The Last Good Day of the Year

by Jessica Warman

  “I still don’t have my license. You’ll have to drive all the way to Shelocta. It’s a long drive.”

  Squeezing my hand more tightly now, trying without success to stop his own fingers from trembling, Noah says, “I know that, Sam.”

  “What’s the matter with you? Did something happen?” The Noah I remember is nothing like the panicked kid staring up at me. He was polite and soft-spoken. He was an honor roll student and a varsity baseball player. His biggest screw-up in nineteen years had been … well, I guess it was me.

  “I’ll tell you. Promise you’ll meet me, Sam, and then I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Noah …”

  “Promise me.” Even his eyelashes are dirty, littered with tiny crusts of sleep.

  “Fine. I promise.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  January 1987

  I tried to hide the day we moved away. My parents were busy loading our things into the U-Haul. Along with Remy’s parents, several other neighbors volunteered to help without being asked: Ed Tickle showed up with a dolly and some extra boxes; Darla cleaned out our fridge and mopped our floors, which were covered in muddy footprints by the end of the day; Mrs. Souza, in a rare gesture of humanity, brought over a pan of homemade manicotti. It was January, and the weather was bone-cold. Remy and I hid in the playhouse. We huddled beneath a blanket in our winter coats, holding on to each other’s mittened hands and keeping quiet when we heard our parents calling our names. I don’t know what we expected to accomplish; it wasn’t as if we actually believed our plan would work.

  It was Abby who found us. I don’t remember where Gretchen was that day, but she must have been around. Abby was in her yard, smoking a cigarette, when she noticed my face as I peered at her through the playhouse window. She wasn’t wearing a coat when she came in and crawled underneath the blanket to sit between us on the floor. She must have been freezing.

  “You have to go with them, Sam. Your mom and dad are waiting.” She could have told my parents where I was hiding instead of dealing with it herself. I don’t know why she bothered trying to comfort us. It was the first time she’d ever been even remotely kind to me, and I didn’t know how to react.

  “Why can’t I stay here and live with Remy?” He squeezed my hand more tightly beneath the blanket when I asked the question.

  “Because you have to do what your parents say. I know it sucks, but that’s how it goes.”

  “But I want to stay.”

  “I know you do, kiddo, but it’s not up to you.” She reached over to wipe my tears, and I flinched as though I expected her to hit me. She didn’t try to touch me again after that.

  We heard my father shouting my name from the back porch, and I knew he or my mom would find us any minute; we didn’t exactly have the best hiding place. When I think about it now, it’s obvious they knew where to find us the whole time.

  “It will be easier if you don’t fight it,” Abby said. “Trust me.”

  But we wouldn’t listen; her words just made me cling more tightly to Remy. When she finally gave up and left, it was only another minute or two before my dad came knocking at the playhouse door.

  It took both of our fathers to pry us apart as we screamed and kicked and held on to each other as tightly as we could with fingers numb from the cold. Once they managed to separate us, my dad threw me over his shoulder and carried me to the U-Haul. Remy watched from his living room window as we drove away, crying and waving until we turned out of sight. It was no proper good-bye for two kids who’d known each other all their lives. My arms were scratched and bleeding from where Remy had tried to keep hold of me.

  We weren’t yet out of town when I had an idea. “What if Turtle comes back and we aren’t home? How will she find us?”

  Remember, I was seven. I knew Steven was in prison for my sister’s murder, but she’d been alive the last time I saw her.

  Beside me in the tiny backseat, Gretchen grabbed my wrist and squeezed so hard that I had a bruise the next morning. “Shut up, Samantha. Turtle’s never coming back. She’s dead.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “Why not? It’s true. She’s dead. She’s gone forever. Right, Mom? Tell Samantha it’s true. Tell her.”

  Our mother didn’t answer. Our dad turned up the radio to drown out the sound of our voices. Gretchen stopped talking and stared out the window, and I fell asleep shortly after we pulled onto the highway. As I dozed off, I thought I heard her speaking softly to herself, although it might have been a dream. But I could have sworn I heard her whisper, repeating the same sentence over and over again: This can’t be how it ends. This can’t be how it ends. This can’t be how it ends.

  In the past five years, Paul and Sharon Myers have allowed themselves to hope for closure no fewer than eight times. Every instance is different: once it was the discovery of Turtle’s shoe alongside a highway; another time it was bone fragments that ended up belonging to another missing woman waiting for another family to claim her remains and the heartache that came with them. Several times, an especially promising tip shriveled into nothingness upon closer inspection, and there have been two very convincing false confessions. Each of these events bears one thing in common: unlike the diminishing returns that tend to occur with multiple instances of good news, the Myers’ grief over each new disappointment has not yet begun to sting any less. And perhaps “sting” is too mild a word for what they endure.

  “Imagine you’ve been cut open and had your insides pulled out,” Paul tells me. “You’d think that eventually there would be nothing left, but that isn’t how it works. Somehow it keeps filling up, over and over again. You think it won’t hurt as bad the next time around, but somehow it manages to get worse. I never knew this capacity for misery could exist within one person, and it’s fucking endless. Will it stop after I’m finally dead? Where will it go? I’ll tell you what I think—what I know: there’s no getting rid of it. It’s self-generating. Once I’m buried, it will just find somewhere else to grow. Those scientists who are trying to invent a perpetual motion machine—would they settle for discovering perpetual pain? They ought to cut me open and have a look inside.”

  Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, p. 136

  Chapter Fifteen

  Summer 1996

  The first time my parents’ lawyer called to tell us that my sister’s body might have been found was eight weeks after she disappeared. It was March 1, 1986. By then, every day bled into the next like an endless waking nightmare for my family, especially for my mom. I remember prescription pill bottles taking up a whole shelf in the bathroom closet. My mother may not have been able to pull herself together enough to do laundry or cook dinner, but she always managed to go to the pharmacy or the liquor store.

  By early March, Steven was in jail on charges of aggravated kidnapping and second-degree murder, which struck some people as odd, since there was no hard proof that my sister was dead. My parents hadn’t given me any inkling of that as a possibility, not yet. They were still holding out hope that Steven had stashed Turtle away somewhere—maybe at a friend’s house—and that she was alive and unharmed. Because I was seven years old and had never known anyone who died, death was still more a vague idea than an inevitability; it was something that happened to old people, something—so I’d been told—that I wouldn’t have to worry about for a very long time.

  Back then I still believed in God. Every morning when I got up, and every night before I went to sleep, I prayed for him to send my sister home. I tried to be as clear as possible about my request: Please let Turtle come home. I don’t remember ever asking for my parents to stop being sad or for Gretchen to stop acting crazy; I knew getting Turtle back would solve all of my family’s other problems.

  Imagine Point Pleasant way back in 1986, when the neighborhood was still new enough that even our row of cheap, cookie-cutter town houses had some sheen to it. When Channel 4 News anchorwoman Stacy Middleman stood in our driveway to film a segment on Turtle’s kidnapping
, she described us as living in “a quiet family neighborhood in a small community.” She spoke to my parents a few times, her film crew lugging its gear into our living room and taking all afternoon to set up, while Stacy and my mom sat at our kitchen table and looked through the carefully assembled photo albums that documented my sister’s brief, interrupted life. Imagine me peeking around the corner to get a glimpse of the celebrity who was drinking tea with my mother. (Until Turtle’s kidnapping, my mom had been a dedicated coffee junkie, but now her stomach was too weak to handle anything stronger than green tea.) I wanted to ask for Stacy’s autograph, but I was too shy.

  We got used to seeing news vans parked outside our house. I guess they felt it made a better story if they filmed their segments at the scene of the crime. They all seemed like nice people who didn’t want to interfere too much with my family’s attempt to keep our pain and worry from bubbling over, which used to happen at the slightest provocation or reminder of Turtle’s absence: back then, just seeing a kid with blond hair was enough to make my mother lose it. All the reporters and behind-the-scenes tech guys did their best to be kind and respectful, but at the end of the day they wanted a good story more than anything else.

  When the police found Turtle’s red shoe on the side of Route 22, somehow the press found out before my family. We came home from the mall to find Stacy Middleman reporting live from our sidewalk, holding up a shoe similar to the one that had belonged to my sister; I guess it made a good visual aide. It had been almost a week since the last swarm of reporters had shown up at the house, so we knew right away something big must have happened to prompt their arrival. Gretchen had opted out of our trip to the mall that day; she was alone in the house when the Channel 4 News van pulled up, and she saw the shoe in Stacy’s dainty, well-manicured hand. After closing the curtains and turning off most of the lights, Gretchen took a few of our mom’s Xanax pills and spent the afternoon drawing shallow lines across the skin on her Achilles tendons with a steak knife. The wounds weren’t deep enough to do any lasting damage, but you can still make out the scars if you look closely enough.

  But back to the shoe: it was a real blow to our family, but it could have been worse. Lots of little girls owned the same kind of shoes, which our mom had bought from Kmart. Plenty of those same little girls had to have worn the same size. There was a chance—a small one, but still a chance—that it wasn’t her shoe at all. If they’d found, say, Boris, the stuffed bear she’d been clutching when Steven carried her away, it would have been worse, I think, because there would have been no doubt that it had belonged to Turtle. Because Mrs. Souza had used purple thread to reattach his ear, he was unique. There was only one Boris.

  The discovery of the red shoe was the first of many false alarms regarding the recovery of my sister’s body. (Even now it makes me shudder to use those words, but they’re better than the alternative of calling them her “remains.”) The police initially thought it was a big deal because of the location of the ditch along a secondary road two miles away from the home Steven Handley shared with his parents. The road was surrounded by woods. At first, the theory was that Steven had tossed the shoe out his car window before or after dumping Turtle somewhere nearby—or maybe it had fallen off without him noticing—and then he’d quickly returned home.

  Police and volunteers searched within a two-mile radius surrounding the drainage ditch for fifteen days. They used four cadaver dogs. They scanned from above in a helicopter. They found nothing.

