Conviction (29 page)

“Nothing.”

“I know that isn’t true.”

“You didn’t want to hear it. Remember? You threatened me to never bring her up again.”

“I did nothing of the kind.”

He definitely had. Still, I was mad, but not quite dumb enough to contradict him. I pressed the tip of my pencil into my thumb until it hurt and muttered, “Well, there’s nothing to
tell.”

“Braden, please. You already went behind my back and broke my trust. After everything I’ve done for you, please, please don’t keep lying to my face this way.”

That stung. “I’ve never lied to you in my life. There’s just nothing to say.”

“You left me here thinking the worst and you couldn’t even be bothered to pick up your phone to tell me you were coming back? Do you know what it was like for me worrying like that?
How could you do that to me, Braden? That’s why you wanted to go to LA? To hurt me?”

If he was mad it would’ve been one thing, I figured I’d been punished enough already, but that’s not how he looked—he looked pained and old and sad, and it made me
second-guess myself. Was that what I’d wanted, really? I said, stiffly, “I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. But I’m sorry for what I did.”

“I forgave you already. I forgave you the second you came home.” My dad crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at the floor. He puffed out his cheeks and blew air through
his lips. “Well?” he said. “How was it? When you saw her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Braden, please.”

“Fine. It was stupid. She doesn’t want to see me ever again. So it doesn’t matter. Whatever. Who cares.”

“Well, I could’ve told you that, Braden. She didn’t want you before, she’s not going to want you now. People don’t change. I can’t even think what was going
on in your head. She dropped you off like you’d get rid of clothes that don’t fit anymore. She didn’t
care
. I don’t know why you’d think that disobeying your
father the way you did would make anyone like that change her mind.”

“I just—I thought—”

“You thought what?”

I twisted away so he wouldn’t see my eyes filling up. What was I supposed to say? I thought she’d want to know me, after all these years? I thought she’d
love
me?

“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t think anything. I was just being dumb.”

He reached out and took my chin in his hand. I tried to look away, but he tilted my head back so I couldn’t. He reached out and brushed under my eyes with his thumbs.

“B,” he said, “I love you. I love you so much. I believe in you. I’m the only one who sees the best in you. You have a dad who lies awake at night thinking about you and
who every day of his life thanks God for you. Isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

I’ve replayed this part again and again in my mind. Because I could’ve changed everything, I know that, if I just gave him the answer he wanted. I could’ve told him yes, and he
would’ve relaxed, and we would have stayed home that night and he would have thought things were okay. And I couldn’t have said why I didn’t, if I was angry about the past four
weeks, or if I blamed him for the way things were, or if I’d always been a destructive kind of person or if maybe I was just exhausted from how much he always wanted from me. But all I said
was, “Fine.”

“Fine?” he repeated. “
Fine?
Jesus, Braden—” He dropped his hands, then he stood up. He checked his watch and stood there for a couple seconds, blinking, then
something shifted in his face. “Go meet me in the car.”

When I didn’t move, he said, “I’m not suggesting it, Braden. I’m telling you to go get in the car. Now.”

So I did. My car had disappeared that week from the garage—I didn’t ask—but there were still pieces of glass in the driveway. I had no idea where we were going, and I
didn’t know—I still don’t know—if I was going with him because deep down I believed somehow he could fix things still and he could make everything all right again and I
wanted him to prove that, or if I thought he couldn’t and that was the thing I wanted to prove. Maybe neither. Maybe both.

We went through Ceres, Salida, and Manteca, and I didn’t feel anything except maybe numb. We got onto 205. It was when we hit Tracy, passing through the flats and the foothills with the
windmills spinning on either side of the freeway, that he said quietly, “Braden, I’m not the one you’re mad at, you know. I know you. You’re mad at her. And you’re mad
at yourself.”

We drove through Livermore and came up over the pass where you see the valley spread out beneath you; we drove through Pleasanton and Dublin and then in Castro Valley we cut north. We kept going
past the gray concrete cities until we hit Oakland, and that’s when he exited. We made enough right and left turns that I felt like a Tetris piece, spun out of shape, and I lost the map
I’d been trying to keep inside my head.

