The congregation was puzzled. They were relieved when she added, “We’ve all heard Clark’s terrible puns. They’re just awful.”
“Awful,” the rector said aloud.
Sam burst into tears. “But you know what? The best pun was God’s, when he named Clark ‘Goode.’ And the world can’t afford to lose a good man. So I’m just here to tell you folks, pray for him. I don’t believe any of this junk. But just in case…” Sam had to stop again, swallowing hard. Reaching blindly for the minister’s hand, she sat down in tears, further confusing the town of Emerald, who’d finally accepted that Sam Peregrine was a Lesbian and now were wondering if they’d been wrong and she and Clark were in love after all.
Clark was still unconscious when Annie had to drive back to Annapolis to take her final exams. She told him again as she left his hospital room, “Keep your promise.”
Clark kept it. He came out of the coma and survived. It wasn’t easy, and during his convalescence he started smoking again.
A month later, Annie was waving her diploma at the Annapolis graduation. Sam pushed Clark forward in his wheelchair so the graduate could see him hold up his “Annie Peregrine Goode, Top Gun!” sign.
The car wreck left Clark with a steel pin and Sam with white hair. Otherwise, Pilgrim’s Rest was pretty much the same whenever Annie returned to it. Teddy still slept in her pagoda. The top of Annie’s oak dresser with its blue-flowered porcelain knobs still was covered with crystals and magic charms. The photograph of the beautiful pilot Amy Johnson was still on the wall with the flying-circus poster. The commemorative stamp sheet of Bessie Coleman still hung next to a picture of a gloriously grinning Amelia Earhart, looking very much like Charles Lindbergh.
Emerald itself didn’t change much, except on the outskirts where the malls spread. On River Street, Now Voyager and Nickerson Jewelers still bowed with their bay windows, side by side, leaning out to customers as if planning to snatch them off the sidewalk. And down the block the sweet tang of Dina Destin’s Barbecue, run by her nieces, floated onto the street. In St. Mary’s spongy green graveyard, the ivy and moss took their time climbing up the tilting stones.
John Ingersoll Peregrine
1946–1948
Taken From Me
In time the stone markers were joined by other stones with other names and none of them was going anywhere.
On the other hand, thanks to the Navy, Annie had traveled both far and fast, faster than the speed of sound. In her love of speed, she knew, she was more like the father who’d left her than the one who’d taken her in, Clark, who was like the level lighted path of a runway on which she could land, who was like the arresting hook that caught her jet on the aircraft carrier. He was home safe.
***
On the Pilgrim’s Rest porch, slowly Annie’s uncle rocked to his feet. He walked inside, dropping the pink cap on the hall table. In the pagoda, Teddy was snoring. In the kitchen, Sam was listening to the news. He could hear her retorts. “Lies! Tell the truth!” Why the woman kept believing network television would tell the truth, he couldn’t imagine. But he loved her stubborn faith.
He predicted that Sam, caught up in her battle with CNN, wouldn’t notice him. Often in the old days, he would pass by Sam and Annie on the couch watching television together—sometimes Annie would have her Walkman headphones on as well—and he would speak to them, even wave his arms at them, but they wouldn’t or couldn’t see him. He’d say, “Ladies, there’s a real live human being passing through your field of vision…Okay, last chance. Okay, I’ll say good night.”
Sometimes they’d notice him and derisively wave. Sometimes they wouldn’t even do that. Sometimes he’d blink the overhead lights at them until they told him to stop it. Sometimes he’d just kiss the air loudly and then proceed with his nightly ritual of locking up the house, turning the old iron keylocks in the doors, turning off the lights, turning down the thermostats, and heading upstairs.
Pilgrim’s Rest was so familiar that he didn’t have to switch on the hall light to make his way to the kitchen. He reminded Sam that they were supposed to meet friends at a local restaurant soon. Sam waved him off, riveted to a news graph showing the recently elected President Bush’s abysmal poll numbers for the first week of July. “Five minutes,” she promised.
Back in the front hall, he ran his hand softly around the crown of Annie’s pink baseball hat. It seemed to him quite improbable that these glass beads were anything other than glass, much less priceless jewels.
