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explanations came and went through her thoughts, from the mundane to the impossible. A broken limb? An incurable disease? The island was out of toilet paper? Was she being held hostage by a tribe of island cannibals out of a nineteenth century adventure novel? Her imagination rampaged through a host of wild scenarios, and for the hundredth time she wished her mother’s e-mail had been more specific. This wasn’t 1860, when people sent messages by telegraph and had to pay by the letter.
She leaned her head back and stared up at the ceiling, which was covered with bumper stickers, most of them so old their colors were faded and their edges curled up. They blasted slogans like keep calm and fly on, i’d rather be lucky than good, and caution: aviation may be hazardous to your wealth. One depicted a Pegasus soaring through stylized clouds, but instead of feathery angel wings
it had sleek airplane wings fixed to its shoulders. There were at least a dozen different AOPA stickers. She glanced behind her; the back seat was cramped and in some places, the cracks
in the leather were covered with duct tape. It made her a bit nervous, as her mind couldn’t help but imagine the engine being held together in a similar manner. Then she thought,
Can’t go back now. Might as well make the most of it. “Can we go higher?” she asked, feeling reckless. “Above the clouds?”
“Well, I didn’t file the flight plan and technically I’m not certified to—”
“Just for a minute?” She appealed to his reckless side, hoping it was still intact.
Jim’s lips slowly curled into a grin. “You asked for it. Here we go!”
She gripped her seat, her stomach flopping as he took them higher, feeling a rush of delight that Jim, at least, seemed to have changed little in the nine years they’d been apart. Here was the daring little kid she’d remembered, challenging the world to just try to stop him.
Suddenly the plane burst out of the cloud and into another world. Sophie gasped. As a child, she’d flown in this same little plane, and definitely seen the sky from above on the big Boeings, but she’d forgotten it could be like this. So close, so real, so immense. The clouds spread below and around them like some silent white city, with coiling spires and rivers and bulbous stacks, all made of the same pinkish white cloud. It was a dreamscape, a world that continually shifted and flowed, sparkling in the sun like ice cream. She felt the urge to open the window, reach out, and scoop the clouds into her hands as if they were foam in a bubble bath. It was dazzling and terrifying, and the more she stared the more impossible it seemed. The clouds seemed spun of silk the color of apricots, piled and folded and flung across the sky by an unseen hand. She had the strangest sensation that she was three years old, completely enraptured by childlike wonder, pressing her nose to the glass while Jim’s dad laughed and wobbled the plane on purpose to scare them.
“Something, isn’t it?” Jim’s voice crackled through her headset.
“Very,” she whispered, and she stole a look at Jim. Their eyes met and held, and he grinned. She found herself smiling in return, and feeling suddenly shy, she looked away. They dipped back below the clouds and Sophie fell into a trance, hypnotized by the endless wrinkling sea. It sparkled with a million winking lights, like a sheet of gray silk peppered with golden white glitter. She saw a few islands, dark green and bent into irregular shapes, pebbles dropped carelessly across the sea. They seemed so small she could pick them up and slip them into her pocket.
Jim lifted one hand and pointed toward the east. “There she is.”
Her reverie snapped in two. She leaned toward him and stared out his window as he took the plane lower. Skin Island expanded as they approached, became brighter, more green, its mountains more pronounced. They steepled down the center of the island like