The Most Wanted (32 page)

I didn’t have much ground to stand on there.

“You did it, after all,” Elena said.

“I’m married,” I answered. “And you don’t even love Ricky.”

“I love him that way.”

“Elena, every girl in South Texas loves him that way. What about you weren’t going to give it away until you were sure, and all that? What if you get pregnant?” She still wasn’t convinced. Then I asked her what was I supposed to do while they were bouncing away in the bedroom? Watch the TGIF sitcoms? She couldn’t think of an answer to that. “It’s not fair, though,” she pouted. “At this rate, I’m going to be a virgin when I’m a senior.”

We were hungry, so we threw out all the chicken liver pâté and hummus and other junk Annie had left for me, and made a big mess of frijoles and rice, with lots of Cholula sauce. Finally, Elena perked up and asked if I could guess her other surprise. I tried a couple of things: Her mama was going to take her to see her relatives in Puerto Rico. No. She was going to get a car next year. No. She was going to go out for freshman attendant on prom court.

“Close,” Elena said. “But better. One more guess.” She’d brought a couple of those little airline bottles of wine she stole out of her father’s workshop, and she offered me some, but I wouldn’t take any. I was getting aggravated, so she just burst out with it: Last Saturday, with nobody, not her mother or father or me or anybody knowing, she had gone down to the fairgrounds and tried out for Flower Princess for the Fiesta de San Antonio in June. There were three hundred girls there, some of them already in college. And she was picked! One of only seven girls!

I screamed. I couldn’t believe it.

When you grow up here, you think the fiesta princesses are like movie stars or something. They’re always in the newspaper or passing out roses in Dalton’s the Saturday before Mother’s Day or giving trophies to college boys in big football games and stuff. On the first day of the fiesta (which is this superhuge thing, like a giant carnival, for a whole week), each one of the princesses got her own float; each float is a different color, and her dress and the flowers and everything match. I don’t know who paid for everything, I guess the town did, though I know Mr. G. pretended to go nutty after he found out that the girl’s family had to buy the dress (he was actually very proud; for years afterward, Gracie G. would call the arrangement of Elena’s princess pictures on the living room wall the “Shrine of Santa Maria de Vaca”). On the last night of the festival, all the princesses were guests of honor at this big ball; Elena said I could come as one of her sisters.

Elena was going to be the Bougainvillea Princess, the red one. “That was always my favorite one!” I said, and I really did mean it. Of course you’d immediately like something involving your best friend the best, although I had always sort of favored the Primrose Princess, because when I was little, I thought her big yellow skirt looked like Cinderella’s.

Elena smiled a tiny secret smile, not at all braggy. “It’s so cool,” she said. “I still can’t believe it.”

“When did you find out?”

“Last night! When Annie was on the phone with my mom, we already knew! And I was, like, dying to tell you!”

“What did you have to do to get it?”

“Well, I just had to walk around in different clothes—a dress, and jeans with some cowboy boots . . .”

“How do you know how to do it?”

“You just pick up this pamphlet at the . . . well, all over the place. You can get them at the museum.”

This didn’t sound like the Elena I knew. “What were you doing at the museum, El? Putting the T-rex together?”

“No.”

“What?”

“I was there with Brin Dennison.”

“Oh,” I said. “She’s nice.” She really was nice. And really popular. She could sing and dance. Brin’d been Juliet
and
Marian the Librarian in the school shows, and she was only a sophomore. What was Elena doing hanging around with a sophomore? And
that
kind of sophomore? I loved Elena, but she wasn’t the drama club kind of person. Then I got another surprise.

“I’m in variety show with her,” Elena said. “I . . . tried out. And I got in the Stevie Nicks number and the
West Side Story
number. Brin is in both of those too. So we’re together.”

“Doing what?”

“Dancing.”

“You can dance?”

“Arley, you know I can dance.”

“I mean, I know you can dance. I didn’t know you could
dance
dance.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’m so hot at it. But I can move. And you know, I gotta do something other than go to the mall and Taco Haven. By myself. I guess all your studying and being on track and everything rubbed off on me. You were a good influence.” Well, I could have said something then—like, what kind of influence had she been on me? Here I was, the pregnant ex–track star. But I couldn’t say anything. I just felt so bad.

At least I wasn’t just paranoid; it really was what I’d been afraid of. Brin Dennison was her new best friend. I knew Elena wouldn’t admit it, but that was purely what she was saying. Brin was closer to her than me now, and it had happened, like, that fast. It was like Mrs. G. said: everything happened in dog years. I swallowed hard so I wouldn’t cry.

“When did you start all this?”

She shrugged. “Like, a month ago. Or a little more. After you moved here. Arley, come on. It’s no big wup. I just . . . you’re always thinking about Dillon, or writing to Dillon, or sending a package to Dillon—”

“He’s my husband, Ellie!”

“Well, I don’t have a husband! I’m fifteen years old!”

We sat there, quiet. We both looked out the window at the boys playing basketball in the playground.

“You were the one couldn’t wait to grow up, so we could get our own apartment and everything,” I said bitterly.

“I didn’t mean to really fucking go and do it,” Ellie snapped.

