“I can,” I assured him. “I can keep it shut.”
“Okay,” he said, without much confidence.
He was quiet for a few moments as he watched me, considering, then he said, “She’s had a tough time already, a hard life. She doesn’t need this. She’s scared.”
“I know,” I said.
“Do you?” he said—a pause. “If they can do what they did to that other girl, think about what they can do to Sara.”
He lit a cigarette with a Zippo, clicked the lighter shut, and stood smoking, watching me with an expression of frustration and worry. Then he said, “I’m leaving tonight. They think it’s me, and let them think that if they’ll leave her alone.” He looked around him and said, “She likes you, trusts you. Listen, someone might be following me. I don’t know, maybe I’m paranoid. But I need to leave. I don’t want them to see me talking to you. She’s going to call you in about a week. Wait a bit first, after I leave. Just in case. You’re going to meet with her and help her. You’re going to tell her that you can keep your mouth shut, and then you’re going to keep it shut. You’re the only one that she can talk to about this. Tell her that you’ll protect her, and then do it. Tell her that you can protect her from your dad and your brother.”
“Okay,” I said.
His hand went to my arm and gripped me for a second, and then he left quietly out a side door.
I LEFT MIKE at the party and returned to my room at the Woods’. It was small and comforting, like a cave, a stack of books beside my futon, and I cracked the sliding glass door to give myself some air. The air had that misty-rain feel, barely coming down. I listened—the rain was too soft and vaporous to make noise. I could barely hear the television coming from the Woods’ living room.
Though I hadn’t inhaled much from the vegetarian girl’s joint, I now felt stoned. I lay on the futon. The sheets and comforter were from a queen-size mattress, and the excess material spooled around my legs. It felt like I could hide there forever.
I opened my laptop and checked my email. The Internet was slow compared to at Dad’s house, but I had nowhere to go. There were fourteen emails from my mom. I read the first:
FROM: Gina Hyde
TO: Daniel Hyde, Gabriel Hyde, Even Hyde
DATE: Saturday, January 18, 2004 4:17 PM
SUBJECT: Gabe and Trial
Now we’re going to trial right after the school year ends. Summertime. I’m telling you, this whole thing is a bunch of nonsense. You boys are going to get dragged in the mud. You have the rest of your lives, in two or three months, no one would have remembered what happened or cared about one out-of-control moment that happened when a bunch of teenagers engaged in a bit of foolishness. Tove Kagan, if she’d been smart, would have just taken some money and forgotten the whole thing. She’s got her whole life ahead of her, and nobody dwells on past mistakes. The whole thing is so ridiculous. This girl slept with all three of you boys the night before. She’s easy. We had a name for girls like her when I was in high school but I’m not going to say it. She came over that night expecting to have sex with you boys. You went over the line with the pool stick and because you weren’t thinking, add to that alcohol, and that’s a bad combination. But I have always taught you boys to be good boys. If a bunch of girls had stripped you naked and done things to you, would they go to trial? NO. Had the video never came out, no one would be trying to destroy you poor boys’ lives. You are supposed to be sacrificed and go to prison and be irrevocably damaged because this girl likes to have sex with you and then it got out of hand? Ask yourself, a girl her age already so sexually active? That says to me one thing. Bad parents. You boys were presented with a forbidden opportunity and you did what boys will do. You grasped the opportunity and didn’t realize the seriousness of your actions. You didn’t even know you might be breaking a law! Every high school class has a low self-esteem girl that will have sex with anybody. So you boys are going to go to prison because of that? And this girl, had this video never been discovered, would have continued to be a slut as a result of who she is. Now all you boys are going to be picking up your shattered lives for the rest of your lives because of who she is. Not right. That’s why I’m so glad we’re fighting this thing.
Proverbs 1:8
Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.
