The Four Corners of the Sky Read online

  “Annie, about your dad? Maybe he’s dying, but at least you hadn’t seen him for decades.”

  “That’s a comfort, Gigi.”

  At the door Clark handed Georgette her raincoat. “If Jack’s dying, it’ll be the first time.”

  Sam joined them in the hall. “Stop talking about it. Clark, you’d better go tape the windows. Georgette, stay here tonight.” Sam suggested they all watch a movie to get through the storm. “Les Diaboliques. Clouzot. I’ve got a great print.”

  But Georgette moved to the door. “Isn’t that a movie about Lesbians that really aren’t Lesbians? I love you, Sam, but not that much. I like new movies.”

  Sam said she liked old movies because she herself was old.

  “Right. Old enough to be my mother,” agreed Georgette. “And as you know, I’ve always wished you were.”

  “Only because I spoiled you.”

  “Thank God.”

  Sam noted that she had only told Georgette the same things she’d told Annie—that she was smart and strong and could do anything she wanted to do. That she was beautiful and lovable and someday she’d find the right someone to love her as she deserved.

  Georgette let Sam help her into her raincoat. “You introduced me to high heels and Häagen-Dazs espresso ice cream. When Kim sided with Mr. Neubruck after he’d called the police on us about blasting out our Nirvana tape all night, you told Kim, ‘You were young once too.’ I’ll never forget that. Not that Kim ever was young.”

  “Honey, your dad told me one night your mom sank a 30-foot putt at the golf course at midnight in her bra and panties.”

  “Sam, you made that up.”

  “Call me when you get home,” Sam urged. “I don’t like your being alone over there.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “You’ll find the One, Georgette.”

  “That would be nice, just somebody to open jars.”

  Sam shrugged. “You’ll find him. And he’s going to love you like nobody’s loved you.”

  Georgette, laughing, asked Annie, “Why does Sam always sound like some awful soundtrack song?”

  “Clark and I blame it on Jill.”

  “Her old girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, she ran off to Belize and can’t defend herself.”

  Sam handed Georgette her yellow rain hat. “I’m serious. The two of you should drive up to Annapolis after the holiday. Georgette should meet this condo neighbor of yours, Trevor Smithwall. He’s an FBI analyst, Georgette, and an archeology buff. Isn’t that right, Annie? They’re made for each other.”

  “Ignore her, Georgette.” Annie left for the kitchen, to help Clark tape the windows.

  Sam tied the hat straps under her neighbor’s chin. “I’m serious, honey. Trevor sounds like a nice guy.”

  “Sam, you think Brad’s a nice guy. Even I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “But this guy Trevor could be your type.”

  Georgette buttoned her raincoat. “He’s my type if he’s got a combined total of at least three arms and legs and he weighs less than four times his IQ. Can he spell his last name? Has he been convicted of any capital crimes—I don’t mean just charged, but actually convicted?”

  “Stay here.” Sam ran to the kitchen and returned with a big plastic bag of spicy tuna rolls and half the birthday cake, none of which Georgette wanted, but all of which she took.

  Sam opened the door. “Run. It’s raining.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Call me when you get home!”

  “Sam, I live next door!”

  “Call me, Georgette! And if this gets worse—”

  “I know! Go to the basement.”

  Sam found Clark alone in the morning room, attaching big Xs of masking tape to the bay windows. She hugged her arms around her Now Voyager T-shirt. “Where’s Annie?”

  “Still taping kitchen windows. So you hear Brad’s going to fly here? I guess he’s ready for life at twelve o’clock high again.” Brad’s repeated use of the phrase about Annie’s stress had become a family joke.

  The sound of the swing on the porch banging against a window startled them. Sam ran outside to tie it to a corner post. Thunder booms rattled the house and all the lights flicked suddenly off and on.

  In the darkness the telephone rang. Carrying her plate of sashimi, Annie hurried in from the kitchen to answer it, assuming it would be Brad again. Sam, Clark, and the dog Malpy squeezed around her in a circle.

  It was a strange man with a soft, faintly accented voice. He asked for Annie Peregrine.

  “This is Annie Goode. Who is this? Is this the Miami police?”

