The Most Wanted

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “That guy’s alive,” he said. “Let him be.” He leaned over the guard, gently removing his pistol from its holster and asking, “Where you hit? In the shoulder? Doesn’t seem so bad. You’ll make it. Figure your fellas will be along soon. Almost time for the cavalry to come.” He’d added then, “You tell them you saw the Highwayman, hear? That I came along here by moonlight and now I’m gone.”

  Ironically enough, Stuart and I had gone to dinner that night at a restaurant just down the street from the huge whipped-cream mansion where, a few years earlier, a famous artist was gunned down by his spurned lover. Afterward, Stuart had wanted to walk on the beach, but I wanted to call Arley. So we found a pay phone, and Stuart stood there while I called Charley, the cabin, and Jeanine. There was no answer anywhere.

  “Do you think something’s wrong?” I asked Stuart.

  “No,” he told me. “I think she’s probably outside.”

  I called again at nine, Florida time. Still no answer.

  We went back to Stuart’s apartment. The building stood at the end of the strip where South Beach emptied into real Miami, and its stucco front was as pink as raspberry cream cheese. “Now we both have houses our mothers would be ashamed to visit us in,” Stuart told me.

  “But mine will improve,” I insisted.

  We went inside and lay down on the bed. I took out pictures of Desiree to show Stuart; but he gently placed them on the night table and kissed me, long and familiarly. The way I wanted him to make love to me was not so much desire as the need for completion you feel when your bed is made with clean sheets and you’re so tired only sleep can satisfy you. But when he began to unbutton my shirt, I was suddenly aware of a dozen unfamiliar sounds—the whicker of a ceiling fan, the rattle of the icemaker, a voice fading from a car driving past. I was somewhere else, not home. I sat up.

  “So,” Stuart said, not moving.

  “You know, we have to talk about this.”

  “Anne, hey, hey. Settle down, babe. I know you have unfinished business in Texas—”

  “It’s not just that.”

  “Okay.”

  “And it’s not that I don’t love you.”

  “Oh, Anne. Oh, shit.”

  “Because I do.”

  “I know you do.”

  “What I guess we have to face is that if we’d really wanted to get married and have kids, we’d have gotten married and had kids. No one stopped us. . . .”

  “It was timing, Anne. The timing was off. . . .”

  “But, Stuart, I think the timing will always be off. If you wanted that kind of life with me, you’d have stayed in Texas—”

  “I have to work.”

  “I know you have to. And I respect that. But I want to be wanted more than you want anything else.”

  “I want you more than any other woman.”

  “I know. It kills me to say this, Stuart. And it kills me I didn’t say it sooner. But you don’t want the things I want. And the unfair part is, I didn’t know how much I wanted them until now.”

  “Like I needed to know this sooner. I don’t even want to know this now.” He sighed. “The thing with Arley—”

  “It was only a symptom, Stuart. But it’s true, I care about her. More than I could ever have expected.”

  “Oh, Anne,” he said, pulling me down beside him. “I’m sorry for us.”

  Near tears, drained, we had nothing left to say. We fell asleep.

  The shrilling of the phone next to my head sounded like a shriek. I sat up, confused by the angle of the bed, forgetting where I was, as Stuart fumbled, knocked the telephone over, and finally gasped, “Hello? Yeah? . . . Anne, it’s Charley Wilder.”

  “Charley?” I cried, glad Stuart couldn’t see my face. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m calling to tell you, first of all, that Arley is safe. I’m right here with her and the baby, and everything’s all right. Nothing has moved outside this cabin all night long.”

  “What are you talking about? What happened? Why didn’t anybody answer the phone?”

  “We were . . . busy. Jack came . . .”

  He told me then. And he assured and reassured me. Dillon was gone for sure this time, into Mexico south of Laredo. He’d been spotted twice already. Dragnets set on both sides of the border would snag him at any moment. “Anne, I know you’ll want to run right back here,” Charley said. “But before you do, listen. The devil himself couldn’t give them the slip this time. Jeanine’s going to come out here around noon, and I’ll be back before five. So there’s nothing to worry about.”

