The Four Corners Of The Sky (63 page)

Sam told Clark,
“
Love means you fit in even if you don’t.”

“Okay, leave your banner up, just don’t start crying again.”

“I never cry, Clark.”

“You always cry.”

Sam’s surgery had been so successful that she’d been moving about on her cane and decorating the house for weeks before the wedding, without, she claimed, much discomfort at all. Despite a busy schedule, Sarah Yoelson was a big help with everything. Sarah still lived in Charlotte, where she was chief of orthopedic surgery at a hospital, but she was visiting Emerald more and more often, and Sam was visiting Charlotte, although Sam said she would never move out of Pilgrim’s Rest, until Clark and Annie carried her out of the house in a box.

“Couldn’t we hire an undertaker to do the heavy lifting?” asked Clark. “You’ve put on some L.B.s since your surgery.”

“Hey, I’m fitter than you’ll ever be,” Sam told him.

“God knows,” he agreed.

Annie finally called Brad the night before her wedding. She wanted to tell him she was marrying Dan and to ask his pardon for her part in their failed marriage. There were so many stupid things she’d said and bull-headed decisions she’d made; she’d thought she’d known everything but she hadn’t known much at all.

As soon as they hung up, Brad phoned Sam and told her that Daniel Hart must have pressured Annie into marriage by threatening to send her to jail for aiding and abetting a criminal.

“I don’t think so,” Sam told him.

Brad claimed his heart was broken.

“He’ll recover,” Annie predicted to Sam.

Later that night Brad met a fashion model at the Atlanta airport. She had a gold stud on her tongue and was very sympathetic to the way Brad had been mistreated by his former wife, who was (and he choked up saying it), marrying somebody else tomorrow, even though he would have taken her back and had told her so.

“You’re a prince,” agreed the model.

At Pilgrim’s Rest, where the wedding party gathered after the rehearsal dinner at Dina Destin’s Barbecue, Sam took a stack of old sheet music from her piano bench and offered to play a few songs. But when she called for requests, she knew none of the songs that anyone under thirty wanted to hear. So, instead, Sam, rolling arpeggios up and down the keys, played a medley of “Moon River,” “The Sounds of Silence,” and “Lara’s Theme.” Most of the people under thirty fled from the lush romantic music to the kitchen. But Annie sat with her aunt at the piano. As she sat there, she glanced at the tattered music cover to “Lara’s Theme,” where “Ruthie Nickerson” was inscribed, the looping curves under the
R
and the
N
,
con amore
in faded blue ink. She thought of the postcard with its photo of Claudette Colbert on the front and the note in the same handwriting. Maybe Ruthie had actually sent that postcard to Jack, rather than his having forged it as Annie had assumed. “Better this way,” the card said. And after all, maybe it had been better.

For Annie there was no longer any surprise in thinking of Ruthie Nickerson as the young girl who’d given birth to her and then given her away. In that moment when Annie had looked a last long time into Ruthie’s eyes, there in the Plaza de Armas, she’d felt a curious sense of quietly closing a door on the past; just as her father’s raised hand, waving good-bye, dappled in the gold Havana sun, had made her feel so oddly peaceful.

Annie leaned over and gave a kiss to Sam’s cropped white hair.

After the rehearsal guests all left, Sam announced that she was taking the plunge and throwing away the World’s Biggest & Hardest Jigsaw Puzzle so that Annie could have the wedding cake set out tomorrow on the round mahogany table in the bay window of the morning room. Besides, the family had long ago stopped even pretending they were interested in finishing that puzzle of vast rectangular cloudless blue sky. Annie herself wasn’t interested, although she had once worked diligently to find parts that fit together, believing, without being able to articulate it, that to fill in the corners of the sky would be to understand something that had always waited just on the verge of meaning, like the woman on the ship in the ocean of her dream.

It was Dan who put the last pieces into the center of the puzzle, so that the sky was one huge blue square. Clark, Sam and Annie stared at it, a little disappointed. Somehow, all those years, finding the right shapes, fitting them together, they had imagined that this square would be more than it turned out to be. Bluer? Bigger? Filled with meaningful symbols? Somehow more?

Clark embraced Sam and Annie. “Well, ladies, you know how that song goes. ‘It’s not how you finish, it’s how you start.’”

Sam said, “Clark, that’s not how that song goes. Listen, I’ll sing it—” She pulled away from him.

He held her fast. “Please don’t go in there and play it again, Sam. Please!”

