Conviction (31 page)

I picture myself describing him for a jury as aggressive, unhinged. I could give a whole litany of things for him to scream at my dad; the jury heard things my dad’s said on the radio that
would’ve maybe set someone like him off. I could describe my fear, how the encounter with him careened suddenly out of control and how afraid we were for our lives. I picture myself
describing panic at the sight of an out-of-control officer going for his gun.

Last night after Mr. Buchwald left, when Trey was in his room for the night and I couldn’t sleep, I finally read what happens when someone gets the death penalty. I’ve been telling
myself not to even look ever since I heard the prosecutor was pushing for it, but I did, and now I can’t get it out of my head.

This is what I read: it always takes place in the morning at six. There’s a strict routine. For the two weeks before, people watch you; there’s a psychologist who reports on your
mental state, a chaplain who writes about your emotional and spiritual well-being, a doctor who performs a physical (I can’t imagine why). The day before, you’re allowed to listen to
the radio or watch TV. You can ask for soda, if you want, or coffee. At night you’re supposed to go to sleep. The next day you get two hours to see visitors. After that, they give you a new
pair of pants and a new shirt; at that point you have half an hour left.

There’s a room with cameras and a window and a curtain over the window, and the walls are cinder block, and in one of the cinder blocks, there’s a hole, and coming from the hole
there’s tubes for an IV. You lie down, and someone straps you in, and someone else places heart monitors on your skin. Someone outside checks them, makes sure your heart’s still going
strong. The monitors are hooked to a printer outside. You lie there, strapped down, while they get you ready. Your family has to wait outside. Someone takes sterilized needles and slides them into
your veins, and they’re hooked to the IV with the tubes going through that hole in the cinder block. On the other side of the wall is the person who’ll flush the drugs through that IV.
But none of the people are nurses or doctors, just correctional officers, and maybe they’re nervous or maybe they’re impatient or maybe it’s their first week on the job, and maybe
they can’t find a vein right away or they miss or they stab the needle all the way through the vein and back out the other side and they hit the muscle instead. If the needle gets clogged,
then the drug bleeds into your muscles and causes excruciating pain, and then they either have to push through your yelling and wait it out and hope it works, or wait for you to calm down and then
stop and try again. And then you get an extra five minutes, maybe six.

I
never told anyone this, but for the past four or five years now, I’ve woken up early Easter Sunday and slipped out of the house while my
dad was still sleeping and watched the sun rise over the small, sloping green of the golf course you look out on from our backyard. Later we’d go to church, and we’d hear the
crucifixion story and the songs about Christ rising again with the chords that would swell into your heartbeat until you felt broken and lucky and grief-stricken all at once. But before all that,
every year, there was a time when it was just me and the quiet, empty space I left open hoping for some kind of glimpse of God.

When I go out this morning, it’s just barely, newly light. Trey’s ashtray plate is still out next to the lounge chairs. I have a piece of bread and—it was the closest thing we
had—a cup of Gatorade, grape-flavored.

It’s easy for someone like Kevin to talk about God’s forgiveness when there can’t be all that much he needs to be forgiven for. I’ve had too many years of my dad’s
voice on the radio reminding me what happens to people who reject God, reminding me how you recognize them and how you ferret out that own darkness in yourself. That’s what I really
believe—that love can’t stretch out far enough to cover a person who cheapens it by disobeying, that if I turn away from God, that’s it for me.

I think about Jesus dying his painful, brutal death, and I think about him looking a few thousand years into the future at me, and I imagine him seeing how I’m not worth it, how I never
deserved what he did for me. I think how I’ve been skipping church all this time and how I’ve only ever wanted to pray on my own terms because I don’t really want God to find me.
All this time I’ve done everything I could to hide from him, and time is running out on me.

I kneel on the damp flagstone and take a bite of the bread—
my body, broken for you—
and then drink the Gatorade.
My blood, poured out for you.

Make a way out for me,
I pray.
Don’t abandon me. Don’t make me do this. Please don’t make me choose.

