The Perfect Letter (3 page)

“And you have your life here,” said Bennett. “Your friends, your career.”

Leigh grinned. “That, too. You can take the girl out of New York, but . . .”

Bennett held up her glass for a toast. “Well,” she said, “I'm glad to find out my
Oliver Twist
assumptions were all wrong. I hated to think of you begging for gruel and walking barefoot through the snow.”

“There's no snow in Texas,” Leigh said.

“In my imagination there was.” Bennett smiled. “It did make for a good story, though, didn't it?”

“Please, miss, may I have some more?” Leigh said, and she held out her champagne flute for the waitress to fill.

It wasn't until the flight attendant woke her twenty minutes outside of Austin, asking Leigh to return her seat back and tray table to their full upright positions, that she started to feel the first real stirrings of dread. Outside the window she could see the gray waters of Lake Austin tucked between the dark green hills of East Texas, the rough shape of the city center, the golden dome of the capitol glinting in the sunlight. Austin had gone through something of a renaissance in the years she'd been away, and now it was the cultural capital of the Southwest, epicenter of a thriving music, art, and lit scene. The People's Republic of Austin, some called it. She hadn't laid eyes on the place since that miserable day in February when she'd taken the late flight back to Boston after burying her grandfather. Ten years. She'd always assumed she'd come back sooner than this. Funny how time got away from you. Time . . . and guilt.

Leigh wouldn't let herself think about that—not yet. She was Scarlett O'Hara, back at Tara. She'd think about it all tomorrow.

By the time the plane pulled up to the gate and she was able to turn on her phone, she had four text messages from her best friend, Chloe Barrett.
THE SECURITY GUYS AT THE AIRPORT ARE HOTTT!!!
wrote her friend, and afterward
WHEN ARE YOU GETTING HERE? I'M RUNNING OUT OF LIQUOR,
followed by
WHAT, COULDN'T SPRING FOR WI-FI ON YOUR SALARY?
and finally
I'M YOUR BAGGAGE. COME CLAIM ME. CAROUSEL 4.

This last made Leigh snort out loud, so that the passengers all standing around her waiting for the plane door to open stopped
to stare at her—at the young woman in the designer-label jeans and bag, her long, dark hair cascading in perfect waves to her shoulders—who'd made such an inelegant sound. No matter how long it had been since they'd seen each other, Leigh and Chloe always managed to pick up right where they'd left off. Like high school all over again. More than anything or anyone else, it was Chloe whom Leigh had come to see. Her friend had been begging for years for her to come home, but there was always something holding her back. An exam to take. An internship to complete. A book to launch. When the invitation came from the Austin Writers' Conference a few months ago, Chloe told Leigh she'd officially run out of excuses to stay away, that she'd better get her butt on a plane and come home, for once.

Leigh stepped off the plane into immediate Texas heat; she could feel it radiating off the jetway, which she tottered up in heels that suddenly seemed too high, too citified, too painful. By the time she got down to Carousel Four in baggage claim, her feet were killing her. Only pride was keeping her from reaching down and pulling off her shoes.

In baggage claim Leigh didn't see Chloe anywhere, not at first. There was a church youth group gathered around Carousel Two in matching neon-yellow T-shirts proclaiming
DISNEY OR BUST
, several sets of beaming elderly grandparents holding stuffed animals or toy trucks, a few scrawny musicians in knit caps and long beards carrying heavy instrument cases, and a couple of middle-aged women hugging and smearing each other's lipstick. But no Chloe. Leigh sighed.

She was about to text
WHERE ARE YOU?
when at last she caught a glimpse of jagged-cut pink hair and bright red cowboy boots under a short flowered dress of the kind favored by cute hippie girls from Brooklyn to Portland. Only Chloe could pull off such a look so effortlessly, though—she'd have been as much at home singing the blues onstage at a hipster bar in Williamsburg as in East Austin.
Out of the corner of her eye Chloe spotted Leigh, turned her back on the disappointed security guard she'd been chatting up, and immediately they were both eighteen again, squealing and throwing their arms around each other and making a spectacle of themselves. All around them, the passengers stopped to watch them embrace, the Texas hippie chick and the cool New York brunette.

“Holy shit, look at you!” Chloe drawled, dragging it out like
ho-leeeee-sheee-it.
She stood back to admire Leigh's outfit. “Miss Fancy Pants. I almost didn't recognize you. You've gone uptown, baby!”

Leigh shook her head and laughed. “I look like a hog raised on concrete. I'd recognize those boots from fifteen miles away, though. And the hair! I like the pink. It suits you. Kind of cheery, really.”

