The Last Good Day of the Year

For Colin, of course

And for my father, William Bush. Thank you for teaching me how to keep a promise—and for teaching me that it matters
.

Hiraeth:
n
: homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home that maybe never was; nostalgia, yearning, grief for the lost places of your past

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Acknowledgments

Also by Jessica Warman

New Year's Day, 1986

Midnight had come and gone, but Remy and I were still awake. How could anyone expect us to sleep with all the activity going on above us? Our mothers had tucked us into our sleeping bags hours ago, but the adults had continued their party upstairs. Through the thin basement ceiling above our heads, we felt the constant, dull tremble of the music playing on the living room stereo. If we paid close enough attention, we could track the path of every footstep right down to its owner—my mom's light gait, my dad's clumsy plodding that sent occasional sprinkles of drywall from the seams of the recently finished basement walls. We heard their countdown to midnight, followed by the
pop-pop-pop
of corks from champagne bottles. We listened to Ed Tickle and Darla—whom we all knew as Darla Tickle, even though she and Abby's dad were never married—saying their good-nights. Remy's
mom played a tinny version of “Auld Lang Syne” on the electric keyboard I'd gotten for Christmas a few days earlier. We smelled the cigars that our dads had lit up the second us kids had been banished to the game room, the smoke spilling downstairs and permeating every surface, souring the warm basement air almost instantly. We heard Remy's dad tell a dirty joke, and I thought I'd never be able to look him straight in the eye again. We heard our mothers screeching with laughter at the punch line, and I think we both felt horrified by this quick glimpse behind the curtain of adulthood, which brought with it the creeping realization that our parents, when they weren't being our parents, did all kinds of things we didn't understand or expect.

Beside me on the floor, Turtle slept through all of it. My sister—whose real name was Tabitha, but nobody ever called her that—was four years old. Remy and I were seven. The three of us were resting side by side on the carpet, with Remy nearest the stairs, me in the middle, and Turtle cocooned next to me in her Disney Princess sleeping bag, Boris, her tattered stuffed bear, in her arms. Her wavy blond hair almost glowed in the moonlight that shined through the sliding glass door at our backs. I'd always been jealous of her hair, which was thick and dense but soft as silk. My own hair was coarse and wavy, full of cowlicks that kept it looking unkempt, and my mother forced me to wear a bob cut even though I wanted to grow it long; but my little sister's hair hung almost to her waist in smooth tendrils that sometimes seemed to sigh with the weight of their own beauty. Turtle's small body took up less than half of the length of her sleeping bag. She was sucking her right thumb, like babies do, and pulling in slow, even breaths
as she remained unconscious despite all the noise coming from upstairs.

It was well known in my family that Turtle could sleep through just about anything. A few months earlier, our dad had fallen asleep on the sofa late at night, forgetting he'd left the oven on with a frozen pizza baking inside. The sound of the smoke alarm was so loud and piercing that my eyes watered; if it had gone on too much longer, I might have thrown up. On my way back to bed, I found my mother standing in the doorway to the room I shared with Turtle, staring at her. My sister was still dead asleep, Boris nestled beside her with his head peeking out from under the blanket. Turtle's thumb was planted securely in her mouth as she dreamed of rainbows or puppies, or whatever four-year-olds dream about. Her blanket was still smooth across her body, the top folded down and tucked beneath her chin, just the way our mother had left it hours ago. Turtle hadn't moved.

According to Channel 4 meteorologist Mike Schmitt, that year's winter was our area's coldest in decades. Shelocta, the little town where I lived, was situated in a valley in the mountains of southeastern Pennsylvania. Lousy winter weather was nothing new, but that season was so cold and hostile to life that I remember wondering whether nature was deliberately trying to harm us. By early December, school had already been canceled a handful of times due to the temperature alone. There was a ten-day stretch where it didn't even manage to climb into the single digits. People had trouble starting their cars in the morning. Some of the moms in our neighborhood put together a list of all the elderly residents and took turns checking up on them, making sure they hadn't frozen
to death. Leo and Milly Souza, the elderly Portuguese couple who lived down the street, started dressing their beloved German shepherds in thick sweaters and booties that Milly had knitted herself. Some mornings we'd wake up to find that, while we slept, slivers of frost had grown through the seams around the light switch beside our kitchen sink. It was a mean kind of cold. My dad called it “suicide weather.”

The game room was toasty, though, with all three baseboard radiators purring along at full blast. Combined with the heat coming from the space heater that my dad had left running in the bathroom a few feet away—he spent a lot of time that year fretting over the possibility of a burst pipe—it was almost too warm; I was sweating inside my sleeping bag. Remy was still awake, but I was starting to fade. I tried to fight it. Remy thought he was so tough, being a boy and all, even though I was taller and could run faster. He'd bet me a dollar that I couldn't stay up until midnight. I'd already won, but I wanted to be the last to fall asleep. I knew I wasn't going to be able to hold out much longer.

