The Summer of Owen Todd Page 9

  “You a Pan fan?” I ask, having just come up with the rhyme.

  “Yeah. I empathize because I can’t grow up. Never gonna. Not me.”

  Grandma chuckles. “I wonder how they’ll treat the Indians. There are Indians in the play, you know. They can’t do it the way they used to. Too racist. Ha! As if you can be a little racist.”

  Kyle nods. “They changed the native people to sort of generic settlers, and their songs have changed. I read about it.”

  “Ah,” she says, “I do like when settlers sing.”

  “How was your vacation?” I ask.

  Kyle leans over to me. “They have no clue what a beach is down there. Dad was grumpy the whole time about work. I’m kind of glad to be back. Coach is, too. I heard about the game with Orleans. Nice play. Coach told me.”

  “He told you?”

  “Yeah. Sounds like a real traffic jam at second, but you pulled it out. And waiting for the runner to dash for home? Excellent.”

  I’m about to respond when the curtain parts in the middle and swishes to the sides with a recorded fanfare of trumpets and flutes, except you can hardly hear them over the kids in front yelling and clapping.

  We see the home of the Darling family in London, where there is a sudden rush of dangly puppets on strings, marionettes, worked from above the stage by black-shirted, black-gloved kids. A great window is open at the back of the room, and through it you can see the famous skyline of London painted on a backdrop.

  Grandma is leaning over, almost rocking.

  “Are you all right?” I whisper. “Grandma.”

  “I’m sorry, Owen. Is there … I need some water … and a quiet bench, maybe?”

  “We passed some on the path,” Kyle says across me. He points to the end of the row on Grandma’s side. “It’s shortest that way, and you can scoot around behind the risers.”

  It’s all happening at once, the wobbly figures on stage, the marionettes laughing and screaming at Nana, the giant floppy dog that romps awkwardly from bed to bed, and now Grandma, standing and wobbling herself. I’m grateful that we’re in the back row and not in front of anyone.

  “A little less noise there!” Mr. Darling says to his spindly children and dangly dog. Of course, the audience shrieks, which sends Mr. Darling’s arms flailing, so they shriek some more.

  So many people in the row have to get up to let Grandma out. Then I realize of course that I have to go with her, so I follow, trying to stay clear of toes and keep my grandmother from toppling over. I hold her by the elbow, and it’s so bony that something zings in my chest. Lullaby music is playing, and the Darling kids are in bed, and quiet, so people are looking at the two of us, clomping down the side of the stands to the ground.

  I give a little wave to Ginny and stupidly show her a frown and a thumbs-up. I don’t know what I mean by this, and neither does Ginny. Her mouth hangs open. She starts to get up, but I shake my head. Then Grandma and I move around the side of the risers to the back. We walk down the path to the parking lot, where there are two benches under the trees. Grandma is wheezing loudly and perspiring. I don’t know what’s wrong.

  She plops down on the nearest bench, almost before she gets to it, then slides in from the edge. “Bring me some water, please.”

  I trot back to the ticket booth. “My grandmother isn’t feeling well,” I tell the girl, but she must have seen us already because she’s digging behind the counter and snatching a water bottle for me.

  “I have more if you need any. Do you want me to call anyone?” She’s so nice.

  “No. Thanks. Thank you.”

  “Just let me know.” She can’t be much younger than Paul Landis’s girlfriend, and so nice, my throat tightens.

  I hurry back to the bench. Grandma has her head low near her knees, but lifts her face. It’s stark white, her forehead beaded with sweat. She takes the bottle. It’s wet and her fingers slip. I grab it before it hits the ground. “Grandma, should I call Mom?”

  She shakes her head as she drinks. I don’t know what to do, so I sit next to her. She’s warm. She drinks, rocks, drinks, drops her head. I hear a roar of laughter and turn to see Ginny on the path, floating in midstep, her wide eyes staring at me and Grandma sitting, and she’s on the verge of tears.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Go on. Don’t miss anything. Grandma’s fine.” I try to smile.