Then, in the middle of the neighborhood, we stopped. It was when we stopped that the numbness thawed some and I realized how much I didn’t want to be wherever this was.

We were in front of a house surrounded by similar houses with browning lawns and shoulder-high chain-link fences going around the yard. It was unmarked, no signs or anything, just 2407 as an
address and, above the garage, an Oakland Raiders flag.

“Well,” he said, and he took a deep breath and looked toward the door like he was trying to psych himself up, “We’re here.”

“We’re where? What is this?”

“You’ll see.”

“Can we just—”

“Let’s go, Braden.” He swung his door open. “Get out.”

The man who opened the door was wearing a leather vest with a flag stitched on one side and a bandanna tied over half his head. He had a buzz cut and a handlebar mustache, and he was huge, like
a prison guard maybe, the kind of guy you’d watch carefully if you saw him in a parking lot somewhere, and it was when I saw him that I started to get scared, and started to wonder if I
didn’t know my dad as well as I’d thought I did. I thought how maybe I shouldn’t have come, although maybe I also didn’t have a choice. Either way, it was too late now.

My dad said, “Hi, Jimmy,” and the man blinked at him, then laughed like he was startled and said,
“Mart?”

“Look, I need a small favor.” My dad pulled a folded slip of paper from his pocket and unfolded it, then handed it to Jimmy. “Here. Can you do this?”

Jimmy looked at the paper, then blinked again at my dad. “This? You show up here out of the blue for
this
? When was the last time I saw you? Fifteen years ago? What’s
the—”

“Can you do it?”

Jimmy was going to say no, I think, but he changed his mind. He sighed. “Fine, fine. No one can say I ever turned away an old friend. For you, even though it’s last-minute, six
hundred.”

“All right.” My dad reached into his wallet, and I tried to think what you’d drive two hours to pay someone you hadn’t seen in fifteen years—someone who looked like
Jimmy—six hundred dollars to do. Jimmy grinned.

“You’re not even going to haggle, weakling? You could’ve worked me down to less than half.” He opened the door wider. “Come in, come in. Let me go grab my stuff.
Hang tight.”

“Dad?” I whispered when Jimmy had disappeared down the hallway. “I’m sorry. For everything. I’m sorry. Can we just go home?”

We were standing in the den, and between the den and the kitchen there was a counter, bar-height, so you could see the dishes stacked up in the sink. The house was messy. There weren’t
very many windows or doors, and it was dark, and when my dad cracked his knuckles and then reached up and put his hands behind his head, the shadows his arms made went all the way across the
room.

“Dad, come on, what is this? Who’s that guy? What’s he going to do?”

“So now you feel like talking,” he muttered. He dropped his arms against his sides with a thud, then he turned and looked at me. “I try to tell you how much I love you and you
tell me
fine
, Braden? That’s how it is for you? You don’t believe me?”

“Dad, come on, that’s—”

But Jimmy came back then, so I shut up. He had a plastic tray with a couple bottles, a stack of gauze, a stick of deodorant, a disposable razor, and a tub of Vaseline. He set the tray next to
the sink in the kitchen, then he said, “Changed the needle for you and everything.”

My stomach knotted like a rope. I hate needles, I’d rather break a bone than get one stuck in me, and I knew my dad knew that because he’s always felt the exact same way. I turned
back to him, ready to do whatever he said to get out of here, but before I could say so he went to the counter and unbuttoned his left sleeve and rolled it up to the elbow. He pushed aside a
half-full bottle of Pepsi and laid his arm across the counter, palm up. Even from across the room I could see his shoulders were tense and his forehead was shiny with sweat.

Jimmy rubbed his hands together. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He poured something onto a cotton ball and rubbed it on my dad’s arm, then picked up the razor and ran it carefully over the skin. He licked his middle finger and stuck it down on the tray
and when he pulled it up, there was a small cutout of paper clinging to it. He rubbed the paper over the deodorant and then pressed the paper onto my dad’s skin. I still didn’t
understand until Jimmy picked up something that looked like a gun chamber attached to an awl, and I realized what it was. The gun made a whirring sound, like something in a toolshed or a
dentist’s office, and even from across the room, the needle looked sharp and huge.

