by Tony Abbott
“Can I come over to see him?” I ask. “I know you don’t live here anymore, but sometime?”
She crumples a ragged tissue in her hands. “Sean doesn’t want to see anyone right now. That’ll change, I know it will.” She looks across the wicker footstool between us. I think she’s deciding to say or not say what she wants to. Maybe she’s trying out different words for it. She doesn’t speak for a long time, so I find myself saying it again.
“I’m really sorry.”
She shakes her head from side to side, sniffling. “You were closer to him than anyone, Owen. If he didn’t have you, he wouldn’t have had anybody. You knew him better than I do. You’re closer to him than I am right now.”
“No.”
“You are.”
She leans far forward in her chair, her hair dangling over her face. She slides it back and says in a kind of whisper, “Sean wouldn’t be alive except for you.”
My throat gets thick. “That doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t—”
“You did,” she says, softer now. “Do you know where we found him that night after you came over? The police and me and his father? You know, his father has been great, actually. He came right away. He’s found us a place to live.” A pause. “Do you know where we found Sean that night?”
My chest buzzes and my throat stings with acid. “At the beach, I thought.”
“In a kayak he stole. He was paddling out into the bay. He was a half mile out before the Coast Guard could get to him. He wouldn’t stop. They had to stop him.”
“Where was he going?”
She covers her mouth with her hand. “You know where he was going and what he was going to do.”
I shut my eyes and see waves, and tears seep out onto my cheeks.
“Thank God we got to him,” she says. “We never would have found him. Or only later. But he didn’t have a chance to do it then. And now I don’t think he has those kinds of thoughts anymore. Not often, anyway. He talks to me a lot more than he ever did. He hasn’t let me touch him, but he looked me in the eyes the other day. It sounds so small, but he hasn’t done that for weeks. He’s going to be Sean again because of you.”
We don’t say anything for a little while. She wipes her eyes. I try to calm the thunder in my chest.
“I waited too long,” I say. “I stood there and waited and didn’t do anything while horrible stuff happened.”
“What about the rest of us?” Tears keep running down her cheeks. “Owen, what you did isn’t the bad thing. It’s the only good thing. It’s the best thing you could do.”
My parents tell me the same thing every day. Kyle too, whenever he sees me. They all keep telling me.
Mrs. Huff leans over her chair again and reaches for my hands. “I want to tell everyone to be you, Owen Todd. I want everyone to be like the friend that Sean has. Not every person has one. Not like you.”
I’m too far from her when I cough out a sob, so she slides from her chair and kneels in front of me before I can get up. She hugs me for a long time, kneeling like that. It seems like an hour. I hear pattering from inside the house. Ginny’s feet. I think she looks out, then runs back. A few seconds later the floorboards squeak. It’s the weight of my dad coming to see. But he doesn’t come out, either. The boards creak again and it’s just the two of us.
The blue beyond her shoulder is turning purple. Tomorrow will be bright, warm, one of the last days of real summer.
“Sean will hug me like this again, too,” she says, pulling away and smiling at me through wet eyes. She seems so tired. Out of breath. I guess she would be, after everything that’s happened. I sit there like a lump, shaking, my face wet and hot.
Her hand is on my arm, and it’s hot, too. “He’ll be all right because you love him and you told us. His therapist said that, and we have to believe it. You told us and ended it and Sean is still here. You did that.”
I close my eyes and all the water flushes out and down my face. She holds my head and kisses the top of it lots of times. When I open my eyes, the late sun catches against the white trim on the opposite house, making a skeleton of its frame.
“Okay, then. You going to be all right, Owen?” She wipes her face with her tissue and smiles and stands up. “I think you are. I really should call you O, like he does. I have to go back home now. Well, it’s not home yet. Sean is with his father and his therapist right now. His father moved nearby, did I say that? And his therapist, she’s so good, so kind and patient. She says wonderful things about you, too. So now we have another person who gets to love Sean, because of you.”
She looks at the time on her phone, which I remember she always used to do. “I have to leave pretty much right now. Sean asked me to come back soon. See? That’s another good thing.”
I wipe my cheeks. “You’re not going to stay for the parade tomorrow?”
“Only if it’s for you.” She laughs, wiping her face. “No. I really have to go. It’s a couple of hours’ drive.”
“Where do you live now?”
She keeps wiping her cheeks. “Sean doesn’t want anyone to know, and I have to respect that. It’s not Wellfleet, but that’s where he keeps talking about. You went there a couple of times together, didn’t you?”
Wellfleet.
“Once,” I say.
“He told me all about the beach roses there. The white and the pink and how you like them. He does, too. We don’t have any where we are now. Not nearby.”
It’s hard to believe that out of everything from that day on the beach—the waves, the sand, the girls in bikinis, the roses, and the wind—Sean remembers anything but the promise I made there and how I broke it.
“You’ll tell me when I can come over?”
“I will.” She smiles with her lips closed. “Soon, I hope.”
And that’s all of it. She gets in her minivan. It’s the same car she drove Sean and me home in on the last day of school. So much has happened since then.
