The day after I learn that the island is not reopening, I walk into town to
the bank, hoping to figure out a way to transfer money from my account in New York here. The bank is closed, but near the docks a bright collection of tables have been set up underneath a tent. Masked for safety, locals move up and down the aisles, picking up wares and chatting with each other. It
looks like a flea market.
I hear my name, and I turn to see Abuela waving at me.
Although Abuela and I do not speak a common language, I’ve learned a few Spanish phrases, and the rest of our communication is still gestures and
nods and smiles. She worked, I now know, at the hotel where I was going to stay, cleaning the rooms of guests. With the business closed, she is happy to cook and watch her telenovelas and take an unscheduled vacation.
She is standing behind a card table that has been draped with an embroidered cloth. On it are a few folded aprons, a box of some men’s clothing, two pairs of shoes. There is also a cake pan and a small crate of vegetables and fruits like the ones Gabriel brought me. A word-search
magazine is open in front of her, with a little sheaf of G2 postcards (does everyone have these?) stuck inside as a placeholder.
Abuela smiles widely and points to the folding lawn chair she has set up behind the table. “Oh, no,” I say. “You sit!” But before she can respond, another woman approaches us. She picks up a pair of the shoes, looking at the tongue for the size, and through her mask asks Abuela a question.
They exchange a few more sentences, and then the woman sets on the table a large tote. Inside are jars of preserves, pickled garlic, red peppers. Abuela takes out one jar of jam and another of peppers. The woman slips the shoes into her tote and moves off to the next table.
I glance around and realize that although transactions are going on all around me under this tent, no one is exchanging money. The locals have figured out a barter system to combat their limited supply chain from the
mainland. Abuela pats my arm, points to the chair, and then wanders down the aisle to survey the wares other locals have carted from home.
I can see double-jointed racks of used clothing, mud boots lined up in size order, kitchen utensils, paper goods. Some tables groan heavy with homemade bread or sweets, jars of beets and banana peppers. There are
fresh cuts of lamb and plucked chickens. Sonny, from Sonny’s Sunnies, has brought a full array of bathing suits and batteries and magazines and books. A fisherman with a cooler full of the catch of the day wraps up a fish in newspaper for a woman who hands him, in return, a bouquet of fresh herbs.
I could trade, too. But I don’t have a surfeit of clothing or food I’ve grown or the ability to cook anything worth bartering for.
I run my hand back over my hair, smoothing my ponytail. I wonder what I could get for a scrunchie.
Just then, a zephyr of boys blows between the rows of tables. One small one straggles at the back, like the tail of a kite. He’s red-faced and clearly trying to catch up to the bigger boys, the leader of whom is waving a battered comic book. As I watch, another boy sticks out his foot and trips the little one, who goes flying and lands headfirst under one of the tables.
His crash stops the chase. Rolling onto his back, he sits up and shouts at the boy still holding the book. Even in Spanish, it’s clear he has a lisp—which the bigger boy mocks. The bully rips the comic book in half and tosses it onto the smaller boy’s chest before sauntering away.
The boy on the ground looks around to see who witnessed his humiliation. When his eye catches mine, I wave him closer.
Slowly, he walks toward me. He has dark brown skin and ravenwing hair that catches the sun. The mask he’s wearing has the Green Lantern symbol on it. He clutches his torn comic book.
Impulsively I pull one of the G2 postcards from Abuela’s magazine and root around for the pencil she was using to do the word searches. I flip the postcard to its empty side, and with quick, economical strokes, I begin to sketch the boy.
The summer between high school and college, I spent a month in Halifax, doing portraits of tourists in the Old City. I made enough money to stay at a hostel with my friends, and to spend the nights in bars. It was, I realize, the last time I traded in art of my own creation. After that, I spent every holiday building up my résumé for the internship slot at Sotheby’s.
Every artist has a starting point, and mine was always the eyes. If I could capture those, the rest would fall into place. So I look for the dots of light on his pupils; I draw in the flutter of lashes and straight slants of brow.
After a moment, I pull at the strap of my mask, so that it swings free of my face, and then motion to him to do the same.
He’s missing his front four teeth, so of course I draw that smile. And
because confidence is a superpower, I give him a cape, like the hero in his torn comic book.
What feels rusty at first begins to flow. When I’m done, I pass the postcard to him, a mirror made of art.
Delighted, he runs the length of the tent, thrusting it toward a woman who must be his mother. I see some of the boys who’d been bullying him drift over, looking at what’s in his hands.
I sit down, satisfied, and lean back in the lawn chair.
A moment later the boy returns. He is holding a fruit I’ve never seen before, the size of my fist, and armored with tiny spikes. Shyly, he sets it on the table in front of me and nods a thank-you, before darting back to his mother’s table.
I scan the tent, searching for Abuela, and suddenly hear a small voice.
“Hola.”
The girl in front of me is thin as a bean, with dusty bare feet and braids in her hair. She holds out a dimpled green Galápagos orange.
“Oh,” I say. “I don’t have anything to trade.”
She frowns, then pulls another postcard from Abuela’s magazine. She
holds it out to me, and tosses her braids over her shoulders, striking a pose.
Maybe I do.
When Abuela and I leave the feria two hours later, I am no richer in cash, but I have a straw sunhat, a pair of athletic shorts, and flip-flops. Abuela
cooks me lunch: lamb chops, blue potatoes, and mint jelly that I received in return for my portraits. Dessert is the spiny fruit the boy gave me: guanábana.
Afterward, belly full, I leave Abuela’s so I can take a nap at home. It is the first time, in my own mind, I’ve called it that.
