The Last Good Day of the Year (7 page)

Summer 1996

I'm pushing Hannah on the wooden swing set across the street from our house, which has degraded into terrible shape since Remy's dad and Ed Tickle put it together more than ten years ago. (I vaguely remember Mike inheriting an unused circular saw from a friend who died before ever getting a chance to use it.) The two of them spent entire weekends drinking beer and practicing carpentry as though it were the only thing they'd ever dreamed of doing with their lives. The air in our cul-de-sac smelled like sawdust all season.

Now the air smells like exhaust as Abby Tickle's ancient yellow Volkswagen Beetle comes sputtering down the road. I don't recognize the woman in the passenger seat as Gretchen, not even after she gets out and starts walking toward us. Since I last saw her a few days ago, she's cut almost all her hair off, and now looks like
Mia Farrow in
Rosemary's Baby
. The difference in her appearance is startling. She looks like she's dropped ten pounds in as many days. I can make out the ridges of her collarbones beneath her skin.

“It's going to rain, you two. You should go home.”

“Mom is mopping the floors. She told me to stay out of the house all afternoon.”

“She's probably getting baked in there, not mopping the floors. That's really why she wanted you to leave.” Enter Abby, resting her head against my sister's shoulder and flashing me a quick, insincere smile.

Gretchen elbows her, nodding toward our little sister.
Hannah
, she mouths to Abby.

Abby rolls her eyes. “She doesn't know what I'm saying.”

Hannah hops off the swing and onto the sidewalk, her tap shoes clicking crisply against the pavement. “Watch me!” she says as she starts dancing for us. Her tap routine is a three-minute performance of “Animal Crackers in My Soup,” during which she also sings.

There's a flicker of lightning so brief that I'm not sure I actually saw anything at all, followed a few seconds later by the low rumble of thunder. “It's going to rain,” Gretchen repeats. She holds up her right arm and flexes her wrist back and forth. “I can always tell.”

Behind them, another car turns onto our street. It's Remy and his girlfriend, Heather, in her little red car. Remy makes it a point to keep looking straight ahead when Heather slows down to get a better look at us.

Hannah keeps dancing, ignoring her surroundings, focusing instead on every clickety-clack of her feet. The show must go on.

There's a strange, sudden burst of activity. Maybe it only seems odd because I'm so distracted by Remy and Heather, who are sitting in her car across the street when a beat-up purple minivan turns onto Point Pleasant and parks at the far end of the street.

Gretchen notices the minivan just as a short, gray-haired old woman steps from the driver's side with a stack of paperwork held against her chest. Helen Handley, Steven's mother, has spent the last ten years insisting to anyone who will listen that her son was in for the night by 12:15 a.m. on New Year's Day, 1986. She's lying, and everybody knows it. At first she told police Steven walked in the door around 11:30, which they knew wasn't true. Even Steven admitted it. He claimed he got home a little after midnight, upset and exhausted over his fight with Gretchen, and fell asleep without even taking off his boots.

According to Remy; Gretchen; Abby; Helen Handley; her husband, Jack; and me, as well as five additional witnesses including
himself
, Steven was dressed up like Santa Claus from the time he got to Abby's house until he was booked into jail thirteen hours later. He'd put the costume on over his clothes before walking to Abby's house, he said, just to be stupid. He said he wanted to make Gretchen laugh.

As the owners of Precision Cleaning, what was then the area's biggest dry cleaning operation, Steven's parents were the go-to cleaners for Armando's Tuxedo and Costume, which was the area's sole supplier of Santa Claus costumes. Armando had three of them, and they'd all been rented out to local churches for the holiday.

On New Year's Eve, 1985, Steven made his usual Thursday afternoon visit to Armando's at around five to pick up any tuxes that
had been returned with marinara stains or whatever else you could imagine after a weekend wedding. He'd done the same thing almost every Thursday for the past year and a half. (Armando's also boasted a wide selection of VHS rental tapes and a small arcade; most weeks, Steven would stick around to pick out a video or two for the weekend and play pinball until he ran out of quarters.)

By Thursday the thirty-first, all the Santa costumes had been returned to the overnight deposit box. When he showed up to get the dry cleaning order, Steven told Armando he didn't have time to stick around and play video games. He said he was about to start his shift driving his truck through the storm in the dark, plowing roads for the county. It didn't matter either way to Armando. He was far more concerned about Steven's mouth, and his missing tooth, and the fact that Steven was clearly upset about whatever had caused it to fall out.

Steven finished his shift at eleven and drove straight to my neighborhood. He parked his truck a block away under a broken streetlight, so my parents wouldn't see it on our street. He walked down an alley to Abby's house, where she and Gretchen were expecting him.

Of course, they noticed his mouth right away. Despite the distraction of his Santa suit and the white polyester beard covering part of Steven's face, it wasn't the kind of thing anybody would miss.

He lied about it at first. He said there had been a mechanical problem that morning at Precision Cleaning and he'd accidentally hit himself in the face with a socket wrench while he was making the repair.

The three of them hung out in Abby's basement until a few
minutes before midnight, when Steven finally admitted the truth: he'd been fired from his position with the county. His supervisor had learned about Steven's relationship with an underage girl. He'd called Steven into his office and explained, more or less, that he wasn't worth the trouble it might cause. Steven lost his temper. He took a swing at the supervisor, who swung back, and Steven felt his tooth getting knocked down his throat.

His story must have scared my sister a little bit, because she told him to leave after that. She said he was acting crazy, which only made him more upset. He started to fall apart once it was clear he'd taken things too far, and Gretchen wasn't ready for these kinds of stakes in a relationship. It was all because our father had been so hell-bent on keeping them apart lately; he'd been doing everything he could think of to keep Steven away from Gretchen. He was probably the one who called Steven's boss.