  “Miami police? Those pingitas!” the man exclaimed. “No! This is Rafael Rook. Your papa asked me to call you. ‘Rescue or else the day is lost,’ as the Swan of Avon would put it, and in fact did. Shakespeare. Annie, your papa gravely needs your help.”

  Lightning forked over the sky. Another branch from the oak tree crashed into the yard. She had trouble hearing the soft-spoken man.

  “I’m sorry. Why did you say you’re calling?”

  “I’m a friend of your papa’s from Miami. Pretty much his one and only in these sorrowful times.”

  Rafael Rook had an odd husky young voice, like rustling straw, with a curious style, as if he’d learned to talk from old paperbacks piled into book bins and sold for a quarter. He told Annie that he was calling her from a South Beach Sam’s Club in order to urge her to hurry to St. Louis at the dying wish of her dying father, who was dying.

  “From what?” she asked.

  “He asked me specifically not to discuss it. A man like that! The key to happiness, Annie, is an education. I am Cubano. Well, I think of myself so. I left Havana young and fell into bad company. I never had the good fortune of college. But your father? Definitely, absolutely an education.”

  “I bet.” Not noticing, she dipped her white tuna into too much wasabi and teared up when she swallowed it.

  Rook said, “Jack tells me he taught you to do fractions at four years old.”

  Annie admitted that this was in fact true. Her father had taught her to read and write, add and subtract, ask questions. Maybe that was why, she sarcastically allowed, she was interested in the question of whether or not he really was dying.

  “Nothing’s certain, you agree?” Rook sounded as if he wanted to discuss the matter. “But brief candles, quintessence of dust, no way around it. Still, should Jack go to that undiscovered country alone? You, his only child, you’re all he’s got.” Rook paused. “And myself, if you’ll permit me, I have the honor to be his friend. Some in Miami may even tell you, who’s Jack Peregrine? Who cares if he’s dying or not? I reply, is this what life comes to, a man who lost thirty thousand dollars at Hialeah in an afternoon, smiled, what a smile, and drove to Palm Beach and picked up the tab for the whole table at the finest restaurant, a la carte? Where are those friends now that ate Jack’s chateaubriand? Not at his side.”

  “You’re in Miami?” Annie set down the plate of sashimi. “Is my dad in St. Louis?”

  But the bizarre Latino caller could not be deterred from his philosophizing. “What does Jack’s fate tell you about the human race?—”

  She interrupted. “Mr. Rook, if you and my father are such close friends, tell me something he’s said to you about my mother. Does she live there in Miami with him?”

  He was clearly taken aback. “Your mother? Jack’s a bachelor.”

  Sam kept plucking at Annie’s sleeve, whispering, “Jack could be making it up. He could do handwritings, voices, anything.”

  But whoever this stranger was, he wasn’t her father. Even after all these years apart, Annie was sure she would recognize her father’s bright metallic voice. Rook’s timbre rustled like leaves blown across a yard. “You’re sure you’re a close friend?”

  He puffed dismay. “Close? What could be closer than lying side by side in a prison cell in son-of-a-bitch Cuba?”

  His response wasn’t the one she’d expected. “Cuba? My d
ad was in prison in Cuba? When?”

  Rook said, “To me it feels like yesterday. One year, twelve long months, in that cell. Jack gave me the will to survive. Otherwise? I would have slit my throat on a rusty can lid, if I’d had a can, which I didn’t. I would have woven a noose of my own rotted trouser legs. They took away even time. No watches. But the worst was a bastard threw my guitar to the floor and just slowly stepped on it for the cruel pleasure.”

  She asked if he were a musician.

  “Ah…Here’s a question: Is what we are, what we might have been? Or is what we are, what with such sorrow, we have become?” He paused as if expecting her to offer an answer. When she didn’t, he added, “‘I have a reasonable good ear in music.’ To my mother’s grief I chased rumba down many excessively scummy streets. I could tell you—”

  “Don’t. Mr. Rook! Mr. Rook—”

  “In Miami my cousin found me a job with a dance band. Sad to say, many years later I returned to Havana, with your papa, and that’s when the bastards got us.” Over Annie’s attempts to interrupt, Rafael described how, for twelve months in a small slimy lightless cell, her father had recited Shakespeare from memory every night until dawn. “Oh, the poems and songs. He could just pull out a little verse every night from his head and it would be enough to keep me from misery. Compared to him, that Spider Woman Kiss, that was just silly movies. But this was Shakespeare. Thing of beauty, your papa. I can never repay him…What a heartbreak. And yet death comes to us all if we’re mortal, which they say historically we are—”

  Annie took advantage of the young man’s necessary intake of breath. “Just stop there, okay! If my dad’s dying, why did he leave Miami and rush off to St. Louis?”

