Chapter no 6

Wish You Were Here

Four weeks after I arrive on Isabela, I get an early birthday present: a

strange and unlikely dump of old emails into my inbox. I have no idea why some were coming through, yet not others—but there are several from Finn, and two from my mother’s facility, updating me on her health (no significant change, which I figure is good news). There is also a note from Sotheby’s, saying that I have been furloughed, along with two hundred other employees, because of a massive downturn in the art sales industry. I stare at this for a while, wondering if Kitomi wasn’t the only one to delay her auction, and trying to rationalize that being furloughed is better than being fired. There’s also an email from Rodney, telling me that Sotheby’s can suck a dick, and that the only people who weren’t furloughed were tech support, because they’re pivoting to online sales. He never thought he’d

have to return to his sister’s house in New Orleans, but who can afford rent in the city on unemployment?

The last line of his email is Girl, if I were you, I’d stay in paradise as long as I could.

On my actual birthday a week later, I am invited to Gabriel’s farm. It’s twenty minutes by car into the highlands, and he comes to pick me and Abuela up in a rusty Jeep with no side doors. “You don’t look a day over forty,” he deadpans when he sees me, and when I shove at him he starts laughing. “Women are so sensitive about their age,” he jokes.

As we drive, we see more galapagueños out and about than I have in weeks. At first, when the island closed down, I could walk the beach or hike into the highlands and not see another soul. But now, by the fifth week of lockdown, with no actual cases of Covid on Isabela and no one new arriving to spread it, people have begun to sneak out of their houses and break curfew.

As we wind into the center of the island, the scrub and desert landscape at the shoreline gives way to lush, thick vegetation. The shipments of food

and supplies to the island have been extremely limited, and I know that Gabriel isn’t the only person here to rely on family farmland to supplement them during the pandemic. We pass dirty sheep in pens, goats, a lowing cow with an udder as full as the moon. There are banana trees, with green fruit defying gravity to grow upward, and girls squatting in fields pulling weeds. Finally Gabriel turns onto a dusty path that winds toward a small house.

Beatriz had led me to believe that it was nothing more than a glorified tent, but only half of it is under construction. Gabriel isn’t building a house as much as he is expanding it.

For Beatriz, I bet.

I’ve been thinking nonstop about her confession to me in the trillizos. I’d said that if Beatriz talked to me about suicide, I’d tell Gabriel—and her

recklessness in the tunnel truly worried me. But I couldn’t confess to Gabriel what had happened unless I explained why, and that would mean talking about Ana Maria not returning Beatriz’s affections. That, I know, is not my secret to share. Gabriel doesn’t strike me as the kind of parent who’d be upset if his daughter came out, but then, I do not truly know him. Whatever strides the LGBTQ+ community has made in the United States, they are not universal; moreover, this is a predominantly Catholic country and gay rights aren’t exactly the mainstay of that dogma. I think about Abuela’s house, where painted crosses decorate every bit of wall space. In the absence of church services, suspended because of Covid, she has created a small altar where she prays and lights candles.

Instead, I’ve found ways to see Beatriz every day, to take her emotional temperature, and hope I don’t have to betray her in order to protect her.

Beatriz comes bounding out of the front of the house as Gabriel pulls the emergency brake on the Jeep. “Felicidades!” she says, smiling at me.

“Thanks.”

I realize something is tugging at me and I turn to find a little white goat with brown ears chewing on the hem of my T-shirt. “Ooh,” I say, kneeling down to rub its knobby horns. “Who’s this?”

“I don’t name my food,” Gabriel says, and I gasp.

“You are not eating this sweetheart,” I tell him, “and he has to have a name.”

“Fine.” He grins. “Stew.”

“No.” I fold my arms. “Promise me. Consider it my birthday gift.”

Gabriel laughs. “Only because Stew’s a terrible name for a lady goat. As long as we can milk her, she’s safe. We trade her milk to the neighbor for

eggs.”

He helps Abuela up the steps into his house. The livable area is two rooms: one with a small kitchen, a tiny table, two mismatched wooden chairs, and a beanbag chair; the other a bedroom. I don’t see a bathroom, just a little outhouse in the distance. While Gabriel and Abuela stand at the table, unpacking the food she’s brought to cook and talking in Spanish,

Beatriz pulls me into the bedroom.

