The Most Wanted

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Hi, Charley,” I said.

  “You know each other?” Jeanine was surprised. And a little disappointed. A small thrill of satisfaction rippled through me.

  “This is my neighbor,” I told Jeanine.

  Charley helped me up. He was actually such a sweet-faced person. I was ashamed that I’d referred to him, to Stuart, as a “Hitler youth.”

  “I knew you were coming over here,” he said. “I was getting coffee down at the corner when I saw you drive by. Of course, I didn’t know there was going to be a first-aid emergency. But I wanted to offer my services.”

  Jeanine’s thoughts were so loud, I was afraid Charley would hear them. I felt my cheeks heat up.

  “You . . . huh?”

  “Well, like I told you, I’ve landscaped a lot of these houses. And I do carpentry. Electrical. Everything, really. And I’m cheap.” I couldn’t meet Jeanine’s eyes. Charley said, “Your leg is bleeding.”

  “It’s just a scratch,” Jeanine assured him cheerfully. “Where do you live, Charley?”

  “Two streets over. I have a two-flat. It’s been under construction for about ten years. But it has water. You could come over to my house and wash that knee,” he told me. “And you should probably get a tetanus shot. This is Texas, you know; the germs never die.”

  “I know about germs,” I chuffed. “We have germs where I grew up too. Why do people in Texas think they invented everything? Good and bad? No problem—I’ll just wash it off here.”

  “There’s no water,” Charley said gently.

  “How do you know?” I asked. “It’s just turned off, the guy said.”

  “There hasn’t been any water for years. You can see where the water leaked . . . well, it’s probably better you don’t look too close at that right now.”

  “So I need to call the water utility.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t do any good to call the utility . . .”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, see, the pipes must have broken quite a while ago. . . .”

  “So I need new pipes?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m suing.”

  “Who?”

  “Somebody.”

  “Well, might be cheaper just to fix the pipes.”

  “Do you know where to get cheap pipes?”

  “There’s no such thing as cheap pipes.”

  “I thought you said you knew how to do everything cheap.”

  “No, I said that I was cheap.”

  “But first I have to buy the pipes.”

  “Well, yeah. But I do know where I can get some faucets for you wholesale. They’re tearing down this old house on Mariposa—”

  “And you just sort of tiptoe over there in the dark, when you’re supposed to be, what, watering the lawns in the moonlight . . . ?”

  “You know, we recycle on principle in the King William district. A fireplace ends up a paved walk. Carport somehow just turns into a garden fence. We all believe that once it’s here, it ought to stay.”

  “My mailboxes have sure stayed. So I can be a lawyer with expensive pipes and stolen faucets.”

  “Repeat to yourself: It’s not stealing. It’s sharing,” said Charley. And I laughed.

  After we locked the door and got back into my car, Jeanine said, “He’s muy cute.”

  “Last time I checked, you already had a couple of nice big guys on the stringer,” I told her. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “We’re talking futures here, Anne. It never hurts to have a spare.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Arley

  8477298372

  Texas Department of Corrections

  Solamente River, Texas

  Dear Arley,

  I have been in a terrible state of uncertainty. I’m sending this overnight mail, hang the expense, because I want you to know my thoughts before you decide whether to come and see me next week. I will leave that decision up to you. But you need to understand the facts about how I feel before you make it.

  Dylan Thomas wrote, “Were vagueness enough and the sweet lies plenty/The hollow words could bear all suffering/And cure me of ills.”

  Trust an Irishman. (He is my favorite poet. In fact, my name is Dillon Thomas LeGrande, though I’m named after Mama, sort of, not after the poet. Dillion is her maiden name. I still think there can be connections that aren’t intentional, though, don’t you?)

  Back to the matter in hand. I have been avoiding it because it is too painful. You did lie to me.

  And even if you meant this to be a sweet lie, it has caused me to lose faith.

  First, you quoted Sara Teasdale in that letter to me. I immediately went on cloud nine. It was almost as if you were trying to send me a message. I never read Sara Teasdale, but it was like she knew us. Right away, I started in writing a poem just for you.

  Then, just a few days later, I happened to see the guest list for Saturday, and there was none other than “Constanza Gutierrez,” visiting old Kevin for maybe the 150th time this year.

  Well, I got a guard who’s a kind of buddy, and anyhow, I wasn’t asking to do nothing wrong, so I told him that if it was possible, could I come down for just a minute and give Connie a message for you from me. And also thank her, because it was, after all, Connie who got our relationship started. And he said, well, maybe, okay, and come that Saturday, I get walked down there, and there’s Connie and old Kevin. Now, it was their first contact visit, and it was downright raw, they were smooching away like crazy, and him running his hands all over her. Anyhow, I says, “Connie?” And she looks up and smiles real big—which Kevin did not, because I think he wanted to get back to it—and she comes over to me, with the guard standing right there, and I said, “I just want to thank you, kind lady, for bringing Arlington into my life.”

