Conviction (26 page)

“Well, keep it. I don’t need it.” I slid the envelope back over to her, but my hands were damp and so my fingertips skidded on the tabletop. “You really thought I wanted
to see you so I could ask for
money
?”

“I knew you were asking for something. And that’s what I had.”

She looked around the restaurant then, and that’s when I realized I should’ve said we should meet somewhere else. We were at a Denny’s surrounded by old people, a man in
suspenders and a woman with a walker jammed next to her table because no one else ate dinner that early, and it just wasn’t the kind of place where good things happened, you could tell.

“You might be too young to understand this,” my mother said. “In fact, I hope you are. I hope this isn’t something you learn the hard way. But sometimes you make a
mistake you didn’t mean to and then it sticks to you and you feel like maybe it’ll never go away. And I’m one of those people who’s always on myself about every little
thing, you know, always feeling guilty all the time. Even just this week I got the wrong color frosting for Melinda’s Barbie doll cake, and I just beat myself up over it. For a
Barbie
cake. So it was hard for me, you know. What happened. I spent a lot of years not feeling real good about myself. But it’s not right to live like that, and sometimes the only way you can get
past things is to just turn away and start clean. You just have to forgive yourself and move on.”

In my pocket my phone vibrated, startling me so badly I jumped, and the silverware clattered against the table when I knocked into it. She didn’t react, so maybe it sounded louder to me
than it really was.

“I play baseball,” I said, abruptly, before I could stop myself. “I pitch. I throw a ninety-four-mile-an-hour fastball.”

She raised her eyebrows, took another bite. “Sounds like fun.”

“It’s not
fun
, it’s—do you know how many guys can do that in high school? Matt Cain couldn’t even throw that fast as a senior, and he was still
Baseball
America
’s number thirteen prospect the year he was drafted. I’m better than Matt Cain was in high school. Matt
Cain
. This year I won my team the state championship and I
pitched a perfect game. No high school pitcher in the history of California has done that ever.”

“Well, good for you. I mean that. It’s nice to hear you’re doing well.”

“I’m probably going to get drafted after next year, and I’ll get a contract, and if things go well this year then I’ll probably get a signing bonus, too, and then—I
mean, maybe you really like your job, I don’t know, but—and I know you have other kids, and you’re happy with just them, but—I mean, I could help out. You could stop working
at CVS and taking half-hour lunch breaks in the middle of the afternoon and eating plain tuna fish. And I could learn how to play with little kids, and my catcher has a little sister and I
always—I don’t know. I volunteer to umpire Little League games. And I’m pretty good with dogs.”

She pinched the toothpick in the other half of her sandwich between her fingernails and drew it out like you would a needle, and staring at the mayonnaise glopped onto the lunch meat, I thought,
all of a sudden, that I might throw up. She stuck the envelope back into her purse and drummed her fingers on the table. She started to say something, then changed her mind, then looked down at her
plate. You could see the bite mark in her sandwich. Then she looked back at me, and when she did I could see, maybe, some glimpse of all those years she spent forgetting me.

“You know, you’ve got a father who loves you,” she said. “That’s more than I had when I was your age. And it took me a long time to stop feeling awful about what
happened, but that’s all in the past now, and things went the way they did, and I was twenty years old and there’s not much point in opening old wounds. I wish you well, and I’ll
give you money for gas for coming all the way out here, and it’s nice to see you’re doing good and there’s just not much more than that to say.”

Ornette shares a police department with La Abra, and there aren’t many officers on the Ornette beat. So when you live here you see the same cops over and over again, the
same way you do the cashiers at the grocery store or the postman or the teller at the bank, and so it was Officer Reyes standing in uniform in my garage with my dad and a second officer when I got
home from LA.

The first thing I saw was their car parked on our curb, and then that the garage was open and the three men were backlit because of the lights from the house. From the way they were positioned,
I could tell my dad was yelling. When I pulled into the driveway and turned off the ignition, all three of them turned and stepped backward from their triangle. I’m more used to this now, but
that was the first time I knew what it felt like to silence a group of people just by coming in.

