The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [95]
He looked puzzled. “Don’t be sarcastic.”
“I’m not being sarcastic. It’s true.” She cradled her helmet. “It was great, flying with you again. I’ll take care of your jet.”
He gave her a thumbs-up. “I know you will.”
She had decided against telling him this news but now she offered it in gratitude. “I’m taking the Lockheed JSF X-35 up later this month.”
His eyes widened. “Pax River?”
She was surprised. “You know about these tests?”
He shrugged. “You hear things.”
Excitement slipped into her voice. “Brad, the landing’s totally vertical. I mean zero. You can drop it on a dime. There’re two of us testing for the Navy in a couple of weeks.”
He swung his headset from its strap. “Who’s the other one?”
“Don’t know. But I’ll get higher faster.”
He grinned. “Than anybody but me.”
It was true. She’d never clocked as fast a speed as Brad Hopper had.
“Dropping the X-35 on a ship…” He said it as if it were ice cream on his tongue. “Love it. Well, if you can’t do it, babe, just call me.”
“I can do it. Bye.”
“Remember, thirty days.”
Brad leaned into the cockpit to kiss her. She turned her head so his lips, a thin hard hot line, pressed against her ear. Handsome as ever, he jumped down to the tarmac and waved good-bye. Tightening the strap on her helmet, she watched him turn under a floodlight and grin. His grin had always both attracted and infuriated her. She knew, looking at that grin, that there was no doubt in his mind about her. He was sure that she would never divorce him.
But she would.
She recalled that she’d never liked the way Brad jabbed his tongue into her ear. While his lovemaking was efficient and generally effective, his kisses had never done for her what the old songs Sam played on the piano had claimed for romance; they had never given her the sort of chills run up and down your spine, take your breath away feeling of love songs. With Brad it had not been an unchained melody, rope the moon romance. She laughed at herself. So? Life’s not a movie, love’s not a song. Hadn’t her father taught her that love didn’t last?
On the road as a child with her father she would lie on a towel beside a motel pool while he named the stars for her. One night he told her how, millions of light-years from the Milky Way, hundreds of new stars were igniting. Among them was this quartet of galaxies. The galaxies were uncontrollably drawn toward each other, just as if they were falling in love, just the way he had fallen in love with Annie’s mother before Annie was born.
He said the stars were on fire because of their love for each other. It had all happened millions of years ago, and millions of years ago he had loved Annie, even before she was born, eons before she’d floated down to Earth, a tiny perfect piece of an exploding star. He’d been waiting for Annie a million years before he’d been born himself.
Long after their starry nights on the road, when he’d talked about the galaxies falling in love, Annie was studying astronomy at Annapolis. She had learned then that there’d even been a little truth in her father’s story of the play of gravitational draw. In the southern constellation Phoenix, 160 million light-years from Earth, four galaxies that made up Robert’s Quartet crowded together into space, pulled there by a kind of attraction. And drawn together there, stars in Robert’s Quartet did burst into flames.
Stars did fly toward each other, irresistibly, as if they were falling in love. And millions of years later, lovers on Earth drew together and fell in love, watching the stars fall.
Annie flew through the night of stars, wanting like everyone else to be loved forever. She headed the Hopper jet to latitude 25°47’35” N, longitude 80°17’36” W, Miami, Florida.
***
At this moment, in a small bare Golden Days hospital room in South Beach, Rafael Rook sat beside the bed of a slender man who smoked a cigarette. Raffy spoke quietly. “It seems by no