The Most Wanted

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Langtry?”

  “No. Desiree. My baby.”

  “Arley, sweetie, she’s absolutely okay. She’s perfect.”

  “Do you think she’s . . . bad inside?”

  “Arley, no. No! How people are born . . . what their parents are like, that doesn’t matter. It’s how you’re raised that makes you what you are.”

  “Oh, great,” she said. “That really cheers me up.”

  “You’ll be a good mother, Arley.”

  “How would you feel, if you were me? Annie?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t.

  When Carla Merrill arrived, I listened in silence while she asked Arley the rote questions. To all of them, she answered simply, “No, ma’am.” When Merrill asked if she wanted to phone her mother, she answered, “No, ma’am.” Her dumb show fooled me. I never would have suspected she was anything except shocked and hurting. I never would have suspected secrets.

  She liked the cabin. She admired the soft oak-plank floor, noticed that there was a window air conditioner, bright banks of windows, and even a little screened sleeping porch where she could take the Portacrib and her rocker on days when the heat allowed her some respite. “That’ll help some,” she said. “I appreciate all this, Jeanine.”

  Charley, Jeanine, and I carried in Arley’s few things. But just as Jeanine was about to go for groceries, Arley spoke up. She said, “I need my stile.”

  “Your what?” I asked her.

  “My hurdle, for practicing. I left it at Mama’s.”

  “We can get it,” I suggested, hesitantly.

  “No,” Arley replied quickly. “I don’t want to go back there.”

  “You wouldn’t have to; one of us could pick it up.”

  “No. That’s okay. No, thank you, I mean. I don’t want anyone to go there.”

  “I’ll make you a new one,” Charley offered. “You won’t be running hurdles for a while.”

  “The doctor said two weeks for exercise.”

  “I think you need a little more time than—” I began.

  “No!” Arley said fiercely. “Two weeks! I want to stay in shape. I don’t want having the baby to be the end of . . . everything. Of everything else.”

  I shushed her. Charley and I exchanged looks over her head.

  Jeanine came back with staples—milk, bread, pinto beans. “Just in case. I’m beginning to remember how this place can feel like the far corner of nowhere,” she said.

  “I think that’s what’s called for now,” I assured her. We looked around. Nothing stirred. The cabin was set in a small stand of cedar, in keeping with the Texan preoccupation with shade, surrounded by fields of waist-high Johnson grass nobody’d bothered to cut, hot and coarse against the unprotected thigh.

  When it became clear that Arley was tired, Charley got up to leave. I was going to stay with Arley, but I didn’t want to see him go.

  I followed him onto the porch. “The other night . . .” I began.

  “Just let it alone for a while, Annie,” he answered. “We don’t have to name it right this minute. I think, in time, it will be easy to tell. You have bigger fish to fry right now.” Then he left.

  I tried to let it alone.

  And it got easier. The baby’s needs gave time its own circumscribed rhythm. Even at work, I never felt far from Arley or Desi; but everything else in my life receded, became muffled. Even after I showered, my hands smelled of Desi’s baby powder. After a while, both Arley and I started using the baby oil and soap, too; and the whole place smelled like a nursery.

  It was quiet there at the cabin. Quiet in the day and silent at night.

  I worked unaccustomed eight-hour days. On weekends, we were mostly alone. When we saw the tall grass bow and part, hundreds of yards away, we knew hunters were crossing the fields. But that happened only a few times. Once in a while, we’d glimpse tiny figures on ATVs, buzzing up the flanks of the ridge like angry insects. That meant the owners of the lush houses were out on a country holiday. A couple of times, I saw an older man in boots and much-patched jeans, carrying a backpack, hiking along the main road a couple of miles from the cabin. I’d wave. He’d raise his Spurs cap. But I had no idea whether he was a neighbor or a vacationer. There were intermittent visits from Jack and other police officers, and sometimes I’d glimpse unmarked squads drawn back under the shade trees on the wooded road.

