The Most Wanted

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  That morning in December, all I wanted was for the poor and downtrodden to get their asses in gear and quit flopping over like carp for anything with hairy legs stuck in a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots with lifts. I was sick of hearing about how much some crankhead fruitcake looked like Michael Bolton and how, no matter how bad he was, no one else really understood how good he was inside.

  The name “Arlington Mowbray” was taped across the top of the first intake file in my In box. It was real Texas. Everybody seemed to have been named after a character in General Hospital. I took one look at the top line: “Female, aged 14, married, wishes to obtain . . . ,” picked up the file, and went out into the hall, ready to pass it off to the first sap I ran into, Matt or Raul or Patty. After all, I was the boss. Why did I have to lead the charge into the valley of the doomed every damn day?

  But as I was searching for my intended victim, I saw her. She was sitting in the lobby, just under the big plant shelf. Lilia, our secretary, was obsessively sponging off the philodendron, and the tall, dark-haired teenager didn’t even seem to notice the drops of water that spattered her purse, her arms, and the folder on the chair beside her. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful, though she was. What was remarkable was that she seemed not to have been touched by teenhood to the slightest degree. Her rope of shiny dark-brown hair hung over one shoulder in an ordinary braid. She wore no jewelry; her ears weren’t pierced with even a single punch—a fashion statement most girls would have considered wildly conservative if not worse. Strangest of all, she had no blemishes. Except for the thick wings of her brows, her skin was as pure as an eight-year-old’s.

  As I watched her that first day, I saw her reach around reflectively to grab hold of the thick brush formed by the end of her braid and sweep it across her lips, a gesture I would come to know as intimately as the smell of my own pillow. Arley was reading Seventeen, and she was reading it the way I used to read Seventeen, as if she were studying for SATs. I saw her run her thumbnail furtively down the inside gutter to slice out a page, then fold it with the speed of a magician into the front pocket of her jeans, which, I noticed, were ironed. I knew what she’d do later on: she’d try to duplicate that stunningly coordinated ninety-dollar outfit with something in the same colors at Kmart for $15.99, which she would wear with self-conscious delight for three weeks, until it opened at the seams and unraveled.

  I can think of half a dozen possible triggers—my biological clock, Arley’s touching intelligence—but none of them would fully explain the immediate fusion. I’d seen a great many young women in trouble, all needing my help or my protection, needing the things my credentials could provide. And a few had extraordinary potential.

  But of all of them, only Arley—without the worldly wisdom to understand her presumption—tried to offer me something in return. Propelled, and later terrified, by her own need, she recognized mine. I don’t know why.

  I don’t know how long I watched her; knew only that after a time, I realized I felt like a peeper and should say something. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t summon the words. I saw her look at her hair in the mirror, lift it up on the back of her neck and turn, gazing at her reflection in the fish tank across the room as if she were peering into a pond. She tried a haughty look. She tried next to look deliriously joyful, putting on one of those open-mouthed smiles that seem to have caught someone in the midst of saying, “I’m having the time of my life!”

  And when I saw her do that, I was lost; I know that now, and she knows it too. Those first moments, I was swamped by a tidal current of memory for my sophomore self, when I was so desperately unhappy that I kept threatening suicide, until my mother finally said, “So kill yourself already. Just shut up about it.”

  “Don’t ever cut it,” I finally said to Arley that day, forcing myself to stride into the room, holding out my hand to shake.

  She grinned. “I’m not going to cut it. I’m just going to hate it, every day from now until January, when the weather cools off.”

  “And when it’s cooler?”

  “Then I’ll feel like a princess.”

  “So it’s worth it? Or is it only half worth it?”

  That stopped her. She seemed to think I was scraping deeper than the topic of hairstyles, and maybe I was. “I need to see the lawyer,” she said then, a splash of color lighting her dark skin. “I have to do this”—she pointed to her file—“because I have to go back to school.”

  “Are you in college?” I asked, just to see what she’d say.