To: [email protected] From: [email protected]
It’s crazy—everything’s been shut down. There are no flights out, and none in, and no one knows when that’s gonna change. It’s probably safer that way. Even if you could fly
into the U.S., it’s a shit-show. You’d probably have to quarantine somewhere for a couple of weeks, because we don’t even have enough Covid tests right now for the people who are coming into the hospital with symptoms.
The truth is that even if you were home, I wouldn’t be. Most of the residents who have families are staying at hotels, so they don’t infect anyone accidentally. Even though I’m alone in the apartment, after I peel off my scrubs in the entry and stuff them in a laundry bag, the first thing I do is shower until my skin hurts.
You know Mrs. Riccio, in 3C? When I came home last night, I saw people I didn’t recognize going in and out of her apartment. She died of Covid. The last interaction I had with her was five days ago, in the mailroom. She was a home health aide and she was terrified of catching it. The last thing I said to her was, Be careful out there.
One of my patients—she was extubated successfully but was in multiorgan failure and I knew she wasn’t going to last the day—had a brief moment of consciousness when I went in to see her. I was in full PPE and she couldn’t see my face well so she thought I was her son. She grabbed my hand and told me how proud she was of me. She asked if I’d hug her goodbye. And I did.
She was alone in her room and she was going to die that way. I was crying under my face shield and I thought: Well, if I catch it I catch it.
I know I took an oath. Do no harm and all that. But I don’t remember saying I’d kill myself to do it.
Once we saw a movie, I don’t remember the name, where there was a WWI soldier who was all of twenty, in a trench with a new recruit who was eighteen. The bullets were all around and the twenty-year-old was calmly smoking while the younger kid shook like a leaf. He asked, How can you not be scared? The older soldier said: You don’t have to be afraid of dying, when you’re already dead.
Whatever is going to happen is going to happen, I figure.
I read that the Empire State Building will be lit up red and white this week for healthcare workers. We don’t give a fuck about the Empire State Building, or about people banging pots and pans at 7 P.M. Most of us won’t ever see or hear it, because we’re in the hospital trying to save people who can’t be saved. What we want is for everyone to just wear a mask. But then there are people who say that requiring a mask is a gross infringement of their bodily rights. I don’t know how to make it any more clear: you don’t have any bodily rights when you’re dead.
I’m sorry. You don’t need to listen to me vent. But then again, this probably isn’t even getting through to you.
Just in case it is: your mom’s place keeps calling.
A few days later, while Beatriz is occupied making tortillas with her grandmother, I ask to borrow Abuela’s phone to leave another message for Finn. Gabriel has taught me how to dial direct internationally, but calls are expensive, and I don’t want Abuela to incur the costs, so I keep the conversation brief—just letting Finn know I’m all right, and I’m thinking of him. I save everything else for the postcards Beatriz mails.
Then I call my mother’s memory care facility. Although I haven’t received any emails or voicemail from them, that may be a function of the internet here, since Finn said they’ve left messages on our landline at the apartment. The last time The Greens reached out so doggedly, there was a
glitch in the direct deposit that paid my mother’s monthly room and board.
The administration was all over it like white on rice, until I smoothed out the mistake and their money came through the wire. It will not be easy to sort out another bank error from a quarantined island.
I dial the number and a receptionist answers. “This is Diana O’Toole,” I say. “Hannah O’Toole’s daughter. You’ve been trying to reach me?”
“Hold please,” I hear.
“Ms. O’Toole?” A new voice speaks a moment later. “This is Janice Fleisch, the director here—I’m glad you finally called back.”
It feels pejorative, and I try not to get my hackles raised.
I look over at the counter, where Abuela is showing a recalcitrant Beatriz how to knead lard into flour to make dough. Curling the phone line around me, I turn, hunching my shoulders for privacy. “Is there a problem with my account? Because I’m not in New York at the—”
“No, no. Everything’s fine there. It’s just that … we’ve had an outbreak of Covid at our facility, and your mother is ill.”
Everything inside me stills. My mother has been sick before, but it’s never merited a call.
“Is she … does she need to go to the hospital?” Were they calling to get my permission?
“Your mother has a DNR,” she reminds me, a delicate way of saying that no matter how bad it gets, she won’t be given CPR or taken to the hospital for life-sustaining measures. “We have multiple residents who’ve contracted the virus, but I assure you we’re doing everything we can to keep them comfortable. In the spirit of transparency we felt that you—”
“Can I see her?” I don’t know what I could possibly do from here; but something tells me that if my mother is really, really sick, I will know by looking at her.
I think of Mrs. Riccio, in apartment 3C. “We’re not allowing visitors right now.”
At that, a crazy laugh breaks out of me. As if I could even come. “I’m stuck, outside the country,” I explain. “I barely have any phone service. There has to be something you can do. Please.”
There’s a muffled sound, an exchange of words I can’t hear. “If you call back this number, we’ll get one of our aides to FaceTime with you,” I hear, and I fumble around for a pen. Abuela has a marker attached to a
whiteboard on her fridge; I grab it and write the digits down on the back of my hand.
When I hang up, my hand is shaking. I know that people who catch this virus do not always die. I also know that many do.
If my mother sees me on video, she might not even recognize me. She could get agitated, just by being forced to talk to someone she can’t place.
But I also know I need to see her with my own eyes.
I am so focused on this, I forget I am in a place that lacks the technology to make this possible.
I hang up Abuela’s phone and punch the new number into my cell, but
there isn’t a signal. “Dammit,” I snap, and Abuela and Beatriz both look up. “I’m sorry,” I mutter, and I dart out to the porch, holding my phone up in
various directions as if I could attract connectivity like a magnet.
Nothing.
I smack my phone down beside me and press the heels of my hands to my eyes.