There is a mattress on the floor and a scarred chest of drawers, but there is also a mirror with mosaic glass around it, and a quilt with flowers embroidered on it, and fairy lights strung on a series of nails that have been tacked to the wall. This must have been Gabriel’s room, I realize. I wonder if he transformed it into this little oasis for her, hoping for the best before

she came here from school. I wonder where he sleeps now.

“Oh,” I say, pulling several postcards from my tote. “I brought some more.”

“Cool.” Beatriz takes them, setting them in front of the mirror.

Since our day at the trillizos, we haven’t talked about the girl she left behind on Santa Cruz, or if she still feels like cutting. Only once in the past two weeks has she even alluded to what transpired. We were sitting in Puerto Villamil, watching boobies torpedo into the water to catch fish, our legs dangling off the pier, just letting the afternoon settle around us like

cotton batting. “Diana?” Beatriz had said, apropos of nothing. “Thanks. For catching me.”

What I wanted to do was wrap my arms around her tight. What I did instead was bump her shoulder with mine. “De nada,” I said, when I meant the very opposite. It wasn’t nothing. It was everything.

I figure Beatriz will tell me what she wants to tell me and needs to tell me when she’s ready. And God knows, right now, I have nothing but time.

There’s a knock on the door and Gabriel pokes his head inside. “You ready to earn your supper? I need help picking fruit.”

“It’s my birthday,” I protest.

“No problema.” He shrugs. “We’ll have the goat for dinner instead.” “Funny,” I tell him, and turn to Beatriz. “Come help. I’m way too old for

physical labor.”

She shakes her head. “I’ve got other things to do. Secret things.”

Gabriel leans toward her and in an exaggerated whisper asks, “Was that good?”

“Perfect,” Beatriz says, and she skirts us on her way to the small table, where Abuela is already measuring out flour. “Go on,” she shoos. “Leave.”

I follow Gabriel outside. “She’s making a cake for me, isn’t she?” “You didn’t hear it from me,” he says.

“That’s sweet.” I sit down on a stump near the front door as Gabriel

untangles something from a pile of tools. He hands it to me—a wire basket on a stick—and then picks up a five-gallon plastic bucket.

“Vamos,” he says.

“You mean we’re really picking fruit? I thought that was just a ruse to get me out of the house.”

“It was. But also, this is a farm.” I follow him into the fields that stretch behind the house, where he points to yams and corn, lettuce and carrots.

There is a patch of pineapple not ripe enough to harvest, and then we come to a small group of trees. “Papaya,” Gabriel says. He takes the pole and

squints up at the leaves, jostling the tool for a minute before he lowers it again and with a little flip of the wrist, drops the heavy fruit into my hand.

“I didn’t know papaya grew on trees,” I marvel.

We work in companionable quiet while he strips the tree of its ripe fruit, and then I kneel beside him to dig up a few yams. By the time we get back to the house, I’m filthy. Gabriel leads me to a water pump, jacking its

handle so that I have a stream to wash my hands and my face. When I return the favor, he strips off his shirt and ducks his head and torso under the water, shaking off like a hound and making me shriek.

The noise draws Beatriz, who stands in the doorway. “Perfect timing,” she says. Then she claps, and Abuela appears behind her holding a small one-tier chocolate cake on a plate. “Cumpleaños feliz,” they sing, “te

deseamos a ti …” Beatriz runs ahead and whispers something to Gabriel, who takes out a lighter and flicks the flame to life with his thumb.

“No candle,” he explains.

Abuela sets the cake down on a picnic table outside the house, which has been decorated with strewn flowers. “Make a wish,” Beatriz orders.

Dutifully, I close my eyes. I wish …

That I was back in New York with Finn. That my mother will get better.

That this will be over soon.

These things are what I should be wishing for. But instead, all that runs through my mind is that it is hard to make wishes, when in the moment, it feels like you have everything you need.

I open my eyes again and lean toward the lighter in Gabriel’s hand.

Gently, I blow.

He winks at me, and snaps the lid so the flame disappears. “That means it will come true,” he says.

