Conviction (5 page)

“I’ll pass.” He says it so fast my offer still hangs in the air, blaring like it’s lit up in neon, and I wish I hadn’t asked. Trey reaches into the outer pocket of
his suitcase and pulls out something squishy, wrapped in paper.

“Here,” he says. “Brought this back for you.”

It’s a soft pretzel, encrusted in grains of salt. “Best one in New York,” he says, shaking out a T-shirt and then refolding it neatly. “Buddy of mine has a German
gastropub.”

“I see.” I have zero idea what that even means; it’s the kind of thing my dad would have a field day with. “Uh—thanks.”

“Pretzels still your favorite?”

“What? Oh—yeah. Yeah, sure.” I eat some, and Trey folds more of his clothes. With my mouth full, I say, “So did you tell any of your friends you’d be around a
little while?”

“I didn’t keep friends here except Kevin.”

“How come?”

“Because once you get out of this town, you realize all the people here are shit.”

I shouldn’t have asked. “Did you tell Emily?”

“Why the hell would I tell Emily?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she’d want to see you.” I heard she got married a while ago, but it would still be nice for him to have a friend nearby.

“You’d want to see your exes?”

I don’t have exes. “I liked Emily.”

“Great. You call her, then. Anyway, she’s married now.”

“I know.” I guess, like Trey, she’s almost thirty. “Sorry.”

He shrugs. “You know, in other parts of America, people don’t think it’s normal to get married when you’re still practically a teenager. I’m the one who ended it,
and that was years ago anyway, so who cares?”

“Right.” I shift my weight onto my other foot. “Hey, Trey—you haven’t heard anything from Dad, right? He didn’t call or anything?”

“Nope.”

“I’m worried they aren’t letting him make calls.”

He grunts.

“He still hasn’t called me. And that’s the first thing he’d do, right? So I’m scared that—”

He stares at me like I’m growing another set of limbs right in front of him. Or maybe that’s supposed to be a warning. “Or…we can talk about it later.”

“Listen, Braden, just so we’re clear, I’m here so they don’t put you in a group home or whatever the hell the social worker said they’d do. Not to talk about Dad. I
have zero interest in that. None whatsoever. Understood?”

I pause a second or two. None of this is going how I hoped. But when you’re the reason your older brother just uprooted his whole life, you watch the way you talk to him.

“Sure,” I say, as nicely as I can. “Yeah. You probably had a long flight. You want some water or anything? Want me to make juice?”

“No.” He sinks down on his bed. It makes a creaking sound, one I recognize immediately from childhood. “I’ve been awake for thirty hours straight, okay? I need to get
some sleep.”

“Oh. Yeah. Okay.” I wrap up the rest of my pretzel. “Well, there’s towels in the hall closet, and—”

“Yeah, thanks, Braden, I lived in this house too. I know where everything is.”

That shuts me up, and I turn to go. And then, despite what I just told myself ten seconds ago, I slip. “Well, that’s good. Probably nothing’s changed in the nine years since
you’ve been here. Nothing at all.”

La Abra played Bear Creek today.

Back in my room, I go to the league website and refresh it until the game stats go up. I read until I see that Alex Reyes went two for three against Jorge Ayala, who’s got this slider that
breaks so hard you could watch the same one three times in a row and still not believe it’s going to end up where it does. I’ve faced him once or twice, and that pitch, when he can nail
it, wastes me every time. But it looks like that slider was no problem for Alex tonight.

Alex is a senior and he plays second base for La Abra, so I’ve played against him all my life. La Abra churns out good players, Latino kids who make you wonder if they’re lying about
how old they are, but Alex is just mediocre and I wouldn’t think much of him if it wasn’t for this: despite his .249 average, he’s not an easy guy to strike out, and I’ve
never been able to figure out why.