Shay is hurt, he’s beaten up, he’s broken, but I want to think he isn’t going to be that way forever, and everybody keeps telling me he isn’t going to be that way forever because of me.
* * *
There’s a short parade on Labor Day. It’s a pretty dinky version of Memorial Day’s two-hour float fest. It has a kind of sad, end-of-something feel to it. There are no pancakes, not that I would eat any, only a couple of vintage cars, a high school glee club float, a gang of bicyclers in costumes, and fewer veterans from the older wars. There are always fewer veterans, one parade to the next.
It’s been a rough summer. Grandma. Sean. Things ending. Other things beginning.
By the end of the week, school will start. Ginny will enter first grade, and I find myself surprised for the hundredth time that we’ll never be in the same school at the same time. But I get to see her every day at home, and I will for a long time, so I’m okay with it.
I’ll go into sixth grade. For the first time in forever, my school won’t have Sean in it. Maybe he’ll be in another one somewhere else, if he’s okay enough to go. Maybe he’ll be in a place where he doesn’t ever have to think about anything that happened here.
The trees in my yard and all over Brewster, the Cape, and everywhere are full and green and heavy with leaves, like they always are until the weather chills.
In the next few days, the vacationers will pack up their cars. Lined up like caravans, they’ll drag themselves onto the highway. The town will be back to the rest of us, the roads will clear, the lines for go-karts and ice cream and pizza will thin down to half, then to a quarter, then to two or three people I’ll probably know. I’m thinner, too, and a little taller. Over the summer I lost four pounds and grew two inches, like my mom predicted.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I believe it was Philip Roth who, when asked to describe one of his novels, said, “It’s about what it’s about.” I view The Summer of Owen Todd as a work of fiction not solely about any one thing. It’s about the Cape, about baseball, kartin
g, summer, boys, families. Still, at its core is a horrifying and often unreported crime: the victimization of a child, a boy in this story, by a trusted male adult. I don’t believe that novels can or should properly accommodate messages, but readers can and do bestow on books the power to do more than tell a story. At best this book is only a whisper in the conversation about sexual assault, but a whisper is better than silence, and whispers can be loud, if enough of them join together.
I am grateful beyond words to Mary Jo, who was instrumental in the genesis of this book, and whose son, not as lucky as Sean Huff, didn’t survive the trauma of his abuse. It was and is her passion that not keeping a secret about abuse is a heroic act. To Heather and Liam Staines, for their gracious and generous mom/son discussion of the daily details of type one diabetes. Any inaccuracies about this aspect of the story are, naturally, mine alone. To Erica Rand Silverman, who searched and searched until she found the perfect publishing house to bring this book out. To my editor, Joy Peskin, for accepting the story, and for her inspired and moving work in coaxing out and shaping its final form; I’m so happy to have a book at FSG again. To my daughters, Janie and Lucy, for being the loving people they are: you give me such hope. And as always to my wife, Dolores, for her unyielding support from the very beginning, when I decided to put a difficult story on paper. Her love for the characters is on these pages, too.
Victims and their families and friends who need information on how to deal with sexual assault or suspected abuse or who have any questions at all are urged to explore the resources of RAINN—Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network—at rainn.org. Their National Sexual Assault Hotline is free, confidential, and available every hour of every day. The number is (800) 656-HOPE.
Other organizations include the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (nsvrc.org); the various state-specific agencies associated with the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence (endsexualviolence.org); and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (suicidepreventionlifeline.org), which contains specific resources for young people and a chat line at (800) 273-8255. It should also be noted that in the aftermath of sexual violence victim advocates are available for both primary and secondary victims (like Sean’s mother and Owen himself) to help at hospitals, court houses, and police departments. School counselors are trained to discuss a variety of difficult issues directly with students and can sometimes offer a young person the closest safe environment.
To use the terrorism catchphrase, if you see something, say something. Whatever you do, talk to someone. Children should always speak up, no matter how it might hurt to do so. If you suspect anything bad or uncomfortable is happening to you or a friend, tell an adult, a parent, a teacher, a person you trust. Better to tell someone than to remain silent. Better to lose a friend than lose a life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony Abbott is the award-winning author of more than 80 books for young readers, including Firegirl, The Postcard, and the Secrets of Droon series. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and two daughters. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
An imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © 2017 by Tony Abbott
All rights reserved
Designed by Andrew Arnold
First hardcover edition, 2017
eBook edition, October 2017
mackids.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Abbott, Tony, 1952– author.
Title: The summer of Owen Todd / Tony Abbott.
Description: First edition.|New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2017.|Summary: In the touristy town of Cape Cod, eleven-year-old Owen faces a dilemma when his best friend Sean is sexually abused by a trusted adult, but warns Owen not tell anyone what is happening.|
Identifiers: LCCN 2016058780 (print)|LCCN 2017025282 (ebook)|ISBN 9780374305529 (ebook)|ISBN 9780374305505 (hardcover)
Subjects:|CYAC: Best friends—Fiction.|Friendship—Fiction.|Sexual abuse—Fiction.|Cape Cod (Mass.)—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.A1587 (ebook)|LCC PZ7.A1587 Su 2017 (print)|DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058780
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eISBN 9780374305529