  I didn’t even answer him. I simply put the phone down and called the airline. We drove to the airport in silence, still in our slept-in, rumpled clothes. Stuart got us coffee—mine with, his black—and insisted on waiting with me at the gate. When they began boarding first class, I started to cry. “The ring,” I said, stupidly, awkwardly. “Maybe you want it. I’ll . . . I’ll send it, okay?” I was hurting him. Did I want to hurt him? Or just hurt myself more?

  “Keep it, Anne,” Stuart said lightly, rocking up on the tips of his loafers. “Keep it. You’re a pearl of a girl, huh? Oh, Anne. Arley will be all right. It will be all right. I . . . Jesus, I have no idea what to say. None of this seems real. And maybe—look, we don’t know how you’ll feel six months from now. . . .”

  But I did know. I couldn’t let him hope. “Stuart, there’s something else,” I said. “You’re going to hate me.”

  He looked away from me, following the incoming arc of a landing plane. “No, I’m not. Maybe there is something else. But this is enough. You remember what your mother used to say? You don’t have to tell everything you know.”

  We went to a bank of phones, and I called Arley to tell her I was on my way. There wasn’t much life in her voice, but she said she was glad I was on my way, though I shouldn’t feel I had to come.

  Then there was nothing left to do but say good-bye.

  I kissed Stuart, feeling the jump of his jaw muscle against my cheek. Little nerve. Such a little nerve he was. “Stuart, take good care of . . .”

  “You too, babe,” he said. “Never change.”

  On the plane, I sat down and willed tons of aluminum and steel to make its way back faster in the direction it had come from only the previous morning. Whatever maternal gene I possessed for Arley had been activated into rescue mode, and there was no stilling it. The plane was delayed for three hours in Atlanta, and I ate a one-pound bag of peanuts while waiting and pacing. All told, it took twelve hours for me to get back, home from the airport, and into my car. It was while I was speeding toward the cabin, with the pedal jammed to the floor, with my gun in the glove box, that I realized I hadn’t called Charley, hadn’t grabbed my car phone, hadn’t stopped to think whether I would do whatever it took if I had the opportunity.

  I’m no warrior.

  Even if I could have got to her in time, I don’t know what I could have done.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Arley

  THE CABIN didn’t have a television. Aside from missing E.R., I didn’t really mind. Annie was taping every episode for me anyhow, and when we moved to Azalea Road, we were going to watch the whole thing like some big movie, with no commercial breaks. I made her promise not to even peek at any of the shows, and she kept her promise.

  The days passed quickly, even without TV. You’d be surprised how much work a person weighing twelve pounds can give you, when you’re going through three or four changes a day (breast-fed babies are really ick when it comes to that!) and washing them by hand, not to mention keeping a baby clean and cleared up of rashes and all that. You wouldn’t think a little baby, who can’t even walk around outside, and whose head smelled like the makeup counter at Oberly’s, would get filthy. I once was washing Desi and found this big old crust of crud behind her ear that looked just like bacon grease, and I was shocked; it was like she was this neglected child or something. So besides taking care of her, and washing my own clothes by hand, I was studying fo
r the SATs, which I planned to take in February, just before my sixteenth birthday. Though I know I’m pretty smart, the fact is that my education is awfully sketchy, GED or not. Even so, after the fire there were these stories about “Robber Bride a Genius,” which is not true.

  The studying and keeping busy kept me from thinking about Dillon all the time. And I was trying not to think about him. The process of me losing him had started then . . . how could it have been any other way?

  When I did think of him, I’d try to guess what he was feeling. His mind had snapped from the confinement, I figured that—he always said, didn’t he, that a man like him had to be free? After I heard about what he said to the border guard, I knew he realized that he was going to die. He’d die before he’d let himself be taken back to prison. He would have got the death penalty. And the way Dillon had talked about death, even before “The Highwayman,” even from what I’ve heard of how he was back to the time of that girl he said he loved so much before me, I think he was on the edge of suicidal probably all his life.

