The Four Corners Of The Sky (48 page)

One entire ten-minute film was a single shot of Ruthie standing by the dormer window in Jack’s room on a summer’s afternoon. She wore a long white thin linen shirt, slightly opened to the waist by an easy breeze. She wore nothing but the thin shirt and loose white shorts. Staring into the camera, she smiled a wonderful smile. And when she grew bored with smiling, she turned to look out the window.

Suddenly, in the last moment of the film, the camera jerked away from Ruthie and quickly panned to the doorway. There stood Sam and Jack’s mother Grandee, thin, waspish, unstrung, silently raving at the boy with the camera, at the girl by the window. The footage ended in a sudden blackout.

When watching this movie, years after the fact, Sam understood for the first time what had happened just before the family explosion she’d always called “That Psycho Night.”

Home after her sophomore year at college, Sam returned late one afternoon from playing tennis with her friend Clark Goode. That summer she taught tennis in the morning and practiced three hours a day, determined to keep up her game, for she depended on a sports scholarship for her tuition; her father had declined to pay her way to college (he thought she wasn’t smart) and her mother hadn’t cared whether she’d gone or not.

It had been a hard summer for Sam. In the spring she had fallen in love with a girl in her dorm, who not only had not loved her back but who had expressed horror upon learning of her feelings. Clark had enlisted in the Army and been sent to Vietnam; now home on leave, he had just announced that, despite his firsthand knowledge of the war’s hellish futility, he was heading back to Saigon in a week to begin a second tour of duty.

In that heavy, heated dusk, Sam was staring lethargically out her window when suddenly she heard her mother shrieking from Jack’s bedroom. She rushed into the hallway where she was almost knocked over as Ruthie ran past her, down the stairs.

Sam had to pull apart Jack and their mother by force. Jack, shirtless, a long-limbed knobbly teenager, hurled himself down the stairs and out of the house in pursuit of Ruthie.

Hours later, Sam found him stretched out on their front lawn, smoking marijuana and staring at the stars. His thin chest looked moon-white against the dark summer tan of his arms.

Jack told Sam with bitterness that Ruthie had no further use for him. He blamed their “crazy bitch of a mother” for ruining his chance for happiness. Sam tried a number of strategies to console him, from “you’ll win Ruthie back” to “time heals all.” She finally resorted to jokes about her being even more unhappily in love than he was. At least, cracked Sam, Jack had a girlfriend to lose.

But to her distress, her brother did not respond with his habitual flippancy. Instead he started to cry; something she hadn’t seen him do for years. He muttered that without Ruthie he didn’t want to live. Pushing Sam off, he vanished into the night. She heard him jumpstart their father’s car and drive it away.

Distraught, Sam called Clark, who came over at once. They spent the night driving around Emerald searching unsuccessfully for Jack. A friend of theirs, a rookie cop (who many years later would become Emerald’s chief of police), assured Sam that there were no reports of car accidents anywhere in the county and Jack would be fine.

At dawn, Clark dropped her back home. On the Nickerson porch next door, Ruthie sat on the steps, smoking a cigarette. Clark went over to talk to her. Sam was at the Pilgrim’s Rest door when she heard a loud crash and a scream. She rushed into the dining room, where she saw Jack smashing their mother’s antique chairs onto the top of her antique table. Grandee was beating him on his back with her fists. Then she picked up a three-foot-tall Tiffany vase that had belonged to her Worth father and hit her son across the shoulders with it. Blue and purple glass petals shattered onto the rug. Jack shook off the glass like water in a rainbow. Grandee flung herself on the floor crying.

Sam ran to the living room where her father sat still as death, drinking his tumbler of cognac, pretending none of it was happening.

“Dad, do something.”

He looked up and said in his stiff-mouthed way, “Go to bed, Samantha.”

She shook him so hard the glass flew from his hand. “Do something before they kill each other!”

He didn’t look at her. “There’s nothing anyone can do.” He picked up the glass from the rug and poured himself more cognac.

Sam left him when she heard the front door slam. Jack was driving off again. She cajoled her mother up the stairs, one by one, by promising that she would repair the Tiffany vase, that it wasn’t very damaged at all.

“He made me do it,” Grandee whispered. “Why does he make me do things I hate myself for? He does it on purpose.”