She has been an absent mother, and now I am an absent daughter. Is that quid pro quo? Do you owe someone only the care they provided for you? Or does believing that make you as culpable as they were?
If she dies, and I’m not there … Well.
Then you won’t be responsible for her anymore.
The thought, shameful and insidious, vibrates in my mind. “Diana.”
I look up to find Gabriel standing in front of me, holding a hammer. Has he been here the whole time? “My mother’s sick,” I blurt out.
“I’m sorry …”
“She has Covid.”
He takes a step back involuntarily, and rubs his free hand across the nape of his neck.
“She’s in an assisted living facility and I’m supposed to video-chat but my stupid phone still won’t work here and—” I swipe at my eyes, frustrated and embarrassed. “This sucks. This just sucks.”
“Try mine,” he suggests. He pulls out his own phone, but it’s not the device that’s the problem. It’s this whole damn island. While the local cellular network seems to function, anything that requires any real bandwidth is a complete loss.
Gabriel types something into his phone and then says, “Come with me.” I fall into place beside him, but he is walking so fast I have to jog to keep up.
He stops at the hotel I was supposed to stay at. Although I’ve tried to steal its Wi-Fi, as Beatriz suggested, the network hasn’t shown up—likely
because the business is shuttered. This time, however, Elena is standing outside the door, waiting with a ring of keys. “Elena,” Gabriel says.
“Gracias por venir aquí.”
She dimples, combing her hands over the long tail of her braid.
“Cualquier cosa por ti, papi,” she says.
I lean closer and murmur, “Do I want to know—”
“Nope,” Gabriel cuts me off just as Elena loops her arm through his and presses herself up against him. She glances over her shoulder at me and
whips her head back to Gabriel so fast her braid smacks against my arm. Is a hotel with no guests even a hotel? The lobby feels small and stale,
until Elena turns on the lights and an overhead fan. She boots up a modem behind the front desk, chattering to Gabriel in Spanish as we wait. She
seems to be talking about her tan or a bra or something because she pulls
aside the fabric and peers down at her bare shoulder, then sends a blistering smile toward him.
“Um,” I say. “Is it ready?”
She glances at me like she’s forgotten I’m here. When she nods, I find the network on my phone. I dial the memory care facility number I was given and wander off into a small room filled with tables, each wearing a bright cotton tablecloth.
When a face swims into view on my screen, I blink. The person on the other end is nothing more than a set of eyes above a mask, and that’s behind a plastic face shield. She has a paper cap covering her hair, too. “It’s
Verna,” the woman says, and she gives a little wave. I recognize her name; she is one of the aides who takes care of the residents there. “We were starting to wonder if you were ever going to call back.”
“Technical difficulties,” I say.
“Well, your mom’s tired and she has a fever, but she’s holding her own.”
She holds up whatever device she’s on and the view changes; from a distance I see my mother sitting on her couch with the television on, just like normal. My heart, which was racing, slows a little.
I let myself wonder, for the first time, what I was so afraid to see. Maybe vulnerability. My mother has been a gale force wind that blows in and out
of my life before I can reorient myself. If she were still and silent in a bed, then I would know something is terribly wrong.
“Hi, Hannah,” the aide says. “Can you look over here! Can you give me a little wave?”
My mother turns. She doesn’t wave. “Did you take my camera?” she accuses.
“We’ll find it later,” Verna soothes, although I know my mother does not have a camera in her residence. “I have your daughter here. Can you say
hello?”
“No time. We need to jump on the press convoy to the Kurdish village,” my mother says. “If it leaves without us …” She coughs. “Without …” She dissolves into a fit of coughing, and the phone tumbles dizzily before coming to rest on a flat surface. The image goes black; I can still hear my mother hacking away. Then Verna’s masked face reappears. “I have to settle her,” she says, “but we’re taking good care of her. Don’t you worry.”
The line goes dead.
I stare at the blank screen. There really isn’t any way to tell if my mother’s delirious, or if it is just her dementia.
Okay. Well. If she gets worse, they will call our apartment again. And if that happens, Finn will—somehow—update me.
Finn.
Immediately I try to video-chat him, too, making the most of the internet service. But it rings and rings and he doesn’t pick up. I imagine him bent over a patient, feeling the buzzing in his pocket, unable to answer.
My mother has Covid, I type into a text. So far she’s stable.
I tried to call you while I still had Wi-Fi but you were probably working. I wish you were here with me.
I tuck my phone into my pocket and make my way back to the front desk.
Everything about Elena’s body language suggests she is trying to pin Gabriel against any wall she can. Everything about Gabriel’s body language resists it. When he sees me, relief washes over his features. “Gracias,
Elena,” he says. He leans in to give her a quick kiss on the cheek, but she turns at the last minute and presses her mouth against his.
“Hasta luego, Gabriel,” she says.
As soon as we are out the door, he turns to me. “Your mother?” “She’s sick,” I tell him. “She has a cough.”
His brows pinch together, then smooth. “So, that’s not too bad, right? I bet she was happy to see you.”
She had no idea who I was. The words are on the tip of my tongue, but instead I ask, “Is Elena your ex?”
“Elena was one night of extremely poor decision making,” Gabriel says. “I don’t have very good luck with relationships.”
“Well, I’m ninety-nine percent sure my boyfriend was going to propose to me here on our vacation, so there’s that.”
He winces. “You win.”
“More like both of us lose,” I correct.
Gabriel misses the turn to Abuela’s, heading further into town toward the docks.
I say, “Far be it from me to tell you you’re going the wrong way, but …” “I know. I just thought … maybe you didn’t want to spend today
worrying about your mother.” We stop on the pier, near a string of small pangas, the little metal boats fishermen use.
“What about Beatriz?”