  Her eyes go impossibly wider. “Owen!” she hisses, meaning what, I don’t know. Then she runs back up the path to the clearing. A moment later, there’s a howl from the kids. More flutes. Clapping. I don’t know what is going on. Grandma is just sitting now, as if all the air has been let out of her. She’s breathing fast, in-out, in-out. Suddenly, she turns to me, touches my arm.

  “You’re a good boy.”

  “Really, should we call Mom?” I ask.

  “No!” She pats my arm. “No, no. I’m all better. I get dizzy spells. Tiny spells. Now. Let’s see what those non-Indians are up to.”

  We slowly climb the path to the clearing. In the meantime, Kyle has somehow managed to shift the entire top row in the bleachers so that Grandma and I can just plop down on the end without bothering anyone else. My throat tightens again. Kyle just thinks of things. People are so nice. Ginny turns around, smiles to see Grandma back. They wave to each other. Grandma blows her a kiss, then leans to my ear. “I love you,” she whispers.

  “What about me?” asks Kyle, a pretend-hurt look on his face.

  She cackles. “You too, Kyle, dear. Sean, too. And everyone else!”

  And I realize I haven’t thought about my best friend all day.

  FIFTEEN

  Mom goes a little out of her mind when I tell her about Grandma. I still don’t have a clear picture of what happened back there, but Mom blames herself and a little bit the newspaper for keeping her late at their office on her first week, to which Grandma says, “Nonsense. It was just a spell,” which my mom’s face tells me might be something more.

  Anyway, Grandma spends the next few days with us, is fine and bouncing around, cheering for Kyle and me at Saturday’s ball game, going to church and Ginny’s ballet lesson. Most of the rest of the time, we hang out as a family, and it’s nice. Dad grills, we have lots of patio time, Grandma has a drink, then another, and reminisces about when she lived on “the old Cape,” reads with Ginny, doing voices for all the characters, asks me about karting and Sean. I tell her he’s with his grandparents. She hopes he’s having as good a time as we are.

  By Tuesday morning, she’s ready to go home. We all get long, very long, hugs.

  “Oh, I love you, you pixie,” she says to Ginny. “Be good.”

  “I am!” Ginny says. “Grandma, I love you.”

  “You be good, too,” she adds to me. “I know you will be.”

  Her hands and arms, her shoulders, are just bones, sharper than I realized, and I wonder again whether her spell is something more. She seems smaller than when she came. We take photos of us in various combinations. She kisses Mom and Dad, hops out to her car, beeps, and is off.

  “Is Grandma okay?” I ask Mom when the car pulls out onto the road.

  She smiles a half smile. “She hasn’t been feeling too well lately. She’s seeing a doctor.” She taps her chest, for me, not for Ginny. Her heart?

  “But she’s okay,” Ginny says as if it’s true. Then she frowns and her eyes go wide like at the puppet show. “She is, right?”

  “I’ll visit her in a few days to make sure,” Mom answers.

  Dad has been standing at the sink during this, looking into the backyard. Then he turns. “Maybe your mother could come here. We’ve talked about it before, but maybe now’s the time. It’s dumb for her to drive back and forth over the bridge so much. We can, I don’t know, find a room. Or even build a room.”

  “Really?” Ginny says. “Yay!”

  Mom brightens up. “I’ll talk to her again. She didn’t want to the last time we said anything. But I’ll go this week.”

  “Good. I thi
nk it might work.” Dad jangles his pickup keys. “I mean, how long are we…” He stops, spins on his heel. “Owen? Track time.”

  * * *

  The day starts out overcast, but hot, humid, eighty-four, no wind. Because of Grandma leaving, we’re a little late getting there. Jimmy and the boys have opened. The lot is full, the crowd is teeming. I think of all the sticky seats I’ll have to rinse off, and I suddenly wonder why I’ve never counted how many seats I clean each day, each week over the summer.

  I like the idea of knowing and start to figure it out mentally, but I don’t get much further than “twelve karts times seven races per hour times an average of eight hours a day” before I’m busily running around spritzing. Then, just after I refill the spray bottle, I look and realize the weather is up to something.

  It’s not quite noon when the sky tips a dark bowl over the track. Everything has turned blue gray. My father looks up. My uncle looks up. They lean and talk about whether to shut down for the day. But without actual rain, you try to keep tracks open as long as you can.

