Vitro (2 page)

I need you. Please come at once. I’ll look for you on Friday. Do not reply to this e-mail.
Emergency.

It was the first time in Sophie’s life that her mom had needed her, the first time she’d ever invited Sophie to the one place she’d never been allowed to go, the place that had stolen her mother from her and ended her parents’ marriage. She couldn’t go back to the U.S., not now. Not back to the stepmother who’d never loved her as much as her two natural children, not to the father with whom she’d argued to the point of tears. There was just one person in the world whom Sophie needed and now at last, impossibly and wonderfully, that person needed her back.

Jim didn’t look at the note. “You’re think you’re just gonna sail yourself out to Skin Island?”
She pursed her lips and stared resolutely over his shoulder.
“You’re crazy!” he said.
“Not crazy,” she muttered. “Desperate.”
He studied her, his eyes narrowed, as the wind ruffled his thick sun-streaked hair. Slowly, he shook his head. “If you were anyone else . . .” he murmured. “Sophie Crue. Who’d have thought? I’d almost forgotten all about you.”
“Gee,” she said. “Thanks.”
He uncrossed his arms and sighed. “I’ll take you,” he said, but before she could squeal with delight he held up a hand. “But I hope to God you know what you’re getting into.”

There wasn’t another soul in sight. The airstrip was almost completely abandoned, used only by a few locals like Jim and his dad. The airlines all went in and out of Won Pat on the northern end of Guam. This little forgotten splash of pavement was much quieter, though he still had to deal with the larger airport’s traffic control.

Two unpainted, narrow runways streaked toward the southern curve of the island, abruptly stopping just yards from the beach. The grass around them was tall and uncut, and a perpetual ocean breeze shuddered through it and curled beneath a loose flap of tin on the lone hangar, making it rattle and clap. Jim was so used to the sound he barely heard it, the same way he tuned out the steady hush of the surf and the throaty cries of the seagulls.

He ran his hands over the propeller of the plane, then along the familiar aluminum fuselage, feeling the smooth round rivets against his palm. It was warm to the touch from baking in the sun all day, and the green strip that ran from nose to tail was so faded it was nearly yellow. Dents and scratches marred the metal, each one telling a story of some landing or storm or parking mishap, and the floats beneath it had churned as much water as any boat. He knew each ding and dent by heart. Despite its age and appearance, Jim trusted N614JA more than the pavement beneath his feet. He fingered a scratch along the engine cowl that had come from a freak collision with a seagull during takeoff three years ago.

“Well, beauty, I guess we’d better get going,” he said, slapping the edge of the wing as he ducked beneath it. When he came up on the other side, he found himself face-to-face with Sophie Crue. Her long blonde hair and thin white cargo shirt fluttered in the salty breeze. Little Sophie Jane, all grown up.

“You made it,” Jim said. He’d told her it would take a while to get the plane fueled and prepped, so she’d gone off in search of something to eat. That had given him an entire hour to reconsider the deal he’d made. On the one hand, this was Sophie Crue, who’d been his faithful follower for years, letting him drag her from one mild crime to the next, playing the sidekick to all his superhero shenanigans, covering for him when he set things on fire or broke valuable items. On the other, it was Skin Island he was flying to. The only aircraft flying in and out of Skin Island were black, expensive helicopters piloted by men in dark suits and sunglasses. They used the main airport, but never stopped to hobnob with the locals. He knew where the island was—the other pilots all did, because they had to avoid it—but he’d also heard the story about Nandu. The island had a whole canon of urban legends attached to it: boaters who sailed there and never returned, strange lights on the shorelines in the middle of the night, labcreated monsters that were half-man, half-beast. Jim didn’t put much stock in most of the rumors that went around about the place, but he knew better than to test them himself. Now those stories cut through his thoughts like an emergency alert on the television, a warning he was tempted to heed.

