The Four Corners of the Sky

by Michael Malone

  He held out his hands to her. “You ready to go?”

  Annie couldn’t look away from his extremely blue eyes with their rings of darker, cobalt blue around their azure irises. She nodded.

  He suddenly yelled, “Hey, Chamayra! Chamayra, how you doing!”

  Annie looked around the bench and saw Raffy’s friend. The short curvy waitress squeezed over to their booth. She was now wearing a sequined jean jacket and clutching a huge shoulder bag with a dozen buckles. “Hey, Danny, I didn’t know you was back here in the corner. Who you hiding from?” She leaned in, saw Annie. “Ah, okay, okay. You located him.”

  Annie smiled at her. “Yes, I did. Thank you.”

  “Hey, no problem.” Chamayra rubbed her knuckles into Hart’s bicep. “Why you want to cause trouble, Danny? Answer your fuckin’ phone.”

  Sliding out of the booth, he hugged her and asked how her son Alex was doing.

  “Doing great. Ninth grade this fall, you believe that? He ask me all the time, how’s Sergeant Hart?”

  “Tell him fine. Still wearing the bracelet.” He spun the braided lariat on his wrist. The braids reminded Annie of the green design on the cowboy boots she’d worn as a child. “Chamayra’s kid made me this.”

  Proudly Chamayra announced, “Him and my boy did this thing together. FSU Role Model Program.”

  Dan tapped the bracelet. “Tell Alex, keep it cool. Dry ice.”

  She made her imaginary rectangular sign in air. “Clean is Cool.”

  Dan took his credit card and bill off to find a waiter. As soon as he moved off, Chamayra sat down beside Annie. “You not getting my Raffy in trouble, are you? Don’t talk about him to Danny.”

  Annie repeated that she wanted Dan Hart to help her negotiate a deal for Raffy and her father.

  Chamayra blew out a noisy sigh of exasperation. “It’s bad enough Raffy plays guitar. This mess with your dad is driving me loca. Raffy thinks he’s like God and every time it’s nothing but heartaches and court costs. You know where he probably is?”

  Annie said she had no idea.

  “Doing some shit for your dad.” Chamayra stuck her thumb under the heavy gold necklace she wore as if she were going to yank it off. “Okay, you hear from him? Tell him he don’t show up tonight, then he don’t be calling me till he got Alzheimer’s and don’t know my number.” She swatted at Dan as he returned to the booth. Her tight chartreuse pedal pushers disappeared into the crowd. “Bye bye.”

  Dan waved to the retreating waitress. “Tough life, Chamayra’s. Her ex? Complete ass wipe. But she’s the best.”

  Annie insisted she would re-pay him for her half of the bill. “You don’t even have a job,” she pointed out.

  “Next time it’s on you.” He left too big a tip in cash. His hand brushed over hers as he slipped the money under a glass. “You’ve had a little too much to drink. How about we take a walk on the beach? Fresh air. Moon over Miami?”

  She had the odd sensation that unless she held onto the table she’d float to the ceiling and tangle herself in the blue netting among the toys and seahorses. The thought made her laugh. She said it was odd that she was laughing after she’d talked so sadly about the breakup of her marriage. What her father said about con games was true of love; only the cheats get cheated. It wasn’t so much that Brad had tricked her; it was that she had worn blinkers. She’d blinkered herself and tripped and fallen. And if there was blame, it was hers as well as Brad’s. She’d been too busy, she told Dan, even to know how she felt.

  “I knew exactly how I felt,” he said. “Like somebody took an axe to my heart.”

  Here, she thought, was a man who wasn’t afraid to feel his feelings. On the other hand, it was amazing he could feel anything, after the amount of tequila that must have gone down his throat. She asked him how he could drink so much. She’d only had a few margaritas and her head was spinning.

  “I bet.” He admitted that tonight he had way over-gone his limit. “I keep it to two a day most times. But I’ve got a hollow drum. Rusted too.” He hit hard on his breastbone.

  “Oh?” She smiled at him. “I thought you said there was a broken heart in there.”

  He pulled her hand to his chest and pushed it against the muscle beneath his shirt. “You feel that heart? Doesn’t it feel broken?” To her wonder, her own heart leaped so intently that she had to take a long breath.

