Conviction

by Joey Bush

  charges pending. An unidentified female was also at the scene,

  but she left before police arrived. Authorities would like to speak

  with her, so anyone with information regarding her whereabouts

  or who she is, is asked to come forward.

  No one knew me, was the thing. I had seen the article, so yes, I could’ve come forward, I could have driven myself down to the Carmel police station and answered whatever questions they had. But I didn’t. Instead, I stared at that article, reread it so many times that I eventually had it memorized. I didn’t come forward when Oliver plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter, and, because they’d avoided a trial, the district attorney offered him ten to twelve years. And now he was getting out after seven. I told myself that my coming forward wouldn’t have changed anything. It would not give Isaac his life back, it would not make Oliver’s statement any more or less true.

  “The incident,” Dr. Mike said. “We haven’t really touched upon that much in your sessions. Do you feel ready to talk about it?”

  Dr. Mike knew the broad details: something had happened about seven years ago, something that had made me mistrustful of pretty much every guy I’d ever been around, and that someone had ended up in prison because of it. I’d been purposefully vague with him, and he’d been completely accepting of my vagueness. There was no way I would’ve been able to stand something like that—I would need to know, right then, the specifics of whatever the hell it was the person was talking about. Not Dr. Mike, though. He’d probed a little, trying to extract more information, but when I wasn’t forthcoming with it, he let it drop, maybe knowing that this day would eventually arrive.

  Did I feel ready to talk about it?

  “I think I do,” I said.

  “Good. Tell me what happened.”

  “Well . . . .” It had been seven years ago, yet I could remember it as though it had just happened. I could still feel his weight pressing against me, the terrible helplessness when you realize you are overpowered. “The thing is . . . nothing happened to me. Because Oliver showed up. If he hadn’t though, I don’t know what would have happened. That is something I think about. A lot.” And that was stupid, I knew it. What was the point in wasting all this energy playing out bad scenarios that could have—but didn’t—happen? People did it all the time, but no good was coming from me thinking about the fact that Isaac Wentworth could have raped me, or beaten me, or killed me, if Oliver hadn’t been there.

  “Something did happen to you, though,” Dr. Mike said.

  “I just feel so stupid. I still feel so stupid for being so naïve. It was my first weekend in Carmel. I’d gone out to that bar alone, and when Isaac and his group of friends asked if I wanted to sit with them, I actually felt happy because I thought that the locals were including me, that I must’ve looked like I belonged.” The shame still burned red hot when I thought back to how pleased I’d been at the invitation to sit with them. I was so proud of myself! Moving to this town all by myself, going out to a bar alone, getting invited to sit with some guys at their table. How could I not have seen how foolish I was being?

  “It’s a very natural response to want to be accepted, especially when you’re in a new environment.” I could hear Dr. Mike scribbling something on his yellow legal pad. I wondered what he was writing. Clearly beyond help. The whole thing was obviously her fault. She deserved it.

  “And Isaac asked if I wanted to go smoke a cigarette. I don’t even smoke but I said yes. I thought he was cute. So, we went out to the parking lot, and he said he’d left his lighter in his truck, so we walked over there, but he didn’t even bother with the lighter. He just sort of cornered me against his truck and tried to kiss me.” I paused again, not wanting to continue because to admit that a small part of me had, for a split second, felt thrilled that someone was this interested in me, to admit that would be to suggest that I had invited the whole thing to happen. That I had somehow been sending some sort of subconscious signal that he’d picked up on. Which I knew was bullshit, but at the same time couldn’t help believing, too.

  “How did that make you feel?” Dr. Mike asked after a few long moments had passed and I hadn’t said anything.

