The Four Corners of the Sky Read online

  “You’re welcome to. Doc Clark is what my kids call me—I’m a kids’ doctor. Or just Clark’s fine.” Leaning down, he offered Annie his hand again but she still wouldn’t take it. “Fair enough,” he said. “Come on in when you feel like you want to. I’m not going anywhere. Neither is Sam. And well, Annie, this is a damn dumb thing Jack’s done but we’ll sort it all out.”

  She hugged her legs, the small lavender jeans dirty and wet. “My dad’s in trouble again.”

  Clark nodded at her, slow, unruffled. “But let’s look on the bright side. He enjoys it.”

  “Annie! Annie!”

  Suddenly the tall tanned woman she’d first seen on the porch came running through the barn doors, her clothes wet through. Holding Annie’s pink baseball cap, she crawled under the plane’s wing and pulled the child into her arms. Annie struggled backward, startled by the stranger’s closeness. But the woman nudged her gently toward her again. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m your aunt Sam. Everything’s going to be okay. I’m so sorry.” Slowly she rocked them back and forth together, huddled beneath the plane.

  There was something in the warm feel of the woman’s neck, in her arms, that was familiar. Her eyes were familiar too, like Annie’s father’s, green as emeralds, but sadder, with a small furrowing crease of worry between the eyebrows that, in Annie’s growing up, was never to go away.

  On the first night of Annie’s arrival, in the large long hallway of Pilgrim’s Rest, Sam helped her unpack her blue suitcase; it was filled with her clothes, including her favorite dress and her white jacket with gold buttons. Tucked beneath the clothes was $12,000 in hundred-dollar bills, around which was wrapped, with a rubber band, a birth certificate from a hospital in Key West, stating that Anne Samantha Peregrine had been born there on the Fourth of July at 8:42 p.m., that she’d weighed 6 lbs., 3 oz., that Jack Peregrine was her father and Claudette Colbert was her mother. Looking at this certificate, Annie asked Sam to pronounce her mother’s name and Sam sounded upset when she did so. “Claudette Colbert.”

  That first night, while Annie picked sadly at the Chinese takeout food, Sam told her about the time she’d been here before, when her father unexpectedly showed up with her in Emerald; how he brought the plane, the King of the Sky, on a rented flatbed truck, its wings dismantled, and parked it in the barn. Annie was only twelve months old then and they stayed at Pilgrim’s Rest only three weeks. But during their visit Annie took her first step, running into Sam’s arms.

  Annie said nothing when she heard this story but she’d been intrigued. Then Sam had brought out a bright yellow birthday cake and put on a video of The Wizard of Oz, because Annie, lying, had told her it was her favorite movie, figuring it would be a safer choice than Top Gun. When Judy Garland chanted, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,” the child, to impress the two solicitous adults, made a joke—having first rehearsed the remark silently to herself—“Okay, I guess I’m in No Place now.”

  Sam and Clark laughed, pleasing her despite her grief.

  The next morning there was a card on the kitchen table that said, There’s No Place Like No Place. Welcome Home. Sam was at the stove, flipping pancakes with a dexterity that couldn’t but impress Annie. She even flipped one behind her back and caught it in the pan. “Tennis,” she explained. “You play?”

  Annie shook her head.

  “You want to?”

  Annie shrugged.

  “I’m going to practice today. You could help me out. I pay fifty cents an hour.”

  Over breakfast Sam told her niece that Clark and she shared her family house but that they weren’t married, they were just friends. She added, “I don’t know why people say ‘just friends.’ It’s the hardest thing in the world to be.”

  Annie stared at her aunt carefully. “Are you two gay?” She was trying to shock her.

  Sam said, “I am but Clark’s kind of gloomy.” She held out the yellow birthday cake. “Double chocolate inside.”

  “You shouldn’t eat cake for breakfast.”

  Sam cut two pieces. “Of all the things we shouldn’t do in America, this is way down the list.”

  The phone rang and hoping it was her father saying he was coming back for her, Annie held her breath until Sam returned from the hall. “Clark’s at the hospital. Says we should come there and have lunch with him. He’ll show you around his clinic.”

