The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [57]
There was no answer. Annie had already gone into her room.
“I’m talking to thin air,” Sam muttered.
The tall white-haired woman walked back to the piano and picked up the Navy photograph in which her niece was smiling broadly, saluting her commanding officer, Commander Campbell, as he pinned a Commendation Medal on her. Sam compared the photo to the one of the seven-year-old Annie with Jack, seated in The Breakers restaurant. In both pictures, Annie had the same jubilant smile. “Oh, Anne Samantha, look at you.” Sam moved her fingers for a moment against the glass of each picture frame, tapped each small exultant face. “Look at you.”
The day that Annie’s acceptance to Annapolis had arrived in the mail, Sam had felt the heft of the Academy’s packet, thinking that it wouldn’t be so heavy if it were a rejection; thinking, as she raced up the stairs to Annie’s bedroom, that this news would help her niece, this would fix things. Because Annie had been shut up there all day crying. A boy had thrown her over for another girl, a girl on her track team, the girl from whom Annie had to accept the hand-off baton on the last leg of a 4 x 400 relay race. Only a week ago, the girl had dropped the baton behind the fast-sprinting Annie in the blind hand-off and so they’d lost the race. Annie had been furious at the girl, who’d smiled at her smugly, bafflingly. Then the boy had broken the news. After school, Annie had driven home crying so hard that she’d begun hyperventilating and Sam had finally had to hold a paper bag to her face. She hadn’t cried that hard since the day her father had left her at Pilgrim’s Rest when she’d hidden in the barn behind the wheel of the Piper Warrior.
Late through the night Sam had sat beside the bed where Annie had finally fallen asleep. She knew how her niece must feel. Sam had cried the same way when her partner Jill had not only left her but had charged her for more than her share of their condo equity.
***
Wes Campbell, Annie’s commanding officer at the Annapolis base, called her cell phone while she was packing. He was sympathetic. “Lieutenant, it’s okay. Family emergency. I see here you’re owed three separate weeklong leaves that you never took. Make this one of them.”
“I just need to find my dad, sir. I don’t need a week.”
“Lieutenant, you’re taking a one-week leave starting at 0800.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be back well in time for my test flight.”
Campbell chuckled. “I know that. We’re counting on you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No hesitation?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, good.” Commander Campbell liked the young female officer, whom he had personally chosen for the new F-35 Lightning II test flight. He made his joke about how times had changed from his own all-male days at the Academy in the ’60s, when midshipmen still wore glasses and had acne and everyone’s haircut was as flat as the runway on an aircraft carrier. He made this joke so often to female midshipmen, it was like a rite of passage when they first heard it from him.
He asked, “Your dad go by Peregrine or Goode? You gals here at Annapolis have so many names hyphened together, it’s hard to know what the hell to call you.”
“I don’t know what name my father’s going by these days, sir,” was Annie’s reply.
The commander frowned as he hung up; he often didn’t catch the tone of this generation’s remarks. Was that humor? Just a fact?
***
Up in her bedroom, Annie slid her neatly coiled jump rope in her duffel bag, then studied her birth certificate before placing it in her purse. The piece of paper looked real. Had she actually been born in that hospital in Key West, twenty-six years ago on the Fourth of July at 8:42 p.m.? Had she really weighed 6 lbs., 3 oz.? Was it even possible that her mother’s name had, quite coincidentally, really been Claudette Colbert? Unlikely.
There was a lull in the storm; rain fell slow and soft. Clark was waiting in his Volvo to drive to the airfield when Annie carried her