Conviction (39 page)

“Thank you.” For courage, or maybe just company, I think about Trey coming back with his notes on what he wanted to say to me. “I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry. For
bailing on you, and for being an ass to you, and just for not being the person you thought I was. For a while I thought maybe I was, or at least I could be, but I was wrong about that. And I
don’t want to give you excuses or anything, and if you hate me, I understand, but I wanted you to at least know you didn’t deserve any of that. And that I’m sorry.”

Her expression is unreadable. Maybe I surprised her; maybe she was expecting something else. Or maybe it doesn’t matter what I tell her. The silence rises around us like a flood.

I force myself to stand still and wait for her to say something. It feels like another lifetime that I used to sit here in these pews feeling safe, and right, and lucky. Maddie stares across the
altar over my head, her face giving nothing away. She’d make a good pitcher. Her batter wouldn’t know what to expect.

What I want her to say—beyond all reason—is that she forgives me. That she understands, that all along she saw all the things I never told her, all the redeemable parts of me layered
underneath the things I did. That it doesn’t matter as long as I care about her now. But I know most people don’t understand you that way. I know you probably only get that once in your
life, if you’re lucky, and I guess I used mine up on my dad.

“I don’t hate you,” Maddie says finally. “But—” She pauses, like she’s holding my paper-thin offering up to the light to see all the ways it’s
cracked and ruined, all the ways it’s less than whole. An entire planet spins inside that
but.
“You should’ve let me decide for myself whether you were who I thought you
were or not.”

I think about all the things I can never tell anyone, never tell her. “I knew the answer already.”

“You don’t think it’s possible to be wrong about yourself?”

“Do you?”

“Of course I do.”

She picks up her guitar again and ducks her head over her music stand, which I guess means the conversation’s over. It’s not forgiveness, not exactly, but I guess it’s as much
as I can expect. I stand there a minute, hoping she might say something else, and when she doesn’t, I say, quietly, “Thanks for letting me come by.”

The music starts again when I turn to go, chasing out the muffled sound of my footsteps on the carpet and making the room feel smaller again. I’m at the arched doors going out when I turn
back around. “Hey, Maddie?”

She stops playing and looks up.

I think of that home run ball I caught all those years ago, the one I thought was proof my family belonged to God in some fragile, special way. There’s a part of me that wishes I could
believe I was wrong about all of it—that God never existed to begin with, that he was just some fantasy we made up because we needed it. You can’t betray someone who was never real.

But the rest of me thinks that’s the easy way out. And anyway, I don’t believe that. What I believe is that I’ve been wrong about so much, that fear and judgment don’t
tell you where you stand or what someone’s worth the way I always thought they did, but that maybe, if I could sort through everything I always thought and throw out all the parts that were
never true, I’d be left with just a few glimpses of God that still felt real.

“You can say no,” I say to Maddie, “And I won’t blame you if you do, but—you think I could stick around a little while and listen?”

If she says no, I’ll take it as a sign. She doesn’t, though, or at least not right away. Maybe she’s just a kind person, or maybe she sees something of the past week written on
my face. Whatever the case, she pauses, not like she’s deciding, but like she’s trying to think of something, and then she says, “If I remember right, you liked this
one.”

Her fingers move gently across the strings. The notes are soft, careful almost, and I recognize the tune from the song she sent me all those weeks ago. And something happens in me then,
something so soft and so quiet I might be making it up, but it’s that same feeling you get sometimes in the middle of a game when you can feel the tides start to shift—that moment
you’re certain you’ve won, or certain you’ve lost, even when there are innings left still. I follow the chords through the song, and I think how with my dad, and with Trey, no
matter what either one of them ever does I think I’ll still feel exactly the same way about them that I always have. I know it shouldn’t be like that because it isn’t safe, and
because I think most other people get to choose who they care about and when to stop and it’s not fair if you’re the only one who can’t, and I think that’s the worst and the
most dangerous thing I know.

But I hope—I hope—that’s something like what God feels about me.

T
his is what I kept coming back to the whole time before the La Abra game.

One morning in second grade, I woke up with a start because I was being carried downstairs. It was dark, and I flailed around; my dad was buckling me into the car.

“Shh,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.” He wouldn’t tell me what was happening, but even though I was struggling to keep my eyes open, by the time we’d
gotten onto I-5, I was asleep. I jolted awake again when I felt him put his hand over my eyes. The car had stopped.

“Don’t look,” he ordered, pulling me outside. “All right. Let’s go.” I was going slow and trying to feel around with my feet, and he sighed. “B, come
on, don’t you trust me?”

It was noisy—cars, a lot of people. We walked for what felt like forever, and then we got into some kind of moving car with other people, and there were a lot of sounds from loudspeakers
and some kind of music playing and people everywhere, and then the train stopped and he took his hand off my eyes and said, “We’re here.”

It was Disneyland. I could feel the grin spreading across my face as I looked up at him. “Really? We’re going to Disneyland?”

“No, bozo, I just brought us here to look at the signs.” He thumped me on the back. “You want to go in, or what?”

Inside it was thrumming with happy excitement and there were more people than I’d ever seen in my life. Actually (and I was just a kid, so I’m allowed to say this), with all the
characters you could go up to and meet, the rides, the bright buildings everywhere—it felt kind of magic.

We’d been there a few hours when he went over and looked at a map, searching for something, and then he steered me in the opposite direction and we walked for a while until we came to a
huge line wrapped around what looked like a mountain. We walked around it until we got to the very end of the line, and my dad looked down at me.

“This is the Matterhorn,” he said. “Fastest roller coaster in the park,” and that was when I understood why we were there. A month or so before, I’d gone with
Colin’s family to Great America for his birthday. It was supposed to be fun—we’d been talking about it for weeks—but the first roller coaster they wanted to go on, I freaked
out and begged Colin’s parents not to make me and I wouldn’t get near one the rest of the day.

