The Four Corners of the Sky Page 10

  There’d been a time, a few years after Annie’s arrival in Emerald, when Sam and she had stood in the yard on a crisp starry night, watching Clark set up her new telescope. They’d found Venus luminous in the low southwestern evening sky. “The Queen of Love,” Sam had said. “Don’t bother asking Venus about anything but love because she doesn’t care about anything else.”

  “Annie can make any kind of wish on any kind of star she wants,” Clark assured the child. “Doesn’t have to be Venus.”

  Annie tightly scrunched an eye shut and peered with the other into the telescope at the resplendent black-mirrored sky. “Is that Venus that’s so bright?”

  Clark looked. “Yep. That’s her.”

  Still staring into the lens, Annie said, “I wish you both would never die.”

  On either side, they took her hands. “We plan,” said Clark, “to put it off as long as possible. Tell you what, I’ll quit smoking.”

  Sam added, “I plan to clean out the attic and the basement before I die.”

  Annie laughed. “That’ll never happen.”

  They laughed together and looked up at the stars.

  Thinking of that starry night, Sam lied to Brad; under orders not to reveal her grown niece’s presence in the house, she claimed Annie.

  The handsome naval officer choked up, telling Sam that for some reason Annie thought he didn’t respect her. Whereas, deep down in his heart, even though everybody always said that he himself was the best pilot they’d ever met, deep down he believed Annie was the best, male or female, ever seen in the sky. “I mean, I’ve got the big T and that’ll just always kick ass in the end, but truth is, she’s Number One. And you tell her I said so.”

  “What the hell is the big T?”

  Brad hit himself in the abdomen. “You know. Testosterone.”

  With an elaborate thoughtfulness, Sam considered this idea. “Ah…but otherwise, Annie’s got at least a tiny little bit of a future in flying?”

  “I don’t know why y’all have to be so sarcastic. She’s the best. I mean, before she went nuts about our problem. Probably not doing so good now. When she stresses, well, you know…”

  Sam swung an imaginary tennis racket overhead as if she were going to serve Brad’s head to the other end of the hall. “Well, it’s true, having her marriage blow up in her face did stress her out a little bit.”

  Brad said he had no idea how their lives could have gone so fatally wrong so fast. “I wish you could help me smooth this over. Why can’t she just move on?”

  “I’ll give you a hint,” growled Sam, the invisible racket swinging back and forth. “Naked married woman under naked married man, not married to each other. Man would be you, you dumb big T dickhead!”

  Brad yanked at his thick black hair. “I sure see where she gets this aspect of her personality.” He rapidly cracked his knuckles in an elaborate tattoo. Couldn’t Sam look at it from Brad’s point of view? He was always getting shot out of the water by Annie’s smart bombs and it was no vacation. “Sam, with her, it’s twelve o’clock high every day of our lives.” And while he’d be the last to deny that, given his wedding vows, he’d been out of line with Melody, he felt Annie should admit that she was partly to blame for his “slipup”: she had a Terminator temper and she’d been so busy trying to prove she was the number-one pilot in the Navy that she hadn’t made enough time for their marriage; otherwise she would have known that Melody didn’t mean a thing to him. Annie was a “mental capacity natural” so she didn’t understand how hard Brad had to work to stay ahead of the game. He’d had a tough time on some exams he’d taken just before Annie’d caught him with Melody. Plus he really suspected Melody had given him sex pills without his knowing it. He was strictly off all substances now but he had to admit he’d gotten a little high that night after hearing he’d flunked the one exam he thought he’d passed. Melody came over to the bungalow to borrow some olive oil and then she’d started to rub it on—

  “Jesus Christ, just be quiet!” Sam exclaimed, hearing a floorboard creak above her. “It wasn’t a ‘slipup’! It’s not something to ‘smooth over.’ You are so full of shit, I could, I could—” At a loss, Annie’s aunt, still almost as athletically trim as Brad himself, swung the imaginary tennis racket down onto his skull while with her other hand she landed a hard jab in the pilot’s washboard abdomen. They stared at each other, both surprised. Then straightening up, Brad grinned. “I see where she gets her temper too…Nice left.”

