The Four Corners Of The Sky (22 page)

Clark helped Sam restore Now Voyager and, without even having to change its name, reopen it as the town’s first video rental place. Now Voyager was a much greater success in its new incarnation. People so much liked staying home to watch movies that the Paradise, Emerald’s only downtown movie theater, went out of business. Next, Sam started a mail-order service for serious rare film collectors. Eventually customers throughout the country were contacting her for help in locating film footage—even the most obscure independent movie, newsreel, preview, director’s cut, and studio screen-test. Her promise was, “If they made it, and if anybody, from a projectionist to a grandchild, saved at least one print, I can find it for you.” For local customers, she would transfer old Super-8 movies or slides of their children, their weddings, their reunions and graduations and anniversaries, onto first video, then, in later years, DVDs. “Past Perfect,” she called this popular service.

Above the store, her restored condo became a small theatre called Sam’s Place, where friends and neighbors came to “Play It, Sam,” the free double and triple features she showed on rainy weekends. “Bite Night” featured meal movies like
Big Night
,
Babette’s Feast
,[__] and
Eat Drink Man Woman
, and at intermission served a fusion buffet. On “Phys Films” night she screened films like
Magnificent Obsession
and
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, and had Dr. Clark Goode speak (to a chorus of “Louder!”) on “Doctors in American Movies.” “Phys Films” started the town rumor that Sam and Clark were a couple, secretly in love. (Though why their love should be kept a secret stumped the theorizers.)

Then one day in July the seven-year-old Annie showed up in their yard, abandoned by her father. Within days of the child’s arrival, they were sitting together on the couch, watching Shirley Temple in
Bright Eyes
sing about wanting to be an airplane pilot on the Good Ship Lollipop. Within a week, the imperious puppy Teddy, moving from lap to lap, joined them. The couple became a family.

It was Clark who figured out the recurring dream that was awakening Annie nightly in those early months. He brought home some paints and suggested she draw her dream on the barn wall behind the airplane parked there. It was something he asked his child patients to do, draw their dreams. She painted a picture of a girl in a little red airplane that chased after another red airplane on a straight blue line of horizon. Between the sky and the ocean, she painted a brown ship on which a woman in a yellow cape stood, her arms in air.

After Annie finished her picture and carefully cleaned the colors from the brushes, she reached up and put her hand in Clark’s. Clark told Sam that when he felt the life in Annie’s small hot hand race up his veins to his heart, he knew it would stay there the rest of his life.

The next morning, Annie asked Sam if Clark was her in-law. Sam explained that he was not an in-law, but he was an in-love. She said that sometimes in the end an in-love could be more counted on than a “real” relative. “You can always count on Clark,” Sam told the child.

Annie agreed with a quiet solemn nod. “He’s not going anywhere. He promised.” She was predisposed to believe that if Jack Peregrine were any example of a “real” relative, she could do without them.

A year later, Sam and Clark officially adopted Annie at the Emerald courthouse. The judge, a married woman with children, questioned Annie carefully about whether she wanted to live at Pilgrim’s Rest with Sam and Clark. Annie said she did. “You can always count on them.”

As they left the courthouse after the hearing, Annie heard a woman say she’d just been awarded damages because a department store’s elevator cable had snapped and plunged her down two floors, breaking her leg. Annie found this notion of legal retribution for suffering so comforting that the following day, forging an excuse from Clark about a doctor’s appointment, she left school and found her way back to the courthouse. Judge Susan Patterson answered her office door in Bermuda shorts and with her peppery hair held up by a big paper clamp. When Annie said she’d come to ask a question, Judge Patterson told her to take a seat and ask away. Annie said she wanted to find out how she could sue her father for leaving her.

“That’s a tough one,” admitted Judge Patterson, nodding. “You could maybe sue him for support. For money.”

Annie struggled to sit maturely in the large leather chair. “No.” She gave her head a fierce shake. “I don’t want money.”

“What would you like?” asked Judge Patterson.

The child thought. Finally she sighed. “I don’t know.”

“I told you it was a tough one. Well, think it over and let me know. It’s an interesting question.”

