The Perfect Letter (6 page)

Four years she went without a word from him. Jake had never written back to her, never called, never came out to see her when she tried to visit. So when she was about to graduate from Harvard and move down to New York, she decided to stop writing him altogether. He didn't care about her anymore, she was certain about that. She needed a clean break, a fresh start. She needed to move on. Wasn't that what he'd told her, the last time they'd spoken, the last day of the trial when the jury foreman had read the verdict, that awful, awful verdict? He'd leaned over to speak to her, just her, in the crowded courtroom while the bailiffs were preparing to take him away. She'd leaned forward in her seat to hear him, and his mouth had moved against her ear.
Forget about me. I'm no good for you. Move on with your life, Leigh,
he'd said. And she had. He couldn't fault her for taking his advice.

She opened the last letter, though she still remembered very well what it said.
Dear Jake,
it read,

            
I've tried not to be so angry with you, but it isn't easy. I didn't expect when you said I should move on with my life that it meant you would cut off all contact with me, that you would refuse to give me a single word from you, no sense of how you're doing, what you're doing, if you're coping well, or badly, or at all. If you still think about me, if you still care. I'm writing into silence here—it's like broadcasting letters into empty space, waiting for some echo to come back to me. It's cold, and blank, and alone. I've given up everything except school and these letters. I
promised you I'd wait for you, and for nearly four years I've kept that promise, shutting myself up, shutting out the world, waiting for the day you'd get out. I have hardly any friends here, hardly any life. I don't do anything except go to class and write to you. I don't have any family anymore either, no one but Chloe. I think I've been afraid to make new friends, to let anyone else into my heart, because it's still full of you.

                 
I'm starting to think it would have been better if we'd never met at all.

                 
I know you must be angry with me, that you must blame me for what happened, but I don't understand why you won't answer my letters. Are you trying to torture me? To make me suffer?

                 
If you are, it's working. I'm serving a sentence, too. Maybe it's the wrong kind of sentence—maybe you don't think it's fair, and it's not—but I can't change that now. I can't change the fact that you weren't the one who really killed Dale Tucker, and I can't change the fact that you decided to tell everyone you were, and that the jury decided to believe you. We both have to live with the decisions we've made.

                 
All I wanted was a letter. A note. Something. I don't think I can keep doing this, writing and writing every week without a word from you. Any word would do. Even “good-bye.”

                 
If you won't say it, then I will. Good-bye, Jake. I'm finally moving on, like you said I should.

She remembered writing that, how angry she'd been, how hurt. She had written it to a man who was in prison, convicted—
wrongly
convicted—of killing another person. A man who had sacrificed his future for hers. And not a day had gone by that she hadn't wondered if she hadn't made a terrible mistake. But she couldn't take it back. She didn't know how.

She set the letter down. There was a second bundle of envelopes, too—clean white envelopes, sealed, never opened. Each one was addressed to her in the same cramped, uneven handwriting, the same black pen, but there was no postage, no return address. They'd never been mailed. Tied around the bundle was a note in the same handwriting. It read,

            
I kept these for the time we would meet again. I thought maybe they would explain why I did the things I did. I thought maybe it wouldn't be too late.

                 
Now I think it would be wrong for me to intrude on your new life. No hard feelings.

                 
You did everything you set out to do. You really made it, kid, and I'm so proud of you. It was all worth it. I swear.

                 
You once asked me for one word, even if it was good-bye. Now you have it. The word is “love.” I'll always love you.

 

—J.

She slid down the wall with the letter in her hands, shaking so much she could hardly breathe, her eyes blurring with tears. The light in the cottage seemed to dim.
I'll always love you,
he'd written. But it was too late. He was too late. He'd been too proud, taken too long. She'd made a new life for herself. He couldn't undo everything she'd spent the last ten years building.
Some mistakes can't be unmade, Jake, no matter how hard you try. The dead can't rise again, can they? The sentence can't be commuted after it's served. And we both served that sentence, no matter how hard you tried to protect me, Jake. We both got locked away all those years ago.

She had left Texas behind, but it hadn't left her. It was here, now, in this room, in her hands, and she knew immediately she would have to find him. She would have to find Jake and close the door on the past once and for all. She didn't have a choice.

 

MAY
20, 2004

Burnside County Jail

Dear Leigh,

Three days I've been here, three days of fear and violence. Three days of despair. I lie on a mattress of stones, waiting for sleep that never comes.

