Conviction (18 page)

“Yeah, but those are other people,” I said. “Not people like—” I hesitated. “Not people we know.”

“When you sin,” he said, his voice rising, and he raised a finger to point at me, “every time, when you sin, it’s like you nail Jesus on his cross all over again. If you
aren’t right with God, then you don’t even deserve to live. You think that’s something to mess around with, Braden? You think that’s something to take lightly?”

“No, sir.” I didn’t. I don’t. “But—Dad, please. Please just put it away.”

He’d leaned back against his pillows. He was wearing shoes on his bed. “You’re sixteen,” he said.

“Uh—yeah.”

“You know what happened to me when I was sixteen?”

A feeling crept into the room like someone watching, someone waiting in the shadows for you to turn your back. I shouldn’t have left him alone on Trey’s birthday. “Um,” I
said, “yeah, I—you told me once—” and then I couldn’t get the words out, how my dad had found his own dad’s body bleeding in the garage.

“Come here,” he said.

“Okay, just—put your gun away first.”

He put the gun back in his drawer and closed it with a thud, and the look he gave me seared me. “I just want a hug, Braden. Come on.”

I went to him. I should’ve stayed home all night. I shouldn’t have made him sit there alone all night, thinking about Trey, thinking about his dad, because I know this about him:
he’s a good person. He’s not the kind of man who could really hurt people. I should’ve proven myself to him then.

“You won’t leave me,” he said, gathering me in a hug I felt too old for, a hug that hurt my heart. “Right? It’s you and me. You’re all I’ve
got.”

T
he morning of the annual church barbecue at Lake Ornette, I text Maddie to see if she’s going. I was going to skip it this year—I
always went with my dad, and anyway, I’m not exactly in the mood to sing worship songs around a bonfire and balance flimsy paper plates of baked beans and potato chips on my lap—but I
change my mind when she says yes. We’ve been texting some more at night, but when I see her at school it never feels anywhere close to the way it did when I took her home from youth group
that one night and so I can’t tell what this is to her—a good deed because she figures I’m having a rough time, a consolation prize for not getting to talk to her real friends, or
what.

I bike there, which takes an hour. The sun beats down on me as I ride, and I try to imagine what it would be like if we were together. The orchards around town are blooming, and I think about
how I could bring her to places like this, show her how the trees look like clouds hovering right over the land. There’s probably a lot here she hasn’t seen yet. But then when I get
there she’s tossing around a volleyball with some of the other girls, wearing just a T-shirt over her suit, and when I go say hi she’s smiling and out of breath and her hello seems
distracted; I have that feeling I get sometimes around Trey, that there’s a huge gap between how much you matter to a person and how much they matter to you.

I kind of wish I hadn’t come. I kill time throwing a football around with some of the guys instead. Later, when everyone’s gathered around the huge bonfire to eat, I’m near but
not next to Maddie when Mrs. Kolpowski comes to give me a hot dog to roast and tells me she’s praying for my dad.

“You know,” she says, laying her hand on my shoulder, “you are the spitting image of him.”

Because it’s clear she means it as a compliment, I tell her thanks. I can feel Maddie watching me.

It cools down in the evening. By the time everyone gathers again around the fire I’ve had enough of parents coming over to ask me how my dad’s doing, and I slip away and go lie down
by the water and watch the sun set over the lake. When someone comes and lowers herself next to me, I know before I even look it’s Maddie. My heart picks up. I turn my head back up toward the
sky and say, “Hi.”

“How come you aren’t roasting marshmallows with everyone else?”

I shrug, my shoulder blade dragging against the ground. “Eh, I’m not that big on sweets. I always end up burning marshmallows anyway.”

“I happen to make an impressive s’more. Want me to make you one?”

“I’m all right.” I glance in her direction. “Why aren’t you over there with everyone else?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I get tired of being around a lot of people all at once.” She hugs her knees to her chest and draws neatly into herself, like she thinks maybe she was
getting too close to me, and when she’s farther away like that the air feels thinner. The sun dips under the waterline, and she says, “You know, I don’t really think you look like
your dad.”

“No?”

“My parents listened to him sometimes before we moved here, and I remember being really surprised the first time I met you because I thought you’d be more like him. I didn’t
expect you to be like you were.”

“And what was that?”

“Quieter. More private. I can’t imagine you talking on a public broadcast every day.” She hesitates. “And…nicer. I remember when we were picking lab partners in
Science and you asked Austin O’Connor when you saw he was all by himself.” She unfurls herself—I can trace the line of her calves in the low-lit dusk—and lies down on the
sand, too. “And I remember when my youngest sister spilled grape juice on you at church when we were doing Communion and you were really nice about it. Your dad’s…more
intimidating.”

Maddie’s six or seven inches away from me, and when you’re pressed close to the ground that way it’s easier to pretend there’s no one else around. My skin pulses with a
desire to touch her. A breeze picks up, ruffling her hair and sending ripples across the lake. It’s not dark yet, but there’s a full moon hovering low in the sky. Her shirt’s
slipped down, and I can make out the goose bumps on her neck and collarbone and the skin just underneath, and so I take off my sweatshirt and say, “Here,” and drape it over her, careful
not to touch her, and she lets me.