  The commute to work was easy if I left early enough. Every other night or so, Charley would show up very late and stay, throwing his sleeping bag down on the floor. A few times a week, I’d invent for Arley’s benefit urgent night field calls, and meet Charley at Azalea Road.

  His smell, his voice, the calluses on his palms became part of my emotional clothing. Daily, our being together seemed less novelty, more context. The sense of crisis might have hastened things between us. I am sure it did not idealize them.

  From the office, I’d phone Stuart, getting his answering machine as often as not. His new job was keeping him madly busy, and he sounded excited. But it didn’t erase my guilt.

  Each night before I closed my eyes, I would promise myself, I’ll think this through tomorrow.

  But truthfully, I was too exhausted to think anything much. Arley had so much to learn, tasks for which even raising herself hadn’t prepared her. At first we took turns getting up at night with Desi, and then we simply parked her on the bed between us, so I could roll the baby over like a sweet-smelling larva in her receiving blanket and help settle her on her mother’s breast, sometimes without even waking Arley.

  “Why’s she get up every five minutes?” Arley would wail. For brief moments, she’d sound annoyingly like an ordinary teenager, and I’d wonder how much of my affection for her was based on her deceptive maturity. Arley would lie on her stomach on the floor, studying Desi, who was wailing and cycling on her squeak-and-rattle Pooh bear quilt. “What do you want, girl? I changed you and I fed you and I rocked you, and I’m like to die on my feet here.”

  When I look back, I see how fatigued I really was. I’d settle down with a notebook to make lists and a pen to chew, hoping to sort things out even in an artificial way, and then the baby’s inconsolable night wails would drive every other urgency away. Then there was the two-week period when it seemed Arley’s milk had dried up, and she was inconsolable. Or maybe things were so distorted, they would have been no clearer had I been in peak shape. Could I leave Arley on her own and join Stuart? Get him to come back? Pack up a teenager and her baby and head for Florida, all the while keeping an eye peeled for her marauding next of kin? Stay here, playing house with a guy who hadn’t even been born on the day Kennedy was shot? It all felt like a kind of illness from which I kept expecting to recover momentarily. If I’d been more myself—more Annie-as-I-knew-her—I might have read Arley’s reticence about Dillon more clearly. Perhaps I could have spared her the eventual hell she went through. For the first time, she seemed unwilling to talk to me about him. Should I have simply declared Azalea Road open for business? Even though we would have had little beyond two beds and a couch, plus a couple of barstools for a kitchen that had no running water? I guess I should have. And yet reason told me Arley was safer where she was.

  The word from the police was that Dillon had vanished into Mexico. Either that, Jack told me, or he’d left all his flesh-and-blood qualities (footprints, hair, fingerprints, even visibility) back in his cell at Solamente River.

  Then the stickups started.

  Some were little, some were big.

  A liquor store robbed of two hundred dollars in register receipts by a drop-dead-handsome young man who distracted the clerk by telling her that someone was trying to break in by the back door. The clerk never felt threatened; but she did remember the robber’s astonishing green eyes and his cap with the armadillo embroidered on it—she had one like it, and they talked about it after he got all the cash stuffed into an inside pocket. “I’m not even going to show you my gun, honey,” the young man told the clerk. “Jus
t enough you know I’ve got one. No need to get ugly.” And then he slipped away, like smoke.

  His aftershave, the woman said, was lavender.

  “The younger men don’t use that kind much anymore,” she said. “It was kind of old-fashioned.”

  Arley acted decidedly uninterested in the newspaper account of it. In fact, at one point she jumped up, took Desi outside, and sat with her in the rocker, singing.