“I already texted her. My grandmother is watching her.” He shields his eyes, looking up at me. “I did promise I’d show you my island.” He steps into a boat and holds out his hand so I can follow.
“Where are we going?”
“The lava túneles,” Gabriel says. “They’re on the western side of the island, about forty-five minutes out.”
“We’ll break curfew.”
He scrabbles for a key under the plank seat and turns over the engine.
Then he glances up, one side of his mouth quirked. “That’s not all. Where we’re going is closed even to locals,” he says. “What is it you americanos say? Go big or go home.”
I laugh. But I think: I wish.
Fishing, Gabriel tells me, is dangerous here.
He expertly moves the panga he has borrowed from a friend beneath
delicate lava arches formed by volcanoes. We weave through the formations like thread through needles, the tide edging us precipitously close to the
narrow walls of rock. Columns rise from the water, capped by land bridges with cacti and scrub growing over them. For some, the connector has already crumbled into the sea.
“Fishermen can catch bluefin tuna, blanquillo, cod, swordfish. But I had friends who headed out, and never came back,” he says. “Riptides …
they’re unpredictable. If your engine fails for some reason, you can get caught in one that moves three meters per second.”
“So you mean … they died?” I ask.
He nods. “Like I told you,” he says. “Dangerous.” He navigates through the steampunk maze of risen rock. “Look, over there, on the aa lava.”
“The what?”
He points. “The spiky rock,” he explains. “Pahoehoe lava is the other kind—the stuff that looks like it’s melting.” I follow his finger to see two
blue-footed boobies. They face each other, bowing formally to the left and then to the right and back again, twin metronomes. Then they attack each other with their beaks in a frenzy of nips and clacks. “They’re going to kill each other,” I say.
“Actually, they’re going to mate,” Gabriel says. “Not if he keeps that up,” I murmur.
He laughs. “That guy’s a pro. The older the bird, the bluer the feet. This isn’t his first shoot-out.”
It takes me a moment. “Rodeo,” I correct, grinning. I watch him hop out of the boat and drag it onto the beach. “I know Beatriz learned in school, but how come you speak English so well?”
“I had to for my job,” he says. He reaches under the seat again and tosses me a snorkel and mask. “You know how to use these, yes?”
I nod. “But I’m not wearing a bathing suit.”
Gabriel shrugs, kicks off his flip-flops, and wades into the water fully dressed. It laps at his hips, his waist, and then he dives forward, surfacing with a shake of his shaggy hair. He fits his own snorkel and mask to his forehead. “Coward,” he says, and he splashes me.
The water is a dizzy mirror of the sky, the sand like sugar under my feet.
It feels strange having my shorts float around my legs and my shirt plastered to my body, but I get used to the sensation as I tread water. Gabriel dives a few feet away and a moment later I feel him tug at my ankle. “Vamos,” he says, and when he ducks beneath the surface this time, I follow.
The undersea world explodes with color and texture—bright anemone jewels, runnels of coral, wispy fronds of seagrass. For a little while we
follow a sea lion that keeps playfully slapping Gabriel with its tail. Gabriel
squeezes my hand, pointing out a sea turtle rhythmically sawing through the water. A moment later, in front of my mask floats a bright pink sea horse, a question mark with a trumpet nose and translucent skin.
Gabriel surfaces, pulling me with him. “Hold your breath,” he says, and still grasping me, he kicks us powerfully to the seafloor, where a rocky promontory juts, polka-dotted with sea stars and a ripple of octopus. Gabriel twists until we are hovering in front of a small crevice in the boulder. Inside I see two small silver triangles. Eyes? I swim closer for a better look. But when I do, one moves, and I realize I am staring at the white-tipped fins of sleeping reef sharks.
I kick backward so fast that I create a wall of bubbles. Without looking to see if Gabriel is following, I swim as hard and as fast as I can back to shore. When I crawl onto the sand and rip off my snorkel, he’s right behind me. “That was,” I gasp, “a fucking shark.”
“Not the kind that would kill you.” He laughs. “I mean, maybe just a good bite.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, and I flop onto my back on the sand.
A moment later, Gabriel sits down next to me. He is breathing hard, too. He pulls off his soaked shirt and throws it to the side in a soggy ball. When he lies back, the sun glints off the medallion he wears.
“What is that?” I ask. “Your necklace.” “Pirate treasure,” he tells me.
When I look at him dubiously, he shrugs. “In the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, pirates used the canal between Isabela and Fernandina Island to hide from the Spaniards after raiding their galleons. Back then, this was a place where you could disappear.”
Still, I think.
“The pirates knew the galleons went from Peru to Panama, and after they stole the gold, they hid it on Isabela.” He raises a brow. “They also nearly hunted the land tortoise population to extinction, and they left behind donkeys, goats, and rats. But that wasn’t nearly as interesting to a seven- year-old boy who was digging for buried treasure.”
I come up on an elbow, invested.
“It was back in 1995 on Estero Beach—that’s near El Muro de las Lágrimas. Two sailboats showed up, full of Frenchmen who were exploring Isabela, digging for treasure. I helped them for a few days—or at least I
thought I did, I was probably more of a nuisance—and they found a chest. I helped them dig it out.”
My eyes fall on his medallion. “And that was inside it?”
“I have no idea what was inside it.” He laughs. “They took it away, still sealed. But they gave this to me as thanks. For all I know, it came from
inside a cereal box.”
I smack him on the shoulder. He grabs my hand to stop me from swatting him again, but he doesn’t let go. Instead, he squeezes it, and looks me in the eye. “Speaking of thank-yous,” Gabriel says, “Beatriz—”
“Is a great kid,” I interrupt.
He releases me, and seems to be carefully choosing his words. “When she would come home from school, there was always a wall between us.
