Jessica Khoury: Vitro

With her senior year approaching, Sophie was ready to make college plans, and her goal was to get through med school as fast as possible and then get a job with her mom. She couldn’t imagine anything more worthwhile to do than find cures for the disorders and diseases of the world. Her mom was a hero, and all Sophie had ever wanted was to be by her side, helping her. But for reasons her dad never seemed able to articulate, he was dead set against her plan. Well, if anyone can back me up, it’ll be Mom. If her mom was okay. Anxiety fluttered in her stomach like a wounded bird, and the note in her pocket weighed like a brick. Dozens of possible 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 satin green tents, their foothills crowded with dense forests of palms and pines.

The shadows of their ravines were a deep purple, testifying to the range’s steepness and height. A cloud cast a shadow over the southern rim of the larger island, where she thought

she glimpsed something white—buildings, or perhaps just the beach. A smaller island graced the waters above the northern shore, like a dot over a fat, slightly bent lowercase i. “The airstrip is on the smaller one.” Jim’s voice crackled through her headset. “I guess she’s expecting you?” “My mom? Yes. It’s Friday, isn’t it?” Her mind still felt a bit fuzzy whenever she tried to reckon out the time change,

factoring in the international date line as well.

“It’s Friday,” Jim confirmed.

Sophie’s eyes were fastened on the island. She didn’t see any people, or any buildings, though they could be hidden in the trees or situated on the southern half. The whole situation didn’t feel quite real. Skin Island. She had to keep reminding herself that this was it, there was the island rising up from the sea, the island that haunted her her entire life though she’d never seen it until now.

She’d lost count of how many times she had begged her mother to let her come to Skin Island, always to the same negative result—so why now? What had changed? She hadn’t hesitated a moment when she saw the e-mail. It was if she’d been waiting her entire life for an excuse to do this very thing, running off to Skin Island to see her mother in her element. She’d always wondered why she’d been sent to Boston with her dad, instead of here, with her mother. She didn’t recall having ever been asked what she wanted to do. All she remembered was that one day, her mom kissed her on the forehead and said she’d see her at Christmas, and a month later Sophie and her dad were on a plane to the States. It was a whirl of dizzying changes that had assaulted her too quickly, too wildly for her seven-year-old mind to digest. She’d always resented her father for whisking her away to a new life and new family she’d never wanted, and always dreamed her mother would whisk her back. She’d just never imagined it would happen quite like this.

“They are expecting you, right?” Jim’s voice crackled through her headset.

She blinked at him. Were they? A sudden, new scenario burst into her thoughts—what if the emergency had to do with the company her mother worked for? Sophie had never trusted the shadowy corporation and its penchant for secrets. What if they’d done something to Moira? “I . . . I don’t know.

I mean, my mom is, but—”

His fingers gripped the yoke tighter, making the veins stand out on the backs of his hands. “Look,” he said, “I just want to stay out of it, okay?”

“What do you mean?” She slid him a confused sideways look.

“Just saying.” He kept his eyes trained ahead, but she could see the tightness in the skin around them, even behind his glasses. “All I want is to fly in and fly out, okay? I don’t know what your mom’s got going on in that place, and I don’t want to know.”

She shrugged and turned back to her window. That makes one of us.

Jim tilted the yoke and the plane sank through the air.