After we finish the cake, Gabriel builds a fire in a ring of lava stones in the yard. He turns on a small transistor radio and we all sit on folding lawn chairs. To my shock, there are presents for me: Beatriz gives me a small box she has decorated with shells; Abuela gives me a necklace with a medal of

the Virgin Mary on it and insists on securing it around my neck. Even Gabriel tells me he has a gift—but it’s an experience, not a thing, and he’ll take me in a few days. Afterward, Beatriz brings me a blank journal and

demands I do a portrait of her, like the ones I did at the feria. When the last of the light leaves the sky it’s decided that Beatriz will share her bed with Abuela, and that Gabriel and I will camp out under the stars.

When we are alone, I look at the medal nestled between my breasts. “Did I just get baptized or something?” I ask.

Gabriel grins. “It’s called a miraculous medal. It’s supposed to bring blessings to people who wear it with faith.”

I glance at him. “So basically if I’m not Catholic, lightning could strike at any moment?”

“If it does, it will likely hit me first, so you’re safe,” he says. He pokes at the embers with a stick, stirring them, and then picks up the journal with the sketch I made of Beatriz. “You’re very talented,” he tells me, carefully closing the book and setting it on the picnic table.

I shrug. “Party trick,” I say.

He disappears into the house for a moment. When he reappears with two rolled sleeping bags, the radio is playing a Nightjars song. “The first vinyl album I ever bought was Sam Pride’s.”

I look up at him. “Was it the one with Kitomi Ito naked on the cover?” Gabriel blinks. “Well,” he says, “actually, yeah.”

“I know her,” I tell him.

“Everyone knows her.” He lays one of the sleeping bags at my feet, and shakes out the other on the opposite side of the fire.

“But I know know her,” I tell him. “I was in the process of selling her painting. The one from that album cover, actually.”

Gabriel pulls his own sleeping bag closer to the fire pit. The reflections of the flames dance over his forearms as he pours what looks like water from a bottle into two shot glasses. “That sounds like a story,” he says, and he passes me a glass. “Salud,” he says, and clinks his own against mine.

Following his lead, I drain it in one swallow, and nearly choke, because it is most definitely not water. “Holy fuck,” I gasp. “What is this?”

“Caña.” He laughs. “Cane sugar alcohol. One hundred proof.” Then he leans back on his elbows. “Now tell me why you know Sam Pride’s wife.”

I do, skirting over the fact that my last conversation with her may have cost me a promotion, if not my job. When I finish talking I look up to find Gabriel staring at me, puzzled. “So your job is to sell other people’s art?” he asks, and I nod. “But what about your own?”

Surprised, I shake my head. “Oh, I’m not an artist. I just have an art history degree.”

“What’s that?”

“Useless arcane knowledge,” I reply. “I doubt that …”

“Well, at Williams I wrote a thesis on the paintings of saints and how they died.”

He laughs. “Maybe that miraculous medal isn’t such a stretch after all

…”

I hold out my glass for another shot of liquor. “Hey, I’ll have you know that Saint Margaret of Antioch was eaten by a dragon, but is usually painted with said dragon hanging out at her side. Saint Peter the Martyr’s portraits

include the cleaver in his skull. Saint Lucy—patron saint of eye problems— was always shown holding a dish with two eyeballs on it. Oh, and Saint

Nicholas—”

“Papá Noel?” Gabriel pours me more caña.

“The very same. He’s often painted holding three gold balls that look like candy, but they’re actually dowries he’d give to poor virgins.”

Gabriel’s eyebrows rise. He lifts his own glass. “Merry Christmas,” he says.

We toast, and I swallow; the second time, I’m expecting the burn. “So as you can see,” I tell him, “my esteemed education has made me very good for trivia at cocktail parties.” I shrug. “And it helped land me my dream

job.”

He leans back on the mattress he’s made of his sleeping bag, his feet crossed. “People dream of making art,” he says. “Nobody dreams of selling it.”

This makes me think of my mother, gallivanting all over the world to

take pictures that won awards, that graced magazine covers, that chronicled struggle and war and famine. How her images were in museums and even gifted to the White House but had never been sold in a public forum until I auctioned some off to pay for her assisted living facility.