“No he doesn’t,” Sam kept repeating. “He loves you. He loves you.”

By the time Sam had cleaned up the broken chairs and glassware, it was morning and she had to leave for her summer job at the tennis camp. All day long she was overwhelmed by the sad certainty that whatever “family” the four Peregrines had ever formed together, this summer had ended it forever.

Five days later, Sam sadly drove Clark to the airport to start his long trip to Saigon.

A few weeks after that, Jack’s friend George came over to Pilgrim’s Rest to tell him that Ruthie had run off with a married man in the night.

The next evening Jack was stopped a hundred miles from home for speeding in a stolen car, which luckily he had not yet driven out of the state of North Carolina, so his father still had connections to get the seventeen-year-old’s sentence commuted. Jack had to pay back his fine by clearing two acres of Peregrine underbrush. Over the next month, he worked ten hours a day at the task. His muscles hardened, his skin darkened. Sam’s foreboding proved true. Jack did not ever speak again either to his father or to his mother. He worked till nightfall, walked to town, returned to sleep in the barn.

Six months later, Judge Peregrine was dead. During the judge’s funeral, Jack stole all the cash he could find in the house, threw his suitcase into his mother’s Mercedes coupe, and left Emerald, as he wrote Sam, forever.

But it wasn’t forever. Over the next quarter of a century, he came back to Pilgrim’s Rest three times—once to bring home the infant Annie and the King of the Sky, once when his daughter was seven, and once when he ran out of the cornfield and gave her a ruby for her seventeenth birthday.

Now it was time, Sam told herself, for her brother to come home again. She took a
DVD
she’d labeled “Jack’s Movie” across the lawn to Georgette’s house. It was three in the morning.

Georgette’s sleep-swollen eye peeped cautiously through the front-door glass in her hallway. Only last Christmas she’d had her house burglarized by an ex-con drug addict she’d been treating for bipolar disorder; she’d told him at the police station, “As your therapist, I hope you get help. As a homeowner, I hope you get eight to ten. And give me back my Dad’s silver Rotary trophy!”

As soon as Georgette saw Sam waiting outside her door, she swung it open and yelled, “Stop ringing that buzzer! How do you know I’m not upstairs having wild sex with six men?”

Sam pushed past. “If you are, it’ll have to wait.”

Georgette saw a
DVD
in her neighbor’s hand. “I am
not
watching
Diabolique
with you if that’s what this is all about. I have to be at the hospital in four hours. There isn’t a movie you could name that I’d want to watch.”

Sam sat down on the first chair she came to. “Yes, there is.”

Locating glasses in the pocket of her pink fluffy bathrobe, Georgette examined the
DVD
case. “‘Jack’s Movie.’ What does this mean? ‘Jack’s Movie’? Is this about Annie’s dad?”

“Yes.” Sam walked back to the front door as if she’d changed her mind about her late-night visit and decided to return home immediately. But then she slowly let the back of her head fall against the doorframe. She looked at the younger woman. “You may want to sit down.”

“Is Annie’s dad dead?”

“No. Well, as far as I know, no.”

“Is this about Annie and the Miami detective?”

“Oh, did you talk to Rafael Rook too? He thinks Annie’s spending the night with that detective Daniel Hart.”

“How does he know? She called me and talked about floating around with this detective in outer space. She sounded intoxicated. And/or she’s in love.”

“Already?” Upset, Sam shook her head no, then yes. “Well, I can’t think about that now.”

Georgette took the older woman by the arm, leading her back into the hall. “Sam, what’s the matter with you?”

“Annie may call you about her mother tomorrow. I want you to be prepared.” Sam pulled Georgette down beside her on the painted pine bench.

“Prepared for what?”

“I’m pretty sure I know who Annie’s mother is.” She pressed Georgette’s hands in hers. “Your aunt Ruthie is her mother.”

Georgette laughed. “You’re joking.”

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

Georgette looked at her. “No, you don’t. Who told you this?”

“Nobody. Nobody tells me a goddamn thing in this family.” Sam thrust the
DVD
at her. “Watch this home movie. If you don’t see what I see, we’re both crazy.”

Georgette stood up, frowning. “Let me process this. You think my aunt Ruthie is Annie’s mother because of a movie?”

“Well, tell you the truth I’ve wondered about it ever since Ruthie came back here that night, you remember? You and Annie were fourteen, I think. But this is footage Jack shot of Ruthie about a year before Annie was born.”

