Conviction (34 page)

It was less than ten minutes I waited on the side of the road, and I begged God to send him back. I swore to him that if my dad came back for me I would never talk back or
disobey or disappoint him ever again no matter what. I’d do anything, everything, if things could be okay. I was sick and exhausted with guilt, I was terrified that now I had no parents at
all, and all I wanted to do was get home and go back to when it was just him and me and baseball and pretend none of this ever happened. I wanted to take everything back. And I guess, when I saw
his car coming back toward me through the fog, I still thought I could.

I know now how I was wrong about that, of course. But the other thing I realized when I saw his car was this: that I’d known all along he’d come back for me. I had. I’d known
all along that whatever I said or did he wasn’t going to leave me and I’d also known he was the only person in the world who that was true about. And that part, I was right.

Before the car had stopped all the way he threw open the door and retched onto the asphalt. Then he stayed leaning over like that, shaking, for a long time. I was crying, but trying not to. When
I got into the car, he pulled me toward him and clung to me and buried his head in my neck. He grabbed my arms and pulled them around himself, wrapping them around his back. I could feel how fast
his heart was beating against my chest. He was starting to hyperventilate, his breaths like gasps. In the car he kept saying
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I never meant to, I’m
sorry
, and I told him—because I didn’t understand yet what he meant—I’d deserved it. I told him I was sorry, too. I pulled myself together and tried to fight off the
throbbing in my head as he drove us home.

It was when we pulled onto our street that the cop cars swarmed around us. They’d been waiting there; they were waiting in driveways and around the street to close in on us. As soon as he
saw them, his face went white. He covered his mouth with his hand, then shrieked, “Duck, Braden, don’t let them see you.
Duck.
”

“What—”

“Oh Jesus,” he said, “Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. My license. My license.” He gripped the wheel and tried to force it like he was going to turn the car around, but squad cars had
pulled up behind us, cutting us off. He made a strangled noise.

“Listen,” he said. His voice cracked. “Listen, Braden. Are you listening? Are you listening? I love you no matter what. I always have. You know that?”

An officer was starting to walk toward us, his gun drawn. I still didn’t understand. I couldn’t. Just like how for as long as possible I’ve still tried so hard to believe all
this was some mistake, that my dad who I love isn’t capable of this, how in spite of everything I hope that still. “Dad—”

“I love you. Since the very first day I laid eyes on you. I love you more than anyone ever has or anyone ever will. You know that, right, B? No matter what, you know that? You know
that?”

The officer yelled for him to come out. And then there were more officers, and the car was surrounded.

“Nothing happened. Do you understand what I’m telling you? It was foggy. It was dark. You thought there was a flat tire, but we pulled over and the tire’s fine. That’s
it.” He was pressing down the lock on his door over and over, his fingers slipping off like they were sweating. “We didn’t know it was him. We didn’t know. Braden,
please—please. If you love me. If I mean anything to you at all. If you didn’t mean it that you hate me, tell them nothing happened and tell them we didn’t know anything else
until just now.”

T
he next day, I do something I’ve never done in my life, which is cut class. I don’t know how I’m ever going to be in the same
room as Kevin again. Trey’s door is shut when I get up, and I go to the workout room at the country club all day just to get out of the house. I go to school for practice and I see Maddie
across the parking lot with some of her friends, and I think about trying to talk to her. But by now I’m familiar with that shadow that crosses her face when I pass her in the halls, with how
sitting across the room from her in class I hear all those voices in my head rising to condemn me, whispering the truth of all my worst fears about myself. So I don’t try. I don’t think
she’d talk to me anyway. When I get back from practice that afternoon the kitchen is silent, and the air is still. And all the things Trey brought back with him—his knives, his pans,
the jars of ingredients he kept lined up on the counter—are gone.

I know right away, because there’s a way that things lie still and a way that emptiness in a house sinks into you when it comes. But I pound up the stairs anyway, trying to tell myself
there’s a good reason for everything missing from his room, and it’s not until I go into my own room that I see the note he left there on my desk with his car keys resting on top and a
stack of bills clipped neatly with a binder clip.

Braden,
it reads, in his cramped uppercase letters,
Good luck with everything. Keep the money & the car.

I’m so sorry.

—T

I
take his car that night. I fill it with gas and then I drive out past the turnoff for the lake and past Memorial Park and up half a mile into the
hills, and I pull up outside the Cortlands’ house. Pastor Stan’s Ford is parked in the driveway and all the lights are on inside, and through the sheer curtains, I can see the two of
them moving around in the living room. I park Trey’s car on the street.

