The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [124]
“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