He had vague memories of Sophie’s parents, both doctors or scientists or something, who had worked on Guam but went out to Skin Island several times a week. When they did, Sophie stayed with him and Ginya, his Chamorro nanny. His mom had been a professor, and if he remembered it correctly, she met Sophie’s parents at the labs in the university, which they used from time to time. Those days were a distant haze, another life. He thought of that time period as Before She Left, and it was a vault of memories he rarely opened. It only left him with a sucking hollowness in his chest. But Sophie Crue . . . She was a memory he didn’t mind reliving, especially now that she was here in the flesh, nine years older than when he’d last seen her. What can I do? Tell her no? Watch her walk away, disgusted with me?

According to Nandu, the airstrip that serviced the island was set on a smaller spit of land just off its north shore; he might not even need to set foot on Skin Island itself. He’d stay with the plane, let Sophie do her thing, not get involved. He ignored the voice in his head that pointed out that as many times as he’d sworn to stay out of other people’s problems, it wasn’t really his style, and interfering had gotten him in more trouble than he cared to add up. Not this time, though. He’d help Sophie, but he wanted nothing to do with Skin Island itself.

“Are you sure this thing is safe?” Sophie asked, giving his plane a dubious look.
Jim didn’t deign to answer that. “You ready to go?”
“Sure.”
She looked ragged, as if she hadn’t slept in days, with shadows under her eyes and tangles in her hair. She was obviously going through some kind of hell, but was trying her best to just keep it together for a little while longer. He knew the feeling all too well.
“Not too much daylight left,” he said. “You’ll have one hour on the ground, two at the max. Got it? No delays. This trip—well, being Skin Island and all, I’ll kind of be flying below the radar. Don’t want to broadcast it to the whole world. They’re touchy that way, these scientists.”
“What do you know about them?” she asked sharply.
“Not much.” Jim opened the passenger door. “You sure about this?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” She gripped the metal doorway and pulled herself into the cockpit, and he had to duck to avoid being slammed in the face by her backpack.
“You want to go to Skin Island.”
“If it’s so bad,” she leaned out of the doorway until her nose was inches from his, her turquoise eyes burning with a look that brought back an onslaught of memories, most of them involving their five-year-old selves running wild through the street markets, “why are you taking me there?”
Jim shut the door, making her sit back quickly to avoid getting caught in it. He grumbled to himself as he made one last walk around the plane, asking himself the same question. It came down to one, she was pretty and needed help and that was a powerful combination, and two, simply for old time’s sake. As he climbed into the pilot’s seat and jammed his ancient headset over his ears, a third reason occurred to him: I’m an idiot.
Well. It was done now, and he wasn’t one to go back on a promise. He checked to be sure Sophie’s seat belt was strapped over all the right places and securely fastened—he was paranoid about seat belts ever since a Japanese tourist kid had left his off and gotten his head knocked on the ceiling during landing, resulting in a concussion that had severely damaged Jim’s dad’s finances (such as they were) in the resulting insurance fiasco.
Then he went though the preflight procedures, checking the throttle, flaps, instruments, brakes, on and on the list went. He set the altimeter, then pulled the headset over his ears and pulled a scratched pair of aviators from under the seat and slid them over his eyes. The plane rumbled and vibrated around him, making his heart beat faster. There was nothing more exhilarating than flying. When he was fifteen, and his mom finally gave up on him and his dad and returned to the States, Jim spent more time above the ground than on it, covering hundreds of miles of open sea and sky, trying to lose himself in the vast blue-white atmosphere. On the ground, he only ever felt half himself, an empty body going through practiced motions while his soul lingered in the clouds. Every time he went up, it was like slipping back into his real skin, like coming up for air after being too long underwater. Easy and natural and right.
Like going home.
The cramped, weathered plane felt more like home than the house he and his dad lived in. He thought of his dad, whom he’d found that morning passed out on their dilapidated porch, surrounded by empty bottles. Jim had dragged him inside and left him on the couch. It was becoming an all-too-common routine each morning.
He pulled an extra headset from the pocket behind Sophie’s seat and dropped it in her lap. “Put that on.” She pulled it over her ears, adjusted the arm of the mic, and then gave him a dazzling smile. He sighed and pushed her backpack over so he could reach the throttle.
Jim revved the engine and the plane jerked into a taxi. The Cessna roared up to speed, fighting to leap into the air, but Jim waited until he was nearly out of pavement before pulling back on the yoke. The climb was steep and swift, just how he liked it. Back when he’d bothered to care, Jim’s dad had always criticized him for flying recklessly, but he himself was just as bad. He glanced at Sophie, wondering if she’d get sick from the rapid, rattling ascent, but she looked absorbed in her own thoughts as she stared out at the towering clouds rising around them like ghostly, vaporous skyscrapers. The smile was gone. He knew she must be worrying about her mom, and whatever emergency had called her to this godforsaken armpit of the universe.
When he reached six thousand feet, Jim leveled the plane and settled back for the short flight to Skin Island, hoping that in doing so, he wasn’t making a terrible mistake.