No one wanted to talk first. Officer Reyes folded his arms across his chest. I could tell he didn’t recognize me. My dad grasped both sides of his face with one hand and then ran the hand
slowly, and roughly, down over his mouth and over the stubble on his jaw.

“Well?” he said, very quietly. “Where were you?” He breathed the words more than spoke them so they didn’t come to rest, exactly; they brushed against my shoulders
and my ears, raised goose bumps on my skin.

“Ah—” I took a few breaths, shifted my weight from one foot to the other, and looked at the wall. “I went to Los Angeles.”

“You did
what
?” He was shocked. “You planned to take off like this?”

I nodded, my throat too tight to talk. None of them liked that. Officer Reyes muttered something sharp and ugly under his breath. My dad said, still very quietly, “Alone?”

I nodded again.

“Where was your phone?”

I pulled it halfway from my pocket, then let it drop back in.

His expression didn’t change. “And why did you go to LA?”

“I don’t know.”

My dad nodded very slowly, bobbing his head up and down in a way that made me think of a scarecrow, like a head detached partway from the neck. He flexed his fingers back and forth against his
thigh. His voice dropped lower. “Why did you go to LA, Braden? Why did you go to LA, without telling anyone, and without answering a single one of my calls, when it was your job to be at your
game?”

“Because I—” I could feel my pulse through every inch of my body. The two officers looked out of place there in our garage, Officer Reyes’s hand on the holster of his
gun.

“No reason,” I said flatly. “Whatever. I just thought it would be fun.”

“You thought it would be
fun
?” Something tightened in his face. “You had a
game.
Is this how you think I’ve raised you?”

I said, “Apparently so.”

Officer Reyes made a short, jeering laugh, his lips stretched across his teeth. He smacked the palm of his hand against the club strapped in his belt. “I told you so.”

Officer Molson said quietly, “Frank. Not the time.”

“No, didn’t I tell you? I told you. This is a joke.” He was radiating with anger when he turned to me, his face contorted in contempt. “You know what, kid? We were here
three hours wasting time. We got four patrol cars out looking for your license plate on your
Mustang
. Even though as soon as I got here I told your dad I’ve seen this case a hundred
times before. Same spoiled, rich brat with his head up his ass. I bet you never think about other people, do you? I bet you got everything handed to you your whole life.”

I didn’t care. Whatever. Nothing he said was going to make me feel any worse. Officer Molson said, “Frank. Frank. Come on,” and patted him on the chest. “Let’s
go.”

Officer Reyes turned away, disgusted. “If there was any justice in the world, you wouldn’t have just come waltzing back in here without a care in the world, without the decency to
give a damn about all the effort we all wasted for you, and your dad would’ve realized what an asshole he raised and what an asshole he is, too.”

My dad took a step forward and grabbed my arm, squeezing so hard it hurt. “What do you have to say for yourself, Braden?” he hissed. “You have anything to say?”

I had never, not once in my life, said anything bad about my dad in public. I never had to Colin. I never even had to Trey. “Nope,” I said. “Not a thing. Except he’s
right about one of us. And he’s right I shouldn’t have just come back.”

My dad let go of me, his hand extended toward the officers’ car, a smile plastered across his jaw.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I believe I can handle things from here. But thank you
so
much for your help.”

It was dark that night, foggy, the tule fog pooling on the ground so you could barely see a hundred yards away; you couldn’t quite make out the neighbors’ houses.
There was a near-full moon. When the officers walked down past him and past me and to their car on the curb, the night swallowed them before they’d gotten even to the end of the street.

Their taillights had disappeared when he came toward me, backing me up against the car. He yanked me by the arm and pulled his face close to mine, his breath hot and sour on my face. He’d
been drinking. That was when I remembered to be scared.

“Dad, I—”

“
Dad
what?” he hissed. “
What
, Braden? You think I’ve worked so hard on you for you to blow off your games and ignore my calls this way? I gave you that
phone and I gave you the clothes you’re wearing and the car you ran away with and every last dollar in your wallet. I gave you every last thing you have, and
this
is how you treat me?
What do you have to say for yourself? Huh?”