She drank down a whole glass of her airline wine. Then she started in on her favorite subject of all time: “I don’t want to fight, Arley. We’re still best friends, okay? Let’s not ruin this time we have together. We don’t get that much time. Now, I gotta know. Tell me once more exactly how it felt. When he stuck it in the first time, did it hurt right away? All at once?” I was a little grossed out by how fascinated she was. Still I remembered how I had felt the night before my wedding, quizzing Elena about every sexual thing I could think of. I tried to tell her as best I could. She finished the first little bottle of wine and pulled out another one. “I’m not driving!” she said brightly, and added, “No one’s going to know if you have one drink, Miss Goody Pure Married Sex Lady.”

I told her then about the baby. She about died.

I never saw a thing sober Elena up so fast. She even called Ricky Nevadas and told him not to come over, that there was an urgent personal situation. Damn, she kept saying. Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn. Arley, damn. Finally, she asked me, “Are you going to get rid of it?”

“Of course not. I’m married.”

“You can still get an abortion if you’re married.”

“I don’t know if you can or not,” I lied.

“You can.”

“Well, even if I can, I don’t want to. I want to have this baby. I mean, I guess I always wanted to have a baby. Maybe not this young. But maybe this is how it’s meant to be.”

“Are you scared?”

“Of what?”

“Of it hurting, for chrissakes.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, and . . . ?”

“I’m more scared of what happens after it’s born. Like, what do I do?”

“How to take care of it?”

“No. I have books about that. I mean, what do I do, to live? I don’t want to go on the state, and I don’t know where I can live, and even with good behavior, it’s going to be two years or something before Dillon even comes up for parole.”

“You’ll figure out something. Annie’ll help you.”

But there was more to it than that. What I was really, deep down worried about was what kind of mother I could possibly be—because if there was a gene for bad parenthood, I surely must have it, having had one parent who wasn’t ever there and one who didn’t want to be. I wished I could ask Mama if there’d been a time, even a short time, when she’d rejoiced over the thought of having me, when she couldn’t wait to see how I would look or what talents I might have. If I had known then about why Mama went traveling when she was a girl, why we got those names we got, I guess I wouldn’t have troubled myself looking for diamonds in a cereal box, for I would have understood that Cam and I and even Langtry were just means to an end. But maybe all babies are. What matters is what the end is.

From the dream I started having again just before Desi was born, the old dream about colored wagons, I assumed I was like all the teen mothers I read about in magazines. I thought having a baby would make me feel important and grown up, that it would transform my life into something more significant. That I was having a baby so that I’d have something to love that couldn’t leave me. Like a living teddy bear to dress up and play with.

All that was true, in a way. I didn’t ever have anything reliable to love in my life, not completely, until Dillon. But that love had already changed me totally, inside and out, giving me everything where I thought there was never going to be anything much. I had no idea about Annie and me, or getting to know Charley and Jeanine and all, or how anything that started out so far outside the only world you ever knew could come to be so much a part of the inside, in such a short time. And of all the things I didn’t reckon on being so important, I didn’t reckon most on Desi.

I thought that eventually Dillon and I would have a little place, maybe someday even own us a house the way his daddy had. And we would both have jobs. I thought that having a baby, though it would be hard for us to afford, would be exciting and fun and a living proof of our love. Desi was an idea to me, then, a nice idea, like in the poems I wrote about marriage and being a couple when I never knew anything about marriage except making love. How could I have imagined a baby as a person? And for all I knew about babies, how could I have expected that knowing a person who couldn’t even talk would teach me more about everything in the world than all the talking everybody else in my life had done all put together? And I certainly couldn’t imagine anything like that back that night, alone in the apartment with Elena, because even though I was sitting there telling her all about my worries and my big news—it was way bigger news than hers, after all, even though it sort of felt like something to be guilty about instead of celebrating—I was really thinking about how it would be to be the Bougainvillea Princess.

It just came to me, right then.

I could have been the Bougainvillea Princess myself. I could have even been the Primrose Princess. My mind just never included it until it was too late. I mean, I had all these ideas about having good speech and getting good grades and being an athlete, but I never had any dreams about just fun stuff. My mama never said I was a pretty princess who could dress all up in a tulip skirt and ride on a float so covered with buttermilk flowers it smelled like a pole boat floating down the river of heaven. She didn’t tell me, and you don’t know if you don’t know.

I wanted to bawl like a fool. Here I was, married to the handsomest man I ever saw and carrying his child and living with a good friend in a nice place, and I was mooning about never being able to be a flower princess. How could it be that I was growing up backward?

But that was just the beginning of what was happening to me.

Did Dillon feel it, far away in his cell in Block C in Solamente River? Did he wake up all restless and wonder where was his wife, his Arley, in her dreams if not in her body? Did he feel he was losing me, that he would have to win me crazy like if he couldn’t hold me with his love? No, I don’t think he really did. But I can’t deny that I was changing. During those months I was pregnant with Desi, I wasn’t just growing fat as a heifer; I was growing, growing, growing in my mind. Annie was making me grow, challenging me. Now I look back, you’d best believe I’m glad I felt uncertain about so much. It might have made the things that happened easier to bear, in the sense of my being prepared. It was probably my destiny turning over another card is all.

But I still worry. I still wonder.

The fiesta was in June, so I was pretty far along pregnant. I wrote Dillon all about the fiesta. Elena hadn’t had anything to eat but fruit smoothies for five days. She wanted to lose five pounds. “And she’s already thin!” I wrote Dillon. “I’m going to look so fat and ugly next to the other girls.” I thought that might hurt his feelings, though, him having been the one who got me this way, so I added that most people, including guys, seemed to notice me a lot more, and hardly any of them could tell I was pregnant.