The Four Corners Of The Sky (35 page)

His hands rested on the faded leather of the brown flight jacket. “So that’s the truth,” he said. “I couldn’t let you go.” A single tear fell from his pale face to the paler pillow.

Her eyebrow raised. “Don’t try that single-tear thing on me. I watched you practice it in motel mirrors.”

“Is there a tear?” he asked her, smiling. “Well, why not cry? It hurt like hell to let you go.”

For seven years, he said, crisscrossing the country, he had kept Annie beside him, while he’d supported them by a variety of cons and swindles. But finally he had to stop running. A private detective hired by the couple from Ohio almost caught them on two different occasions.

Annie asked, “He was the man at the motel, at the Royal Coach in St. Louis? The guy with the gun? He’d been chasing you for seven years?”

“No…that was years before. You did great that day.” But, he said, what had happened at Royal Coach had decided him to take her home to Pilgrim’s Rest. Clearly, word was out that threatening her was the way to get to him.

“You mean I was a liability?”

“They knew I loved you.” He looked directly at her. “Believe this one thing. I didn’t want you in danger. And I was coming back. I always meant to.”

“That’s two things.” Annie waited but his story seemed to be over; his eyes closed again and he breathed quietly. “Well, you didn’t come back.”

His eyes fluttered but stayed closed. “Kids like an ordinary life. House, dog, school. Was I wrong?”

She looked away. “Just tell me my mother’s name.”

Pulling himself up, he lit a cigarette with a sort of rakish defiance. “I don’t want to tell you her name and I won’t,” he said finally. The resolution in his voice surprised her. “Whooooo…” He puffed smoke at the ceiling. “Whoooo was she? Who was she to us? She left us. Didn’t I do okay by you for a while?” He made a small shrug with his shoulders. “Didn’t Sam do okay?”

“Sam did great.”

“So who…cares?”

Annie was trying to imagine the teenaged girl who’d given away her baby then fled from a Barbados hospital into a new life. “You’re saying my mother was just some nameless girl who had your baby and all of a sudden walked out of your life.”

He sighed. “That’s it. That’s what I’m saying.”

Why, she asked, had he named Claudette Colbert on the birth certificate as her mother?

He flicked ash on the bed tray. “I always thought you wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for what Claudette Colbert said on the beach that day to your mom. She said, ‘What a beautiful, interesting child you two will have.’ That’s what she said.”

Annie responded with her skeptical look. “I guess I don’t believe you ever met Claudette Colbert either.”

“Why not?” he challenged. “Movie stars are real people too.”

She walked around the small room, sat back down. “And you never heard from my mother?”

Fumbling at the bedside tray, he retrieved an old postcard lying there beside the green gems. The card was a photo of Claudette Colbert on the cover of
Life
magazine, in 1939; she was standing in billowing white pants on a stone balcony in some Mediterranean or Caribbean garden. Her raised arm held a cigarette.

Jack gave Annie the postcard. “This card came to Emerald…Sam sent it on to me, figuring, well, I don’t know…” He fell silent again.

Turning the card over, Annie saw a postmark dated New York City. She’d been a student at Annapolis when it was sent.

Jack Peregrine

c/o Pilgrim’s Rest

100 River Hill Road

Emerald, N.C.

And it had the right zip code. There was no salutation, no signature, no return address, just a tight scribble:

Claudette died today. Here’s to a great lady.

I’m fine. Hope you’re ditto. Better this way.

Reach for the sky…

Annie tried to imagine a woman’s hand holding the ballpoint pen, forming the letters—the
e
’s in Greek style, the capital letters with loops that lay under whole words like bowls—to write these words. She tried to see the surface (a table, a desk?) on which the woman had proposed that giving up her baby was “better this way.” She tried to see the room, the town, the life the woman had lived.

In the hospital room, light unhurriedly dimmed. Her father reached across the shadows and touched her hand. “‘Sorry, no silver cup.’”

Annie thought, Yes, he’s right. The cup of this story is not silver, not romance, just a sad ordinary tale of a very young woman who’d gotten pregnant and rejected the responsibility. This story was far more likely the truth than her father’s old fables about how her mother was the last of a foreign dynasty or how Bob Dylan had written “Lay Lady Lay” for her. Annie moved her fingers over her mouth’s twist. “Nope, no silver cup.”