My dad winced. I felt it, too, and closed my eyes. I opened them again right when the needle slid through his skin and my dad made a gasping sound and then a high-pitched, girlish yelp.

Jimmy roared with laughter and said, “Raynor, you are getting
soft
.” He made a high-pitched sound like
Uhnngh!
, imitating my dad’s little scream, and after that
he stopped smiling and worked quietly with the tip of his tongue positioned carefully between his teeth.

The needle kept sliding rapidly in and out of his skin. Jimmy kept dabbing away what looked like blood welling up around it. After a few minutes—or maybe it was longer; I had the weird
feeling that if I looked at a calendar, whole days could’ve passed—Jimmy leaned closer to peer at what he’d done, dabbed at the blood and ink, and switched off the gun.

“All right, you woman, there you go. Be right back.” He went into his hallway again. When he did, my dad said, “Come here.”

His skin had puffed up around where the needle slipped into his forearm. It was black blocky letters, two rows:
MARTIN SCOTT RAYNOR III
. That was Trey. And then, under
that:
BRADEN SCOTT RAYNOR
. That, obviously, was me.

“You like it?” He watched me stare at our names. His anger had evaporated; he looked as close to nervous as I’d ever seen him look. Then he looked down at his arm and broke
into a proud, tired smile. “You want to know a secret? That needle scared me half to death. Jesus, B, that
hurt.
”

Jimmy came back then, holding up a bottle. “Forgot the ointment.” He dribbled some onto a pad and then pressed it against my dad’s skin. My dad made another high-pitched sound
and Jimmy smirked and pressed harder, rubbing it in.

“How about you?” he said to me. “You want one, too? I do it free if it’s a name you won’t want covered up later, some girl or something.” He let go of the pad
and grinned. “No, I don’t. I just feel bad your old man didn’t even try to haggle. You want a matching one? You want your old man’s name?”

My dad tried to sound like he was joking, like he didn’t want me to know how much he wanted it, how much it would mean to him. “Two for one,” he said, and he nudged me in the
ribs. “How about it, B?”

It was like an egg cracking and spilling its contents, messy and runny, all over your hands: just like that, I was sick of everything, I was done, and whatever things I’d been pretending
weren’t there for I don’t know how long clawed to the surface all at once and then broke loose. I’d lost the one thing I always wanted most, the one thing I couldn’t even
talk about to anyone because I wanted it too much, and I was supposed to be grateful for
this
? My name needled into someone who thought I wasn’t good enough for anyone else to care
about, ever, except him? He gave me a shy, hopeful smile and held his breath the way people do when they’re caught up in something that really matters to them, and I said, “You
should’ve saved your money, Dad,” and I had just enough time to catch the way his expression collapsed before I walked out and left him, the smile dangling off his face like a broken
limb.

I stay off the Internet completely the weekend of prom and leave my phone off and I mostly avoid Trey, which even though neither of us leaves the house is easy enough because he
avoids me, too. But he cooks for me, platefuls of things like spaghetti and roast chicken that he brings up to my room without saying much, which I know means he feels bad about what happened. He
shouldn’t—I pushed him too far and got what I had coming because of it, and anyway I’d put up with him losing his temper and I’d eat canned tuna and peanut butter the rest
of my life if it meant he wouldn’t pick up and leave again.

I get to school as late as I can Monday morning, my dread fossilizing into a hard, painful lump inside my chest. Just before the bell rings, someone takes my arm—I jump a mile—and
when I turn around from my locker, Maddie’s there. The concern on her face chokes me.

“Braden, thank God.” Her eyes are huge. “I kept checking the news because I was so scared something happened to you. I’ve been trying to call you all weekend. What
happened? Are you okay?”

All weekend I’ve been trying not to think about this moment. And now that I’m in it, now that she’s standing so close I can make out the downy hairs on her forehead, I wish for
a second I’d just never met her. I kept trying to tell myself that Maddie was proof I wasn’t alone and forsaken by God, but that’s because I twisted things with her into what I
wanted them to be. I see that now. I never deserved her; I should’ve just left her alone. Just because you need something doesn’t make it right.