Conviction (28 page)

A
ll week, Laila’s been parading academic-type expert witnesses across the stand: a blond woman who uses plastic models to re-create something
to do with the physics of the scene, a gun expert who claims Officer Reyes’s gun was never discharged, more cops from other counties who talk about procedure. Mr. Buchwald is openly
impatient—he checks his watch and half-asses the cross-examination with the cops, and he even declines to cross-examine the physics woman. When Judge Scherr asks him, he just waves his hand
like,
Get on with it
, and I catch one of the jurors looking surprised. I wonder how that made my dad feel.

But tonight’s prom. So tonight, just for the night, I’m not going to think about any of it.

At lunch, just before the bell rings, Maddie finds me and tells me to come at six for dinner with her parents.

“Great,” I say. I’ve done my research this time and I have a corsage for her ready to go, and the necklace wrapped up. “Should I bring anything? I could pick up a pie or
something.”

“No, it’s okay.” She looks around like she realizes for the first time where we are. “What are you doing in Señora Díaz’s room?”

“I’m studying.”

“For Spanish? At lunch?”

“Yeah, I’ve gotten behind.” The truth is that I can’t take watching Greg hobble across the quad on his crutches, the guys slapping him sympathetically on the back. I
can’t tell her that, but it bothers me how easily the lie slips out. That’s one way I’ve always thought I’d turn out different from my dad. “Hey, Maddie, what’d
your dad say when he met me?”

That amuses her. “In the four seconds he spent with you?”

“He seems…protective.”

“They just want to vet you because they don’t know you. They’ll like you after they talk to you.”

I wonder if it’ll feel at all like it will with the jury—strangers deciding on you. “How should I act around them? I want to make a good impression.”

Her eyes crinkle up when she laughs. “It’ll be fine, Braden. You’re definitely an easy guy to bring home. Just be yourself.”

That echoes in my head all day, that
be yourself
, clanging even louder when I nearly trip over Greg’s crutches in the locker room at practice. That afternoon, it takes me forever to
bike back home from the rental place balancing the tux across the handlebars, and finally I give up and jog-walk. I get home late and throw the tux across the couch and head for the stairs to take
a shower, mentally rehearsing what I’ll say at dinner to Maddie’s parents, and what I’ll say to Maddie after the dance. When I go through the kitchen, Trey’s standing still,
staring at something in his hand. From the quick, tight-lipped way he motions me over I think he’s been waiting for me.

“I have to go shower,” I say.

“Get over here.”

I do. When I get closer, I realize what he’s holding is the birthday letter from my dad, and the moment tilts and then topples over. My skin shrinks around my chest.

“‘Braden year sixteen,’” Trey reads aloud in a voice tight with something that sounds a lot like rage. “‘Work ethic: 8.5. Pitching: 7–9. Responsibility:
9. School: 10. Attitude: 6. Loyalty: question mark.’ The hell is this?”

“Where’d you get that?” It was on my desk in my room, where I figured it was safe because Trey never goes anywhere but his own room and the kitchen. “It’s
nothing.” I reach for it. “It’s just—it’s nothing.”

“This is what Dad sent you?”

“And a birthday present. Let me have it back.”

“This is disgusting, Braden. It’s sick.”

“You shouldn’t have read it in the first place. It has nothing to do with you.” The letter is exactly why I don’t like talking to anyone about my dad: because I know no
one understands him the way I do. I try to grab it, but Trey pulls it away. “Give it—”

“He sent you this for your
birthday
?” The veins are starting to jut out in his neck. “Does he do this to you every year?”

“Give me that back.”

“For your
birthday
?”

“Just give it back.”

“‘Loyalty:
question mark
’? Braden, are you
kidding
me?” He makes like he’s going to tear the letter in half. I lunge for him and grab his arm, but he
wrestles the paper away. “Braden, knock it off. This is trash.”

I try to twist his arm around, but he yanks it back; he’s stronger than I am, and while I’m still struggling for control he rips the letter in half and in half again and it feels
like getting slashed across the face. I snarl, “That was
mine
.”

