The Most Wanted (3 page)

“You’re getting to a dangerous age,” he’d told me that night, making his opening argument for the prosecution.

The defense objected: “People have kids much later now, Stuart. You know that.”

“And there are already too many children in the world. . . .”

“There are too many lawyers in the world too.”

“Anne,” he pleaded, “you know what I am. You know what I do. When I think of that mix with a child in it . . .” It wasn’t just the hours, the strain, the pitiless economic pasting they took (Stuart and his colleagues at the Texas Defense Center made salaries that didn’t seem horrible on paper, until you factored in days that lasted seventy-two hours, none of them billable). All that did make for a fragile personal life, true enough. But the real reason death row lawyers didn’t have children was that life was incompatible with death.

For Stuart’s clients, everything that could go wrong with life had. “The mental slowness we pleaded was no stretch. The guy was a rock—he was plant life with a tongue.” So Stuart’s best Texas friend, Tarik, once said of Willert Styles, a spree killer Tarik had battled three years to save, whose date with fate (Stuart and his friends called an execution “dinner and a movie”) took place just a couple of months before. “He was a bag of lawn clippings with legs, and his parents would have treated lawn clippings better.”

“If they’re so worthless,” my girlfriend Jeanine used to ask Tarik, “then why is it so important for them to live?”

“It’s only important for them not to die,” Tarik would tell her.

I’d heard it all so many times. I even believed in it. I was proud of Stuart’s convictions. Still, an overwhelming lassitude seized me whenever Stuart pulled the “what I am” card in one of our discussions. From that moment on, it would be like running in cold syrup. We’d pirouette around the impasse like smart people: Stuart would say his work was just like having a baby; it ruined his sleep and trashed his social life. But it never grew up, I’d respond, it never got smarter and made you a valentine.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

Point, Stuart. Advantage, Annie.

The unspoken fact was that there was no way to compromise: one of us would have to blink. It was inevitable that we’d eventually wash up on the place where there was nothing left but to consider what would happen if we couldn’t get married. Would we go on as we were? Break up?

I knew that for Stuart, remaining the kind of loverly pals we’d always been, in bed and out, was a life goal. But I didn’t know if it still was for
me
.

So that night I started to feel really sorry for both of us. How poignant it was that, despite neither of us really being wrong, nothing could really be all right. Sad, even contrite, Stuart began nuzzling my shoulders: another of his life tenets was that a nice sexy interlude could bridge all human spans. I didn’t exactly disagree with this prescription, usually. But this time, unlike other times, neither of us could even summon the will for sex. Looking back, I see that sense of something beginning to end must have prepared the ground for what took root between Arley and me. Of course, if you had asked me then, I would have told you that Arley’s kind of trouble was the distilled essence of everything about Women and Children First that could grind a lawyer to a stump. Some nights, my junior colleague, Patty Flanagan, and my friend Jeanine—an adoption social worker—would end a just-girls night at our favorite haunt with a toast to Louise Marker Drew. Mrs. Drew was the Texas whiskey heiress who stunned her kin twenty years earlier by bequeathing her entire estate to found a legal support center for women in trouble. “To Missus Drew,” Jeanine would say, “defending the sacred right of women to make piss-poor life choices!”

Patty and I didn’t really feel that way about our clients, not usually, not any more than Jeanine believed in chastity belts for her serial-birth mothers. Some of my clients squeezed my heart with their courage and gallantry. But others . . . you did get weary. A young woman would show up with a fat lip and a big belly, and you’d get her sorted out—a training job, a place to live—and eighteen months later she’d be back, with the same fat lip and big belly. After seven years, burnout was not just a concept. At first—in fact, for a long time—I fooled myself into believing that my involvement with Arley was so intense because it constituted a career crossroads, either a new beginning or a last hurrah. It was never that. It was, from the beginning, a person-to-person call, a near-biological obligation. I hadn’t had such an experience before—how could I have recognized it?

That morning in December, all I wanted was for the poor and downtrodden to get their asses in gear and quit flopping over like carp for anything with hairy legs stuck in a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots with lifts. I was sick of hearing about how much some crankhead fruitcake looked like Michael Bolton and how, no matter how bad he was, no one else really understood how good he was inside.

The name “Arlington Mowbray” was taped across the top of the first intake file in my In box. It was real Texas. Everybody seemed to have been named after a character in
General Hospital
. I took one look at the top line: “Female, aged 14, married, wishes to obtain . . . ,” picked up the file, and went out into the hall, ready to pass it off to the first sap I ran into, Matt or Raul or Patty. After all, I was the boss. Why did
I
have to lead the charge into the valley of the doomed every damn day?

But as I was searching for my intended victim, I saw her. She was sitting in the lobby, just under the big plant shelf. Lilia, our secretary, was obsessively sponging off the philodendron, and the tall, dark-haired teenager didn’t even seem to notice the drops of water that spattered her purse, her arms, and the folder on the chair beside her. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful, though she was. What was remarkable was that she seemed not to have been touched by teenhood to the slightest degree. Her rope of shiny dark-brown hair hung over one shoulder in an ordinary braid. She wore no jewelry; her ears weren’t pierced with even a single punch—a fashion statement most girls would have considered wildly conservative if not worse. Strangest of all, she had no blemishes. Except for the thick wings of her brows, her skin was as pure as an eight-year-old’s.

