The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [16]
“Give your dad credit,” Sam urged. “He taught you to read and write.”
But Annie gave him credit for nothing and credited nothing he’d ever said to her. The fact that he had endlessly told her she was smart and beautiful was meaningless. He had also told her that her mother was Claudette Colbert and that he’d make her the queen of the world.
On the hot summer afternoon when Jack Peregrine showed up at Pilgrim’s Rest, Annie was next door with Georgette. They were lying on the floor in Georgette’s bedroom, listening to Metal Urbain’s Les hommes morts sont dangereux and watching a muted tape of Goddard’s À bout de souffle with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. For a party that night, they planned to retro-dress like Jean Seberg in the movie, with short hair and sunglasses, crisp striped shirts, their collars up, and belted flaring skirts that perfectly fit them. They had been enthusiastic Francophiles all year, tying thin black cashmere sweaters around their necks, pulling filters off Mrs. Nickerson’s cigarettes to smoke them, and otherwise preparing themselves to spend a month in France on a language immersion program before they left for their separate colleges. Annie even renamed her friend Gigi (for Georgia Georgette, and because it was like Gigi in the movie musical set in Paris), though the nickname never stuck.
When Sam spotted her brother Jack from the garden, her first thought was Annie. How would Annie feel? She ran into the barn, where she found him “in a state” because the King of the Sky, the plane he’d left there seventeen years ago, was missing.
“Are you kidding?” she shouted at him. “You’re standing there asking me where your goddamn plane is?!! How about your daughter?”
“Where’s Annie?”
“Next door!” Sam pointed angrily to the Nickersons’ house.
“She okay?”
“She’s fine!”
Jack had an excuse for dropping Annie off a decade earlier and disappearing. He claimed he’d been locked up in prison, and that in prison he’d come to believe that the best thing he could do for Annie was to stay away from her and let her have a normal life.
Frustrated, Sam punched at him, shoving him to the dirt floor. “You are so full of shit, Jack.”
“Come on, Sam. Where’s the King of the Sky?”
“Annie flies that goddamn plane, which you gave her, damn it!”
Jack dusted himself off, grinning. “She does? That’s wonderful. She flies a plane? Wow. Really?”
“Really. She’s going to Annapolis.”
“Really? How’d she learn to fly?”
“D. K. taught her. The plane’s at his place. Aren’t you going to ask me how I am?”
“How are you?”
“Jill left me. Mom died. Clark lives here.”
“I know all that.”
Sam pointed again at the Nickerson house. “Go talk to your daughter, she’s next door! But let me warn her you’re here. You know, this kind of shock is rough on normal people.” Sam ran inside the house and telephoned her niece.
Across the yard, grabbing at Georgette, Annie held the phone against her heart. “Oh my God, Sam says my jerk of a dad’s in the barn. I don’t want to see him, okay!”
“Oui, Jacques qui?” Georgette leaned far out the window, her spiked black and purple streaked hair giving her the look of a sooty gargoyle. “Tu ne sais pas Jacques. Oh, there he is!”
From Georgette’s window the two girls watched as Jack ran toward them through the grass, waving up to his daughter as if it had been ten minutes ago that he’d last seen her, not more than ten years. Even from so far away, she could tell that he was thinner and that his pants and his T-shirt were loose. He came close enough to the Nickerson house for her to see that he held a small dirty cloth sack, like a bag of marbles.
The white puppy Malpy raced around him in a friendly frenzy, yapping so loudly that on Georgette’s bed, Teddy lifted her head and growled before returning to sleep—uninterested in either Jack Peregrine or New Wave Cinema.
From the high vantage of Georgette’s window Annie could