The Perfect Letter

by Chris Harrison

  Afterward it was all they could do to keep their plans a secret. Nearly every night Jake would come to her window, tossing his little pebbles on the glass—tap, tap—and she’d climb out to him, kissing him fiercely in the darkness. They’d go to their place in the hayloft, lie on the blanket in the soft straw, and make love eagerly, struggling to keep their voices down, keep from getting caught. They clung to each other in a haze of sex and sweat, Jake’s mouth devouring her neck, her breasts, Jake’s hands pinning her down while she writhed beneath him and came so hard she thought she might faint. Her cries were so loud that Jake often had to hold his hand over her mouth to keep her grandfather from hearing a quarter mile off.

  When it was over they would talk about their plans, the kind of apartment they’d look for in Boston, the classes Leigh would take, the kind of job Jake might find. Leigh said there’d be plenty of places near the city where he could look for a stable-hand job, but Jake didn’t want to, said he didn’t want to trade on his father’s name, or Gene’s, not after they were married. It was just like him to be too proud, to try to prove himself. The Honorable Jacob Rhodes, Chloe always called him. Instead he wanted to learn a trade, maybe take some classes himself at the community college. “Maybe I’ll try tending bar,” he’d say. “That might be fun. Get to meet a lot of girls that way.”

  Leigh had swatted him on his bare ass. “Like hell. After we’re married, no more girls for you, mister. Besides, you’re not old enough yet to tend bar.”

  “They won’t know that.” He pulled out the fake ID, the one he’d used a bunch of times to sneak into bars in Austin. “Got me a little insurance.”

  “Oh good. I’m sure they won’t do a background check.”

  “I’ll just use my considerable charm.”

  “Or you’ll sound like a talking ass.”

  “Won’t be the first time,” he said, and stopped her from replying with a kiss.

  The stress on both of them, the waiting, was palpable. Leigh was impatient with her grandfather again, started talking back in ways she had never before dared. The good sense of their plan, the safety she felt now being so close to her goal, made her reckless. She called Gene a snob, an elitist, whenever Jake’s name came up, said there was nothing wrong with Jake except his lack of money, and for long periods of time she and Gene would go through the house without speaking, barely acknowledging each other’s presence.

  Jake started arguing with his father more often, too. She’d find the two of them in the barn from time to time, coming around the corner to hear Ben’s voice raised to a furious whisper. You’ll do what I tell you to do, and that’s that, he’d say, and Jake would answer, You know it’s wrong. You know, but you won’t stop it. The two of them would fall silent when they saw Leigh approaching, and she’d give Jake a poignant look, as if to say, This will all be worth it later. It will all be worth it, I swear.

  Of course it wasn’t Leigh that Jake and his father were arguing about, but she wouldn’t know that until later, until the trial. When she found out what they were really fighting over, she’d felt foolish, even duped.

  The truth was that Ben and his partner, Dale Tucker, had been doping her grandfather’s horses for years, using injections of steroids to cover up limps caused by training injuries, to cover up their own mistakes. They’d started to pull Jake into their secret, too—all those trips he’d taken for his father, Leigh would find out later, were to pick up the drugs for them, to hide what they were up to.

  Jake had argued with them that it was wrong, that it was Gene Merrill’s reputation on the line as well as their own. That the horses would suffer for their mistakes. But he hadn’t stopped, had he? He’d kept right on going, picking up the steroids, helping Dale and his father break the rules. He hadn’t told anyone about the doping, not even Leigh, not once in all the nights they spent together. He lied to her about his trips out of state, the work he did for his father. The delivery of the horses was always a pretext, a way for Ben and Dale to keep their noses clean. Ben could have sent anyone to deliver horses, but he sent his own son to make sure that the secret stayed hidden.

  It wasn’t until later, at the trial, that details of the doping scheme came out. Jake pleaded guilty to the drug charges and was sentenced to four years on that count. Afterward, at the murder trial, he would take the stand and admit what he and Dale Tucker had been up to, admit his own role in the scheme, although he never mentioned his father’s involvement. Jake put the whole thing on Dale. It was Dale Tucker whom he had gone to see in the barn the night of the shooting, he said. Not a lame horse, the way he and Leigh had first said.

  “And why were you wanting to meet with Dale Tucker when you got back to the ranch?” asked Jake’s lawyer.

  “Dale was anxious to get his hands on the steroids,” Jake said. “I’d just come from Florida with a shipment. He needed them for the farm’s best colt, which had come up lame in practice earlier in the week. He was racing in less than a week, and if he didn’t improve in a hurry he was going to miss the whole season. There was hundreds of thousands in breeding fees on the line. Millions, probably.”

  “So you fetched the drugs, and brought them back to give to Dale?”

  “I did. I got back late and met Dale in the barn.”

  “Then why did you argue? If you picked up the steroids as requested, and you were planning to give them to him, why didn’t you simply hand them over and walk away?”

  Jake raised his head to look at Leigh, just for a moment. “I told Dale I wouldn’t do it anymore, fetching the dope for him. That I was done lying. That’s why he went after me, because I told him I was going to tell Leigh everything. He said he’d kill me before he’d let that happen.”

