Conviction (16 page)

I make my way downstairs to the kitchen, taking the stairs as loudly as possible so Trey knows I’m coming and has time to change the subject if he’s complaining about me or anything.
It smells like a bakery. When I walk in, Kevin says, “Braden, we missed you at youth group tonight!”

“Ah, yeah—I had homework.”

He smiles. “I should’ve assigned less, you’re saying? Was that a complaint?”

“Nah, it was for my other classes.”

Trey’s holding Ellie. We haven’t had any real good moments since the night he brought home his birds, and so I check to see if he looks irritated I’m here now, but he just
glances up and gives me a small nod before turning his attention back to Ellie. She’s gripping one of his wooden spoons in her fist and sucking on her thumb, her legs wrapped around
Trey’s hip as she gazes down at what he’s doing. It’s noisy, stuff sizzling, and Trey stirs with one hand and ducks his head near hers to talk to her.

“Jenna’s away on a women’s retreat,” Kevin says, “and I couldn’t for the life of me get Ellie down to sleep. So, naturally, I’m reinforcing her terrible
behavior, bringing her here. She gets to see her Uncle Trey, and he makes treats for her—do me a favor, Braden, and don’t tell my wife this is how I handle parenting when she’s
gone.”

I force a smile. I wish for a second I had his life instead of mine. Kevin says, “Pull up a chair. Sit with us a while.”

I sit. He says, “You missed a good service. Maddie Stern was singing again tonight.”

I say, “Ah.” His grin goes wider. But he spares me the guard-her-heart-and-purity talk, at least, probably because Ellie and Trey are right there. I respond to his questions about
school on autopilot, trying to think how I can somehow turn the conversation where I want it, which is maybe a long shot. I guess what I want is for someone to assure me,
It’s fine,
you’re fine, God still loves you.

I guess what I really want is for my dad to say it. You can trust him to give you the truth.

Trey sets a bowl on the table and sits down, shifting Ellie to his lap. “Quinoa and brown rice pudding with vanilla bean,” he says. “Usually I do tonka bean, but I thought it
might be too much for her.”

Ellie seizes the spoon Trey set down next to the bowl. “Ellie, what do you do first?” Kevin says, reaching out and catching hold of her wrist. “What do you do before you eat?
Do you pray?”

I watch her duck her head, her eyes peering up at Kevin, crinkled and gleeful, like it’s a game. She says something I don’t quite make out.

“Give us this day our daily bread,” Kevin translates, then lets go of her wrist. “Say thank you to Uncle Trey.”

Trey helps her eat, guiding the spoon to her mouth. It’s messy and tedious, but he looks calm doing it—as close to happy as I’ve seen him look since coming back here.

I resist the urge to clear my throat and turn to Kevin, trying to sound casual. “So have you always taught her to pray?”

“For about as long as she could talk.”

“You think she’ll ever pray for something she doesn’t get?”

“Ever?” he repeats. “Of course. Even people who don’t consciously believe—everyone carries around unanswered prayers in their hearts. It’s part of being
human. Part of living in a fallen world.”

“So what’ll you tell her when that happens?”

“Hm,” he says, and watches me more closely. I look away. Kevin’s not stupid; I’m sure he can name a few unanswered prayers I might be holding on to right now, and
I’m also sure he knows I’m not actually asking about Ellie.

Trey ignores us. I’m probably pushing it. I’ll bet he wishes he told me to get lost when I first came in.

“Well, sometimes maybe our prayers aren’t in line with God’s will,” Kevin says finally. “Sometimes answers come in different ways than we’re looking for.
I’d tell her that, I suppose, and I’d tell her that these are questions no one knows the answers to, but that what I do know is that our whole salvation rests on Christ’s
unanswered prayer to the Father to be spared the night before his death.”

“Ah.” I don’t know what I wanted to hear, exactly, but it wasn’t that. I say, “You think it’s because God’s angry at someone?”

“No.”

I expected a much longer answer, not something so unequivocal. “Really, you don’t think that?”

Ellie arches backward and lets out a long shriek that dissolves into a sob, and Kevin slaps his palm on the table and pushes himself up. “All right, that’s our cue.” He picks
her up from Trey’s lap. Trey looks something like disappointed, but he helps Kevin get Ellie’s stuff together, and they say goodbye. As they’re leaving, Kevin pulls me aside.

“Braden,” he says. “You’re going through a lot right now, and I know it’s tempting to look for reasons why, but resist doing that to yourself. Sometimes life is
difficult, but God doesn’t change in his love for you. None of this is happening because he’s angry, I promise. You can trust he’s still good even when the rest of the world
doesn’t feel that way.”

I tell him thanks, and to be polite I smile like I believe him and like that helped. Even if he was trying to make me feel better I don’t think Kevin would deliberately lie to me, but I
know what my dad thinks of that kind of theology—that more often than not you’re just fooling yourself, trying to take some kind of easy way out in a way that’ll only come back to
haunt you later as you veer further and further from God’s path.

But listening to an old show he did for strangers isn’t the same as my dad telling me something directly about myself. And you can believe whatever you want and that doesn’t make it
true, I know that, but I also know I don’t want to believe that God’s already turned his back on me.

Upstairs again I find that message Maddie sent me with her phone number, and then I sit for a while in front of my laptop with the e-mail pulled up. I figured God would be irritated if I kept
hanging around her, that he’d take it as a sign of disloyalty on my part, but maybe I was looking at it wrong. I know sometimes when God speaks to you he chooses something quieter and gentler
than his own voice, that sometimes it’s through a person he brings into your life.

I’m not going to directly pray for anything this time. But if Maddie could feel about me the way I do about her, if I could be the kind of person who deserved her—that would have to
mean something, wouldn’t it? I could take that as a sign I’m not alone.

