The Pen Pal was how Aubrey thought of Harriet’s boyfriend. When Harriet was nine, her father had taken her to San Diego on a business trip, which he stretched into a long weekend so they could catch a baseball game and visit the zoo. On their last morning, Harriet’s dad took her down for a wander along the waterfront and bought her a soda. When her Coca-Cola was gone, Harriet tucked a note into the bottle, with her address in Cleveland, a dollar bill, and a promise that there would be more money if whoever found the bottle would be her pen pal. Her father launched the sealed bottle a good hundred feet out into the sea.
Two months later, she received an envelope from someone named Chris Tybalt. He had returned her dollar bill, along with a photo of himself and an informative note. Chris was eleven, and his hobby was building and launching model rockets. He had gone to Imperial Beach, just south of San Diego, to launch his new CATO rocket, and the Coca-Cola bottle had been sticking out of the sand. He let her know that his favorite president was JFK, his lucky number was sixty-three, and he had only four toes on his right foot (accident with a firecracker). The photo, standard school issue, with a cloudy blue backdrop, showed a boy with reddish-blond hair, dimples, and braces.
They wrote letters for another three years before they met in person, when the Pen Pal was on his way across country with his grandmother. Tybalt spent a weekend at Harriet’s house, sleeping with his gram in the guest room. Harriet and the Pen Pal launched a rocket together, an Estes AstroCam that snapped a picture of them from six hundred feet up: two pale spots in a green field, a dreamy beanstalk of pink smoke leading down to their feet. By Harriet’s sophomore year in high school, they were “dating,” had switched to e-mail, and agreed they loved each other. He applied to the Kent State aeronautics program just to be near her.
Aubrey thought the Pen Pal looked like a freckled junior investigator from a young-adult novel, and never mind he was in his early twenties. He played golf with unnerving grace, looked like he’d never had acne, and had a habit of finding injured birds and nurturing them back to full health. June’s brothers loved him because he was easy to get drunk, and when he was drunk, he would try to kiss them—he called them bro kisses. Aubrey desperately wanted him to turn out to be a closeted homosexual. Unfortunately, he was just Californian. When Harriet and the Pen Pal talked about what they would name their children—Jet if it was a boy, Kennedy if it was a girl—Aubrey felt that his own life was hopeless.
There was room for Harriet in Ronnie Morris’s van, but she always went to the shows with June and Aubrey in the Volvo. The Pen Pal insisted.
“Chris says I have to,” she told Aubrey on one of these rides. “He says he doesn’t want to be our Yoko Ono.”
“Ah,” Aubrey said. “So we’re keeping lovers apart. Riding in the backseat with me is almost a form of punishment.”
“Mmm,” she said, closing her eyes and rolling her head around to get comfortable in his lap. “Like a weekly spanking.”
June cleared her throat in the front of the car in a funny way, and after a moment Harriet made a low sound of discontent and sat up, then shifted around. Harriet had a Junicorn of her own, and she made a pillow of it, dozed off with a foot of space between herself and Aubrey.
10
IN THE LATTER PART OF the afternoon, the wind picked up, whipping the surface of the impossible island into a series of rough wavelets. His island, like a cutter, was beating right into the blow, tacking this way and that. Aubrey smelled rain.
His cloud vessel fought its way toward lowering, ugly clouds, straight into a downpour like a black scarf, miles across. The first rattling pellets hit Aubrey sideways, tearing at his coat of cloud. He flinched, hugging his stuffed Junicorn protectively, as a mother caught out in the rain might’ve protected an infant. He retreated, looking for cover. An umbrella handle of white fog protruded from a bucket of cloud, next to the coatrack. He grabbed it and threw it open, and a vast spreading canvas of hard cloud opened above him.
Now and then he turned the umbrella aside to shut his eyes and open his mouth. Icy pellets of water stung his lips, tasted cold and good, tasted like licking the blade of a knife.
More rain fell into a claw-foot bathtub of dense cloud. A great pool of water, suspended in a chalice of ice. A deep puddle hanging in smoke.
They were three hours in the pelting rain before his vast ship of cloud veered off to the east and raced away from the storm. Aubrey lay flat in the day’s last dazzle of sunlight, head hung over the edge of the cloud, to watch the mile-wide shadow of his sky island racing across the green map of the world below.
By then his belly hurt from all the water he’d drunk, using a dipper as big as his own head to collect the rain from his deep tub. By then he had taken a nearly thirty-second piss off the side of the island, a golden parabola leaping into the brilliance of the afternoon. By then Aubrey Griffin had forgotten he was terrified of heights. It had, for the moment, slipped his mind.
11
THE ONE TIME SHE SLIPPED into his arms was the night they played Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine, a gig at a gastropub right off the slopes. The Pen Pal wasn’t along that time. Harriet said he had to stay at school and study, but Aubrey learned from June that there’d been a fight: ugly sobbing, terrible things said, doors slammed. Harriet had come across e-mails from a West Coast girlfriend the Pen Pal had never bothered to mention. He swore they weren’t still together, but he hadn’t seen any reason to get rid of the photos. The half-naked selfies weren’t the worst of them. The one that had really turned Harriet’s stomach was a picture of Imperial Beach from five hundred feet up, shot from an AstroCam, the Pen Pal and his West Coast Sally staring up at it together. The West Coast Sally called him “Rocket” in her e-mails.
Aubrey was sick at the news—sick with excitement. In three weeks he was due to fly to Heathrow Airport. He was doing a semester at the Royal Academy of Music, beginning right after Christmas break. He had already put half a year of savings into the flat he was renting, money he couldn’t get back, but he had a wild notion to stay, to make an insane leap, grab at a moment with Harriet.
She was stiff and uncommunicative the whole twelve-hour drive to the show, where they were opening for Nils Lofgren. Privately, Aubrey calculated that the pay would not quite cover the gas money, but they had free rooms in the resort, meal vouchers, and the lift tickets were on the house. In happier times Harriet and the Pen Pal had made plans for a full day of skiing. In a sign of how things were now, she had not even brought her skis, muttering that she’d pulled something.
“Actually, it was Rocket who pulled something, wasn’t it?” June asked as they were loading the car. Harriet replied by slamming the trunk.