“You’re a laugh riot.” She scooped the pieces of the puzzle into a large plastic bag that she promised to put in the trash. But her family knew she would take the bag to the attic and save it.

Annie told Sam that the wedding was, in every way, as perfect as she could have dreamed it. Even the fact that Raffy Rook called her collect from Mexico early in the morning and told her that Jack and he weren’t going to make it to the celebration. They had honestly been trying to get to Emerald for Jack to give her away but there’d been a slight problem. The two of them, Jack and himself, were fortune’s fools. They’d been arrested in San Miguel de Allende for selling a Hollywood producer the last Russian Czarina’s diamond brooch, which wasn’t exactly really Russian or exactly really diamonds either. Then they’d been robbed of all their money by the two convoy guards who were trucking them to jail. Not of course
all
their money, for Raffy still had a sizable bank account back in Miami in Chamayra’s name, even after the $200,000 he’d given his mother Maria Ramirez. The good thing was, the guards had allowed Raffy to escape in exchange for everything they had on them and they promised to let Jack out in just a few days if Raffy sent them some more money, which Raffy had done.

“Is Dad dying?” Annie asked him.

“We are mortal, Annie, and, as Buddha and Christ both concluded, that sadly includes your dad. We are all dying if we take a longer look.”

“Raffy! Is he dying
now
?”

The Cuban musician’s voice was like his songs, soft, sweet. “Now? Oh no, not now. I have no doubt in the universe that your father will be leaving Mexico tonight at the latest. He plans to borrow a car—well, from a car lot, and I am to meet him in Vegas. Annie, your father has a terrible weakness for the four-card flush. It’s his downfall.”

Annie laughed. “Well, if you see him, say, well…”

Raffy sighed happily. “You love him.”

“I love him.”

“Didn’t I tell you? ‘Love bears it out even to the edge of doom.’ And beyond, if you ask me. This wisdom of our humanness was true 500 years ago when the great Swan said it. And true it will be 500 years from now, when we all of us here today are unfortunately, or not, in the earth, silent as dirt, or, let us hope, singing like angels.”

Annie’s long satin wedding dress, perfect for her, had arrived weeks earlier in an elegant box from a famous designer in New York. The card with the dress said only, “For Annie. From Ruth.”

Down the garlanded stairs of Pilgrim’s Rest, its banister hung with the pale gold roses and ivy and white silk ribbon, walked Sam. Then Dan’s mother on the arm of his partner from the Miami Police Department. Behind them came the bridesmaids in dark green and then the ring bearers and the flower girls and then Georgette, slim and pale, in the perfect dress for her auburn hair.

Everyone turned in the hallway as the string trio played Annie’s favorite Mozart and Annie appeared in the beautiful dress. Everyone said the bride looked lovelier and more peaceful that she ever had looked before. She walked down the stairs of Pilgrim’s Rest on Clark’s arm. When she reached the hall, she paused an instant to touch the falcon carved above the words
Peregrinus ergo sum
. Then she turned smiling and walked into the living room under an archway of roses and ribbon.

When Dan and Annie said their vows, she heard them this time, unlike at her first wedding. They said, “I do” to promises that, with love’s help, they would be able to keep.

Clark and Sam and D. K. and Malpy and Teddy gave Annie away to Dan. Sam cried out loud when the minister told Dan, “You may kiss the bride.” Dan said in his dinner toast in the bright noisy tent that everyone in Emerald knew that Clark and Sam and D. K. and Malpy and Teddy would never give Annie away at all.

Georgette, the maid of honor, caught the bouquet in her rose-silk Vera Wang, a dress as thin as a slip and the first dress, as she said in her maid of honor toast, that she’d ever worn that was a size eight since she and Annie were ten years old.

Georgette started the dancing in the tent, doing the cha-cha to “Baby It’s You” with D. K. rolling himself backward and forward in his wheelchair, yelling, “This is a good day on the Mekong.”

Georgette led Trevor through a salsa (she was taking salsa lessons) while pretending that he was leading her. They talked about the Baalbek archeological dig where Trevor had vacationed, and a trip to Luxor that they both had always wanted to take.

Malpy raced among the dancers, barking at them with enthusiasm. Teddy growled weakly in her pagoda.

Georgette ran up to Annie’s room where the bride was changing clothes to leave for her honeymoon. “Annie, I’m not drunk. I’m a little drunk. I don’t even drink except at your weddings. So please don’t get married again. I’ll get a reputation as a binge drinker.”