After a while he opened the porch door again and looked up at stars as crowded as lights on Sam’s Christmas trees.
For years, starting when Annie was seven, together they studied the stars through a telescope. Annie had written Santa Claus asking for this instrument, not believing in Santa Claus but wanting a way to stay in touch with the stars that her father had pointed out to her on the road. Buying a good telescope had been one of many successful Christmas choices made by Sam and Clark, who always avoided mistakes by scrupulously following the child’s wish lists. She was thrilled when they set up the telescope in the yard. Together they made a monthly chart of the reliable, recurring pattern of the constellations. It proved a great pleasure to Annie to chart the order of the sky, every star in its predictive place.
Now Clark looked east to west at the sky. She was somewhere up in that black starry space much of the time, in jets faster than sound. He turned to look south where, far less sure than stars, her inconstant father had gone to meet her in Miami, to ask something unfair of her, after decades of neglect.
“It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay,” Clark told the sky.
Chapter 36
For the Love of Mike
It was almost dark in Golden Days as Annie turned on the bedside light to look at other small snapshots from her father’s wallet, pictures that she’d never seen before and could only identify by their dimmed descriptions on the back. In one, she was standing beside the red Mustang in an anonymous Wyoming parking lot, wearing her neon blue sunglasses and her cowboy boots (paled to lime green in the Polaroid) with the lariats up the sides. In another, the same age—about five—she sat atop her blue suitcase, her eyes the same color, but both faded in the old photo. In another she was a baby, outside some Southwestern motel, crawling up yellowed concrete stairs wearing paper diapers. In a fourth picture, she was crying, open-mouthed, in her father’s arms as he showed her the broken birthday piñata in the palm tree by a Las Vegas pool. In another, she was dancing wildly beside a portable CD player in a luxury Chicago hotel room. In the final photo he handed her, she was sitting in a little red airplane on a kiddie park merry-go-round near Vidalia, Georgia. The ride looked just like the little planes in her dream.
Also in his wallet was a small copy of the picture taken in the restaurant of The Breakers Hotel on her seventh birthday, the one that Sam had framed on the piano at Pilgrim’s Rest. In this copy, a fold had left a crease between the little girl and the tanned smiling man with the cigarette gracefully arced in his raised hand. On the back of the photo her current cell phone number was scrawled in her father’s upward slanting style.
“Keep it,” he said. “It’s a good picture.”
“Sam has a copy at home.”
“You can never have too many memories of a good thing.”
Annie slid the photo back into his wallet.
It was a distinctive portfolio deeply tanned wallet; it looked like the wallet she remembered from her childhood. Jack said, “So there’s your life as I know it. And now here you are, a grown woman, a flyer, like your dad.”
Standing just inside the door, Raffy held both arms as if they were wings, tilting them. “Annie’s definitely a flyer. Absolutely a flyer. Just like you, Jack.”
Annie was offended. “Well, I fly for the U.S. Navy. I don’t know who he flies for. Or why.”
“My mistake,” the Cuban shrugged apologetically.
Her father touched her hand again; his fingers felt like snow falling
on her. “Tell me about Sam?” he suddenly asked, willing energy into his voice.
“She doesn’t want you to do anything stupid like die.”
“Tell her I tried my best.” It was an effort now to lift his head from the pillow. “How ’bout some water?” He shook a pill from a bottle beside the bed. When she held the glass to his lips, his chilled hand closed softly around hers. She was shaken by their closeness after so many years; a tremble floated down her back. She said, “Sam will never stop loving the people she loves.”
“You needed a home. I knew Sam would be a better mother, Clark would be a better father, than the couple who wrote the check for you in Barbados.”
His self-congratulation annoyed her—as if Sam and Clark’s virtues had justified his abandonment; as if throwing her out in the yard at Pilgrim’s Rest had been his plan all along, farsighted childcare.
Had he no remorse about that desertion? Did he regret the chaos of her life with him, before Sam and Clark? She recalled one moment of many such: he had rushed into the shabby motel room where she sat on the bed eating dry frosted cereal for supper, watching a movie on TV. He flung open her suitcase like a magician. “Let’s see how fast you can pack it up, baby, we’re out of here.” And they were in the car within minutes. Speeding down highways, racing into black sky. Had he thought about how she’d felt about that at all?
