The Four Corners Of The Sky (17 page)

“And?”

“Their planes crashed.”

“And?”

“They died.”

“Hello baby.”

A
nnie and Clark stood in the kitchen, looking out at the rain. Clark said, “Annie, I wouldn’t count on the truth from Jack.”

Annie shook her head stubbornly. “Either he’ll tell me about my mother or he won’t. He’ll die or he won’t. Either way, it’ll be over.”

From behind Sam’s “Gore 2000” magnet on the refrigerator, Clark took a photograph of Annie at a track meet, sprinting to the finish line, her hair flattened against her face, her face twisted, her smile triumphant. He nodded. “You’re going to St. Louis. I accept it but I don’t like it.” He volunteered to drive Annie the eight hundred miles to Missouri instead.

Annie smiled at her uncle. “Clark, if you drove me, Jack would die of old age before we got there. I’m flying the
King
.” She had calculated that the Piper Warrior could make it with one stopover to refuel. She could be at Lambert Airport not long after midnight, Central Time. The real question was, would her father even show up? “I’m thinking I should call that detective in Miami, Sergeant Hart.” She started to dial his number from memory on her cell phone.

Sam grabbed the phone, agitated; she shoved it into the pocket of her shorts. “No, please, don’t call the police. They’ll put Jack in jail. He couldn’t stand it. Please!”

A sigh, then Annie relented. “…Okay, okay, I won’t call the police.”

“Just till we sort things out,” Sam pleaded.

Annie took her aunt by the arm and walked with her back and forth in the kitchen, soothing her. “But if he’s really ill, shouldn’t he be in a hospital? If he’s bleeding all over motel bathrooms?”

Sam stopped, pulled away. “You said it was practically nothing!”

Annie backpedaled. “Well, I mean, it’s not that serious or he wouldn’t be on the phone asking me to lend him an airplane, would he? It’s just some little screw up.” From long thinking about how to interpret her father, she knew he would always be experiencing “little screw ups.” Time after time the calamities were a complete surprise to him, as if they’d only by the remotest chance had anything to do with him at all. It dawned on her now that this was a trait he shared with her soon-to-be ex-husband Brad. She recalled how Brad had looked up at her mystified when she’d caught him on their bed in that “slip up” with Melody Wirsh, as if Melody’s presence in the bed was as much of a shock to Brad as to Annie.

Clark held up the huge emerald on its chain. “Where do you suppose Jack got this thing?”

“Not by paying for it at Tiffany’s,” replied Annie.

Sam examined the emerald again. It was doubtless worth a hundred thousand, she theorized. It was very large and looked to be perfectly formed.

“Great. Maybe he wants to trade it for my mother’s name.” Annie zipped the stone with the fake business cards and the hundred dollar bills inside her father’s flight jacket. “Let’s go.”

Clark left them to go check on Georgette before he brought the car around to the porch.

Annie repeated the numbers from memory, “362484070N and 678STNX211,” and wrote them on a message pad, handing the pad to Sam. “Keep this.”

Sam checked the numbers against those on the pink cap. “Perfect. And I can’t remember a phone number long enough to call it.” They walked together through the hallway. “More and more I just remember what happened ages ago, millions of little things, just flashes, from when I was a kid. When you’re young, you don’t have time to remember your life. When you’re my age…” Sam rubbed at her white hair. “The past starts to push the present aside.” She pulled from her shorts pocket the copy of Annie’s birth certificate that she’d found in the attic. “Know what I mean?”

“Not really.” Annie studied the certificate.

Sam’s familiar frown deepened. “Well, like when I was eating the chicken korma, I was remembering squeezing soy sauce out of a plastic packet in a booth at House of Joy. The soy sauce squirted onto my mother’s blouse sleeve. A gray silk blouse with two little covered buttons at the cuffs. Grandee was furious at me and hit the back of my hand hard with her fork. She didn’t like chopsticks and always used a fork.” Sam answered an accusation no one had made. “All right, all right, my mother wasn’t a loving person. But she had great style.”

Annie patted her hands. “No wonder you eat everything with chopsticks, even French fries.” She took Sam back into the living room, pointed out a photo on the piano. In the picture, Sam stood among thousands of placard-waving protesters at the 2000 inauguration in Washington. “You’ve got the love thing and style too. Look at you. It’ll always be 1968, Sam.”

