The Last Good Day of the Year (17 page)
Read The Last Good Day of the Year Online
Authors: Jessica Warman
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Partial Transcript of Interview with Steven Handley, Conducted March 16, 1988, by Davis Gordon
Steven Handley:
  They didn't care about the other suspects. Ask that detectiveâask him about Space Barbie.
Davis Gordon:
  Space Barbie?
SH:
  You don't know about that?
DG:
  No.
SH:
  Turtle wanted this Barbie doll. She went crazy one day at the store about it. I wasn't there, so I don't know exactly what happened; Gretchen told me later. But you can imagine, right? Turtle wanted the doll, her mom said no, and she threw a fit. But a couple of days later, when Gretchen was babysitting, I
was
there. We'd had these rolling blackoutsâremember them? They started up in New York, I think, and then moved down the coast, and we didn't have power for two days. Remember?
DG:
  I do. It was around Halloween.
SH:
  Yeah, it was a few days after Halloween. Gretchen let the kids binge on their candy so they would leave us alone. It wasn't that she didn't care about them stuffing their faces. It was Halloween, you know? But their mom was so uptight about food. On Halloween night, she let her kids pick out two pieces of candyâonly twoâto eat, and then she hid their bags in her closet. Gretchen didn't think it was a big deal to get it down for themâwould you? Anyway, Turtle threw up. Skittlesâoh, man, I remember the Skittles. It was all over her shirt, so she went upstairs to changeâSam went with herâand she found a Space Barbie sitting on her bed. Brand new, still in the box. Well, she'd taken it out already before we saw it, but the box was still there on her bed. I wouldn't have guessed it was a Barbie if I hadn't seen the packaging; the doll looked like David Bowie. You know, like Ziggy Stardust? She had this short, spiky hair and crazy makeup, and she was wearing a jumpsuit. Gretchen told me they never could figure out who'd bought it for Turtle. It sure as hell wasn't me.
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt
, pp. 165â67
Summer 1996
We're watching
Saturday Night Live
when one of those old anti-drug commercials comes on: a father confronts his teenage son with drugs he found in the kid's room. “Who taught you how to do this stuff?” he demands, his mustache twitching with emotion. “You, Dad,” the boy replies. He looks at his father with this sad, weary expression, and you're supposed to be able to tell that he's already numb from life's disappointments, probably because his parents are potheads. “I learned it by watching you.”
There's a tornado warning for the whole county until tomorrow morning. The weather has been breezy and humid all evening. The rain will be here any second, I know. In the last five minutes, the wind outside has built into a frenzy, gusting with enough strength to set off a car alarm a few streets over.
“It's true, you know.” Remy holds a joint between his lips. He
nods at the TV screen. “Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs.”
The smell of marijuana makes me ill if I'm around it for too long, so I lie flat on the floor with my head beside the open window and breathe in as much fresh, cool night air as I can. The floor creaks beneath the weight of our bodies. When I close my eyes, I can feel the whole playhouse rock in the wind.
“This seems like a bad idea.”
“What does?”
“Being out here in a storm. We could get struck by lightning.” The TV is plugged into a long, thick extension cord that goes out the window and across the yard, all the way to the power outlet beside Remy's back door.
“Nah.” But he unplugs the television anyway, and we're suddenly alone together in the dark. Any light from the moon or stars is blotted out by the clouds.
I don't say a word while Remy smokes. When the joint gets too short for him to hold without burning his fingers, he puts it out with a dab of spit and balances it on top of the TV. It's dark enough in the playhouse that I can barely make out his face as he lowers his body onto mine.
“What if the floor collapses?” This place wasn't built to support the weight of two horny teenagers in bad weather.
“It won't.” He kisses my forehead, then my nose, and finally my mouth. I can feel the pressure building within his body as soon as we connect. There's an urgency to his movements. With electricity rippling from his palms, he inches his fingers up my T-shirt, slowly but surely trying to tug it over my head.
“Remy, wait a minute.” I wriggle out from under him.
He sits up. “Did I do something wrong?”
The air is so thick with moisture that it's a little hard for me to breathe. “No. Maybe I should go home, though.”
“Oh.” He reconnects the television. The screen is nothing but static. “So ⦠was that not okay?” he asks.
“No! I mean, yes, it was completely okay.” My gaze falls to his lap. He's obviously not ready to stop.
“But you want to leave,” he says flatly. “So obviously it's not ⦠what you wanted. I mean, I'm not.”
“That isn't true.” I pause. “There's just so much between the two of us. There's so much background running through my head.”
He looks dazed. I notice his glassy eyes and sweaty forehead. “You know what I do sometimes, Sam?”
“What?”
“I drive to Steven's house.”
“Steven Handley?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean his parents' house?”
“Yes.”
“Why would you do that?” The whites of his eyes are bloodshot from the pot. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person I know who isn't constantly seeking the next opportunity to muffle their thoughts.
“His mom still lives there. Did you know that? The business is gone, though, so there's just an empty storefront. She's all alone.”
“I know.” Steven's dad died a few years ago. Helen had to take a job with one of her competitors in order to support herself.
“I can't stop thinking about her sometimes. I feel sorry for her.”
“Remy, what's the matter with you? Has she ever seen you there?” I don't know if I feel sick because of the smoke or because of what he's telling me.
“I don't think so. Calm down, Sam. I've never knocked on the door or anything like that.”
“So what do you do? You spy on her?”
“I wouldn't consider it spying.”
“What do you do there, Remy?”
