, only pretending to sleep. The boy in him wanted to be tougher than any girl, but the fact that we were both children was all that mattered. He didn't want to leave his sleeping bag because he'd wet his pants as we lay there with our eyes shut, unable to sense anything beyond the breath of the stranger beside us. Now he was crying while I said it didn't matter, tugging him upstairs with me to get help.

“Santa Claus took Turtle away.” I reached for Remy's hand, which was sticky and damp.

Our parents stared at us, uncomprehending.

“He took her,” I repeated.