Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“For courage!” she said aloud to herself, breaking off half a tablet and popping it between her chapped lips.

Outside the bungalow, the clouds had diffused and parted company and the sun had traveled closer to the earth in the night and now took up the whole sky. She started to jog to the main house, but the jostling further tenderized her skin. She walked rapidly on her toes instead, until she reached Eva at the front desk. She showed wide-eyed Eva the empty bottle of aloe and asked for more.

“Oh, no, no, you’re cooking yourself alive in this,” Eva said. Thirty minutes later, Jen had in her hands a prescription tube of shiny translucent goo and a larger store-bought tube of thick white cream, which she was to alternate applying every two hours.

On Jen’s last day in Belize, she tearfully pulled on her swimsuit and a long-sleeved T-shirt that sawed at her ground-beef flesh, popped half an Animexa tablet, took the ferry back to Caye Caulker, and, still teary under her wide straw hat, purchased a spot on a group snorkeling tour of the nearby reef. Manning the boat were two men whose names she didn’t catch.

The rest of the group in their snorkel gear kicked and splashed near the surface, peering down on the reef. Jen, her shirt still on and her thick, wet hair splayed protectively over her neck, plunged in as deep as her lungs and cumbersome snorkel mask would allow. The lumpy ocean floor stirred and heaved upward, mutating into a manta ray. Brain coral pulsed. Rainbow formations of fish fanned and feinted. The mask cut and bit into her scorched face like a machete on a picnic table. After a while she tossed her gear into the boat. She filled her lungs and dived down to the shallow ocean floor again, eyes wide open, hugging her knees, watching a turtle float by. She laughed, and watched and listened to her breath turn into bubbles until she ran out of breath.

Jen and Karina waited to put their bags through security at the Belize City airport.

“You poor thing,” Karina said from behind her big-fly sunglasses as she combed her fingers through her ponytail. “You look like you need a vacation from your vacation.”

“Yeah,” Jen said. It hurt to smile. “It was so overcast and rainy the whole day I was out with Baz Angler — so dark —I just completely forgot to put sunscreen on.”

“Out an entire day in the Caribbean and no sunblock,” Karina said, shaking her head. “Jen, what are we going to do with you?”

“I know, I know,” Jen said, nodding, her usual cushion-laugh squeaking out as a pained heh. “Heavy cloud cover is no substitute for UV protection. I learned the hard way. But as you probably know, Baz is really into reality, and I sure did get a dose of reality.”

Karina continued to shake her head, and Jen continued to nod.

“So,” Jen said, “is Travis on our flight?”

“You know, I didn’t want to say, but that brother didn’t just leave the U.S. of A. — he might have left planet earth,” Karina said, tapping her sunglasses and raising her eyebrows.

Jen’s rolling suitcase clattered onto its side, and as she leaned over, grimacing, to pull it upright, her tote bag slipped to the floor, too, tossing lip gloss and car keys onto the linoleum and setting Jen’s shoulder alight again. An eidetic image, unbidden and undeniable, burned into Jen’s mind — a gauzy silhouette of Karina atop Travis in an enormous canopy bed, her back arched, her hands scraping compulsively at her tossing hair, Travis beneath her wearing nothing but a polo shirt, counting down a multitasking round of tricep lifts on the colorful bedspread as Karina writhed above.

“I see,” Jen said, gripping the handle of her suitcase harder.

“A few irons missing in his golf bag, know what I mean?” Karina said, tongue nestled between her teeth.

Jen’s mouth was hanging open. “Wait, who are we talking about?”

Karina’s expression behind her big-fly sunglasses was inscrutable. “Your new BFF and our likely new board member,” she said. “Baz. He’s nuts. Am I right?”

“Oh, yeah, well,” Jen said, looking down at the floor. “The thing is, Karina, if that was the case — if we knew Baz was a handful — it would have been good for me to know that about him ahead of time.” Jen was talking to the floor. Her synapses ejaculated three more pumps of Karina’s hips atop Travis ungh ungh ungh before she could blink them away. “Good for LIFt, I mean,” Jen continued. “Just in terms of being able to plan ahead, to strategize — I just — I wish I’d known more ahead of time. That’s all. No harm done, of course.” She feared that she was coming across as pouty, bratty, so she wrested her features into an amiable alignment and looked up at Karina.

Twinges of pleasure played at Karina’s lips. This was who she was, Jen remembered, not for the first time. When Karina had information to disclose that could be helpful, she wouldn’t disclose, and yet when it might have conferred favor on Karina to withhold information — to appear ignorant and therefore innocent — she freely disclosed, because the clear and present benefits of demonstrable informational superiority were more palpable, more valuable to her, than the less immediately tangible benefits of trust or goodwill she might have salvaged by withholding. This was something Karina had in common with Baz Angler, Jen thought. An iron missing in their respective golf bags.

“I just don’t understand how a disagreement about whether or not Congress votes to extend unemployment benefits somehow turns into people threatening to leave before the pumpkin pie is even served,” Jen was saying to her mother on the phone.

Jen had in truth been happy for her brothers’ argument to erupt over her parents’ Thanksgiving dinner table, as the yelling and gesticulating and slamming of fists on table had drowned out her sisters-in-law’s tag-team queries about when they could expect Jen and Jim to “start a family” (in Sharon’s straightforward terms) and/or “get going already!” (Betsy’s more insouciant wording).

“Well, I admire your brothers’ passion,” Jen’s mom said. “They feel strongly about things, and that’s what they have in common, never mind politics. Their passion is their common ground.”

“It’s ridiculous, childish behavior,” Jen said.

“What are your plans for Christmas?” Jen’s mom asked.

“I still need to book the tickets,” Jen said.

“Okay, well,” Jen’s mom said, sighing heavily, “you know, I hate to bring this up, and before I do, I need you to know that I certainly don’t care about this, and your father certainly doesn’t care — I mean, he doesn’t care all that much — but I would be terribly remiss if I didn’t say something, so—”

“What? What is it?” Jen asked.

“It has been noted,” Jen’s mom said, her staccato inflection introducing a contractual formality to her speech, “that you did not spend the assigned family budget on gifts last Christmas.”

“What? Noted by who?”

“That is unimportant to the moral of the story, and—”

“What is the moral of the story?” Jen asked.

“—and it is of course completely up to you what you spend, but I would ask the two of you to try to keep the family budget in mind.”

“I thought we were supposed to spend one hundred fifty dollars per person,” Jen said.

“Right, so you and Jim should be spending three hundred dollars per recipient, because there are two of you,” Jen’s mom replied. “God, I hate this. It’s only to keep it fair, please understand that.”