The Most Wanted (33 page)

I guess that was stupid. Maybe I
did
want to make him a little jealous.

In the weeks leading up to the fiesta, a couple of really big things had happened to me. I took my GED, and I passed. Annie was so excited she sprang this big surprise on me: she took me to New York. That was the second big thing.

Now, how can I tell this? I hadn’t ever even seen the airport. In fact, all I knew of even Texas was Galveston, and the part of Dallas you could see from watching the football game on TV. From our valley, where Avalon was, the whole world was like a medieval map with just Florence and China, or whatever, on it and then all these other big shapes and drawings of waves and sea monsters. I was on a map with only three points: my house; San Antonio, where Annie’s and school and work were; and Solamente River, where Dillon was, where I’d said my marriage words and left my blood on a fold-up couch covered with yellow and red fabric, in a trailer next to a field stitched all around by a fence topped with razor-sharp steel ribbon.

I don’t think I slept for two hours the whole three days I was in New York. Annie couldn’t keep me inside her girlfriend Penny’s apartment on Twenty-third Street. I wanted to go outside before it was even light and walk around, see all the groceries, with their big bins of flowers and fruit, opening up, the people walking dogs, hear the endless rhythm of horns honking that never died away, even in the middle of the night. Then we stayed at Annie’s sister’s house, and I met her two boys, both littler than me. Annie and I took the train with Rachael to the city to see
Carousel
. It was the most beautiful night of my life.

I think Annie chose that show not because she got a good deal on the tickets but because of Billy Bigelow being a bad boy who hit the girl he loved and left her pregnant when he died. I think she wanted me to see similarities, and I did—but I’ll tell you, I wanted her to see similarities too. And I think she did. I think she saw how you can be helpless not to love somebody. At the end, when Billy came to see his little girl graduating, I cried so hard Rachael and Annie thought I was going to be sick, and they wanted me to go right home. But I wanted to go to the restaurant they promised me, and have a cream tea, and when they said I was getting hysterical, it made me get even more that way. “I want to see stuff!” I cried out. “This is my last chance!”

“Your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” Rachael told me gently.

“I don’t think any goddamn thing on earth could be bigger than my stomach!” I yelled back, and then I felt terrible, and Annie did too. Embarrassed by this Texas hick kid she brought to show her family, like I was some kind of bigeyed thing in a box from Peru. She started shaking her head at me, but Rachael smoothed it all over.

“Annie, she’s got the jits is all,” Rachael said. “It feels so strange when you’re that pregnant . . . You feel like you’re drowning in your own body.” She got the cream tea packaged all up in a big box, and we took it home and ate it sitting on Rachael’s deck, and Rachael told me how it would feel to be on my own at college and how there was plenty of what she called “federal money” for girls with babies who were smart. “I don’t mean the babies have to be smart,” she said. “That’s not a requirement.” When I told Rachael that I was pretty sure I couldn’t make it outside Texas, she reassured me. “You can grow up ignorant about the world even if your father is a rich doctor from New York, Arley. People from up here don’t have any special corner on being smart; they just act like they do.”

That’s how nice she was to me, a stranger, just because Annie loved me.

Coming home was a time for me to be lost and gone in thought. At night, I would feel like I wanted to cry, and I’d pray for my mind to fold up like one of those little origami pocketbooks and stay down nice and flat and tight the way it used to be. But it was all over the place, thinking about New York and junior college and maybe running track again—because Mary Slaney was even better, after she had her baby, and so was Jackie Joyner-Kersee—and hoping the baby would be a girl instead of the son Dillon wanted so bad. For the first time, as I covered pages of that beautiful recycled paper with poems and ideas for Dillon, I felt as though I was lying to him: that even though I kept saying it, he
wasn’t
the only dream in the world for me, like I was for him. I still loved him, that was never a question, but I didn’t think I could explain the changes in me that weren’t obvious to the eye until we got some real time together.

The two times Annie drove me to Solamente River while I was pregnant, Dillon and I didn’t hardly talk at all. He just rolled his hands and his mouth over me as best we could in a room full of derelicts and girl derelicts doing the same thing, him trying to hold back, but rubbing my breasts with his wrists while he held my face and kissed me. I wasn’t comfortable with the whole scene. I was very conscious of him, physically, but a part of me was sitting back inside, high up on the hill of my motherhood, watching Dillon and me panting and smooching in that dirty room and thinking, No, no. Just like Annie was thinking. I could almost feel her, those times, out there in the foyer, smacking her gum and checking her watch. She didn’t like Dillon and Dillon didn’t like her. He called her my “jailer,” because she had so many things for me to do on the weekends, when I wasn’t working: going with Charley to pick out plants for the house, shopping for furniture for Azalea Road, listening to lectures and parenthood classes given by the people at Jeanine’s agency who counseled the pregnant girls who were giving up their babies for adoption—all of which interfered with seeing Dillon. In six months, I could have another conjugal visit, and I sort of pinned my hopes on that, knowing that if Dillon and I were really together, our love would fall into place again. Meanwhile, I talked and wrote to him about my everyday life, and about hoping for my apartment.

Getting a place of my own, even if it was just a room in a rooming house, was starting to be this huge thing. After his one client got the poke and was buried, Stuart was really depressed. He was applying for jobs in Florida and in New York, and he kept asking Annie if she was applying for jobs, too, but she wasn’t doing anything I could see. It was obviously not a time for a couple to have to put up with the stress and responsibility of another person around the house. So Annie and Jeanine started talking about me having one of those little one-bedrooms they give the birth mothers who are working with the agency.

