The Last Good Day of the Year (9 page)

 

Summer 1996

We were pariahs in Shelocta as much as we were celebrities. How many people can say that their fifteen minutes of fame was also the single worst thing that's ever happened to them? At first everybody wanted to help, but once they all realized Turtle was never coming home, nobody knew how to treat us. Most people tried to avoid my family as much as possible.

Even Abby, who had barely spent a day apart from Gretchen in years, pulled away for a long time. Her dad and Darla showed up to volunteer for the search parties that assembled at the end of our street every day for almost two weeks. They tried to help in other ways, too, even though they weren't always successful. Ed Tickle got into a fistfight one day with a reporter who'd followed Gretchen all the way home from school, asking her if she ever thought about killing herself over what had happened to her
sister. Darla brought over her makeup kit one day and spent hours giving me a makeover while my mother stayed in her bedroom. Darla liked to have the television on while she worked; she said having soap operas in the background kept her mind engaged. During a quiet scene in
The Days of Our Lives
, we could hear my mother sobbing all the way upstairs. Darla turned up the volume and kept right on dabbing my lids with eye shadow as if nothing had happened, but I remember thinking it was taking her an awfully long time to finish my makeup. When she was done, she braided my hair and painted my toenails before starting to work on her own manicure.

“You don't have to stay here all day with me,” I told her. “I'll be okay.”

“I don't mind if you don't mind.” Darla always seemed so glamorous to me, but her heavy makeup and shellacked hairdo weren't nearly as impressive up close. “When I was a little girl, about your age, my mom left me home alone all the time.”

“Really? That's so cool.”

“Yeah, well, it ain't legal.”

“Did your mom get in trouble?”

Darla's lips trembled into the briefest of half smiles. “She was always in some kind of trouble.”

But Abby stayed almost completely out of sight until after we moved away; I don't even think she came over to say good-bye the day we moved out. She and Gretchen didn't reconnect until a few years later. I don't know exactly why it happened that way, but my best guess is that Abby figured my parents hated her for being Steven and Gretchen's go-between, which they did.

I wonder if Abby realizes how hard it was for Gretchen to lose her best friend and her sister at the same time, or if there was a reason for the rift that I don't know anything about. Either way, nothing seems to have changed about their relationship. They are inseparable once again, spending most of their time at Abby's house. Ed Tickle needs almost constant care since his stroke last winter. Gretchen told us she doesn't think he'll live much longer. She's been here with Abby, on and off, since February. Darla and Ed split up years ago; without Gretchen's help, Abby would be looking after her father alone.

I'm surprised to realize how jealous I am of their friendship. I don't know why it bothers me so much. Maybe it's because the Remy I've remembered for so long does not exist anymore; instead he's been replaced by an aloof stranger, way more interested in his friends and girlfriend than he is in me. I've never had a friendship like Gretchen and Abby's.

I barely see Gretchen. When she is around, she always seems to be either coming or going in a hurry. Our only consistent interaction happens most mornings as she's getting ready for work. She takes the longest showers of anyone I've ever met, hogging the bathroom and leaving me with no hot water, wet towels thrown on the floor for someone else to worry about. She is always running late. As I brush my teeth one morning, she strolls in without knocking and sits down on the toilet. She doesn't acknowledge me as she props her foot against the edge of the garbage can and begins to clip her toenails while simultaneously peeing.

“Do you mind?” I spit into the sink. “I'd appreciate some privacy.”

“You're seriously foaming at the mouth, Sam.”
Clip. Clip
. “Guess what I just saw outside. Remy was sneaking that chick out his basement door. She
clearly
spent the night. I watched him walk her outside, and I felt like I should be paying them for the show they were putting on. No joke. They were like a couple of octopuses.” She pauses. “Is it ‘octopuses' or ‘octopi'? Anyway, you know what I mean.”
Clip, clip, clip
.

I rinse my mouth and slide the garbage can out of her reach with my foot. “Get out.”

She blinks innocently at me. “What's wrong?”

“Get out.”

“Sam, calm down.” She grasps my arm. “You're way prettier than her. She's built like a ten-year-old boy. You could steal him in a second if you wanted to.”

“Why do you need to use my bathroom every morning, Gretchen? Why don't you just stay with Abby all the time instead of making everything harder for us here?”

She's silent for a moment, drawing her hand away from me and crossing her arms. “This is my family, too. I have as much right to be here as you do.” Her wedding band sparkles on her finger. It seems strange that she's still wearing it when she hasn't so much as mentioned her husband since she arrived.

“You're still wearing your ring.”

She glances down at it, wiggling her finger. “Yeah. So what?”

“I thought you were getting a divorce.”

“It's not that simple, Sam.”

“You seemed happy together.”

“Well, things aren't always what they seem.”

“So you're giving up.”

“We're working on things.”

“Isn't it hard to work on things when you're up here and your husband is all the way down in Texas?”

She flings a hairbrush into the sink. “You're such a brat. You think you know everything, don't you?
I am here. To help. My friend
. Her father is dying. I didn't want her to go through it alone. I know—I'm such a bitch, right?”