  “I was going to say I am,” she told me, with a level look. “But you all got the facts of me right in front of you. I’m only in high school, ma’am. Freshman year.”

  “So what brings you here?”

  She brushed her lips with her braid, thoughtfully. “I guess because I think they should respect a person’s civil rights.”

  “This person is you?”

  “Yes. Me and my husband. My husband Dillon.”

  “You really are married, then?”

  She stared hard at me. “Are you the lawyer?”

  “I’m one of them, yes.”

  “Are you my lawyer?”

  “I might be, if it turns out that you need a lawyer.”

  “Then you already know about what I’m here for. I told the lady.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “I am legally married. Even though I’m . . . well, I’ll be fifteen.”

  “When?”

  “In April.”

  “And, Arlington, just how—”

  “It’s Arley. Arley Mowbray. Well, now it’s really Arley Mowbray LeGrande. I’m sorry to interrupt, ma’am.”

  “Pretty name.”

  “Arlington is the name of a town. Between Dallas and Fort Worth.”

  “Is that where your family is from?”

  “No, I . . . we’re all named after towns in Texas, my sister and my brother and me.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, my mama—” she began, and then said, “Does that matter?”

  “No, of course not. Just making conversation.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how did you come to marry so young?”

  “It’s not so young. We just read Romeo and Juliet, and she was exactly my age.” I couldn’t help but smile. She saw it.

  I said, “Yes, but that didn’t work out so well.”

  “This will.”

  “I hope so.”

  I took her into my office, and she immediately began playing with the perpetual motion gadget on the desk, just the way every child who came into that space did, instantly and with utter concentration, experimentally plomping the steel balls on strings one against the other. I paged through the intake forms again, thinking almost exactly what Stuart would say later, that Arley’s story was fit for the Hallmark Hall of Fame of bad ideas. Not everyone goes to prison for just cause, particularly in the republic of Texas, but from the facts, Dillon LeGrande came from the kind of people who could have found trouble in any quarter of the lower forty-eight.

  The eldest of four sons of a mother widowed once by a refinery explosion and once by a knife fight, Dillon seemed to have more or less raised himself in the little town of Welfare, one of those single-tavern burgs on the ragged hem of San Antonio’s outskirts. Arley’s family lived only a few miles west, but their orbits didn’t seem to have overlapped, despite their having attended the same magnet school in Alamo Heights. Dillon’s brothers were roughneck punks, in and out of foster care and baby jail for the usual drinking-fighting-truancy stuff, but Dillon seemed to have stayed out of trouble—officially, anyway—until the night he and his brother Kevin decided to take a friend and his handgun and hold up a gas station in Comfort, a few miles north of their home. The hapless kid working the cash register ended up with his left arm shattered by a gunshot wound, and Dillon and Kevin wound up in Solamente River Prison. As the elder and, supposedly, the shooter, Dillon had been given eight years.

  Arley and Dillon had begu
n corresponding in September. She’d visited him once. He’d pledged his troth. For two full weeks, they’d been husband and wife.

  I sighed. Ordinarily, I started interviews with a stab at outlining goals: Why were we here together? What had happened and what was needed? But for some reason I found myself eager that day to influence a situation I knew very well was none of my business.

  And so I asked Arley, “What possessed you to do this thing? What possessed your mom to sign for it? Was he your boyfriend before he went in?”

  Arley shook her head. “I didn’t have a boyfriend before him. I just got to know him through the letters.”

  “Three months ago.”

  “Three months.” She squared her shoulders then and said, “He’s really good.” And I knew what she meant—good in the sense that applies to a child, or to a nun. “I know what I’m doing. I might only be fifteen—”

  “You’re fourteen.”

  “Okay, but I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing when it comes to this. My husband—Dillon—has a clean record for his . . . incarceration, and he really should be out in less than two years. It’s all right there.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Ma’am,” said Arley, coloring deeply, “he needs me to be with him before that.” I could tell it was killing her to do this, and I felt like a shit. She would not have said any of this for worlds, except that Dillon mattered more to her than her sense of decency. I didn’t realize then what an exaggerated sense that was, or why, though I would come to see that Arley’s decency was exactly like her skein of heavy hair—equal parts discomfort and joy.

