The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [113]
He stared at her, slowly smiled the old smile that she didn’t consciously remember but that her muscles knew and echoed. “You were always so damn smart,” he said. “I’ve sold the Queen. I said I was leaving you a million dollars.” He laughed. “I am. More.”
Raffy glared at his friend, surprised and not entirely pleased. Jack shrugged. It seemed to be a whole conversation, the look between them.
Annie shook her head. “I don’t want a million dollars. I don’t want anything from you.” She dropped the green stones on the bed tray.
Surprisingly the young Cuban took her hand and brought it to his lips. “Wisdom from Lear, Annie. Goneril and Regan? Let us grant those two daughters were 100 percent right. Their papa was not an easy man. Lear had serious—” He searched around the room for a word. “Insufficiencies. But in the end, why couldn’t Goneril and Regan show him a little kindness? Like Cordelia did. She didn’t take his kingdom from him, and frankly your papa shouldn’t exactly give away money he doesn’t exactly have, but what did it cost Cordelia to be nice? Nothing.”
Annie snorted. “Raffy, Cordelia gets strangled to death.”
His chocolate-sweet eyes dilated, his mouth fell open. “She does? Her own sisters kill her?”
“By then I think her sisters are already dead themselves.”
He looked distressed. “I’m only in Act Four. Cordelia dies?”
“And Lear and the Fool die too. Everybody dies in the end.”
“Ah me ah me ah me.” Mournfully the slender Cuban slipped through the door into the hall and closed it behind him.
To Annie the moment felt hallucinogenic. Rafael Rook’s dissonant musings, her father’s presence in her life again, the thrust of their conversation. Everything was too removed from the ordinary to assimilate, too incongruous with the routines that for decades had organized her orderly days. She felt as if she were being asked to converse in an alien language in a foreign place she’d been told she had once visited but of which she had only the most dreamlike recollections.
Walking over to the small smudged hospital window, she looked out, trying to orient herself. It was dusk; long shadows poured over the lawn. Golden Days patients still sat outside in their chairs, most of them sleeping. She turned back to her father. “Coming to see you, I had a strange run-in with a couple out on the lawn there.”
“A strange run-in?”
She described her encounter outside. “And here’s what’s weird. Long time ago I met Georgette Nickerson’s aunt Ruth. This woman on the lawn brought Ruth back to me so…” She thought back to how she’d felt. “…so intensely. Is there any reason Ruthie Nickerson would show up here to visit you?”
Jack’s mouth tightened, but so slightly that if he hadn’t given her early lessons in looking for such signs, she wouldn’t have seen it. “Who?” he asked.
“Ruthie, from next door in Emerald, George Nickerson’s sister, remember him? You may not have heard. George died of a heart attack, long time ago, before I came to Emerald, before you left me at Pilgrim’s Rest.”
His bandaged fingers moved lightly over the green jewels. “Sam told me George died. She said our mother scared him to death when she hammered his store window.” He pulled himself up on the pillows. “George scared easily.”
“I wondered if maybe you were…I don’t know…involved with Ruthie.”
He said “involved” would be an exaggeration. “For a little while I had a crush on her. It wasn’t particularly reciprocated.”
She persisted. “Could she have been this woman I saw here today?”
He kept frowning. “Ruthie Nickerson?”
“Yes,” she repeated impatiently. “Georgette’s aunt. Georgette and I are good friends. Best friends.”
He stared at her. “That’s nice. George would have liked that.” It was disconcerting to hear him talk so familiarly about Georgette’s father. He asked her when she’d met Ruthie.
“At Pilgrim’s Rest. Long time ago. She was visiting Sam one evening. Only that once. The Nickersons didn’t keep up with her. I remember Georgette’s mother Kim really