The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [13]
“Annie! Annie!”
Suddenly the tall tanned woman she’d first seen on the porch came running through the barn doors, her clothes wet through. Holding Annie’s pink baseball cap, she crawled under the plane’s wing and pulled the child into her arms. Annie struggled backward, startled by the stranger’s closeness. But the woman nudged her gently toward her again. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m your aunt Sam. Everything’s going to be okay. I’m so sorry.” Slowly she rocked them back and forth together, huddled beneath the plane.
There was something in the warm feel of the woman’s neck, in her arms, that was familiar. Her eyes were familiar too, like Annie’s father’s, green as emeralds, but sadder, with a small furrowing crease of worry between the eyebrows that, in Annie’s growing up, was never to go away.
On the first night of Annie’s arrival, in the large long hallway of Pilgrim’s Rest, Sam helped her unpack her blue suitcase; it was filled with her clothes, including her favorite dress and her white jacket with gold buttons. Tucked beneath the clothes was $12,000 in hundred-dollar bills, around which was wrapped, with a rubber band, a birth certificate from a hospital in Key West, stating that Anne Samantha Peregrine had been born there on the Fourth of July at 8:42 p.m., that she’d weighed 6 lbs., 3 oz., that Jack Peregrine was her father and Claudette Colbert was her mother. Looking at this certificate, Annie asked Sam to pronounce her mother’s name and Sam sounded upset when she did so. “Claudette Colbert.”
That first night, while Annie picked sadly at the Chinese takeout food, Sam told her about the time she’d been here before, when her father unexpectedly showed up with her in Emerald; how he brought the plane, the King of the Sky, on a rented flatbed truck, its wings dismantled, and parked it in the barn. Annie was only twelve months old then and they stayed at Pilgrim’s Rest only three weeks. But during their visit Annie took her first step, running into Sam’s arms.
Annie said nothing when she heard this story but she’d been intrigued. Then Sam had brought out a bright yellow birthday cake and put on a video of The Wizard of Oz, because Annie, lying, had told her it was her favorite movie, figuring it would be a safer choice than Top Gun. When Judy Garland chanted, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,” the child, to impress the two solicitous adults, made a joke—having first rehearsed the remark silently to herself—“Okay, I guess I’m in No Place now.”
Sam and Clark laughed, pleasing her despite her grief.
The next morning there was a card on the kitchen table that said, There’s No Place Like No Place. Welcome Home. Sam was at the stove, flipping pancakes with a dexterity that couldn’t but impress Annie. She even flipped one behind her back and caught it in the pan. “Tennis,” she explained. “You play?”
Annie shook her head.
“You want to?”
Annie shrugged.
“I’m going to practice today. You could help me out. I pay fifty cents an hour.”
Over breakfast Sam told her niece that Clark and she shared her family house but that they weren’t married, they were just friends. She added, “I don’t know why people say ‘just friends.’ It’s the hardest thing in the world to be.”
Annie stared at her aunt carefully. “Are you two gay?” She was trying to shock her.
Sam said, “I am but Clark’s kind of gloomy.” She held out the yellow birthday cake. “Double chocolate inside.”
“You shouldn’t eat cake for breakfast.”
Sam cut two pieces. “Of all the things we shouldn’t do in America, this is way down the list.”
The phone rang and hoping it was her father saying he was coming back for her, Annie held her breath until Sam returned from the hall. “Clark’s at the hospital. Says we should come there and have lunch with him. He’ll show you around his clinic.”
“Is my mother dead?” Annie asked abruptly. “If she is, can I see her grave?”
Sam said she didn’t know who Annie’s mother was; that, despite her frequent questions, Jack had never told her.
***
A few weeks later,