Harriet gave him a distracted smile and said, “What else did you and June discuss?”
Aubrey had the sense she was trying to steer the conversation somewhere, but he couldn’t see where. He said, “We talked about how she wanted me to move on. That’s what I want to do. I want to move right on to the first thing on her list.”
“Good man,” Ronnie said. “We’re jumping in six weeks.”
Aubrey lifted his chin in a mild nod of acceptance, although his stomach knotted with nervous tension. Six weeks was so soon. Maybe his unease showed on his face anyway. Harriet was watching him with quiet, damp-eyed concern and— What the fuck? How had she wound up sitting on Ronnie’s knee?
The sight of her practically in Ronnie’s drunk-ass lap bothered him, made him uncharacteristically resentful.
“Course, we could all just go skydiving in our imaginations,” he said lightly. “And save money.”
Ronnie furrowed his brow. “And be complete pussies.”
“I thought you just said if you imagine something, it’s the same as if you lived it.”
“Jesus, man,” Ronnie said, beginning to cry. “I just lost my sister, and you’re going to make dick arguments?”
20
WHEN AUBREY AWOKE, ALMOST ELEVEN hours later, he knew something he should’ve understood months earlier. June had not told him he needed to move on from Harriet because she cared about him. June had told him to move on because she cared about Harriet, and Harriet was too sweet—or too lacking in assertiveness, take your pick—to tell Aubrey to get the fuck out of her life. That was what Harriet had been getting at on the day of the reception. What else did you and June discuss?
Harriet and June had maybe been only moments from breaking up their little goof of a folk act when he hijacked things that night in the Slithy Toves. He had made it all more serious than it had to be and than they had ever wanted it. The girls had made room for him in their lives, but only after he’d elbowed his way in and superimposed his own desires over their harmless fun.
There was, in fact, no one on the ground aside from his mother who would be unable to recover from his inexplicable disappearance. There was no life waiting for him down there, because he had never bothered to build one. He had left as little trace on the world below as the shadow of a cloud passing over a field—a notion that infuriated him and made him want to get back down there all the more.
He folded up the balloon silk just as he’d found it, following the timeworn creases. As he worked, he noted it had been reconfigured to open wider than a balloon normally would, although the ropes could still be drawn together to a single narrow point, about as wide as a man’s waist.
Aubrey trod through the wispy billows of the cloud with the thick mass of silk under one arm and the bundle of ropes under the other. His breath smoked. He quivered, although whether from the cold or indignation, he did not know. He was ashamed of the way he’d yearned for Harriet when she had so obviously not wanted him, ashamed he’d tried to back out of leaping from the plane, ashamed to be twenty-four years old and not yet to have begun to live. He clung to his shame as if it were another kind of weapon, maybe one of greater worth than the gun.
His bed and bath and coatrack were where he’d left them. He hung the piles of silk on the rack, next to his skydiving harness. If there was a point to keeping it . . . well, it wasn’t one he wanted to think about too closely. Not yet. Not when he had a gun. The gun had last been used for a suicide, but Aubrey thought it offered the possibility of a different, more satisfying form of escape. The silks and ropes, on the other hand, would do just fine later on, if all else failed and he truly had his heart set on killing himself.
He scooped up his helmet and buckled it onto his head (on the theory that you didn’t march toward a fight without armor) and turned in the direction of the palace. The spires and soaring battlements reached high into the sky, with that central dome looming above all. He’d tried to climb the dome once before and had been driven back. It seemed to him it was time to find out what it might be driving him back from. It was protecting something up there, and if it had something to protect . . . it had something that could be threatened.
He set out for the castle gates. He wondered what he’d find if he could get all the way to the top of that creamy white globe. He had a wild, probably slightly hysterical notion that there was a control panel up there, a hatch into a hidden cockpit. He imagined a black leather seat in a tiny capsule filled with blinking lights, and a bright red lever with the words “UP” and “DOWN” stamped alongside it. The thought was so adorably goofy he had to laugh.
He was still laughing at himself when he got to the moat around the palace and discovered that the bridge had been withdrawn. Twelve feet of open sky separated him from the yawning gates opening into the courtyard.
That shut him up.
21
THE VERDANT FOLDED LAND BELOW shone with the buttery golden glow of first light. The hills threw vast lakes of shadow across the vales. He spied a red barn and a silver silo, a pale green field drawn into shaggy furrows, some yellow buttons that were probably haycocks.
His Harriet of the sky watched from the far side of the moat, twisting nervously in her gown. Her Greek-statue face was hopeless and frightened.
His pulse was a hand beating a barbaric drum.
“What are you going to do if I take a step forward? Let me fall? If you could drop me, wouldn’t you have already?” he asked her. “It’s against the rules—that’s what I think.”
He wasn’t sure he really did think that. But the cloud had held on to the balloonists even after they died, had kept them for all the years since, when it could’ve drifted over Lake Erie anytime and dropped them unseen. What it caught, it kept. When he understood he was going to test this hypothesis, his abused insides seemed to overturn in a slow, heavy lurch.
“Not one thing you’ve shown me was real, and that includes your moat,” he said.
He shut his eyes and lifted one foot. His lungs seized up in his chest. His balls drew so tight to his body his testicles ached.
Aubrey stepped forward.
And dropped. His eyes flew open as he fell headfirst.
Cloud foamed outward as he plunged, spilling before him. For an instant he was tipping into open sky. But as he collapsed to hands and knees, the living fog boiled in under him and caught him.
The billowing vapor continued to spread out across the moat until it formed a slender bridge across the gap. He looked around for Sky Harriet, but she had melted away.