The Most Wanted

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  I wish that I could ask Mama more about it, but no hope of that. Mama’s out of my life for good, and that’s the right thing for me, though it can’t ever be a cause for happiness. I can speculate, though. Mama probably loved his face, and the way he sang, and loved having his hands on her, beyond good sense or reason. Maybe she wasn’t looking to make her a family when she had us all. Maybe she wanted to be a child herself, a child wanted, in the way she never had been by her own mama, and us kids were the ties she used to try to bind Mr. Justice to her. Look at those names she gave us—mine’s for the town where they have that old amusement park, Six Flags. Cam’s name is for Cameron, Texas; but his middle name is Jeremy, which, though everyone always called him “Remy,” is Mr. Justice’s real first name. Langtry’s middle name is Justine, from Justice. Mama was trying her best to cook up a sort of family tree, doing things that looked the way you would think relationships look if you never had the real experience.

  But it didn’t work out. Maybe they were both just missing parts, so nothing they made together could be real. By the time she got to me, I guess Mama really knew the score, and she sort of just ran out of enthusiasm. That’s why she never bothered with giving me a middle name, only the name of the town where they were the night they slept together and she woke up with me inside her, the way I woke up at Solamente River with Desiree in me.

  I’ll bet she kept on thinking, until the very end, that if she followed Mr. Justice around enough, he’d turn out to be her colored wagon, the one who made her free. The one who made her a somebody. And probably that was the last time she really tried anything having to do with loving another person.

  I guess Lang wanted the same thing, too, though I’ll never be able to ask her. She won’t be in the women’s prison at Taggart forever, but hell would freeze over before I’d have anything to do with my sister. They couldn’t rehabilitate her enough so far as I’m concerned. I guess her men friends sort of threw in and got her a pretty hot defense lawyer from Dallas, who tried to convince the jury that she did what she did because Dillon hypnotized a woman too young to know better. But the jury didn’t entirely buy that. They gave Lang life for the border guard and twenty-five years for killing Dillon. To be honest, there probably was some hypnotism going on. I know what Dillon was capable of—and Lang had nothing to fall back on. He probably talked her up a vision of some tropical paradise they were going off to, just to get her to cooperate with him. And she always just took whatever she could get, even if it wasn’t hers. She got that from Mama.

  On that night, the night of the fire, it must have hit Lang like a sack of bricks that she’d done everything she’d done for nothing. That everything she thought she had with Dillon was just a lie.

  The way Lang’s lawyer told Annie, Dillon promised he was just going to go get the baby. And Lang thought Dillon was going to kill me. She actually believed that he was going to kill me, when the real truth was probably that he was just using Lang to find me. Langtry helped him tail me from watching Annie’s comings and goings at the places where I was. And she helped set the fire to draw everybody’s attention away from me.

  But it must have been when she saw me standing in the doorway, and saw me take the baby away from Dillon, that Lang’s tumultuous jealous heart just burst. She balanced that deer rifle they’d stolen on a tree limb and aimed the telescopic sight right at Dillon, not giving a damn, either, what happened to the baby or to me.

  She’d have killed me. Her greed and Mama’s spitefulness almost cost me my life. Lang would have fired again, if Mr. Justice hadn’t grabbed her from behind.

  He saved my life.

  He saved my life, and Desi’s, just like he gave me those scarlet ribbons when I worked at Taco Haven, and like he gave me that track stile. Maybe he always cared more than he could ever study out how to show. Maybe he had to wait until I was away from Mama to pay any attention to me at all. I figure that’s why I never saw him before I started working at Taco Haven. But I’ll bet he was around. Like he said, guys like him are pretty invisible.

  Just the little bit of how gentle he treated me makes me see how he must have been, long ago.

  I wish I could ask Mr. Justice more about the time before I was born, and about his people. I’d try, but I don’t think he’d have the words for it. I see him sometimes, but it’s not how you would imagine it being in a novel, a big reunion and him being a good grandpa to Desi and all. Mr. Justice is not well. He still lives in that shell of a trailer out by Uvalde, and he’s not all there, in the head, all those years of whiskey and probably a core sadness being the reasons why. Sometimes he comes around, and he always leaves things for Desi, the way he did the coffee and the flowers and her beautiful bed. He leaves little horses carved from wood, but he hardly sticks around long enough for me to thank him. Cam sees him once in a while, too, and I know Cam would like to know him better; Cam also hopes that someday him and me will be friends again. Maybe we will.

  If it were mine to choose, I’d have Mr. Justice be a real daddy, and teach Desi and me to play the fiddle, which he still can do, and beautifully. But what Mr. Justice did for me was all he could do, and he did it at the time it mattered, and I have to reckon that it’s enough. It seems to me that you have to accept what you’re given, and choose what you’re able to. That there are relationships in a life that can change the whole course of everything, even if they don’t last forever. Even if they don’t last the whole length of a life, but instead, just a moment.