I shake my head. “You don’t understand. These pieces of art … they’re worth millions. Sotheby’s is synonymous with prestige.”

“And that,” Gabriel says, “is important to you?”

I stare into the fire. Flames are the one thing you can’t ever really

replicate in art. The moment you make them static in paint, you take away their magic. “Yes,” I reply. “My best friend, Rodney, and I have been plotting our meteoric rise through the company since we met there nine

years ago.”

“Rodney,” Gabriel repeats. “Your boyfriend doesn’t mind that your best friend is a man?”

“No, Gabriel,” I say sharply, “because my boyfriend and I do not live in the Dark Ages. Plus, Rodney is … well, Rodney. He’s Black, Southern, and gay, or as he puts it, a golden trifecta.” I look carefully at Gabriel as I say

the word gay, gauging his reaction. Beatriz’s confidences are still not mine to tell, but I can’t help wondering what his reaction would be if she were

brave enough to confide in him. Gabriel, however, doesn’t bat an eye. “Are there a lot of LGBTQ people here?” I ask breezily.

“I don’t know. What people do in private is what they do in private.” He shrugs, a smile tugging at his mouth. “But when I was a tour guide, the gay couples always tipped best.”

I hug my knees to my chest. “How did you become a tour guide?”

I don’t expect him to answer, since he keeps that part of his life—and his subsequent departure from it—close to his chest, but Gabriel shrugs. “When my parents honeymooned on Isabela in the eighties, there were maybe like two hundred residents on island, and they wanted to stay. So they brought

Abuela in from the mainland. My father loved it here. People used to call him El Alcalde—the mayor—because he would go on and on about how amazing Isabela is to anyone and everyone who landed in Puerto Villamil. He didn’t have the scientific background to be a park ranger, so he became a tour guide.”

Gabriel looks at me across the fire. “When I was growing up, it was expected that I’d join the family business. I’d been doing it unofficially with him for years. You have to train for seven months to be certified as a guide by the government of Ecuador—studying biology, history, natural history, genetics, languages. Professors come here from all over the world

—the University of Vienna, and the University of North Carolina, and the University of Miami—they ask for the help of the guides to continue research for them when they’re off-island. So you know, we might wind up taking pictures of green sea turtles, and sending them back to a scientist so he can track them around the island for his research. We might be asked to document penguin behaviors that seem unique.”

“I was bit by one,” I say, rubbing my arm. “When I first got here.” “Well, that’s unique.” Gabriel laughs. “They usually are pretty shy

around people, but with the quarantine, they seem to crave human interaction a little more. Even if it hurts the humans.” He pokes at the fire with a stick. “There was a time, believe it or not, that I thought I’d be the scientist doing marine biology. Not the tour guide doing the grunt work.”

“What happened?”

“Beatriz,” he says, smiling faintly. “My ex, Luz, got pregnant, when we were seventeen. We got married.”

“So you didn’t become a marine biologist.”

He shakes his head. “Plans change. Shit happens.” “Beatriz told me her mother … left.”

“That’s a polite way of putting it,” Gabriel says. “The truth is, we didn’t stay together because we didn’t belong together. Not even for a baby. I learned the hard way that you shouldn’t stay with someone because of your past together—what matters more is if you want the same things in the future. Luz felt like she was too young to be trapped as a mother, and she was always looking for the escape hatch. I just didn’t think it was going to take the shape of a National Geographic photographer.” He glances at me. “Very different from you and your boyfriend, I’m sure.”

I am glad for the darkness, because he cannot see the flush on my cheeks. Finn and I are the couple that our friends tag #relationshipgoals. Every time Rodney has cried over another breakup, I’ve curled up in Finn’s arms in bed and silently given thanks that of all the people in the world, we found each other. I trust him and he trusts me. It’s steady and stable and I know exactly what to expect: I’ll get my promotion; he’ll get a fellowship. We’ll get married in a vineyard upstate (tasteful, no more than a hundred guests, band not DJ, justice of the peace officiating); honeymoon on the Amalfi coast; buy a house outside the city during the first year of his fellowship; have our first child during the second year and a sibling two years after that.