The young psychiatrist held out her hand. “Sam, I want to take back what I said. I guess maybe there
is
a movie you could name that I’ll watch at three in the morning.”

They went to the Nickerson “family room,” still so called, although there was no one in the family living here but Georgette. Together, while the cat Pitti Sing purred for attention, the two women viewed the
DVD
of the short silent films that Jack had made of the teenaged Ruthie.

Georgette turned off her
DVD
player. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. Ruthie was hot. It’s clear Jack was crazy about her. It’s clear your mother Grandee was crazy.”

“Don’t go there. Talk about Annie.”

“I guess you’ve got a point about Annie. There’s a…”

“Family resemblance?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?” laughed Sam tensely.

“Sort of. Still it’s a stretch. Wouldn’t somebody have said something?”

“People don’t say things.”

Georgette snorted. “Get into psychiatry. People say things to
me
for fifty nonstop minutes. You can’t stop them from saying things. They keep saying things as I shove them out the door.”

Sam rubbed her hand affectionately on the case of the
DVD
. “You didn’t see Jack’s face when Ruthie ran off. I always suspected he went after her when he robbed us at Dad’s funeral…But I couldn’t even think about it then. Dad had…drowned. Mama’d gone even crazier. This is before your time, of course.”

“It’s a relief to find something that’s before my time,” admitted Georgette. “So you think Ruthie is Annie’s mother? Wow. Ruthie stood right out there in the yard with us that night in the ninth grade. And then she just packed up the Nickerson salad forks and left and never came back.”

Sam said that she didn’t think Ruthie knew that Annie was the child she’d given up at birth. Once, pressed, Jack had told Sam that Annie’s mother had abandoned him, believing their just-born baby had been adopted. Sam suspected Ruthie had no idea that Jack had kept the child and that the child was Annie.

Georgette wondered, “Why didn’t you ever ask Jack about Ruthie’s being the mother?”

“I did ask him,” Sam sighed. “I asked him the last time I saw him. I asked him on the phone for years. He says the mother was just some girl he’d known in Barbados.” Leaping to her feet, Sam paced the hallway, nearly tripped up by Georgette’s Siamese cat. “You know what I think? He was always scared he’d lose Annie if Ruthie found out.”

Georgette’s cat brushed against her legs. “He
did
lose Annie, Sam! Wasn’t that always Annie’s point? He lost her when he left her here. And Ruthie didn’t find out because she didn’t want to…Do I call Annie, tell her about Ruthie, is that what you want?”

Sam took a long breath. “No. No. I don’t want you to say anything till she gets through this mess with Jack. Please. I just want you to be there if she needs you.” Sam picked up the young woman’s bathrobe belt, which was hanging tangled at her feet. “You want to trip and fall on this thing?”

“Oh Sam, don’t cry.” Georgette hugged her.

After Sam left, Georgette rubbed her plump white arms as if she were warming herself. “
Sacrebleu
!” she said to her cat Pitti Sing, who arched softly against her ankles.

A
cross the lawn at Pilgrim’s Rest, Clark Goode was awakened by a knock on his bedroom door. He had drifted off into a dream in which he was teaching his first wife Tuyet and the seven-year-old Annie to fly-fish on Emerald’s Aquene River. In the dream, his childhood tormenters the Fanhart brothers had suddenly ambushed him, just as they’d often done on his way home from school many years ago. But in the dream, Clark was an adult, dressed in his operating scrubs and towering over the Fanhart bullies, who were still fat little boys in the third grade. Easily, triumphantly, he chased them away. But when he turned around, both Tuyet and Annie had disappeared.

“Clark?”

He woke fully, expecting a hospital emergency. But Sam was saying, “It’s Brad. He just called me about Annie.” Sam held the old dog Teddy in her arms.

“What? What’s wrong! Where is she?”

“It’s okay.” Sam shook his foot. “Somewhere in Miami.”

“Somewhere? Why is Brad calling you about Annie in the middle of the night?”

Teddy dropped from Sam’s arms onto the bed, where she tried to make a pillow comfortable by pawing at it. “Brad’s in Miami too. At the Hotel Dorado.”

Sitting up, Clark turned on his light. “Just tell me! Is Annie okay?”