“Don't you ever worry that she's taking advantage of you, Gretchen?” I ask, echoing the suspicion our mother has been muttering to herself for weeks. “She could hire a nurse, couldn't she? It's not like she couldn't pay for it. Mom says Ed has veteran's benefits.”

Gretchen's irritation softens into sadness. She looks at me with an unsettling expression of aching, sincere regret. She feels
sorry
for me, I realize, because I don't know what such an intimate friendship feels like.

“Abby isn't taking advantage of me. Trust me, Sam—you think you know all about her, but you don't have a clue. Nobody knows her like I do. She's going to surprise everybody someday.” She pauses. “You just wait.”

Summer 1996

I'm still working on the Mitchells' basement at the beginning of July. Susan is at some kind of teachers' conference today, so I'm supposed to let myself into her house and get started on my own. So far, my days in the basement have been unrelentingly dull reminders that I have no friends or social life here, but after my fight with Gretchen this morning, I was looking forward to being alone. So of course, when I walk into the kitchen, Remy is standing over the counter with his back to me, nodding along with whatever's playing on his headphones as he butters a piece of toast, oblivious to my presence. He starts to sing and dance along with a Bob Marley song, the one about three little birds.

I've been watching him for less than a minute and have barely moved an inch since walking through the door, but somehow Remy can tell he's not alone. He spins around and we make eye contact.
His face freezes in mortification. His arm bumps the counter, sending his toast flying from his plate onto the floor. All he's wearing is a pair of Smurfs boxer shorts. He tries to cover himself with his arms for a second before realizing that it doesn't help much, so he switches tactics by running out of the kitchen and down the hallway. He forgets to grab his Discman from the kitchen counter, and it falls to the floor and breaks into three pieces when his headphones snap away, but that doesn't slow his exit. We haven't exchanged a single word yet.

When he finally comes back—fully dressed—I hand him the Discman. “The hinge on the lid is broken. Sorry.”
Bob Marley's Greatest Hits
rests safely on the index finger of my other hand.

“Damn it, Samantha, I won that playing skee-ball last week at Cedar Point. I had to spend, like, seventy bucks on tokens.”

“You could have bought one for less than that.”

“That's not the
point
.” He stares at his now-ruined toast, which landed butter side down on the linoleum.

“I thought you knew I'd be coming over. I've been here every morning for a week.”

“I'm not monitoring your every move. I don't even know what time it is.” He's trying to brush the dirt from the floor off his toast. I think I see a pubic hair among the debris.

“Please don't eat that.” I reach for it.

“Five second rule.” He pulls his hand back.

“Remy, it's been sitting there for at least three minutes. Throw it away. There are ways to get more toast.”

He sits at the kitchen table and tries to fix the Discman, without success, while I make him a new slice.

“Did you find anything interesting downstairs yet? My grandma kept everything she ever saw or touched, pretty much. My dad says it's because she lived through the Great Depression. We used to take her to the buffet at the Howard Johnson's on Sunday mornings. You know, the one down by the old Family Dollar? She'd stash bacon in her bra to eat later that day. One time we caught her stealing the little salt and pepper shakers. It was humiliating.”

“When did she die?”

“Back in March. She just didn't wake up one morning.”

“I'm sorry.”

He shrugs, chewing nonchalantly. “Don't be. She was so old that it wasn't even sad, not really. I mean, she was out of her mind, so it was more of a relief than anything. I know I'm not supposed to say that, but it's true. I'm the one who found her. Did you know that?”

“How would I know that?”

“I don't know. It seemed like a big deal to me at the time. I told lots of people.” He pauses. “Her eyes were open. I wish they would have been closed.”

“I thought you said she died in her sleep.”

“She must have opened them, maybe right before it happened. Her light was out. It would have been dark in her room.” Another pause. “It would have been better if they'd been closed. You remember her, don't you?”

I nod. “A little bit.”

“But she was normal back then. She was crazy toward the end.”

“Yeah, your mom told me about that.”

“You don't know how bad it got. She was paranoid. She used
to set up all these weird little booby traps to see if someone was going through her things. Like, she'd put little pieces of tape on the edges of doors or drawers or whatever, so she'd know if someone other than her had opened them. She did it all over the house, and sometimes she'd forget about them for days. Her memory went in and out like that. One minute we'd be watching
Wheel of Fortune
together and everything would seem fine, and the next she'd be begging me to drive her to a violin lesson.”

“Your grandma played the violin?”

“Uh,
no
. That's what I'm trying to explain. She had dementia on top of being paranoid—or maybe she was paranoid because of the dementia, I don't know, I'm not a doctor or anything—so even when she could think clearly, she was still insane. Like with all those pieces of tape; she'd forget about them, and we'd all go about our business living here, and when she finally remembered what she'd done, all the tape would be broken or out of place. It was awful.”

He takes a bite of toast, staring at me while he chews. It's so quiet in his kitchen that I can hear his jaw muscles moving as he works the food around in his mouth. He swallows, takes a swig of milk directly from the open half-gallon jug beside his plate, and repeats the chew-and-stare process all over again. He can tell I'm uncomfortable, but he seems to be enjoying the power of his silent gaze too much to let it go. When I can't stand it for another second, I blurt out the first thought in my mind: “You have a big hickey on your neck.”