“I wish,” sighed her aunt. “Check out the gray hair in that crowd. We’re practically on walkers. Where are all the young people?”

Annie pointed at a group photo of her first flight-school class at their graduation. “Here we are. In a land called Reality where you know you can’t change human nature.”

“The world is fixable, Annie. You just need to get the real news so you know what to fix.”

Annie straightened the Navy photo. Two of those classmates were dead now. She said, “We’d rather hear the news on comedy shows.”

Sam helped Annie slip into Jack’s old leather flight jacket, rolling up its sleeves for her. “That’s about the only place you can hear the real news these days. Vietnam, we had Cronkite.”

Laughing, Annie put on her Navy cap. “Sam, just leave war to pros like me.”

“You think you’re so cynical. Good lord, you telephone Georgette practically every day. There’s no reason to do that but love.”

“Sure, and I buy organic. But most of all, I work hard to get promoted and—” Annie smiled, patting her flat abdomen, “—stay in shape.”

Sam pushed a curl back off her niece’s forehead. “Well, an elliptical trainer won’t make your heartstrings zing—”

Annie started melodramatically up the stairs. “Please, I beg you, don’t sing some awful love song.” Her mockery of Sam’s romantic songs was an old joke between them. “Love is not a many-splendored thing. Love does not make the world go round.”

Sam called after her, “Yes, it does.”

Annie turned back at the landing. “Well, I hope it doesn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry because I am looking forward to a major apology from Jack Peregrine!”

Sam patted the carved peregrine hawk in the newel post as she shouted up the stairs to her niece. “Love means saying you’re sorry and hearing ‘I’m sorry,’ every goddamn day of your life. But oh sweetie, maybe you won’t hear it from Jack.”

There was no answer. Annie had already gone into her room.

“I’m talking to thin air,” Sam muttered.

The tall white-haired woman walked back to the piano and picked up the Navy photograph in which her niece was smiling broadly, saluting her commanding officer, Commander Campbell, as he pinned a Commendation Medal on her. Sam compared the photo to the one of the seven-year-old Annie with Jack, seated in The Breakers restaurant. In both pictures, Annie had the same jubilant smile. “Oh, Anne Samantha, look at you.” Sam moved her fingers for a moment against the glass of each picture frame, tapped each small exultant face. “Look at you.”

The day that Annie’s acceptance to Annapolis had arrived in the mail, Sam had felt the heft of the Academy’s packet, thinking that it wouldn’t be so heavy if it were a rejection; thinking, as she raced up the stairs to Annie’s bedroom, that this news would help her niece, this would fix things. Because Annie had been shut up there all day crying. A boy had thrown her over for another girl, a girl on her track team, the girl from whom Annie had to accept the hand-off baton on the last leg of a 4 × 400 relay race. Only a week ago, the girl had dropped the baton behind the fast-sprinting Annie in the blind hand-off and so they’d lost the race. Annie had been furious at the girl, who’d smiled at her smugly, bafflingly. Then the boy had broken the news. After school, Annie had driven home crying so hard that she’d begun hyperventilating and Sam had finally had to hold a paper bag to her face. She hadn’t cried that hard since the day her father had left her at Pilgrim’s Rest when she’d hidden in the barn behind the wheel of the Piper Warrior.

Late through the night Sam had sat beside the bed where Annie had finally fallen asleep. She knew how her niece must feel. Sam had cried the same way when her partner Jill had not only left her but had charged her for more than her share of their condo equity.

Wes Campbell, Annie’s commanding officer at the Annapolis base, called her cell phone while she was packing. He was sympathetic. “Lieutenant, it’s okay. Family emergency. I see here you’re owed three separate weeklong leaves that you never took. Make this one of them.”

“I just need to find my dad, sir. I don’t need a week.”

“Lieutenant, you’re taking a one-week leave starting at 0800.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll be back well in time for my test flight.”

Campbell chuckled. “I know that. We’re counting on you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No hesitation?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, good.” Commander Campbell liked the young female officer, whom he had personally chosen for the new F-35 Lightning II test flight. He made his joke about how times had changed from his own all-male days at the Academy in the ’60s, when midshipmen still wore glasses and had acne and everyone’s haircut was as flat as the runway on an aircraft carrier. He made this joke so often to female midshipmen, it was like a rite of passage when they first heard it from him.