  “Thanks.” Sam took a long breath. “All right, forget about Annie then. Get divorced. Aren’t you a Republican? Why don’t you move on?”

  “I’ll never get over Annie.”

  “Why not?”

  His face furrowed. Finally he gave up thought. “I don’t know what to do without her.”

  Sam couldn’t help but respond. “Oh, Brad.” Frowning unhappily, she walked him to the door. “Okay, gut it up. Quit the pills—”

  “I’m off those uppers. If Annie told you—”

  “She didn’t tell me anything. Say you’re sorry, mean it, try to win her back.”

  Brad shook his head. “No-go. I asked her to take me back. Know what she said? ‘How dumb are you?’”

  “Well, you are dumb,” Sam conceded. “But brains aren’t everything. Like I used to tell Annie myself, ‘Maybe I’m not as smart as you—’”

  “Wow, Sam, I used to say the same thing.” He hugged her like a comrade.

  “‘But, Annie, you can still learn a lot from me,’ that’s what I used to tell her. So, try again.”

  “No-go.” The young lieutenant added with the world-weariness of youth, “Life’s a bitch.”

  “Honey, you don’t know the half of it,” Sam predicted.

  He stepped out the door onto the porch then slipped back inside. “I’m not a Republican. I don’t even believe in politics.”

  She shook her head at him. “Jesus Christ, what does that mean? You can’t not believe in politics. It’s not like the tooth fairy, Brad…You want me to give Annie a message?”

  “Yes.” He nodded mournfully. “‘Don’t hate me.’”

  Sam hugged him. “She’s just mad.”

  “How long you think it’ll last?”

  She rubbed his arms briskly with strong tanned hands. “Oh, twenty, thirty years, max. I love you, you jerk. No cause why I should, love’s funny that way…Hang on.” She ran up the stairs, whispering into the hall. “Annie, Brad’s leaving! Annie?” Sam looked for her niece, but her bedroom was empty. As Annie’s father Jack had done as a boy, she had climbed out the window, run across the roof and swung down the old wisteria vine that twisted around the back porch corner post. She was sitting on the ground, beside the thick root, her head in her arms.

  If Brad had known Annie better he might have looked near that wisteria. But he didn’t know her well at all. He drove next door to see if she were with Georgette and if not, to get Georgette’s advice. Not finding the young psychiatrist at home, he called her at the hospital and poured his best wheedle into his voice. “My heart’s about broken. I flew all the way here and Annie won’t see me. I’m staying at the Omni; meet me for a drink? I need help and all the roads are leading back to you, Georgia.”

  With a sigh, Georgette declined. He was the only person who made her like her full name, Georgia Georgette. He knew it and was always singing “Georgia on My Mind” whenever he saw her. He was a very good-looking man. “You know what, Brad? I see you, I see a box of Dove bars in the freezer. I know they’re bad for me but I eat them anyhow and all of a sudden, they’re gone and I feel sick.”

  “Come on, Georgia. Just one old sweet song!”

  “You cheated on my best friend.”

  “Yeah. I know. And she’s totally right to be mad. But she won’t even see me and I flew all this way…I’m not a rocket scientist. I need help figuring out what to do. Come on. I need some company and you’re the absolute best.”

  Georgette sighed.

  He said, softly s
ad, “Omni in half an hour? Room 1405. Really nice suite; I’ll get room service.”

  “Brad, if you were the last man in my entire life who was going to ask me to come have a drink with him at his hotel—and, frankly, you very well might be—I would say no. Why? Because if I was on the Titanic, Annie would get me into a lifeboat.”

  “Well, hey, give me a break. I can’t help it if I’m not ‘Women and Children.’”

  “What?”

  “And let me tell you, Annie was no piece of cake. It was always twelve o’clock high with her.” He had liked the sound of that phrase when he’d said it earlier to Sam.

  Georgette hung up the phone. Brad figured he’d lost the connection.