  Leigh would meet his eyes across the courtroom, his familiar dark blue eyes, and see the shame there, the admission of guilt, and she’d realize the truth of it all—that Jake had been helping his father illegally dope her grandfather’s horses, that he’d been running drugs for Ben and Dale for months. That he’d lied to her. It had been happening under her nose all the time, and she hadn’t even known.

  Five

  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.

  Leigh set Jake’s letter down and held on to the table. The room was spinning, the sunlight streaming in through the windows making everything too bright, too hot. She could hear the echo of Jake’s voice in every word, the slight Kentucky twang he’d clung to even after years in Texas: I know that I’m doing the right thing.

  But she didn’t think so, not anymore. Maybe she’d never thought it was the right thing. Maybe she’d never been able to let go of the guilt, her own culpability. A man had died by her hand, and she’d let someone else suffer for it. Someone she’d loved; someone she’d promised to marry. What kind of person did that? What kind of person sat in a courtroom for weeks and weeks and listened to the man she loved lie for her, sacrifice himself for her? The fact that she would try to put a stop to it eventually didn’t change all the hours she’d sat there listening to his lies, the lies he told to protect her.

  Now I think it would be wrong for me to intrude on your new life. No hard feelings, read the note he’d left on top of the bundles of letters. It made her want to scream. No hard feelings? How could he say that—how could he even think it? After everything?

  The Honorable Jacob Rhodes, still torturing himself over his mistakes, still trying to make up for his father’s sins. He might even have managed to convince himself he was doing the right thing, for a time. But if ther
e was one thing Leigh was sure of now, it was that no one could outrun the mistakes they’d made.

  She couldn’t walk away this time without another word. She couldn’t let him shut her out, not again. She had to talk to him.

  She opened the door and went running out into the sunlight of the vineyard, shading her eyes to look for him on the paths, the dining pavilion, the cool groves of live oaks where groups of writers sat in little clusters talking to each other or scribbling in notebooks. Jake had to be nearby, still—he couldn’t have gotten far, not if he’d delivered the bundles of letters to her room in the few minutes she’d been eating lunch. He was somewhere on the property, somewhere nearby. She had to find him.

  She went full speed down the hill toward the main house and the parking lot. It was like running in a dream, except she was wide-awake. Clusters of people sat in rocking chairs on the front porch. She ran when she saw a man in a brown Stetson near the far end, talking to someone, but when she put her hand on his arm she saw he was only a gray-haired cowboy in a jacket and jeans who looked up, surprised by her attention. Not Jake.

  She’d been secretly hoping he might have been waiting inside for her, but the lobby of the main house had the usual assortment of conferencegoers and staff, and nowhere did she see the white T-shirt, the tattoo of a bat in flight on the back of one triceps. But he had to be here, somewhere. He had to be. He’d come to her talk that morning, then delivered a bundle of letters to her cottage. He had to want to be found. Didn’t he?

  She went back outside into the bright Texas sun. She had no car—Chloe had driven her from Austin to the vineyard—and no way to get ahold of Jake. He’d never owned a cell phone before he went to prison, and even if he’d bought one after he got out, she didn’t know the number. Chloe was away in Austin for the day. Leigh was stuck. She stood in the middle of the gravel parking lot wondering which way to go, which direction to run, turning around and around until Saundra arrived and took her firmly by the shoulders, holding her still.

  “My goodness, honey,” she said, “whatever has you turning in circles?”

  Leigh didn’t even know where to begin. The only thing she could think was that perhaps Saundra had access to a car, something she wouldn’t mind lending Leigh for a few hours to run an errand in town. “It’s kind of an emergency,” she said. “There’s someone I need to find, and fast.”

  “A man?”

  Leigh colored. “Yes, but it’s not like that.”

  Saundra raised her eyebrows at her as if she’d heard that before. But still she handed over the keys to her Prius and told Leigh with a wink she’d need it back no later than breakfast the following morning. “Any later than that,” she said, “and it will turn back into a pumpkin. Understand?”

  Leigh threw both arms around the older woman. “Thank you so much. You have no idea how much this means to me.” Keys in hand, she took off toward the parking lot. Jake couldn’t have gotten far.

  She started to formulate a plan as she turned down the vineyard driveway and then west on the state highway, flooring it. She’d start in Burnside; that’s where Chloe said she’d first seen Jake, eating dinner at Dot’s by himself one night. She kept scanning the highway the whole drive, spying tourists with Georgia plates slowing down to take pictures, a family dressed in identical white shirts and jeans having their picture taken in a field of bluebonnets, a hitchhiker in a long beard wearing a backpack and a T-shirt that read KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD. Not much had changed in a decade. This was the Texas she remembered—beautiful, conflicted, with the wide-open skies she’d missed so much.

  She went west first, then north, following the river, feeling a kind of desperation rising in her throat while she scanned the roads for any sign of Jake’s red truck, not seeing it anywhere, assuming he still had it. All these years, she’d wondered what he was doing, how he was, whether they would be able to move on and forgive each other for what had happened. Ten years she’d been waiting, holding herself back, either out of guilt or maybe hoping that somehow, when Jake was finally released, they could go back to the way things had been, that it would all be the same as it had been before.

