Conviction (2 page)

We stood waiting as the balls rained down on the field. There were a few dozen close calls, and I had my glove ready each time and my heart kept picking up as I’d flash forward to what it
would feel like to know God had personally promised something to me. But then each time the ball would drift back twenty rows, or it’d fall down onto the field. Each time I felt my faith
eroding. When batting practice ended, I had two autographs Trey had gotten for me, but no foul balls.

The game started, and my dad settled down in his seat to talk it through with me. Maybe it’s partly all the years on the radio, but when it comes to baseball, he can turn it into something
no one else can, like he’s stripping tarnish off an old mirror layer by layer so you slowly start to see everything reflected back at you and you start to see yourself and your own place in
it, too. I was distracted that day as he went over the different pitches and plays, quizzing me occasionally and acting proud when I knew the right answers. He wanted me to pay attention to
baseball’s unwritten code of honor, making sure I could tell whether everyone was doing the right thing at all times.

In the fourth inning, the Cardinals second baseman, who’d just hit a ground-rule double, cut to second base across the pitcher’s mound, and—because I was too absorbed wondering
what I’d done wrong with God, why he’d ignored my prayer—I noticed only when my dad stiffened and sucked in his breath.

“You see that?” he said. “What’d he do wrong there?”

I knew the answer: it’s pure, calculated disrespect for anyone but the pitcher to set foot on the mound. But before I could say it, Trey said, “Relax, Braden. It’s just a
game,” and the disgust and disappointment that crossed my dad’s face was so sharp it made me think I’d been wrong—that after all that,
this
was my sign that things
would never be all right.

“A
game
?” my dad said scathingly, loud enough that the people around us turned to look. “That’s all this is to you? You don’t give a fig what I’ve
tried to teach you all your life about integrity, is that it? You think this is nothing more than eighteen guys batting a ball around with a stick?”

Trey was going to say something unfixable. I knew he was, and I knew he’d been close to doing it for a while, for months maybe, and I was certain then that God had failed me. I was just a
kid, but I knew already how sometimes you can feel the slipping point just before it happens: that vast, awful stretch of possibility that’ll hang there waiting to haunt you forever once
it’s past.

But then, before Trey could speak, everyone around us jumped to their feet and started yelling, and the three of us broke that ugly triangle we were caught in and looked up. And then it
happened: the ball Cole Hummer had just hit flew and flew, out toward where we were sitting in right field, and Trey stopped short of whatever he was going to say. On pure instinct, I jammed my
glove on my hand, and then the ball was coming right to me and I reached up and caught it and it landed hard and stinging against my palm in a way that could only be my sign from God.

There’s a lot that’s magic about baseball. I don’t mean that as in superstition or coincidence or luck, because more than anything, baseball is mechanics and effort and hard
work. Even in first grade I knew that; even then my life was shaped and measured in metrics and repetitions and stats. But there’s magic in the way it comes together and in the way it makes
you who you are. There’s magic in the way that, when you’re good enough, you can stand on a mound in front of forty thousand people who’ve watched and lived your past with you and
prove you’ve earned the right to be there.

But this is the thing about it that’s the most magic about it of all: that it opens up a stage for God to give you moments like that. That you can go watch a game with your dad and your
brother and have a night together that winds up being as close to perfect as anything in your life has ever come. That it can give you something to hold on to when you need it most. Like when
you’re six and in church on Mother’s Day, and all the kids are told to stand up and give their moms a hug and you try to pretend you’re not there; or when you’re seven, and
for reasons you’ve still never understood, your brother drops out of college and quits talking to your dad altogether and stops coming home.

Or when you’re sixteen, and without warning, before you even understand what’s happening, your dad, the best man you know and the person who taught you right from wrong, is arrested
at gunpoint on the street outside your house.

A
t the police station in La Abra, I’m frisked: arms above my head and my legs spread apart while someone runs his hands across my body, my
face hot and my heart thudding so hard I’m sure he can hear it, and I’m too afraid to ask what’s going on. When he’s done, I’m taken to a cramped, stuffy room with no
windows and a door that shuts heavy and holds the sound in the room like a trap. There are two cops sitting at a long metal table under a garish fluorescent light. The cops are wearing dark blue
uniforms and they’re both trim and wiry-looking, men you could imagine throwing someone against the asphalt. One’s black. The white one says, “Braden Raynor?”

My voice comes out scratchy. “Yes, sir.”

“Have a seat.”

Outside, the night is so thick with tule fog you’d think someone dragged a tarp over everything and pounded all its edges down with stakes. As I was being driven here the streetlamps and
traffic signals were shrouded in that eerie gray and nothing looked familiar, not even when we drove by places I’ve known all my life, and everything I need to say has turned to dust on my
tongue. “I need to—can—can I see my dad?”

“He’s in the facilities in Grovemont.”

“The facilities?”

The look he gives me is pure contempt. “Jail.”

The word hits me like I’m taking a fastball to the chest. “Sir, I think there must be some kind of mistake because—maybe you don’t know who my dad is, but
he—”

“Sit.”

His tone shuts me up, not just the tone but how fast it turned like that, and I obey. The lights in this room are hurting my eyes. When I close them, I see the fear blooming on my dad’s
face as the cops drew their guns on him, the three officers who wrenched his arms in place while another one locked him into handcuffs. And I see myself watching it all happen, still and silent on
the driveway.

If it had been me instead of him, he wouldn’t have just stood there like I did.

“Tell us what happened tonight,” the first cop says now, his voice breaking the silence like gunfire. My eyes fly open again.

“Nothing happened. We were just—it was too foggy to see—”

The night catches up to me then, all of it, and I run out of air. I lower my head toward my lap and try to breathe. When I raise my head, the first cop’s gripping the edge of the table
like he wants to dent it.