  Things like this have happened again and again over the years: someone finds some bones in the woods that look as if they could belong to a human child, authorities are called in to investigate, forensic tests are conducted, and my family waits for weeks, only to learn that the bones belong to an animal and not somebody’s daughter. A tipster in upstate New York calls the police because his downstairs neighbor has a quiet little girl who looks like she could be an older version of Turtle, and our hopes soar at the possibility that every fact we know about her disappearance is somehow wrong. We ignore the ridiculousness of our new theory, in which Steven had an accomplice—someone for whom he was willing to go to prison—who’d whisked my sister away in the night in order to raise her in a middle-class suburb eight hours’ drive away. It’s not impossible. Miracles happen. Never give up hope, people used to tell us; hope will sustain you. Hope only sustains for so long before it corrodes into fantasy. Without evidence, hope becomes delusion. After enough time, people stop grieving with you and start grieving for you. It’s a lonely feeling.

  Last year, on Christmas morning, my family got up to find that a sealed white envelope had been slid through our mail slot overnight. Thinking it was a card from a neighbor—there was no stamp, which meant that someone had hand-delivered it—my mother opened it right away.

  It was a photograph of Turtle from when she was three years old, asleep in bed. Nobody knows who took the picture. Nobody knows where it came from. When we called the police, they told us it was probably someone’s idea of a sick joke.

  Things like this happen more often than you’d think, they said. The world is full of people who like to watch their friends and neighbors suffer. And we’re still supposed to hold on to our hope—even knowing something like that.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Summer 1996

  Hannah and I are sharing cotton candy on the Ferris wheel at the local Fireman’s Carnival when I spot Remy and Heather below us. It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon, almost dusk. Lines are already forming at most of the rides. The cloudless sky is a mellow blend of reds and yellows near the horizon. Remy and his girlfriend are watching some friends shoot baskets, trying to win stuffed animals. He’s standing behind her, his hands in the front pockets of her white denim shorts. She reaches up to drag her fingers through his hair, and he leans over to bite her neck, which makes her giggle. I feel a wave of nausea as our chair lurches forward.

  “I see Remy,” Hannah says.

  “Me, too.” It will be a nightmare trying to avoid them. The carnival isn’t big enough.

  We’re playing Skee-Ball when they come strolling out from behind a hot dog booth, their arms around each other’s waists. Before I have a chance to distract her, Hannah notices Remy and calls out his name.

  If it wasn’t for my little sister’s enthusiasm, I’m certain the three of us would have been able to stay away from one another and still manage to have fun. Remy and I have been spending time alone together, mostly late at night, but he’s also been around more often in the afternoons and evenings lately. I know he hasn’t been with Heather as much as usual. I haven’t asked him why.

  He has a startled look in his eyes, glancing back and forth from me to Hannah, trying to figure out how he should react.

  “I’m Sam. It’s nice to meet you.” I give Heather an awkward wave with my fistful of game tickets. “You’re Heather, right?”

  She’s pretty and petite, even in wedge sandals that add a few inches to her height. Her tank top is cropped to show off her flat stomach and pierced belly button.

  “Yeah … ,” she says. She gives Remy a death stare. “How does she know my name, baby?”

  I look at him, too. “What?”

  He looks at my sister. “Hey, Hannah. I like your overalls.”

  “Thanks.” My mother makes sure Hannah is always well dressed, even in play clothes. Before we left for the fair tonight, she put my sister’s hair in two braids with yellow ribbons tied to the ends. Her lips are stained dark red from the cotton candy we ate on the Ferris wheel.

  There’s noise and activity all around us, but silence settles over us like a methane cloud while Heather and I wait for Remy to answer her question.

  “So you and Remy have talked since your family moved back? I didn’t know that,” Heather says to me. She gives Hannah a fake smile that is all teeth and gums.

  “She lives next door, baby, so it’s not like we weren’t going to bump into each other.” Remy tries to put his arm around Heather’s shoulde
rs, but she steps out of his reach.

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  He’s staring at the ground. I can’t tell whether he’s afraid to look at her or embarrassed to look at me, or both.

  Heather’s attention shifts back to Hannah. “Is this your sister?” she asks me. Her mouth drops before I can answer. “Oh, wow.” She puts a hand to her mouth in genuine surprise. “She looks so much like Tabitha.” Her eyes are wide. For a second I don’t understand how she would even know what Turtle looked like, but then I remember that my sister is something of a local celebrity. You’d have a hard time finding someone around here who would be able to take one look at her photo—the school picture from kindergarten was the one they always showed in the papers and on the news—without knowing exactly who it was. Everybody remembers what happened to Turtle.

  Everybody but Hannah. “Who’s Tabitha?”

  “Your sister,” Heather says. She’s either very stupid or very mean.

  Hannah shakes her head. “My sisters are Sam and Gretchen.”

  “Heather and I have to go now.” Remy smiles at Hannah while he backs away, dragging Heather along behind him. She starts yelling at him as soon as she thinks they’re out of earshot, and I see her smacking his face and shoulders as the two of them disappear around the corner.

  “Who’s Tabitha?” Hannah repeats. Aside from the question, she seems unfazed by what just occurred.

  “Don’t worry about it. You don’t know her.”

  “But that girl said she was my sister. She said I looked just like my sister Tabitha.”

  “She was confused.”