Every time I thought about knocking it down, every time I got close enough, I could feel so much heat on the other side—like a fire, you know. If you think there’s a fire on the other side of a door, you don’t rush in,
because with even more oxygen, the flames are going to consume
everything.” He draws a line in the sand between us. “This past week, I don’t feel as much heat.”
“She’s angry,” I admit softly. “She was ripped out of her comfort zone.
It’s not fair, and it’s not her fault. When you can’t see light at the end of the tunnel, it’s hard to remember to keep going.”
“I know,” Gabriel says. “I’ve tried to do things like this with her— distract her, you know, by taking her around the island? But she only goes through the motions, like it’s a chore.” He rubs his forehead. “For years, she lived with her mother, and God knows what Luz said about me. And then
she was at school. And then when the virus hit, she called me, begging to come home.”
Clearly, I misunderstood. “I thought she had to come home,” I say. “She’s spent school vacations with her host family before—almost all of
them,” Gabriel says. “I don’t know, maybe she was worried about the virus? Whatever it was, it was a gift. I was just happy she wanted to come back. I thought if we spent time together, she’d figure out that I wasn’t actually a monster.” He smiles a little. “I wish I could do what you do so easily.”
“Talk to her?”
“Make her like me.” He pulls a face. “That sounds pathetic.”
I shake my head. “When you lose something that matters, you grieve,” I say carefully. “Right now, Beatriz thinks she’s lost her mom, her friends,
her future.” I hesitate. “So maybe there’s a reason she keeps you at a distance. You can’t grieve something if you don’t let yourself get close enough to care.”
His gaze snaps to mine—this seed of doubt is the absolution I can offer: the chance to think that Beatriz’s aloofness might not be because she hates him, but the opposite.
Suddenly a marine iguana runs right between us, making me shriek and scurry backward. Gabriel laughs at me as the big lizard crawls with surprising speed into the water, bobbing a few times before it dives under the surface. “Why aren’t those things as afraid of me as I am of them?” I mutter.
“They’ve had the run of the island longer than humans have,” he says. “Not surprising, since they look like baby dinosaurs.”
“You should see the land iguanas in San Cristóbal. They turn turquoise and red during the mating season—we call them Christmas iguanas. That’s how they get the ladies.” He nods toward the water. “But the marine
iguanas are my favorite.”
I lie back down on the sand, looking up at the sky. “I can’t imagine why.” “Well, they used to all be land iguanas. The ones that arrived came by
accident ten million years ago, rafting in from South America on debris. But when they got here, there wasn’t any vegetation. The only food was in the ocean. So their bodies changed, slowly, to make diving easier. They got salt glands around their nostrils to expel the salt when they went underwater. Their lungs got bigger so they could take bigger breaths and sink deeper.”
Gabriel turns, rising on his elbow. Very slowly, he takes one finger, and traces the slope of my throat. “Evolution is compromise,” he says softly. “When humans evolved to speak, our throats got longer to make room for that precise tongue, and with that came risks. Food had to travel further to get to the esophagus … but manage to miss the larynx.”
His thumb rests in the spot where my pulse flutters at the base of my neck, and I swallow.
“So unlike animals, we can now sing and speak and scream … but unlike animals, we also can choke to death if our food goes down the wrong pipe.” He looks at me, almost as if he is as dazed to find himself touching me as I am. “You can’t move forward without losing something,” Gabriel says.
I clear my throat and swiftly sit up.
Immediately, so does he, and the moment breaks like a soap bubble.
Before I can process what just happened, Gabriel scrambles to his feet. A boat putters closer to shore, idling where the waves are breaking. I shade my eyes with my hand and see a man in a khaki uniform and a brimmed hat. As he approaches I squint to read the patch on his shoulder, which
looks official.
“Gabriel,” the man says. “Qué estás haciendo aquí?”
“This is Javier.” Gabriel’s voice is perfectly even, but I can feel him stiffen. “He’s a park ranger.”
I remember what Beatriz said at the swimming hole with the mockingbirds—if the park rangers find you trespassing on a site that’s closed due to Covid, you can be fined. And if you’re a tour guide, you can lose your license.
Gabriel spills forth a river of Spanish. I don’t know if he’s trying to be placating or act clueless or justify our journey here.
I wing a wide smile at Javier and interrupt. “Hola,” I say. “This is all my fault. I’m the one who begged Gabriel to take me here—”
I do not know if the park ranger speaks English, but I hope I am rambling enough to draw attention away from Gabriel. And it seems to work, because Javier’s gaze jerks toward me. “You,” he says. “You were at the feria.”
I feel sweat break out between my shoulder blades. Was it illegal to trade at that market, too? Will park rangers go after the locals, or just the tourist? And if I can’t pay a fine, then what happens?
I know there is no hospital on the island, and no ATM. But with my luck, there’s a functional jail cell.
“You drew pictures,” the ranger continues. “Um,” I say. “Yes.”
I can feel Gabriel’s eyes on me, like the stroke of a brush. “My son gave you a guanábana.”
The boy, I realize, who was being bullied.
“You are talented,” Javier continues, smiling a little. “But more important
… you are kind.”
I feel my cheeks heat with both compliments.
The ranger turns back to Gabriel. “You know, Gabriel, if I saw you here, I’d have to report you. But if I turned away and you were gone, it might just have been a trick of the light, sí?”
“Por supuesto,” Gabriel murmurs. He reaches down for his shirt, stiff with dried salt, and pulls it on. I pick up the discarded snorkeling equipment and follow him to our panga. The surf whispers around my ankles while he holds the boat steady, letting me climb in before he pushes off from the
shore and hops aboard, revving the engine in reverse.