Judge Patterson located Sam and sat with Annie in the lobby to wait for her. “You ought to be a judge yourself,” she told the child. “The bench could use some more smart women.”

For the next year, whenever adults asked Annie what she planned to be, she told them “a judge like my grandpa and Judge Patterson.” Some people in Emerald thought this was “precious.” Some thought the less Annie knew about her grandpa the better.

Clark warned Annie, with one of his terrible puns, that she was too fast to be a judge. What she wanted was wheels. “Whoa, slow down, you’ve got the court before the horse. You need a job where you don’t sit still.”

Years later, when Annie flew her first mission for the Navy, she joked to Clark that he’d been the one first to predict and then to make possible the “dangerous” profession of aviation from which he’d tried to divert her.

“See, Clark, it all balances out.” She patted his shoulder. “As long as you and Sam don’t go anywhere, I can go 1200 miles per hour.”

“So Sam and I just get to hang around here waiting?”

She laughed. “That’s what parents do.”

On the Pilgrim’s Rest porch, Sam sat with her cell phone on the table beside her rocker, waiting for Annie to call to say she’d made it to St. Louis. Clark was still at the hospital, where he was removing a .22 slug from the thigh of a ten-year-old whose little brother had accidentally shot him with one of the family guns.

Sam couldn’t sleep. She told herself to stop worrying about Annie. Annie flew every day in all kinds of weather—much faster than she was flying the
King of the Sky
to St. Louis tonight. In fact it was almost impossible to conceive of the speeds Annie flew. How was it imaginable for anyone to travel at 1000 miles per hour, at 2000? What must that feel like? In a big passenger plane, you had almost no sense of speed at all and yet you were sometimes going as much as 600 miles per hour. But suppose you were moving three times that fast? It must feel…well, impossible to grasp.

Sam looked over at the Nickerson house next door. All the lights were off except the one in Georgette’s bedroom. She went back inside. In the hallway her glance caught something glittering. It was the pink baseball cap that Annie had worn here nearly twenty years earlier; the cap Sam had taken out of the suitcase with Jack’s flight jacket tonight. Annie had forgotten and left it sitting on the newel post.

The green and red beads spelling
ANNIE
on the front of the cap drew Sam’s attention again. A few of the brass-set round beads sparkled in the chandelier lights as she turned the pink brim. Finding the bone-handled magnifying glass that Clark kept in the hall table drawer because he couldn’t see the print on envelopes as well as he once had, she studied the capped round beads, noticing that they’d been painted over with green, blue, and red paint. Where the paint had worn away was where the sparkle was. She scratched more paint off with her fingernail; wherever she removed the paint, a shimmering twinkle of bright color flared in the light.

In the kitchen she scrubbed with a soapy brush on the water-based paint until all thirty-seven beads were clean. There would have been, she counted, forty-two little beads spelling
ANNIE
, except that five were missing.

She took the pink hat into the living room to hold under a halogen lamp so she could examine the exposed beads in its brighter light.

In her excitement, Sam couldn’t stop herself from calling next door. Georgette took a long time to answer her phone.

“Did I wake you up?”

Georgette told Sam that she’d been trying to read herself to sleep with her own upcoming conference paper on sleep disorders but that all she’d done was convince herself that her paper was stupid.

“I know the feeling,” Sam commiserated. “When I can’t sleep, every wrong I’ve ever committed slips in through the cracks in the doors and windows like the ghosts in
Poltergeist.
”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“I want you to come over here and look at something.”

But Georgette didn’t want to get dressed in order to come over to examine Annie’s childhood baseball cap. Besides, Georgette’s appraisal of the true value of the glass beads on the cap was useless. Although she had grown up working in Nickerson Jewelers, she had never possessed what her mother Kim had called “an eye for the real thing.” “So, good night, Sam. I have a feeling those glass beads are just glass beads. You’re sounding a little too much like my mom.”

