The Four Corners Of The Sky (32 page)

The grass was neon-green; big red and purple flowers grew in bright heaps along curving concrete walks. In trees, yellow lemons and fat oranges weighed down the branches, glistening as candy drops.

On a bench beside a turn in the walk, three thin little women sat together, their skin shriveled from their bones, so small that their white-socked feet dangled loosely above the grass. The woman in the middle of this group struggled with a red tangle of knitting in her lap while the other two wound together a big twisted skein of blood-red yarn. Against their chalky hands, the red wool looked like a bouquet of roses they were fighting over. Annie set Malpy down on the grass and he ran over to them.

A black Mercedes smoothly stopped at the curb. Its black-suited driver slid out and leaned against the dark tinted window, staring at them from behind his wraparound sunglasses. He wore a phone earpiece. His large black car had a mournful air but the driver looked too stylish in his linen shirt for the funeral business. Rafael reacted in surprise, as if he knew the man.

A well-built gray-haired man in a gray silk suit slipped out of the back seat of the Mercedes. Raffy had been watching the car carefully. When he saw this man in the gray suit take off his sunglasses, he sucked in his breath loudly.

“What’s the matter?” Annie asked the Cuban.

“Nada.” But he abruptly grabbed Annie’s purse and with it raced off to the side of the Golden Days building, disappearing behind flowering bushes.

The gray-haired man bent down to re-tie his glistening shoe. Then he started up the hospital walk, passing not far from where Annie stood near the old women’s bench. He passed close enough for her to see that he had a black mole beside his mouth. Nearby, a male nurse stood smoking on the lawn. The gray-haired man approached the nurse, began asking him questions. Their conversation went on for a while. Finally the nurse nodded, pointing at the top floor of the stucco building.

At that instant a slender woman slid out of the backseat of the Mercedes and ran toward the man. Handsome, she looked to be in her forties. She wore oversized sunglasses and a loose stylish linen jacket over a short skirt; everything about her looked like bright metal—from gold bracelet to bronze-hued shoulder bag to dark-gold hair so brilliant it was like a snaky coil of copper wires. She hurried onto the lawn, sliding her arm under the man’s arm and urging him back toward their driver. The driver energetically waved a cell phone and called to him, “
Jefe! Pronto!
”

Across the path, the woman caught Annie’s eye and she took off her sunglasses. They stared at each other for an instant; it felt longer to Annie because so many disjointed images flashed at her, like slides too quickly changing. The woman looked familiar, yet Annie didn’t know her. She had a jarring flash of the woman with pink sweatshirt and flip-flops outside the lobby of the Admirals Club at the St. Louis airport. But the two women weren’t at all alike. Besides, why should a woman she’d seen a day before in the Midwest be here at Golden Days in Miami? Then two other images pushed the present aside. Both were out of place here in Miami. They were Emerald images from long ago. One was a picture on the wall of Georgette’s bedroom; one took place in the kitchen at Pilgrim’s Rest, where Sam sat crying.

Again, the driver called,
“Jefe!”
and waved his phone. Exasperated, the gray-haired man jerked around, striding back to the car, grabbing the cell phone from the driver. Whatever the caller said to the man, it changed his mind about visiting Golden Days. Angrily, he slid into the rear seat of the Mercedes, gesturing at the woman to join him.

The three elderly patients, scrambling up from their bench, accidentally tangled themselves against the woman as she hurried toward the car. Fighting free, she knocked two of them onto the concrete walk.

Malpy jumped on the woman. She flung him off with a violent gesture. With an ear-piercing squeal, the little dog hid in the azaleas.

Annie helped the two old people struggle to their feet. She called after the woman, who had now reached the Mercedes door. “Excuse me! How about an apology?”

The woman turned, took off her sunglasses again; her deep blue eyes looked blank. She slipped into the car, her coppery hair ablaze in the low slant of sun.

The black sedan sped away.

Annie stood watching until it was out of sight. She couldn’t shake the picture of Sam at the kitchen table at Pilgrim’s Rest. Annie, in her early teens, entered the room. Seated across from Sam was a woman who looked a little like this woman. Sam was crying. Annie stopped in the doorway, struck by the emotional intensity. Sam and the woman looked up at her. That was all she could remember of the scene. It had been so long ago, so brief and so vague she couldn’t even be sure exactly how old she’d been when it had happened.

