The Summer of Owen Todd

by Tony Abbott

  And that’s it.

  The thing is out of me now, the hate that choked me and kept me from talking is part of what I threw up, but the other huge thing starts, the thing that will take the rest of the summer and forever.

  * * *

  Later that night, my dad comes into my room. He sits on the bed. I’ve been staring out the window. I’ve seen the police car crunching slowly up the driveway.

  “Dad, I’m sorry I took your phone.”

  “Owen, no. Look. They’ve been at Sean’s for hours, the police. He’s been to the hospital and is home again. And now two officers are here. They want to ask you some questions.”

  “Did they catch him? The two … men?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. Not yet. That’s why…”

  I wipe my face. “I’ll be right there.” He gets up. “Dad. I’m sorry about before. I’m sorry I stole—”

  He cuts me off with a strong hug. He holds me to him. “You did good, Owen.”

  My eyes sting, my throat tightens up. “I don’t feel good.”

  “I know. But you did good.”

  Ginny pokes her head in the door while we’re like that. “Mommy told me somebody hurt Sean.”

  My eyes flood up again. “Yeah.”

  “Will he be okay?”

  “I … I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  “Yes, honey, he’ll be okay,” my dad tells her. He doesn’t know whether that’s true or not. But that’s what he says. Ginny gives me a flat, sad face and puts her soft little arms around me. Mom is on the landing outside my room now. I know she wants to hug me, too, but there are sounds downstairs. I hear the car idling in the driveway, the muffled crackle of a radio. Light is coming in the front door. The police are waiting for me.

  I wipe my face. “Okay. I’m coming.”

  * * *

  While Mom stays upstairs with Ginny, Dad takes the chair next to me at the kitchen table. The interview with the police is a repeat of what I told him and my mom, except slower, with details. One officer stands with his back to the side door, the other writes it all down in a notebook, her walkie-talkie beeping and clicking. She tells us that Paul Landis and his friend, whose name is William Doyle, had already left Sean’s house by the time the first police arrived. Even now the town is being searched, the Cape, the whole state.

  Then she asks this: “Did he, Paul Landis, or his accomplice ever do anything when you were alone with them or when you were together with Sean Huff?”

  “I never met the friend.”

  “All right, but I mean to you. To you? Did Paul Landis ever touch you?”

  I shake. It’s a normal question for the police to ask, but I shake. I look at my dad. His eyes are wet. He’s searching my face. I glance into the officer’s body camera and understand that I’m part of the story.

  “No. No. Nothing like that. Never.”

  My dad shifts at the table, reaches his hand across to me.

  That night I lie in bed. My bed. I think: Is it safe to be here? Sean’s room is so much like mine, my room could be his. Am I safe?

  * * *

  I go over to Sean’s with my parents and Ginny the next day. Ginny huddles close to Mom all the way down the sidewalk. By now it’s past the middle of July, a bright, hot, hazy gold day. I’m sweating through my second shirt of the day by the time we stop in his driveway. Then, even before Mrs. Huff opens the front door, Sean plows past her and leaps off the porch stairs at me. His face is red, puffy, and he freaks out, jumps up and down and screams as my parents try to go to his mom, but she holds up her hand and they stop.

  “Want! He … you … want … he … no!”

  I back away across the lawn, farther and farther as he comes at me, and I try to understand what he’s yelling. I finally do.

  “He wanted you! He wanted me to get you over here so he could make you do it, too. More boys in his movies are better, he said. He was going to make you do it with me! I wouldn’t. I said I would rather die. He was worse after that. I saved you. And you ratted on me. You showed everyone what a creepy ugly dead thing I am!”

  I have nothing to say. I turn to ice. Sean saved me?

  He shrieks all kinds of things and keeps going, screaming words that strike me like burning rocks or bullets or knives, until he tears back into the house and into his room.