Honestly, the only point of contention was whether we’d get a Bernese or an English springer spaniel. I had believed that Finn and I were so attuned that even a forced separation like this one wouldn’t shake our rock- solidness. But it’s taken only three weeks for me to feel disconnected; for doubt to grow like weeds, so insidious that it’s hard to see what used to blossom in that bed instead.

There is still the niggling thought that Finn suggested I leave New York without expecting me to actually do it—as if this were some sort of relationship test I was supposed to pass, but failed. And maybe I am equally to blame for not insisting that I stay. But I also know that focusing on that

one moment of miscommunication keeps me from examining a more painful, scarier truth: here on Isabela, there are times I forget to miss him.

I can explain it away: At first, I was distracted trying to figure out how to stay fed and housed. I’ve been thinking of Beatriz, and trying to keep her from cutting. I’ve been literally disconnected because of a lack of technology.

But if you have to remember to miss the love of your life … does that mean he’s not the love of your life?

I pin a smile on my face and nod. “I’m lucky,” I tell Gabriel. “When Finn and I are together, it’s perfect.”

And when we’re not?

“Finn,” he repeats slowly. “You know what finning is?” “Is this a sex thing?”

His teeth flash white. “It’s when massive Chinese fleets fish for tons of sharks. They cut off their fins for soup and traditional medicines—and then leave the sharks to die in the ocean.”

“That is awful,” I say, thinking that now I’ll always associate this with Finn’s name.

Maybe that’s what Gabriel intended.

“That’s the part of paradise you don’t get to see,” he says. “Am I a terrible person?” I ask quietly. “For being here?” “What do you mean?”

“It’s been weeks. Maybe I should have been trying harder to get back to New York.”

He glances at me. “Short of growing a pair of wings, I’m not sure how that would happen.”

I lift my gaze. “Natural selection favors wings …”

His mouth curves. “I guess anything is possible. It just may take a few thousand years for you to evolve.”

I scrub my hands over my face. “If you read his emails, Gabriel … it’s so bad. It’s killing him slowly to watch all those patients die, and I can’t do anything to help him.”

“Even if you were there,” he says, “you might not be able to do anything.

There’s some shit that people have to work through on their own.” “I know. I just feel so … powerless.”

He nods. “I imagine it feels like you’re caged in and can’t get to him,” Gabriel says, “but maybe you’re the only one who sees it as a cage.”

“What do you mean?”

“If it were me,” he says, looking down at the fire, “and if you were the person I love … I’d want you as far away as possible so that I could battle the monsters and not have to worry about you getting hurt.”

“That’s not a relationship,” I argue. “That’s … that’s like a beautiful piece of artwork you don’t display because you’re afraid it will get

damaged. So, instead, you crate it up and stick it in storage and it doesn’t bring you any joy or any beauty.”

“I don’t know about that,” Gabriel says softly. “What if it’s something you’d fight like hell to protect so you can someday see it one more time?”

His words make a shiver run down my spine, so I unzip my sleeping bag and slide into it. It smells like soap and salt, like Gabriel. I lie down, my head still spinning a little from the caña, and blink at the night sky. Gabriel does the same, lying on top of his own sleeping bag, his arms folded over his stomach. The crowns of our heads are nearly touching.

“When I was a boy, my father taught me to navigate by stars, just in

case,” he murmurs. I hear a catch in his voice, and I think that of all he has told me tonight, the one thing he hasn’t revealed is why he is a farmer, not a tour guide. Plans change, he’d said. Shit happens.

“How bad was your sense of direction?” I say, trying—and failing—for lightness.

The fire hisses in the quiet between us. “Everything you’re seeing up in the night sky happened thousands of years ago, because the light takes so long to reach us,” Gabriel says. “I always thought it was so strange … that sailors chart where they’re going in the future by looking at a map of the past.”

“That’s why I love art,” I say. “When you study the provenance of a piece, you’re seeing history. You learn what people wanted future

generations to remember.”

The sky looks like an overturned bowl of glitter; I cannot remember ever seeing so many stars. I think of the ceiling at Grand Central Terminal, and how I restored it with my father. It is hard to piece out the constellations here, and I realize that’s because on the equator, you can see clusters from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. There—I find the Big Dipper. But also the Southern Cross, which is normally hidden beneath the horizon for me.

