I’m sitting on my bed, staring at the photo in my lap and willing it to change, when Gretchen strolls into my bedroom wearing only a bra and underwear.
“Oh—oh, hey, Sam. You’re in here.” Her hair is soaking wet, dripping water onto my floor. “I thought I heard you,” she says, trying to play off the obvious fact that she was hoping to snoop around my empty room.
“What do you want?”
“Can I borrow some of your jewelry?”
“I guess so.” I barely own any jewelry, and none of it seems like it would suit Gretchen’s style. But it’s not like I have any good reason to refuse her. “It’s all in my jewelry box. There’s not much, but you can take whatever you want.”
Gretchen winces as she carefully creaks open the lid with her clean, delicate fingers. She leans over to peek at the plastic ballerina curled up inside, her pointed toes wedged into a metal spring, waiting to resume her endless pirouette to the metallic rendition of “Für Elise.”
My sister starts poking at the contents, frowning. “Is this all you have?”
“I told you it wasn’t much.”
“This is all crap.”
“Thanks, Gretchen.”
“I know you have better stuff somewhere. Where’s your hiding place?”
“My hiding place?”
“Where do you keep your weed and condoms?”
I bat my eyelashes at her. “With my hypodermic needles and pharmaceuticals, naturally.”
“Naturally,” she laughs. “How about the locket you found in Remy’s basement?”
I reach into my shirt for the chain hanging around my neck. “This one?”
“Aha! Yes! Can I borrow it?”
I hold still while she leans over me to unclasp the necklace before I’ve even given her permission to take it. My palm trembles over the photograph resting faceup in my lap. I don’t know why I care whether Gretchen sees the picture.
“Whatcha got there?” She swipes my hand away to get a closer look. “Ooh, is that me? Oh, my God. Look at my hair.”
“It’s from one of my birthday parties with Remy.” I try to act nonchalant. “I found it in his basement.”
“Lemme see.” She snatches it away before I have a chance to stop her, holding it up to the light for a better look. I can’t be sure, but I think I notice her gaze deliberately avoid Turtle’s face.
“I remember this party. Wow.”
“Gretchen?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you see the man in the woods?”
She takes a closer look at the photo. “Oh,” she says, and I think I detect a hint of trepidation in her voice. “That’s Frank Yarrow.”
“Frank Yarrow?” My ears ring at the sound of his name. Frank Yarrow. I’ve heard it before.
“He worked for Abby’s dad sometimes. I think he might have been homeless.”
“Did you know him?”
She shakes her head. “No,” she says flatly, “but I saw him around sometimes.”
“Was he—was he nice?”
Gretchen won’t look at me. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, Sam. He’s dead now.” Now that she has what she wanted—the locket, clutched in her fist—she’s done with pleasantries.
“He’s dead? When did he die?”
“A long time ago,” she says, annoyed. “You were still a little girl.” She pauses, one hand poised above my doorknob. “I think he was Amish. There was something wrong with him; he had some kind of mental disability.”
“Remy and I saw him at the railroad tracks once. He was terrifying.”
Gretchen turns to frown at me. Her short hair is beginning to dry into small, silky blond waves, delicate as fluff. Her pretty face has a sharp expression. “You couldn’t remember him, Sam. He died when you were too young.”
“We saw him,” I insist. “He gave us marbles.”
“You’re wrong.” There’s something about the way she says it that keeps me from arguing any further. She isn’t going to believe me. “Forget about him, Sam,” she says, before she pulls my door closed. “He was nobody.”
* * *
Later that night, Remy and I are on the seesaw at the playground across the street when a blue car pulls up outside Abby’s house. We’re hidden by darkness as we observe the scene, our bodies gliding slowly up and down through the cool night air. The driver, a man, walks around to the passenger side and opens the door for Gretchen. The two of them go into Abby’s house, their arms around each other’s waists the whole time, their heads close together. The car is still there in the morning. I don’t see Gretchen for the rest of the weekend.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Summer 1996
Over a few weeks last spring, I called Davis Gordon a number of times. I always did it from Noah’s house so my parents wouldn’t see it on our phone bill. Noah didn’t know about it at first; nobody did. If his mom wasn’t home, I would tell him I needed to use the bathroom, and then I’d sneak upstairs to use the fancy white phone on her nightstand.
I never knew exactly what I wanted to say to Davis. It didn’t matter, because I always hung up shortly after he answered. I called him maybe seven or eight times in less than a month.
I made the phone calls around the same time I started spending most weekends at Noah’s house. I was drunk on the thrill of being so close to him. I used to have to remind myself to breathe every time he touched me. I couldn’t believe the energy I felt in his presence. I remember thinking it was no wonder love made people go crazy sometimes.
Noah figured things out easily enough: Davis’s number was a long-distance call, and his name showed up with the charges on the phone bill. He didn’t press me much to explain myself, which was good, because I couldn’t have explained anyway. Even I didn’t understand why I called.