  “Is my mother dead?” Annie asked abruptly. “If she is, can I see her grave?”

  Sam said she didn’t know who Annie’s mother was; that, despite her frequent questions, Jack had never told her.

  ***

  A few weeks later, Sam came home with a black and white female Shih Tzu puppy, tiny and imperious, whose sale had been advertised on the staff bulletin board of the pediatric clinic. She gave the dog to Annie, claiming it resembled Toto in The Wizard of Oz, which it did not. Annie named the Shih Tzu Teddy B, after a stuffed bear of similar size, the loss of which, in some motel on the road with her father, had left her for weeks inconsolable.

  Like Annie, Teddy cried through most of her first night at Pilgrim’s Rest. After that, the little Shih Tzu pretty much took over the house.

  Another present arrived in an express mail truck a week later. It advertised itself as “The World’s Biggest & Hardest Jigsaw Puzzle.” Clark, who had ordered it, set the puzzle out on a table by a bay window in a room called “the morning room,” although no one knew why it was so described. The jigsaw puzzle was a giant photograph of blue sky, nothing but blue, with—so its box claimed—20,000 tiny, nearly indistinguishable pieces. It was as large as the mahogany top of the fat spiral-legged table onto which Clark poured all its pieces.

  Inviting Sam and a resistant Annie to help him assemble the sky, he told them, “We’ll get the corners first. Annie, see if you can find a corner.”

  While she was still wary of these two strangers and did not yet return their smiles, she couldn’t resist proving how quickly she could locate in the huge pile of particles of blue cardboard a piece that had a 90-degree angle.

  “Great!” Sam exclaimed. “We’re on our way.”

  The little girl wrinkled her mouth in disdain. “This will take years to put together.”

  Clark smiled. “Let’s look on the bright side.”

  “It probably will take years. Decades,” promised Sam, her sad eyes for a rare moment as playful as her brother Jack’s.

  The day the puzzle showed up was also the day that Annie’s eventual best friend, Georgette Nickerson, plummeted into her life. Georgette lived next door but had been away at a camp for overweight children—which her mother had forced her to attend.

  The plump little black-haired girl had suddenly come loudly skittering into the kitchen of Pilgrim’s Rest, flinging herself at Sam and shouting, “I missed you! I hated that camp, they starved us and they threw us in the lake and kicked big orange balls at us. I ate purple Jell-O day and night, night and day.” She spun around at Annie. “Who are you?”

  Sam introduced her niece, who was overcome not so much with shyness as surprise when the fat little girl flopped down abruptly on the floor beside the Shih Tzu and barked loudly. “Woof woof woof!!” The dog barked back at her, growling. “I don’t have a pet. My mom thinks I’d eat it. Is this yours?”

  “Yes,” Annie said. “Her name is Teddy B.”

  “My name’s Georgia Georgette Nickerson, can you believe it? I make people call me Georgette. Dumb, huh? I was named after a state and after my dad George. That’s like naming your child like, you know, Rhode Island Rhodette.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “My dad had a heart attack and died. My mom says the police are after your dad.”

  “He’s too fast for them,” insisted Annie, pushed to his defense.

  Over the years, Georgette’s fast-rising scale of laughter and Teddy’s sharp bark, and the hum of Sam’s and Clark’s voices at Pilgrim’s Rest, softly moving back and forth in the slow Southern dusk, conversation l
eisurely as a river, became for Annie the sound of safety. After dinner, the four of them would sit together at the mahogany table, with Teddy curled on the cushion of the best chair and Georgette staying until her mother telephoned from next door to demand her return, and they’d talk over their separate days, while idly looking for connecting pieces of the puzzle of the sky. Its frame wasn’t hard to assemble; in a month, they had all four corners in place. After that, things slowed down.

  Annie’s father Jack was, as she predicted, too fast for the police. The state patrol eventually found that he’d sold the red Mustang with license plate MJ87143 to someone in Atlanta who hadn’t looked too closely into whether or not he’d really owned it. Sam pestered the police and even hired private investigators to search for her younger brother, but without success.

  At first, Annie missed him, and his songs and stories, with an ache that hurt like a bruise. But carefully she taught herself to stop hoping. She taught herself that she was alone in her life and would always be and therefore would rely only on herself.