  In La Loca, laser lights crisscrossed dancers on the shiny floor; broken blinks of flashing blue and pink flickered across Annie’s and Dan’s faces. Their looking at each other was in a peculiar way simultaneously intense and effortless.

  Dan’s phone was ringing and finally he checked the number. “Hello?…Hello?…I’ll be right back,” he told her. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  She felt—and it was a new sensation—in no hurry.

  After he left, she telephoned Georgette, who was asleep in Emerald and whose heavy book on Roman ruins slid off the bed when she sat up. Annie told her friend that to her surprise she appeared to be falling for a Miami detective she’d recently met.

  “How recently?” asked Georgette, turning the light on, feeling for her glasses.

  “Like a couple of hours ago,” Annie said.

  “Is this a joke?”

  Annie laughed. “No. I don’t sound like myself, do I?”

  “Let me put it this way. You sound definitely under the influence of something,” Georgette agreed. “What’s his name?”

  “Dan. Daniel Hart.”

  “Oh, that guy. The cop that’s after you. Is he nice or just good-looking?”

  “Both. And he’s smart. But he just lost his job because of the case he was on, which involves my dad. I won’t get into it now. He wants to come back to my room.”

  “His name is Dan? Danny and Annie? Cute. Okay, I’m glad you’re having fun.”

  Annie said, “I’m not having fun. I feel like I’m in outer space, kind of floating in the sky.”

  Georgette assured her that floating in outer space was not necessarily a bad place to be. “Enjoy yourself and call me in the morning. Bye.”

  Annie asked, “Gigi? Everything okay with you?”

  Georgette said that so little interesting ever happened to her, apart from talking to patients who really were crazy as opposed to just feeling sorry for themselves, that the tornado’s smashing her patio furniture a couple of nights ago was the big event of the year. “A bientot. Love you.”

  “Love you too. Bonne nuit.”

  While Annie was waiting for Dan to come back, the muscled fellow with the white teeth who’d tried to pick her up earlier abruptly stuck his face in front of hers again. Drunk, he grinned close to her, moving his tongue back and forth over his teeth like a windshield wiper. “So where’s the boyfriend?” Without waiting for a reply, he slid into the booth across from her.

  “Right here, beach boy.” Dan grabbed the man by his layered Versace T-shirts. “I told you last week to stop coming in here, hitting on women. Go get a life.” He flung the drunk out of the booth. Cheese nachos and mugs of beer flew in air. Dan and Annie jumped up after him. The drunk staggered backward then lunged at Dan. The man in the next booth slid out of it and grabbed the drunk. Within seconds, the bar was a moil of shoves, jabs, grunts, and curses as the “beach boy” seized the opportunity to let off steam by randomly hitting bystanders. A woman who turned out to be a cop and Dan’s friend came hurrying up to restrain and arrest the drunk.

  In the distraction of the fight’s aftermath Dan grabbed Annie’s hand and ran out of La Loca with her into the summer’s night.

  From the restaurant they took a short walk to a side street that led down to the edge of the ocean.

  Barefoot, they strolled along the curve of an unlit beach to a spot that Dan knew, where the house owners were never home and no one was ever out in the surf at night. All around them the black velvety sky shimmered; the sea was silver with stars.

  Dan threw an imaginary lasso at the sky. “‘I’m going to reach up and grab
stars for her,’ You know that line? Clark Gable? It Happened One Night?”

  At the surf’s edge, she called back over her shoulder, “Of course I know that line. Didn’t my dad tell me my mother was Claudette Colbert?”

  Standing in the cool silver foam of the water’s edge, she billowed her shirt, letting the wind blow under it.

  “I’ll be back before you know it.” He suddenly tossed a handful of sand up in the air and as it fell, ran off into the darkness.

  Everything in Annie’s life now felt so unpredictable that she thought it as likely as not that Daniel Hart would never return. That, like a magician, he’d blinded her with a puff of colored smoke and behind it he would disappear.

  Okay, she thought, let him. She pulled the band from her ponytail, shook loose her tangled hair and stared up at a dome of stars whose names she knew by heart. There in the sky, inside a carefully designed solar system, she could chart her way clearly among the constellations, but floating in space, or sitting at the sea’s edge down here in the muddle, wasn’t she losing her bearings?

