The Last Good Day of the Year (22 page)

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 them 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.”

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.”

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 grad 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.”

His hands have the same faint yet constant tremble that I noticed a few weeks ago at the meeting. Despite this, they've been working the Rubik's Cube the whole time he's been talking to me,
and now the yellow side is fully reassembled, which he somehow managed to pull off despite barely glancing at it over the past few minutes. Everything he's just said is true, of course, to varying degrees. But what's the point in talking about it? Nothing is going to change. Sitting here with him in this tiny, cramped room all afternoon, the two of us complaining about our shitty luck, feels like a level of wallowing that I'm not interested in exploring.

“Maybe it's just that you aren't a very good writer.”

“I don't think so. I got an A on the assignment.” His eyes have this tendency, whether he smiles or frowns or whatever, to slip into what seems to be their default expression, the look of a person who's just thought of something very clever. From all the pictures I've seen of Bethany Taylor over the years—and I've seen plenty—I recognize the expression as a trait shared by the siblings. They look alike in other ways, of course, as brothers and sisters do, but this gaze gives its wearer the look of a person who is both bright and wise. I know it's hard to imagine a twelve-year-old looking wise, but it's true: if Bethany were alive today, I'm betting she'd be a smart cookie. For just a second, the thought pops into my head that maybe Chester Stark chose Bethany because he was drawn to her gaze; there's something undeniably riveting about it. But before the idea is fully formed enough for me to properly consider it, I push it down inside me as far as it will go and do my best to ignore it.

“We paired off in class and exchanged essays. This girl, Laura, was my partner. She was so affected by what I'd written that it was as if she zeroed in on me and wouldn't let go. We started spending all this time together during the week. She was so interested in my fucked-up, tragic life; it was as though she wanted to save me. Some
girls are like that, you know? She wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. She was what you'd call a nurturer, the kind of girl who'd make a really great mom. And even though she thought she knew me, she didn't know anything, not really. She didn't know who I was outside of this narrative I've built up over the years about Bethany and what it was like to grow up without her, not knowing where she was or what had happened to her. Laura thought she was getting, like, an exclusive peek into my soul or something. She believed it because I
let
her believe it, even though I knew it was all bullshit and that she didn't have the first fucking clue who I really was.