There was a screeching rattle as a Golden Days food trolley moved past the door. The thick smell of hospital food seeped into the room. Her father frowned; his eyes fighting to stay open. “’Member, Annie, pasta we used to make in the suites? Used the salad spinner for a colander?”
“No,” she said. “I remember Jack Lemmon drained spaghetti on a tennis racket in The Apartment.”
His voice strained to be audible. “Raffy!” Rook stepped back into the room. “She ’members Jack Lemmon’s pasta, not mine. Wasn’t for me, she couldn’t tie her shoelaces. ‘Dada.’ First word. Dada, April 9. First dance, two-step, Ritz, Boston. First word read? ‘Hat.’ Then ‘cat,’ then ‘Annie,’ then ‘dad.’ Doesn’t remember, for the love of Mike.”
A memory came back, corroborative. “Shoelaces.” Annie nodded. “That I remember. I sat on the floor between your legs and practiced on your shoes.” She looked down at him in the bed, his skin faded tan against the sheet.
He pointed out the hospital window. A pink moon was rising in blue clouds. “There’s your travel buddy, the moon. Remember your pal the moon that always came along for the ride?”
Puzzled for a minute, she let memory drift back to her. “…You said the moon checked into every motel with us. We’d look for the moon in the motel swimming pools—” She stopped herself.
He nodded, waiting.
Annie was recalling a night when she’d floated on her back in the pool of a high-rise motel in a flat desert landscape. Her father lay in a deck chair beside the pool edge, looking up at the domed stars. She had paddled her seahorse float to the ladder and told him how the water in the pool was humming in her ears. He’d asked her to listen for the history of the sea in the loud reverberating echo of pool water. Could she hear Phoenicians and Carthaginians and Columbus’s ships and the Spanish Armada?
And she’d said, yes, she could hear all of that. But it hadn’t been true. She hadn’t wanted to disappoint him. The truth was, she’d heard nothing but the noise of the pool.
She admitted that lie to him now, describing the memory. “I didn’t hear any of the things you talked about.”
“Oh you just heard them differently,” he told her in a curiously gentle way.
It was, she considered, a kind thing to say and she wanted to offer something in return. “When my ears stopped up from diving, you would tilt my head and shake it. And it was a really good feeling when my ears unstopped, the water letting go. The water was so warm leaving my ears.”
The three of them were silent together a moment. Then Raffy quietly sighed his rustle of sorrow. “I don’t have many memories of my papa. It’s like somebody took a long thin needle and poked them out of my head. He worked all the time. I liked the Ramirez side of the family better. My uncle Mano played trumpet so I picked him over my father. I feel bad about it.” The Cuban slipped out into the hall again, gently closing the door behind him.
Jack murmured something that Annie couldn’t hear and as she bent her head toward him to listen, she could feel his mouth touch her forehead. She thought his face would be cold like his hands but his lips were warm. “Don’t erase us, Annie. Even though I wasn’t a regular kind of dad.”
She let her face stay there a moment, near his, the two of them quietly breathing, no one speaking. But then she drew back and retreated into irony. “True, most dads aren’t con artists that get arrested all the time and end up in prison.”
He sighed, gathered breath to mimic the sarcasm. “Well, for the love of Mike, most daughters don’t get to be the queen of the world.”
“Sure, I’m the queen of the world and you could sell the Mona Lisa to a blind man and Christ’s tears to an atheist.” She stood up and picked up a notepad from the table. “Your passwords are 362484070N and 678STNX211. Do you want me to write them down for you?”
His voice was fading. “Amazin’. We won a lot of bets with you doing that numbers trick.”
Her mouth tightened. “I did it for you.”
“I know.”
“I wanted to make you proud.”
Slowly he pulled his shoulders higher on the pillow. “Just do one more thing for me? Fly me to Cuba?”
Surprise made her laugh. “What?”
He tried to sit up in the bed. “I figured I could fly myself but…” He held up his taped hands.
The request was so preposterous that she sat down again, shaking her head. “You can’t fly to Cuba from the U.S.”