  Of course she wasn’t alone. Outside her door waited family and friends. But it was a long time before she heard them there. Months passed before she laughed again as loudly as she had when her father had sung his funny songs. And from her first weeks at Pilgrim’s Rest, she wasn’t restful. She started having the dream about the woman in her gold cape on a ship in the ocean, the mother she’d never seen, the mother whose real name Sam and Clark could not tell her because they didn’t know it. She would wake up from her nightmare as the little ship was sinking and she couldn’t save the drowning woman and her father was flying away.

  For months, whenever it rained in Emerald so hard the sky went black, Annie could see Jack Peregrine’s car racing away from her over the hill.

  But finally, as months became years, even rain was just rain.

  Chapter 4

  Wings

  Growing up as a child with Sam and Clark, with her friend Georgette and with her flying teacher D. K. Destin, Annie had to learn new styles, very different from the fabled schemes and exuberant stories of her father. In the town of Emerald, stories were for the most part just boring local gossip, tales of neighbors’ daily triumphs and travails. She felt them to be much smaller than the tales—like the saga of Spanish treasure under the sea—that her father had told her. Only D. K.’s stories of the great pilots of old had for her the same kind of magic.

  Still, over the years Annie listened to Georgette’s jokes and Clark’s puns and Sam’s way of comparing everything in their lives to the movies and eventually their worlds became hers and her father’s romance faded. Georgette and she were soon best friends and all through their Emerald school years spent nearly half their lives companionably in one another’s company, despite or because of their differences: Annie, small and neat, practical, athletic, serious; Georgette, funny, dreamy, zaftig. Both ironic about life but ready for life to do big things with them.

  And then when Annie was seventeen, on a summer day, ten years after her father had just dropped her off at Pilgrim’s Rest, he suddenly returned, calling her name.

  Sam’s heart almost stopped, she later claimed, when her brother ran noisily crashing out of a cornfield and raced into their barn. In the vegetable garden, where on her knees she’d been tying up tomato plants, she had to use a fence post to pull herself to her feet because her legs went wobbly. Sam called the event, “The day Jack showed up like Cary Grant chased by the crop duster in North by Northwest.”

  By this time, it was too late for Jack Peregrine to lay claim to Annie. For almost eleven years, she’d lived a “normal” life without him. She had just graduated from high school, had broken up with her first serious boyfriend, and had been accepted at Annapolis. Her family was now Sam and Clark, who had long since officially adopted her. Her dog Teddy had grown old and they’d recently acquired a new puppy, an exuberant Maltese named Malpy, for Malpractice, whom Teddy tolerated with a begrudging noblesse oblige.

  They made a reasonably content family and on vacations together spent more time studying stars from campsites than learning card tricks in hotel rooms, as she’d done with her father. They hiked and climbed rocks and kayaked, then returned together to a home that stayed put. She ate real food at a real table and went to bed in her own room and had her height and weight measured annually by Clark, who’d inoculated her against everything he could think of. Thanks to D. K. Destin, she had her pilot’s license and could do loop-the-loops in the King of the Sky. She wore on her flying jacket the Navy wings and handmade black eagle badge that D. K. had given her. She drove the car Sam bought for her on her sixteenth birthday. She went to the same schools in the same town where she’d started in the second grade because she’d tested so well.

  “Give your dad credit,” Sam urged. “He taught you to read and write.”

  But Annie gave him credit for nothing and credited nothing he’d ever said to her. The fact that he had endlessly told her she was smart and beautiful was meaningless. He had also told her that her mother was Claudette Colbert and that he’d make her the queen of the world.

  On the hot summer afternoon when Jack Peregrine showed up at Pilgrim’s Rest, Annie was next door with Georgette. They were lying on the floor in Georgette’s bedroom, listening to Metal Urbain’s Les hommes morts sont dangereux and watching a muted tape of Goddard’s À bout de souffle with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. For a party that night, they planned to retro-dress like Jean Seberg in the movie, with short hair and sunglasses, crisp striped shirts, their collars up, and belted flaring skirts that perfectly fit them. They had been enthusiastic Francophiles all year, tying thin black cashmere sweaters around their necks, pulling filters off Mrs. Nickerson’s cigarettes to smoke them, and otherwise preparing themselves to spend a month in France on a language immersion program before they left for their separate colleges. Annie even renamed her friend Gigi (for Georgia Georgette, and because it was like Gigi in the movie musical set in Paris), though the nickname never stuck.