On the Golden Days lawn, the three patients pressed around her, thanking her. One was bleeding from a scrape on her knee; another was clutching her elbow. Annie retrieved her father’s flight jacket. “She knocked you down. I saw the Mercedes’ plate number. I could call the police.”

The woman with the knitting needles shook them in the direction of the car. “She was a bitch, wasn’t she? Total bitch!”

Her friend agreed. “Worse bitch than Ms. Skippings!”

The knitter weakly smoothed the thin white curls of her hair. “That was nice of you,” she told Annie. “Who do you have here?”

It took Annie a second. “Oh, you mean staying here? I’m visiting my father.”

The knitter squeezed Annie’s arm with sharp bony fingers. “That’s nice of you.” She smiled. “What’s his name?”

“Jack Peregrine,” said Annie. “No, I’m sorry, I mean, Ronny Buchstabe. My father’s Coach Ronny Buchstabe. Do you know him?”

“No. I have a daughter.”

Another old woman pushed to the front. “I have two daughters.”

The woman with the knitting wasn’t interested. “Where’s the dog, the white dog?”

“Here he is!” shouted a man sliding toward them by means of a walker. Malpy was trotting beside him, his tail a brisk flag not of surrender but of salutation. He’d suffered no damage to his pride from being flung to the grass; in general, he forgot assaults as soon as they were over. Happily the old people circled him. The little dog began busily showing off his back-leg dancing trick in exchange for everything edible they could scrounge from their hoarded rations—bits of banana and apple, Junior Mints, corn chips.

Out of bougainvillea blossoms at the far corner of the building Annie saw Rafael Rook poking his head, like a swimmer in an Esther Williams production number. By complicated gestures he telegraphed her to join him but to leave Malpy behind.

The old people were glad to keep the Maltese while she went inside. The dog was a bouncy, licking, yapping scrap of life, a distraction from dying, and if Annie had asked them instead, “How would you like to be as young as I am and madly in love?” they could not have assented more heartily.

“His name’s Malpractice,” she explained. They found this hilarious, having been subjected to so much of it themselves. “Malpy. Don’t give him seafood.”

Raffy returned her purse to her. “Pardon, pardon,” he whispered as he led her behind the Dumpster at the rear of the building. “But discretion is the better part, if you take my meaning.”

“Raffy! You can’t just run off with my purse!”

“I had to use your phone. A family emergency.”

Automatically, she checked inside the small black Coach bag for her wallet. It was there. “You knew that man and woman in the Mercedes.”

“Not to speak to.”

“Well, that much was obvious since you ran away.”

“Happiness eludes them. Certain people could definitely use a little less caffeine, up the dosage on their serotonin, aromatherapy, maybe spend quality time on a nature walk or even a cat, little bird even—”

“You ran to the bushes.”

Raffy lowered his voice as if he could be overheard. “With that man, I tell you the truth, the bushes are not a bad plan. I am a naked newborn sitting on a shark’s molars in comparison to that man, who is not a nice man, any more than Castro was the Second Coming the way he convinced my Uncle Oswardo he was. That’s Feliz Diaz.”

Annie shrugged.

“Feliz Diaz. There are many people in Miami, when he says vote they vote; go throw rocks, they go. When he says buy that, they buy that. So on. The ace of aces. I heard in Little Havana, he blew a man’s hand off with a Beretta 92FS for misdealing the cards. There was talk of the incident on the street for years.”

Annie interrupted him. “Is the woman with him involved with my father?”

Rook gestured uncertainty. “I doubt it.”

“I feel like I’ve seen her before.”

Raffy shrugged evasively. “Annie, I swear, I’m a prop, I swell a scene, I’m a man of plastic packing bubbles. All I know is, Jack asked for my help: ‘Raffy, send this FedEx to my daughter; make this phone call, pick me up off this curb, and drag me into a hospital.’ Nightly I read the ‘Swan of Avon,’ to whom he introduced me in our prison cell in Cuba, for which I can never sufficiently thank him for I hate ingratitude worse—”

“Please don’t start talking Shakespeare.”

“The complete works from one volume at Costco. The Poet has a way of putting things nobody could improve on. ‘Lady, you are not worth the dust the rude wind blows in your face.’ That’s what I say to the
puta
that knocked those old ladies down. Could you say better than that? Could I?”