“Yeah, well, I guess it was time for me to outgrow my Goth stage.”

“It had to happen sooner or later.”

“Damn, you look good enough to eat. Look at those heels,” Chloe said. “I can't believe you can walk in those things.”

“Well, walking might be an overstatement,” Leigh said, bending down to slip them off at last. She carried them loosely on two fingers, standing on the linoleum in her bare feet. “Oh my God, I've been dying to do that since Fifty-seventh Street.”

“Now,
that
looks like the Leigh Merrill I remember. Barefoot at the airport. You should have left those torture devices at home.”

“Agreed. I don't know what I was thinking,” she said. “I'm starving. There's no good Tex-Mex in New York. I'm thinking I want the biggest, greasiest burrito in town. You know a good place?”

Chloe grinned and said, “Don't I always?”

They headed for a sawdust-and-roses bar not far from downtown that swirled with music, a touch of country, a touch of blues, a woman's low voice singing sweetly about heartbreak, enough twang in her voice
to remind Leigh that she was really in Texas again, a moment both welcome and surreal. Austin had changed more than she'd thought: the downtown was nearly unrecognizable to her, crammed with shiny new high-rises that nearly crowded out the old tower at One Congress Parkway. New Vietnamese and Thai places had sprung up in East Austin, and the old Town Lake had been renamed Ladybird Lake, but it still looked the same, crammed with kayakers and dogs chasing Frisbees onshore. They crossed the Congress Avenue Bridge, a favorite landmark from their high-school days, in Chloe's rusting old Ford, and Leigh craned her neck to see if she could get a glimpse of the famous colony of bats that lived beneath the bridge. Nothing. It was early for bats—too sunny, too bright.

It was too early for lunch as well, so the two of them had the restaurant nearly to themselves. They ordered drinks—a beer for Chloe, a margarita on the rocks for Leigh—not caring about the hour. They chatted about Chloe's band, a few old friends, Leigh's job. The waitress was putting down the fattest carne asada burrito Leigh had ever seen when Chloe asked, “So how's Joseph lately?”

Leigh was midbite, her mouth so filled with steak she couldn't answer right away. She chewed slowly, buying herself time. “He's fine. His mother's been in and out of the hospital, but he's holding up. Excited about the new summer books. He's got some big meeting today with Randall about the future of the company. I expect he'll be getting a promotion.”

“That's nice, but you know I wasn't asking about his career. Or his mother.”

In the background the waitress was singing along with the music, an old Robert Earl Keen song called “Feelin' Good Again,” and Leigh watched her, chewing for a moment and swallowing. “He asked me to marry him yesterday.”

Chloe nearly dropped her fork. “He did
what
?”

“At the launch party last night. In front of everyone, even Randall.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I'd have to think about it. I couldn't answer him right there.”

Chloe rubbed a hand over her eyes and said, “And are you thinking about it? I mean, for real?”

“Sure. I mean, why wouldn't I?” said Leigh. The grains of salt on the rim of her drink looked like little shards of glass, like they'd cut her if she tried to take a drink. “He's probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Certainly the most stable.”

“But you said you weren't serious about him. That it was just a fling.”

“That was two years ago! Things change. I mean, would I be crazy to marry him? Of course not. He's successful. He loves me and treats me well. I could do a lot worse, that's for sure.”

“
‘I could do worse'?
Did you seriously just say that?”

“Don't look at me like that. We've been together awhile now. We see each other every day. He means a lot to me, Chloe. I owe him my whole career, my whole life in New York.”

Chloe waved the waitress over for another beer. “I'm going to need more alcohol for this conversation. I can't believe what I'm hearing. Leigh Merrill is
settling
.”

“Chloe, I love him.”

Chloe fixed her with a level look. “Do you really?”

“I do. He's a good man. He's maybe the best man I've ever known. That isn't settling.”

“I know you,” Chloe said. “You're trying to talk yourself into it. Because if you were that certain, you would have said yes right away and meant it.”

Leigh sighed. There was no point arguing with Chloe.
Something,
after all, was holding her back. Just what, though, she wasn't sure.

Chloe took a sip of her beer and said, “Is he okay and all, you coming home for a week?”

“Why wouldn't he be?”

“I've seen the way he looks at you,” Chloe said. She squeezed a lime into her beer and then stuffed it down into the neck of the bottle. “I've seen him holding your chair out, offering you his arm.”

“So he's a gentleman,” Leigh said. “I like that about him.”

“He treats you like a kid. Like you're made of glass or something.”

“He's not as uptight as you think.”

Chloe grinned.