Annie promised she wouldn’t.

Georgette took a deep breath. “I just feel I have to tell you something. Maybe it’s wrong. But I feel like…”

Annie asked, “This isn’t about Brad again, is it? I’m sure he did hit on you. Every chance he got.”

Georgette shook her head violently. “No, he’s really good-looking but, I’m sorry, forgive me, he’s a jerk. Besides I couldn’t. We’re practically, well, sisters. That’s what I want to tell you. We’re—”

“Cousins,” Annie smiled. “We’re cousins. Your aunt Ruthie’s my mother. Is that what you were going to say?”

“You just have to be faster, don’t you?” Georgette hugged her friend. “Yes, I did my blood work and Clark’s got every test he ever ran on you. We’re cousins.”

Annie kissed her again, smiling. She picked up the crystal on her dresser, the wishing bell, the small neon-blue sunglasses. “Just don’t do blood work on the Peregrines,” she said. “Or Clark. You’ll be in for a shock.”

“Oh my God,” said Georgette. “Just tell me Trevor’s not your brother because then he’d be my cousin. And I really like him. Good-bye. Have a wonderful honeymoon. I love you. Good-bye.” Georgette threw a handful of paper confetti on Annie’s head.

Dan and Annie raced down the porch steps through the rainbow of confetti and ran out into the meadow between Pilgrim’s Rest and the Nickerson house.

D. K.’s tethered hot-air balloon, the same one in which Annie had for the first time in her life left earth for air, floated against the blue summer sky. D. K.’s nieces held the ropes that tethered the basket. As Annie and Dan climbed inside, Clark held Malpy in a tight clasp to make sure he didn’t leap in the basket too.

They fired the burner and in a whoosh the huge ruby-red and emerald-green balloon ascended with Sam’s hand-painted banner of Congratulations flying out behind them, among old shoes and cans.

As Dan and Annie floated up over Pilgrim’s Rest, they heard the hum of a small airplane buzzing by. It was D. K. in his Pawnee Cropduster, tipping his wing to her. Down in the field below, she could see Sam and Clark, Georgette and Trevor, all dancing. The tiny plane with its black American eagle painted on its nose vanished into clouds.

O
n their honeymoon, fourteen thousand feet above the sea, Annie and Dan hiked steadily, pausing to rest in the thin air, trekking the steep trail that twisted through misty green mountains into Machu Picchu. They stopped to watch as dawn lined up its rays with Intipunku, the sun gate. And then, suddenly, there they stood, the two of them gazing down on the Lost City of the Incas, secret and sacred, a metropolis built half a millenium ago, when the Incan empire stretched larger than all of Europe. A city abandoned, as if overnight, who knew why?

Leaning their backs against the gray immense blocks of perfect stone that had been so long ago so precisely, patiently carved, and that now lay haphazardly toppled beside the hiking path, the young couple ate their picnic on the last weekend of their honeymoon. They had hiked in from their hotel in Cuzco, a sixteenth-century convent a few blocks from a Spanish cathedral built on top of an Inca palace. They’d spent a week with no phone calls, no television, no papers. But now Dan was looking at a Miami newspaper another guest at the hotel had given him.

News of the world, Dan told his bride. Annie was eating fruit and bread, cheese and sausage, leaning into him. Under this blue sky, in this sun, news of the world sounded ordinary: the American economy was weak, Bush’s job performance rating was 51 percent negative, a consortium of major news organizations was expected on September 12 to release its findings that Al Gore had in fact won the vote recount in Florida. Israel was meeting with Palestine and the top U.S. utilities analyst had just reported that Enron Corporation was about to implode.

Dan and Annie found the local Miami stories more interesting.

On the society page, Melissa Skippings announced her engagement to local stockbroker and tarpon fisherman, Tucker Bradley. Miss Skippings, formerly chief administrator of the Golden Days Center for Active Living on Ficus Avenue in Miami, would be moving with her husband to Japan.

Danish wreck salvage divers employed by the Cuban government had made an astonishing discovery while exploring a sunken sixteenth-century Spanish galleon, a vessel sunk in a storm in 1549 while sailing in a twenty-ship fleet past the Archipiélago de los Colorados to Havana. The divers had focused their attention on a particular cay after a local student, cleaning a conch shell on the beach there, had found inside the conch, to his astonishment, a 135-carat cut and polished star ruby.