Our father was always closer to Gretchen than he was to me or Turtle, and sometimes even our mom was jealous of how much he obviously adored their oldest child. When push came to shove, Gretchen's loyalty was to our dad. She told Steven she didn't want anyone else getting hurt. She didn't exactly break up with him that night, but it was pretty close. It was enough to make him frantic.

Once Gretchen and Abby managed to get Steven out the door, he stood there in the cold, pounding on the glass with his fist while he begged my sister to kiss him when the ball dropped at midnight, even if it was for the last time. Abby turned out the basement lights and switched off the television. She and Gretchen went around the corner and sat on the stairs, in the dark, while they waited for him to go away. They heard the New Year's countdown on the upstairs
television; Darla kept it turned on at a high volume pretty much twenty-four hours a day.

It was so black in the stairwell that all either of them saw were each other's eyes reflecting fractals of light no larger than specks of dust. They stayed close while they waited, resting against one another, and together at that moment they felt perfectly balanced: little Abby Tickle with all her darkness, reaching up to meet Gretchen's towering beam of light.

“She's going straight to your front door,” Abby says to me as we watch Helen walk down our street.

“Sam,” Gretchen commands, “go over there and stop her.”

“What? Why do I have to do it?”

There's more lightning. Hannah's dancing has taken her nearly all the way to Abby's house.

“Go stop her. Hurry up!”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“I don't care! Just go!”

But I can't move, not until Gretchen grabs my arm and shoves me into the street. At the same time, Abby says, “Her shoes!” and takes off running toward Hannah. She scoops up my little sister and tugs off her tap shoes, throwing them into the grass. It takes me a minute to realize why she does it.

The old woman standing on our porch is much shorter than I remember. Obviously, I've grown, but she's also shriveled; I guess you could say the years have not been kind to Helen. She smells
strongly of chemicals. She tries to smile, but there is fear behind her milky gray eyes.

“Is that you, Samantha?” She brings a shaky hand to her mouth. “Oh. You've gotten so pretty.”

The last thing I expected was a compliment, and it catches me so off guard that for a second I forget who she is and why I'm supposed to hate her; instead she becomes a stranger, somebody's grandma. Her skin is crinkled into a map of fine, deep lines, the bags beneath her eyes full and dark. It's hot outside, but she wears beige polyester slacks and a long-sleeved cotton shirt. I imagine sending her flying off the porch with a flick of my finger.

From behind the front door, my mother's voice is full of barely controlled rage. “Samantha, come inside.”

Helen gives me a desperate look. “I only want to speak to your mother for a minute—”

My mother opens the door but doesn't step outside. “Get in here, Sam!”

I shake my head at Helen. “You have to leave right now.”

“Please. I know she doesn't want to see me.” She holds up her clasped hands, shaking them under my nose, the chemical smell wafting around me. “I am begging you.”

My mother rushes outside in her bare feet, slamming the door behind her and ignoring me altogether as she grabs Helen by the shoulders, forcing her to take clumsy steps backward to avoid falling over.

“Get the
fuck
off my property. Get the fuck out of here now. I'm calling the police.”

Helen puts her hands up in surrender, her stack of papers scattering onto the street. “I'm sorry, Sharon. I'm leaving now. I didn't mean to upset you. I'm sorry.”

“You didn't mean to
upset
me?” My mother shrieks, her voice pure hatred. I wish I could say I've never seen her so upset, but this transformation—calm one moment, furious the next—has happened many times throughout the years. It is as if she is constantly balancing on a tightrope, a hair's breadth away from crumbling. You'd think it would get better as more time passes, but it doesn't, at least not by much. Every day, for her, is the worst day. Until Hannah was born, that's what she would say. She always apologized afterward. “It's not your fault, Samantha.” But we all know it sort of is. “It's not your fault, Gretchen.” But she undeniably played a big role. “It's not anybody's fault except Steven's.” But her pain—and my father's—cannot stay so sharply focused on him. The blame oozes onto everything and everyone connected to that night; it is impossible to keep it neatly contained; it is too slippery, and there is far too much of it. And just when you think you've managed to get it under control, you find more seeping from cracks that you didn't even realize existed.

Helen rushes to her car without attempting to collect the papers she's left to scatter up and down the street. She fumbles through her purse as she looks for her keys, glancing over her shoulder every few seconds to make sure my mom isn't about to pounce.

It feels like we're on stage, the whole world watching the drama of our sad lives playing out on our dead-end street. Mrs. Souza peeks out her front door to gawk at the scene, but she would never do anything besides stare at us with her big, droopy eyes and open
mouth; I don't think I've heard her say one word in my entire life. The whole time she's looking at us, she keeps a withered hand on the neck of the German shepherd sitting calmly at her side.

Susan comes running out the door and wraps her arms around my mother from behind, wrangling her back into our house as the rain starts. In our living room, my mom sobs into Susan's chest while Gretchen and Abby—Hannah still in her arms—hurry into the kitchen.

“Shh, shh,” Susan says, stroking my mom's hair as if she were a child. “She's gone, honey. It's okay now.”

“It's not okay. It's never going to be okay. Never, never, never, never.”

“Shh. I've got you. Take a deep breath.” Susan meets my gaze and mouths
Call your father
, but I don't know where to find his work number.

“It's never going to be okay.”

“Shh. I know. I know. I know it won't.”

Through the living room window, I can see Remy walking around in the downpour, trying to pick up the papers Helen left behind, though most of them have started to dissolve into pulp that will easily wash away with the rain. Hannah's tap shoes dangle from his free hand. When he sees me staring at him, he waves the drippy papers and gives me a slight shrug, as if to say it's no problem for him to clean up the mess, even though it's not his.