I don’t speak until we are out of the cove and through the túneles, bouncing over the chop of the ocean. “That was close,” I say.
Gabriel shrugs. “I knew it could happen when I brought you here.” “Then why did you? He could have taken your tour guide license.” “Because this is Isabela,” he says. “And you should see it.”
On the way back to Puerto Villamil, we do not talk about what happened the moment before Javier interrupted us. Instead, I find myself thinking of the hollow bones of birds, of the long necks of giraffes. The changeable skin of leaf frogs, the insects that disguise themselves as twigs. I think of
girls who are dragged from safe havens into the unknown, and men with secrets as deep as the ocean, and grounded planes.
It’s not just animals that must adapt in order to survive.
Dear Finn,
Beatriz—the girl I wrote you about—told me that before there was a real mail service in the Galápagos, sailors would put their letters in a barrel in Post Office Bay, on Floreana Island. As other whalers showed up in their ships, they’d sort through the post, find ones
addressed to their home port, and then hand-deliver them. Sometimes the mail wasn’t delivered for years, but it was the only way the sailors had to communicate with the people they left behind.
Beatriz says now, tour boats go to Floreana. Tourists leave
postcards in the barrel, and claim postcards others have left to deliver when they’re back home.
The barrel’s small; I wouldn’t fit in it. Otherwise, I’d probably crawl in and hope someone would carry me back to you.
Love, Diana
The day I met Kitomi Ito, and found myself standing alone with her in front of her painting, I realized exactly what was wrong with the Sotheby’s pitch, and why we would likely lose the opportunity to Christie’s or Phillips.
Everyone seemed to be concentrating on Sam Pride, who’d bought the
painting. But no one had stopped long enough to think about who he gave it to, and why.
I began to talk fast. I didn’t know if Eva would interrupt us, and if my boss heard me actively subverting her plan for the Toulouse-Lautrec painting, I’d be out of a job before the elevator hit the lobby.
“What if the auction wasn’t about fame,” I said, “but about privacy? It seems to me that everything was a big show for your husband—even,
forgive me, his death. But this painting—it wasn’t any part of that circus. It was just for you, and him.” When Kitomi didn’t respond, I took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t use this to
headline the Imp Mod sale. I wouldn’t reunite the Nightjars. I wouldn’t make this public at all. I’d build a private sale in a room with simple staging, good lighting, and a single love seat. And then I’d extend a confidential invitation to George and Amal, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Meghan and Harry, other couples you might think of. It should be a privilege to be offered a showing. A nod to the idea that they have a love affair that’s timeless, too.” I turn back to the painting, seeing the vulnerability in the
eyes of the pair, and the rock-solid belief that they were safe in sharing it with each other. “Instead of the buyer having the upper hand, Ms. Ito, you’d be choosing the couple that gets to continue the love story. You’re the one giving it up for adoption; you should be the one to pick the new caretakers
—not the auction company.”
For a long moment, Kitomi just stared at me. “Well,” she said, and a slow smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “She speaks.”
Just then Eva’s voice cleaved between us like an ax. “What’s going on here?”
“Your colleague was just presenting an alternate approach,” Kitomi said. “My associate specialist does not have the authority to present anything,”
Eva replied. She shot me a look that could cut glass. “I’ll meet you at the car,” she said.
The driver hadn’t even closed the door behind Eva when she started lacing into me. “What part of ‘do not speak’ did you not understand, Diana? Of all the moronic, irresponsible things you could say, you managed to find something so … so …” She broke off, her face red, her chest heaving. “You do realize that the reason you have a salary is because the company survives on massive public auctions that attract an obscene amount of money, yes?
And that silly little romantic love letter you proposed will make us look like
kindergartners, compared to whatever spectacle Christie’s is offering—for God’s sake, they probably said they’d find a way to throw in a posthumous Kennedy Center Honor for Sam Pride—”
She was interrupted by the ring of her phone. Eva narrowed her eyes, warning me to be quiet under penalty of death, as she answered. “Kitomi,” she said warmly. “We were just discussing how much—” Her voice broke off, and her eyebrows shot to her hairline. “Well, yes! Sotheby’s is honored to know you trust us to showcase your painting at auction—” Her voice
broke off as she listened to Kitomi speak. “Absolutely,” she said, after a moment. “Not a problem.”
Eva hung up and frowned down at her phone for a moment. “We got the account,” she said.
I hesitated. “Isn’t that … a good thing?”
“Kitomi had two conditions. She wants a private auction for couples only,” Eva said. “And she insists that you’re the specialist in charge.”
I was stunned. This was my break; this was the moment I would talk about years later, when I was interviewed by magazines about how I’d advanced in my career. I had a vision of Beyoncé hugging me after she placed the winning bid. Of a corner office, where Rodney and I would close the door at lunchtime and share bowls from the Halal Guys and gossip.
I felt heat creeping up my collar and turned to find Eva staring, as if she was seeing me for the first time.
To: [email protected] From: [email protected]
Before I forget: The Greens called again and left a message at home.
It’s 72 hours old, though, because that’s how long I’ve been at the hospital.
Of course, a shift that long is technically against the rules, but there aren’t rules anymore. It’s Groundhog Day, over and over. We have it down to a routine. There’s me, a junior resident, and four nurses. My job is to put in central lines and arterial lines, to manage a patient’s other comorbidities. I put in chest tubes when they get air around their lungs, caused by the vents. I call the families, who ask for readings they don’t understand on oxygenation, blood pressure, ventilation levels. I hope she’s getting better, they say, but I can’t answer because I know she’s a mile from better. She’s dying. All I hope is that she gets off the vent or ECMO, and that there’s not a cytokine storm that sends her back to square one. The families can’t visit, so they can’t see the
patients hooked up to wires and machines. They can’t see with their own eyes how sick they are. To them the patient is someone who was perfectly healthy a week ago, with no chronic illness. They keep hearing on the news that there’s a 99% survival rate; that
it’s no worse than the flu.