He crumples the quartered pages in a ball. “Listen,” he says, his voice low and urgent, “you can’t let him pull shit like this with you, Braden. You need
to—”

“Give me those back.” I’m dangerously—humiliatingly—near tears. “I
miss
him, Trey, and that’s the first he’s been able to talk to me since
he got arrested. And if the trial doesn’t go well, and he gets—he gets—”

“If he gets killed, then what? You want this garbage playing over and over in your head, following you around everywhere you go? That’s what you want?”

I choke on the words, I couldn’t say what I was afraid of with the trial, but it seemed all too easy for Trey to voice it. “You’ve been gone nine years. What do you
know?”

“I know him. I know what he’s like.”

“Okay, well, you keep telling yourself that, but you know what? Just because you’re a shitty son doesn’t mean he’s not a good dad.”

He drops his hand, but he takes a step closer. “That’s what you think?”

“Yes.”

He holds the crumpled pieces of paper with his thumb and index finger. “You think he’s right about all this?”

“What’s it to you?” I’m shaking with anger; my brother is the one person in the world who should understand. “You think you know me better than he does? You were
gone over half my life. What do you care?”

“You really think that, Braden? I packed up my whole life and came here for you, and you think—”

“You never even called me back until the
social worker
called, Trey. You don’t give a shit about me.”

When I say it, something floods and unleashes in his expression. Before I can react, he hits me in the chest, his fist like a fastball to the solar plexus. I thud into the edge of the table and
then I fall, and the glass on the table falls after me and shatters on the ground. I gasp like a fish, the wind knocked out of me.

Trey’s never laid a hand on me, and I know it wouldn’t take much for him to really hurt me. But when I look up, he looks even more scared than I am.

“God,” he says. “Braden, I—” He takes a step forward and starts to say more, and then he turns and slams the door shut behind him so hard the whole house shakes.
Please,
I think to him,
please, please come back,
but I hear the garage door opening and his car starting, and I hear the car rumbling until I lose it down the street.

I was so stupid. I should know better than this by now. I should have let him say whatever he wanted, and I shouldn’t have talked back, and I shouldn’t have pushed him like I did. I
know what that does to people, how far the consequences can reach. And I know what it is to live here with nothing more than his ghost.

Maddie was wrong, it turns out: in some ways, some of the worst ways, I am exactly like my dad.

I’ve read everything there is to read on the Internet about my brother—every interview in every obscure magazine, every restaurant review, every old archived story
about back when he used to wrestle and play baseball in high school. I’ve memorized every website photo of the inside of his restaurant, and once, a few years back, I subscribed to
Restaurants Monthly
because he’d been profiled in it and I wanted a copy to put up on my wall. And besides that, he’s my brother. When my dad was working, Trey was the one who
raised me. So I can’t try to excuse myself by saying I didn’t know, that I wasn’t trying to upset him—I knew I’d upset him. And for a little while there, for long
enough to do real damage, I wanted to.

I stay on the floor like that a long time waiting for him to come back, the minutes notching themselves like cuts in my chest. My phone rings at six fifteen, and six thirty, at a quarter to
seven, and I let it ring. I know it’s Maddie. I picture her, waiting and nervous and hopeful, on the other end. I picture her all dressed up and assuring her parents I’m just late, that
I’m a good person and they can trust me with someone like her. I picture myself yelling at Greg, and at my dad the night of the accident, and at Trey just now. I picture Maddie thinking well
of me, trusting me and giving more and more of herself to me, not knowing I’m someone who drives the people I care most about to ruin. And I picture how it felt to lie next to her at the
lake, how it felt to plan out a future together over and over in my mind.

I don’t know why I ever thought I could have that.

When I finally get up, I duck my head down to the faucet and run the cold water and pat it over my eyes until my face feels numb. My chest still hurts. I get the broom from the hall closet.
There was still some water in the glass and when I sweep, it mixes with the dust on the floor to rub across the tile.