  “I felt . . . .” There was no point in lying, or withholding the truth. I was paying him to listen to this, after all; he wasn’t someone I was trying to impress. There would be no hope of the nightmares ever letting up if I wasn’t honest about it all. “I felt surprised. I couldn’t believe it, and yes, there was a part of me that was excited because he was kissing me. I might have kissed him back. I can’t remember. But then . . . but then, he started trying to take things further and I told him to stop.” I had laughed as I said it, the idea that he wouldn’t still not occurring to me yet. That was the sort of thing that happened in movies, or to girls who dressed in short skirts and tight shirts and had too much to drink. It wasn’t supposed to happen to me, not during my first week in my new town, my first night out on my own. “He wouldn’t stop, though. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I said it; I felt like I said it dozens of times, but maybe it was only once or twice. I don’t know.”

  “Would it make a difference? How many times you said it?”

  “Wouldn’t it? If I only said it once or twice, maybe he didn’t hear me. Or maybe he didn’t think that I really meant it.”

  “It shouldn’t matter if you said it once or a hundred times. You shouldn’t need to say it one hundred times. The fact of the matter is: he was doing something to you that you didn’t want him to do.”

  That was probably the most opinionated I’d heard Dr. Mike get about anything I’d said so far. He’d given me slippery non-answers in my previous sessions, when I detailed the guys I’d been with, wondering aloud if my ability to just turn my emotions off was an ability that I’d always had or if it was a result of the night in the parking lot. It didn’t seem as though Dr. Mike was going to give me any of the answers I was looking for, despite the exorbitant amount of money I was paying him. It was as though he was expecting me to figure out those answers on my own, which didn’t seem like something I was going to be able to do any time soon.

  After my appointment, I went back to work. I usually scheduled my appointments with Dr. Mike during the lull between breakfast and lunch, so when I returned, the place was mostly empty and my main waitress, Lena, was re-setting the tables with clean silverware and napkins.

  It still made me feel giddy sometimes to think that I owned this restaurant. I didn’t have much in the way of accomplishments to my name—no college degree, no husband or children to speak of—but after the previous café had been put up for sale, I used the inheritance money my grandma had left me and bought the place, shut it down for a few months while it was renovated, and re-opened it under a new name: Ollie’s.

  We did breakfast and lunch, wholesome, hearty food, not the slop you’d get at the diner right off the highway, but not the high-priced, tiny plate fare you’d get at some of the swankier establishments in town. I wanted the place to be welcoming, laid back, but also visually appealing. I’d been a little nervous about the whole thing at first, because I didn’t have much restaurant experience aside from a few waitressing jobs, and I didn’t have a degree in business, but I was determined to make this work. I did not consider failure to be an option, even if no one wanted to come in to the restaurant and eat.

  “Hey, Wren,” Lena said when she saw me. “Everything go okay at your appointment?”

  “Pretty good!” I said, trying to sound cheerful. I told Lena I’d started seeing Dr. Mike, though I hadn’t specified why. I didn’t need to though; Lena was totally one of those women who was all about self-help, and she herself “seeing” someone, though it was for the opposite reason of why I was going: Lena couldn’t seem to make any relationship work, or she was choosing the wrong guys, or some combination of the two.

  I went out back and put my purse in the office, said “hi” to Shaun and the other two cooks, then went back out
to the dining room. I needed a coffee.

  There was a guy sitting at the bar, drinking a cup of coffee of his own, working on a club sandwich. It was Ryan, one of the out-of-state employees who worked at one of the nearby guest ranches. Last season, he’d had a girlfriend, but one of the very first things he’d said to me when he set foot in the restaurant was that they’d broken up. I had acted nonchalant about this information, though I figured it would only be a matter of time before he and I hooked up.

  “Wren,” he said. “Was hoping I’d run into you.”

  “Had an appointment,” I said. “How’s the sandwich?”

  “Delicious as always. You got plans tonight?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of things I need to take care of.” I didn’t have anything I needed to take care of, but I’d felt odd after I left Dr. Mike’s, and I knew when I was feeling like this, it was better to spend the night alone.