  “He wants a conjugal visit,” I suggested.

  “And I do too.”

  “It’s been denied.”

  “Yep.”

  “You want to have sex with him.”

  “I want to . . . be close to him.”

  I put my face in my hands. “Well, Missus LeGrande, unless there is something that you are not telling me, unless there is something I learn about your husband that you have not told me: for example, that his record suggests that he constitutes a risk to your health or well-being”—beyond the obvious, I thought—“or a risk to the security of Solamente River Prison, your request and his petition together should work. Now, your responsibility—”

  “I can pay. . . .”

  I sighed. “Well, you pay what you can pay. We generally work those things out fairly well. But what I was going to say was, your responsibility is to tell me the truth and give me some patience while I try to work this out without litigation—that is, without having to—”

  “Without going to court.”

  “Exactly. Because I think that would be best for everyone involved, including you and your husband and the state of Texas and, God knows, me.”

  “Well, I can be patient.”

  I hope so, I nearly said, looking at her and thinking, You haven’t been a bit patient so far; why can’t you be patient enough to grow your last inch or two before you load all this on? I wanted to say, Kid, this barge is never going to get any lighter, and it will only sink lower in the water, no matter how fast you pole or bail. But there was something in her gaze, a kind of pleading, that suggested she already understood everything—the sorry way this looked, the inappropriateness of her claim, the risk of shame—about this thing she’d launched, and that it was beyond her, entirely beyond her, to correct the path of flight.

  And I sensed what I would later know: that Arley needed no help from me at experiencing guilt or regret. That she’d seen the world as mostly a place of recklessness all her young life. I’d learn that she had created a plan on paper, her Book of Life Goals, out of fear of growing up the way she’d been raised—that is, recklessly—and that, much as she loved Dillon, it hurt to see her carefully written entries on sports and clothes and manners become so many sticks and ladders, marks in rainbow ink, meaningless as bird tracks.

  As we stood up, I managed to avoid the impulse to pat her shoulder. Suddenly she pointed to the purple folder she carried and said, “I’m going to leave this with you all now. But there’s just one thing.”

  I sighed. “What?”

  “In our letters. In here. You’ll see that I lied at first. I said I was older.”

  “I see. But he knows now? Everything?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Everything. And he doesn’t mind.” I looked at the lean curve of Arley’s waist and thought, I’ll bet he doesn’t, I’ll just bet he doesn’t one bit, but all I said was, “Well. Then it’s no problem for me, I suppose.”

  I watched her close the door behind her, and said to myself, Well, we will just have to find a way for this girl to land as softly as possible. Then I sat down with my cold coffee, to read the “evidence” in her purple folder, which she’d labeled in filigreed sticker letters, “Dillon and Arlington LeGrande.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Arley

  I USED TO THINK none of this would have happened if I’d been raised normal. But maybe it doesn’t change everything. Once I met a girl who grew up in a rich family in Dallas—her father was even a doctor—and she told me that in high school she was drunk every day; she drank milk and Scotch out of a thermos every morning. It had to be her parents’ fault, but I couldn’t see how. She told me they did everything for her.

  The way I see it, everything came out of me getting the job at Taco Haven. It was my first step. The way it worked was, Elena talked her mom into letting her get a part-time job. She told her mother it would make her “more responsible,” even though she didn’t even know whether she could find a job at that point! Then Elena went over to see Ginny Jack, the owner of Taco Haven (which was just across the street from our school, where Alamo Heights merges into San Antonio). She convinced Ginny that the two of us should work there, and that we should work the same hours—which she told Ginny was for safety but was really just so that we could goof around and be together. Then I had to talk my mama into letting me take the job. Which was not easy, but I was pretty set on it.

  It was going to be part of my master plan, anyhow, a way to save money for college or for moving out on my own. Some teachers were starting to say I could get a scholarship.