Trey comes to my room a few hours later while I’m skipping church. My door’s open, but he knocks gently on the frame and waits for me to look up before taking a step
inside. We’ve been like this around each other since the night of my would-have-been prom. My dad’s been gone long enough that I’d half forgotten what it’s like to have to
be careful like this, like balancing a heavy beaker of dangerous chemicals around your classroom lab.

“Hey,” Trey says. He has a clean white towel tucked into his waistband, his cooking uniform. “Jenna and Kevin are coming at six. You’ll be around?”

“What for?”

“It’s Easter.”

What exactly that means to him, who knows; if he remembers Easter was when everything went to hell with him and my dad, he doesn’t let on. I say, “Yeah, sure, I’ll be
around.”

“Great.” He starts to go back downstairs, then he turns back. “Hey, uh—you want to come help me?”

It’s warm in the kitchen and smells like garlic cooking, and there’s bags and containers full of food in neat rows across the entire kitchen table. Trey motions me to stand next to
him at the counter and slides a knife toward me. “Dice onions for me. You know how to dice?”

I attempt a smile. “Is that harder than scrambling eggs? Because if so, then no.”

He reaches over to show me. His knife flashes and leaves behind a mound of geometric pieces, like white Scrabble tiles. “Make them look like this.”

It takes me a long time to do the onions, and afterward he has me stir the pan they’re cooking in so they don’t burn. I can feel a rhythm unfolding in his own tasks, something that
feels less ragged and frayed than the way things have felt lately with him, and with everything. I almost said no when he asked if I wanted to help, but I think I’m glad I didn’t.
It’s better being here with him. While I’m stirring and he’s dunking strips of lemon peel into a boiling pot, I say, tentatively, “So when you’re in New York, do you
do stuff for holidays like this?”

“Nah, I’m always working.”

“But even on holidays?”

“Especially on holidays. People still have to eat.” He picks the lemon peel pieces out of the pot with chopsticks and lays each one on a tray, then picks up some zucchini and a
knife. “Christmas we do a dinner for people who didn’t go home to family. We close early, and then around nine we open up again and everyone eats family-style. I don’t advertise
it. But I’ve been doing it every year, so people know about it. Just to give people a good place to go.”

“It’s your friends who all go to your Christmas dinner?”

“Strangers.” He looks down at the zucchini he’s shaving into paper-thin slices. “Holidays are rough on a lot of people, you know? You start remembering too many
things.”

There’s a lot he could mean by that, but before I can stop it, my own heart pinches thinking about Maddie, as if Trey and I are having some kind of depressing, silent conversation about
everything we’ve lost. I don’t want to think about her. Her friends cross to the other side of the hallway when they see me at school or they circle around her like a hedge of
protection, and from how she turns away when she sees me coming in the halls, I know she dreads running into me. Even though I know I deserve it, it still hurts. In Spanish this week we were
assigned to be dialogue partners, and when she sat down in front of me, I said, quietly, “Maddie—”

“Page one twenty-nine.” She looked back at me evenly, her voice cool. “I’ll read the first part.”

“Look, Maddie, can I just—”

She turned to Missy Winestone next to her, smiling a bright, cold smile I’d never seen from her before then. “Missy, will you please switch partners with me?” That was the last
time we spoke.

To Trey, I say, “Is that why you’re doing dinner today? Because it’s a holiday?”

He looks kind of surprised. “I’ve been talking about making all of you dinner forever.”

“Oh. Right. I just thought—” I cut myself off. I thought I ruined that when I let his birds go, but I’m not about to bring that up. “I just didn’t know it was
for Easter.”

“Felt appropriate.” He sweeps the zucchini into a colander and sprinkles salt on it, then stirs another pot on the stove. It smells sweet and rich, like cinnamon. “Anyway, they
always have Kevin’s family over and Jenna ends up doing all the work. I figured she deserved some kind of break.”