Love,
Mom
I read the second email, which I saw that she’d sent five minutes after the first:
FROM: Gina Hyde
TO: Daniel Hyde, Gabriel Hyde, Even Hyde
DATE: Saturday, January 18, 2004 4:23 PM
SUBJECT: Money
This is for Gabe but I’m sending it to YOU TOO. Make no mistake. This is about money. I’m just a regular middle-class woman, while your father has reaped the benefits of having worked his whole life to become a successful businessman. Yes, we’ve had our difficulties, and I’m sorry for the pain we’ve put you boys through. I’m sorry we couldn’t save our marriage. But your father is a good man. He is guilty of loving you children too much and not being able to be with you enough.
Tove Kagan is a rebellious and troubled young woman. She and her family have a reputation for being greedy. She viewed you as a way to escape her horrible less than great family and life. She saw that your father is rich and lives in wealthy Newport Beach and she saw an opportunity. She wanted attention. If seducing you and your friends would give her that, she was willing to do it. You, like all young men with raging hormones, thought only about your immediate sexual gratification with a willing young woman but definitely used exceedingly poor judgment in having sex with her. All four of you teenagers willingly participated in behavior such as drinking and having sex in which you are too young to engage in. Yet my pastor was explaining to me that young people do not always use good judgment or think of the consequences of their actions. But why punish you boys more? You’re already being punished for what you did that night because now people will know. That’s enough. It’s going to get worse, now the newspapers are going crazy. Did you hear any more about that 48 Hours television show? I think it’s a good idea that your PR lady said to have a show about teenage sex because then you could teach other boys not to go out of hand like you and to be careful. You are a polite, quiet, loving young man. I know that you will show that on 48 Hours and that people will understand that what you did is not worth ruining your life for one little mistake. Sure you were searching for your identity and acceptance, but I never did feel good about that Kevin Stewart and I never met Kent Nixon before. They don’t come from good stable Christian homes. I don’t want you to be punished more.
Chronicles 16:11
Seek the LORD and his strength; seek his presence continually!
Love,
Mom
I deleted the remaining twelve emails, shut my computer, flipped off the lamp next to my futon, and stared for a long time at the shadows on my ceiling. Then I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew I was at a party and there were people everywhere and I saw Joe’s cowboy hat and went to him.
He pointed to a door and his face was not his but Gabe’s face but with a stitched lip like Joe’s. I opened the door and went inside and there was someone—a girl—on the bed with her back to me under the covers and she whimpered, so I went to her and got beneath the covers.
Then I understood that it was my futon and that the girl was the vegetarian girl from the party and she wanted to have sex with me and I wanted to have sex with her and that I didn’t want it to be her but I wanted it to be Sara.
What happened next was so awful that I don’t think I can write it. But I will tell you that it wasn’t the vegetarian girl from the party and it wasn’t Sara and that I started doing things to her that I’d seen on the video camera.
I shot up from the futon with a scream and awakened, sweating and breathing hard, and for some reason, my hands went to my throat, where I felt the bumping thrum of my pulse.
I c
ollected myself and looked around the room to remember the safe feeling that I got from it, repeating in my head: Not real, not real, not real.
25.
KNOWING THAT WHAT Gabe and the Ks did to Tove was wrong didn’t alleviate my guilt and self-hatred for having turned over the video camera. I had two conflicting sensations: My life was over; my life had just begun. I felt that every person could see through me and know that I was a traitor. At the same time, to have taken such an action proved an independence from my family and that I didn’t belong to them. I realized now that I’d always wanted that freedom, and that I had it. That I’d told no one (except for Sara and Mike)—to have a secret of that magnitude—made me strong, and gave me a feeling of power.
One way I survived those months before the trial was by obsessing over how not to tell anyone about what I’d done or letting anyone find out, while at the same time fantasizing about coming clean or being found out.
I didn’t sleep or I slept too much, barely ate, and drank almost every night and took drugs.
I wanted to be alone. Yet when alone, I became prone to a general neurotic anxiety and self-loathing that I hadn’t experienced before.
