The Most Wanted (2 page)

And still of a winter’s night, they say,

when the wind is in the trees,

When the moon is a ghostly galleon

tossed upon cloudy seas,

When the road is a ribbon of moonlight

over the purple moor,

A highwayman comes riding—

Riding—riding—

A highwayman comes riding,

up to the old inn-door.

Over the cobbles he clatters

and clangs in the dark inn-yard;

And he taps with his whip on the shutters,

but all is locked and barred;

He whistles a tune to the window,

and who should be waiting there

But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,

Bess, the landlord’s daughter,

Plaiting a dark red love-knot

into her long black hair.

E
VEN NOW
, years later, I know there are going to be those nights. Nights when I will wake up with my nightgown soaked to my ribs. When I will be taking breath from deep in my stomach, not my chest. When I will be sure that it’s really not a dream.

Instead, it will be as though my very own safe room on Azalea Road is really the dream. As if my Desi, right on the other side of the wall, sleeping in her white bed under that wagon train mural we painted for her, all in the palest of pinks and yellows and greens, is just a wish that found its way into my sleep, when my mind was off its guard. As if I didn’t get away; I didn’t live to tell.

The fire dream, and the other one, the kiss, come back so round and full of sound that I could swear I’m back there again in that black little square of cabin on the night of the fire, watching Desi go out the door in that flickery red wash of light, afraid I will never feel her little stickpin fingers close tight around mine again, afraid I will never again smell her hair.

Once or twice, I’ve had both those dreams on the same night, and then I’m sick with the shivers and done with sleep until morning.

When I dream of the kiss, I don’t hear the fire. I can feel my mouth open up under his as if that mouth had never done a single thing—not eat or breathe or pray—anything but wait for what it was made by nature to do, the only thing that made it feel satisfied, or useful, as if it had been not two years but instead two minutes. That scares me just as much as the other dream does. It makes me know that I am, at the core, as bad as he was.

I don’t tell Annie. I guess I’m still immature enough, or prideful enough, that I don’t want Annie to think she was right about Dillon all along. And we’ll never know, not really, if she was totally right, because what he did on the porch that night . . . well, only he would know, and he’s gone so long, there’s no asking. Annie comes if she hears me crying, she comes as if I’m a baby that woke with a fever, and she just sits there, she doesn’t try to hug me or anything. She’s good that way. Actually, she’s probably good in all ways. Still, I don’t want to admit to Annie that I know I was a fool. I used to tell her, “Annie, I made this here bed, and now I’m going to have to lie in it.” I guess I wanted that to sound like bold talk. But there was no other choice. I did wrong, and then I did more wrong, and I did it because I knew that what Dillon did was part my fault. That he did it in some sense for me, or maybe all for me, and one piece of me had to stick with him on account of that.

I guess, by that night, along with the police and everybody else, I had started to think of Dillon as almost a supernatural creature, who could do anything he desired and not be stopped. On TV, they called him “The Highwayman,” just like he wanted. It was as if he’d made himself up a new self, a self I didn’t know. I couldn’t feel him moving in my chest or trace his jaw with my forefinger in my mind. And if I tried to make him come back to me and fit inside my heart the way he used to, he just wouldn’t. We weren’t one anymore. All I would be able to think of was Desi. Of course, it was a mercy that I could let him loose that way, I know that now. But it felt then like being in hell. It was like I walked right down Kings Highway with my shirt bare off for everyone to see, did it on purpose, not having any clue why, not even seeing my shame until somebody showed me pictures of what I’d done. There are times when I think that none of it could ever have happened at all. And yet I know.

I have certainly got the proof.

When Dillon came along, he just filled up the sky over me, and I couldn’t see around him to good or bad or wise or stupid or anything. I know how that sounds. But if you feel like that, it’s more than love, it’s like your mind getting turned over and emptied out like a drawer; you’re so cleanly dedicated to that one person, it’s as if all the rest of you was scrubbed off. It’s like waking up from a dream into a dream and not knowing where one left off and the other began.