“See?” my dad said, motioning to the throngs of people in the line as they inched forward. “Look at all the kids having fun. There’s
girls
going on it, for crying
out loud. You think they’d go if it wasn’t fun?”

“I don’t think it looks fun.”

“You don’t think it looks fun, or you’re too scared?”

“Um…I guess…both.”

“You think I’d let you do something that wasn’t safe, Braden? You’ll like it. I’ll be right there next to you the whole time. I’ll hold your hand if you want,
even. You’ll be glad you went.” He cupped my chin in his hand and lifted it to make me look at him. His eyes were clear and alert. “You didn’t want to go with your friends
before, that’s fine, but don’t you want to go with me?”

Of course I wanted him to be happy with me. I know not everyone’s that way with their parents, and I never understood that, because why wouldn’t you want that? Why would that not be
a big deal to you? I could see how proud it would make him; it’s just I was terrified.

“Um—” I swallowed. A hundred feet in front of me Cinderella had shown up; there were a bunch of girls running toward her. I looked up at the peak of the mountain again, and
then I couldn’t do it. “I just—I think—it doesn’t really sound that fun. Maybe another time.”

He dropped his hand to his side with a thud. “All right, then. I’m not going to make you. You don’t want to, we won’t go.”

I was nervous he’d be mad all day, but he wasn’t. We went to Toontown; we rode the spinning teacups; we ate Dole Whips and turkey legs; he took pictures of me next to Buzz Lightyear
and Snow White. But I was uneasy, and as we were leaving a gift shop, I worked up the nerve to ask if he was disappointed in me. He stopped in the middle of the walkway to turn me to face him,
holding me at arm’s length to look at me. I stared down at the asphalt.

“You’re like me, Braden,” my dad said. “You know that? You’re—” He laughed, an affectionate laugh. “Lord knows you’re a heck of a lot
softer, and you
think
so much all the time, and don’t you get a big head about this but you have a better nature than your old man and I know it, but you want to know how we’re
the same?”

I asked how.

“Because you aren’t your true self places like this. It’s not where you really belong. For guys like us, the pitcher’s mound is the only place in the entire world where
you get to be the kind of man you want to be.” He brought me closer and took my face gently between his hands and held me there for a second before he let me go. “Someday, Braden,
you’ll see.”

He wasn’t mad, I knew that; what he’d said was pretty close to absolution. He understood, and he forgave me for not being my best self. But I kept seeing the Matterhorn all day long
out of the corner of my eye, towering above everything else. I felt guilty and sad and sick of being myself. Finally, when he told me he wanted to leave around dinnertime to make it back home, I
steeled myself and turned to him.

“Dad?” I said. “I think we should go on the Matterhorn before we leave.”

Everything changed—a different kind of smile came into his eyes, and he lit up. It took an hour and fifteen minutes to get through the line, and the closer we got, the worse I felt. I
tried not to show it. He kept me close in line, his hands on my shoulders, and when we got to the front, he talked the attendant into letting me on even though I wasn’t officially tall
enough. I hated her for letting us in as soon as the bar locked over our seats and I knew we were trapped. My hands were sweating so bad they kept slipping off the bar I was trying to grip. My dad
patted my leg.

“You can take anything for ninety seconds, can’t you?” Then he laughed, and socked my thigh. “Guess now you don’t have much choice.”

There were clanging metallic sounds and jerks as we went up, up, up. My lungs seized. Then, while we were climbing, in the midst of the noise and that feeling like fish flopping around inside my
stomach and like my head might float off into thin air, my dad leaned in and put his mouth right next to my ear.

“Hey,” he said, so quiet that for a second everything else stopped, “B, I’m so glad you’re my kid, you know that? You’re more than I ever could’ve asked
for. You’re the best thing I ever had in my whole life and you can’t even imagine how much I love you.” And then—we were at the very top of the first huge peak—we
dropped, so fast I was pressed back against the seat and he was whooping in my ear and there was air rushing past me and at me, and I felt exactly the way I always pictured astronauts feeling when
they went zooming into space.

He was so happy afterward. And at the time I thought it was just that I got over something you aren’t supposed to be afraid of and that I did it because he asked, because I wanted to make
him happy. And that was part of it, maybe. That meant something to him. But I think even more than that, he was so happy because he felt the way you do when you’ve put things right in the
world around you, because he’d told me something that was as true to him as anything else had ever been. Even at the time it felt like some kind of prophecy spoken over me, a truth I’d
be bound by and owe something and belong to, the thing I would again and again come back home to.

And that’s what I’m carrying with me right now, now that I’ve just arrived on the field where my team is warming up for the La Abra game and everyone’s gone quiet at the
sight of me and Cardy’s calling me over to tell me, “Saved your spot in the lineup for you, Seven. I knew you’d be back.”

The stands are filled solid, split by color: orange for La Abra, blue for us, and down at the bottom of the bleachers, there are cops planted like sentries in every aisle. I
think nearly everyone I know is here. I asked Maddie if she’d be here, too, and I see her sitting near the top. I didn’t think she’d come. But I guess if I learned one thing from
Trey it’s that sometimes people stay a part of you even long after you should’ve faded into each other’s pasts.

We’re the away team, so we hit first. The sun is starting to set over the backstop, the lights casting long shadows across the grass, and lined up in the dugout my team is quiet the way
you are when you’re standing over some kind of precipice looking down at a drop. The season won’t end if we lose today—there’s still four more games left if we don’t
make playoffs—but it might as well. It can make you feel pretty worthless playing out the string.