I sometimes abused the prescription meds that I stole from my dad’s medicine cabinet, promising myself that I’d quit once the trial ended. High on Demerol one night, I attacked a rose bush and scratched up my fists and arms.
I shoplifted recklessly, daring security to catch me. I found out how difficult it was for a white, clean-cut teenager to get caught—even mugging for the security cameras. Everything that I stole, I gave away. If I was caught, I imagined that under interrogation and with the sway of authority, I might confess my role in Gabe’s case, and the waiting and anticipation would be over.
One afternoon, I walked into Target, took an iPod, dismantled it from its packaging and security bar with a knife from the kitchenwares department, and walked out with it. Then, when stopped at the signal to leave the parking lot, I passed the iPod through my opened car window to a man in a wheelchair with a cardboard sign on his lap that read DOWN AND OUT PLEASE HELP.
“God bless,” he said, with a big, semitoothless grin, reaching a sun-cracked hand out to me.
For a few days, I trailed Tom L., waiting in the parking lot for him to leave his AA meeting. I’m the man you want, I wanted to tell him. I gave you the video camera. I’ve never seen anything that disturbing before, either, and I’m not a cop! I’m the brother of the perpetrator and the son of the protector of the perpetrator!
He lumbered to his Buick, sat, shut his door with a whack, and started the engine. Careful to stay a few cars behind, I followed him. He lived in Costa Mesa in a two-story light blue house with white windowsills and a picket fence. The garage door opened and swallowed him up.
But I waited for him the next morning before school, a block down, parked and sipping a Coke. When he pulled out of the garage, I followed him through the fog to the YMCA where Mike went to lift weights, and watched him lumber from the parking lot in his sweat suit with stripes down the legs. A gut, and a wide cowboy-like walk, swinging his arms.
I thought about going back to the AA meetings, just to hear the people talk. But I didn’t go.
I spent hours in pointless reflection, turning over my family’s history, looking for cracks that I’d missed, trying to understand how everything had happened and what it meant. No matter how much time I deliberated, I couldn’t figure anything out, like a dog chasing its tail.
My refuge and comfort had been reading. Now it didn’t do much good. I would try but the sentences evaporated after I read them. I couldn’t get them to sink into meaning.
But when they did, and when a book resonated, such as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which I cracked open for a couple of days, it overwhelmed me. I’d read it before and enjoyed the thrill of the fiction, but now it left me shaken with identification, and I had to put it away.
Every cruel and stupid thing I’d done came back to haunt me. How I used to wipe my boogers on my bed frame as a child, collecting them in some sort of gruesome fascination, a trail of dried, bumpy snot along the wood post. Our maid, Juanita, finally cleaned them one afternoon, shooting me a disgusted look. The three times I’d kicked our beloved dog and made him yelp, before he’d been hit and killed by a car. How once I’d gotten Gabe in trouble by claiming he’d shattered our parents’ bathroom mirror. I’d done it with a rock, for no reason. And plenty of other worse humiliations.
By myself a lot those months, I took long walks along the Back Bay and watched the joggers and bikers whir past me.
I went to the movies alone and spent afternoons sneaking into one stupid movie after another, until I’d finally leave six or seven hours later, the sky dark and littered with stars.
It seemed that I hadn’t properly noticed life before—everything was more intense and alive and relentless and always, always, always tinged with sadness. The sky was larger and deeper and the sun brighter and the grass greener and the stars more sparkly. How hadn’t I noticed before?
I felt strangely liberated and fascinated by the sheer impossibility of just living and breathing and being alive.
Instead of wearing boxers or pajamas, I slept naked. I didn’t like the feel of clothes on my skin at night and started wearing an old, tattered robe that I’d bought at a garage sale.
I lost about fifteen pounds and had to poke new holes in my belts. I developed a habit of having to smell foods before I ate them. Things that I used to crave (chocolate, mustard, dill pickles) I couldn’t stomach.