Hey,
I text her.
It’s Braden Raynor. Are you still up?

We beat East Union that week 6–4. Two of those runs are on me and two are on Greg, who got another shot at pitching, I think, because Cardy, of all people, actually felt
sorry for him. He does better this game, so I tell him so—it’s one of the best things about baseball, that you get the next game to redeem yourself—and his face turns red and he
scuffs at the dirt with his cleats and says, “All right.”

“I mean it, Greg, you were good. And I, um, I wanted to say—”

He turns around without answering, and the apology I’ve been practicing dissolves in my throat. I leave the locker room without talking to anyone else and spend lunch the rest of the week
doing homework in my Spanish classroom, and at practice I avoid Greg. He never should’ve shaken Colin off that way, but I shouldn’t have yelled at him even so; if anyone should shoulder
more blame for that loss, it’s me. That game was mine to win, and I know it. To make up for it, I avoid Maddie a while, too, and I don’t text her the next few nights like I’ve
been doing.

By the end of the week after we’ve played Pacheco—a 4–1 win—the jury’s been selected, and Mr. Buchwald comes back to ask me more questions and to tell me April 30,
less than two weeks before we’re slated to play La Abra, is the date I’ll have to go to court. And I don’t know what else I have to offer God now to get me out of this, and I can
feel the days between now and then vanishing and my court date sliding toward me the way a dense fog moves across the valley, blinding and close.

E
ven if I didn’t have the date of the trial committed to memory, I’d know it from all the messages the reporters leave and the pictures
of my dad splashed across the first page of the paper on our doorstep and the news van that, for an hour or two early in the morning, parks itself on our street. Colin finds me at my locker that
morning and hands me a paper bag, saying, “My mom cooked tri-tip just to send to you for lunch, you lucky bastard,” and says nothing about the trial even though I know he knows
it’s starting. And even though I try to move through the halls fast enough not to have to talk to anyone, Claire Kolpowski takes hold of my elbow as I’m going by the English wing and
tells me she’s here for me.

The trial starts at nine. At eight fifty-five that morning, the Punnett squares on the overhead projector in Biology burn away from my vision and instead I see my dad in shackles paraded in
front of a room of prosecutors and jurors who are cold and unmoving against his fear; I see his Adam’s apple sliding up and down as he tries to hold himself together in front of all those
people, tries to convince himself it’ll be all right. I stare straight ahead at the board and will myself not to see any of it, to imagine myself somewhere or sometime else instead. I try to
picture hanging out with Trey. I imagine myself pitching. I try to replay the last conversation I had with Maddie. I think I understand something now about how people can live double
lives—how when it feels like doing ordinary things ought to be beyond you, you still pick up the shell of yourself and go.

When I get home that evening, Mr. Buchwald’s dropped off DVD recordings of the proceedings. I leave them on my desk untouched most of the night, uneasy about watching. But I can see their
presence here isn’t a suggestion, something for me to do with as I see fit; it’s a direct order, and I wasn’t raised to disobey those.

I wait until Trey’s in his room before I watch. When the picture fills my screen, I scan the whole room for my dad. You can’t see him, though, and it feels like a door slamming in my
face.

The recordings are terrible, they cut off most of the room and are really wobbly—I have to keep looking away so I don’t get motion sickness. I don’t know exactly what I
expected a trial to look like, but my dad used to watch
Law & Order
sometimes and I guess I was expecting something fast-paced, well-lit. Instead, there’s a lot of standing around
and a lot of instructions. Judge Scherr, a white-haired man with a mustache and a potbelly, has a monotone voice and looks tired, maybe bored. The camera makes everything dingy and depressing, and
most of the jurors are older, too, and fat. I can see about half of them in their seats and they look so…normal. The woman in the front row looks like someone you’d picture handing out
orange slices after a Little League game or something. But then, as we learned in Civics, they are ordinary—in no way especially qualified except they’re citizens and over eighteen.

The prosecutor, Laila Shah, is attractive in a cold-looking way—Mr. Buchwald said something sarcastic once about how nice it must be to get jobs based on your looks, and I think he meant
her—and she holds herself very straight and doesn’t smile. I can’t imagine her having friends, or family, or doing normal things like cooking dinner for her kids or wrapping gifts
or shopping. I looked her up online one time and found out she’s only a year older than Trey.

At the judge’s direction, she goes first. “Martin Raynor is a dangerous, duplicitous killer who murdered an officer of the peace in cold blood.”

She pauses for a second, letting that sink in. “The evidence you’ll witness will demonstrate that the defendant, a man who fancies himself above accountability, is guilty of the
brutal murder of a beloved family member and public servant.

“On Sunday, February ninth, Officer Frank Reyes, who had served with the La Abra Police Department for six years, was driving down Highway Fifty-Nine. He was providing his nephew a ride
and, though he was off-duty, was driving his squad car as a service to the community. He was returning down Fifty-Nine when he received radio notification that the defendant’s car had been
flying down the highway and veering back and forth over the lanes and had been parked precariously halfway on the road in a way that demonstrated an utter disregard for the safety of others.

“Officer Reyes’s first thought was that this was a drunk driver, a threat to the driver himself and to any other innocent drivers who might happen to pass. As a committed public
servant, he quickly volunteered to go to the scene to offer assistance. Minutes later, as you know, he was dead. We are here to bring to justice the man responsible for his death.

“The defense would like you to believe that the defendant is an upright man being wrongfully framed for a crime he did not commit. The counsel for the defendant is going to ply you with
excuses and half-truths: that Mr. Raynor had no discernible motive to commit so grisly a murder, that he acted in self-defense, that it was simply too foggy to realize one’s car had hit
something the size of a human being. Those blinded to Mr. Raynor’s true nature will be paraded around the room to laud what they perceive as his moral rectitude.