It feels like a peek at a secret.

“I can’t usually see the Southern Cross,” I say softly. It makes me a little disoriented, like the whole planet has shimmied off course.

I wonder if I had to come to this half of the world just to see it a whole different way.

After a moment, Gabriel asks, “Did you have a good birthday?”

I glance at him. He has rolled to his side. While I’ve been looking at the sky, he’s been looking at me.

“The best,” I say.

To: [email protected] From: [email protected]

Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever going to do an appendectomy again. I’m a surgeon. I fix things. Your gallbladder’s infected? I got it. Hernia repair? I’m your guy. If I have any

ICU patients, it’s temporary, a complication from surgery that I know how to fix. But with Covid, I can’t fix anything. I’m just maintaining the status quo, if I’m lucky.

Also, I’m a resident, which means I’m supposed to be learning—but I’m learning nothing.

I’m good at my job. I just don’t know if my job is still good for me.

Three days ago, when I left the hospital, 98% of the beds in the ICU were occupied, and all my patients were on oxygen and dying. On the way home, I called my dad to check in. You know he voted for Trump—so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when he told me that the Covid numbers are inflated, and that the shutdown is a cure

that’s worse than the disease.

I get that not everyone is seeing this virus firsthand. It’s another thing entirely to disavow it.

I hung up on him.

Fuck. I just remembered your birthday.

My mother was often asked how she “did it all”—juggled the roles of wife, mother, and one of the most renowned crisis photographers of the century. In real life, the answer was simple—she didn’t do it all. My father did most of it, and if there was a balance between motherhood and her career, it canted hard to the latter. In interviews, she would always tell the same story about the first time she took me to the pediatrician. She bundled me into my snowsuit, loaded her pocketbook and the collapsible stroller and the diaper bag into the car, and drove off—leaving me buckled in my infant carrier on the floor of the kitchen. She was in the doctor’s parking lot before she realized that she’d left her baby behind.

My mother never told me that story directly, but I had seen so many

interview clips on the internet that I knew where she paused for dramatic effect, the part where she smiled wryly, the bit where she rolled her eyes in self-deprecation. It was an act, and my mother never broke character. She and the interviewer would both laugh, in a charming, what-can-you-do way.

What about the baby, I used to think, as if it were not me, as if I were a mere observer. What about this is remotely funny?

Finn—

Last night I had a supervivid dream of you. Someone had kidnapped me and drugged me and I was in a basement and there weren’t any

doors or windows where I could escape. I was tied to something—a pole, a chair? Then all of a sudden, you were there, wearing a costume. I couldn’t see the bottom half of your face, but I knew it was you because of your eyes and because I could smell your shampoo.

You kept telling me to stay awake so you could get me out of there, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Then I realized we weren’t alone. There was another woman with you, and she was in costume, too.

I was the only one who hadn’t been invited to the party.

It’s somewhere around the fourth hour of a seven-hour hike to the Sierra Negra volcano that I wonder why, exactly, Gabriel thought this was a birthday gift anyone would actually enjoy. I am hot and sweaty and sunburned when we reach a small tree with a black rock in a crotch of its

limbs. “This is the spot where tourists leave their overnight packs,” Gabriel says, and he shrugs off the gear he’s been shouldering. “Some of them stay overnight before hiking down into the caldera. No one’s allowed up here without a ranger or guide.”

We are breaking curfew, Gabriel isn’t really a guide anymore, and the volcano happens to be active. What could possibly go wrong?

Till this point, the climb has taken us along dirt paths, through lush, thick greenery. The trail begins 800 meters above sea level, Gabriel tells me, and by the time you reach the volcano, you’re 1,000 meters up. From the pack he’s carried, he takes out a lunch Abuela has made and spreads it between us. There are plastic bowls of rice and chicken, and a chocolate bar that is already soft with heat, which we share. I stretch my legs out in front of me, looking at the dust on my sneakers. “How much further?” I ask him.

He grins at me, his eyes shaded by a baseball cap. “You sound like Beatriz, when she was little.”

I try to imagine Beatriz, smart and demanding, as a little girl. “I bet she was a handful.”

Gabriel thinks for a moment. “She was just the right amount.”

