The Last Good Day of the Year (4 page)

“Who took her?” As my dad stood up, Susan Mitchell noticed
her son's wet pajamas and beckoned him over. He tugged me along beside him, refusing to let go of my hand.

“Santa Claus.” I knew it sounded absurd. I could feel the blood rushing through my head but not the floor under my feet, and before I knew it my knees were wobbling, followed by my legs, until my whole body trembled with panic and I fell crying into my mother's lap. “Why aren't you helping her? He took her!”

“Sweetie, calm down. Nobody else has been in the house. We've been here all night.”

“Christmas is over, Samantha. Santa's back at the North Pole.” Mike Mitchell, who was halfheartedly concealing a glass pipe in his cupped hand, tilted back his head and blew three perfect smoke rings. In
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt
, Davis Gordon would make frequent mention of all the precious seconds wasted as a result of Remy's and my parents' failure to act quickly. But it's easy for outsiders to look back on any tragedy and insist they would have handled things better. It's been suggested more than once that our parents were unforgivably negligent, but that's simply not true: it couldn't have been more than a full minute before they
did
act. Our fathers hadn't yet reached the bottom of the basement stairs when my dad hollered for someone to call the police.

We heard my father and Mike shouting for Turtle as they searched everywhere she might be hiding: the bathroom, the mudroom, the laundry room, the garage. When they didn't find her, they searched in less likely spaces: beneath the sofa, the cabinet below the bathroom sink, the washer and dryer. They shouted her name while they looked everywhere her small body could have managed to fit, and some places where it couldn't. Later, they would
hate themselves for not going outside sooner, where they would have seen a single pair of adult footprints going from the house to the woods. She had only been gone a few minutes by then; they might have been able to find her simply by following the prints before they were covered in fresh snow.

I don't remember everything that happened after that, but there are bits and pieces of the hours that followed that I can recall in perfect detail, the sights and sounds chiseled permanently into my memory. My mother was so upset that she didn't even try to make it to the bathroom before vomiting a belly full of booze and pretzels onto our carpet. The first floor of our house—the kitchen and living room in particular—quickly became the kind of mess she would have stayed awake all night to clean up under normal circumstances: Empty beer bottles crowded into sloppy rows on the coffee table next to a pile of sticky playing cards and an ashtray, two cigars still burning within. Dirty dishes filled the sink, spilling onto the surrounding countertop. Though I didn't know what it was at the time, nobody bothered to hide the bag of marijuana on the bar. The TV was tuned to ABC's
New Year's Rockin' Eve
wrap-up show, hosted by a somehow-still-alert Dick Clark, his energy rippling over the airwaves even with the volume muted. When the heavy winds interfered with our satellite signal near the end of the show, the screen froze on his sign-off for the night, his mittened hand raised in a wave. It stayed like that for days. When someone finally thought to turn it off, Dick remained, his silhouette literally burned into the screen. The rest of the mess would remain, too, until Mrs. Mitchell decided to clean it up almost a week later; by then the smell of stale beer and vomit was impossible to
get rid of. Eventually we replaced the carpet and slapped a new coat of paint on the walls. It was the best compromise my parents could come up with. My dad didn't want to change a thing about our house after that night; if he'd had his way, we might still be living in the same filth. On her worst days, my mom begged him to let her burn the whole place to the ground. I don't think any of us would have been surprised if she'd gone through with it.

I'm not sure why the police barely spoke with Remy and me until so much later. They at first seemed far more concerned with their search for Turtle than finding out exactly how she'd gone missing, which seems like a real no-brainer in hindsight. Maybe it was because we were so young. It was well after midnight, and we were two children struggling to manage our terror and exhaustion, along with all the unspoken fears that were displayed so clearly on our parents' faces as they waited, not knowing where Turtle was—if she was warm or cold, fast asleep or awake and panicking, alive or dead.