When I think back on the house in Avalon and Taco Haven in San Antonio, Mrs. Murray’s class and the Bexar County library, Coach Diaz and the track team, it’s all like an old film in black and white. And for a while, the future looked that way too, but not now. Now the future shows up in my sleep in all those pastel pretties Desi likes. So I’m not afraid to sleep most nights. It’s not like I’m depressed. You don’t have to be depressed to regret what deserves regret.

Did anyone else ever feel about anyone the way I felt about Dillon? Like he was a strongbox that would look gray and ordinary to anyone else but show its jewelly treasures inside only to the one person who had the key? If someone else ever did feel that way, how long did it last? I know one thing: nothing on earth can explain how I could know every breath and hand line of the boy who wrote those poems for me, and have the very same boy be a stranger who did all those terrible things. If you ever felt love that crazy for somebody, you can’t imagine that you would ever feel the other, a growing so far and wide apart you might see him on the street and not even have to swallow hard. That you might even think, Oh boy, there’s trouble.

Of course, I can’t ever know whether that would have happened to Dillon and me. Whether we’d ever have had fights or got divorced or started to hang around with different crowds. We never passed each other on a street or even held hands. We never got anywhere close to getting ordinary. It wasn’t ordinary how quickly he became everything to me. It wasn’t ordinary how quickly he had to become nothing. It wasn’t natural: I only knew Dillon a handful of days. Most of the time Dillon was growing up and going to school and even making love, I never knew him. Maybe that was the real Dillon, and the Dillon I knew hardly real at all.

When I was a kid, the one time I ever got farther away from Avalon than the half-hour bus ride to San Antonio was when Mama and Grandma and my brother and sister and me went to visit my aunt Debbie Lynn in Galveston. I was almost six, and I didn’t even know there was an ocean alongside Texas. No one ever told me.

Debbie Lynn took us to the beach in her car. The end of it was invisible, it was so long. And the white strip was so much a contrast with the green Gulf, water that seemed like a huge soft mattress, that I couldn’t take it in all at once. I had to look down at my feet. Down there was this whole carpet of tiny shells, no bigger than my thumbnail, with colors I’d never seen before except in a church window—rose pink and gray and shiny black. I started to scoop them up and stuff them in my pockets and even my undershirt, peeking around at everyone else on the beach and wondering why they weren’t doing the same thing. How could anybody keep from wanting them, these beautiful things just sitting there, free for the taking?

But later on that night, when those shells dried off, I almost cried. They still had their tiny fan shape. But they didn’t have their colors anymore. They were dull. You could barely believe they could be those same ones that lay gleaming, washed in the sand.

I remember asking my aunt, Which are the real colors?

But she was like my mama: nothing drove her more nuts than a child asking questions. So I decided myself about those shells, the way I had to decide most things when I was little. I studied it without the information a grownup could give you.

And I decided that both colors of the shells were real.

It just depended on where you were.

T
HAT MORNING
, I had crawled in to work, my pressed white cotton blouse already damp and crumpled at the waist just from the ten-minute drive to the office. I was beat from the heat and sapped from a major wee-hours bicker with Stuart. We didn’t fight, Stuart and I. I don’t think we ever really had a fight—not a blowout of the kind my sister and her husband have twice a month and laugh about later. Don had such a habit of hurling the contents of a cup or a bowl at the ceiling during his rants that one year, for their anniversary, Rachie hired an artist to paint a mural of stains—from coffee to ketchup—on the kitchen ceiling, so Don’s outbursts wouldn’t show. “He’s just loud,” Rachael said, “not dangerous.”

Don loved the mural. He beamed at Rachael and said, “That’s why you’re my best girl.”

“Enshrining their dysfunction,” Stuart commented when I told him about it. “Well, to each his own.”

What Stuart and I had instead of fights were long, tortured, semantically dissective chats, in which each of us would try to out-lawyer the other—as if anybody ever prevailed in a personal disagreement through the use of logic. The night before Arley Mowbray turned up in my office and overturned my life, the chat had been about our marriage, which either was or was not imminent, depending on which of us you talked to. Stuart had been pulling cruise folders out of the Sunday paper and leaving them on my nightstand for months, as well as speculating aloud about getting La Casita to cater its famous ranch eggs for a brunch. But I, for my part, was not picturing a beige linen frock and a straw hat in my near future—though that was actually the only sort of wedding outfit I thought I could endure.