“You’ll be luckier. You’re too beautiful for luck not to happen. You’re the queen of the world.” He picked up the emerald by its chain, let it swing like a pendulum. A cough wrenched him.

Annie took the chain. She said quietly, “Just stop it, stop lying. There’s no Queen of the Sea.”

“Oh she’s real.
La Reina
’s head-to-foot real.” Suddenly energy went through him like a shock. “Come on! Let’s play cards. Old time’s sake?” He reached to the bedside drawer, pulled out an old deck of cards and dealt them with a quick fluid rhythm onto the thin blanket, face up, twenty-five cards.

She watched the cards fall perfectly as leaves. “Doesn’t using your hands hurt your burns?” she asked.

“Painkillers,” he told her. “Come on, do it for me?” He moved his hand over the cards. “Please.”

She studied the cards for a minute and then nodded. He gathered them back into a pile. “How many hearts
didn’t
I deal out?” he asked her.

Eyes closed, she saw the dealt cards lying face up on the sheet. She counted them “…You dealt eight hearts. So five are left. Ace of hearts, jack, nine, eight, and…the two.”

He shuffled through the undealt cards, found and showed her the ace, jack, nine, eight, two of hearts. “A-plus,” he sighed. “What a waste. You’ve still got the gift.”

She shrugged. “For three or four more years. I’m better than I was at seven and not as good as I was at seventeen. Age can wither us, Jack. And it will.”

He shuffled the cards with easy grace, despite the bandages. Tossing a handful in air, he caught one. “Darlin’, age is just an…inconvenient obstacle.”

She caught a card at his next toss. “Has this been a life, Dad?”

“No, but it’s a gift. You’ve got the king of spades.” Without looking, she knew he’d be right. He pointed at the small metal name tag above the pocket of her spotless white Navy jacket. “Lt. Anne Peregrine Goode.” He cocked his eyebrow. “So how is Clark Goode?”

Annie touched the tag protectively. “Clark’s fine. And if you ever use his name in one of your scams again, you
will
go to jail. Because I’ll make sure of it.”

Laughing softly, her father tossed the cards again. “I bet you would.” He snatched a card from air and held it out with its back to him. “Jack of diamonds,” he said.

M
eanwhile, at home at Pilgrim’s Rest, thinking of Annie’s race to find her father, Clark sat rocking on the porch. Too blind to see him, the old black and white Shih Tzu, Teddy, stood inside, near the screen door. Finally, annoyed by the slow screech of the rocker, she made her way down the hall into the living room. There, looking up from the piano bench, Sam watched Teddy move slowly to the pagoda, unable to keep her curled tail in air, although her gait still had its old hauteur. Sam was playing “Lara’s Theme” from
Dr. Zhivago
, which she’d found opened on the music stand. The music lapped like a warm pool onto the porch.

Clark ran his fingers along the beads that made up the letters of Annie’s name on the pink baseball cap. Down the hill, stars were coming out, shining in the deep night river like city lights. He was thinking about a conversation he’d once had with D. K. Destin, after they’d gotten news of Annie’s sudden separation from Brad. D. K. talked about how during her childhood he’d worried that her feckless father would show up and ruin her life. But a part of Clark wanted Jack to return, for Sam’s sake, and because it would be proof to Annie that love came back around.

Aware that in the girl’s life, people seemed to vanish, Clark was always trying to comfort her with his predictability. He even deliberately repeated his worst puns, asking over and over, for example, “What’s the difference between an ornithologist and a stutterer?” until she could recite the answer before he could give it. “One’s a bird watcher, and the other’s a word botcher.” His bad puns were a sure thing, regular as the stoplight blinking at the crossroads, regular as Emerald farmland that stretched to the four corners of the sky. In the same way, his gestures—tapping the wide-beamed pine floors with his shoe three times—was a means of reminding her he would keep his promise: “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Pilgrim’s Rest and I, we just sit here,” Clark told the child as they rocked with Sam and Teddy on the porch, looking west at a sunset reddening the river. He lit a cigarette with the lighter he carried always in his loose khaki pants.

“One of these days,” Sam predicted to Annie, “it’ll be your kids running in and out of Pilgrim’s Rest and then this house will laugh all the time.”

“Houses can’t laugh,” Annie informed her aunt. Laughter had been her father’s gift to her. Laughter was betrayal.

