The Most Wanted (7 page)

Three days later, I got a letter back. It was only a page, but it came express. The postman brought it right up to the door; thank God Mama wasn’t home.

It said that my name was filled with “music” and my dream with “prophecy.” And it finished up with these lines: “I can’t abide cheap trading on real feelings. So if you think it would be a big laugh to tell your girlfriends you’re writing to a man behind bars, find a different man. I’m sure there’s plenty wouldn’t mind. Now, myself, I’m hungrier than I can rightly explain for the pleasures of real life, and they’ve been denied me for two more long years. So if you want to write, I will answer you. If you honestly want to share thoughts with me, I will respond truthfully. It was that dream about rising up and out, out of this dusty redneck hell, that made me have enough trust to do it this first time. But if you’re not that woman of energy and heart, don’t write me back. I won’t bear you ill will.”

It was signed: “Yr. obedient servant, Dillon Thomas LeGrande.”

I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to cry, I felt so ashamed.

It was like he saw right through me. Saw me sitting there thinking maybe I could use him for some kind of status symbol at school, for proof that I wasn’t little Goody Two-shoes. It was just what he feared.

The saddest thing, though, what really grabbed my heart, was that in spite of what he suspected, he still turned to me. He was so lonely, he had to take the risk of getting betrayed. And I was the one he turned to.

I couldn’t foresee, from that first letter, what would happen with us. But I knew how it felt to be that lonely, to feel as though there wasn’t one other person in the whole world who truly cared about your feelings or your thoughts. To feel you would never be free of everything that tied your hands. And so the pull from him to me was like the pull of the earth, all that loneliness a void to be filled.

Of course it’s easy for me to say now, because I know what came afterward. But somehow I felt bound to Dillon from that first moment, simply by how much he needed me. No matter what else, I’ve never seen anything to convince me that being wanted isn’t more powerful than wanting, that it’s the most powerful thing of all.

Annie once got so mad at me when I was explaining this to her that she about went savage. She said Dillon probably tried that line about his loneliness on a dozen girls, that he was a professional manipulator, using self-pity to set the hook, and that he finally snagged someone. And maybe she’s right. But I also think that from the very beginning, Annie was jealous of the power Dillon had over me, and jealous, too, of the way we felt. After all, she knew how you could fall in love—the kind of love anyone would recognize as love, the kind that’s enough to have a life together, even—and still not feel how we did.

Or maybe it’s just different for people like Dillon and me. Annie’s not from here. She used to say she’d seen it all at her legal aid agency, but seeing it’s not the same thing. You’re still a step outside the rim. Annie’s mama would leave messages if Annie didn’t call her every single Sunday. But a phone call at the house where I lived with Mama and Cam could be to tell you someone was in jail up North or dead. You asked somebody, they’d always say kin is kin. But that doesn’t mean the same thing to people everyplace. When you grow up with all kinds of love from your blood kin, maybe you don’t have that desperate hope for someone out there waiting who can make up for all the things blood never brought you. Someone who can look deep inside you and see things no one ever bothered to tell you were there.

We
both knew. Not right away, but early on. It was like you had been waiting all your life, hungry for one sweet food; and finally you got it in your mouth, and you knew you would never need anything else to fill you again. Like God didn’t make one, but two, and you were born knowing everything in each other before you ever laid eyes on each other or said one word.

Dillon later said that what convinced him I was his special waiting someone was the way I described my dream, the very last thing I wrote, the thing I almost left out of my letter.

Dillon thought that numbers were significant, and he thought that since the first letter I wrote him was about the first dream I remembered, and because he was my first love, we were meant to share that dream. I reckon that’s at least one thing he never had to lose.

T
HERE WAS NO
good reason to drive over to Avalon to see Arley that Wednesday. There was no good reason to see Arley at all, in fact, for the time being.

I had a dozen cases in which time pressed more urgently. But there were plenty of things to do for Arley’s sake. One thing was to phone Ray Henry Southwynn, the warden at Solamente River, to see whether a few minutes of plain talk could derail the potentially expensive path of this petition somewhere short of court. But first, I needed to be more of an authority on the matter. For me, hell is being embarrassed. And there’s nothing that can short-sheet you faster than a lack of information.

I flipped through Arley’s file. I could call a few of her teachers. I could call her mother. I could do all those things if I could sit still, which I couldn’t. A dangerous bout of buying anything I could find in the office vending machine and slathering it with frijole dip threatened, so I took a walk down the hall, looked in to see if Patty could be distracted into wasting some time with me, ended up settling for a bag of pretzels and the tepid coffee that was Lilia’s specialty—today, everything in Texas would be boiling except the coffee in our office.

