The moon, round and full like a perfect pumpkin, laid its trail of glitter across the water as Mary pedaled purposefully along the dike towards the twinkling lights. In this pre-dawn dark, icy wind whipping and the palms slapping their fronds around in response, she thought of a Christmas long ago, of a Christmas eve spent in the gentle rock of a sailboat moored offshore from twinkling lights just like these, off the shoreline of Tortola.

They said there’d be no wind on Christmas eve, and yet it came in the night with a howl to wake the dead, the ghost of hurricanes past, a mighty thrust of gusts that stripped their mooring, ripped their sail, and in the end sent Mary and Jean-Claire into the sea with one violent toss of the deck. They tread water under a storm-darkened sky until enough moonlight broke through the clouds to light the near shore. They swam to the boulders, enormous round rocks called the Baths, and sought out a soggy cave between two massive rocks in which to shelter from wind and rain– too exhausted to celebrate the holiday, two grateful to escape the storm’s wrath, sprawled on sodden sand with the drumming of the surf echoing through the chamber like the warm and close heartbeat of the world.  On Christmas Day, they emerged to the shoreline to survey the scene, sailboats smacked and toppled along the coral reef. No merriment that morning, just a grim determination to put things right.

Mary felt that same fire in her heart now. After six weeks, power likes still lay silent, poles snapped like toothpicks and tossed across the dike. Her neighbors huddled under blue tarps and boiled water. At least she could live in her tent, in her leaking store, but what of all these people without roughing-it skills? She knew a talk with Slim was more important than ever, and this was the morning for it.