  And Connie says, “Oh, she did write to you, then? She’s a sweet girl. She’s my sister Elena’s best friend a long time. They go to Travis together.” And I think, Travis? Last I heard, that was a high school up there in Avalon. And so I says, “Connie, don’t you mean she used to go there? She’s in college with you now, isn’t she?” And Connie just shakes her head like I’m stupid and crazy and she says, “College? That little bitty girl ain’t but a ninth grader.”

  Well, I couldn’t say a thing. The guard took me back to my place, and I just lay down on that hard bunk. You let me believe very basic, simple things about you that were not true. Maybe it sounds corny coming from a man the world regards as a convicted felon, but I believe in honesty.

  I didn’t realize, until right then, how my feelings for you were changing. Getting deeper and deeper in a way that I never experienced before.

  It took me days before I could even think about the whole thing in one piece, you know what I mean?

  If you were older, this would not matter so much. If I was in my 30s and you were in your 20s, it would not be such a big deal. Rich men do it all the time. But once, I did go out with a girl who was only 17. And I was hardly 20 myself. And you’d’a thought her daddy was going to call out the Texas Rangers. He said I was nothing but a slinky skunk who wanted his girl for just one thing only, which was, in fact, not the case, though indeed she was very ready, willing, and able in that department.

  I vowed to myself, then, that I would never make the same mistake twice. So should we go any further? I don’t know. Once trust is broken, it is hard to mend it. Maybe we can be just friends, depending on how you define friendship. I need to go now. This has about worn me out.

  Yr obedient servant,

  Dillon Thomas LeGrande

  • • •

  Dear Dillon,

  I’m sending this by overnight mail too, because I won’t come to see you if those are your feelings. I guess the sight of me would only remind you that I really am only fourteen, and of how disappointed you are in me. I did not realize your feelings for me were growing stronger. I only knew that my feelings were growing so strong for you that there were nights I watched the moon cross the whole sk
y and go down without getting one single second of sleep. That whole week I didn’t hear from you, I felt like I would stop eating and die. In fact, I did stop eating. (I lost three or four pounds.)

  What happened, if you will think back, is that you just ASSUMED I was the same age as Connie. I should have corrected that idea right away. But I wasn’t brave enough.

  Why would a man of your age want to write to a kid in high school? I have never enjoyed talking to someone so much as I did with you. I knew that if I told you the truth, I would have to give all that up, and just go back to my boring life the way it was before.

  Believe me, I did think about the future. But it all seemed so far away. By the time you got out, I would be 16 or or even older. Maybe things would be different then. If you did want to see me, I thought I could explain things to you then, even though, by then, you will be almost 30, or whatever.

  I know I have no right to ask for your forgiveness. In fact, I don’t expect to hear from you ever again.

  So, I am going to say all the things I would have said if we went on. I’m going to wish you a happy birthday now, for December. My birthday is April 1. Elena says my middle name should be “Fool,” as in “April Fool,” because I’ve messed this up so much and made her mad and you mad and Connie mad too. Anyhow, I wish you the most happiness for your birthday. “Joie LeGrande.” That would sort of be the way to say that in French, because your name means “The Biggest” or “The Most,” doesn’t it? Anyway, I want to send you congratulations for when you get out. Get a great job, find someone worthy of your love, and have a happy life.

  Arley Mowbray

  P.S. I know you probably already know this. But Dylan Thomas was Welsh.

  • • •

  8477298372

  Texas Department of Corrections

  Solamente River, Texas

  Dearest Arley,

  Happy birthday.

  In advance for you, too.

  But not because I won’t be in touch with you at the time of your birthday. And afterward. And maybe for the rest of your life.

  I guess that I got your letter and felt that something between us was being reborn.

  Your letter was so full of maturity and decency I couldn’t stay mad at you. I guess they don’t make 14 year old girls like they used to. Or maybe you’re just a remarkable person and you would be the same at any age.

  I wish I could touch you so that I could express to you so many things I can’t say in words. Like forgiveness. Your letter convinced me that your mistake was made out of a sincere desire to continue communicating with me. I felt more affection in that letter than I had felt in any of the others.

  Maybe we only let our true feelings show when we feel we have nothing left to lose. I certainly have nothing left to lose, except you. And that I couldn’t bear to lose.

  Maybe the world would think what I’m going to say is ugly and wrong. But the world is a pretty cold examiner, to me. It doesn’t make much room for people who have to do things their own way. So I’m just going to say it plain. I think I am falling in love with you. And I don’t care if you are just a girl. You are a woman, too, in my mind and heart. My grandma wasn’t but 13 when she married my grandfather, and they lived together for 60 years and had seven children, of which my mother, Kate, is the fifth one. When my grandma had her first baby, she told me, she was so young she hadn’t even reached her full height yet. And she had never even been outside her mama’s house overnight the night she went home with my grandpa, and him only 17. Before my grandma died, she said to me, “Half the time, that old man wasn’t worth the powder to blow him to hell.” And I said—I don’t know, I was a kid—I says, like, why’d you stay so long if you were so mad? And she said, “The other half of the time is why.”

  I am many years beyond you, girl, but if we were on flat ground, equal and free, and it was the future, even the world might smile on you and me. I want the chance to see you in that future. Will you give it to me?