“Really. He thought it was a great idea, me coming to the conference. Drove me to the airport, even.”

“Sure, sure, he's always been supportive of your career.”

“Chloe, don't start.”

“I don't think I ever told you what he said to me at dinner the last time I came to visit you. It was at that restaurant you like, the one with the glass Buddhas. You had gone to the bathroom, and he leaned over and whispered to me, real softlike, ‘Was Leigh's grandfather a good man? Was he . . .
gentle
with Leigh?” Chloe broke into a crazy laugh. “I almost died. Could you imagine anyone thinking Gene Merrill was some kind of child abuser?”

Leigh put down her fork. “Jesus. What did you say?”

“I told him Gene used to whip you with a willow switch. Said he made you cut it yourself and bring it to him whenever you'd done something bad. Said he did it over your clothes, so you wouldn't have any incriminating marks.”

“Chloe!”

Her friend grinned. “Kidding! I told him he was being an elitist New York prick, and that not everyone in Texas beats their children.”

“Chloe! You didn't!”

“No, I didn't either. But I thought about it.” That was Chloe's way: she had to make at least one joke, and sometimes two, before she could get around to being serious. “I said your granddad was the most
gracious old gentleman I ever met, and you adored him. What do you think I said?” She took a sip of her beer. “I know Joseph's just looking out for you.”

“Yes, he is. He is just looking out for me.” She picked up her fork again and cut herself another bite. “He thinks there's a reason I haven't been home in ten years. Some kind of secret I've been keeping from him.”

Chloe rubbed a hand over her hair, a gesture she made whenever she was trying to be tactful, but it always gave her away. The bell over the door rang, and a couple of hipster boys in low-slung jeans came in, bringing the heat with them. Chloe said, “Isn't there?”

“No,” said Leigh. “I mean, it's not a secret.”

“So you told him what happened with Jake?”

Leigh swallowed hard, took a sip of her margarita, and said, “I haven't lied to him. Everyone knows what happened. It was in all the papers, on the news. If Joseph wants to look me up, anything from my past, it's all there for him to find out. I'm not hiding anything. He maybe hasn't asked the right questions yet.”

“And denial is a river in Egypt.”

Leigh took another gulp of her drink, then licked a bit of salt from her lips, which suddenly felt too dry, too tight. “Really, I'm sick of thinking about it all, Chloe. It was all such a long time ago anyway. I've moved on, like Jake said we should. I'd rather forget it.”

Chloe pointed at Leigh with her beer bottle and said, “Well, you better get ready to remember, babe, because there's something you need to know.”

Leigh took another bite. “What's that?”

“Jake's back in town.”

L
eigh must have told the story dozens of times to the police, the lawyers, the jury, the press, her grandfather, her friends. A man had died: Dale Tucker, one of the horse trainers who worked on her grandfather's farm. It happened in the barn late one night when she and Jake had gone out to check on a sick horse. They met after dark and slipped into the barn quietly. They left the lights off. Later they would tell the police they didn't want to alarm Leigh's grandfather or the gelding, a skittish creature under the best of circumstances, while they checked to see if he was still favoring his injured leg.

After midnight, after it became clear the gelding was doing all right under the circumstances, they heard a sound in one of the stalls farther down the barn, a sound of shuffling footsteps and a stall door sliding open. In the dark they couldn't see him clearly, but they knew someone was sneaking out with a horse on a lead. The man was a horse
thief, they thought—had to be. No one should have been there at that hour. Jake went to get her grandfather's .357 revolver, the one Gene always kept locked up in the tack room. They warned the intruder to stay where he was, that they were going to call the police. Instead the man lunged for Jake and tried to wrestle the gun away from him. Jake shot once and missed. The intruder had Jake down on the ground, his hands around his throat. Jake didn't hesitate: he fired her grandfather's revolver one more time, hitting the intruder full in the chest, killing him instantly.

By the time they realized it was one of the horse trainers, by the time they realized the man was unarmed, it was too late. A misunderstanding, everyone said. Could have happened to anyone.

But still a man was dead, and still someone would have to pay. At the trial Jake had pleaded self-defense, but his lawyer had not been able to convince the jury. Jake had been sentenced to ten years all told. A lifetime, it felt like then, and still did, sometimes. Jake had told her to forget about him, to go to Harvard and move on with her life. And in most ways, she had.

Except that wasn't the real story, not even close. She'd tried to tell the real story once, but no one had believed her. Not the prosecutors or the police. Not her grandfather or even Chloe. She'd tried to tell the truth, and instead everyone had believed the lie.