Back at my desk, I decided to call my sister. We hadn’t spoken in weeks. I looked at my watch. She’d still be home, flying around the kitchen, stuffing clients’ business plans and her sons’ forgotten homework papers into the same huge, worn doctor’s black bag (formerly my father’s) that Rachael had used as a briefcase since graduation. I lifted the receiver and listened to the harsh buzz, but I didn’t dial her number. There was something I wanted to ask Rachael. Something that pertained to my business with Arley. I just wasn’t sure what.

Still restless, I sat on the windowsill and flipped open Arley’s purple folder. Here was Dillon, in one early letter, on the night of the crime: “I should never have been used the way I was at the Humble station with Kevin and his buddy. I let myself get victimized by greed. The only thing that hurts is that I ended up taking the fall for everyone else. But there’s no point complaining about it. I could tell you a great deal about that night that would put it in perspective, but it would only be scratched out by the censors (hello, gentlemen!), and it will suffice to say that I had never had a gun in my hand outside of the pasture back home until that very night—though I must admit, I am a dead shot. . . .” Nothing special here, or at least, not really. Lots of tough-guy talk and that ever-present savor of conspiracy. In Stuart’s experience, he always says, plenty of bad eggs are eager to admit what they’ve done and treat you to the Technicolor version. But in my job I seem to encounter the kind of mopes who were always on their way to either choir practice or a tryout with the Mets when nasty fate intervened. I couldn’t get what little I’d seen of Arley to stick comfortably to the flypaper of Dillon’s quite ordinary self-pity—she seemed to have such preternatural grace and sanity for a girl her age. How had things escalated, in mere weeks, from ordinary lonely-pen-pal-in-the-pen chatter—“Gee, there’s nobody like you”—to “Instead of going out on your first date, how about marrying an armed robber?”

I read on. It was all the fault of younger brother Kevin, who had been “wild as a hard rain since the day he was born and given our mom no end of suffering.” But enough about good old Mom: Dillon quickly got back to number one. “If only that kid at the Humble had not jumped down on me like the damned Sundance Kid—I’m surprised he didn’t kill us both—nobody would’ve been hurt. He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to be no hero. All Kevin wanted was beer money, anyhow. And now here I sit. I can see about four inches of sky through the window just across of my cell and down the hall. My big excitement for the week is when I see a storm cloud. The whole place gets jumpy when there’s going to be a storm. We’re like cattle in a barn, trying to feel changes in the air.”

Well, there
was
that: he was smarter than most.

But guys in prison have nothing if not time, and those who can read do. They borrow from what they read; there isn’t a con without a whole storybook full of naive, romantic, grandiose, unfocused plans. Dillon certainly had his down pat: He was going to trace his roots back to County Galway, Ireland, where his mother’s people, the Dillons, were from. He was going to write poetry—after all, wasn’t there some kind of kismet in the fact that he was named Dillon Thomas (never mind the spelling). And he was going to collect antiques, and get a big cattle spread like his grandpa used to have, before the old man was forced to sell off. “And a week later,” Dillon wrote, “the land was punched for oil leases and ended up making every non-Dillon in sight richer than God.” Sheesh. The dog probably died too, run over by the pickup truck. If Dillon LeGrande’s family didn’t have bad luck, evidently, they’d have had no luck at all.

My head began to hurt at the back, the place where I believe conundrums are stored like tightly capped jars of pickles and relish. Hadn’t there been a single person in Arley Mowbray’s life with enough brains to point out that this particular ladder of love was one any fool could see didn’t have a safe rung to stand on? And even if every single person she knew had warned her, would it have mattered?

Any fool, I thought. My job had not done much to strengthen my belief in the common sense of women. From what I’d seen, for the love of a man, plenty of women would cut up their best friends and sell them for body parts. Good relationship? Lousy relationship? Didn’t seem to matter much. Experience with that kind of psychology had made me sort of a handicapper for certain varieties of attraction—I could pick the couples who would wind up at our office in pieces just by looking at what special sorts of trouble they’d been raised on and were predestined to seek out for themselves when they grew up. It didn’t explain, though, how a normal woman, with normal cells and an ordinary background, could pass Go at warp speed without a backward glance, headed straight for the worst man in the room. I myself had never had the kind of love that didn’t sprout from friendship. In Stuart, especially, there was the essential buddiness that outlasted simple heat. And so it had been with the ones before him—only two major candidates, really—both candid, indoorsy English majors, versions of me who buttoned on the right.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in the charms of animal attraction. Attraction was a good thing. The involuntary tightening of tissues, the flutter, the sinking, the sense of wanting to steep yourself in another person’s smell. Great sex was like a good massage—a gift of being alive you could not imagine doing without. But I would never have willingly danced in traffic for its sake, or any other sake. I’d learned from meeting scores of sad-eyed old ladies who’d had only thirty birthdays that life was too short for certain risks. You definitely didn’t want it to get shorter.