  You must not think this is only the lonesomeness of a captive talking to you. I am not bad to look at. (See photo enclosed.) I’ve had my chances, even in here, to bind a woman to me. But I have not taken them. Arley, I was waiting for you. If you doubt that, read the poem I named after you and that I am placing in this letter.

  Dillon

  After I read that poem, the one he called after me, “Arlington,” well, that was that.

  That was that.

  I knew it was a good poem, besides everything else. It meant that I was right about Dillon—despite all the hard times he had brought on himself, Dillon was an unusually sensitive person. Later on, when Annie read it out loud, I could see people react, and I was so proud.

  When I read these words, when he called me “the place I am always moving toward,” I just started to cry. I cried right through reading it five times, and by then I knew it by heart, though it normally takes you a long time to memorize something. It was about me, my own self, real and unique as the circles of my own fingerprints but drawn around by Dillon’s love for me, like a heart around two names on a tree. That letter with the poem, the week before I went to see him for the first time, was the beginning of the part of our life together that no one else would know. Except Annie, and then only partly. And Elena, of course. But then, also only partly. I never showed Elena another one of those letters. I didn’t want to share that part of my life with anyone else.

  Because I was so young, back then, I had to rely on other people to get Dillon and me together. I mean, together in the sense of face-to-face. I started getting closer to Connie. Not to use her, but because she was going through the same thing with Dillon’s brother. It was like we were kin, sisters-in-law or something, and so we had a special connection, even though she was a lot older. Also, she was pretty immature. She still is, but at least she’s not with Kevin LeGrande anymore. After his part in what happened, Kevin’s going to be in Solamente River for a long, long time, and even Connie doesn’t have enough patience, nor should she.

  Anyhow, it was Connie who told me how Dillon had to put people on his list and give a reason why each one was included (he said I was a friend he’d met through his mother’s church), so they could be approved in advance. Otherwise, they plain wouldn’t let me in. And they wouldn’t call ahead to tell me, either. They’d just stop me at the door. She told me I was going to get searched too, but just my purse and my pockets. It helped me not to get scared when she walked me through it, how it was going to feel when they locked those thick green steel doors behind you. How it would rob your breath, even though you knew you were going to get to walk right back out and go home after an hour went by.

  The last few days before I went, I was so nuts I couldn’t think about anything but Dillon. At home, I kept looking at his picture, which I had taped inside my French book, and trying hard to see what he really looked like. But the picture was a little far away. He was hunkered down next to a tree, like he was looking off into the distance. He had on normal clothes—I didn’t know, back then, that people in prison wore jeans and T-shirts; I still thought you would wear striped pajamas or a surgeon’s outfit or something. His legs were strong-looking. But I couldn’t tell much about his face, and to tell you the truth, I couldn’t even look at it that long. When I did, the longing and the awe in me got so sharp my insides ached and turned, the muscles clasping so tight I could sit up at night and feel a sore place, as if my period were about to come. I could be all alone, and still be as embarrassed as if fifty people were leaning over my shoulders and pointing and staring. It was as if Dillon himself could see me—as if he could look out of that picture and could tell just how my eyes licked over his jaw and his neck and the skin of his shoulder, where his shirt was pulled away a little, like a kid trying to catch every single drop of ice cream before it melted.

  When I was in school, I didn’t even dare open to the picture. Everyone’d see. They’d see my face flush and my eyes lock on a spot far away. See my thoughts materialize above my head
in block print, strange thoughts, hot to the touch: awe is not too strong to describe it. I just couldn’t take it all in—the oneness that Dillon seemed to want for him and me. Dillon was a man, a whole man, with strong muscles and perfect eyes and a history of griefs and jokes and books he’d read and songs he knew, and he was all mine, to know, to love, maybe even to touch. A whole other person. I wanted to know everything about him. I wanted to eat his past like a loaf of bread, so it would settle inside me too. Then I would be able to recall the first time he washed his car without a shirt on or listened to the oldies station from Lake Charles until the sun came up. I didn’t just want to hear about these things; I wanted to have seen them. I wanted to really feel the first time he got a bee sting, the six months when he ate nothing except banana flakes, when he learned to walk in heeled boots without wobbling his ankles, the time he tried to patch his dog Donut’s ripped-open leg after she tangled with a coyote. I wished I could have lain beside him the night his papa was burned, while he tried to block his ears so he wouldn’t hear his mother’s wails; when he was six and lost a tooth in school and cried because he didn’t know baby teeth fell out and thought he’d done something wrong; and the first time he’d tried to impress a girl by swinging out on a mustang grapevine over the swimming cove at Grapetree Fork—that, actually, I didn’t like to think about very much. But I guess if that memory had been offered, I’d have taken it too, because it was part of him and because much as you hate to think of the boy you love with someone else, one of the things that makes you want him most is that other girls do too. Then and before, plenty of girls would have wanted Dillon, no matter what he’d done. He was nothing if not pretty. It still makes Annie crazy when I say that. But I’m not going to stop saying it just because it bothers her.