He asked, “Your dad go by Peregrine or Goode? You gals here at Annapolis have so many names hyphened together, it’s hard to know what the hell to call you.”

“I don’t know what name my father’s going by these days, sir,” was Annie’s reply.

The commander frowned as he hung up; he often didn’t catch the tone of this generation’s remarks. Was that humor? Just a fact?

Up in her bedroom, Annie slid her neatly coiled jump rope in her duffel bag, then studied her birth certificate before placing it in her purse. The piece of paper looked real. Had she actually been born in that hospital in Key West, twenty-six years ago on the Fourth of July at 8:42 p.m.? Had she really weighed 6 lbs., 3 oz.? Was it even possible that her mother’s name had, quite coincidentally, really been Claudette Colbert? Unlikely.

There was a lull in the storm; rain fell slow and soft. Clark was waiting in his Volvo to drive to the airfield when Annie carried her Navy duffel bag out onto the porch. Malpy raced into the opened car. Clark called to Sam, now kneeling in a flowerbed, moving fallen branches off the plants. “Let’s go!” They’d driven off so many times in just this way, year after year.

Sam leaned into the car, upset. “We lost most of the hollyhocks and foxglove but for some reason those hideous orange irises of yours look pretty good.”

“Every cloud has a silver lining, as I learned when my cousin died and left me his classic
GTO
.” Clark pointed behind Sam. “Did you lock the front door? Go back and check the door.”

“Nobody’s going to rob us,” Sam said. “A tornado just went through here. People are busy.”

“Drug addicts don’t mind a little storm. Remember that burglar that broke into Georgette’s house in the ice storm?”

“That was nothing. She played her barking Doberman tape and he ran off.”

“I’m locking the door.” Clark loped up onto the porch to lock the front door and then returned to the car.

Annie checked her watch. “You want to drive me to the airfield or not?”

“I do not. Did I ever?” He started slowly forward.

From the backseat, Sam called, “Be careful, Clark. The drive’s flooded.”

“Wait’ll she gets to the sky.” Her uncle eased the station wagon out into the gravel road. “This cousin’s
GTO
, which I sold for two hundred bucks—”

Annie took a long breath. “—would be worth a fortune today.”

“Would be worth a fortune today.”

From the back seat Sam muttered, “I’ve got an Armageddon feeling. Like Tippi, being driven away from the doomed house at the end of
The Birds.
”

Annie turned around and repeated what her father had told her so often as he’d spun her in the air all those years ago. “Don’t worry. I’m a flyer.”

Clark pointed up at the car roof. “So proudly we hail.” Tiny pellets of hail were striking the car.

“Now, there you go,” smiled Sam. “We are actually hearing a new pun. You never know what life will bring.”

S
hortly after Annie’s birth, Jack Peregrine had won in a poker game in Key West, or so he’d told Sam, the old single-engine 1975 Piper Warrior, with engine troubles, that he’d brought to Emerald. In the barn at Pilgrim’s Rest he repainted its body. He planned to fix its engine and even burnt a crude landing strip into a long flat meadow behind the barn. But as far as Sam knew, Jack had never flown the little red and yellow Warrior on whose wing he had written, “King of the Sky.” Instead the plane waited unused in Emerald until the seven-year-old Annie began sitting in it alone for hours, hoping she could, by her stoicism in the cockpit, compel her father to return. She found an ignition key taped to the underside of the wheel cap, near where on her arrival she had huddled so long crying. She used this key to pretend to start the plane, although the motor was long dead.

One Sunday evening, as Sam, Clark, and she sat on the couch with Teddy, watching the movie
The Great Waldo Pepper
, the quiet little girl suddenly announced that she intended to fly the Piper Warrior herself. It was, after all, her airplane.

For the next two years, Annie spent daily hours in the barn playing at flying the single-engine plane, cleaning it, studying it. Since the birthday when Sam had given her that first ride with Georgette in a tethered balloon and the flying lessons in the Pawnee Cropduster at D. K. Destin’s airfield on the outskirts of Emerald (“Private Planes, Sell or Rent, Low Monthly Rates, Rides, Instruction, Groups or Single”) the small airport had become her favorite place, and D. K., one of the few African American naval combat pilots in Vietnam, had become for a while the most important person in her life. At every meal she asked in her solemn watchful way for flying lessons with the retired lieutenant. It was the first thing for which she asked her aunt and “uncle,” other than information about her missing parents.