I saw you today, even though you didn't know it. I saw you in your blue dress, the one with the white polka dots, the one like a shower of meteors streaking across the sky. Your hair was tied up in a ponytail. The sun was shining on it, all that long dark hair. I wanted to reach up, pull the rubber band out, and let it fall through my hands like water. Bury my face in it and breathe deeply. Drown in it. I thought if I could touch you one more time, if I could feel your hands on me again just once, I could go back into the prison and stay behind bars the rest of my life. I would face the death penalty, if it meant I could touch you once more before I go.

I didn't know the last time I kissed you would be the last time.

It was from the window in my cell I saw you. You parked your granddaddy's white truck in the visitors' lot. You came up the walk to the front door of the jail wearing your red lipstick, clutching your mama's little white purse. A vision of how you'd look at forty, fifty—still beautiful, still brilliant and burning as a deep blue night. I wanted to freeze that picture, bring you to a standstill. I want to remember you like that.

The guards came to tell me I had a visitor. I told them to send you away. I said I wouldn't come out for anyone but Jesus.

I stood at the window and watched you come out again. You were crying. You put your head in your hands, and my heart broke, because I knew I had done the one thing I swore I would never do: I had made you cry.

I don't dare let you see me here. I don't dare speak to you
behind a glass window. If I see you, I know my resolve will break, and that's the one thing I can't let happen. My only comfort is knowing that I am sparing you everything I see around me. How can I look at you through a glass, lie to you, tell you I'm fine?

I don't sleep. I don't eat. Down the hall from me there's a crazy man screaming about bugs crawling on him. My clothes are filthy. I haven't had a shower or slept or eaten a decent meal. My cellmate is a car thief who punched a cop. He snores all night. I can't tell him to roll over—he's already said if I talk to him he'll stab me in my sleep. Violence in him like a sickness.

I asked one of the guards if he could move me to a different cell, and he laughed. You think this is a hotel? the guard said. You think you can switch rooms if you don't like the bed or the view?

No, sir, I said.

Take my advice, kid, he said. Pick the biggest guy here and beat the shit out of him one day where everyone can see. The others will think you're crazy and leave you alone.

That's all the protection I have here. What I can earn through violence.

I'm not complaining, not really. I deserve this terror. I deserve this darkness, after what I did. I deceived you, and I allowed myself to be deceived. I won't let myself be a curse on your life anymore. When I think of you safe and whole, getting ready to head off to Harvard, I know I'm doing the right thing. I can atone for both of us.

I already know I won't send this letter to you. I already know it will upset you. I don't want you to think about doing something foolish. You can't save me. Only I can do that.

I hope you can forgive me for today. For everything.

 

Love,

—J.

W
olf's Head Farms, the Thoroughbred ranch owned by Leigh's grandfather, sat outside the little town of Burnside, Texas, a river town a few miles west of Austin in Texas Hill Country—spring-fed, sunwarmed, green and rolling as England. Better horse country, too, her granddad always said. It was the clear springs, Gene used to say, that made Texas Thoroughbreds grow up to be such fast runners, the fastest anywhere, and though Leigh always suspected it was an old man's sentimental attachment to the land that kept him there more than any magic springs, she never dared contradict him. Her grandfather loved Texas—loved its harshness, loved its beauty. The prickly irascible nature of the place suited him, suited his sharp mind and quick temper and taciturn disposition, his soft old heart, and she'd known, even as a very young child, that he would never leave it.

She'd grown up on the farm protected by her granddad's money and his deep love for his impulsive, restless, book-loving granddaughter. Her mother, Abby, had grown up there, too, the younger of Gene Merrill's two kids—“stubborn as a two-dollar mule,” her grandfather always said, which was ironic coming from a man as stubborn as he was—but despite that one shared quality, they had little in common. Gene was old-fashioned, as strict and controlling as Abby was idealistic and adventurous. Abby's mother, Leigh's grandmother, had died of a sudden heart attack when Abby was in high school, and her absence became an ache in her daughter like a missing tooth, and afterward father and daughter never saw eye to eye on much. When Abby graduated high school she ran away to New York to live with a bunch of musicians in a cold-water squat on the Lower East Side against her father's explicit orders. It was the seventies, after all. Gene was a horseman, an outdoorsman, a self-made businessman and Texan—he didn't have much patience with punks or hippies and was suspicious of anything as unconventional as a squat. He was deeply disappointed when Abby came home pregnant and unmarried after five years. She'd broken his heart, he said. Still, he took his daughter back into his home, and after Leigh was born he doted on her as much as if she'd been his own child.