Over from the road a car starts. And I think to myself how this feels like the direct opposite of what it feels like to be lonely, and how if I were the kind of person who deserved her,
everything else would feel more clear. And, kind of suddenly, I have this image of the two of us lying places together like this—outside under the stars or maybe on the beach or maybe in our
living room, maybe a couple of our kids playing nearby. I could take care of her and make sure she was never cold or scared or sad. We could get old together. We could make sure our kids knew
we’d stay there with them no matter what, and each other, too; I’d prove to her that I’d be there no matter what. “Hey, Maddie?”

“Yeah?”

I don’t know what I’m going to say, exactly, but then before I can shape words into something true they wash out anyway. But then, like the way I feel right now is some kind of
magnet, she comes nearer so she’s lying alongside me, our hips nearly touching. When I lean in closer, she stays. When I reach out and gently stroke the skin between the hem of her shirt and
bikini bottom, she shivers, but she doesn’t move away. And I tell myself to stop there, that her parents are nearby somewhere and all the pastors, and it would be pretty hard to explain lying
alone with her this way in the dark.

But when I kiss her, she kisses back, and while it lasts that feels like everything, like hope again, and absolution, like God’s presence coming down to rest on me. I think I could lie
here with her just about forever, just like this.

T
he prosecutor doesn’t start with Alex Reyes or with any of the cops or the investigators or the coroner; she starts with Tucker Walker, the
weatherman from the local news. Walker’s a short man with greasy hair who wears rings on half his fingers and shiny-looking shirts—I would not be at all surprised if he turned out to be
gay—and Laila Shah lets him describe the habits of tule fog as though it’s an animal, what it likes and doesn’t like and how it behaves. It’s nothing any of us who live here
need explained to us, and I catch a few of the jurors looking bored.

I know strategy. I know the way you lull a batter into complacency with softer pitches so when you give him worse, it has more impact. And I’m right—after she’s drawn out the
long explanations, Laila smooths her skirt and says, “Given the conditions the night of February ninth, if one were in a car parked twenty or so feet behind another car, would one expect to
be able to clearly see what was happening?”

Walker says yes.

“Would one be able to see an adult male standing within striking distance of the car?”

Walker sort of laughs, a high-pitched, nasal laugh like maybe he doesn’t like talking to real people instead of a camera, or like maybe he isn’t quite telling the truth.
“Visibility that night was calculated around two hundred feet.”

“When was the last time, in your experience, that weather conditions would have been such that a driver might not notice someone in such close proximity?”

Walker blows air through his lips. “Truth be told, I’d say a good three or four years.”

That’s her last question, so Walker stays up there as Laila takes a seat and Mr. Buchwald stands. I’ve seen him talk (obviously) to me and I’ve seen him on the news and
I’ve seen him addressing the jury, but as soon as he adjusts his tie and starts speaking to Walker, I realize I still probably don’t know him at all. He talks in a measured voice the
way people do when they’re so angry they know any second they might slip. His face is expressionless, and he punctuates what he says with a pointed finger jabbing in the air, and if he were a
principal or a coach or something, I think I’d be afraid of him. Watching him talk that way makes you believe Walker did something awful.

Under Mr. Buchwald’s cross-examination, Walker admits that visibility can vary from point to point, that cars can slide unexpectedly into fog banks with no warning, and that there’ve
been multiple documented instances in the Central Valley where visibility fell as low as under a foot. Laila and Mr. Buchwald battle two days over that fog. A 911 dispatcher who Laila brings up for
all of two minutes claims there were no weather-related accidents that night, and Mr. Buchwald says, aloud and to everyone,
“Other.”
Judge Scherr tells him sternly to remain
silent, but I think he might be hiding a smile, too. After that, Laila calls on a short, squat woman who claims to have driven by my dad’s car when it was parked halfway off the road that
night.

“The car was fully visible, despite the fog?” Laila says. The woman says yes. Laila shows a photograph of the car and the woman nods: yes, yes, it was that one, that same car.

“A navy Range Rover?” Laila presses, and the woman moves her head up and down. She was driving home and had to swerve to miss it; she thought she was going to be killed. She keeps
looking around nervously, fingering the crucifix she’s wearing on her neck, and when Mr. Buchwald asks her why she didn’t call the police if the car was really as dangerously parked as
she claims, and if she was driving by so fast and was really that scared, how she can be sure it’s the same one, she bursts into tears. Then Laila plays a 911 recording, and that’s
worse: a man who scolds the dispatcher, “I nearly got run off the road by some crazy driver swerving all over the lanes on Fifty-Nine. You’d better send someone out right now before
anybody gets killed.”

All these people who could be up there saying anything, could be lying through their teeth—I watch how they stay fast or they crumple and fall apart on the stands; I feel how they’re
picked apart and mercilessly cross-examined and how everything they say is held up to scrutiny and judgment. And I think how each of them holds some share of blame in whatever the eventual verdict
will be, and how I will, too.

I’ve been working myself ragged every day at practice lately, coming home after to work out in the garage until the exhaustion’s purged any errant thought from my mind. This is the
longest I’ve gone in my life without any coaching from my dad, and while some days I feel strong and certain, hopeful about the future still, others I feel uncentered and lost. Once at
practice I come too far inside throwing during batting practice and nearly take off Dutch’s head, and I’m rattled all day. Dutch jokes about it, but after that he doesn’t get a
hit the rest of practice. That night I hunt down my dad’s old game videos and watch them until I can hold the image of his pitching perfectly in my mind, and then the rest of the night I go
through my windup over and over with my eyes closed, trying to superimpose his steady, impeccable mechanics over my own. At our game against Lodi the next day, my command is better, and nothing
gets away from me. We win 3–0. And Maddie comes to watch.