  Seated in the wet sand, she let the edge of the waves touch her bare feet. Her cell phone vibrated in her pants pocket; the caller ID said “Trevor.” She almost answered. But inexplicably she was seized by an impulse. She pulled out the phone and flung it far off into the surf. Just threw it irretrievably away. She had a rush of regret—and the knowledge that her severance wasn’t complete, for her Blackberry was in her purse back in Dan’s Thunderbird. Still she felt freer and she liked the feeling. Annie took a deep relaxing breath and sat there, still.

  All at once a blaze of light bounced behind her. Dan’s pick-up truck came splashing along the sand toward where she sat and stopped with its headlights searching the waves. In the truck bed was his blue windsurfer board. Its slack white sail flapped against its mast in the quickening breeze as he dragged it to the surf. “Sailed one of these?”

  “Only once.”

  He stripped off his pants and shirt, gesturing at her to do the same. “Think you could hang on?”

  Annie laughed, recalling the shake and stretch of skin as her fighter jet shot off the carrier deck and climbed the sky. “I think I could hang on,” she said.

  Sitting on the board, they were floating on the black swells of water, then they were standing, their hands together fighting the sail into trim, Dan balanced behind her so close that she could feel his heart against her back, the heart that he’d said was broken but that felt too strong and steady to break. Quickly he was letting her hands guide his on the bar, responding to how well she could feel the wind.

  The windsurfer board raced along the waves, a thread on the foam, sewing the sea.

  His face in her wet hair, his mouth warm against her ear, their heads turned and they were kissing, kissing as the board rose with the swell of the wave. He pointed far ahead where a star fell gleaming far off in the night sky and spilled down into the sea. She thought she was crying but she couldn’t be sure, because how could she tell her own salt tears from the ocean?

  ***

  At this moment, six hundred miles north in Emerald, the phone beside Georgette Nickerson’s bed once more awakened her. Grouchily sitting up to answer what she assumed was another call from Annie, she knocked her glasses to the floor.

  But unexpectedly the caller was Brad Hopper. Apologizing—with an edge of accusation—for phoning Georgette so late, he wondered if she might be able to tell him where her best friend could be. He knew the two of them kept in daily touch, or at least they had done so all during Brad’s marriage to Annie. He’d called Pilgrim’s Rest but Sam hadn’t been able to help him with Annie’s whereabouts and he’d figured maybe Georgette could.

  Georgette said, “She went to St. Louis. Then she went to Miami.”

  Brad was aware of that much. In fact Annie had gone to Miami thanks to him, in his jet. He even knew that she was staying at the Dorado in South Beach. The problem was, she hadn’t returned to the Dorado tonight and it was awfully late for her to be out, given the circumstances. He’d had the assistant manager check her room but they’d found no one in it but that Maltese dog.

  Annoyingly the hotel had said they wouldn’t tell him where their guest was, even if they knew where she was, which they didn’t. Annie wasn’t in the hotel bar or pool because Brad had checked them all. He was standing right here in the Dorado lobby at this very minute.

  “You’re in the Hotel Dorado?” Georgette climbed all the way out of her bed, turned on her light and found her glasses on the floor.

  “I sure am.”

  To give herself time to think, she fluffed her pillows. “Why did you go to Miami?”

  “It’s a holiday.”

  Georgette snapped at him. “Brad, don’t get cute.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry.” He was used to women chastising him. “I’m here trying to get Annie to call off our divorce. I already got her to put it off for a month.”

  “You did?” With her glasses on, Georgette felt surer of herself. “I thought she was signing the final papers in just a few days.”

  “Come on, Georgette,” he chuckled. “You never thought that was really going to happen, did you? I told her, if she postponed, I’d lend her one of our jets to get out of St. Louis. That’s how she got to Miami. Things were a mess in St. Louis, you know, with the storm? She could have never gotten here by now except for me.”

  Privately, Georgette was happily thinking, “Wow, are you going to be sorry you brought Annie to Miami,” but out loud she took a judgmental tone. “You blackmailed her?”

  Brad was defensive. “I just cut a deal. And she checked the jet in fine, so that’s no problem. What’s wrong with saving a marriage? Marriage is a sacrament.” He paused. “I think. I’m not really a churchgoer anymore.”