“Sure you can.” His eyes took on a little of the old glimmer. “I’m serious about La Reina Coronada del Mar. The little jewels are in your hat. Most of the big ones are in Cuba.”
Annie watched the pink moon float past on baby blue clouds. “The big jewels meaning your stories about the seven emeralds and that huge ruby heart.”
He nodded. “That’s right. It’s a solid gold statue. These emeralds go in the crown.” He held up the green gem on the gold chain. “We’ve got three now. There are four more even larger, and the ruby, in the bank in Cuba—”
Leaping to her feet, Annie slapped the bed cover. “Stop. Stop!” Her shout brought Raffy back through the door. “Do you ever listen to yourself? You’re dying and you’re still trying to pull off some fraud about a bogus treasure hunt in Cuba! Do you get it that a cop from Miami Vice is going to arrest you and throw you in jail, that he has been hounding me to give you up, threatening to arrest me for harboring you?”
Her father raised himself wincing. “Daniel Hart?”
“Yes! Sgt. Daniel Hart, Miami Police.”
Raffy called from the doorway. “He nabbed me at the Dorado.”
Jack squeezed the bed sheet with his taped fingers. “Hart’s after me because of the Queen.”
“Dad, don’t insult me. That statue is not real!”
But his face was stubborn, just as Sam had often told her her own face would tighten. “My great-grandfather Boss Peregrine carried the Queen out of Havana and brought her back to North Carolina in a burlap bag.”
“I’m not listening to this craziness. And I’m not flying you to Cuba, or anywhere else till I talk to your doctor. Where’d you get this photo?” She slid out the picture of them at The Breakers from his wallet and palmed it while pretending to put it back. “Daniel Hart raided your room and got my cell number off the back of this.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. He must have put it back. You know what? I like Dan Hart. He won’t quit. But tell him from me, I’m not going to jail, not for a day, not for an hour.”
Suddenly Raffy waved his arms for them to be quiet. Then he hurried to the bed, grabbed the emeralds off the tray, yanking on Annie’s arm. “We gott
a go,” he whispered. “Right now!”
Footsteps grew louder, passed the doorway, moved toward the other end of the hall. Raffy tugged at her. “We gotta go! We’ll come back and see Jack in the morning.”
Jack urged her to listen to Raffy, to leave now. He’d make sure his doctor was here at 8 a.m. “Raffy, watch out for her.”
The Cuban ran to look out the crack of the door.
She couldn’t resist raising her ironic eyebrow at her father. “It’s a little late to start taking care of me now, Dad.”
He blew a soft kiss with his bandaged hand. “I really was coming back for you.” His fingers reached for hers. “Somehow the years got away.”
She remembered how he’d left his wristwatch once in a motel room and although he’d loved that watch, thirty miles later he’d refused to turn around to go back for it. Upset that it had taken her so long to notice that he’d forgotten it, she’d been in tears, blaming herself for the loss.
She told him now, “You always cared more about what was ahead than what we’d left behind.”
“Did I, darlin’?”
“Don’t you know yourself by now?”
He smiled his old silly smile.
Slipping her fingers away from his, she pointed to his bedside monitors. “I guess it wouldn’t be so easy for you to run off this time, would it?”
“Nope.” He let his hands lift, then softly fall. “You’re the flyer now, Annie.”
Raffy flung back through the door. “It’s Ms. Skippings! Quick!” He grabbed Annie and pushed her out into the hall.
Chapter 37
Flight for Freedom
Raffy hurried Annie to the elevator bank. An attractive tall silvery blonde woman, sharp-edged and too thin, with a tag identifying her as “M. R. Skippings, Chief Hospital Administrator,” stepped around the corner and blocked their path. “Stop!” she ordered. She was Annie’s age and wore a remarkable platinum and diamond engagement ring that looked like a piece of modern sculpture.
So, Annie thought, this is “Ms. Skippings,” the managed-care supervisor of Golden Days who’d been described so unfavorably by the old patients on the lawn. The woman glared suspiciously at Annie’s naval officer’s uniform and at Raffy with his long hair in a ponytail and his tight chinos and floppy pink flamingo shirt. “Yes? You are?”
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 29