“You,” he says quietly, “are going to tell us exactly what happened tonight.”

I open my mouth, but I can’t get enough air to speak.

The white cop leans forward, so close that if he wanted to, he could reach out and grab me around the neck. “What were you and your father doing in the car? Were you out hunting
him?”

I don’t know who he’s talking about. “Sir, I don’t—”

He leans in even closer. The corners of his mouth are pinched white. “Your father thought he’d get away with this?”

“He wasn’t trying to get away with—we were just coming home, and then—I don’t even know what’s—”

“He was just waiting for his chance, wasn’t he?”

There’s something awful in his expression, and it feels like he’s reached down my throat and grabbed my lungs in his fist. “Did someone—” I try to swallow.
“Did someone get hurt?”

“Hurt?” he repeats, spitting out the word like it’s poison. “
Hurt?
Is that what your dad told you to say when you ran Frank down? Huh?” He’s shaking,
his jawline vibrating like a guitar string about to snap. He curls his hands around each other as if he can barely stop himself from slamming them into something, and then something loosens in his
face and before he turns away, I swear I see his eyes are wet. “Your father just murdered one of our very best men.”

At home, even with every single light on and the alarm system activated—I checked twice—I can still feel my pulse in every one of my fingertips and I have that
feeling in the back of my neck you get when you think someone’s following you. All three thousand square feet of the empty house feel like they’re pressing on my chest.

It’s late, and it’s even later in New York, but I call Trey.
Pick up,
I plead silently.
Pick up, pick up, pick up.
He doesn’t. I tell myself he’s just
sleeping with his phone turned off, that if he saw I was calling him for the first time in over two years, he’d answer. Finally, I text:
Dad just got arrested. Please call me. I
don’t know what to do.

I watch the clock. I track when it’s six a.m. in New York, when it’s seven, when it’s eight. I fall asleep sitting upright on the couch, and when I wake up with a start,
there’s still no calls. I remind myself Trey always liked to sleep in late.

The knock on the door, sharp and insistent, comes just after I wake. When I get up and look out the window to see who it is, there’s a woman standing on the doorstep. She’s youngish
for an adult, probably a few years younger than Trey, dark-skinned, kind of hot. I’ve never seen her before in my life. She’s wearing this skirt-suit thing that clings to her chest and
carrying a clipboard, and she makes eye contact. She gives a little wave.

I should’ve pretended not to see her. Against my better judgment, I open the door.

“Hello,” she says, her lips stretching into a professional-looking smile. “I’m Melanie Ramos, LCSW.” She holds out her hand. “You’re Braden, I
presume?”

I stare down at her outstretched hand, long enough I guess that she figures out that her name and the string of letters after it mean nothing to me.

“A social worker, Braden,” she says, enunciating like I don’t speak English. “May I come in?”

There’s a feeling every pitcher gets in a game that’s spiraling out of control, when you can’t find the strike zone or you’re giving yourself away to
your batters, and I have that feeling now. The social worker comes into the living room and plants herself on one of the leather recliners without waiting to be invited. She rests her clipboard on
her knees. “You have a lovely home here, Braden.”

I’m not in the mood to talk interior design. “All right.”

She looks the tiniest bit amused. “Well, let’s get down to business here. I understand that your father has sole custody of you, Braden?”

“Ah—yes.”

“And your mother’s no longer alive, Braden?”

I think the fastest way to make someone not trust you is to overuse their name. “No.”

“Braden, do you have other adult relatives nearby—grandparents, maybe, or aunts and uncles?”

I thought at first that maybe she was here to help my dad get back somehow, but I don’t like wherever this is going. I say, “I’ve got an older brother.” A half brother,
technically, since he has a mom, Elaine, who’s lived in Connecticut ever since she left my dad when Trey was young. A brother who still hasn’t called me back.

“How old is your brother?”

“He’s twenty-eight.”

She glances around the room like she thinks maybe I’ve got him stashed off in the corner or something. “And does he live here with you?”

“No.” It’s been nearly ten years since Trey left home. The last time I even saw him was five years ago in sixth grade when he flew out to be the best man in Kevin’s
wedding, and he took me to lunch and made me bike to the gas station on the corner to meet him so he wouldn’t have to see my dad. “He lives in New York.”

“I see.” She writes something down on her clipboard. “What does he do there?”

“He owns a restaurant.”

“And, Braden, what’s his family situation there?”

“He doesn’t have a family there.”

She sets down her pen and leans forward, her hands clasped in her lap. “You’ve probably figured out, Braden, that I’m asking because my job here today is to make sure
you’re placed in the care of a temporary legal guardian right away.” She pauses. “Now, am I correct in thinking that your brother sounds like the best candidate?”

“Wait,” I say. I look around the room to ground myself back in my normal life: the remotes tossed on the leather ottoman, the stack of
Sports Illustrated
magazines by my
dad’s favorite chair. “I don’t think I understand what’s happening here. I know my dad’s not here right now, but I mean—how long can this possibly
last?”

She runs her tongue over her teeth. I can feel her thinking of what to say, and I’m about to tell her that obviously I’m fine at home by myself for the time being, I’m not
going to starve or trash the house or anything, but then before I can get the words out an awful feeling like a premonition creeps in and spreads through me. The white-hot terror of all those guns
drawn and aimed at our car, the claustrophobia of being questioned at the station by the cops—those things felt like a nightmare I’d wake up from in the morning. It’s this
moment—sitting in my own living room with this calm, professional-looking stranger in the daylight—that I suddenly realize I might have to mark as the time when I understood this
wasn’t going to just easily go away overnight.