I’ve talked to him exactly once, when I was twelve and we were both at an umping clinic for Little League, and they had breakfast for us there and he ate his cereal with juice. I said it
was gross, and he shrugged and said maybe I was jealous. But he didn’t say it like he was defensive or like he was joking around and wanted to be friends; he said it like what I’d said
just didn’t affect him at all. To be nice, I said, “I’m Braden,” and he said, “I know who you are.” Then he said, “You’re a good pitcher,” only
he said it matter-of-factly, not as a compliment, and I didn’t know what to make of that.

I read the stats with his name four times over until the words start to lose their meanings. Then I shut the computer, fast.

It’s twelve more weeks until we play La Abra. I hope that’s enough time to figure out how I’m supposed to get up on a mound and face the nephew of the cop my dad’s
accused of killing.

T
here are things you can hold at bay in the daylight, but it’s when you’re drifting off to sleep that the thoughts and images creep up
on you, slithering across your dark room from the corners where they’ve been lying all day in wait. Every night when I close my eyes, I see again the cops swarming over our driveway like an
invading army, the flashing lights like dull explosions through the fog; I see the cops shove my dad into the back of the squad car so roughly he almost hits his head on the door as he turns back,
trying to plead with them. And I see myself standing frozen on the driveway with officers surrounding me so close I can’t catch my breath long enough to say
Wait
or
Please
or
Dad
before his car is swallowed in the fog halfway down the street.

I’ll say this, though: it’s a lot better knowing Trey’s here.

The morning dawns bright and cool, and through the window I can hear the lawn mower for the golf course driving across the greens. Today’s opening day of our season, the first game in my
life I’ve ever played without my dad there.

I hear Trey get up and go to the bathroom, and then I hear him go downstairs to the kitchen. There’s drawers opening and screeches of furniture being pushed across the floor. The doorbell
rings when I’m still in bed, and I hear Trey clomping down the hall, pissed-sounding, and then back upstairs. My door swings open, and he says, “Get up. The lawyer’s here to talk
to you.”

“Right now?”

“Yes, right now.” He looks exhausted. “Look, Braden, you know this isn’t my deal, but he said you haven’t returned any of his calls.”

“That’s because I really don’t want to be involved in any of the trial stuff.”

“This isn’t like a party you don’t want to go to or something. You can’t mess around like that.”

“Okay, well, I can’t talk to him right now. I have school.”

“Then I’ll call you in sick. But get your ass down there. He’s waiting.”

When I pass through the kitchen I see Trey’s moved everything around—shoved the table all the way against the wall, corralled the chairs into one corner, moved my dad’s coffee
mug from its place on top of the microwave and stuck it in the sink. He’s done some unpacking, at least, and the sight of his knives lined up on the counter and his gleaming coppery pans
resting on the stove is reassuring.

The lawyer’s in the dining room, tapping his fingers on the glass tabletop. He looks at me a few seconds too long, holds out his hand for me to shake, and smiles in a way that looks
practiced. He has a viselike grip. “So you’re Braden.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I still haven’t been able to get through to you on the phone.”

“Oh. Yeah.” I release my hand and pull out the chair across from him. “I keep missing your calls.”

The lawyer’s named MacDouglas Buchwald. He has glasses, and something about him, maybe his laser stare, reminds me of the ex-athletes who turn into sportscasters and argue with everyone on
TV. His website’s this dump of blocky text and clip art pictures of dancing Greek columns and no actual information about him or his record or anything, and every time he leaves me a message,
he sounds surprised—
Oh, hi, Braden, I see I’ve missed you
, like he can’t believe I didn’t pick up.

Trey comes in with a cup of coffee and some sugar and sets it down in front of the lawyer in an exaggeratedly polite way that, if I were the lawyer, would probably annoy me. Mr. Buchwald stirs
in two spoonfuls of sugar, and I guess I (stupidly) thought there was a chance Trey might sit down with us, too, but he disappears back into the kitchen. I hear the thud of a cutting board.