Annie was struggling to connect the face she’d just seen with the memory of Sam’s crying at the kitchen table. Then abruptly it came to her—the family portrait on Georgette’s bedroom wall of Georgette’s father and his sister. She said, “I think that woman was my neighbor’s aunt, from my home town. I think she’s a woman named Ruthie Nickerson. Do you know that name? Ruth Nickerson?”

Raffy looked puzzled. “Why would she be your neighbor’s aunt? She belongs to Diaz.” Raffy looked furtively at his watch. “We’ve got to go.”

He pulled her around behind the Dumpster, past a pile of garbage bags and up some stairs to the Golden Days rear landing, the door of which he propped open with his sneaker.

“Why can’t we walk in the damn front door?” she asked him.

“Shhhh.”

A pretty Latina woman in a nurse’s uniform suddenly appeared in the doorway, her finger to her lips.

“Chamayra!” Raffy embraced her with unexpected fervor. She pushed him away, her finger again pressed urgently against her lips. Then without a backward glance she walked ahead of them.

They hurried along a maze of concrete corridors and up staircases that took them to the third floor, which seemed to be the ward for patients near the end of their lives, whether they knew it or not, and most seemed not to. There was no one this elderly or this ill in Annie’s life and until this moment she had never found herself inside such a ward. On the landing she had to squeeze by a wraith of an old woman with blue veins and wild white hair, who beat her head against the dinner tray on her wheelchair and whimpered that she wanted her mother. When Annie, picking up a fallen plastic cup, said hello, the old woman grabbed and kissed her hand.

They passed an old man with huge purple feet leaning on a walker and talking furiously to a mirror. He told the mirror that his son had stolen his shoes so that he couldn’t get back to the office.

Finally Chamayra signaled to Raffy that they should wait in the corridor, that she’d return for them.

Annie looked into rooms in which the old were staring without interest at car chases on outmoded televisions hung from concrete ceilings. When she said hello, some smiled gratefully; some stared blankly through her. She wondered if Sam had put her mother, Grandee, in a rest home like this and if so, how had someone as loving as Sam borne doing so?

Beside her, Raffy sighed. “Youth’s a stuff.” He pointed at a room where two men sat slumped, patient, on the sides of their beds. “Nobody believes that this sad destination could possibly be our own. But it’s as true as dirt.”

Shifting her father’s jacket, Annie turned around to the Cuban. And for the first time she looked deeply into his eyes, which were warm and, oddly, it occurred to her, not unwise. “Occasionally, Raffy, you make sense.”

His high-boned face rounded with pleasure. “Gracias. I do have some personal thoughts on our human history, but the Bard provides a more concise and poetical summation.” He blinked as if to block out knowledge. “I don’t know, should I laugh or cry, because frankly, Annie, what a world, what an awful world. ‘Robes and furr’d gowns hide all.’” He tugged at his ponytail with both hands. “Lear found that fact out in stormy weather. If you look around you, and most don’t, the world breaks your heart…” He glanced at her shyly. “Chamayra says I talk too much.” With his small graceful fingers, he made a time-out signal, then slit his throat, zipped his lips, lowered an invisible bag over his head and tied an invisible string tightly around his neck and hanged himself.

They laughed together quietly.

“Shhhh!” Chamayra appeared on the staircase and motioned for them to follow her.

Midway down a hall of closed doors, Chamayra stopped at a room where a card identified the patient within as “Coach Ronny Buchstabe.” With a tap on the door, she told Annie, “Good luck,” then gave her hips a shake at Raffy and walked in an efficiently provocative way down the hall, vanishing around a corner.

“See you tonight,” he called after her.

Her head reemerged and she put her finger to her lips.

“Sorry,” Raffy called.

Annie’s hand touched the door. “My dad’s in here?”

“Now, Annie, don’t let it show, all right? About the cancer. He doesn’t want to talk about it.” With a careful look both to left and right, the Cuban pulled her in through the door and quickly shut it behind them.

With its blinds closed and lights out, the bare frugal room was in shadows and very still. Motionless on the utilitarian bed, tilted up at an angle, lay a thin man, with his wrist attached to an IV drip and an oxygen feed clipped to his nose. The palms of his hands were bandaged.

Leading Annie to the bedside, Raffy leaned over and whispered to the prone figure, “Jack? You awake, Jack? I got her. Here she is.”