Judith Arnold - Right Place, Wrong Time

“I like the way it smells,” Alicia said as they strolled back along the boardwalk toward Palm Point. She held Gina’s hand and added a little skip to her step. “It smells hot.”

“It is hot,” Gina pointed out. “I think what you’re smelling is the ocean and all the plants and flowers.”

“This isn’t the ocean,” Alicia argued. “The ocean is gray.”

“Up north it is. Down here it’s turquoise. I guess this is actually a sea, anyway. The Caribbean Sea.”

“The Carrybeaner Sea,” Alicia said. Gina didn’t bother to correct her. “Can we do that thing with the tubes tomorrow? What’s it called? The thing with the masks and the tubes.”

“Snorkeling. Sure.” Gina pointed to a cabanalike building on the pool patio near the beach. “We can rent some equipment there.”

“Is it hard?” Alicia peered up at her bravely. “I want to do it anyway, but is it hard?”

“No. It’s really easy.” Gina had tried snorkeling a couple of years ago, when she and a couple of friends had spent a long weekend at a lakeside inn in the Poconos Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. The most interesting marine life they’d seen through their masks had been minnows flashing past them and underwater reeds that billowed and danced every time had Gina kicked her flippered feet. It had been fun—and very easy. Alicia knew how to swim; snorkeling would come naturally to her.

Alicia sighed. “I love it here. Can we stay forever?”

Gina might have argued that Alicia hadn’t been in St. Thomas long enough to fall in love. She suspected that what her niece loved was being far away from her feuding parents. “I wish we could stay here forever, too,” she admitted. “No more work, and no more school for you—” a prospect that roused a cheer from Alicia “—and every day at the beach. And dinner at a restaurant every night. I could get into that.”

“Then let’s stay!”

“But we’d run out of money,” Gina pointed out. “And after a while you’d miss your friends.” She didn’t dare suggest Alicia would miss her parents. “And you’d never learn algebra.”

“You can teach me. What’s algebra?”

“It’s a kind of math you have to learn in ninth grade.” And then never use again, Gina thought, although she actually did use math a fair amount in designing shoes. Not algebra specifically, but she supposed all those years she’d spent in high school, learning trig and history and the periodic table, did her as much good as the classes she’d taken in design and sculpture and color theory.

They had reached the Palm Point pool, which gave off a faint whiff of chlorine. The sky stretched salmon pink above them, and the tide carried a constant breeze in on the waves. If Gina hadn’t brought Alicia with her to St. Thomas, she’d probably be only just getting ready to go out now. She’d have located a club where she could stay until closing time, consuming fruity tropical drinks and dancing until she was sweaty and every muscle in her body ached. She loved dancing, especially with people who smiled, laughed and danced as enthusiastically as she did. She never went to clubs to pick up guys. She just wanted to enjoy the music with them.

But strolling through the humid tropical evening with Alicia had its own satisfactions, most of them at least as gratifying as dancing at a club would have been. Maybe she’d teach Alicia how to dance, and they could blast songs on the radio in the condo and dance around the living room.

No, they couldn’t. Not with Ethan and What’s-her-face sharing the unit.

Ethan and What’s-her-face were still gone when Gina let Alicia and herself into the condo. They’d unpacked their things in the master bedroom, though. Gina was going to hate spending her week so conscious of them, alert to their presence and their absence, wondering when they would arrive and when they would depart. Alicia seemed more relaxed about the arrangement, however. She flopped onto the sofa, turned on the TV and flipped through the channels until she found a Spanish-language station. A variety show was on—lots of showgirls in skimpy outfits with fluffy feathers attached in strategic places, everyone speaking machine-gun-rapid Spanish. Alicia giggled. “We get this channel at home,” she said.

“Good. Maybe you’ll learn some Spanish,” Gina suggested, crossing to the kitchen for a can of soda. Swinging open the fridge, she spotted a six-pack of beer that hadn’t been there before—a local brew with Bluebeard the pirate on the label—as well as a red-waxed sphere of Gouda and a jar of olives. Ethan and Blondie must have gone shopping. Their grocery list clearly differed from Gina’s, which had included such gourmet delicacies as cornflakes, milk, peanut butter, bread and bananas.

The beer tempted. What would those people do if Gina helped herself to a bottle? Would they bill her? Short-sheet her bed? Toss her over the balcony?

She’d had enough roommates in her life—starting with her sister, Ramona, and including fellow students at the Rhode Island School of Design, a couple of apartment mates boasting various levels of neatness, consideration and integrity, and six other people one summer when a friend had talked her into participating in a group rental in Southampton. Every Friday, she’d spent two hours on an overcrowded train to reach their overcrowded bungalow three miles from the beach, where she’d slept on a mattress on the floor and argued with a ditzy platinum-blond wanna-be actress who was always leaving her shoes in the middle of the kitchen floor and a junior stockbroker who had loud sex with a different woman every night, and a social-climbing gay couple who bickered incessantly about which parties to crash. She still remembered the scream fest that had erupted when the stockbroker had helped himself to the gay guys’ orange juice. World War Three would not be so cataclysmic.

No, Gina wouldn’t take a bottle of beer. The last thing she wanted Alicia to witness this week was a fight.

She popped open a can of her own Diet Coke, wandered back into the living room, settled on the sofa next to Alicia and kicked off her sandals. She didn’t want to watch Mexico’s answer to the Rockettes, so she flipped through the channels until she found a nature show on yaks.

“This looks good,” Alicia said, snuggling up to Gina.

Gina arched her arm around her precious niece and planted a kiss on Alicia’s silky black hair. “It looks great,” she said, settling back into the cushions and grinning.

ETHAN COULD COME UP with an extensive list of reasons for his insomnia: a strange bed, a strange room, a strange climate. Jet lag—although flying south and losing only one hour shouldn’t have thrown him off that badly. Irritation with Kim’s parents—that was a likely culprit. Irritation with Kim. Guilt over being in bed with her after implying to her parents that he would sleep on the couch. Guilt over being in bed with her and not wanting to make love.

Awareness of Gina Morante.

He felt guilt about that, too. Major guilt. Kim slept soundly on her half of the bed, the familiar scent of her face cream wafting into the air around him. But he picked up a different scent, faint, almost subliminal. Gina’s scent.

Kim hadn’t seemed upset when he’d gently rebuffed her attempt to seduce him. “I’m beat,” he’d explained, a perfectly reasonable excuse. He’d endured a long flight with a ninety-minute layover in Atlanta, the stress of driving on the wrong side of the road, the much greater stress of behaving courteously toward Kim’s overbearing parents, the hauling of luggage to the unit in Palm Point, the scaring up of a suitable hotel room at a resort down the road, more driving, stocking up on drinks and snacks, unpacking the groceries and the suitcases, dressing for dinner, enduring a three-hour meal with the Hamiltons, complete with aperitifs and a fifty-year-old bottle of wine, listening to Ross and Delia describe all the far superior resorts where they had vacationed over the years and bobbing and weaving through an interrogation concerning Ethan’s politics, which were located a good few miles to the left of Ross Hamilton’s. Ethan and Kim had dropped her parents off at their hotel and returned to Palm Point at around eleven. He hadn’t been lying to her when he’d said he was too tired to do anything more than brush his teeth and fall into bed.