Jeanine is really a character. She has what Annie calls a generous interpretation of things. Jeanine would say, “I mean, there are circumstances under which you would consider an adoption plan for the baby, right?” And I’d answer, Yeah, like if I got hit by a bus, but she would put her finger to her lips and go on, “So, technically, you are one of those people who could be served by this available subsidized housing.” We all knew it was just for the short term, anyhow. No matter what the far-off future would hold, Annie was going to move into Azalea Road sooner or later, at least for a while. A couple of times, I asked her, if she was going to go off to another job in another state, why did she keep making so many improvements on the house, and her eyes all filled up with tears. “Sometimes, I think I want to stay here, at least for now,” she said.

Annie and Stuart were supposed to get married, by summer at the latest, but I didn’t know if Annie was going to go through with it. Busy as I was with work and studying, I couldn’t pretend I was comfortable with the idea that Annie would leave. When she would talk about these fantasies about us living at Azalea Road and my going to college, I really liked that. It was getting so when I thought of the future, I thought of Annie and my child instead of my husband.

Dillon probably wasn’t too happy that I didn’t write so much about our love but about other things: like about the leatherbound set of books Annie got me for my fifteenth birthday, her favorites when she was a girl, like
To Kill a Mockingbird
and
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
all stories about girls in tough circumstances. Maybe it felt to him like I was bragging. Or maybe it made him think that his gift to me, his poem about his cell and the agony of not being free, wasn’t much compared with those books. I had told him I loved the poem, that it was beautiful, but scary. But then I babbled right on about the cactus garden in a big pottery bowl painted with moons and stars that I got from Charley.

I remember I wrote, “Maybe we’ll have it in our house someday. If cactus live that long.”

And then I got the phone call from Mama.

Dillon would have never known about it, except we were having our weekly talk at the time. We hadn’t been on but about five minutes when all of a sudden this operator broke in and said, “Got an emergency call for y’all from Rita B. Mowbray.”

Well, I thought, sure enough, Cam’s dead in a car wreck, otherwise why would she call me? But I said to Dillon, “Bet she can’t live without me being her maid.”

Dillon said, real quick, “Well, honey, maybe you should go on and live at home until the baby comes. I think you ought to be with your own. Blood is blood.” It seemed strange to me at the time, but afterward I realized that he just wanted to get me away from Annie.

I told him, “Okay, honey, I guess I’ll think about it.”

The operator said, “Y’all going to hang up or not?”

So we did.

And Mama came on. “Arley,” she said. “I need you to come on out here.”

“Come home?” I asked her. “Why?”

“Just you come on out here . . .” It sounded like she was covering the phone for a moment; “. . . on Wednesday. For supper.”

“Supper?”

Mama laughed. “Yeah, girl, supper.” Then she hung up. Wasn’t but a minute we talked, and I thought, well, there went my phone call with Dillon for the whole week . . . for nothing.

But it wasn’t just for that week, though I couldn’t have known that then. I didn’t know that the days ahead would be so busy, with the festival coming and all, that, for the first time, I’d forget to write Dillon.

He’d never get a letter from me again.

That time he ignored me, at the beginning, when he wouldn’t write me, I almost went crazy. Did he go crazy, waiting, too? Did he have time to listen to unsaid things, meanings underneath words, and decide that they were telling him to act? Do those things go out, over the wind or the telephone wires, on their own special frequency, between people whose ears are tuned to the slightest change in one another? Dillon had always believed in signs.

Anyhow, a couple of nights later, Annie drove me out to Mama’s.

Right away, when I went inside, I could see things were different. In place of the old chipped-up pine table we ate at for a thousand years, there was this light, wrought-iron set that looked like it ought to be out on a patio in a house in France. Somebody, probably Lang, had put magazine covers in those pop-together plastic frames and hung them all over. I must admit, they looked fresh. The dumb old curtains I hated so much, but had washed and ironed so many times they were the color of old oatmeal, those were gone, replaced by miniblinds. Mint green, pulled tight against the sun. Mama thought sun faded everything. She and Lang were sitting in the living room with
Oprah!
on, having a smoke.

“You did a lot of stuff,” I said, to start things off.

“Wait till you see,” Lang said, out of the dark of the room. “We’re redoing the whole upstairs, with fabric drapes on the walls and stuff.” Their faces as played up by the faint light from the TV were so similar in shape that I could have mistaken one for the other if I hadn’t known it was my sister’s voice. I didn’t know how long it had been since I’d seen Langtry—a year?—but when she stood up, I saw she was thinner and more like Mama, more set, somehow, like a rubber figure; even her hair had that orangey color Mama called strawberry blond. “Girl,” she said, “you’re as fat as a pig!”

“I’m going to have a baby, Lang.”

“I heard! I heard congratulations are in order, for my baby sister’s baby!” Mama and Lang about died laughing then. Lang was getting out a plate from the fridge with sandwiches made of pita bread and cucumbers and cream cheese, and some applesauce in a bowl. “You living with Dillon LeGrande’s people now, up in Welfare?”

It hit me then, and I had to sit down. They hadn’t talked about my baby or my marriage for one second before I came into that room. They had this whole life of theirs going on, buying a set of soda chairs and a dining room table and some picture frames, and I was just this fly on the edge of it that came buzzing in, and they didn’t pay me no more advance notice than they would if that fly had come buzzing up Jean-Marie Street past the Nevadases’ house before it got to our door. Mama hadn’t even told Lang where I was living, or what I was doing, or anything else except why she let Lang come home. My head started to ache like it did sometimes when I skinned my hair back too tight. “Where’s Cam?” I asked. Neither one of them answered. Mama said something, half to Lang and half to Oprah, about how she’d kick that man’s ass over the moon for him, he tried that trick on her, and finally, I asked again, “Where’s Cam? He dead?”