The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [199]
Chapter 50
Only Angels Have Wings
Sam, in the recovery room following her surgery, felt herself float up to the ceiling away from the pain. She had wings and was flying all around the room but, like a fly or a bee in search of an exit, she couldn’t find her way out and struck herself against the windows.
Annie, seven years old, stood with Clark at the foot of the hospital bed, their heads tilted back, turning to watch her aunt fly from light to light. “How come she’s got wings?” Annie asked Clark. “Is she dead?”
Clark said no, that Sam was not going to die yet because she hadn’t finished cleaning out the attic as she often promised to do before she died.
“Only angels have wings,” Annie told him.
“Don’t flyers?” he asked.
“That’s true,” the solemn little girl agreed. “Flyers have wings.” She unpinned the tiny medal bar of wings from her jean jacket and broke it in two, fastening a wing to each of her shoulders. The wings suddenly grew to full size, sprouting out of her jacket, and, using them to fly, Annie glided up to the ceiling next to Sam, who was trying to kick open a transom window. “Come back, Aunt Sam. It’s about that time.” The phrase was the one Sam used nightly to let Annie know it was time for her to go to bed. Tugging on Sam’s hand, Annie floated down with her in looping circles back onto the hospital bed below. Sam lay on the bed and Clark pulled up the white sheets around her.
***
An hour later, in the recovery room, Sam awakened from her dreams, worried that Jack hadn’t received the FedEx he’d asked her to send him two nights ago to his hotel in Key West—enclosing the photograph of Jack and Annie at The Breakers Hotel in West Palm Beach that he’d left in Annie’s little blue suitcase so many years ago and that Sam had framed when she’d found it. There had been something about that photograph that Jack had suddenly needed. Sam couldn’t now remember if Jack had explained what the importance was and she worried that maybe she hadn’t sent the FedEx correctly. Had she talked to Jack since she’d sent it?
Something had happened to her this morning; something had fallen on her. The old Worth armoire, that’s it, it had been her mother’s armoire. She’d been distracted, listening to news on the television from down the hall while she’d tried to drag the heavy ornate walnut piece of furniture into Jack’s room. That’s right, she was fixing up Jack’s old bedroom for his recuperation. The armoire had caught on the doorsill. Served her right. She’d been wearing her old leather weight-lifting belt to help strengthen her back but it hadn’t helped. She was not as strong, not as fast as she once had been. Why, when she was a girl, she’d once caught a runaway horse for a neighboring farmer and she’d ridden the horse home bareback. Once she’d killed a wild pig with a bow and arrow. She’d shaken apples out of the tops of trees for her friends and rescued her brother Jack from a bull’s charge.
Jack had called the teenaged Sam “the fastest woman alive.” He’d boasted to D. K. of her “amazing catch” of the infant Annie when the year-old baby was crawling so fast across the porch that she headed straight off into the air over the top of the steep steps. Jack was standing not far from the steps, talking to D. K. about the King of the Sky. They hadn’t noticed the baby. Sam had been upstairs, cleaning out the rooms that she never seemed able to empty of the collected past. She heard Annie laughing downstairs in the hall and then the door screeching open. According to Jack, Sam had flown down the stairs and through the air out onto the porch and never touched the floor before she had snatched Annie’s heel with her outstretched fingers and stopped her from falling.
But then Jack always exaggerated.
Sam drifted back into a dream in which she was trying to edit together a film but at the same time she was showing that film on a projector at the Paradise, Emerald’s now defunct old movie house. Sam was in a state because the film kept jamming and breaking off and