The Last Good Day of the Year Read Online Free PDF Page A

both children was all that mattered. He didn’t want to leave his sleeping bag because he’d wet his pants as we lay there with our eyes shut, unable to sense anything beyond the breath of the stranger beside us. Now he was crying while I said it didn’t matter, tugging him upstairs with me to get help.
    â€œSanta Claus took Turtle away.” I reached for Remy’s hand, which was sticky and damp.
    Our parents stared at us, uncomprehending.
    â€œHe took her,” I repeated.
    â€œWho took her?” As my dad stood up, Susan Mitchell noticedher son’s wet pajamas and beckoned him over. He tugged me along beside him, refusing to let go of my hand.
    â€œSanta Claus.” I knew it sounded absurd. I could feel the blood rushing through my head but not the floor under my feet, and before I knew it my knees were wobbling, followed by my legs, until my whole body trembled with panic and I fell crying into my mother’s lap. “Why aren’t you helping her? He took her!”
    â€œSweetie, calm down. Nobody else has been in the house. We’ve been here all night.”
    â€œChristmas is over, Samantha. Santa’s back at the North Pole.” Mike Mitchell, who was halfheartedly concealing a glass pipe in his cupped hand, tilted back his head and blew three perfect smoke rings. In
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt
, Davis Gordon would make frequent mention of all the precious seconds wasted as a result of Remy’s and my parents’ failure to act quickly. But it’s easy for outsiders to look back on any tragedy and insist they would have handled things better. It’s been suggested more than once that our parents were unforgivably negligent, but that’s simply not true: it couldn’t have been more than a full minute before they
did
act. Our fathers hadn’t yet reached the bottom of the basement stairs when my dad hollered for someone to call the police.
    We heard my father and Mike shouting for Turtle as they searched everywhere she might be hiding: the bathroom, the mudroom, the laundry room, the garage. When they didn’t find her, they searched in less likely spaces: beneath the sofa, the cabinet below the bathroom sink, the washer and dryer. They shouted her name while they looked everywhere her small body could have managed to fit, and some places where it couldn’t. Later, they wouldhate themselves for not going outside sooner, where they would have seen a single pair of adult footprints going from the house to the woods. She had only been gone a few minutes by then; they might have been able to find her simply by following the prints before they were covered in fresh snow.
    I don’t remember everything that happened after that, but there are bits and pieces of the hours that followed that I can recall in perfect detail, the sights and sounds chiseled permanently into my memory. My mother was so upset that she didn’t even try to make it to the bathroom before vomiting a belly full of booze and pretzels onto our carpet. The first floor of our house—the kitchen and living room in particular—quickly became the kind of mess she would have stayed awake all night to clean up under normal circumstances: Empty beer bottles crowded into sloppy rows on the coffee table next to a pile of sticky playing cards and an ashtray, two cigars still burning within. Dirty dishes filled the sink, spilling onto the surrounding countertop. Though I didn’t know what it was at the time, nobody bothered to hide the bag of marijuana on the bar. The TV was tuned to ABC’s
New Year’s Rockin’ Eve
wrap-up show, hosted by a somehow-still-alert Dick Clark, his energy rippling over the airwaves even with the volume muted. When the heavy winds interfered with our satellite signal near the end of the show, the screen froze on his sign-off for the night, his mittened hand raised in a wave. It stayed like that for days. When someone finally thought to