  “How about this weekend? You ought to come on over to the ranch, there’s going to be a barbecue and a little party of sorts to kick off the start of the season. Saturday night.”

  I nodded as I poured a giant cup of coffee in my special mug that said This is whiskey on the side in pretty pink script. It was a joke because I’d never had whiskey in this mug before, or any mug, for that matter; I got tipsy off of a few beers, so definitely couldn’t handle something like whiskey. “I might be able to make that,” I said. I did love a good barbecue.

  “That’d be mighty nice,” Ryan said, giving me a look that plenty of guys had given me before. I used to feel dangerously thrilled, but now it didn’t really do anything. It wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t even that much fun. It was just another way to spend an evening.

  2.

  Ollie

  There was no reason to expect anyone would be there to pick me up the day I got released from the Reynolds Correctional Facility. Upon leaving, I’d been given the few belongings I’d gone in with, plus bus fare back to wherever the hell it was I wanted to go. I figured I might just get on the bus and go until I got kicked off, which might be all the way across the country—or just across town, depending on what bus I happened to get on.

  But when I stepped outside, the hot sun beating down on me, the sky such a bright blue it hurt my eyes, there was that matte black Ford F150 that I’d recognize just about anywhere.

  Garrett Wilson was in the driver’s seat, and he lifted his hand from the steering wheel to give a little wave as I walked over.

  “There you are,” he said. I tentatively got into the passenger side. “You look surprised to see me.”

  “They gave us bus fare.”

  “Did they, now?” Garrett had his beige Stetson on, the same one he always wore, his face deeply tanned and leathery from spending most of his life outside in all sorts of weather. “And where were you going to take a bus to?”

  I paused. “I don’t know.”

  “Might as well close that door then, so we can be on our way.” I pulled the door shut and Garrett put the truck in drive. Reynolds suddenly became nothing more than a building, getting smaller and smaller in the side view mirror.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, after a few minutes of silence had passed. It felt strange to be in a vehicle again, to see the landscape rush by in a blur of greens and browns.

  “Back to the ranch,” Garrett replied, as though it were the most obvious answer in the world. “I can take you somewhere else, if you’d like.” It was a nice offer, but he knew I had nowhere else to go. “In fact,” he continued, “I’d like to give you your old job back. Season’s about to start again, and these past years have been busier than ever.”

  “What?” I said, certain I’d heard him wrong. He wanted me to work on the ranch again?

  “You heard me,” he said. “You’re one of the best wranglers I’ve ever worked with, and I wasn’t just saying that to make you feel good about yourself. We’ve got seven employees already at the ranch or coming in the next couple weeks, but half of them are working in the kitchen. So, I need one more wrangler. Figured you’d be needing a job.”

  “You figured that right,” I said. “I do need work.”

  “Sounds like a win-win situation for everybody, then.”

  That was one of the things we’d gone over in the pre-release and re-entry program I’d had to go through before getting out: finding employment, and how important that was to integrating successfully back into society. Those of us who had work were less likely to be repeat offenders and find ourselves back behind bars. At the time, I just sat there, trying to think of where I was going to work, figuring I’d have to travel to get to some remote ranch where no one had ever heard of me before. But now here Garrett was, offering me my old job back.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked him. “Don’t take this the wrong way or nothin’, but I just don’t understand. Don’t really deserve it, if you want the truth.”

  Garrett shook his head. “Now, that’s where you’re wrong. How long have you worked on my ranch? Since you were about eleven years old, I’d say. Got to know you pretty good in that time. Good enough that I know you’re not a bad kid. I think of you as a son, if you want the truth of it. But I know what can happen to a man if he gets released from prison and doesn’t have any prospects. Nine times outta ten, he finds himself back behind bars in real short order. Don’t want to see that happen to you.” He eyed me, taking in the tattoos that now covered my arms. “That’s quite a bit of artwork you’ve got there.”