  I don’t think it was our love pushed him over. If anything, our love probably made him better than he was, happier, if you can call it that, at least for a while. When I would think about Dillon, I would try to see him looking at a breathing person and firing a gun, and when I would think that this man was the man who’d been inside me, I would turn sick and my feet and hands would get icy cold despite the heat. One night, I even peed my bed. I couldn’t think about it. And yet it was always there.

  I was always tired. I ate like a pig, and I still lost weight. I’d been so prissy, but there were times I didn’t wash my hair for three days. I thought I’d grow dreadlocks like Cully the cook, back at Taco Haven. Every day after she got home from school, Elena would call me and watch Days of Our Lives on the phone, telling me all the parts so I could keep up. Annie wouldn’t let her come to the cabin—she said it was police orders—but I still gave Elena the phone number. I missed her a lot. She hadn’t seen Desi since the morning after she was born, when Mrs. G. let Elena go in late to school to come see me at the hospital, before I came out here. Ellie said my life was more gruesome than anything on Days. Even when I nursed Desi, I would sometimes think of Dillon, but I would try not to. It seemed kind of sick. I didn’t want anything bad to come through the circle around Desi and me.

  People think little babies are boring, but you can watch them for hours. It’s sort of like watching a beautiful plant instead of a person. After I fed her and before her nap, she would make her mouth into a perfect O when she yawned, and a milk bubble would stretch out big and shining and then pop, and her little hands would fly out from the sound. She didn’t cry, but I couldn’t even stand to see her that upset. As she lay on her quilt, I would kneel down over her and cover her, careful not to put any weight on her, like I was a mountain or a willow tree, so that she would have this impression that there was always something between her and anything in the world that could hurt her.

  When Desiree was asleep, generally I was asleep, or I was reading. Often, they were just goofing-off books. I’d still read only half the books Annie gave me. Once, she said that some of those books would probably sound pretty naive to me, given what I’d been through. That wasn’t entirely true, though. In spite of being married and having a baby and having the kind of family I had, I was still pretty much a kid at heart. One of the books I read was a play, Our Town. And I found that I could identify with all those sweet small-town feelings, about being sheltered and shy and lonesome for being a little girl, even though I’d never been a little girl myself. I could identify with how embarrassed Emily was when her boyfriend first confessed his love to her, I could feel just that way, even though I knew much more of what love was about. So I read, or I listened to my CDs, mostly CDs Charley gave me—folks I’d never heard of, like Tom Paxton and Rick Danko and Joan Baez. It was like country music but not, and even sadder. Folk’s my favorite music now, though Annie yells at us every so often to “turn off the damned draggy ballads.” I read or I listened to my CD player, and though the CD player had a radio, I never turned the radio on, so everybody on earth knew about the border guards before I did.

  It was Charley who came and told me. Jack came later, but Charley was first.

  Right away, I went over and snatched Desi up out of that beautiful mesquite rocking bed, even though I’d just laid her down to sleep and, like Annie says, you let sleeping babies lie. I picked her up, and I handed her to Charley and I went into the bathroom and puked up my guts. Before then, I’d been sort of half and half on Dillon. Some nights, after Jack Becker or that cute boy cop Pedro checked on me, I’d lie there and think, C’mon, Dillon. Come for me by moonlight and pull me up off this here floor and onto your black horse . . . like he ever had a horse or anything. I’d try to stop myself from the long, slow, every-word replay of our wedding night, but then I’d give in to it, and I’d make myself so hot I thought you could hear my breathing all up and down that field, not that there was a soul around to listen. And after I came, with the sheet all knotted against my crotch, which was still sore, I’d feel as though I’d done some monstrous, depraved thing. But at least, after I did that to myself, I could sleep, and sometimes, when I’d wake up, well, Desi girl would be laughing in her red-hearted crib. Laughing. That girl woke up laughing at three months old, even if she’d screamed four hours straight from colic after supper the night before.