I’m going to Skin Island.
It hardly felt real.
But the plane around her certainly felt real; it jolted and 
shuddered worse than a subway train. When it bucked suddenly, throwing her against the seat belt, she reached out and grabbed Jim’s arm, her stomach and heart tangled in her throat.

“You okay?” His voice was muffled in her ears, the headset 
transmitting so much static she winced.

“Fine.” She let go of his arm, embarrassed by her jumpiness. He had only one hand on the yoke, and the other rested lightly on a knob on the center console. His amber eyes studied her sidelong from behind his dark aviators, and his lips quirked into a half smile.
“Scared of flying?” he asked. “We used to go up all the time with my dad, remember?”
“Not scared,” she replied quickly. “It’s just been a while since I was in such a small plane. I forgot how bumpy—ah!” The Cessna tilted to the right, and she clamped her teeth onto her lower lip and slammed a hand into the window to steady herself. Jim laughed.
“You’re doing great!” he shouted.
“I should have known you’d end up here,” she said. “You loved this when we were kids.”
He laughed again, and the knot of nerves in Sophie’s stomach slowly relaxed. There was something soothing in his easy confidence, the way his eyes lit up as the plane gained altitude. Compared to this Jim, the one she’d spoken to on the ground had been half asleep. She found herself staring at the line of his jaw, the way the corners of his lips continually twitched as if he were always on the verge of a smile. His thick, dark hair crested over his forehead in an unruly wave, and she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to attack it with a pair of scissors or run her fingers through it. She was intrigued and a bit shy of this grown-up Jim, unsure of how much of the boy she’d once known still remained.
Realizing she was staring a bit too long, Sophie turned away and stared through the windshield. Above them stretched a ceiling of clouds, bending away to the horizon. She felt a flutter of claustrophobia in her gut—a strange feeling, considering I’m surrounded by the whole of the sky—and to distract herself, she reached out and ran a finger over the yoke in front of her, wondering how it worked. She gripped it with both hands and tried to imagine what it would be like to fly the plane. A string of white beads hung from the ceiling; they swayed with every movement of the plane. On each bead was carved a word in a language Sophie did not recognize. She reached up and took them in her fingers, running her thumb over the delicate letters. “What does it say?”
Jim glanced at the beads. For a moment he didn’t reply, and she peeked behind his sunglasses to see his eyes had a faraway look. “It’s a Chamorrita poem.”
Chamorrita. The call and response poetry sung by the Chamorro people, who were Guam’s original inhabitants.
She remembered sitting on Ginya’s lap as she sat on the porch with the other Chamorro women, braiding jewelry to sell to the tourists and singing intricate, clever verses back and forth, like freestyle rap, except sung by grandmothers. I forgot how much I loved this place.
“So what does it say?”
“It says, ‘There is no brightness without darkness. There is no body without its shadow.’”
She let go of the beads, and they swung back and forth hypnotically, the sunlight flashing off them. “Some kind of good luck charm?”
He drummed his fingers on the yoke, and his tongue darted across his lips. “So your mom moved out to Skin Island full time, huh?”
“Yeah. I don’t remember the details, and she doesn’t talk about it, but I think she was promoted or something and had to move closer to the lab out there. That’s when Dad and I moved to Boston. He teaches biology.”
“Remarried?”
“Yeah. Her name’s Karen. She has two kids, younger than me. What about your folks?”