  I looked down at my arms, feeling a pang of regret. At the time, I hadn’t thought about what people on the outside would think of them when I was finally released, because getting out seemed like such a far ways away. When a day feels like an entire year, the possibility of getting out in ten seems like an eternity.

  “It was dumb of me to do,” I said. “It was just a way to pass the time.”

  The guy who’d done them, Mark, had been an art student who had gotten drunk one night and drove his truck through a red light, causing a three-car pile-up and killing four people. The tattoos he’d given me were good enough to pass for something done at an actual parlor, of things that I liked: a roping horse, boots, a skull wearing a Stetson. I’d gotten the tattoos without thinking of the future, without considering the implications they might have for potential employment.

  “A permanent way to pass the time,” Garrett mused. “Well, I guess that’s what they make long sleeves for.”

  “You really want to give me my old job back?” I asked.

  “I sure do.”

  Wilson Ranch was a working ranch, a place for people to vacation at while at the same time participating in the day-to-day activities of running a cattle ranch. Which meant, unlike some of the other ranches in the area, this place had paying guests. Paying guests that most likely wouldn’t want to be around a man who had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter.

  “I don’t really see how that could be good for business,” I said.

  “Don’t worry—we’re not going to put a big announcement on the website,” Garrett said with a wry smile. “Seven years is a long time, Ollie. People forget. People forget after seven minutes. Nobody needs to know about your past unless you decide to tell them.”

  I felt an ache in my throat and knew if I didn’t watch it, I was going to cry. Which was about the last thing I’d want to do in front of Garrett, or anybody for that matter. You certainly didn’t cry in prison.

  “Well I appreciate it,” I said after a minute. “I wasn’t expecting anyone to show up here today, to be honest.”

  “You’re not alone, you know,” Garrett said. “It might feel that way, but you aren’t.” He paused. “I can take you to see your mother’s grave, if you’d like.”

  “That’d be nice.” I stared out the window. My mother had died five months after I’d been sent to Reynolds. She’d come out to see me, but I didn’t go out to the visitation area. At the time, I’d been stalwart in my belief that her last memory of me shouldn’t be in a
n orange jumpsuit. Our last interaction shouldn’t be in a visitation room. It was all I could think about, at least until she was gone, and I realized how much of an effort it must’ve been for her to get out there, and how I could have at least given her one last hug, told her I loved her and how sorry I was. How all of that superseded her seeing me in prison, but I’d been too selfish to realize it until it was too late.

  We didn’t talk much the rest of the ride, though I knew Garrett would listen if there was anything I felt like I had to say. It was just so weird to be out, to be a civilian again, to know that I wasn’t going to wake up in cell 56. Everything looked so familiar, yet so different at the same time. I saw the sign for Wilson Ranch come into view.

  “You just gotta keep your head down and your nose clean,” Garrett said as he turned down the long, hard-packed dirt driveway that led to the ranch. He drove up to his house, though, the original log cabin that had been built in the 1890s. “You’re going to be fine, Ollie. Why don’t you stay here up here at the main house for tonight at least, and then tomorrow if you want you can move out to one of the employee cabins. C is open. Saved that one for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Like I said, some of our employees have arrived already; the rest will be trickling in over the next week or so. They’ve all worked at least one season here before, no one’s totally green. If it feels more comfortable for you to keep to yourself at first, that’s fine. You don’t have to do anything with the guests unless you feel ready for it; Ryan and Jerry will be responsible for the leading the rides and teaching lessons, so you don’t need to worry about it.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Before I’d gone to prison, I’d been the head wrangler, even though I was young, and one of the ride leaders, taking guests out on the cattle drive, helping them figure out how to ride if they’d never been on a horse before, giving them pointers and demonstrations on how to get the cattle from one place to another. But now, just the thought of having to face a group of people I didn’t know seemed overwhelming, an insurmountable challenge. Ryan and Jerry, whoever they were, would have to handle all that.