I realized that it used to matter to me what people thought about me, but that I no longer cared so much whether they liked me or not. It just didn’t matter.
If someone handed me a pill at a party, I no longer asked what it was. I just swallowed it and waited to see what happened.
Mike said that I was isolating myself, and that I should make more of an effort to be around people. I didn’t want to be around people.
Sara shared my secret, and I knew now that she understood my situation in a way that I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge.
I waited for her to call—like Joe had told me to do—and she never did. I thought about her constantly.
“Should I call her?” I asked Mike.
“I don’t know,” he said, so I left her alone.
But then one afternoon, about two months before the trial, Mike brought me an article from the OC Weekly by this reporter named R. Sam Michaels. Michaels had hooked into the Hyde Three case with a vicious determination, and no one—not Gabe’s PR lady or his lawyers or other reporters—could sway him to take a more neutral position. Dad hated him.
The article claimed that a young woman who lived near the Jane Doe of the Hyde Three gang rape case (“Jane Doe” was a pseudonym for Tove Kagan), and who knew who Jane Doe was—a girl who looked like Jane Doe, especially in the dark night—had been attacked, to the point of needing plastic surgery. Nothing could be proven, no connection made, but only, the woman asserted, when she had yelled that she wasn’t Tove (the paper hadn’t used Tove’s name) did the large man (“a big motherfucker,” I remembered Joe saying) stop his beating and flee.
I set the article down, quiet for a moment, and then I said, “Holy shit.”
Mike said, “Do you think it’s true?”
I nodded. The feeling of doing the right thing by turning in the camera had been accumulating slowly—so slowly that I’d hardly noticed it—but now it locked into place.
I’d question many things from here on out, but I never questioned myself about this again.
A certain relief came from my certainty, but alongside it was a deepening loss of respect for my father, mother, and brother, so that for a long time it just felt like a huge, sorrowful defeat.
“Call Sara,” Mike said, but he didn’t have to tell me. I’d already reached for my cell in my pocket.
She said that she’d meet me at my room at Mike’s later that afternoon.
I dres
sed, washed my face, and gave the room a harried cleaning: tucking the sheets and bedspread under the futon, restacking my books, arranging my shoes in a line on the floor.
I couldn’t stay still; I was wandering around my room, picking at my skin, looking at my books and papers without really seeing them.
As I was giving myself a final look-over in the mirror—slicking my cow-licked hair back with my fingers—I heard a light tapping at the glass door and jumped forward, on edge with anticipation.
I turned and Sara stared through a crack at the curtains at me, her eyes alive with her smile.
Sliding the glass door open, I said, “Oh!” and she said, “Even!” and she stepped inside and we embraced. We stayed that way for quite some time.
When she pulled away, I saw that she’d also lost weight, and her cheeks were sunken. She looked as if she’d just gotten out of bed, her hair tousled like she hadn’t bothered to brush it, and she wore no makeup. Her sweatshirt came down over her wrists, and the hems of her jeans—long and frayed—were tucked under her flip-flops
“This is nice,” she said, looking around my room. “They let you live here?”
“As long as I want,” I said. “I’m lucky to have it.”
We sat on my futon and she put her hands on her knees; her cheeks were flushed. She shivered. She saw that I noticed and she said, “I’m so glad to see you, Even, but it scares me, too.”
I told her what Joe told me to tell her—that I would protect her and that I would keep her safe from my dad and brother, no matter what happened—the words came as Joe had directed, and when I finished, she gave me a blank look and said, “Thanks, Even,” but I couldn’t tell if she believed me. She went silent for a moment, and then she said, “Joe told you to say that.”
I didn’t say anything. Regardless of what Joe had told me to say, I didn’t think it was right for her not to trust me. I felt a genuine desire to protect her. It must have shown in my face because she said, “I know you will, Even. That’s why I’m here.”
The Little Brother Page 16