There’s one patient who’s been haunting me lately. She and her husband came in together; he died and she didn’t. When she was extubated, her adult kids didn’t tell her
that her husband was dead. They were too afraid she’d panic and cry and her lungs couldn’t take it. So she made it all the way to rehab thinking that her husband was still in isolation at the hospital. I think about her all the time. How she thought this was temporary, the separation between them. I wonder if she knows, yet, that it’s forever.
Jesus, Diana, come back.
Sometimes I lie in bed at night and think: What was I trying to prove? Why didn’t I turn around and get on that ferry and go back to the airport?
Sometimes I lie in bed and think: What kind of partner was I then, if Finn wasn’t in the forefront of my mind, when I stood on the brink between staying and leaving?
For that matter, what kind of partner am I now, when there are times he is not in the forefront of my mind? When he’s slogging through hell and I’m in a different hemisphere?
My father’s father fought in World War II, and when he came back from it, he was never quite right. He drank a lot and wandered the house in the middle of the night, and when the car backfired once, he dropped to the ground and burst into tears. As a little girl, I was often told that the war did this to him, created an invisible scar he’d never lose. Once, I asked my grandmother what she remembered about the war. She thought for a long moment, and then finally said, It was hard to get nylons.
There’s a part of me that thinks this is exactly what my grandfather would have wanted: to risk death every day so that my grandmother’s life could stay mostly unruffled. But there’s another part of me that recognizes how shallow, how privileged it is, to be the one who’s an ocean away.
These days when I am swimming in pools as clear as gin or hiking green velvet mountains or frying a tortilla on a cast-iron pan in Abuela’s kitchen, there are whole swaths of time when I forget the rest of the world is suffering.
I am not sure if that is a blessing, or if I should be cursed.
The trillizos are three collapsed lava tunnels in the center of the island.
Beatriz and I start our hike there before dawn, which means we get to watch the breathtaking artwork of the sunrise as we climb into the highlands. I’ve been on island for just over three weeks now, and it keeps surprising me with its beauty. “How old are you?” Beatriz asks me, just as the last streak of pink becomes a bruise of blue sky.
“I’m going to be thirty on April 19,” I tell her. “How old are you?” “Fourteen,” Beatriz says. “But emotionally, I’m older.”
That makes me laugh. “You’re a veritable crone.”
We walk a little further and then, lightly, I ask if she’s heard from her friends at school.
Her shoulders tense up. “Can’t check social media when the internet sucks.”
“Right,” I muse. “It must be hard.”
Beatriz doesn’t look at me. “The silver lining is that I don’t have to see what people are saying about me.”
I stop walking. “Is that something you usually have to worry about?”
What if her cutting is tied to bullying somehow? I still don’t know much more about Beatriz than I did when I first saw her on the ferry. She guards her secrets like her life depends on them. For a teenager, I suppose it does.
I have been wondering if I should intercede in Beatriz and Gabriel’s relationship. From my vantage point, all I see is misunderstanding. But then I think I have no right to involve myself in someone else’s relationships when my own are a mess.
Finn’s emails are now shorter and more desperate.
For the past two nights, I’ve awakened in the middle of the night, convinced I hear my mother’s voice.
“When was the last time you talked to your mother?” Beatriz asks, as if she’s reached right into my mind.
“Before I came here. I visited her,” I say. “Although I can’t really say it was a conversation. It’s more like she talks at me and I try to keep up.”
“My mother used to send me cards for my birthday, with money in them.
But that stopped last year.” Her mouth tightens. “She didn’t want to have me.”
“But she did.”
“When you’re pregnant and seventeen and the guy says he’ll marry you, I guess you do it,” Beatriz muses.
I tuck away this information about Gabriel.
“I think unconditional love is bullshit,” Beatriz says. “There’s always a condition.”
“Not true,” I offer. “My father would have loved me no matter what.” But is that true? I wonder. I adored the same things he did—visual art and painting. If I’d been obsessed with geology or emo rock, would we have clicked the same way? If my mother hadn’t been absent, would he have been as attentive?
“And Finn,” Beatriz says. “Don’t forget about him. How did you know he was the one?”
“I don’t know that,” I bluster. “I’m not married to him.” “But if he proposed here, weren’t you going to say yes?”
I nod. “I think that I used to believe that love was supposed to feel like a lightning storm—superdramatic, with crashes and thunder and all the hair standing up on the back of your neck. I had boyfriends like that, in college. But Finn … he’s the opposite. He’s steady. Like … white noise.”
“He puts you to sleep?”
“No. He makes everything … easier.” Saying this, I feel a surge of love so fierce for Finn that my knees go weak.
“So he’s the first person you felt that way about?” Beatriz asks, probing.
She isn’t looking at me, but there’s a stripe of heat across her cheekbones, and I realize she isn’t really asking about me. If not for this pandemic, Beatriz would be at school and would likely be confiding in a friend her own age about her own crush.
Then I think of what she said about being flamed on social media. I remember that Gabriel told me Beatriz begged to come back to Isabela.
Suddenly she breaks into a jog, and stops at the edge of a yawning hole that seems to reach to the belly of the earth. It’s about sixty feet wide, with a ladder mounted at the lip, twined with several thick ropes. Ferns and moss grow on the walls, which narrow and narrow to a black hole further down. I peer into the abyss but it looks only dark and endless.
“People rappel to the bottom,” Beatriz says.
