The Most Wanted (42 page)

People thought that, at first.

One late afternoon when Desiree was about eight weeks old, I came into the cabin and found Arley frantically swabbing a spreading brown pool around the old Mr. Coffee that the owner kept in the kitchen. “I can’t do this,” she told me, red-faced. “This is the second time I’ve made this mess.”

“It’s in wrong or something.” I opened the swing-out well in the unit’s housing. She had stuffed a nice handful of beans in there. “Arley, these beans aren’t ground. You have to grind them.”

“We always used instant at home,” she said sullenly. “I never saw anything like that before.”

“What about at the restaurant?” Why was I needling her?

“They just got the
ground
kind there. I thought this would make the
bean
kind. I’m not retarded.”

“Where did you get it, anyhow? Is it this guy’s? He’s got to have a coffee grinder, then.”

She was sweating, her hair greasy, and she turned to me, hands on hips, with as close to a belligerent attitude as Arley would ever display to me. “Well, you brought the damn stuff! I know you meant it for a nice present, but look! I poured it all over the floor!”

“What present?”

“Jeez, Anne. The
coffee.
You know, the coffee?”

“I didn’t bring this coffee.”

She stared at me. “I found it on the porch.”

“Charley must have brought it.”

“It was just there when I hung out the baby’s things to dry.”

“Charley probably forgot and just got beans. Honey, take it easy. I’ll have it ground at the store when I go home, and I’ll bring it back to you. I didn’t even know you drank coffee, Arley.”

“Well, I do! All kids in Texas drink coffee! And now I’m going to have to drink it twice as much if I’m going to stay up all night every night of my life.”

I sent her for a nap. And of course, I forgot all about the coffee beans. I found them in the trunk of my car the following spring, when, late for court, I blew a tire going over a curb. I never even asked Charley about them.

The flowers were another story. Just before Christmas, a bouquet of lantana and Indian paintbrush, tied with red ribbon, showed up on the front steps of the cabin. “They’re kind of like from my wedding,” Arley told me, her voice husky with fear and something else, almost a dreary elation.

“Arley, who do you think these are from?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Charley? Maybe they’re for you?”

“Maybe. But he’d have told me. . . .”

“Yeah, I’m totally sure he’d have told you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She turned away from me, with a sniff. I felt like a fool, then, for trying to keep the extent of Charley and me from her, and because I felt foolish, I got angry.

“Listen, Arley. Let’s not worry about me. Have you heard anything else about Dillon, or from him?”

“No.” But she hesitated, a hesitation no one else would have noticed.

“Have you?”

“No.”

“Swear.”

“Let me alone, Anne.”

“This is serious, Arley.”

“Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I know what he’s done, or what they all say he did? You think I want him to come here?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“No.”

“I know that feelings are powerful, passion is powerful—”

“I said
no!
” she screamed. “Now what else can I say? Do you think I’m so stupid all I care about is sex? Do you think that’s all I think about? What about you?”

“Me? Why am I in this?”

It was our first genuine fight. We’ve had others since, but not many, and never so loud. Arley shouted at me, red-faced: Shut up, she said, just shut up; she couldn’t take any more bullshit questions, from me or the police or Elena; she was worn out with the baby and everything else, and she wished she’d never met Dillon or me, and she just wanted to be left alone to run her own life, and she didn’t need me or my money . . . and of course, deeply mature individual that I am, I yelled right back—lovely things about where she might be if it weren’t for my help and what had her own mother done for her—and then the baby woke up and started to cry and I stalked out of there and drove home, sobbing.

When I got there, there were already three messages on the answering machine: “Annie, I’m so sorry, Annie. I do owe you everything and I know that I was an awful bitch, but the thing is, I can’t stand talking about him anymore; it just hurts too much. . . .”
Beep.
“Annie, it’s me again. Like I said, I’m really sorry, and I guess this was all my fault. I know you just want the best for me, but I really don’t know. Annie, are you there and just not picking up the phone? Which is okay, really. I would understand.”
Beep.
“Annie, I’m better now, but I’m still sorry, and you’re right, but didn’t you ever know you were being really stupid about something, and then someone keeps reminding you how stupid you are, and you just have to defend it, anyhow? Just, like, to keep your pride? Probably you never did. . . .”

Of course, I felt like a nickel-plated shit, and I drove right back out there, beating myself up the whole while: No, I’d never done anything stupid, nothing like sleeping with the carpenter and neglecting even to mention that fact to my loyal and trusting companion of eleven years, whose ring I still wore on my hand.

At the cabin, Arley and I bathed Desi in a tin tub on the porch. Warm water soothed Desi, then and now; she’s still a little porpoise. But that night, she actually fell asleep while Arley was dripping water from a squeezed cloth onto her blond tufts. We hated to move her, to dress her. The sunset turned Desi’s bathwater pink and her body a deep rose. Her tiny toes floated like foam. She started to fuss when Arley diapered her, and suddenly seemed ready to combust. But I took her, and she caught her breath and sighed herself to sleep, light as flannel, on my shoulder, making me feel all maternal and proud.

Then we all sat on the little glider that took up half of the tiny railed front porch, and I told Arley everything she already knew.

“You know that Charley . . . ,” I began. “You know that Charley and I are, uh, close. . . .”

“I know he’s in love with you.”

“Well, me too. Maybe.”

