The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [15]
At first, Annie missed him, and his songs and stories, with an ache that hurt like a bruise. But carefully she taught herself to stop hoping. She taught herself that she was alone in her life and would always be and therefore would rely only on herself.
Of course she wasn’t alone. Outside her door waited family and friends. But it was a long time before she heard them there. Months passed before she laughed again as loudly as she had when her father had sung his funny songs. And from her first weeks at Pilgrim’s Rest, she wasn’t restful. She started having the dream about the woman in her gold cape on a ship in the ocean, the mother she’d never seen, the mother whose real name Sam and Clark could not tell her because they didn’t know it. She would wake up from her nightmare as the little ship was sinking and she couldn’t save the drowning woman and her father was flying away.
For months, whenever it rained in Emerald so hard the sky went black, Annie could see Jack Peregrine’s car racing away from her over the hill.
But finally, as months became years, even rain was just rain.
Chapter 4
Wings
Growing up as a child with Sam and Clark, with her friend Georgette and with her flying teacher D. K. Destin, Annie had to learn new styles, very different from the fabled schemes and exuberant stories of her father. In the town of Emerald, stories were for the most part just boring local gossip, tales of neighbors’ daily triumphs and travails. She felt them to be much smaller than the tales—like the saga of Spanish treasure under the sea—that her father had told her. Only D. K.’s stories of the great pilots of old had for her the same kind of magic.
Still, over the years Annie listened to Georgette’s jokes and Clark’s puns and Sam’s way of comparing everything in their lives to the movies and eventually their worlds became hers and her father’s romance faded. Georgette and she were soon best friends and all through their Emerald school years spent nearly half their lives companionably in one another’s company, despite or because of their differences: Annie, small and neat, practical, athletic, serious; Georgette, funny, dreamy, zaftig. Both ironic about life but ready for life to do big things with them.
And then when Annie was seventeen, on a summer day, ten years after her father had just dropped her off at Pilgrim’s Rest, he suddenly returned, calling her name.
Sam’s heart almost stopped, she later claimed, when her brother ran noisily crashing out of a cornfield and raced into their barn. In the vegetable garden, where on her knees she’d been tying up tomato plants, she had to use a fence post to pull herself to her feet because her legs went wobbly. Sam called the event, “The day Jack showed up like Cary Grant chased by the crop duster in North by Northwest.”
By this time, it was too late for Jack Peregrine to lay claim to Annie. For almost eleven years, she’d lived a “normal” life without him. She had just graduated from high school, had broken up with her first serious boyfriend, and had been accepted at Annapolis. Her family was now Sam and Clark, who had long since officially adopted her. Her dog Teddy had grown old and they’d recently acquired a new puppy, an exuberant Maltese named Malpy, for Malpractice, whom Teddy tolerated with a begrudging noblesse oblige.
They made a reasonably content family and on vacations together spent more time studying stars from campsites than learning card tricks in hotel rooms, as she’d done with her father. They hiked and climbed rocks and kayaked, then returned together to a home that stayed put. She ate real food at a real table and went to bed in her own room and had her height and weight measured annually by Clark, who’d inoculated her against everything he could think of. Thanks to D. K. Destin, she had her pilot’s license and could do loop-the-loops in the King of the Sky. She wore on her flying jacket the Navy wings and handmade black eagle badge that D. K. had given