Everything between them would have been all right after that, except that Abby wouldn't name Leigh's father. The secret was a splinter that burrowed itself between Gene and his only daughter, a constant source of irritation. Leigh suspected her grandfather would have taken a shotgun to her daddy if he'd been able to find him, so Abby kept him a secret, so secret that not even Leigh knew his name or where to find him. It was possible that Abby hadn't really known herself who he was, but that didn't stop Leigh from dreaming about him, from imagining Abby as a young girl in the big city, a punk girl with black hair and big black boots and a leather jacket living a whirlwind
romance with a mysterious stranger. It didn't stop Leigh from dreaming that she, too, might run away from home one day, run to New York and have her own adventure there, meet someone mysterious, wriggle out from under her grandfather's strict control.

Life was quiet at Wolf's Head—too quiet, for Leigh—and over time New York started to feel like a beacon, calling to her from her bedroom in Texas with its pink canopy, its parade of stuffed animals. At the Burnside library she'd take out all the books on New York: its politics, its complicated geography, its history. She'd cut pictures of Manhattan skyscrapers and brownstones out of magazines and hang them on the walls of her room, pore over real-estate listings to choose fantasy apartments and neighborhoods, watch Woody Allen and Nora Ephron movies and dress like the characters. And she had the perfect career in mind for a girl addicted to romance novels, one that was guaranteed to lead her to Manhattan one day—editor. All she had to do was get terrific grades, go to a top-notch school, and learn everything there was to know about books.

Her mother seemed to love the idea. She'd look at the pictures of Manhattan on Leigh's walls and the movies about Brooklyn on the TV and say,
We'll go there together one day, Leela. I'll show you all the places I lived. I'll introduce you to the people I knew. You'll be happy there. I know I was.
And Leigh would lie with her head in her mother's lap and smell the hay, the bluebonnets growing in the fields, and she'd think:
Someday I'll have a different life than this. More exciting. More adventurous.

Leigh loved remembering her mother that way, with hay in her hair and promises on her lips, because Abby Merrill had died of breast cancer when Leigh was ten. Afterward most of Leigh's memories of her mother were of her mother's illness—Abby losing her hair, Abby sleeping all day, skeletal and hollow-voiced when she kissed Leigh good-bye. What was left of Abby were a few impressions: her mother's laugh, her mother's strong hands brushing her hair. Her mother's
kindness. Leigh mourned her and mourned the dream they'd shared. In many ways, moving back east had been as much about reconnecting with that image of her mother as it had been about Leigh's own career ambitions.

As the years went on, the pain of losing her mother lessened a little bit at a time, helped along by distance and the constant needs of the farm. There were always new foals in the spring, and lambs, and her grandfather's ornery peacock, Peabody, as playmates and projects. Her grandfather insisted Leigh help with the chores—he believed chores built character, and it didn't matter if it was for boys or girls—so from the time she was old enough to hold a pitchfork, Leigh helped muck stalls and mend fences and mow grass. Gene took her all over the country to watch his horses race, Kentucky and New York and Florida and California, Leigh cheering her grandfather's swift horses. At home there were books to read and schoolwork to finish, secret places to explore, and chores, chores, chores—horses to breed, horses to break, always the horses, which managed to be both business commodities and expensive pets. Only the best trainers, the best feed and tack for her grandfather's Thoroughbreds, who were the best sires and dams in the world.

It was for this reason that her grandfather hired, when Leigh was sixteen, a couple of famous Thoroughbred trainers named Ben Rhodes and Dale Tucker, who were well known for turning even marginal horses into champions, and champions into stars. They arrived at the ranch in Burnside one summer with Jake in tow. Jake was seventeen, resentful as hell about leaving his friends and his old girlfriend back in Kentucky, which he seemed to think was paradise on earth. Real Thoroughbred men lived in Kentucky, Jake had complained, not Texas. Texas might as well be the ends of the earth.

Leigh remembered the day they arrived, a dusty Sunday afternoon in August, the kind of day that stretched out sweltering and indolent,
the kind of day she usually spent at Wolf Rock, a little pool at the back of her grandfather's property fed by a clear underground spring. Above the lip of the pool stood a large limestone boulder that the wind and water had molded, over the centuries, into the shape of a wolf's head—hence the name of the farm. The water there was always cool and clean, and in the long afternoon hours of the summer, she'd strip off her clothes and soak naked in the water, her skin turning brown in the sun, the air hot and still. Animals came from all over for a drink, and Leigh would hold herself as silent as possible whenever a deer or a coyote (even, once, a small black bear) came stealthily out of the bushes. They always ignored her; she was just another animal to them, not small enough to eat, not big enough to be a threat. The horses would come, too, sometimes rolling in the cool mud at the edge of the spring, scratching their behinds against a tree trunk. When the sun started to go down, Leigh would get dressed and wander home in time for supper, her grandfather admonishing her to take a bathing suit at least. “It isn't seemly, Leela,” he'd say. “It isn't ladylike. What will you do if someone sees you? You're nearly a woman now. I don't want you to get into trouble.”