Each of us—especially as a child—wants to feel secure and protected. All my life I'd looked to my parents for reassurance that things were under control amid all the chaos and uncertainty of life. When I was afraid, they soothed me. When I was sick, they healed me. Because this was my reality, I felt certain at first that they would quickly find my sister and bring her home safely. It seemed impossible that they could fail. In the same way, I believed the police would arrest her abductor and throw him in jail, easy as that. It was the only outcome I could imagine: my parents would protect Turtle, and the police would protect everybody else by capturing the man who'd taken her. Good things happen to good
people, and bad people get punished. We tell ourselves these things because we have to, and there's nothing more frightening than when this curtain of comfort is yanked away to reveal the truth: life often doesn't make sense; it isn't fair, and sometimes it is far more cruel than kind. We are never fully protected. To a child, these facts are incomprehensible. To an adult, they are reason to fear the worst—the fact that tragedy can swallow a person in one gulp without so much as a moment's warning.

Because nobody asked, it simply did not occur to me to mention whether I'd recognized the man inside the ill-fitting Santa suit. I'd seen enough of his features as he stood beneath the floodlight in our yard; they were mostly hidden by the white beard strapped to his face, but I'd still recognized him.

The previous summer, my parents had hired a landscaping company to build a retaining wall on the hillside in our backyard. The soil on the hill was too unstable for grass or plants to put down roots, and my mother couldn't stand the constant accumulation of pebbles from the steady erosion. Ed Tickle had promised to help my dad with the project months ago, but then he'd gotten too busy. He ran the local hardware store and did small construction jobs on the side; my dad knew Ed could have done a good job on the wall, but he didn't want to be pushy. He'd already built a playhouse for Remy and me at the edge of the Mitchells' backyard that summer. He'd done it for almost nothing, too, because he said it was good for the neighborhood.

Since Ed wasn't available, my mom hired a guy named Lenny
LaMana, because his bid was the only one my family could afford. His company was called Landscaping by Lenny. My father had seen him around town and thought he was a sleaze. “His name might as well be Lenny Leisure Suit,” he'd complained. “I mean, come
on
—the guy wears a freaking pinkie ring!”

My mother is terrified of awkward conversations; as a result, she's polite to the point of absurdity. She once ate a hamburger at a restaurant because the waitress got her order wrong and my mother didn't want to embarrass her by correcting the mistake. My mother is a vegetarian.

“I already hired them,” she said, referring to Landscaping by Lenny LaMana/Leisure Suit. We can't back out now; it will be too uncomfortable. Besides,” she added, “we'd lose our deposit.”

“You gave him a
deposit
already? You think we have a money tree growing out back that you can go shake when you need some extra cash? Christ, Sharon, I was gone for less than two hours this afternoon.”

“He won't even be doing the work. He's a salesman. He'll send a crew of local guys, I'm sure. They'll probably be college kids.”

“Oh, that's just great. I'm sure he hires only the best and brightest. Did you ask him if he does background checks on them? Do they get tested for drugs?”

My mom laughed at him. “Should they? Do
you
? Listen to yourself, Paul. You sound like your father.”

In the end, my dad gave in, like he always does with my mom. There were four men on the crew Lenny sent to our house the following
week. Steven Handley was the oldest at twenty-three. He'd graduated from the local high school when Gretchen was barely twelve years old, but she'd still heard about him. Shelocta was a small town.

Everybody had known and liked Steven back in his high school days. He acted in the musical every year and played drums in the concert band. He had dark brown hair, long eyelashes, red cheeks, and teeth that could have benefitted from braces but didn't need them to accomplish his ordinary but well-scrubbed look of a country boy who had always listened when his mother told him to brush his teeth and eat his vegetables. He got decent grades and played varsity football; his dad was the team's assistant coach. His parents owned their own business and worked hard. They were comfortable, but nowhere near rich. Under different circumstances, he might have grown up and become a successful insurance salesman who coached his kid's Little League team on weekends, and he might have been perfectly satisfied with life.

At Steven's senior prom, which was held at the local Marriott that year, he did a backflip into the wrong end of the hotel swimming pool and smacked his head against the cement floor, splitting his skull open underwater. He was bleeding buckets and was unconscious for more than six minutes before the ambulance showed up. He needed one blood transfusion, eighteen hours of surgery, more than a hundred staples in his head, and three months of physical therapy to repair hairline fractures in several vertebrae, but by fall it seemed to doctors like he'd made a miraculous recovery.

He hadn't. The people closest to Steven—his parents and his girlfriend, Amy, who was also headed to Penn State—could tell
right away that something had gone wrong during his reassembly. It was as if he'd woken up a whole different person.

He and Amy left for college in late August as planned, but things went downhill from day one. Steven started getting high with his roommate almost immediately; Amy said he was heavily into LSD, which would have been a big deal to his friends and family. Steven and his roommate supposedly got so tripped out on Halloween night that when Amy tried to leave the room, they tied her to the bed and kept her restrained for hours. They even stuffed a sock in her mouth and put tape over it so she couldn't scream for help. She got away at dawn when Steven decided to set off all the fire alarms in the building and run screaming up and down the halls, pounding on everybody's door to warn them of the approaching apocalypse.

Steven might have been a different person five years after flunking out of school and moving back into his parents' house, but Gretchen hadn't known any previous version of him to use for comparison. My parents knew his name and story, mostly because Susan Mitchell was the high school band director. Steven's all-American looks still held up after everything he put his body through; the only major difference was the twelve-inch scar running from the top of his head to the base of his skull.

My mom and dad weren't the kind of parents who kept track of their kids' every movement. Maybe they didn't notice when my sister and Steven started flirting every day. Maybe they truly believed she was out until midnight or later most nights with Abby,
at the movies or the mall. She lied to them all the time, and she usually got away with it. They didn't ask too many questions.

Steven and the rest of Lenny's crew worked in my yard the summer Remy and I turned seven. It was 1985. I remember going to the movies to see
Back to the Future
the weekend it was released, and hearing “We Are the World” every time someone turned on a radio. It was also the summer my family and I gathered in our living room to watch the press conference at which Vice President George H. W. Bush introduced America to Christa McAuliffe, the social studies teacher from New Hampshire who had been selected from among thousands of applicants to be on board the
Challenger
space shuttle when it launched the following year.

“What do you think, Sam? Would you ever want to be an astronaut and go up to space?” My mom was beside me on the couch, putting her hair in foam curlers while we watched TV.

I used to love looking at the stars, but I felt no desire to see them up close. “No. I'd be too afraid.”

As she looked at me, she reached up to remove a bobby pin she'd been holding between her teeth. “Good girl,” she said, patting my head. “Sometimes it's smart to be afraid.”

New Year's Day, 1986

From the moment I came unfrozen after Turtle was carried off into the cold night, I cried without stopping. Even when I was silent and otherwise seemed calm, the tears continued, and there didn't seem to be any point in trying to hold them back—not that I wanted to. None of it felt real. It was like we all had been actors in a pleasant but uneventful long-running play—
Childhood: Not a Musical
—but tonight we'd somehow wandered onto the wrong stage and picked up the wrong scripts.
Tonight, the part of Terrified Mother Who Cannot Stop Screaming will be played by Sharon Myers. This is a big change for Ms. Myers, whose previous role as Pretty Suburban Housewife did not require much screaming
.

While our fathers searched, Susan Mitchell walked down the street to retrieve Gretchen from Abby Tickle's house. My mother stayed by the front door and prayed the Rosary, which I'd never
seen her do until that night. Remy and I sat at the kitchen table with a friendly cop—he told us to call him Officer Bert—who took notes on a small yellow legal pad as we talked.

“The man you saw tonight—can you tell me what he looked like?”

“He looked like Santa Claus, except he was skinny. I already told you.” Beside me, Remy nodded in silent agreement. I thought he'd been asleep while it happened, but now he insisted he'd been faking.