  The last night, I knew Annie was coming home, even though I’d told her not to. She’d called me from the Miami airport and then again from the Atlanta airport, said she was going to drive right out to the cabin whether I wanted her to or not, even if it was midnight. Jeanine came and brought me a sub for lunch, but it was so hot I couldn’t eat. Charley called and said he was waiting for a glass delivery at the house and would be by as soon as it came. I slept for a while in the late afternoon and was startled to see that it was getting dark when I woke up.

  I got up. And not long after, Desi did, too, and started tuning up for her night of squalling. I figured Charley’d be along any minute. And when Jack Becker came on by with old Pedro, I told him just that. The two of them came up on the porch and turned off their car and asked me for Cokes. I was glad I’d got up enough energy to wash that day and put on clean clothes, though I was embarrassed that I didn’t have any food to offer them and that Desi was screaming her fool head off. Sometimes Jack came alone and sometimes he brought Pedro—I guess he was training Pedro or something—but I got a kick out of it the times he’d stop by himself, because he always talked about Jeanine. Jeanine thought Jack didn’t know anything about the pediatrician; but he knew everything, and he would tell me—this kid!—about how it hurt him, deep inside, that he wasn’t man enough to hold on to Jeanine. “She’s wild at heart, Arley,” he would say, and I would memorize it to repeat to Elena later on. You never think of people in their thirties moaning on about stuff like that.

  That night, a tiny little breeze had just started. It was like the whole field where the cabin was took a deep breath. You could bear heat if the air wasn’t totally still, but it was so still that winter. I was like to die out there without air-conditioning—lucky thing for me I grew up poor, with no air-conditioning in the house except in Mama’s room, and Cam and I only daring to sit in there when she was at work. I don’t think I ever put a stitch on Desi except an undershirt and her diaper the first six months of her life, though, it was that hot a time.

  “You got enough milk and stuff in the house?” Jack asked me, that night before he left. “You want us to get you some ice cream or something?”

  “It’d melt before you got back here,” I told him. “Anyhow, Annie’ll be here later.” We both laughed about that. We knew that Annie would somehow manage, through dark of night, to find a way to bring me enough food to feed an army. Annie never came anywhere without bringing food; she said it was an inherited trait. Jack was just about to leave, and Pedro was rocking on the little porch glider with Desi, when the car radi
o went crazy.

  “Let’s go, son,” Jack yelled after a minute. “Grass fire up there. Threat to the wealthy. You take care, Arley.” He stopped then; I never knew exactly why, because they were in a big hurry to get up there on the ridge, where the six or eight big houses would be in trouble if the fire department didn’t get things under control right away (though they always did; grass fires are common as armadillos in Texas). “Arley?” Jack turned back for a second. “You want me to get Jeanine to come out here for you?”

  “No. Why?” I shivered then. In all that heat. And I just purely ignored it.

  “Just . . . well, that fire will go right up the hill if it goes at all. You’ll be fine.” We all turned and looked about behind the cabin, and sure enough, you could see a faint red glow, like a line of Christmas lights, a few miles off at the base of the ridge. “Listen, how about I call you on the phone an hour from now. . . .” The radio was squawking again, and he jumped into the driver’s seat, and he waved, and Pedro winked at me.

  All the while I was giving Desi her bath, I kept looking out the back window of the cabin, the one above my bed, which was low on the floor. I could see flames now, actually sort of bounding along the ground, far off, going up the ridge, and sometimes I could hear a faint pop, like a firecracker, when a tree exploded. The air was full of smell—good scents, like fireplace fires. They say a fire sounds like a bus roaring, but I couldn’t hear much sound. What I could hear was the thin yowl of sirens, different kinds—the regular ones and the ones that sound like the German police cars in Diary of Anne Frank—and every so often, the loose gutter on the cabin would scrape and bang against the north wall. I plugged in my CD player just to put something in the air to sing to, and I wondered why Jack didn’t call. When I tried to call Elena, the phone just clicked and clicked. The fire must have got to some wires. If I’d had a car, I probably would have driven on over to Elena’s then, even if I wasn’t entirely sure of the way. But since Annie was coming, I wasn’t really scared or anything. Charley was usually late for everything. But I knew he’d come.