It was an understatement when she told Chloe she was sick of thinking about it. For a decade she'd been replaying the events of that night in her head over and over late at night, on the subway, at work, wondering
what if
? What if we hadn't gone to the barn? What if there had been no gun? What would have happened then?

So much had been spoiled by that one night—her family, her friendships. Everything she used to plan for, everything she used to think she wanted. It was all changed, all damaged by that single rash act, the pulling of a trigger, and even now, sitting in the bar
with Chloe, she could close her eyes and hear the shot, hear the gurgling noise the man made as he died, his lungs filling up with blood. She could see the shock in his face, the shock of knowing he was dying. She'd been hearing the noise in her head all these years.

Now Chloe was saying Jake's sentence was up. He'd served all of his ten years, no time off for good behavior. It was the talk of the town, apparently—people around Burnside couldn't believe he was out, that he'd come back to the scene of the crime. That he dared to show his face in town.

Jake was out, he'd been released. And he hadn't let her know.

Now Leigh realized she was holding her breath. She let it out slowly, looking for the exits, mapping a route for escape. But there wasn't one, not this time. She'd come back of her own accord, and now she was going to have to deal with the problem instead of running away.

She said, “How do you know he's back?”

“He knocked over a liquor store. How do you think?” Chloe polished off the last of her beer and set the bottle back on the table. “I saw him. He was eating supper at Dot's one night when I drove by. He was sitting in the window, drinking a beer, eating some chili, regular as you please.”

Leigh was starting to feel a little sick. She could picture the spot, in a little wooden A-frame building near the highway, picture Jake as he was in high school, tanned and dark-haired, lean as a greyhound, picture herself sitting across from him drinking a root-beer float. The part of her that was still eighteen wanted to weep. “When?”

“About three days ago. Went home to Burnside to see my ma, and there he was, big as life. His hair's shorter and he looked a little bigger, like he's put on twenty pounds of muscle, but it was the same Jake, all right.”

Leigh resisted the urge to order a shot of tequila and asked, “Was he alone?”

Chloe smirked. “Do you think he's been out meeting girls? The man's been in prison.”

“For ten years. That's right.” She had a picture of him in her mind: the faded brown Stetson he'd always worn, wrapped with a rattlesnake band, the tattoo of a bat on the back on his left triceps, barely visible under the sleeve of a clean white T-shirt. A girl—someone young and pretty, someone local—sitting across from him.

“Ten years is a long time.”

Some of Chloe's pink hair fell into her eyes, and she pushed it back with one rough motion. “I didn't see him with anyone, but that doesn't mean there isn't anyone. Seriously, he's been in prison since he was twenty. He's trying to get back on his feet. Girls are probably the last thing on his mind.”

“Or the first.”

“Jesus, what's with you? Are you mad that he didn't call to tell you he was getting out or something? I thought you'd be happy.”

“I am. I am happy.”

Chloe cut her eyes at Leigh sideways, like she was judging a horse show. Leigh knew that look. “No, you're not. You're pissed off.”

“I'm not. He shouldn't have been in prison in the first place. It was all a big mistake. A misunderstanding.”

“A man died, Leigh.”

“Yes, a man who should have known better than to sneak around my grandfather's barn in the middle of the night. Don't tell me you feel sorry for Dale Tucker now.”

“I don't. But I don't think he deserved to die either.”

Leigh sighed. “Me neither. But it was a mistake. Just a stupid accident.” She rubbed her temples; she was starting to get a headache. In a few minutes it would be full-blown, and she'd be ill, unable to see straight. She didn't know if she was angrier at Jake for not telling her he was getting out or at Chloe for waiting until Leigh was actually in
Texas before springing the news on her. But it was too late—she was stuck, committed to the conference and the trip. She couldn't leave without embarrassing herself and causing a scandal. And if there was one thing Leigh Merrill was good at, it was avoiding a scandal. It was her greatest talent.

The music changed over to James Taylor, singing “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You),” and Leigh nearly groaned.
Not now
. She sat back in her chair and stared down at the half-eaten food on the table. “I always figured that when it was time for Jake to get out, I'd be the first person he called. I never thought he'd just show up back in town without a word to me.”

“You think he's going to be angry about Joseph? Is that it?”

“No. I mean—maybe. But there's more to it than that.”

“You're thinking he blames you. That if you hadn't gone to the barn that night, none of it would have happened.”

“Something like that,” she said.

Chloe was watching her carefully. “Have you really been beating yourself up over it all this time? Leigh, you're not the one who went to get the gun. You're not the one who pulled the trigger.”

