The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [117]
“Things do.” He reached awkwardly, only the top half of his fingers free of bandages, for a wallet on the bedside tray. From it he took a faded snapshot: it was a delivery room picture of a pink newborn, minutes old, bawling. “I saved this.”
Annie looked at herself, less than an hour old.
“Fourth of July. Anne Samantha Peregrine. I named you for Sam. Two days later, I’m back in the hospital looking at you. I go in the maternity ward and your mom’s checked out. Gone.”
“Gone?” She repeated the word; it tasted strange in her mouth. Every word he said was like a bitter taste.
“This hospital is real loose on the rules and I tell them it’s just a communication glitch between your mom and me. I take you and I run back to the resort, a little one-room tin-roof bungalow we had, and I lie you down on the bed, pillows ’round you so you won’t roll off. I notice, your mom’s clothes are gone. The twenty-five thousand in cash is gone. No note, nothing. I run all over the island, looking. Finally a guy working at the resort tells me a taxi drove her to the airport.” His bandaged hands stroked along the white starched sheet. “Never saw her again.”
Shaken, Annie tried to take it in. “My mother gave me up to this couple from Ohio and then she left you without a word?”
His hands lifted, opened. “I spent months going back over it, everything she said, every look. She’d planned it all, how she’d leave. Tell you the truth, Annie, I didn’t mean that much to her. And afterwards? I’m sure she figured you were leading a nice normal Ohio life with nice normal parents. Why should she think I’d keep you?” He turned his hands back and forth close to his face, examining them as if the bandages were a surprise.
“Why did you?” Why hadn’t he given her to the couple who had paid twenty-five thousand dollars for her?
His eyes closed. “Couldn’t.”
The claim silenced her. She studied him lying there for a while. Finally he opened his eyes again. “Claudette bought you some baby clothes. Those first weeks, sometimes she’d drop in the restaurant; she’d sit in a chair and hold you and talk to you.”
Annie thought of the film star in Since You Went Away, with her two daughters kneeling beside her chair. How kind she had looked in that film, in all her films. It would have been lovely, really, to grow up as Claudette Colbert’s daughter.
Jack finished his story. The couple from Ohio, who’d prepaid for a baby they’d never seen, returned to Barbados as arranged, the night before he was scheduled to give them the three-week-old. Instead, he fled the island, taking Annie with him. He flew to Key West in a friend’s plane and hid out there. Another friend in Key West who worked at a hospital did the paperwork so Annie would be born in America instead of Barbados. “In case you wanted to be president.” Friends back at the resort sent him news that the Ohio couple had searched the whole island for Jack and the baby but had never gone to the police about their twenty-five thousand dollars. It was, after all, an illegal adoption for which they’d paid.
A year later, in a poker game in Palm Beach, Jack won the single-engine Piper Warrior that he’d renamed the King of the Sky. He took the plane and Annie to Emerald. She was a year old and she learned to walk at Pilgrim’s Rest.
Annie didn’t speak for a long time. Then she walked to the window and tilted her head so she could see the sky. “Sam said that’s why it felt like home to me.” She looked back at him.
His hands rested on the faded leather of the brown flight jacket. “So that’s the truth,” he said. “I couldn’t let you go.” A single tear fell from his pale face to the paler pillow.
Her eyebrow raised. “Don’t try that single-tear thing on me. I watched you practice it in motel mirrors.”
“Is there a tear?” he asked her, smiling. “Well, why not cry? It hurt like hell to let you go.”
For seven years, he said, crisscrossing the country, he had kept Annie beside him, while he’d supported them by a variety of cons and swindles. But finally he had to stop running. A private