  Mama just said forget it. No way was I working Saturdays. She told me it was because she didn’t like me hanging around with Elena, not because of why you would think—that Elena was a little wild—but because Mr. G. had his own construction business and all. She didn’t want me getting ideas about what I should have or not have, I guess, but she acted like it was because the Gutierrezes were Hispanic and we were somehow better than them, which is a big laugh. We didn’t have much room to talk about social class. City people would have called us hillbillies or worse, though there are no hills right around where I lived.

  Well, I said I still wanted a job, because then I could pay for my own clothes. Mama said she’d think about it. Of course, she came right up with another objection. One night, she waited up to see me, even though it was a lot of trouble for her, being as how her shift started at six and she usually worked until five the next day and didn’t get home until seven. “No way are you leaving this house on Saturday,” she said. “Any Saturday. That’s your day to get your work done here. I can’t work these kinds of hours without you take care of this house, see? That’s your job. That’s your keep.” I wanted to defy her. But I knew she would give me up as incorrigible. Lots of mothers said to girls they’d give them up to the state if they didn’t behave, but they didn’t mean it. Mama truly did.

  I did sass her, sort of, one of the only times in my life I ever said anything back to her. I said, “So it isn’t really about Elena’s family.”

  “Well, I don’t really care if they adopt you,” she told me. “If they’re so successful, they could use another kid.”

  Elena’s mother actually did treat me like another kid in the family. And she was happy when Elena and me started being best friends. We’d always kind of known each other. But then, in eighth grade
, Elena cheated off me in a math test, and when I caught her, she started to cry. That surprised me, because I always thought of her as so tough. So when the teacher noticed how good her grade was, I lied and said she didn’t look. Elena said that was the most loyal thing she ever saw anybody do.

  When we got the job, Mrs. Gutierrez said, “Well, at least Arley can be a good influence on you, Elena, and you can do like she does. She doesn’t have half of what you have, and you look how hard she works.” That embarrassed me, but you know, I was secretly kind of proud of it, and when I started hanging out at their house more, I would sort of leave my book reports around, so Mrs. G. would see how neat they were labeled and typed and decorated. I even kind of liked it when she said that I would end up a doctor or a lawyer and Elena would be, like, selling earrings at the mall.

  “No way, Ma,” Elena would pipe up. “I want to be a nude dancer. You know that.”

  Mrs. G. would mutter swear words or prayers in Spanish and go in the kitchen to get chips for us. The best thing about working, for Elena, was getting her mom off her case.

  “She’s such a royal bitch,” Elena would say. But Mrs. Gutierrez wasn’t a bitch at all. Elena just didn’t know there were mothers who wouldn’t even know what year of school you were in. When Mrs. G. would go, “Did you study for your English test, Elena Louise?” she thought it was a way of controlling her. To me, it was like tucking her in at night, or something, and when I would stay over on Saturday nights after Elena and me went to the movies at the mall, and her mom started nagging me, too, about how I would wreck my complexion eating so much grease or whatever, I totally loved it. I would even show her my report card, and she would make me promise I would never waste that good mind on just being a housewife, like her. “Go on,” she would tell me. “Say, ‘I promise, Luisa.’ ” I couldn’t really call her Luisa, though, but I did, sometimes, quietly call her “Ma.” The way Mrs. G. must have felt about me at first, about what I did, was one of the things that hurt the most. They had one of those big, close Hispanic families, where they watch out for the girls like they were made of cake sugar that would melt in the rain. Not that this had much effect on Elena’s oldest sister, Gracie. Connie was the nice sister, but Grace was a desperado, who’d once even spent a few months at the Evins Center in Edinburg after she refused to go to school so many times Mr. and Mrs. G. had to call the authorities. Connie, on the other hand, was in college now, at Midtown Tech. I never even thought too much about college before Elena’s mom started saying how different I was from other girls my age. How serious. It made me think maybe my life was more than just a thing Mama could do with whatever she wanted.