I push away the thought about my sister.
I can finally see the white wooden house, one of the largest in the neighborhood. The red van with the FIRST KLAS, INC. logo is still parked in the driveway. On a regular morning, Tilda’s dad would have left for work hours ago. Caroline’s car is nowhere to be seen.
I park on the street. Leave my phone on the passenger’s seat. Stina’s calling me again.
Klas opens the door before I even ring the bell. He’s wearing his stained work pants, the ones with reflective stripes. His arms, fat and muscular, burst from a tight T-shirt with the same company logo as the one on van stamped across the chest—a cartoon man holding a dripping cement trowel, grinning from underneath a jauntily angled cap. But the real Klas isn’t smiling. He’s pale beneath his stubble and his eyes bug out slightly, as if the pressure inside his head has ratcheted up.
“Hello, son,” he says, and gives me one of his awkward hugs, slapping me hard on the back. “Good God, huh?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Good God.”
“They’re saying three and a half months.”
“Yeah.”
We stand there awkwardly. I can feel the seconds ticking away, one after the other. How many seconds are three and a half months?
“She’s in her room,” Klas says at last.
I slip off my shoes near the door and run upstairs. The door to Tilda’s room is open.
She’s at the window. Sunlight makes the copper in her dark hair shimmer. She turns as I come in, looking at me with those pale eyes that change color depending on her surroundings, just like water.
“Everything looks so normal,” she says.
“I know.”
“And soon it’ll all be gone.”
I don’t know how to respond.
Her open laptop is on the bed. A muted news broadcast is streaming. The American president stands by a podium in front of blue drapes. WHITE HOUSE CONFIRMS. It occurs to me that it’s still the middle of the night over there. Quick glimpses from similar press conferences in Russia, England, Iran. They cut to an interview with the Secretary-General of the UN. I wonder what it’s like in Dominica, if Judette’s family are watching the same images.
“You’re shaking,” Tilda says quietly, stroking my newly shaved head.
I wake up, as if from a trance, and wrap my arms around her. Finally. She leans her forehead against my chest. Her hair is still damp, and I inhale the smell of chlorine and shampoo. Tilda’s smell.
“It might not happen,” she says. “It might just pass right by us. There’s a small chance.”
I don’t want to say what I’m thinking. That they wouldn’t have told us unless they were sure.
“Or they could come up with some way to fix it,” she continues. “Maybe they’ll . . . build a giant trampoline or something.”
I laugh. It comes out more like a sob. Maybe it is.
“I’m so fucking scared,” she says.
“Me too.”
Tilda looks up at me. She’s so beautiful it hurts.
She can’t die.
We kiss. The world outside disappears, shrinks until all that’s left is our mouths, our bodies. Tilda locks the door carefully so that Klas won’t hear it downstairs. I move behind her and unzip her hoodie, kiss her shoulders, tasting the chlorine that never leaves her skin completely, stroke her stomach under her white top. Then I remove that, too. Unhook her bra. I need to feel her skin against my own, as many square inches as possible.
She spreads her blanket across the floor, like we usually do when we aren’t alone in the house. Tilda’s bed is too loud.
“I didn’t bring protection,” I admit reluctantly as I get undressed.
“Does that even matter anymore?” Tilda says.
We look at each other. The world outside the room makes itself known again. I have to force it away, so I kiss her entire body, explore her like it’s the first time.
Eventually, she grows impatient and pulls me close, throws her legs around my waist, leads me in.
Whenever one of us risks making too much noise, we silence each other with new kisses. Afterward, Tilda rests her head on my arm. Her back is to me, and she’s breathing heavily. It sounds like she’s drifted off. My eyes travel over the trophies and statues above the bed. Medals with pins pushed through their colorful ribbons. A clipping from the local paper. Tilda is wearing her swimming cap in the picture, laughing under a headline that calls her “up-and-coming.”
Tilda’s wall of inspiration is full of photos. Competitions all over the country. Swim camps in Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands. Her old friend Lucinda is in most of the pictures taken before last fall.
My eyes linger on a picture from last winter’s St. Lucia Celebration. The hall, including the swimming pool, is black. Tilda is wearing a crown of candles on her head. The flames are reflected on the dark surface of the pool. She smiles like a maniac at the camera to hide how heavy the billowing robe is in the water. She never shows how much she sacrifices for this life, how much work goes into it maintaining it. I don’t know anyone as determined as Tilda. She knows exactly where she’s going. Me, I get good grades, but I still haven’t figured out what I want to be. The endless number of options is paralyzing. How am I supposed to know what I want to do in ten years? In twenty? In fifty?
But I don’t have to decide anymore.
The pins and needles are back.
Don’t think about it.
I roll onto my side, putting my free arm around Tilda, and raise my head a little to kiss her cheek.
But she’s not sleeping. She’s watching the laptop on the bed. Notifications pour into the corner of the screen. Everyone wants to know where she is. If she’s heard what’s happening. The news shows pictures from rural India. Crying women stretch their arms out toward the sky.
I close my eyes.
“I love you,” I say.
“Me too,” says Tilda, without turning around.
The End
4 WEEKS, 5 DAYS LEFT
NAME: LUCINDA
TELLUS #0392811002
POST 0001
Idon’t know a thing about whoever’s reading this. I really mean nothing.
You might be a creature who looks like me. You might be something beyond my wildest imaginings.
In movies and on TV, extraterrestrials are almost always almost-people. Something derived from us, only with some small difference: Lizard skin. A pair of extra eyes on their foreheads. Tiny bodies with giant heads. Does any of that sound like you?
Can you even call it “extraterrestrial” when there’s no more Earth?
Of course, the most likely scenario is that you don’t exist. And if against all odds you do, how will you understand me? The TellUs app has a language key, a digital Rosetta stone encoded with a few hundred human languages. Hopefully, it makes it possible for you to read the diary entries we write, to decode all the audio files that transform into text before they’re broadcast into space. But how are you supposed to understand anything beyond just the words? I mean, as I’m writing this, I’ve got a live broadcast playing in another window on my screen. The American president is giving a speech. (I don’t even want to mention his name, that’s how much I hate him. You’ll hear enough about him from other people.) He’s in the Oval Office in the White House, his hands folded on the desk in front of him, the American flag in the background. His opening line was “My fellow Americans.” I can tell you these things, but what does it actually tell you? How do I explain how difficult it is to really believe what’s going on? I still haven’t gotten used to associating this scene with anything but thousands of movies and TV shows. In them, the presidents are usually handsome, dignified, reassuring. Everything the real president isn’t. (These scenes are usually about aliens that have come to blow up Manhattan and then get thoroughly defeated. I apologize. We’ve usually assumed that you would want to colonize, enslave, or exterminate us. Probably because certain members of the human race have done this very thing to other members of the human race. I don’t know if you study psychology, but around here, we call it “projecting.”)