But Sam Peregrine had always had a good eye. Good enough to win the state championship in her division in competitive tennis singles for six years running and to make it to the finals last year against opponents half her age. Still good enough to spot an intact 1922 print of Murnau’s
Nosferatu
in a tin can at a Paris flea market last autumn. Still good enough to see that the “glass” beads spelling the five letters of Annie’s name on the pink baseball cap, the cap that Jack had always oddly insisted that Annie “hang onto,” were not glass beads at all: they were precious stones.

Those beads, mounted in bezel-rimmed settings of cheap brass, were in fact, in Sam’s opinion, ten rubies, fifteen sapphires, seven diamonds, and five emeralds, all of very high quality and each approximately 6.5 millimeters in diameter, or three carats in size.

And here, thought Sam, Clark and Annie had always given her such grief about never throwing anything away.

A
nnie was more than an hour west of the small Kentucky airfield where she’d refueled. She was thinking about the odd peacefulness she felt with Sam and Clark at Pilgrim’s Rest. From her childhood, there had been the part of Jack Peregrine in her that was relentlessly unsettled, like a craving for salt she couldn’t satisfy. But that restlessness eased when she came home to the tall house where she’d lived as a child. At Pilgrim’s Rest she could look out over the land and wait for the reddening of the sky and the sound of Clark and Sam’s voices as they pushed together in the porch swing at dusk. They were in her memory—though she knew them now to be far more complicated—like the clear figures in an old-fashioned snow globe of America that had somehow survived on this small hill in this small town. Here at Pilgrim’s Rest she could wait for the breeze to lift the air, for Teddy’s old arthritic sigh, for what in the moment let her feel easy, when her shoulders, her neck, her hands, everything loosened, because she was home.

But she never stayed long. She was her father’s daughter and needed to move. Pilgrim’s Rest was too fenced in. Her first remembrance of the place was its borders: the white gateposts, the red barn doors, the corners of the blue-sky puzzle, the square picture that she’d painted on the barn wall for Clark. And the vast open world outside the fences pulled her to the horizon.

As an adult it was only in the fast world of the sky that she found the ease she’d once felt at home with Sam and Clark, Georgette and D. K. Maybe, she thought, this trip to St. Louis could somehow help her bridge horizons and borders. Maybe her father would ask for her forgiveness for old injuries she’d almost forgotten; he would tell her how to reach a mother she hadn’t much thought about for a long time. And when that happened, Annie’s sinews would untighten for good, all the restlessness would still.

Or maybe not.

Who knew what Jack Peregrine would tell her, or whether it would be true? How much could she trust a man who made his living by telling lies? Would he now, even on his deathbed, if he were on his deathbed, tell her the truth about anything?

Annie gave the little white Maltese a pat, awakening him. “It’s a good thing I’m going to St. Louis,” she said. He looked at her sleepily. “Okay, Malpy, here’s where you say, ‘You’re absolutely right.’” The dog barked in a cooperative manner.

There was a faint, almost imperceptible catch in the Piper’s engine before its steady humming resumed. Some pilots might not have noticed but Annie had unusually acute hearing. At medical checkups in Annapolis, she had always scored in the top one percentile on auditory tests, as well as tests of her vision, reflexes, and coordination; it was why she was the pilot so often picked to fly test runs. Georgette teased her: “You’ve got the brain, you’ve got the body. We just need to work on the heart a little bit.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my heart,” Annie insisted to her friend.

“Really? Seems to me it hurts.”

“My neck hurts, that’s all. Pinched nerve.”

“Right.”

Now Annie moved her neck side to side, hearing the crunch and crackle. At Annapolis she’d had to wear a brace late in her senior year, so painful was the pinch, or alternatively compressed disk, or myofascial trigger points, or displaced vertebrae—the neck specialists all had different diagnoses. Clark thought Annie’s problem went all the way back to the motorbike accident. Georgette thought it was psychosomatic.

In the
King
, flying through the black night, Annie rolled her neck, humming, “Don’t tell me the lights are shining, any place but there.” She rubbed at the knot in her shoulder’s muscle. The instrument panel was so familiar she knew right where to tap it when a light blinked. The red engine-overheat warning light flashed on, then off. Or had it? Was she losing thrust? No, indicators looked fine. “…Lights are shining, any place but there.”