“Well, Braden.” The lawyer takes a long sip of his coffee—I always thought it was a dick move to start a sentence and then eat or drink something so the other person has to
wait—then sets the cup down on the table. “Your father’s preliminary hearing has been set for Thursday, February twenty-seventh, so we’ve got quite a bit to cover. As
you’re no doubt aware by now, the charges filed against your father are one count of resisting an officer, one count of vehicular manslaughter, one count of felony hit-and-run, and one count
of aggravated first-degree murder with special circumstances, because the deceased was an officer. I predict at the preliminary hearing the prosecution will demand guilty pleas on all charges and
require fifty years served. I’d be downright shocked at anything less than twenty, which I wouldn’t view as a tempting deal. Point being, it’s quite likely a plea deal isn’t
in the cards.”

If I was holding on to any hope that the point of a lawyer was to get him out of jail without having to go through the rest of it, that vanishes. It feels like someone’s grabbed my stomach
with both hands and is twisting in opposite directions as hard as possible. “So you think there’s going to be a trial.”

He gazes at me as if he’s trying to figure out if I’m slow. “Yes.”

I remind myself that I believe God raised people from the dead. Maybe it’s Mr. Buchwald’s job to assume the worst, but it doesn’t mean God can’t work miracles even when
you thought there was no hope. I say, “Have you talked to my dad? How is he?”

“He’s doing as well as could be expected, I suppose. Now—”

“Does he know about…about what they said this week? The DA’s office, I mean? About the death penalty?”

“I make sure to keep him apprised of all relevant developments in his case.”

“Oh,” I say, and then can’t bring myself to ask how he took the news. “I haven’t heard from him at all. I don’t even know if they’re letting him make
calls.”

“He’s not permitted conversation with potential witnesses. However, by law, he’s permitted a certain amount of phone time each week, so I wouldn’t worry about that.
Now.” He slides a folder across the table toward me, then reaches over to flip it open. The papers inside are printed on
MACDOUGLAS BUCHWALD
,
JD
letterhead. I can’t imagine any situation where I’d print out papers for someone else and make sure to have my name on every single one of them, especially if my last
name kind of sounded like
fuckwad
. “This is a collection of pointers I’ve put together for you about how to be an effective witness.”

I don’t look at the papers. A witness, I think, and I try to ignore the way my skin prickles—I should just take this meeting as a reminder to hold up my end of my bargain with God.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be involved in any of that.”

He gives me the blank look people give you when someone made a joke they didn’t get. “You can read these on your own time. What I’d like for us to do now is begin to discuss
your testimony and how it will—”

“Actually, sir, with all due respect, I really don’t want to be involved in any of that. I’m not great at getting up in front of people, and I’d be too scared I’d
screw things up somehow and—”

He picks out a piece of paper between his thumb and forefinger and sets it on the table between us. “Well, as it so happens, this,” he says, “is a subpoena letting you know
that your presence is required in court.”

Oh.

I slump back against my chair. I wish Trey hadn’t let him in; I had a feeling this was why the lawyer kept calling me. I wish I’d left for school already. But I guess it’s too
late to do anything about that now.

I glance toward the kitchen. There’s chopping sounds, Trey cutting something. “At the station the cops said something about me being an accessory, or—”

“Is that what they told you?” His lips curve. “No. The funny thing about police interviews is that officers conducting them aren’t legally bound by the truth. They can
lie about whatever they wish to try to squeeze out a confession. You’re a minor and you weren’t driving; there’d be no case. But no doubt they wanted you to make some sort of
statements incriminating your father, which would also likely tarnish you as a witness for the defense. And certainly they knew you’d be a critical witness. You and Alexander Reyes were the
only ones who were there.”

He leans forward and shuffles through the papers. “Now, what I want to begin doing today is discussing what you’ll be saying during the trial so I can start thinking about how
that’s going to fit into my larger, cohesive strategy.”