  That sudden decision, Rook confessed, remained a mystery. In fact, Jack had left Golden Days entirely against Rook’s advice.

  “What about his doctors? Isn’t Golden Days a hospital?” Annie paced, yanking the phone cord free of the leaping Malpy.

  “Golden Days? It’s a petty creep down a dusty hall. I had a connection there and we slipped him in but I would not recommend it. Now he very much needs you to meet him in St. Louis with the King of the Sky. There are people who…do not wish him well.”

  Annie didn’t doubt it. “What does Dad want, the big emerald?”

  “Big emerald?” The Cuban sounded greedy. “You found a big emerald?”

  “Or the password in his jacket? Do you know what this password’s to?”

  A little too eagerly, he asked her to tell him what the password was.

  She declined to do so. “Rook, what the hell are you and my father up to? Why does he need a plane? Can he even fly a plane? Frankly, I never thought he could.”

  Rook claimed that Jack could do anything. Conversely, Jack and he were up to nothing. “I would basically like to offer him a helping hand at this juncture, because of my great debt to him; that’s the simple truth, Annie, no insinuation that truth is simple.”

  Annie sat down in the chair that Clark carried over to her. “‘Juncture,’ meaning he’s definitely dying?”

  “What’s definite? But when a man’s about to slip off a mortal coil, Annie—I feel I can call you Annie, because he talks about you all the time—a man goes to the core. So, if you want my advice, if it’s a password of Jack’s, it will have something to do with you, he is so proud of your accomplishments—”

  The remark took her aback. Never before had she considered that, despite their long separation, her father might talk about her, and apparently with pride. She was surprised that he would even know of any accomplishments of hers. Sam must have told him. “Have you heard of my aunt Sam?”

  The man said yes, “absolutely, of course. His sister Sam sends him news about your goings on. Impressive, number one in your class. In the end, Annie, you cannot take it or leave it with familia. This is what—you agree?—gives us our humanity.”

  Although reluctantly moved to hear that her father had boasted about her, and although already planning to fly to St. Louis, she took a caustic tone. Even if he were dying, she asked, why should she deliver a plane to St. Louis to a man who’d thrown her away when she was seven years old?

  Rook coughed as he mumbled, pardon him, but if he had been blessed with Annie’s brains, and if his padre were dying—which he wasn’t alive to die, because he had already died, young and much too fast, of this bastard cancer. And his father’s father, Simon Rook, had died even younger, in fact a horrible death off the coast of Cuba, thanks to the lying cabrones in the CIA.

  Annie jumped to her feet, pacing. Sam rescued the plate as she flung out her arm. “Twenty years ago my ‘padre’ unloaded me on his sister and waltzed off into the ozone! So you’ll excuse me if I don’t get worked up over Jack Peregrine’s ‘dying’ wish. So fuck you!” Her outburst surprised her.

  Rook’s rejoinder was also unexpected. He shouted loudly: “Excuse me, that is absolutely, definitely a lie! You have insulted me!”

  But then she heard a pounding noise, grunts, and shrieks and realized he wasn’t talking to her anymore but to someone in his vicinity. Where had he said he was? South Beach? A store?

  Finally he blurted out in a choked way that a vicious old lady was trying to wrestle out of his hand his mobile phone, claiming it was hers.

  Annie heard more thumps and shouts. Then Rook was yelling, “I believe we still have a tiny ember in Florida of what once upon a time we called Liberty. Do not accuse me of committing a crime! Why would I steal your cheap cell phone? It’s pink!”

  Annie could hear a woman’s voice shouting something about how this man had stolen her purse out of her shopping cart and that he was a foreigner who thought he could get away with robbing her because she was old, whereas people like him had no right even to be in Florida.