“About the same as yours. Mom split three years ago, haven’t seen her since.”
Sophie stared at her hands in her lap. “Sucks.” “Yeah.” He shifted in his seat, lifted a hand to massage the back of his neck. “Have you been to Skin Island before?” “Never.” But not for lack of begging. Sophie leaned her head against the glass window, then sat up again when the vibration made her teeth rattle. “I see my mom three times a year at least, and she e-mails and calls a lot. We’ve stayed close, considering.” Considering the distance. Considering how much my dad hates every moment I spend with her. She’d never understood why her dad loathed her mom so much, or
what had severed them so severely apart all those years ago. Maybe Skin Island held the answers; it had certainly been a recurring topic of contention in their house when she was seven.
“We sure tore it up, didn’t we?” Jim asked, lightening the mood with a grin. “Back when we were kids.”
Sophie snorted and propped her elbow against the window, resting her head on her hand as she looked at him. “It’s lucky I did move, or you might’ve landed me in jail.” “Nah. You were too cute to get in trouble. It was me they always blamed.” He winked at her, and she rolled her eyes. “You were the one that deserved it!” She studied him thoughtfully. “So how have you been, anyway?”
“Oh. You know.” He shrugged. “Nothing changes here.
Same old faces, same old drama.”
“What about Ginya?”
“She left when I was about ten, to take care of her mom in Yigo. I’ll see her every now and then. She hasn’t changed a bit. You’d recognize her right off. She’s like, ageless or something.”
Sophie smiled, comforted by the idea that some people never changed, could always be depended on to be exactly the way they should.
“What about you?” he asked. “Boston, huh?”
“Ugh. It’s cold and dirty. I miss here.” She turned and looked down at the blue water below. “I miss the beaches and the never ending summer.”
He grimaced. “I’ll trade you. You know I’ve never been to the States? I’m a U.S. citizen but I’ve never once set foot on the continent of North America.”
“You have a deal,” she said. But it wasn’t Guam she wanted, not really. It was Skin Island. This was the argument that had her and her dad at each other’s throats lately.
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.
Sophie’s stomach rose and for a single moment she felt entirely weightless. Within seconds, she was looking straight ahead at the island instead of down at it; the plane seemed so close to the sea that she imagined she could reach down and drag her fingers through the water.
The plane began to jerk and shudder the lower they went, and Sophie gripped her seat and felt her stomach turn over, threatening to slosh up her breakfast. Jaw clamped tightly shut, Sophie trained her eyes on Jim, as if somehow she could will him to make the wind stop throwing itself against the plane. He must have noticed her discomfort, because he gave her a lopsided grin. “Don’t worry,” he said, rolling his shoulders as if he was on a casual stroll down the beach. “I can handle this.” “Then shut up and start handling it,” she said through her teeth.
Jim laughed. The plane tilted violently onto its side and for a moment, she was certain they would roll over and slam into the ocean. The grin on Jim’s lips slipped, and then she really began to feel nauseated.
“What’s wrong?” she shouted, resisting the urge to grab onto his arm and hang on for dear life.
“We’re fine!” he insisted.
The island rushed up to them. Too fast too fast, she thought, pressing into her seat with her eyes stretched wide and her heart pounding. Palms whipped past them, and suddenly there was a ribbon of tarmac unraveling below. The plane slammed onto the ground and Sophie was certain that was the end, it was over, she would die—but Jim was