  Now she knew she didn’t want to go back to the way things had been. They’d been kids; they’d been young, impulsive, and foolish. It would never have worked in Boston, the two of them married and living together—how could she ever have thought otherwise?

  She’d have been the only freshman at Harvard with a husband. He’d have hated living in such a big city, hated tending bar or waiting tables, and she’d have hated being eighteen and already settled down. After a while she and Jake would have grown apart, grown to resent each other. It was only desperation that had led them to promise themselves to each other in the first place. Desperation, and the thrill of the forbidden. But the forbidden wasn’t enough to build a life on. She knew that now. She simply had to say it to Jake in person, so they could both move on.

  She pulled into Burnside just after four, parking the car in front of the drugstore and stepping outside. She’d run after Jake without her sunglasses and sunscreen, and she could feel the hot May sun burning her nose and cheeks, but she kept going, down the dusty streets of downtown, the heat rising up from the baking concrete. Behind the shops there were glints of the river, cool and gray, the occasional boat speeding past.

  She looked in every shop window, poked her head in the door of the two honky-tonks, the post office, even the library. She texted Chloe to ask for help, but Chloe had rehearsals in Austin all afternoon and didn’t answer right away. Leigh paused at a newish Chinese restaurant on the corner and stuck her head inside, the hostess at the front door looking at her like she must be crazy, and Leigh glanced down at her sweat-stained clothes and started to think she really was crazy.

  Maybe he’d left town. Maybe he wasn’t living in Burnside at all anymore. He could be living in Austin, in San Marcos, even one of the other little towns like New Braunfels, Granite Shoals. He could be back home, wherever he was living now, planning to let her go on with her life without him, like he’d written in his note.

  She was chasing a phantom. She must be out of her mind.

  Except she couldn’t walk away, not now, when she hadn’t been able to walk away for ten long years. It didn’t matter what she’d written him in that last letter; she’d never let him go, not really. She’d held back from Joseph, she’d held back from every man she’d ever met, because there was always the question of Jake, of what she and Jake would do when he was finally released. He might have been in a physical prison, but Leigh had lived in a prison of her own making, unwilling or unable to grant herself parole.

  Now, as she caught sight of her reflection in the window of a shop on Main Street—her wild hair and clothes, her skin pink with sunburn—she realized she’d been naive to cling to the hope that they could simply pick up the pieces. Jake was a thirty-year-old ex-con whose only skill was training horses, and people in the horse-training world would distrust and despise him because he was Ben Rhodes’s kid.

  She couldn’t picture him walking with her down Broadway to see a show on a Friday night, meeting her for drinks at an upscale restaurant in SoHo. Even if she could convince him to come with her to New York, she didn’t have the faintest idea what he’d do there. Drive a cab? Be a house husband? He’d hate living in such a big city, hate how expensive it was, hate the noise and the crowds and the attitude. And Leigh sure as hell wasn’t about to torpedo the publishing career she’d built so carefully to come back to Texas and do—what? Edit tractor manuals? Wait tables? Sing in bars with Chloe?

  No—it wouldn’t work. She had to say good-bye to the hope she’d been clinging to all these years, that when Jake got out for good, they’d be able to pick up the pieces. Before she could give Joseph an answer to his proposal, before she could even think about being his wife, she had to say good-bye to Jake once and for all.

  The problem, though, was that she couldn’t find him anywhere. He wasn’t at Dot’s. He wasn’t at the Foxh
ead. He wasn’t at Booches. By the time she gave up looking for him, she was hot and tired, and the sun was starting to go down.

  Chloe texted back that she was sorry, she’d been in rehearsals all afternoon without her phone. But, she asked, if Leigh was free did she want to grab a bite? Leigh was footsore and discouraged, and texted back, SURE, LET ME GRAB A SHOWER FIRST.

  Leigh was about to get in Saundra’s Prius to head back to the vineyard just as the sun was sinking behind the hills, lighting up the river in pink and gold. She loved the river—when she and Chloe and Jake were kids, they’d head to the end of the long dock after dark and sit cooling their feet in the water, sometimes joined by their friends around town, sometimes not.

  Leigh walked down to the water and stood on the shore, looking out at the sun’s reflection. It was dusk—in a few minutes, when the sun went down, the colonies of bats that lived in the caves up in the hills would come out for the night. It seemed strange that bats could be so lovely, but they were. The sight of them was one of the few things Leigh had looked forward to when she came home to Texas. She waited, watching the sun’s reflection washing the world gold. It sank down and down, the light changing over to pink, then orange, purple shadows creeping up from the east.

  The first bat swooped past, followed by another, then another. If you didn’t look too closely you’d think they were birds, the small dark forms fluttering here and there, but they didn’t move like birds, didn’t swoop gracefully on the air. Instead they flitted and chittered like mosquitoes, following their sense of hearing, calling to each other and listening to the echoes coming off the water, the hills, the trees. The bats flew past in a great black cloud, then rising into the air, went off in the night to hunt for bugs.