  “One more race. We’ll see how much darker it gets,” my uncle says.

  “Agreed,” Dad says.

  So another race begins, and I’m caught between looking up and being mesmerized by how well my dad fixed the green kart we bought from that guy. It’s running fast and weaving through the others, even past number seventeen, which a girl is driving way too slowly, and the whole race is battering the air like a hundred lawn mowers and I’m starting again with “twelve times seven times eight” when a flash of white jackknifes across the sky. It’s an enormous, silent, jagged sizzle.

  The waiting crowd does a collective “Whoa!” and some of the drivers immediately slow down. But when the crack of thunder hits a few seconds later, one driver, a T-shirted girl who just squeaked in at the height requirement, the driver of number seventeen, in fact, lets out a scream you can hear over everything. Her kart swerves wildly around two others near the turn at the top of the track. She runs over the rear tire of one of them and bounces at top speed toward the fence.

  “She’s out of control!” somebody yells. I drop my stuff and rush out with the boys, and we all begin waving her down, like cops when you’re driving too fast through a construction zone. There’s another blast of light and a boom like a bomb going off, and the girl freaks. Her kart slams into a row of orange cones and sends them flying like bowling pins. Her arms and feet seem to freeze as she accelerates right at me. The sky opens, spattering us with quarter-size drops of hot rain.

  “Stop, stop, stop!” my father cries, and now he’s out there waving his arms, too, but she can’t slow down. I jump out of the way to the boardwalk behind me, but I misjudge the step and fall flat on my back. My dad is there, dragging me away as the girl slams into the boardwalk full speed. My feet would have been sliced off if Dad hadn’t pulled me out of the way.

  The seat belt holds the girl snug, and she doesn’t look hurt. But she’s a disaster—crying, screaming, squirming in her seat—not that you can hear her because the rain is hammering so hard. One of the older kids shuts off her engine from behind and unbuckles her. Everyone’s drenched. Her mother pushes through the gate and rushes to the kart, screaming “Sorrysorrysorry!” to me, her hair soaked, rain streaming down her face.

  “It’s okay,” I say, trying to be calm. “It happens.” My voice squeaks. I’m shaking, staggering along the boardwalk to the office, and I probably would collapse if my dad didn’t have me by the arm.

  “Owen, jeez, Owen,” he’s saying like he’s the one in shock. We’re saturated by the time the karts are back in the garage, where the boys give me an ovation. Most customers huddle under the awning in front of the track’s ice cream stand to see if we’ll start up again or to get a refund. Some have taken shelter in their cars. The rain keeps spitting bullets.

  “How are you?” Dad’s face is strained, bloodless. His hands on my shoulders are warm, strong, but shaky.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Are you? You want something. Water? Coffee? Owen, man!” He shakes his head, keeps his hands on me. “That could have gone bad.”

  “I’m okay. Go. Hand out vouchers.”

  “Never mind that, Jimmy’ll do it.”

  I slump into his desk chair, quaking but feeling lucid. “I’ll regain consciousness in a couple of minutes,” I joke.

  “Just sit.” Dad runs out, grabbing a stack of yellow cards that allow a free ride to the drivers who were pulled in early.

  I catch my breath, finally get it back to normal, stand, and trot out through the garage, but it’s pretty much all over. The high school boys grin at me, the nearly wounded hero. I help nudge the karts into lines and pull in the “open” banner while my dad and uncle head back to the office to count up three hours of receipts. The track closes, the boys leave, and the parking lot eventually empties out to just my dad’s pickup and my uncle’s car. I’m totally back to myself by then as I listen to their grumpy talk from the doorway.

  It’s Cape Cod. We’ve been through this before. When it storms, go-karts are usually done for the day. After tourists run for shelter, they eat, return to their hotels or rented houses, drive back over the bridge for the indoor karts, give it up for the day, drift away. That is, unless the rain stops and the pavement dries and you can reset, but that usually doesn’t happen and it doesn’t look like it’ll happen today. The sky is black, the rain is pounding the pavement in sheets, and the air is one constant rumble of thunder.