“I know that too.”

“Okay. But I’ve been with Stuart for eleven years. And I love Stuart very much. I mean, we had hoped to be married by now, really. And I just don’t know if I want that anymore.” I felt the tears start behind my eyes.

We sat there, pushing against the floorboards with our feet, in synchrony.

“I don’t want you to believe that I haven’t considered Stuart’s feelings, or that this thing with Charley was just an . . . an impulse I’ll regret later on. I think it might be . . . a change for me in the way I’ve lived my life.”

“You mean you thought it over.”

“Yes.”

“Just not very long.”

“That’s right. But no matter how bad I feel about some of the
effects
of what I’ve done, I don’t feel bad about—what I’ve done.”

“Ahh.” Arley looked up at the sherbet rim of light above the ridge. “I know what you mean.”

“You’re just a kid,” I said. “I haven’t even told my sister this yet.”

“That’s different,” Arley said.

“I haven’t told Stuart.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m sure he knows.”

“What?”

“If he doesn’t know it’s Charley, he knows it’s something, and you have to help him figure it out. People always know when the other person starts to change.” She leaned over and stroked the ball of Desi’s feet, watching her toes bend like a dancer
en pointe.
An unfamiliar car rattled past the opening of the dirt road, and Arley flinched. Was she thinking of Dillon, feeling for the sorcery of their connection, wondering if it still held true?

“How do you feel when you think of breaking up with Stuart?” she asked.

“Sad. Afraid.”

“How do you feel when you think of leaving here? Of leaving Charley? And . . . us?”

“I don’t think about that.”

“I think you should go see Stuart,” she said. “Don’t you think you should?”

I knew I should; I said that I would. After Christmas.

Stuart couldn’t go home for Christmas because of the new job, and since I’d been to New York just months before, I used the excuse of Desiree being too small to travel and Arley having no one else, and I spent my holiday in San Antonio. Charley gave me strict orders not to show up at my house for the two days before Christmas Eve, and I complied, though there were suspicious conversations on the telephone at the cabin several times when I was there, replete with smothered snickers and whispers, Arley then insisting, “It was just some salesman or something. . . .”

But on Christmas Eve, Jeanine and Arley arrived at my office with Desi, nestled in her car-seat shell, a Santa cap the size of a child’s sweat sock on her head.

“We’re here to pick you up,” Arley said. “No arguments.”

“My car’s here,” I said.

“No it isn’t,” Arley answered. “We’ve taken care of that.”

“Put yourself in our control, Anne,” Jeanine told me, steering me through my office door and closing it firmly.

There are twenty-eight casements at Azalea Road, and Charley had lit a candle in each one. For the thirty-two-paned bay window, he had fashioned a menorah from a huge potted cholla, each of eight cactus arms adorned with an oil candle in a fragile foil cup. Inside, courtesy of Charley’s pal at The September Garden, was a Chinese feast laid out on the library floor, across three yards of snowy linen tablecloth, with chopsticks for ten. Patty Flanagan joined us for a while, and Tarik came with a girlfriend—a Filipina beauty who must have weighed eighty-five pounds soaking. Jeanine brought the pediatrician, but he left early. When his shift ended at eleven, Jack Becker and his partner, a cute black kid named Pedro, who couldn’t take his long-lashed eyes off Arley, showed up to help us eat the leftovers. Arley gave me a journal to record my dreams, its cover embossed with cows jumping over the moon. I gave Arley a camera, a saucer bouncer for Desiree—her whole body, at that point, would have fit through one of the openings for the legs—and a basket full of lotions, potions, and soaps, all lavender, Arley’s favorite scent. After midnight, Arley and Desi fell asleep on the library floor, curled on the Amish quilt Jeanine had given me. Since the water in the downstairs bath had needed to be disconnected temporarily, for the third time, Charley and I brushed our teeth with champagne and peed in the yard, and then we lay down upstairs, where the nubs of fat white candles still burned bravely on the sills.

“I’m . . . going to Miami in a couple of weeks,” I told him, deciding at that moment that, indeed, I was. “I need to see Stuart and to talk all this over with him.”

“That’s going to hurt,” Charley said.

“I know. But until I do, I don’t think that I—that we—can go forward.”

“I have a present for you,” he said then.

“Besides the festival of lights?”

“Yeah. But I’m pretty sure it’s in bad taste. And I don’t want you to think . . . well, what I want you to know is this, Anne. I bought this for you a while ago, and I wanted you to have it even if you left. And if you decide to do that, I still want you to have it.”

The ring was silver, a skeleton mermaid fashioned so that her own graceful hands lovingly held the flukes of her long tail. “It’s a Day of the Dead symbol for fertility,” Charley said. “Not . . . that kind of ring. Not a promise. Just a love ring. I want you to have all the love you want, Anne. And here, I hope.” He slid it onto my finger, and I curled, speechless, against his warm chest. Lucky me, I thought. How had so many unlikely ingredients simmered up such a kettle of turmoil in just one year, since Stuart and I had thrown our wish rocks through the windows of Azalea Road? It was even stranger to tell than to live. And where, in all of it, was the late Anne Singer, she of sound mind?

“Will you look out for Arley while I’m gone?” I asked Charley.

“You know I will. She can stay at my place.”

“She won’t do that. She’d think it was an inconvenience to you.”