  Even from outside, I hear his door slamming with a crack, then things crashing as he throws stuff around his room and finally at the window. Glass shatters onto the lawn while he screams over and over until he goes dead silent and stares through the broken window at me. His eyes are blacker than anything. Mrs. Huff says nothing to any of us, just disappears inside the house and closes the door.

  I stumble back to the sidewalk as Ginny clutches my mother’s legs, sobbing.

  * * *

  My mom and dad try to tell me Shay is going through something they don’t—and can’t possibly—understand, and to give him time. “To heal,” my mother says, but all that makes me think of is a wound, a huge, deep, bloody wound. I feel as if Sean’s been blown up, and when his front door closed, it was like a door slamming shut in my life. I go to bed that night, not sleeping, my heart hammering for hours, unable to remember a time before Paul Landis destroyed our lives.

  The next day, Mom calls his mother. “She wouldn’t say much,” she tells me later, “but she did tell me Sean hasn’t spoken a word since we saw him yesterday.”

  I want to go silent too, and realize I nearly have. I look at her, wanting her to hold me, but she doesn’t, just tells me more.

  “When she finally knocked on the door of his room yesterday, Sean wasn’t there. He must have gone out the window. There was blood on the broken glass. She called the police right away. While some of them searched for those criminals, others went out to look for Sean. We didn’t know any of this. They found him hiding at the beach.”

  This surprises me, but I still can’t find anything to say.

  “I’m proud of you, Owen,” she tells me finally. “Thank God you told us.”

  * * *

  No matter what my mom and dad believe, telling actually doesn’t help everything. Of course, the ugly story hits the TV news and the Cape newspapers. Paul Landis and William Doyle are named, but not Sean, who is called “an adolescent boy living on the Cape.” It’s sketchy at first, but it becomes clear when they talk about Paul’s position at Old Sailors Church that the “boy” was a parishioner and lived in Brewster. It’s starting exactly as Sean said it would if I told. Everyone will know. Everyone.

  A few nights later we’re eating dinner quietly, which is how all our dinners are now, and my dad gets a phone call. “Hello?” He listens, cups his hand over the receiver. “It’s the police.” He listens again. “Yes. Yes. Can I tell him?” Another few seconds. “Thank you.” He hangs up.

  “Tell me what?”

  He’s frowning, swallowing a couple of times, and Mom once again looks to take Ginny from the room, but Ginny says, “I know, ‘Time to play.’ It’s okay,” and she skips out, so Mom stays.

  “Dad, what did they say?”

  He takes a breath. “Some—some of the videos, like those creeps said, some of them are online. The police said they try to shut down sites, but there are loopholes and laws to get around, and those people are clever and it’s hard to stop those kinds of pictures once they get out.”

  Mom shakes, her lips quivering, curses openly about “laws,” then says we’ll never lie again about anything ever. “We’re going to tell one another everything and not keep secrets ever. Things are different now, no matter how we don’t want them to be. We’ve been burned, too. We have to protect ourselves. By never lying.”

  We need it to be that way, she says, to keep strong as a family.

  So that’s a good thing.

  The police and the lawyers are pretty quick to pounce on the case, but nothing shuts down. It only grows bigger. From the video I took, the police track the cameraman’s car to Pennsylvania. He’s n
ot there, but I learn later from the newspaper that his wife—his wife!—rats on Paul so that she won’t be charged, but she is charged because she knew about it, and she claims that Paul Landis is the one who set it all up, but the police say he wasn’t, although they find he’s done this in other towns with other boys. The story grows day by day, week by week, well beyond Brewster. Altogether over the next weeks, about a dozen people in different states are arrested. No one else from Old Sailors Church is involved. Just Paul Landis. Everyone there is shocked and sad and angry. But it still doesn’t stop growing. Not long after, the newspapers mention that it was “a friend of the victim’s video evidence” that broke the story.

  In early August, another two police officers come with an agent from the FBI.