“Sure they can,” Clark said.

“Then can houses cry?”

Sam nodded. “This house used to cry. But not since you got here.”

“I’ll never sell it,” Annie vowed to Sam, who had bequeathed her Pilgrim’s Rest. “But I don’t want you and Clark to die.”

“Me either,” Clark said, slowly rocking.

Although Annie had in her teens criticized Clark to Sam, had once even called him “a stupid slug” in an argument, she had counted on, even in those angry years, the steadiness of her adopted uncle. In fact, Clark’s promise that the world could be relied on, his advice “to look on the bright side,” did not come without effort, for privately he believed in flukes and horrors and knew that chaos could only be absorbed, not defeated. Two years in a
POW
camp as a teenager had shown him the malignity of man and the indifference of nature. Twenty years of performing emergency surgery on children had taught him how thin the shell of life, how easily cracked. It was hard to reassure Sam that nothing like the drowning of her baby brother would happen to Annie, when deep down he worried too. Like Sam, he wanted the equivalent of dunking both of Annie’s feet in the River Styx for safety’s sake. What could that goddess of a mother of Achilles been thinking, to miss wetting one of her baby’s heels?

Clark’s concerns about Annie’s safety focused on speed and Sam’s on water. Sam held up the school bus to lecture the driver on the dangers of hydroplaning. On Annie’s first try at a bicycle, she ran beside her on River Hill Road, ready to fling herself between the child and the rocky river below. She showed up with a life jacket for a camp boat trip that was (as Annie hissed at her) only a three-minute ferry ride across the lake.

But with Clark it was always, “Slow down.” He’d call it after her as she sped away on the bike, in the car, in the plane.

Clark was right to sense that their fretting oddly comforted Annie. She could count on him, on Sam, not to want to let her go. And slowly that counting-on gave her back an instinct for trust. Each evening, the little girl would wait for the measured three hoots of Clark’s horn as he chugged slowly up the hill in his Volvo. Every Friday, she would drag out of the backseat the large brown paper bag of takeout Chinese food, under whose weight she would stagger across the lawn like a small drunk. The takeout never varied. Sitting in the family room, watching movies, Annie, Clark and Sam ate the dishes from the House of Joy cartons, week after week as years went by. First with Teddy, then joined by Malpy, they watched every classic film owned by Now Voyager so often that they knew them by heart. They didn’t always like each other’s favorites—Clark thought speed movies like
Top Gun
had about as much appeal as a demolition derby—but they took pleasure in watching together. Simultaneously breaking apart their wooden chopsticks, they ate the fried dumplings, shrimp lo mein, and moo shu pork that were always in the bags, just as Clark’s suitcase always contained a “good luck” present for Annie on his return from pediatric conferences. He took no chances and bought her talismans of all faiths, amulets as varied as a Celtic cross, a wooden Buddha, a Peruvian woven purse, and an Abyssinian wishing bell. He filled her room with charms and crystals.

From the porch swing in the evenings, Clark would wait for her to appear at the end of her five-mile jog, looking for the orange glow of the reflector vest to come over the crest of River Hill Road and in through the gates to Pilgrim’s Rest. Why did she run so fiercely? He’d watch her small sturdy body keeping to its hard-earned pace, her concentration so intent that she rarely even saw him until she’d dropped to the grass beside the steps, bending this way and that to stretch her limbs. What was she running from, or running to? And what could Clark do to help her, but just to be waiting on the porch?

Sometimes his unhurried style so maddened her that she had to leave the room, but by her high school years no one had more confidence in his dependability than Annie did. When she left for Annapolis, she promised her aunt and uncle that, despite her desire to fly jets for the Navy, she would let nothing harm her. She told them that at her graduation she would point her diploma out toward the field of parents, so that Sam and Clark would know that they shared this triumph. They promised to be there.

But a month before her graduation, Clark drove off to pick up the Chinese takeout for Annie’s visit home and didn’t come back
.
When by 10 p.m. he still hadn’t honked his horn in the yard, Annie and Sam telephoned 911. It was not until midnight that the police chief came to the door about the collision at a downtown intersection. The two of them rushed to Emerald Hospital, where Clark lay unconscious. Doctors there admitted to Sam they had no hope of their colleague’s survival.