  It’s like what Charley says about a tree being an individual and also a family. Everything that happens to a tree is stored inside it—every disaster, every good season—but it’s only the tiny outer part of the tree that is actually alive. Mr. Justice and Mama are part of the wood that formed the living me. Now, my middle name is Mowbray. There’s a lot connected with that name that isn’t pretty or hopeful, but I keep it, just like I do the name LeGrande, because that is a part of who I am. It’s a part, though, that’s not living anymore, like the inner circles of a tree. It is what was, not what is. I’ve had to cut the branches the way Charley prunes our trees in the fall to shape them how they should grow; but that doesn’t mean I cut away the parts that are preserved within, even the ones I wouldn’t choose again.

  Dillon is part of that wood heart too. I have to put him in a place that barricades all that was gruesome and shameful and cruel. I have to accept, and not grieve that in the moment we had, he was all he could ever be to me. I have to believe that those magazine stories about “The Highwayman” are about a boy I never knew, or knew only the shining part of. To the rest of the world, Dillon was the one who crossed over, who terrorized and who robbed. But I was the robber, too, that night in the trailer at the prison. I robbed him of his gold, the best he had in him, without knowing it, and combined it with what was good in me to make the jewel of my life. To make my Desiree. The night he wanted to take her, I robbed him of her again—and if I’d had to, I’d have killed him. Not out of rage or greed, like my sister. But to protect Desiree. I would stop at nothing to protect my baby.

  Maybe I was just like Mama and like Lang, wanting Dillon to be the thing that made all the difference in the world. As it turned out, he was—though, like so much in a life, not at all in the way you foresee.

  Without Dillon, there’d have been no Desi. Until Desi, I thought I understood what love was, and what family was, but I didn’t know a thing. Her deep little voice and the way she comes up to me and says, “My daughter, my daughter,” as if I were the little girl and she the mama, is so funny and so glorious I sometimes can’t imagine why all the songs musicians write are about love between women and men, instead of love for a child by the grownups in her family.

  What I have now really is a family, though it sure doesn’t look like an ordinary one. But one of the good things about living in reverse is that most kids start out surrounded by love they have to grow out of. And I grew into mine. Annie and Charley and Desi and I live in the big house, and little Claude,
who’s six, visits all the time. She loves Desi like crazy, and she spoils her rotten; she walks around calling her “honeybear.” Any day now, though, Claude’s going to have another honeybear. Annie tells Charley she wants to cover the mirrors so she can’t see her reflection until she loses twenty-five pounds. That’s why they’re not getting married until a couple of months after the baby comes, because Annie is so darned vain she says she doesn’t want wedding pictures of her looking like Moby Singer. Charley says they’ll be just like the movie stars who never get married till they have a string of kids.

  Their baby is a boy. They had to have those genetic tests, because of Annie’s being over forty; but he’s fine. My suggestion is they call him Thornton Wilder, because they already got a Claude Monet and they could keep up the famous-name tradition. After all, Charley’s kind of a hippie, not a big professional like Stuart was and all. He doesn’t look like the kind of man for Annie; but you can tell just by looking at them that theirs is a true love, one that will last forever. And you can hear that love—a laugh, a cry—through the walls some nights when our house is quiet. Annie and Charley don’t mean it, but those nights torment me.

  They are the nights I think of Dillon.

  They are the nights I dream.

  Those will be the nights I’ll dream of the fire, or of Dillon kissing me on that mattress in the cabin, dreams that scare me so I sometimes start sobbing without ever knowing I made a noise.

  I know what dreams are supposed to be. They’re the inside of your mind talking to the outside, picking at things you can’t figure out during the day, or things you try to ignore.

  But I’m not sure if that’s all there is to these dreams.

  Sometimes, I think, maybe they’re like ghosts. Maybe they come from what lasts, after a person dies. What would that really be? A soul? And made of what? The evil people did on earth? Or their love?

  I wonder most, to be honest, because there’s another dream I have. Not as often as the others. I’ve had it only three or four times. But I think of it even more.

  In that dream, I have my legs thrown over Dillon’s and my long hair that’s been cut off for so many years swoops down over us like a steed’s wild black mane, and our motion and our emotion are fused into one moving thing, and I’m not afraid, even though I’m naked and completely unprotected. I look straight into Dillon’s green eyes and I feel that I want us to be just this way, face-to-face, until both of us blink out, dissolve, until there is nothing left of either of us but a whisper.

  I’m sure that I’ll stop having that dream someday. When the time comes.

  I want to grow up to be a person like Annie and her sister, Rachael, the two women I admire most in the world. If I’m lucky, I’ll be happy and I’ll be settled, the way they are, the kind of woman who makes decisions that aren’t based on a lust and an appetite that cared no more for the real world than a range fire cares whether it burns a shack or a mansion. I’ll teach Desiree to be that way, too.

  Then I’ll know I’m fully grown.

  And that dream won’t matter anymore.

  But if it does still matter, when I’m old, and my time comes to die, then I’ll find out for myself whether there really are ghosts.

  Lullaby

  Now I lay you down

  my sweet, downy

  head beneath my cheek,

  to sleep your deep

  and dreamless sleep.

  The angels keep you

  safe, I pray; my little one,

  my Desiree,

  and I will watch and I will wait

  and rock this bough

  that will not break.

  No one will take

  your soul this night.

  I’m here.

  Arlington Mowbray LeGrande

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE