Free The Last Good Day of the Year by Jessica Warman Page A

temperatures and a growing tremble of doubt that Turtle would be found alive, if at all. Throughout all of this, Steven was in a jail cell less than six blocks from my house.
    Two weeks into the new year, an overnight storm dropped fourteen inches of fresh snow on Shelocta in less than eight hours. Police called off their official search. If Turtle was anywhere outdoors, she wasn’t alive.
    I slept with my parents most nights for years afterward, either between them in their bed or on the floor beside it. Long after they’d both swallowed their last sedatives of the day and gone to sleep, I stayed awake with my eyes closed and kept track of their breathing, constantly reassuring myself that there was nobody in the room but the three of us. My brain replayed the same nightmare every time I slept deeply enough for dreams: Remy and I were building a snowman in the woods behind our houses when I looked downto see Turtle’s face staring up at me, her mouth wide open and frozen in a permanent scream beneath a sheet of ice.
    In Davis Gordon’s book, he uses the word “colored” to describe how my life, in particular, was changed. He talks a lot about the coloring of my worldview, my sense of security and vulnerability. All I can ever picture is a large, shadowy villain hovering above me, wielding a handful of crayons. It’s funny how much we rely on euphemisms to soften the blow of an ugly truth. When my parents spoke about things like “bringing Turtle home,” what they meant was bringing her
body
home, but nobody would dare say it that way. Even today, we still do it. There’s an expression in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.” It didn’t take long for my parents to realize that we were entertainment for plenty of people, a status that made the most horrific details of Turtle’s case the most sought after. Steven’s parents had it worse in the press, but there were still plenty of stories that stung. “Parents of Missing Toddler Were Intoxicated, High on Night of Disappearance.” “Tabitha Myers: Could She Have Been Saved?”
    Davis seemed different from the other reporters. More than anything, he claimed he wanted to help us find closure. That word gets thrown around a lot in situations like ours, and usually people don’t understand how impossible it can seem in the thick of all the pain. As if what happened that night is a book we’ve all been reading together, and one day we’ll come to the last page and finally be able to put it down forever. But that would mean our livesfollow a predictable narrative that is required to make sense somehow in the end, which is so clearly not the case.
    Davis meant more to my dad than he did to anyone else in our family. My father had always been the kind of person who preferred calm to chaos. After Steven went to prison and my family moved away, it seemed as though even the smallest ripple in his thoughts could set off days of emotional agony. He talked about the past with Davis, and how the smallest decision could change a person’s whole future for better or worse without any rhyme or reason. But if you can’t figure out the moment when something starts to happen, how can you determine when it ends?
    My mother had no patience for my father’s meandering thoughts. She followed a different path. It led her through fields of marijuana to mountains of Valium and Xanax, where a river of codeine flowed into a lake of Everclear. By then she was chewing whole pills into dust—sometimes three or four at a time—between her teeth instead of swallowing them with water.
    Davis was willing to listen to my father’s miserable philosophizing all day, if he thought it would help. He seemed to truly care about us. When he told us all he wanted was to help us find some peace, we believed him. Why shouldn’t we have done so? He’d devoted his career to solving other people’s