  Two weeks later, there was a very cordial armed robbery of an armored car picking up the receipts one rainy, moonless night outside the Red Ryder dance bar in Shadowland. The two guards had curled up for an hour’s nap in the cab and were awakened, fuddled, by a light shower of what they thought was hail on the windshield. When one reached out to check, he looked straight into the muzzle of a handgun pointed at him by a small masked figure, all in black, who climbed down slowly from the roof of the vehicle. Another armed man, a light-skinned blond who made no attempt at all to hide his face, politely helped the other driver out of the car, handcuffed the pair together, and removed a single canvas bag of currency totaling about twenty-five thousand dollars. “He could have took ten times that,” one of the drivers told a TV interviewer. “But he said he didn’t need so much. He said he liked to travel light and keep on moving. Hit the highway. He was actually a pretty nice young guy. The other guy, the really little one, didn’t talk or anything.” The truckdriver’s partner couldn’t say for sure whether the unmasked man was Dillon LeGrande.

  “The weather was bad,” he pointed out, “and I’m not at my best when I first wake up and all.”

  Capture of the suspects was imminent, authorities said. But from what Jack Becker managed to gather from behind the scenes, and what Carla Merrill admitted to me during one of our several conversations, it was no more imminent than world peace.

  Half a dozen times each day and night, cars with what Arley correctly identified as “that police look” slipped past the cabin, tooling up into the ranch of quiet resort homes on the ridge, waiting and watching. We got to the point where we barely noticed them.

  That rainy night and the odd shower aside, it was a droughty season, desert dry and desert hot. The browned tall grass and agarita waved luxuriantly in places where the cattle or the county hadn’t caught up enough to crop it. Cut grass lay bundled in fields too, soaked in five minutes and dried back into fuel in an hour. The humidity stayed low. And it would stay that way until January, when the baked ground sucked up the little rain that fell and looked just as parched afterward. And so the fire could have started the way a thousand Texas wildfires start every year. A cigarette butt. A lightning strike.

  People thought that, at first.

  One late afternoon when Desiree was about eight weeks old, I came into the cabin and found Arley frantically swabbing a spreading brown pool around the old Mr. Coffee that the owner kept in the kitchen. “I can’t do this,” she told me, red-faced. “This is the second time I’ve made this mess.”

  “It’s in wrong or something.” I opened the swing-out well in the unit’s housing. She had stuffed a nice handful of beans in there. “Arley, these beans aren’t ground. You have to grind them.”

  “We always used instant at home,” she said sullenly. “I never saw anything like that before.”

  “What about at the restaurant?” Why was I needling her?

  “They just got the ground kind there. I thought this would make the bean kind. I’m not retarded.”

  “Where did you get it, anyhow? Is it this guy’s? He’s got to have a coffee grinder, then.”

  She was sweating, her hair greasy, and she turned to me, hands on hips, with as close to a belligerent attitude as Arley would ever display to me. “Well, you brought the damn stuff! I know you meant it for a nice present, but look! I poured it all over the floor!”

  “What present?”

  “Jeez, Anne. The coffee. You know, the coffee?”

  “I didn’t bring this coffee.”

  She stared at me. “I found it on the porch.”

  “Charley must have brought it.”

  “It was just there when I hung out the baby’s things to dry.”

  “Charley probably forgot and just got beans. Honey, take it easy. I’ll have it ground at the store when I go home, and I’ll bring it back to you. I didn’t even know you drank coffee, Arley.”

  “Well, I do! All kids in Texas drink coffee! And now I’m going to have to drink it twice as much if I’m going to stay up all night every night of my life.”

  I sent her for a nap. And of course, I forgot all about the coffee beans. I found them in the trunk of my car the following spring, when, late for court, I blew a tire going over a curb. I never even asked Charley about them.

  The flowers were another story. Just before Christmas, a bouquet of lantana and Indian paintbrush, tied with red ribbon, showed up on the front steps of the cabin. “They’re kind of like from my wedding,” Arley told me, her voice husky with fear and something else, almost a dreary elation.

  “Arley, who do you think these are from?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Charley? Maybe they’re for you?”

  “Maybe. But he’d have told me. . . .”