A few weeks later, when I asked Noah for a ride to the annual Mid-Atlantic Conference of True Crime Writers and Investigative Journalists that was being held at a New Jersey convention center, he didn’t hesitate. He still doesn’t know the whole reason for our little escape. For him, I guess it was enough that he got to stay overnight in a hotel with me.
I almost didn’t show up to meet Noah today. It’s been weeks since we saw each other at the group meeting, and I’ve been trying to convince myself that he’s forgotten all about our plans. Yet here I am, stepping off a filthy bus after riding for more than an hour into the city, outside the public library where he’s waiting for me. He’s perched on a cement wall with his legs hanging over the edge, his right sandal dangling from the tip of his big toe. He doesn’t look any better than he did a few weeks ago at the meeting. His clothes look like they were slept in. His face—always smooth before—is peppered with the beginnings of a beard. Most guys can only pull off one look, but once I’m over the initial shock of seeing him so disheveled again, I realize that Noah has managed to shift his appearance from polished boy next door to tortured intellectual without it looking ridiculous. Remy, for example, could not pull off this kind of look. I feel guilty for comparing the two of them. Remy doesn’t know I’m here. There didn’t seem to be any point in telling him.
We find a small, unoccupied study room near the back of the library, behind the nonfiction books. The only sound is the buzzing of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling, their plastic shells littered with the dead bodies of flies and other insects. Noah sits with his arms slung over the back of his chair and his legs sticking way out, taking up almost half the room.
“I’m not going back to school in the fall.” He’s working on a Rubik’s Cube that he’s been holding, but I can’t tell whether he’s making any progress on it.
“You aren’t?”
“No. Do you want to know why?”
“Not really.”
“Sit down, Sam. You look nervous.”
“I am nervous.”
“Why?”
“Because my parents don’t know I’m here, and if they did, they wouldn’t be too happy about it.”
“You tell th
em everything?” He winks at me. “Come on. Don’t you want to have your own life? Your own secrets?”
“I’ve never really thought about it.” I can’t help but notice how his smell fills the whole room. He smells like sweat, like the outdoors. Remy always smells like deodorant. Sometimes he wears Old Spice cologne, which I’m not crazy about, but I’d never tell him that.
“I know that’s not true.” He leans closer to me. “I know you, Sam. You want to be so good, but it’s hard. I wish you could have stayed with us. We would have had so much fun together.” He pauses. “We still could, you know.”
I fold my arms across my chest, trying to flatten my boobs and hide my cleavage. I can feel him staring at me. He knows what I’m doing, and why. I don’t feel as safe as I’d like to in this room: the door is closed, the blinds pulled shut. On our way in, the only other people I noticed were the librarian at the front desk and an almost definitely homeless woman who was reading the comics section of the newspaper, giggling to herself over The Family Circus with the kind of laugh that instantly marks a person as mentally unbalanced.
“I don’t have a lot of time, Noah. What do you want to talk about?”
He puts his hands on the table palms up, cupping the Rubik’s Cube and staring at it as though it were a crystal ball. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
I can tell he’s not kidding. “You think I’m going to tell you?”
“You act as if I’m a stranger, Sam.” He tries to put his hand over mine, but I flinch and pull it away. “What’s the matter with you? I thought we were friends. More than friends.”
“We are.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know.”
A short silence falls between us.
“Listen to me. I did something awful, and I’m going to tell you about it.” He grins. “Lucky you.”
The room feels so cramped and clammy that I can taste the air. Above us, the dead bugs are baking in their lonely, fluorescent grave.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I want to. Before I do, though, I want you to know … you won’t like me afterward.”
“Great.”
“I’m serious. There was a girl at school last year I never told you about.”
He’s right; the thought of Noah with another girl stings, even though I don’t have any claim on him.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “I’m sorry. If there was anyone else I thought I could tell … I’m sorry. I should find a shrink. My mom is right.”
“It’s fine. Go ahead, tell me about this girl.”
“Laura.”
“Tell me about Laura, Noah.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
March 1996
The view from the window of room 108 at the Uniontown Holiday Inn is a brick wall.
“Did I ever tell you about the guy my mom almost married? The one who died?” Noah asks.
“There was a guy before she married your dad?”
“Yeah. Philip Possus. That was his real name. He’s the whole reason she believes in shit like psychic vortices and ESP and the tarot.”
“How did he die? Please don’t turn the light on.”
“We haven’t been outside all day. I’ll feel crazy if I don’t see the sun. That’s how Philip went crazy.”
“He went so crazy that it killed him?”
“Yes. He and my mom got engaged young, at, like, seventeen. It doesn’t actually matter how old they were. They went on a trip to New York City because my mom wanted to see the Rockettes perform, and after the show they went to a bar—even though they weren’t old enough to drink yet, I guess—and two guys who were standing beside them got into a fight. Philip tried to butt in and break it up, and ended up getting his face rearranged.