Leigh pushed away the rest of her food. Suddenly she was a kid again, scared of everything, on the verge of losing control. She was standing at the edge of her grandfather's grave, watching the old man's coffin lowering into the ground—her only real family, her last tie to home—and feeling like she might pitch forward and follow him down and down, into the darkness. Like every tie she'd ever felt to the world had been cut, leaving her alone and drifting on a wide black sea. She hated that feeling. It had taken her years of running to get away from it, but here it was again, cold and smothering as a wet blanket. She shivered.

“All those years, and Jake would never agree to let me visit him in prison,” Leigh said. “I wanted to, you know. I wrote to him a bunch of
times when he first went away, but he never answered my letters. He couldn't bear to see me.”

“He didn't want
you
to see
him,
you mean. He didn't want you to think of him as a criminal. He wanted you to remember him the way he was before any of it happened.”

“He never answered me. Not even once, Chloe. I wrote him for four years straight, and he never answered me—not a letter, not a postcard, nothing. What was I supposed to think about that?”

“That Jake's always been a stubborn ass. Not much more to it than that, really.”

Leigh felt tears starting in her eyes, the shame she'd always felt over what happened threatening to overwhelm her. “He hates me. I'm sure of it.”

Chloe reached across the table and squeezed Leigh's hand. “None of it was your fault, Leigh. Jake knows that. End of story.”

Except it wasn't the end of the story. The truth was something Jake said they should keep, always, between the two of them. Even Leigh's grandfather had never known the whole of what had happened that night in the barn. So many times Leigh had wanted to blurt out the truth to Chloe, to her friends in New York, even to Joseph. But she couldn't. She was too ashamed. How could she admit the truth to them now, after all this time?

The silence stretched out between them, long and thin and airless. Chloe was looking her full in the face now, all joking aside, and Leigh squirmed under the full weight of her best friend's gaze, her total and completely serious attention. “There's something you're not telling me, isn't there?” Chloe asked. She sat back in her chair and blew out a long, low breath. “Well, let's hear it, then.”

Leigh flagged down the waitress and ordered them both a couple of fingers of bourbon on the rocks.

“Damn,” Chloe said moments later, watching the waitress put
down their drinks. “That bad, huh?”

“Yes,” Leigh said. She gulped the bourbon as fast as she could. It burned pleasantly going down, spreading through her throat and into her belly, but it couldn't get rid of the cold pit of fear that lived at the bottom of her. That always lived at the bottom of her. “I can't right now. I have to get ready for my talk tomorrow. I still have some notes to jot down. Maybe soon. But not today, Chloe, okay?”

Chloe looked at Leigh sideways, as if she'd never seen her friend before, as if she were seeing everything new. “All right,” she said, rubbing her hand over her hair again, the tactful gesture, “but only because I love you. Otherwise I'd strangle it out of you right now.”

“I know. Can you drop me off at the conference? All I can manage right now is a hot bath. I just need to be alone for a little while. A little rest. We can go out again later, have a real night out if you want one.”

“Of course I want one,” Chloe said. “But this discussion isn't over.”

“I would be surprised if it were.”

The Austin Writers' Conference was located on a vineyard just outside the city limits, a stunning old Texas estate in the Hill Country dotted with tiny stone guest cottages, a dining pavilion, and an enormous stone-and-timber mansion that would serve for the next week as the conference center. As the guest of honor, Leigh had a little cottage to herself on a hillside with the view of the valley below, the miles of green vineyards and rolling hills. A cozy place with a single room dominated by a large canopy bed, a fieldstone fireplace, and a river-stone bathroom, it was too large for Leigh, but she'd nearly cried at the beauty of the view, at her first taste of home in a decade. The hills were purple with bluebonnets, and as she'd stood at the window watching the sunset turn pink and gold, she couldn't remember why on earth she'd ever thought to leave.

Now, standing under the running water of the shower, Leigh kept her eyes closed and focused on those lovely childhood memories,
breathing in and out as her skin burned red and nearly raw. The trepidation she'd felt for the past month—ever since she committed to the conference, to coming home to Texas—had exploded into full-bore anxiety. If she stayed in the shower as long as possible—if she didn't turn off the water and dry off—she wouldn't have to deal with any of the emotions waiting for her on the other side of the shower curtain, any of the dread, the longing, the loneliness. The guilt.

Jake was back. Jake had been released from prison, and he hadn't told her he was coming home. It was clear now that he really didn't want to see her. It had all changed between them, even though she'd promised, she'd sworn to him, that it wouldn't.
I'll wait for you,
she'd said that day in court, when the guards were getting ready to take him away.
It will all be like it was before. I swear.