I feel the walls of the tunnel pressing on me, and I’m not even inside it. “I am not rappelling to the bottom.”
“Well, you can climb partway,” she says. “Come on.”
She scrambles down the slippery wooden rungs, wrapping the ropes around her arm as a safety measure. I follow her more cautiously. The tunnel narrows around us. The vegetation smells ripe and lush as I
concentrate on stepping firmly with my foot down, down, down.
When Beatriz descends into the neck of the tunnel, I lose sight of her. “Beatriz!” I call, and her voice floats up to me.
“Come on, Diana, it’s magic.”
The further down we go, the hotter it gets, as if the tunnel is tapering toward hell itself. There is no more vegetation, just lava rock that is light and porous, and that shimmers in the faint light from above. I keep moving
methodically and nearly scream when I feel Beatriz’s hand close over my ankle. “Three more rungs,” she says, “and then the ladder runs out.”
She shifts so that we are clinging to the same bottom rungs, side by side. “Look up,” Beatriz says.
I do, and the sky is a tiny pinprick of hope. When I glance back down and breathe in, it feels like the air from someone else’s mouth. I can’t see at first in the dim muscle of the tunnel, and then all of a sudden I can—just the shine of Beatriz’s pupils. It feels like we’re sharing a heartbeat.
“Remind me why we’re here,” I whisper.
“We’re in the belly of a volcano,” she says. “We could hide here forever.”
For a few moments, I listen to the moan of wind from what must be a hundred feet above. Something wet drips onto my forehead. It is terrifying being here, yes, but it is also almost holy. It’s like crawling back in time.
Like preparing to be reborn.
It feels like the place to confide a secret.
“Truth or dare,” I whisper, and I hold my breath, waiting. “Truth,” Beatriz says.
“Your father told me you wanted to come back here, but you don’t want to be here.”
“What’s your question?” I don’t answer.
She sighs. “Neither of those,” Beatriz says, “is untrue.”
I wait for her to elaborate in this cocoon of darkness, but instead, she turns the game on me. “Truth or dare,” she says.
“Truth.”
“If you could change your mind three weeks ago and take the ferry home, would you?”
“I don’t know,” I hear myself answer, and it physically hurts to say it out loud, in the way that truth can sometimes be a knife.
The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve told myself that being stuck on Isabela was a mistake. But there is also a small, new part of me that
wonders if it was meant to be. If I’m delayed because the universe decided Beatriz needed someone to depend on; if I had to distance myself from Finn to see our relationship more clearly—its strengths, and its flaws.
Unconditional love is bullshit. “Truth or dare. Is there someone at school you wish you could be with?”
I have wondered if, when I eventually leave, Beatriz will go back to
Santa Cruz, back to her host family and, maybe, this crush. If that would stop the cutting. Would make her happy.
“Yes.” The syllable is no more than a breath. “But she doesn’t want to be with me.”
She.
I hear the quiet hitch of Beatriz’s breath. She’s crying, and I’m pretending not to notice, which I suspect is what she wants.
“Tell me about her,” I say softly.
“Ana Maria’s my host sister,” Beatriz whispers. “She’s two years older than me. I think I’ve always known how I feel but I never said anything, not until there were rumors that school might close because of the virus. When I thought about not seeing her, like even just at breakfast, or walking back from classes, I couldn’t breathe. So I kissed her.” She curls herself closer to the ladder rungs.
“It didn’t go well,” I state.
“It did at first. She kissed me back. For three days—it was … perfect.” Beatriz shakes her head. “And then she told me she couldn’t. She said her parents would kill her, if they found out. That she loved me, but not like
that.” She swallows. “She said I was … I was a mistake.” “Oh, Beatriz.”
“Her parents wanted me to stay during lockdown. I told them my father wouldn’t let me. How could I live in the same house as her, and pretend it was all fine?”
“What will you do when school opens?”
“I don’t know,” Beatriz says. “I ruined it. I can’t go back there. And there’s nothing for me here.”
There’s something for you here, I think. You just can’t see it.
“Will you tell my father?” she whispers into the dark. “No,” I promise. “But I hope you will, one day.”
We cling to the ladder in the hot throat of the world. Her breathing evens again, in counterpoint to mine. “Truth or dare,” she says, so softly I can barely hear it. “Do you ever wish you could do part of your life over?”
The truth is yes.
But … it’s not these past three weeks. Instead, it’s everything leading up to them. The more time I spend on this island, the more clarity I have about the time leading up to it. In a strange way, being stripped of everything—
my job, my significant other, even my clothing and my language—has left only the essential part of me, and it feels more real than everything I have tried to be for years. It’s almost as if I had to stop running in order to see myself clearly, and what I see is a person who’s been driving toward a goal for so long she can’t remember why she set it in the first place.
And that scares the fuck out of me. “Dare,” I reply.
A beat. “Let go of the ladder,” Beatriz says. “Absolutely not,” I answer.
“Then I’ll do it.”
I hear her release her fingers from the rung, feel the shift in the air as she falls backward.
“No,” I cry, and I somehow manage to snatch a handful of her shirt. With the ropes wrapped tight around my free arm, I feel her deadweight dangling.
Don’t let go don’t let go don’t let go
“Bea,” I say evenly, “you have to grab on to me. Can you do that? Can you do that for me?”
A thousand years later, I feel her fingers clutching my forearm. I grab back, forming a tighter link, until she is close enough to the ladder to grasp it again. A moment later, with a sob, she falls against me and I wrap my free arm around her. “It’s okay,” I soothe. “It’s going to be okay.”
“I wanted to know what it would be like,” she cries, “to just let go.”
I stroke her hair and think: You cannot trust perception. Falling, at first, feels like flying.