  When Sam spotted her brother Jack from the garden, her first thought was Annie. How would Annie feel? She ran into the barn, where she found him “in a state” because the King of the Sky, the plane he’d left there seventeen years ago, was missing.

  “Are you kidding?” she shouted at him. “You’re standing there asking me where your goddamn plane is?!! How about your daughter?”

  “Where’s Annie?”

  “Next door!” Sam pointed angrily to the Nickersons’ house.

  “She okay?”

  “She’s fine!”

  Jack had an excuse for dropping Annie off a decade earlier and disappearing. He claimed he’d been locked up in prison, and that in prison he’d come to believe that the best thing he could do for Annie was to stay away from her and let her have a normal life.

  Frustrated, Sam punched at him, shoving him to the dirt floor. “You are so full of shit, Jack.”

  “Come on, Sam. Where’s the King of the Sky?”

  “Annie flies that goddamn plane, which you gave her, damn it!”

  Jack dusted himself off, grinning. “She does? That’s wonderful. She flies a plane? Wow. Really?”

  “Really. She’s going to Annapolis.”

  “Really? How’d she learn to fly?”

  “D. K. taught her. The plane’s at his place. Aren’t you going to ask me how I am?”

  “How are you?”

  “Jill left me. Mom died. Clark lives here.”

  “I know all that.”

  Sam pointed again at the Nickerson house. “Go talk to your daughter, she’s next door! But let me warn her you’re here. You know, this kind of shock is rough on normal people.” Sam ran inside the house and telephoned her niece.

  Across the yard, grabbing at Georgette, Annie held the phone against her heart. “Oh my God, Sam says my jerk of a dad’s in the barn. I don’t want to see him, okay!”

  “Oui, Jacques qui?” Georgette leaned far out the window, her spiked black and
purple streaked hair giving her the look of a sooty gargoyle. “Tu ne sais pas Jacques. Oh, there he is!”

  From Georgette’s window the two girls watched as Jack ran toward them through the grass, waving up to his daughter as if it had been ten minutes ago that he’d last seen her, not more than ten years. Even from so far away, she could tell that he was thinner and that his pants and his T-shirt were loose. He came close enough to the Nickerson house for her to see that he held a small dirty cloth sack, like a bag of marbles.

  The white puppy Malpy raced around him in a friendly frenzy, yapping so loudly that on Georgette’s bed, Teddy lifted her head and growled before returning to sleep—uninterested in either Jack Peregrine or New Wave Cinema.

  From the high vantage of Georgette’s window Annie could see a blue Corvette at the edge of the cornfield, its nose to the road, the way her father always parked his cars—ready to go. She was furious because tears started down her face. She swiped them away.

  Her father stood in the yard below the Nickerson windows, yelling up at her, “Hi, Annie!”

  She didn’t answer but, with slim tanned arms leaning over the sill, stared out at the fields behind him.

  “You look beautiful! Come on down, say hello.” He made his arms into wings.

  She fought to ignore him.

  “I hear you’re a flyer. Going to Annapolis. Good for you! Come on, let’s go to the airfield, take a ride in the King! Hey, look at you. I missed you so much!” Her father started doing a cha-cha dance, an imaginary partner in his arms.

  Annie pulled her head back inside the window without replying, noticing as she did so that a brown car was coming toward them up the hill, red dirt blowing in spirals on the road, swirling closer.

  “Come on, Annie! I owe you one!” She could hear her father calling her name like a chant.

  Georgette was saying, “Go down there and talk to him!”

  “No.”

  Her friend tried tugging at her. “Go talk to him! I don’t mean like you’re lucky, but, God, my dad’s permanently dead. At least yours shows up every ten years. Plus my dad just owned a jewelry store. My mom just sells engagement rings and flexy watchbands. Boring! Your dad’s a criminal. Go over there!”