Our moms had ushered us downstairs at ten o'clock sharp that evening—a full hour past our normal bedtimes, but still disappointingly early for New Year's Eve. They'd pulled the standard bedtime scam that parents shamelessly use on holidays and special occasions: “You don't have to go to sleep yet, but you have to stay in bed.” Once we were downstairs, Turtle threw a temper tantrum when I wouldn't let her share my sleeping bag. She had a pitchy, shrill way of crying that could drive anyone crazy, and anytime she was overtired, her collapse into sleep was always preceded by a meltdown. The adults were having none of it that night: my
mom ignored Turtle while she put our copy of
Sleeping Beauty
in the VCR and turned it down so low that we couldn't hear a thing over the crying, kissed our foreheads, zipped up our sleeping bags, switched off the lights, marched upstairs, and shut the basement door behind her. She managed to do all of this while still holding on to her drink, a red plastic cup filled with foamy champagne that splashed onto my nightgown when she bent over to kiss me good night.

“I think your mom is drunk,” Remy said.

“What's ‘drunk'?” Turtle asked. She had finished crying, and would be asleep any second.

Remy and I exchanged an annoyed look, as though it were such an awful drag to be down here with someone so intellectually inferior to us, a couple of real mental giants. Turtle and I were like most sisters in the sense that we loved each other fiercely but fought almost nonstop. I didn't like having a little sister. There were so many things I wasn't allowed to do because
she
was too little, and our parents didn't want her to feel left out. I'd wasted countless pennies already in my short life, tossing them into fountains and wishing she would disappear. “Don't you know anything, Turtle? You're so dumb sometimes.” I pinched her on the arm, harder than I should have. Even once I knew it was too hard—after she yelped and tried to pull her arm away—I held on for two or three more seconds. Even then, I couldn't have told you why I did it.

Turtle's chin trembled, and her eyes filled up again. “I'm not dumb. I'm four.”

“Go to sleep. We don't want to play with you.”

“Remy does.” And she looked at him for confirmation, but all
he did was turn away and focus his gaze on the television screen. While lonely Aurora sang of her yearning for the one true love who would come into her life and make everything okay, I saw the pain I'd caused Turtle for no good reason and thought,
Good
.

My sister shut her eyes, wringing tears from her lashes. She held on tightly to Boris. She never went to bed without him. His white fur was matted and dirty because Turtle refused to let our mother put him through the wash. She was afraid his ear would fall off, and she was probably right to be. Caligula (one of the Souzas' dogs) had torn it off months earlier during an ill-conceived game of tug-of-war. Mrs. Souza had sewn it back on with purple thread, creating a crooked scar along the seam.

“I'm going to tell Momma you won't play with me.”

“You'll get punished. We aren't supposed to go upstairs.”

“You're being too mean.”

“I hate you.”

I was only seven, and we were siblings. Siblings fight. It's not like we were heading into Cain and Abel territory quite yet. But when she put her head onto her pillow and closed her eyes, she balled her hands into little fists and cried without making any noise, and I knew I'd gone too far. I told her I was sorry. I think I even told her I loved her. She asked me to snuggle with her while we watched the movie—that was her big thing, always wanting to snuggle with everybody—and I did, until she fell asleep a few minutes later. I pulled her sleeping bag up to her chin and brushed a few stray hairs from her face. I kissed her cheek and whispered, “Good night.”

Remy and I practiced cartwheels and headstands while the
movie played. We started a game of Bloody Mary in the bathroom, but got too scared to finish. We took turns seeing how long we could stand being outside without a coat or shoes. Neither of us made it past twenty seconds.

Remy was like a brother to me. His family had lived next door my whole life. Our mothers were best friends who had been pregnant with us at the same time; I'd seen tons of photos taken throughout their pregnancies, their arms around each other's waists, big bellies nearly touching. We even shared the same birthday—August 25—and had joint parties every year. Each July, our families piled into Mr. Mitchell's old conversion van and drove eight hours to a rented beach bungalow in Ocean City. Those were the days I like to mull over now, when I need something happy to remember. Neither of our families had much money, but that fact didn't make the stars above the ocean shine any less at night.

For the first seven years of our lives, I spent almost as much time at Remy's house as I did at mine, and vice versa. I had two sisters—Turtle and Gretchen, who was seventeen—but Remy was an only child, and I think he and I gave each other something we otherwise would have missed. Having Remy next door meant that I always had somewhere to go when I'd had enough of my own sisters. For Remy, having me meant having someone like a sibling, even if that someone was a girl.