  “We thought we were close to arresting William Doyle, the camera operator,” the federal agent says, “but it turned out to be a false lead. At this point it’s unfortunately too big to stop anything from going wide. It’s already overseas. It may only take an instant, but once something’s on the Internet, there’s no controlling it. Your friend’s nude images were saved thousands of times instantly, and we can stomp on a roach here and there, but they don’t go away. That’s the damn truth of it.”

  I can tell that Dad’s ready to argue with him because he’s so cold about it. But I nod and try to take it in like an adult would.

  About the middle of August, they arrest Paul Landis in Florida and bring him back to Massachusetts. Because he pleads not guilty at what’s called an arraignment, there is a preliminary hearing in late August. He’s put in jail without bail until then. The judge says he’ll try to escape, so he’s just locked up. Good.

  I have to appear as a witness in Orleans District Court, which covers things in Brewster. The preliminary hearing is not in a courtroom jammed with people and reporters and cameras, but in the judge’s private chambers with attorneys. I find out that the cameraman is still “in the wind.” That’s how one lawyer puts it. “In the wind.” Meaning, he’s vanished. They can’t find him. Which makes my skin crawl. One of the lawyers tries to say my video can’t be used in court, but the other lawyers argue about that. The big trial will come later, but I hear from Mom that Adam Sisley from baseball said something, too. Once Adam saw the story in the Brewster paper he told his father, and Mom was in the newspaper office the day the reporter uncovered this from the police. What happened to Adam is nowhere near what Sean went through, but it’s more testimony against Paul Landis.

  “He just put his hand on my butt once, maybe twice, that’s all,” Adam tells me later. That was at our last game, two weekends before Labor Day, which is late this year. A couple of people on the team know what happened to Sean because Adam told them what he learned, and everyone pretty much put it together anyway, because nobody sees Sean around anymore.

  Later that day, Kyle comes running across the field to me. “Good job, man,” he says quietly. “You’re something.” He grabs my hand and pulls it to his chest and wraps his other arm around my back for a long minute. This is the first time I’ve ever done that kind of teenage hug. “You’re Sean’s real friend.”

  * * *

  Each day I remember more of what Sean screamed at me when we drove to his house the day after I snitched on him.

  “It’s not your fault, Sean. None of it,” I told him. “You didn’t do anything—”

  “No? Well, take a look on your computer to see what I didn’t do. Everyone’s going to know what I didn’t do. They may not know me, but they’ll know about that kid who does horrible stuff, the kid who takes off his clothes and his stupid pod. Owen, they were going to leave! Pack up and leave and it would be over. The pictures wouldn’t go anywhere. Now? People are going to stare at my mom wherever she goes. They’ll all know. How long before—does Ginny know what I do?”

  I feel like just bones, standing in front of him. “You did it, but you don’t do anything anymore. You didn’t want to—it was a crime.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Maybe I had to and maybe I didn’t. I don’t even know. But it doesn’t matter. It’s all going out there because of you, you jerk! Everybody’s gonna know. Everybody!”

  “No, they won’t, because maybe it won’t even go out there.” I knew I was lying. He did, too.

  “You’re so dumb,” which are not the words he really used. His voice was just hot, stale breath. I barely heard him, but I did. “I know those creeps. My pictures are going out and they’ll never be gone. They’ll always be there. When I’m old they’ll be there. But that’s fine, because I’m not even me anymore. I’m ‘the boy who was raped.’ There’s no me anymore.”

  My blood turned to ice when he said that. He was careful not to say what I think he wanted to, that killing himself was still a thing he might do, but I remembered his words. I hoped someday they wouldn’t be true, that Sean would be back, that we could hang together like before, but when he shouted those words his eyes were so dark, his face so twisted, I believed him.

  * * *

  “He had his pump on the day we went to see him,” my dad said out of nowhere after that last baseball game. “The day after we called the police.” Dad looked at me across the front seat of the pickup. “You could see it on his arm.”

  “His pod?” I said. “He always has it.”

