The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [158]
“Is this a joke?”
Annie laughed. “No. I don’t sound like myself, do I?”
“Let me put it this way. You sound definitely under the influence of something,” Georgette agreed. “What’s his name?”
“Dan. Daniel Hart.”
“Oh, that guy. The cop that’s after you. Is he nice or just good-looking?”
“Both. And he’s smart. But he just lost his job because of the case he was on, which involves my dad. I won’t get into it now. He wants to come back to my room.”
“His name is Dan? Danny and Annie? Cute. Okay, I’m glad you’re having fun.”
Annie said, “I’m not having fun. I feel like I’m in outer space, kind of floating in the sky.”
Georgette assured her that floating in outer space was not necessarily a bad place to be. “Enjoy yourself and call me in the morning. Bye.”
Annie asked, “Gigi? Everything okay with you?”
Georgette said that so little interesting ever happened to her, apart from talking to patients who really were crazy as opposed to just feeling sorry for themselves, that the tornado’s smashing her patio furniture a couple of nights ago was the big event of the year. “A bientot. Love you.”
“Love you too. Bonne nuit.”
While Annie was waiting for Dan to come back, the muscled fellow with the white teeth who’d tried to pick her up earlier abruptly stuck his face in front of hers again. Drunk, he grinned close to her, moving his tongue back and forth over his teeth like a windshield wiper. “So where’s the boyfriend?” Without waiting for a reply, he slid into the booth across from her.
“Right here, beach boy.” Dan grabbed the man by his layered Versace T-shirts. “I told you last week to stop coming in here, hitting on women. Go get a life.” He flung the drunk out of the booth. Cheese nachos and mugs of beer flew in air. Dan and Annie jumped up after him. The drunk staggered backward then lunged at Dan. The man in the next booth slid out of it and grabbed the drunk. Within seconds, the bar was a moil of shoves, jabs, grunts, and curses as the “beach boy” seized the opportunity to let off steam by randomly hitting bystanders. A woman who turned out to be a cop and Dan’s friend came hurrying up to restrain and arrest the drunk.
In the distraction of the fight’s aftermath Dan grabbed Annie’s hand and ran out of La Loca with her into the summer’s night.
From the restaurant they took a short walk to a side street that led down to the edge of the ocean.
Barefoot, they strolled along the curve of an unlit beach to a spot that Dan knew, where the house owners were never home and no one was ever out in the surf at night. All around them the black velvety sky shimmered; the sea was silver with stars.
Dan threw an imaginary lasso at the sky. “‘I’m going to reach up and grab stars for her,’ You know that line? Clark Gable? It Happened One Night?”
At the surf’s edge, she called back over her shoulder, “Of course I know that line. Didn’t my dad tell me my mother was Claudette Colbert?”
Standing in the cool silver foam of the water’s edge, she billowed her shirt, letting the wind blow under it.
“I’ll be back before you know it.” He suddenly tossed a handful of sand up in the air and as it fell, ran off into the darkness.
Everything in Annie’s life now felt so unpredictable that she thought it as likely as not that Daniel Hart would never return. That, like a magician, he’d blinded her with a puff of colored smoke and behind it he would disappear.
Okay, she thought, let him. She pulled the band from her ponytail, shook loose her tangled hair and stared up at a dome of stars whose names she knew by heart. There in the sky, inside a carefully designed solar system, she could chart her way clearly among the constellations, but floating in space, or sitting at the sea’s edge down here in the muddle, wasn’t she losing her bearings?
Seated in the wet sand, she let the edge of the waves touch her bare feet. Her cell phone vibrated in her pants pocket; the caller ID said “Trevor.” She almost answered. But inexplicably she was seized by an impulse. She pulled out the phone and flung it far off into the surf. Just