  Finally, Dad breathes a heavy sigh. “Okay, Owen, that’s it. Let’s hit the road.”

  But my uncle’s peering up out the window. “I don’t know. It could pass.”

  “The help’s gone home,” Dad says.

  Uncle Jimmy flips the screen on his cell phone. “It’s clearing in Hyannis. Just you and me could run the place for a couple of hours later on. We used to.”

  Dad leaves me at the door, goes to the window, tilts his head from side to side. “Maybe. You stick here, Jimmy. Buzz me if you think it’s possible. Owen and I are taking off, but I won’t be far.”

  Dad drives us home. We talk about the near miss, and he’s saying he’s sorry. “We never should have let her out there. She just looked older than her height.”

  “It’s okay. It’s almost fun, having a story I can tell people. The lightning exploding overhead. The runaway kart. How I almost died, killed by my own favorite car.”

  “Dying is a stretch.”

  “How you leapt over the wall to save me, dragged my lifeless body to safety. The police, the EMS vans…”

  He laughs. “Yeah, all right. Tell it to Sean that way if you want to, but not your mother. Let me do that. Or maybe not do that.”

  And Sean’s there in my mind again, staring with eyes as black as the sky.

  My dad works back up Route 124 in the still-pounding rain, wipers flicking, and I feel my tongue slide around in my mouth. I sense my lips twitching and curling over words that aren’t there yet.

  Dad, I want to say, and am hoping I can come up with the rest when he says, “You know, I might have to go back this afternoon, if this stops. You don’t have to come with me. Some people will pull in, but you know how it is, most will figure we’re closed. There won’t be a crowd—oh, shoot.”

  He drops a hand to the front pocket of his jeans. His phone is buzzing. He takes his foot off the gas and leans to the side to dig his phone out, but he can’t get to it before it stops. He glances at the screen. “Huh? Oh. It was Sean. Here. Tell him how you died and I brought you back. Put it on speaker.”

  I don’t want to talk to Sean, don’t want to call back. Besides, he’s at his grandparents’ house. He’s safe there. But my dad’s expecting it, so I tap RECENTS and it shows me the number. Sean’s house phone.

  He’s home from his grandparents’?

  “And don’t forget the part where we’re all dodging lightning bolts to get to you,” Dad says. “The go-kart’s on fire by this point.” He laughs to himsel
f.

  It rings three times. I hang up. “No answer.”

  Twenty thousand times I open my mouth to try to speak, and twenty thousand times I hear Sean say If you tell, I will kill myself.

  “Drop me there, okay, Dad?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Sean’s. Drop me at Sean’s house. He’s home.”

  “You got it.”

  SIXTEEN

  I should be with Shay, right?

  He told me something, and if he told only me, then I need to be there to hear more, in case he has to tell me that, too. I don’t know. It’s a feeling. It isn’t logical. There’s no way I want to hear any more. I think of being in the fairyland theater, laughing for a few minutes with Kyle. I think about Ginny. About Grandma. About the lightning and the screaming girl in number seventeen.

  But soon enough, we’re slowing down. When Dad comes to our turn, he puts on his blinker, takes a left instead of a right. My heart beats faster. I see the house. Mrs. Huff’s car is in the driveway. Dad pulls in behind it. Thick raindrops splash off our windshield and hood, but not as quickly as before.

  He switches the wipers from fast to regular.

  “You want me to stick around?”

  Not thinking about it, I come out with “Nah,” and it nearly sticks in my throat. “I’ll walk home. Or if it’s still raining, Mrs. Huff will drive me. Or Mom and Ginny will come. It’s good.”

  He leans under the windshield, looks up. “Your uncle might be right. This storm is moving fast. I will have to go back to Harwich. You’re sure?”

  “Yep. Thanks.”

  I get out, run up the driveway, crunching shells under my feet. Shay is sitting on the floor of his porch, leaning against the inside wall. I wave to my dad. He leaves. The rain is pooling in the corner of the porch floor, big drops splashing down from the eaves. Sean’s pants are soaked through. He’s not moving.

  “When did you get back?” I ask him.

  “Yesterday.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  He doesn’t answer.