“Sure, Pop,” she'd say, and then do as she pleased anyway. Like mother, like daughter.

The afternoon Jake arrived she'd promised her grandfather some help with a three-month-old colt that had taken ill. It had been born in May and walked just hours after birth, the way it was supposed to, but a few weeks later it had sickened, lost its glossy bay coat, and refused to stand. For weeks she and her grandfather had tended it, rubbing lotion on its dry skin, trying to encourage it to get to its feet. They'd had vets by the dozens to see it, but nothing had helped.

Finally her grandfather had made the decision to put it down. Leigh was heartbroken—the colt had the best possible pedigree, out of her grandfather's best mare and stud—but the poor thing was
suffering, and it was time for its suffering to end. She had been there to see the vet give it the injection, stroking its head as it closed its eyes for the last time. Afterward she'd gone for her swim, but her heart wasn't in it. She'd managed only a quick dip, but the afternoon was already spoiled, so she'd turned and come straight home.

The truck, a big, new red Chevy with Kentucky plates, was waiting by the tire swing in the circle driveway in front of the main house when she came around the bend. She'd forgotten about the new trainers her grandfather had hired, but there was Ben Rhodes, stretching his back after the long drive, looking the place over admiringly—the long, low stables, clean and cool and shaded from the sun by deep porches; the breeding shed and equipment barns; not one but two freshly painted white cottages for the trainers and the farmhands; the brick big house with its two long, low wings fronted by an impressive columned porch, a deep blue swimming pool in back; the rows of live oaks leading up to the house; and surrounding it all, four hundred acres of the best Texas pastureland, dotted by stands of bur oaks and cedars all fed by the best clear underground springs for hundreds of miles around.

“Whoo, there's a lot of money here,” Ben had said under his breath. He had dark hair shot with silver, wide shoulders stretching a red T-shirt, crinkly, friendly eyes. He gave her a little wave. “Hey, darlin',” he'd said, “I thought I was coming to Gene Merrill's place, not a mermaid cove.”

Leigh had been self-conscious all of a sudden about her damp T-shirt sticking to her skin, her dripping hair, the fact that she wasn't wearing a bra. She folded her arms over her chest.

When Ben's training partner, Dale Tucker, had come around the other side of the truck, a little too close to her, Leigh took two steps back. He was a short man, shorter than Ben by at least a head, and looked Leigh up and down like a man used to judging the value of horseflesh. “My God,” he said. “We'll have to keep an eye on this one,
Ben. She looks like trouble.
Rich
trouble.” Then he'd winked. Leigh was taken aback—she wasn't used to grown men speaking to her that way. Most of the grown men she'd known wouldn't have dared.

It was then that the rear door of the cab opened and a boy stepped out. She definitely did not remember her grandfather telling her the new trainer was bringing his son, and a teenage son to boot. She was sure she'd remember that part. He was tall—taller than she was, which was considerable—and his thin, wiry frame was tanned, probably from hours and hours helping his father in the barn before and after school. He had a thick shock of dark, wavy hair that curled over his ears, and dark blue eyes like his father. He looked around with a bored, almost angry expression, and she remembered being irritated immediately that he'd think anything or anyone here needed his approval. His father noticed her watching them and elbowed Jake in the ribs as if to say,
Check that out
.

Jake looked at his feet and muttered something to his father she couldn't hear. He kicked at the ground, raising the dust, and wrinkled his nose. He was looking over her grandfather's gorgeous spread the way he might have looked at a rattlesnake near his boot, something to be wary of and avoid. Leigh heard him say something to his father, some plea for them to pack up and turn around. “Not on your life,” Ben said to his son. “Gift horses, son. This place is going to be the making of us, I guarantee it.”

“If what you mean is making us into hicks, then I believe you,” Jake had said, low but not low enough that she couldn't hear.

Leigh was immediately angry. Of course she knew a father's career meant nothing to a boy who'd been uprooted from his friends and familiar life, but Wolf's Head was everything in the world to her, and she'd decided, in that moment, to hate him. How could he not see that he'd entered paradise? she had thought. How could he not be grateful to be here?
Who does he think he is, anyway?

He looked over at her and shaded his eyes, grimacing, giving her a glimpse of his braces, flashing silver in the hot sun. So much for his mysterious good looks. She was relieved, actually, to see he wasn't perfect. “You better watch those things, metal mouth,” she called to him. “You're gonna sunburn your gums if you aren't careful.”