I jump; I can’t help it, and I don’t like the way Kalinda laughs at me, her head poking through the window. I get up and open the door for her. She walks into the room and gestures at the TV. “These are all the stations my father won’t buy.” And she walks away, down the hall, opening each door and oohing and aahing, until she opens one door and calls the Lord’s name in vain. When I follow her to see what she’s staring at, I can’t help but call the Lord’s name too.
The bedroom is as big as my house. It has a ceiling so high I feel like I’m in church, and the one bed has see-through sheets covering it so it shimmers in the light of the window. Kalinda runs to that bed so fast that when she lands, she bounces high into the air. I follow, and we jump and bounce on the bed until I fall off with a thud that shakes the whole room. Even I have to laugh, rolling around on the floor.
When our laughing gets quiet, we stay still, staring at whatever it is we’re staring at. I’m staring out at the ocean. I can see the green mirage of Saint John. Closer to Saint Thomas is Water Island. I can see it just fine from the window. If I look hard enough, I can probably see my house too, and see the window that looks into the kitchen, and see my pa sitting at the table, waiting for his two women to come home.
Night is coming. I can tell from the way the sky starts to turn colors like a kaleidoscope. Night is when the cruise ships begin to leave. I can see them at Havensight Dock, backing away from Saint Thomas slowly. It’s peaceful, watching them, until the horns go off like sirens, so loud they hurt my teeth. The walls and floor shudder, and Kalinda and I both cover our ears. When the horns stop, we’re still there with our hands covering our ears, and we laugh at each other. And I think suddenly that if I love Kalinda, maybe there’s a chance Kalinda loves me too, and maybe we could share our first kiss together—maybe she could even become my wife—but I get too scared to even mention such a possibility, and instead we smile at each other in the quiet.
We get hungry, so we go downstairs to the kitchen to see if Oprah left any good food behind. The cabinets are only filled with hurricane food: cold Vienna sausage, stale crackers, and gallons of water.
“There isn’t anything else?” I ask. I always get a little bad-tempered whenever I’m hungry.
“I’m afraid not,” Kalinda says.
We pop open the cans and put them on the living room floor in front of the TV. The TV is the only light, because bulbs haven’t been put into the lamps yet and the sun is now long gone. It starts to get cold once the sun is down and the trade wind kicks up from the Arctic over the ocean and comes right into the condo. Since Kalinda is still wet from her swim by the docks, she starts sneezing and coughing. We watch white people on the TV screen for a while, but even the movies with guns and fast cars and explosions get boring after a while.
“My auntie and dad are going to be so pissed,” Kalinda says.
I don’t know what my pa will do. My ma was the one to discipline me, and depending on my crime, I had a good idea of what my punishment would be. Bad grades meant no television; not eating my dinner meant no dessert. Talking back meant a slap across the mouth, but I never liked talking back to my ma that much when she was around. I liked listening to her when she told me to do something—wash the dishes, clean my room—because I liked the smile she had for me when I was done. When she left, my pa tried telling me to do the same things, but he didn’t have a smile for me at the end of it, so I stopped doing what he said.
“We should go to bed,” Kalinda says. “We’ll have a long day tomorrow.”
We turn off the television and climb into bed. Kalinda is still wet, so the dampness spreads from her and onto the sheets so, before long, I’m shivering too. Kalinda notices. She takes me into her arms, but since her skin is cold too, we do nothing but shiver together.
When I wake up, it’s to a voice. I think Kalinda has woken up before me and turned on the TV, but when I open my eyes, I see that she’s still asleep, turned over and with her arms covering her face from the light coming in through the balcony doors. I sit up to figure out where the voice came from. I freeze when I see the security guard. It’s the same one who’d been sitting in his hot box. He must have been going from condo to condo to make sure that the iguanas didn’t manage to get in.
He stands at the door, yelling and cussing us good. “You want to go to jail, eh?” he asks. “You want to go to jail!”
Kalinda wakes up not a heartbeat later. When she opens her eyes and sees the guard, she gets out of bed carefully, eyes on the security guard’s baton, which is gripped in a meaty hand.
“You’re coming with me,” the guard says over and over again. He