  Rook shouted back, “Pardon me, my great-grandfather Isaiah Rook was a rabbi in Miami! My mother’s brother was up to his waist in the Everglades for Alpha 66 and my grandfather Simon Rook was personally recruited for a little something called Operation 40 by names you’d toss your cookies at if you heard them! That is what the fuck I’m doing in Florida!”

  “What’s going on? What’s wrong with Jack?” whispered Sam, tugging at Annie’s sleeve.

  Annie shouted into the phone. “Listen to me, Rook!”

  The Cuban was panting. “Good-bye! The same to you!…Not you, Annie. That old lady, she’s gone, gracias a Dios! I apologize…Ah, let me take slow breaths. As the Great Buddha said, ‘El camino no está en el cielo. El camino está en el corazón.’”

  Annie ignored a sarcastic impulse to inquire into Buddha’s ability to speak Spanish and instead asked Rook to tell her exactly what was wrong with her father’s health.

  Rook caught his breath loudly, like a balloon losing air, slowly calming himself. “He’s dying.”

  “Dying from what?”

  “Slings and arrows. Life. Pretty much.”

  “Was it an accident?”

  He coughed. “Accident? Annie, I’ll tell you my personal theory. When you’re born, in my opinion, they send you down here with everything worked out ahead of time, like, you know, a fixed race or a stacked deck of cards or a book they wrote the end of first. It could be your astronomical stars, your karma or, I don’t know, a lot of people are into this personal feng shui—From cancer, I’m sorry to tell you.”

  Annie caught at the reality of the word. “Cancer? What kind?”

  “Terminal.”

  “Cancer?” cried Sam.

  Clark whispered, “Get the name of Jack’s doctor. I could phone, see what’s going on.”

  But the Cuban suddenly shouted again, “You called the cops on me, lady? You called the cops? Annie, I gotta go!”

  “Call back,” she demanded. “I don’t know where in St. Louis he is!”

  “Good bye!”

  “Don’t hang up!”

  There was a loud crackle in the phone.

  Annie turned to her aunt. “Rook hung up.”

  “Call him back.�
�� Sam grabbed Annie’s arm.

  Annie dialed the incoming number, but voice mail announced, “This is Evelyn Whitestone’s phone. Please leave me a message.” Then the line went dead.

  Chapter 14

  The Palm Beach Story

  Sam said, “I told you he was weird, that Rafael Rook.”

  Picking up the sashimi, Annie absently ate it whole. “He said he was in prison with Dad in Cuba.”

  “Your poor dad. He would have hated that.”

  “Anybody would have hated it.” Annie turned to Clark. “So he says Dad’s dying of cancer.”

  “What kind?”

  “He didn’t say.” Annie sat down on the bottom stair. “I remember one time when Dad told some suckers he was dying of cancer because he wanted to sell them this fake land and I flipped out because I believed he was dying and he told me it wasn’t true, it was just a trick, he was fine.”

  Clark rubbed her back. “I’m sure he is fine.” He noted that they should all remember how Jack had pulled the same “I’m dying, buy my house cheap” trick in Savannah and had been arrested for it. “Dying’s not in his personality.”

  Abruptly all the lights went out and they heard the porch door tearing loose. In the dark Malpy raced around the room barking wildly, begging to be picked up.

  “Clark, I hope you and the Weather Channel are happy at last!” shouted Sam, upset by more than the weather. “Now it is a damn tornado.”

  The screen door shattered loudly as it blew off the porch.

  Clark called out through the darkness. “Get the dogs. Go to the basement!”

  Grabbing up Teddy and Malpy, they felt their way down the steep steps to the old Pilgrim’s Rest cellar, where Sam had collected all the broken objects, old toys, cracked leftovers of past generations that she couldn’t squeeze up into the attic. Here in the cool stone space, Peregrines had hidden for over a hundred years from bad weather and other calamities, like Yankee invaders and teenaged parties with amplified music.

  Between the furnace and three of Annie’s bicycles, illuminated in the beam of Sam’s large flashlight, they stood together, listening to the cracks of snapping trees overhead. Sam used her light to see her cell phone to call Georgette, who told her, “Thanks. I’m in my basement, sitting on a moldy beanbag.”