Stuart especially thought it would be fun to fly to Las Vegas and get married early in the day so we could spend the night at the blackjack tables.

“Don’t you think that would be cool?” he’d razzed me that night, as I rinsed the leftovers of Greek salad from the Fiesta ware we’d just bought. “We could get one of those heart-shaped tubs. Like those old ads for the Poconos.” I had to laugh, picturing Stuart and me in a red enamel tub, disporting ourselves among the suds. I wonder now whether Stuart felt the boat rocking for us, that fall, long before I did. He had ratcheted up his suitor act a couple of notches, though at the time I couldn’t imagine why.

People always say they know their lovers better than they know themselves, but when Stuart said that, it was literally true. Three days before I’d get a cold, he’d predict it by noticing a change in my eyes—and he was never wrong. He could gauge how bad my day had been by how long it took me to turn the key in the front door, and he’d be ready to offer a back rub (which, unlike another man’s, would not turn into a front rub within the first three minutes). My parents loved Stuart from the moment they met him, but I forgave him that, even though he sometimes teased me by urging my mother on the phone to exercise her parental rights: “Miriam, she won’t set the date. Why can’t you just give me her hand? I thought that was how this worked.” Long silences afterward, during which Stuart would simply smile and nod, made me assume my mother had launched into her own visions for my wedding. Marrying off the plain older sister would, for her, represent a major victory. Given her way, Mom would have the lamps on the dinner tables encrusted with pale-pink furled rosebuds and would fly little second cousins in from Chicago and Flagstaff to strew petals. I would hate this, but Stuart wouldn’t have minded. He was a real person in that respect, adaptable and forgiving, and he proclaimed himself up for any kind of ceremony, large or small, that would end with my being his one and only. As for me, I’d never thought seriously about Stuart and me being married. Or about our being apart. Both things had always seemed excessive.

Since we’d met in Chicago, where we were both public defenders and Stuart was just beginning his novitiate as a capital punishment abolitionist, we’d marveled at our easy, undemanding fit. Displaced New Yorkers greet each other with pathetic relief no matter where they wash up, but almost instantly, it was clear that Stuart and I had a shared sense of things that went way beyond a common city of origin. We agreed on things no one else even considered. We both thought Dionne Warwick could sing rings around Whitney Houston. Locked in separate rooms and allowed to make only one phone call, we would each order pizza with green peppers and pineapple, easy on the cheese. We both thought Jack Nicholson was the world’s most overrated actor and Jackie Gleason the most underrated.

“You can have all of them,” Stuart said the night we met. “You can have
Chinatown
. You can even have
The Godfather, Part Two
. There is only one real movie.
The Hustler
.
The Hustler
is my life.”

I could count on him never to say “presently” when he meant “currently.” He could count on me to be able to sing all the Belmonts’ parts if he sang the Dion parts on “Run-around Sue.”

Ten years later, our routine was still just as predictable and satisfying. We worked all week like dogs and then gave ourselves over utterly to our daylong Sunday date, which only an execution, or the threat of one, could derail. A long, late breakfast and then a drive to one of the hamlets sprinkled around San Antonio. Thirty minutes by car, and you’d feel time had dialed back thirty years—that’s how small those towns, like the towns Arley and Dillon grew up in, really were. People sold Miz Stern’s settee or Miz Brainard’s quilts for the equivalent of East Coast pocket change. Not that Stuart and I bought anything much. The rare tchotchke aside, our antiquing journeys mainly amounted to wishful foraging, in the spirit of a more roomy and prosperous someday we somehow never really articulated. “We should just keep the furniture we have, Anne,” Stuart told me once. “By the time we get around to a house, this stuff will
be
antiques.”

Do I remember the words and thoughts I had the night before I met Arley so clearly only because it
was
the night before? Do things seem more meaningful because subsequent events etch certain cues into a framework that has more weight? I remember rinsing the plates and listening to Stuart sketch increasingly weird motifs for our wedding, and I remember that I suddenly thought, Who will get the Fiesta ware? Why did I think such a thing?