Please come back,
I plead silently with Trey.
I’m sorry. I’ll forget about the letter, I won’t ever talk back like that again, I’ll do whatever you want, just
please don’t make me go through the rest of this alone.

I’m reaching to get a towel when I feel something stinging on the bottom of my foot, and then a streak of blood smears across the tile. I grab my foot with my hand to see where I got cut,
and I don’t even hear at first when Trey comes back in. He says, “You shouldn’t be in here barefoot,” and I startle so badly I nearly fall.

As I reach for something to say, he surveys the pile of glass in one corner, the fallen broom, the blood on the floor, then leans back against the wall and slides down until he’s on the
ground. He stares straight ahead. His eyes are bloodshot. I think I smell pot. He says, flatly, “You all right?”

“Yeah.” I swallow. “Trey, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I—”

“Don’t.” He reaches both his hands on top of his head and then runs them over his eyes and face so his fingers leave white marks that vanish, like ghosts. “Let me see
your foot.”

“It’s fine. It’s nothing.”

“Please.”

So I let him. He presses above the cut until it separates, a red gash that isn’t quite as deep as the blood makes it look. There’s a loosening feeling in my gut. I’ve always
hated blood.

“It’ll be fine tomorrow. Stay off it tonight.” He wipes his finger against his pants and drops his head back against the wall, hard enough that it thuds. “I’ll
clean up here.”

“I can do it. I’ll do it.”

“Go take care of your foot.”

“No, it’s my fault, I’ll do it, I—”

“I said go.”

“Okay, if you say so. I’ll go.” I keep one hand against the wall and hop forward on one foot, trying not to drip blood. When I get to the door and look back, he’s slumped
forward, his forehead in his hands.

He hears me pause there, maybe. He looks up. I can’t read the expression on his face. “Hey, Braden?”

I wipe my eyes and look away. I doubt I want to hear this. “Yeah.”

“You’re probably the most loyal person I know.”

I
know Trey’s been gone all these years and there’s a lot he missed, but I still thought he knew me. He’s wrong about this,
though: I’m not loyal. Not when it really counted.

After that night my dad wrecked my car when I took it to LA, I thought things would go back to normal. I thought I’d paid for things, and I thought we’d just get over it and
we’d pretend it never happened. All I wanted at that point was to forget the whole entire thing, and I figured he’d want that, too.

But I’d misjudged him. The day after, he woke me up in the morning and told me things were going to be different, now that I’d betrayed his trust. From then on, he said, I had to
come straight home after practice; I had to text him when I left and I had to be home exactly fifteen minutes later. The one day practice went late, he called Cardy to make sure I wasn’t
lying, and once I got paged to the front office because he’d called me through their phone to make sure I was really in school. He took to sleeping with his door open and made me give him the
password to my Facebook account and my e-mail, and when I balked at all that, he ordered me to look up Proverbs 15:10, which says,
Stern discipline awaits him who leaves the path; he who hates
correction will die.
So I didn’t fight him on it. But I stopped speaking to him unless he addressed me directly, so for days we didn’t talk—not about LA and not about anything
else, either. I could hold everything at bay if I was throwing and I pushed myself hard enough, or a few times if I was around Maddie, but back at home I could never replay those moments sharp
enough or bright enough to keep. At night I’d sneak out of the house and into the grounds of the country club, running as hard as I could in the dark until everything in my body hurt.

It was four weeks after I’d gone to LA when my dad came and sat down on my bed while I was in my room. Sunday, February 9, although I didn’t know then the date was going to get
played across the news the way it has. I had my homework out in front of me, so when he came in, I flicked up the edge of my papers to show him. It was sarcastic—
You happy
now?
—but he just nodded like he thought I meant it, stared around my room a couple times, drummed his fingertips on his thighs, and finally said, “Look, B. I think—” He
cleared his throat. “I think you need to tell me exactly what you did in LA.”