The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [110]
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.”
Slowly the head turned, the eyes opened and looked at Annie. Years, decades, flung away and memory rushed in. She had known those facetious green gold-specked eyes from the beginning of her life.
“Annie…”
“…Dad?”
Chapter 33
Skylark
Jack Peregrine’s face was bruised, his cheek and lip swollen and cut, his color flat white. His breath was so shallow it was slow to fill the next words. “…Raffy, look, what a beautiful woman…”
“Absolutely,