It scared me. “Well, Stuart,” I’d said finally, “at least it’d be a story to tell the grandchildren. Except there wouldn’t be any grandchildren.”

And that started it, not a new discussion but a thinly disguised variation of a debate we’d had six times, this one distinguished only by its more urgent tenor. I could make Stuart see all the reasons why I didn’t want to get married unless we were going to have a child, and I could even get him to understand them. But I couldn’t get him to feel the same way. A child was beside the point, he would insist. The point was that “living together” at our age was just laziness or perversity—trying to prove something to an audience of people who were either dead or no longer gave a damn.

I, personally, thought that it was Stuart who was trying to prove something. Despite all his stalwart cheer, what I really sensed in Stuart about getting married was a great giving up, like the big get-it-over-with sigh he gave every morning as he got up off the couch to run, after lying coiled in the fetal position, his shoes unlaced, for fully ten minutes. He seemed to believe that marriage, like running, would be healthy for a person, even if initially strenuous and cumbersome.

“Stuart, you don’t regard getting married as an adventure,” I told him that night.

“You don’t regard it as an adventure, either,” he replied.

“But you shouldn’t get married after ten years just because you’ve run out of other things to do.”

“I haven’t run out of other things to do. I assumed that we’d get married one of these decades, Anne. We’re the oldest living cohabitators in America.”

“Not so,” I told him, picking up a bolster to throw at him. (I hate this trait in myself, this willingness to cut the tension in a debate with jabber and slapstick when I should say nothing and let the frosty silence work my will, the way other women do.) “Your uncle Stan and Missus LePollo are.”

“They’re trying to avoid losing their Social Security. Pretty soon we’ll be doing the same thing. So how about it, schweetie? What’ve you got lined up for a week from Saturday? Or Sunday, if you’re busy? Let me make an honest woman of you, even if you are a lawyer.”

“You mean that’s what you want to do? Just mosey on over to the Bexar County Courthouse and lasso up a judge?”

“I already said it would be romantic to just elope.”

“To downtown?”

“Well, you didn’t seem to like the Elvis Chapel idea. So what do you want to do? Rent the back room of Mister Allegretti’s in Hoboken? Or did you want a chuppah, and a light-bulb to step on?”

It was kind of entertaining. And because of that as much as anything else, I didn’t want to rev up the child thing. It wasn’t that I craved reproduction with every waking breath. But I was thirty-nine that winter night, and I figured that if I was going to give the matter an honest chance, it would have to be soon. In fact, I’d been sort of madly dicing around with our birth control in recent months, not really taking any reckless chances, but not covering every base, either, just to see if anything happened. Nothing had.

Unlike virtually every one of my single friends, I’d never had an abortion or even a serious pregnancy scare. My period marched in unremarkably every month, took off its cardigan, and stayed for the exact same four days it had since I was thirteen. Was I that careful? Or that sterile? In the past few years, the distinction had begun to matter. And so I dithered around that night: I wasn’t ready to have a child right now. I wasn’t ready to say I never wanted one. I didn’t spend my days at Women and Children First spinning fantasies about my own nestlings, but it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to see what reasons I had for choosing not to be a mother.

“Stuart, I think the way it goes for most people who stay childless is that they’re tempted to have children but they know they have good reasons not to. I just don’t have those good reasons.”

Didn’t that sound sensible?

“A person doesn’t have a child because she can’t think of a reason not to, Anne. And you do have reasons not to. You have a demanding, draining job—”

“Which I don’t even want half the time,” I interrupted. “I could do fifty other things. Part time, even.”

This was the major difference between us: I found my work interesting and even compelling, but it was not a calling, as Stuart’s was for him. This often made things easier: when Stuart got the chance to work in Texas (the equivalent of Jerusalem for a death row lawyer), I could tag along, certain I’d find a job. And I did. I could even see myself working in private practice one day. It would not put my soul in jeopardy to make more than thirty thousand dollars a year, and I was still a doctor’s daughter: I liked my sheets to have the two hundred thread count, and I bought new running shoes twice a year, while Stuart wore his until they were as thin as ballet slippers. Capital punishment, the Knicks, and I—in that order, I sometimes felt—were the reasons Stuart got out of bed in the morning.