I called Mr. Buchwald today. My hands were shaking so hard it took me three tries to type in the right number, and when he answered I gathered all my courage, at least whatever I had left of it,
and asked him what would happen if I went to Judge Scherr and told him about all the footage I’d seen. I wasn’t actually asking; I was threatening. I thought he’d panic. He was
driving, I think—it was loud on his end—and he was shouting into the phone like he was on speakerphone, and instead of panicked, he sounded annoyed. There would be lots of boring talk
about his ego and his win-at-all-costs unscrupulousness, he told me, and he’d be subject to a disciplinary hearing. There would be a mistrial, and the jury would be dismissed and the whole
thing would happen all over again and drag on, and I’d be subpoenaed again as a witness for the subsequent retrial and possibly face new charges of my own.

“You’re clearly an enterprising young man, Braden,” he yelled over the sound of traffic, “but unfortunately you will not get out of testifying, much as I can see you want
to. A better use of your time is to run through what you’ll say and then get a good night’s sleep.”

Deep down I’d known it wouldn’t have gotten me out of this anyway, but at least I could tell myself I still had that one glimmer of hope. Now that’s been stamped out, too,
trampled like everything else.

Inside the Cortlands’ house a light winks on in a small window I think is one of the bathrooms. I’m close enough that I could be at the front door in about fifteen steps.

If I tell Pastor Stan and Mrs. Cortland what Trey told me, it will shatter them. And I know exactly what they’ll think: that my brother is a fallen person, not someone to be trusted or
needed. And if that’s true, then it means I shouldn’t care that he left, and I shouldn’t care that he won’t be there at the trial tomorrow, and I shouldn’t care if he
keeps his word to me or not. It means I don’t need him. I never needed him. I’m better off alone.

Another light flicks on in the Cortlands’ living room, and I watch their shadows move like silhouettes across the curtains. I think about not going in and instead taking the car way up
into the foothills, where the road drops off into the dark canyons, and driving it off the edge—clenching my hands against the wheel and waiting for everything to be over. And then I
don’t have to live with any of this. And then I don’t have to go tomorrow.

Instead, I sit there for a long time. Not a soul knows where I am right now, and maybe that’s the closest I’ll come to not existing. One by one, the lights switch off in the rooms,
and when the last one does something gets extinguished in my lungs. And then I drive out of town, out onto the two-lane highways held in place by power poles, the opposite direction from La Abra. I
push the pedal down as far as it’ll go, getting up past a hundred, so fast the poles blur into one continuous streak. I could just leave, I think; I could just drive until I wind up somewhere
no one knows me. But—unlike Trey—I have nowhere else to go. And besides that, I could go anywhere in the world and I’d be the exact same person in every place. I go over a rock
and the car bumps so hard it hurts my neck, and then I get scared, and slow down, and drive back home to wait.

I
n the morning, my alarm goes off at six. I don’t know why I set it. I didn’t sleep.

I get up and shower and dress. I have to get there by nine. I try to eat toast with peanut butter, but I can’t choke it down, so I throw it away. I put on dark socks and dress shoes,
which, it turns out, are too small, so I have to go into my dad’s closet and borrow his. His room is dark and quiet, a film of dust over the top of his nightstand, and I sit there in the
silence and think how if I had to name the exact opposite of lying next to Maddie by the lake, it would be how it feels right now.

I’m still in his room when the doorbell rings. Then, like it’s important, it rings again and there’s a pounding on the door, insistent, and the sound flushes out the emptiness
in the house from Trey leaving and I know without looking he’s back.

I pound down the stairs. I don’t care about anything that happened before, I don’t care about anything Trey said or anything he did, and in the moment, I don’t even care about
everything he told me, either. It’s enough that he’s here now. But when I open the door, it isn’t Trey after all.

“Oh, now, don’t look so surprised,” Kevin says. He lets himself in. He’s got his keys in his hand. “You thought I’d let you go alone?”

In the car on the way over, Kevin turns on the stereo and says, “Do you like Jars of Clay, or is that before your time?”

I don’t answer. “Did you eat?” he tries, when we pass Jag’s. “Can I buy you breakfast? Would you like something to go?”

“I ate.”

He glances over at me. “Did you sleep enough last night?”

“Nope.”

“Do you need to go over any of your testimony to practice?”

“No.”

He taps his fingers against the wheel. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

I lean my head against the window and watch in the mirror as the Jag’s sign disappears. Kevin pulls onto the highway and checks his speedometer, then pulls his visor down over the
windshield.

“Braden,” he says, carefully, “I know you haven’t spoken with your brother since—”

“You shouldn’t care.”

He pauses. “No?”

“You have a wife and you have a kid.”

“You know, Trey’s one of my oldest friends and—”

“He told me about you.”

His expression doesn’t change, and he doesn’t answer that. But outside the row of apricot trees I’m looking at blurs and jostles, like for a second there he sped up.

“You were supposed to be his friend and you’re a Christian, so you were supposed to—I don’t even know. I don’t understand what’s wrong with you. It makes me
sick to my stomach thinking about you—God.” My voice is rising. “You have a
wife.
You have a kid and you have parents who actually love you, and people look up to you. You
don’t deserve any of that.”