As I watched her that first day, I saw her reach around reflectively to grab hold of the thick brush formed by the end of her braid and sweep it across her lips, a gesture I would come to know as intimately as the smell of my own pillow. Arley was reading
Seventeen
, and she was reading it the way
I
used to read
Seventeen
, as if she were studying for SATs. I saw her run her thumbnail furtively down the inside gutter to slice out a page, then fold it with the speed of a magician into the front pocket of her jeans, which, I noticed, were ironed. I knew what she’d do later on: she’d try to duplicate that stunningly coordinated ninety-dollar outfit with something in the same colors at Kmart for $15.99, which she would wear with self-conscious delight for three weeks, until it opened at the seams and unraveled.

I can think of half a dozen possible triggers—my biological clock, Arley’s touching intelligence—but none of them would fully explain the immediate fusion. I’d seen a great many young women in trouble, all needing my help or my protection, needing the things my credentials could provide. And a few had extraordinary potential.

But of all of them, only Arley—without the worldly wisdom to understand her presumption—tried to offer me something in return. Propelled, and later terrified, by her own need, she recognized mine. I don’t know why.

I don’t know how long I watched her; knew only that after a time, I realized I felt like a peeper and should say something. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t summon the words. I saw her look at her hair in the mirror, lift it up on the back of her neck and turn, gazing at her reflection in the fish tank across the room as if she were peering into a pond. She tried a haughty look. She tried next to look deliriously joyful, putting on one of those open-mouthed smiles that seem to have caught someone in the midst of saying, “I’m having the time of my life!”

And when I saw her do that, I was lost; I know that now, and she knows it too. Those first moments, I was swamped by a tidal current of memory for my sophomore self, when I was so desperately unhappy that I kept threatening suicide, until my mother finally said, “So kill yourself already. Just shut up about it.”

“Don’t ever cut it,” I finally said to Arley that day, forcing myself to stride into the room, holding out my hand to shake.

She grinned. “I’m not going to cut it. I’m just going to hate it, every day from now until January, when the weather cools off.”

“And when it’s cooler?”

“Then I’ll feel like a princess.”

“So it’s worth it? Or is it only half worth it?”

That stopped her. She seemed to think I was scraping deeper than the topic of hairstyles, and maybe I was. “I need to see the lawyer,” she said then, a splash of color lighting her dark skin. “I have to do this”—she pointed to her file—“because I have to go back to school.”

“Are you in college?” I asked, just to see what she’d say.

“I was going to say I am,” she told me, with a level look. “But you all got the facts of me right in front of you. I’m only in high school, ma’am. Freshman year.”

“So what brings you here?”

She brushed her lips with her braid, thoughtfully. “I guess because I think they should respect a person’s civil rights.”

“This person is you?”

“Yes. Me and my husband. My husband Dillon.”

“You really are married, then?”

She stared hard at me. “Are you the lawyer?”

“I’m one of them, yes.”

“Are you
my
lawyer?”

“I might be, if it turns out that you need a lawyer.”

“Then you already know about what I’m here for. I told the lady.”

“Why don’t you tell
me
?”

“I am legally married. Even though I’m . . . well, I’ll be fifteen.”

“When?”

“In April.”

“And, Arlington, just how—”

“It’s Arley. Arley Mowbray. Well, now it’s really Arley Mowbray LeGrande. I’m sorry to interrupt, ma’am.”

“Pretty name.”

“Arlington is the name of a town. Between Dallas and Fort Worth.”

“Is that where your family is from?”

“No, I . . . we’re all named after towns in Texas, my sister and my brother and me.”

“Why?”

“Well, my mama—” she began, and then said, “Does that matter?”

“No, of course not. Just making conversation.”

“Yeah.”

“So how did you come to marry so young?”

“It’s not
so
young. We just read
Romeo and Juliet,
and she was exactly my age.” I couldn’t help but smile. She saw it.

I said, “Yes, but that didn’t work out so well.”

“This will.”

“I hope so.”

I took her into my office, and she immediately began playing with the perpetual motion gadget on the desk, just the way every child who came into that space did, instantly and with utter concentration, experimentally plomping the steel balls on strings one against the other. I paged through the intake forms again, thinking almost exactly what Stuart would say later, that Arley’s story was fit for the Hallmark Hall of Fame of bad ideas. Not everyone goes to prison for just cause, particularly in the republic of Texas, but from the facts, Dillon LeGrande came from the kind of people who could have found trouble in any quarter of the lower forty-eight.

The eldest of four sons of a mother widowed once by a refinery explosion and once by a knife fight, Dillon seemed to have more or less raised himself in the little town of Welfare, one of those single-tavern burgs on the ragged hem of San Antonio’s outskirts. Arley’s family lived only a few miles west, but their orbits didn’t seem to have overlapped, despite their having attended the same magnet school in Alamo Heights. Dillon’s brothers were roughneck punks, in and out of foster care and baby jail for the usual drinking-fighting-truancy stuff, but Dillon seemed to have stayed out of trouble—officially, anyway—until the night he and his brother Kevin decided to take a friend and his handgun and hold up a gas station in Comfort, a few miles north of their home. The hapless kid working the cash register ended up with his left arm shattered by a gunshot wound, and Dillon and Kevin wound up in Solamente River Prison. As the elder and, supposedly, the shooter, Dillon had been given eight years.

Arley and Dillon had begun corresponding in September. She’d visited him once. He’d pledged his troth. For two full weeks, they’d been husband and wife.