I began chewing through a pen casing, a little stress habit I’d always had and never noticed until the bitter-grass taste of the ink broke through. We were talking about a fourteen-year-old here, a girl who still considered songs on the radio renditions of her real feelings.

But was that fair?

Didn’t the radio sing to all fools?

How many times had I tried to suppress giggles when Stuart got choked up trying to sing along with “Up On the Roof,” which reminded him fatally of Mary Sullivan, the goddess of his apartment-house terrace, who loved him with a ferocity that curled his toes, then left him for a seminarian. Twenty-five years later, he said he could still smell the vanilla of her red hair. And Jeanine. Jeanine was my best friend in Texas, sane as salt, the director of an adoption agency, who swore that, in her job, she’d seen every permutation on a loser that the Y chromosome had to offer. But she’d met Bruce at the airport and taken off with him to Key West, only to end up in an enlightening phone call with his (second) wife a week later.

And look at Rachael. I knew now why she was on my mind so much. Carlos. I found a fresh pen and settled down for another chew. My own saintly sister, the princess of prudence, a woman who actually planned, in high school, to become an accountant. Rachael and Carlos. How many years had it been since I’d thought about that? About the year my sister had spent cutting classes and running up my parents’ gas cards to visit her bad-boy beau at the flat where he lived with several hundred aunts, cousins, and siblings?

My kid sister was no turnip. Rachael had a quick brain and a hot temper, but the temper emerged only when someone tried to interfere with the excruciating slowness that her every decision required, be it buying a bra or choosing a college. Except when it came to Carlos—that once. There had been no talking to Rachael, not that I’d tried. And why hadn’t I tried? Well, Carlos had come along at an awkward time in our sisterhood—my first year of law school, which had consumed all I was and all I had. Still, Rachael was my only and beloved sibling. There had to have been more to it than that.

There
was
more to it than that. I gnawed my pen. I’d given up too easily, possibly because, like every sister at some point, I
wanted
Rachie to stumble, trip herself up.

And she did. Almost. For the first time, she’d gone to war with our parents. The slightest criticism about the merits of a long-term relationship between a Jewish doctor’s daughter from the Upper West Side and a dropout Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx with a thing for lighters and litter bins simply rendered Rachael as impermeable as an oyster shell. Long-distance, from law school in Wisconsin, I marveled at my parents’ restraint, as distinct from their ordinary behavior as Rachie’s obsession was from hers. I remember now how jealous I’d been of their gentle patience with the spoiled brat, always their fair one. Now, of course, I see that it was their very self-restraint that finally allowed Rachael the room she needed to turn around. Had my parents not let her alone, Rachael could easily be right now sitting vigil on Saturday nights in some parish church in Jersey.

Once she was in college and dating solid citizens like herself, we both sort of behaved as if that time had never happened. I figured Rachael felt that she’d let everyone down. I guess I felt that I’d let
her
down. And I’d taken my cue from my parents: around me, at least, they’d never spoken Carlos’s name again.

What the gap meant, though, was that there was a universe of things I didn’t know about Rachael and Carlos. All the things I’d wanted to know but never asked—or never wanted to know? My sister and Carlos met one summer when her temple youth group tutored a select group of bright JDs. He was two years younger, sixteen, and their relationship had lasted a full twelve hours before they made love, Rachael’s first time, standing up in the book-storage room of a public library—something my sister probably had imagined as likely to happen to her as running away with the Ice Capades. She’d confided as much to me, late one night over margaritas at our aunt’s place in Florida, when we were having one of those “first time vs. best time” sister talks. Those kinds of revelations weren’t ever off-limits between us. I’ve always thought Rachie’s secrets and motivations were mine by birthright. But I hadn’t taken the subject of Carlos further that time, nor had I since.

Okay, there was the fact that the whole thing was creepy. I did know that Rachael’s adventure ended when Carlos finally had to choose between prison and the army. I imagined that I felt about the relationship the same way I’d have felt learning Rachael was bulimic but cured. Glad I knew. Glad I didn’t know too much. Glad it had all worked out for the best without me.