The Last Good Day of the Year Read online

  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.

  “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 i
n 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.”