“One of the punches knocked him out for thirty seconds, maybe a minute, according to my mother. She says that when he regained consciousness, Philip was crying and freaking out, asking questions about people she’d never heard of before. He told her it felt like he had lived through decades of a whole different life in that thirty seconds.
“Philip had all these new memories of growing up in Florida with different parents. He knew details—what their house looked like, the names and birthdays of the people he’d dreamed up; he remembered going to Disneyland with his parents, riding the tram, going through the haunted mansion … He’d never been to Florida in his life. He told my mom about meeting a different girl and falling in love with her. He remembered their wedding day and moving to Arizona with her and having three kids. He knew all their names and what they looked like. He mourned for those people in his dream as though they were as real as you or me.
“He couldn’t get over it. He went to doctors and shrinks, trying to figure out how to move on, but nobody could help him. He finally broke off his engagement to my mom and disappeared to search for this other family that he insisted was real. He couldn’t accept anything else.”
“Did he ever find them?”
“No.” Noah switches on the bedside lamp, and I cover my eyes until I’m used to the light. The brightness shifts the tone of the room. I need a shower.
“We have to leave early tomorrow morning. I don’t know how long the rest of the drive will take, and it’s a long trip home after that.”
“It’s less than two more hours. I have a map.”
“Do you think my parents are worried about me?”
“Yes.” Noah runs his hand along the curve of my body through the thin white sheet, bringing it to rest on my hip. “But they know you’re okay. I’m sure they must know we’re together somewhere. They’re probably way more pissed at me. I’ll take the blame, okay? I’ll be your fall guy.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t mind.” His fingers press against the sharp edges of my hip bones, prodding me closer, until our bodies lock together. His mouth is on my neck. The warm air tickles my skin as he mutters, “You have enough to worry about already.”
Is this how Gretchen felt with Steven? I wonder. Did her skin feel electric when he touched her? Did she think it was worth it at first—both of them risking so much potential trouble for the thrill? She had no way of knowing the eventual price our whole family would pay.
“I can’t keep my hands off you,” he says. He searches deeper beneath the sheet, his fingers as clumsy and frantic as animal paws. I realize it’s possible—maybe even probable—that my reasons for this trip are only a parentheses in Noah’s story line, which doesn’t intersect with my own story as much as I’ve been telling myself it does. Am I being naive? Maybe he doesn’t care why I asked him to bring me here, as long as he gets what he wants.
I resist when he tries to nudge me onto my back, sitting up and scooting away on the bed to hug my knees against my chest. “So what happened to Philip? He went crazy?”
Noah sighs, giving up for the moment. “I guess you could say that. My mother sure thought so. She lost touch with him for a few years after that—you can understand why—and then one day his mom called to tell her Philip was dead. He hit a semi head-on while he was driving the wrong way on the interstate. My mom thinks he did it on purpose. She thinks he was trying to find a way back to his other life.”
“But it wasn’t real.”
“It was real to Philip, Sam. In the end, that was all that mattered.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Summer 1996
Her name was Laura Merck. She was this quiet, sort of mousy-looking girl. She wasn’t even that pretty, Sam. She wasn’t anybody I would have noticed under any other circumstances. She wasn’t like you.” He pauses, waiting for me to react. I don’t move. I don’t even blink. My guts are still churning at the thought of Noah touching someone else.
“She was in my freshman comp class,” he continues. “All freshmen have to take it, and she ended up sitting right behind me because of the way the seating chart had everyone arranged. Anyway, our teacher was this guy, this gr
ad student who had, like, zero interest in explaining basic writing skills to us. It was clear from day one that he wasn’t looking forward to spending the whole semester grading essays about whatever dry, boring shit usually gets covered in that kind of introductory class, making sure everyone knows how to write a coherent paragraph and use proper grammar and punctuation. The first thing he did was tell us that instead of focusing so much on mechanics and stuff, we were going to be doing more thoughtful kinds of writing. So the first assignment is to write an essay about ourselves called ‘How I Got This Way.’ Of course, you know, I wrote about what happened to Bethany when I was a child, because what else is there to explain about myself, right? You know what I’m talking about, Samantha. I know you do. It’s like, sometimes I wonder whether I could even exist independently of her. As though I’m just a subplot in the Bethany Story, and if what happened to her hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t even be much of a reason for me to exist.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it isn’t!” Tiny, shiny beads of sweat gather on Noah’s upper lip, so small I can barely see them. “When I was reading through the essay after I’d finished it to look for mistakes—because we were still getting graded on all that stuff—you know what I realized? I barely even got a mention in the whole thing. It wasn’t about me at all. None of it is. All my life has been about Bethany. When people talk about me—and when they talk about you, too, I bet—they don’t think about us without thinking about them. My sister, your sister. We aren’t Noah and Samantha, full stop. Our names, at least our first ones, barely even matter. I might be Noah Taylor on paper, but to everyone who knows me I’ll always be Bethany Taylor’s little brother. Full stop.”
The Last Good Day of the Year Page 16