  “Yeah, I’m totally sure he’d have told you.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  She turned away from me, with a sniff. I felt like a fool, then, for trying to keep the extent of Charley and me from her, and because I felt foolish, I got angry.

  “Listen, Arley. Let’s not worry about me. Have you heard anything else about Dillon, or from him?”

  “No.” But she hesitated, a hesitation no one else would have noticed.

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Swear.”

  “Let me alone, Anne.”

  “This is serious, Arley.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I know what he’s done, or what they all say he did? You think I want him to come here?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “I know that feelings are powerful, passion is powerful—”

  “I said no!” she screamed. “Now what else can I say? Do you think I’m so stupid all I care about is sex? Do you think that’s all I think about? What about you?”

  “Me? Why am I in this?”

  It was our first genuine fight. We’ve had others since, but not many, and never so loud. Arley shouted at me, red-faced: Shut up, she said, just shut up; she couldn’t take any more bullshit questions, from me or the police or Elena; she was worn out with the baby and everything else, and she wished she’d never met Dillon or me, and she just wanted to be left alone to run her own life, and she didn’t need me or my money . . . and of course, deeply mature individual that I am, I yelled right back—lovely things about where she might be if it weren’t for my help and what had her own mother done for her—and then the baby woke up and started to cry and I stalked out of there and drove home, sobbing.

  When I got there, there were already three messages on the answering machine: “Annie, I’m so sorry, Annie. I do owe you everything and I know that I was an awful bitch, but the thing is, I can’t stand talking about him anymore; it just hurts too much. . . .” Beep. “Annie, it’s me again. Like I said, I’m really sorry, and I guess this was all my fault. I know you just want the best for me, but I really don’t know. Annie, are you there and just not picking up the phone? Which is okay, really. I would understand.” Beep. “Annie, I’m better now, but I’m still sorry, and you’re right, but didn’t you ever know you were being really stupid about something, and then someone keeps reminding you how stupid you are, and you just have to defend it, anyhow? Just, like, to keep your pride? Probably you never did. . . .”

  Of course, I felt like a nickel-plated shit, and I drove right back out there, beating myself up the whole while: No, I’d never done anything stupid, nothing like sleeping with the carpenter and neglecting even to mention that fact to my loyal and trusting companion o
f eleven years, whose ring I still wore on my hand.

  At the cabin, Arley and I bathed Desi in a tin tub on the porch. Warm water soothed Desi, then and now; she’s still a little porpoise. But that night, she actually fell asleep while Arley was dripping water from a squeezed cloth onto her blond tufts. We hated to move her, to dress her. The sunset turned Desi’s bathwater pink and her body a deep rose. Her tiny toes floated like foam. She started to fuss when Arley diapered her, and suddenly seemed ready to combust. But I took her, and she caught her breath and sighed herself to sleep, light as flannel, on my shoulder, making me feel all maternal and proud.

  Then we all sat on the little glider that took up half of the tiny railed front porch, and I told Arley everything she already knew.

  “You know that Charley . . . ,” I began. “You know that Charley and I are, uh, close. . . .”

  “I know he’s in love with you.”

  “Well, me too. Maybe.”

  “I know that too.”

  “Okay. But I’ve been with Stuart for eleven years. And I love Stuart very much. I mean, we had hoped to be married by now, really. And I just don’t know if I want that anymore.” I felt the tears start behind my eyes.

  We sat there, pushing against the floorboards with our feet, in synchrony.

  “I don’t want you to believe that I haven’t considered Stuart’s feelings, or that this thing with Charley was just an . . . an impulse I’ll regret later on. I think it might be . . . a change for me in the way I’ve lived my life.”

  “You mean you thought it over.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just not very long.”

  “That’s right. But no matter how bad I feel about some of the effects of what I’ve done, I don’t feel bad about—what I’ve done.”

  “Ahh.” Arley looked up at the sherbet rim of light above the ridge. “I know what you mean.”