“I ⦠do things. A few times last year, I shoveled her driveway after it snowed. It was the middle of the night, Sam. She didn't see me.”
I'm shaking. “Remy, you have to stop that. You can never go back there again. It's a terrible idea.”
“She doesn't know it's me.”
“That doesn't matter! What if she figures it out? Why would you do something like this?” I'm so furious that I'm starting to cry.
“I already told you, I feel sorry for her.”
“Stop it. There's nothing you can do for her.”
“That's not true.”
“Yes it is, Remy. She doesn't want your help. She hates you.”
He nods to himself. “I know. It's one of the things we have in common. We both hate me.”
“Shut up.”
“It's true.” He stares at the static dancing on the television. I can recognize the sounds of Aerosmith performing “Janie's Got a Gun” on
Saturday Night Live
.
“Sometimes I think I ought to kill her, if I'm ever actually going
to help her. She'd be happy if I did it. Don't you think so? She'd be glad it was all over. That's all anybody really wants, isn't it? More than anything, we want it all to be over.” He sighs. He falls onto his back and stares up at me. He doesn't seem to register my anger; his mind seems galaxies away. He reaches for my hand, weaving his sweaty fingers between mine and squeezing them tight, as though he's already forgotten that I was getting ready to leave a moment ago. “Imagine that, Sam. Imagine how good that would feel.”
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“I wish I'd never met him.” Those are Gretchen's first words to me in the common room at her college dormitory, where she's reluctantly agreed to meet. She hands me a stack of unopened letters. They are all from Steven. He wrote to her twice a week for months after his arrest. “He was a lunatic. He thought we were in love. I never loved him. It was just a stupid crush. I liked the attention more than anything.” Yet she's hung on to the letters for years, going so far as to bring them with her to college.
But does she think Steven is guilty? When I ask the question, she doesn't hesitate with her response. “We all saw him in his stupid Santa Claus suit that night. Sam and Remy saw him in the basement. Who else could have done it?”
I start to tell her about the numerous studies that have been done on the accuracy of memory. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially when it comes from children. And what about motive? Why would Steven want to harm Gretchen's sister?
“To get back at my dad? Who knows? Why don't you ask him yourself?” I can tell she's already tired of my questions, but I'm not ready to leave just yet. I ask her if she thinks Steven deserves to die for his crime, and Gretchen goes quiet.
“What do you think he deserves?” she asks.
I tell her I'm not sure.
“Neither am I.” She hesitates. “I shouldn't have said that. I didn't mean it.”
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt
, p. 191
1985
In a former life, my parents used to go out almost every weekend with Mike and Susan and leave Turtle and meâalong with Remyâin my older sister's care. Abby usually came over to keep her company, but she left what minimal childcare was required to my sister. Gretchen had never been much of a babysitter before she met Steven; our evenings with her mostly consisted of us occupying ourselves upstairs while she and Abby watched TV in our basement. Occasionally my sister would holler up the stairs to make sure the three of us hadn't accidentally killed ourselves. My parents knew Gretchen was no Mary Poppins: they usually left money for pizza so she wouldn't have to cook, and my mom always got us changed into our pajamas before she and my dad left, in order to make sure my sister's workload was as near to weightless as possible. And things usually went okay; we never found ourselves in
any real danger because of Gretchen's negligence. The worst thing she ever did was to let us watch any movie we wanted on cable. Off the top of my head, I remember seeing
Children of the Corn
,
Creepshow
, and
The Thing
all before my sixth birthday.
But it was different once Gretchen started seeing Steven. Because here's the thing: even though she never paid much attention to me and seemed almost unaware of Turtle's existence, we worshipped her. How could we not? She was so beautiful and so smart (at least she seemed that way to us), so wise to the ways of the grown-up world. She cursed in front of our parents all the time, and when they told her to watch her mouth, she only laughed. She was never mean to us; on the contrary, she let us do pretty much whatever we wanted as long as we left her alone. She didn't even get mad when we would spill a two-liter bottle of diet soda on the kitchen floor or get nail polish all over the coffee table. My point is this: all three of us loved and looked up to Gretchen. We didn't want to get her in trouble. So when she did things around us that we knew she probably wasn't supposed to be doing, we kept our mouths shut. In return, she always told our parents that we'd been perfect angels throughout the evening.
At first, Abby and Steven would both come over to hang out in the basement with Gretchen. As the weeks went by, we saw less and less of Abby. Gretchen said it was because Abby didn't want to get in the way. I thought maybe she didn't like Steven. But Remy, Turtle, and I liked him very much. Even now, I remember how cool he'd seemed at first. While Abby and my sister had always pretty much kept to themselves in the basement, Steven actually appeared to enjoy being around kids.
“I have little cousins,” he told Gretchen. “They're a lot of fun. Kids are great; you can be as much of a jackass as you want, and they think it's funny.”
My sister was annoyed by his enthusiasm about us. “I rented us a movie to watch downstairs.”
“Later,” he said, “after they're in bed.”
It was Steven who taught me how to play War with a deck of cards. He stood in our kitchen and concocted bile-colored beverages that he called “zombies,” which were just a mixture of whatever sugar-based drinks were on hand: Pepsi, orange juice, ginger ale. They were disgusting, but we drank them all the same. It was an elementary-school version of the kind of experimental mixing of adult beverages that I'd seen my dad and Mike Mitchell do so many times before. We tilted our heads back and held our noses as we gulped down our drinks with the enthusiasm of frat boys. We laughed so hard that, on more than one occasion, liquid shot from Remy's nose.