  Now ready with an alibi, Georgette said Annie was spending the night in Palm Beach at a friend’s home, a female friend, someone she had met recently in Chesapeake Cove, someone whose name Georgette couldn’t recall just now. Annie had phoned her earlier tonight and had mentioned how she was going to stay with this friend and how she’d be back in Miami early in the morning to talk with her father’s doctor at Golden Days. Annie always did what she said she was going to do, right? She was undoubtedly asleep right now, with her phone charging overnight. So Brad should just stop worrying; he should check into his own room at the Dorado, go to bed, and call Annie in the morning.

  Brad was accustomed to taking women’s advice. He decided to do exactly as Georgette suggested. “Thanks, Georgia. You’re a peach.” Brad had long made “Georgia” into a seductive intimacy. He added, “I don’t know what this Atlanta boy would do without you. Night night.”

  “Night night.”

  “Tell Annie to call me if she calls you.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “You’re the best. I love you.”

  Georgette had to remind herself (as she headed down to her kitchen where the birthday cake Sam had given her probably hadn’t been too damaged by being thrown in the trash bin), she had definitely to remind herself, that getting involved even in the most peripheral way with Brad Hopper would be less like eating a healthy peach and more like eating a gallon of Häagen-Dazs Triple Chocolate with a Sara Lee pound cake on the side. She would regret it.

  Georgette wheeled around in the hallway and returned to bed.

  ***

  At the Dorado, on his way to the elevator, Brad was drawn into the bar by the murmur of women’s voices and the chinkle of a cocktail shaker. He decided to have a nightcap. Gliding onto a blue bar stool, he fell quickly into a conversation with a tall silvery blonde who was drinking vodka martinis with a less-attractive brunette. They both wore low-cut pullovers and very high heels whose toes looked lethal. Brad offered to buy “the ladies” another round. The brunette said that unfortunately she was just leaving and was going to catch hell for getting home so late. She tottered away, dangerously tacking. The blonde, however, accepted the drink offer, explaining immediately
to Brad that she’d had a very annoying day. On top of annoying problems at work, there had been an annoying run-in with her ex-husband, and an annoying quarrel with her brand-new fiancé with whom she had planned to celebrate her engagement tonight here at the Dorado, her favorite restaurant.

  Brad made a comic and appealing show of searching under the barstools. So, where was her fiancé? He wasn’t here, he wasn’t there, where was he?

  The blonde laughed. Her laugh wasn’t a good one and she seemed to know it and shut it off. She said that her fiancé, a financial planner, had been forced to fly out tonight with his boss, all the way to Japan, leaving her to eat dinner here at the Dorado with her friend, who wasn’t even really her friend but her future sister-in-law, who’d just left. It was all extremely annoying.

  Brad couldn’t have been more sympathetic.

  ***

  A few miles away, on a starlit beach, Dan and Annie were slow dancing in the surf. From the open door of the blue pickup truck, parked beside them, Etta James sang, accompanied by lush violins.

  At last

  My love has come along.

  My lonely days are over

  And life is like a song…

  It was such easy dancing for Annie, for whom pleasure had never come easily. Such slow, easy dancing. Who would have thought you could kiss, be kissed like this, while you danced? Not Annie, not until now.

  Overhead, a meteor shower fanned out to the east and west. They watched the faint shooting stars.

  She said, “Probably the Southern Delta Aquarids. Really, it’s just debris from a comet’s tail. Just cosmic debris.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Dan murmured. “I mean humans. Just cosmic debris? But just for a tiny bit of time, don’t you think we can be pretty wonderful?”

  ***

  At the Dorado bar, Brad Hopper leaned closer to the blonde. Watching them from a dark corner was Rafael Rook, who sipped morosely on a soft drink. The Cuban was very upset. Not about the Queen, which he knew was locked up in Annie’s room. And not about Diaz, who seemed to have fallen for the story that the Queen had been hijacked to Havana. He was upset about Jack Peregrine, who had told him not to lose sight of Annie. But this morning stupidly Raffy had panicked, jumping out of her car when she had threatened to go to the MPD. Now he couldn’t find her. She wasn’t in the hotel and her phone switched him to voice mail. He’d been waiting here at the Dorado for hours, assuming she would come back. But now it was past midnight and where was she? Moreover, waiting for Annie, he’d had to blow off his promise to meet Chamayra at La Loca earlier and he was now too apprehensive to return Chamayra’s furious messages. Nobody could get madder faster than Chamayra.