  “Well, he could have deactivated it, couldn’t he? Not put on a new one? Or he could use an insulin pen, right? Given himself a big dose? He can control it.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m saying he cares. Even that day, right after finding out we told, as angry as he was, Sean cared about his health. It’s a small thing, but maybe not so small. Maybe it means he cares a little about what happens to him. Sean’s not going to do anything bad. Not necessarily. And he has good people all around him. His mother. She quit the shop, did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “She did. She’s with him all the time. Think about that.”

  Okay.

  But I was still the only friend he told, and it would have ended, Paul assured him, but I went and told everyone and it grew into a huge thing that’s still growing. You could say I had no choice. You could say that of course Paul was lying about stopping the abuse. You could say I should have told someone first thing. You could say I was just pointing to myself and acting the hero by rescuing Sean.

  Either way, he couldn’t be my friend anymore because I told the world what he swore me not to.

  A friend doesn’t do that.

  A friend keeps secrets for a friend.

  Even the darkest ones.

  Doesn’t he?

  * * *

  The last weekend in August I see a FOR SALE sign on his front lawn. I see moving trucks come, but Sean and his mother have been gone for weeks. No good-bye. Just gone. I walk around the side of the house. The flower box under his window is just soil, no plants, the windowpane has been replaced. I peek inside. His room is empty, no furniture.

  Over and over I hear the shattering of glass and see his face with eyes blacker than tar, and no matter what anyone believes, it’s clear to me.

  To Sean, I stopped being his friend at that moment.

  At that moment, to Sean at least, I became the opposite.

  TWENTY-THREE

  A funny thing happens on the Cape in September.

  The days are still warm, but as soon as the sun drops the air cools and turns blue like a deep blue flower. If you can believe it, the air is even clearer at the end of the summer than it is in June. Whites and blues and golds and greens burn with their own fire. Edward Hopper, the painter who lived on the Cape, caught that, too.

  So. The evening before Labor Day I’m in my room, lying on my bed, staring at the green walls, trying to make my heart slow down. This is something I have to do every day, or whenever I think about Sean, which is the same thing.

  It’s going on seven, late for dinner, but everything else is so normal. My mom has just gone out for pizza. I hear Dad slowly setting the table on the patio. I l
ook out and see Ginny near him, sweeping dirt and grass cuttings from the flagstones the way a five-year-old sweeps, mostly just rearranging the piles, when I hear shells crackle halfway up our driveway. Police? Mom? No. From the other window I recognize the minivan and run down the stairs.

  I yank open the front door. “Sean!”

  But like that afternoon weeks before on his porch, it’s not him. It’s his mother.

  She’s out of the car, brushing past the rosebushes, all green now and flowerless, and coming up to the step. “I can’t really stay,” she says.

  Her hair is different, longer, a little wilder, no more angles. Her face is changed from the last time I saw her, too. Thinner. Calmer, maybe, but sad. She looks tired.

  “You just missed my mom. Dad’s in back—”

  “I came to see you, Owen. Do you have a minute?”

  I hear the clinking of silverware and the scraping of chair legs on the patio.

  “Sure.”

  We sit on the front porch in the wicker chairs and just breathe for a couple of minutes before either of us says a word.

  “How’s Shay?” I ask.

  She tries her best to smile, but it doesn’t work. “Oh, Owen.” That’s all she says for a while. She’s different than I’ve ever seen her. She isn’t scattered, fidgeting all over the place. She’s here. Taking a deep breath, she starts.

  “Sean’s been horribly hurt. You know. It will t-take time.” Her face breaks suddenly, and she shakes and sobs into her hands.

  “I know. I’m sorry. I hurt him a lot.”

  “Oh!” she says. “Oh, Owen, no! Not you. You never hurt him. Never.”

  She fumbles in her bag for tissues. It’s strange to see a grown-up shaking so much that she might fall to pieces. I’m shaking too, but that doesn’t matter. She tries to calm down again by breathing slowly in and out.