“Dad, I went to go meet my mom.”

His grip froze around my arm. His lips parted. He let go of my arm and stepped back.

“That’s why I went. I found her a long time ago on Facebook, and after the championship game, I just thought—I don’t know what I thought. But I got ahold of her and she
said I could come see her in LA, so I went.”

He stared at me for a long moment, blinking, and there was a whole universe brimming underneath the blankness of his face. For that moment, the world teetered on an edge and then lay still. And
that was the instant when everything caught up to me—the fact that I’d gone there, the forty-four missed calls from him on my phone, everything my mom had said—and the pain in my
chest twisted even further, and I said quietly, “I thought maybe she’d—I thought she’d want to see me,” and that was when his expression snapped.

We’re alike, my dad and me, in so many ways, but this doesn’t happen for me the way it does with him: that you lose yourself inside your anger, that it spills to the surface and
rushes so fast you can drown inside it if you don’t fight to somehow pull yourself out. I don’t know why I didn’t get that from him. But that night his anger felt like gravity to
me, the way once a ball is released, you can’t stop or change it and you just have to wait to see where it’ll go. He went back up to the garage and leaned down to where all our baseball
stuff was, my cleats and bags and the bucket of balls and Trey’s old catching gear, and he picked up my bat. I froze.

“Dad,” I said, and my voice cracked. “Put that down. Please. Come on. What do you need that for?”

He came back down the driveway toward the car as if he never even heard me, and he smashed the bat against my windshield. The glass cracked and then gave, hammocking inward. He was breathing
hard and fast, veins puffed and snaking around his forehead, and even when he looked right at me it felt like he looked through me instead. I was fumbling for my cell phone in my pocket, my fingers
wooden—but why, because who did I think I was going to call? Because the person I called when I needed anything was him—when he came around to the driver’s side where I was
standing. He smashed in the driver’s side window and shards of glass flew at me, and I brought up my arms in front of my face just in time and my phone arced up in the air, and he had the bat
raised with one arm and then he grabbed hold of me with his other and I lost my balance so badly he stumbled, too, and my blood was roaring in my ears, and I choked out, “Dad, please,
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please.”

The way I always imagined a demon getting cast out was exactly like this: in that moment, I could physically feel something leaving him. The color drained from his face. He dropped the bat so it
thudded onto the concrete, bounced once, and lay still. I was shaking so hard the hand he was gripping me with was shaking, too.

He let go and I doubled over, my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.
It’s okay,
I told myself,
it’s
okay, nothing happened, he didn’t mean to do
that, it’s okay, it’s okay.
He stared at me with his eyes wide, like he was just now seeing me, then he looked behind me at the car and said,
“Jesus.”
He lifted
his hands and pressed them over his eyes, then dragged them down his face so his skin was taut and disfigured and his eyelids flipped out at the bottoms. When he looked at me again, he looked
panicked.

“Braden,” he said, “I wasn’t going to hurt you. I wasn’t. I swear. I swear to you.” His voice was rising, going raw. “Braden, you know me—you know
I wouldn’t. Don’t be like that. Don’t look at me like that.”

He put his arm on my shoulder and pulled me upright so I was facing him. I closed my eyes. I was about to hyperventilate, I could feel that, and I pulled the neck of my shirt up over my mouth
and tried to breathe through the cotton.

“Braden, I’m your
father
. You know me. You know I love you. You know I’d never hurt you.”

I still couldn’t see. I tried to picture the cotton as a net catching molecules of oxygen like they were fish. He pulled me toward him then, and I almost tripped over the bat lying on the
ground. I worked on taking calm, even breaths. He gripped my shoulders and held me at arm’s length, scanning my face.

“I didn’t mean to. I just—I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He gave my shoulders a quick, frantic shake; his tone was pleading. “Don’t
look like that, Braden. Nothing even happened. I’ll buy you another one. We’ll go pick something out together. It’s just a car.”