  ***

  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that disloyalty made Annie angry. Her absent mother, her capricious father, her unfaithful husband, all had produced a young woman determined to bring down the gavel on Life until Life behaved in a dependable way. Annie was faithful. It was the gift she gave and that she wanted to receive. Georgette’s loyalty, Sam and Clark’s loyalty sat safe at the core of her and she loved them for it. The Navy’s dependability was one reason she had chosen the Navy. Its discipline was reliable. She wanted not only to defend her country but also to help keep it in order, the way she kept her closet in order—her shoes side by side on the shoe rack, her tailored uniforms, blue and white, evenly spaced, her slender white T-shirts and jeans ironed and in a row.

  As a student at Annapolis, she’d beaten back inconsistency and fought against limits, including those of her own muscle and bone. She’d endured instructors who’d bullied her and classmates who’d harassed her. She had worked hard every waking minute of her four years at Annapolis. She’d graduated fit and trim and first in her class. The only clues to what it had cost her were the pale purple circles under her blue eyes and the pinched nerve in her neck.

  When Annie received her commission, she made a pledge that she would never let the Navy down; in return, the Navy would never forsake her. After all, despite D. K. Destin’s complaints that the Navy had abandoned him, the truth was, they had shown up for him in the rescue helicopter, hadn’t they? And each time she’d landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the tailhook had grabbed the wire and the jet stopped. She believed that if she should by chance end up clinging to the wing of a plane in the middle of the ocean, they’d send a helicopter for her just as they had for D. K. She believed the Navy would be like Sam and Clark and Georgette. Reliable. Unlike Brad, unlike her father, she could count on the Navy. She trusted that she was someone who could be counted on. If she were asked to help, she would help; if she were asked to rescue…

  Annie picked up her phone and called Georgette again, this time reaching her. “I just made up my mind. I’m going to fly the King of the Sky to St. Louis tonight and give it to my father.”

  “What?”

  “He needs it. I can’t bitch about his not coming through for me and then not come through for him. He’s dying and he needs help.”

  Georgette took a loud breath. “Well, this emotional breakthrough of yours couldn’t come at a worse time.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Have you looked out the window, Annie? My satellite dish just blew by your porch. Clark’s twister may be headed to Emerald. Sit still, I’m coming over.”

  Chapter 13

  Twelve O’Clock High

  Pummeled by rain, Georgette hurried into Pilgrim’s Rest. The wind was blowing so hard that Clark had to help her close the door. He draped her soaked raincoat on the newel post.

  “Clark, you may finally be right about the weather. It could be a twister coming.” Georgette pointed out the window. “I saw old Mr. Neubruck’s gas grill fly through my yard. He’ll blame me.”

  “Check out the Weather Channel. It’s a bad twister, fifty miles from here.” Clark pointed overhead. “I predicted this.”

  “For like fifteen years.”

  “Well,” he said, “Annie’s up in her room.”

  “Please tell me she’s developed a sense of humor because she just said she’d decided to fly the King of the Sky to St. Louis tonight to give it to her dad!”

  “I know. Stop her.” Clark explained what had happened.

  Georgette mulled it over. “She’s got to think Jack will help her find her mother.”

  “She’s crazy.”

  “That’s a loose diagnosis, Clark.” She added that Brad had just called her, with the remarkable hypothesis that Annie would take him back if he flew from Charleston to Emerald in this storm and proposed to her.

  “He’s crazy too.”

  “Clark, stick to pediatric orthopedics. You can’t just keep saying Annie’s crazy, Brad’s crazy.”

  “They are. You need to stop encouraging Brad. He already gets enough of that from Sam. Let’s not have him keep fighting this divorce.”

  Georgette sighed, still single. “At least Annie got married so she could get divorced. I’m a doctor. It used to be that people wanted to marry doctors.” She pulled off her rubber rain hat and shook out her spiky black hair.

  Clark said, “Those were women who wanted to marry male doctors. Like me. I’ve had two different women propose to me in the last five years.”

  “Right, and did you marry either of them? Would you like my analysis of why you’re divorced and living with a Lesbian, Dr. Goode?”