I stay there with him in the kitchen the whole day. He gets quiet like he’s focusing, and doesn’t say much more. It’s funny—before this, I would’ve said his cooking
was about cutting and pounding and searing stuff, different ways of exerting force. But I see today how he’s careful, gentle, almost reverent: when he pats a paper towel on the skin of a duck
breast, when he strokes a tiny strawberry with his thumb. What he’s doing feels like alchemy, and even my relatively pathetic contributions feel like some small part of it. For the first
time, I can see, maybe, some of what this gives him: a kind of order he can root around for and harness, or at the very least somewhere to bury himself a while.

After my court date, I tell myself, there will still be this to come back to.

Three hours before Kevin and Jenna come, Trey unwraps a tiny headless carcass of some kind of bird about a third the size of a chicken and dabs away its blood with a paper towel. Then, out of
nowhere, he turns to me.

“I’ve been doing this so long it shouldn’t feel like this,” he says, and gives me a half smile that I would maybe, almost, describe as shy. “But I always get
nervous when I cook for someone.”

They’re supposed to come at six, and at five, Trey hands me a stack of square white plates I’m pretty sure he must have bought just for this. In the dining room, I see he’s
found a tablecloth somewhere—I didn’t know we had one—and put some kind of white flowers on the table.

At 6:08 (Trey keeps checking the clock), Kevin comes in without knocking, holding a bottle of wine, which he hands me. He’s alone.

“Ellie wouldn’t go down for her nap this afternoon while we were with my folks,” he tells Trey. “She’s a terror when that happens, so Jenna’s staying home
with her.”

“You came by yourself?” Trey says, and from the way he says it, I can feel the whole night tilt and shift. “There’s way too much food for just you and Braden. I made some
purees for Ellie, too. Give Jenna a call now and tell her to come.”

“We’ll do it some other time. Today it’s just me.”

“She decided that, or you did?”

Kevin looks annoyed. “Does it matter?” He motions toward the dining room. “Shall we?”

I know Trey wants to say more, but he doesn’t push it. It’s not until I see him resign himself to silence that I realize I want this dinner to go well as badly as he seems to. I want
him to be calm and hopeful and at peace the way he was in the kitchen today; I want that to have signaled the beginning of some kind of redemption for me, too. I want to trust that if you really
work toward something it’ll fall into place the way you need.

When we go to sit down, Trey goes back into the kitchen, and I get the corkscrew for Kevin’s wine. I bring just one glass, and he says, like he’s tired, “It’s just juice,
Braden. I know Trey doesn’t drink.” He’s kind of staring off into space. “For the record, Jenna thought it was best to stay home with Ellie, too.”

I say nothing, obviously. What am I supposed to say?

When Trey comes back, he takes a deep breath and lists the dishes he’s made, ticking them off on his fingers: ahi crudo with grapes. Quail and pear ravioli with candied Meyer lemon.
Tea-steamed pheasant with fried arugula. Oxtail and tripe in a clear porcini broth. Surf and turf of lamb and octopus with a smoked fig glaze. Zucchini carpaccio with strawberries, hazelnuts, and
duck. Vadouvan goat. Braised beef cheeks with truffled celeriac.

“Wow,” Kevin says. “You cooked a petting zoo.”

“Ha.” Then Trey raises his eyebrows at me. “Minus the ortolans.”

He disappears into the kitchen and comes back with two long rectangular plates with the ravioli, the octopus thing, some pale shiny raw fish dotted with tiny dark purple half globes that look
something like blisters when they rise and fill with blood. Then he stands there and watches us eat.

“Well?” he says, when we’ve finished. “How was it?”

“Good,” I say quickly. “Impressive.”

“Kev?”

“It was…” Kevin pauses. And it’s funny, because I would’ve sworn up and down Trey does whatever he wants and other people’s opinions never mattered that much
to him, but there’s something about the way Trey looks, waiting, that makes me realize this about the way they’re friends: Trey cares a lot about what Kevin thinks. “It was
different.”