  The tall thin man laughed. He’d known Georgette since her early childhood, had encouraged her medical school aspirations, and now saw her daily at Emerald Hospital. “I’ve heard your analysis, dozens of times. You see, here’s your problem, Georgette. You’re in psychiatry and men don’t want a wife who’s going to analyze them for free.”

  The young woman snorted. “‘Free.’ Oh. So ‘free’ is my problem? If I ever have another date, I’ll charge him.”

  “There you go. Go talk to Annie.”

  Pulling a small damp box wrapped in birthday paper from her raincoat, she fluffed up the ribbon. “This is for her birthday.”

  Clark warned her with his raised forefinger. “You shrink-wrap it?”

  “Please, only new puns.”

  “That’s hard at my age. Go on. She’s up there, hanging from her door doing chin-ups or something till D. K. gets her plane ready. She doesn’t have the body weight to hold that Piper down in thirty-mile-an-hour winds.”

  “Lucky her.”

  Clark called after Georgette as she headed up the stairs, “Tell her she can’t fly to St. Louis! She won’t listen to Sam and me. We’re old.”

  She turned back and did a sixties dance step. “I’m bookin’, man. Don’t sweat it. I’m hip, I’m cool—”

  “Fine. Mock the elderly.”

  Georgette ran up the stairs to the second floor, where she found Annie in her bedroom, finishing a set of abdominal crunches. She sat on the bed to watch her. “So, your birthday party’s cancelled. Frankly, the old gang was relieved. You only see them once a year and they feel like you’ve, you know, left them behind.”

  Annie’s left elbow briskly tapped her right knee. “Behind how?”

  Georgette fluffed pillows. “Well, to keep up with you, they have to study Sam’s big window display at Now Voyager. For them, life is a little more landlocked: complaining about husbands, kids, jobs. By the way, Jennifer had another boy.”

  Annie’s right elbow tapped her left knee. “How can so many kids we went to high school with have kids now?”

  Georgette pointed at the retro chrome clock on the wall, spinning her finger in a circle. “Well, frankly, it’s not like at our age we’d be Burmese child brides. The bio bell is tolling.”

  “We’ve got a whole decade.” Finishing another set of sit-ups, Annie touched both elbows to both knees. “I’m shooting for pregnant at thirty-five.”

  “If you want to make thirty-five, you might rethink taking this solo trip in a superannuated single-engine airplane tonight.” Flying the King of the Sky to St. Louis through a tornado was, in a phr
ase Georgette said she had used only this morning to a detox patient who’d tried to jump off the hospital roof, “not a good travel plan.”

  The plump young woman tossed the wrapped gift onto the rug beside Annie, whose legs were now doing scissors, stretched in air over her head. “Here, will you open this? I’ve got to get back. Pitti Sing’s freaking out.”

  “Hang on. Three more…”

  Sliding off the bed, Georgette ripped open the wrapping paper herself. Inside was a tiny set of handsome miniature screwdrivers and pliers and wrenches, in a red leather case with Annie’s initials in gold, APG. “You know, for the girl who thinks she can fix everything.”

  “Except her life,” smiled Annie, leaning over to kiss her friend’s head. “Perfect present.” She saw the little scar on Georgette’s knee, from the accident when they were eleven years old, and felt a twinge of the old guilt. She had taken Georgette for a ride on Sam’s silver Honda 125 (without Sam’s permission) and had skidded off a turn on River Hill Road, crashing into the underbrush below. Georgette still felt faintly queasy whenever she even saw a motorcycle. Annie’s broken collarbone had healed far sooner than her regret about endangering her friend.

  Georgette pointed out the window at the rain. “And by the way, Brad was planning to surprise you by braving the storm and showing up tonight to propose.”

  “What?”

  “Not that you’re divorced. But he’ll never get out of Charleston, even in a Hopper jet. I better go. My mother’s going to call any minute to see if I’m dead.” Thunder cracked loudly and the lights went off and on. “Listen, don’t dig me out if the house falls in on me; let archeologists discover my skeleton in a thousand years and say, ‘God, she had great bones!’”

  They walked together downstairs, in unison the way they’d done as children.