I open my mouth to explain the idiom to him, but then realize his answer is already perfect. “Don’t think I didn’t notice that you avoided my question

…”

“You’ll know,” he says. “Trust me.” And, I realize, I do.

We gather up our trash and put it into Gabriel’s pack, falling into an easy rhythm as we hike to the top of the caldera. “What are the odds,” I ask, “that this is going to go all Mount St. Helens on us?”

“Slim to none,” Gabriel assures me. “There are twelve geological

systems tracking its tremors, and it gives out plenty of hints before it erupts, which happens every fifteen years or so. I was here the last time. My father and I hiked in and we slept on ground that was warm, like it had heated

pipes underneath. He taught me how to gauge the wind and the slope, so that we wouldn’t wind up in the path of the eruption. We took pictures, when it happened. I remember you could see the orange lava in the cracks

of the earth, just a foot or so below. My shoes stuck to the rocks, because the soles had melted.”

“When was this?”

“Two thousand five. I was a teenager.”

I do the math. “So … this volcano is overdue to blow?”

“If it makes you feel better, the Galápagos are moving eastward on their tectonic plate, so even though the hot spot is in the same place, the lava

flows mostly to the west now … which means the eruptions aren’t as dangerous to the people living here anymore.”

It does not make me feel better, but before I can tell him that, the caldera comes into view.

The crater stands out in stark relief to the lush green that cradles it. It’s black, six miles of it, sprawled beneath a cloud of mist. It looks desolate and barren, otherworldly. From where we hike along the precipice, I can see the ocean and the rich emerald of the highlands to the right, but also the ropy, frozen black swirls of the caldera to the left. It feels like standing on

the line between life and death.

We have to climb down into the caldera, trek across it, and then hike up to the fumaroles—the active part of the volcano. As we walk across the scorched belly of the crater, with its melted eddies of charred lava, it feels like we are navigating a distant planet. I follow behind Gabriel, stepping where he steps, as if one wrong move might plummet me to the middle of the earth.

“You know,” he says over his shoulder. “You’re different from when you first came.”

I glance down at myself. I know, from looking in the mirror in the apartment bathroom, that my hair is streaked blonder from the sun. My shorts hang on my hips, likely because I’m not eating every day at Sant Ambroeus, the café in the Sotheby’s building, and because I’ve been running and hiking instead of just briskly walking to work. Gabriel has slowed, so that we are shoulder to shoulder, and he sees me doing a self- inventory. “Not like that,” he says. “In here.” He puts his hand over his heart.

He starts walking again, and I fall into pace with him. “You came here

like every other tourist. Wound up supertight, with your checklist, to take a picture of a tortoise and a sea lion and a booby and put them on Instagram.”

“I didn’t have a list,” I argue.

He raises a brow. “Didn’t you?”

Maybe not literally, but sure, there were things I had wanted to do on Isabela. Touristy things, because what’s the point of crossing off something on your bucket list if—

Shit. I did have a list.

“Visitors come here saying they want to see Galápagos, but they don’t, not really. They want to see what they can already see in guidebooks or on the internet. The real Isabela is made up of stuff most people don’t care about. Like the feria, and how trading a pair of rubber wading boots can get you a meal of fresh lobster. Or how people who live here mark a path—not with a wooden sign, but with a lava rock set in the notch of a tree. Or what dinner tastes like, when you’ve grown it yourself.” He glances at me.

“Tourists come with an itinerary. Locals just … live.” “Gabriel Fernandez,” I say. “Was that a compliment?” He laughs. “This is your birthday present,” he admits.

“You must have seen a lot of ugly Americans,” I say. “Not physically ugly. I mean the spoiled, entitled kind.”

“Not too many. There were way more turistas who came here and saw what nature looks like when it’s wild, when you haven’t contained it and confined it into twelve square city blocks or an exhibit at a zoo, and they were just … humbled. You could see the gears turning: How do we make

sure these beautiful things are here for other people to see? How can I keep my corner of the planet alive, to help? The best part of being a tour guide was planting a little seed in someone’s mind, and knowing you wouldn’t be there to see it, but that it would grow and grow.”

Given how prickly he’d been about me being a tourist when we first met and the fact that he isn’t a tour guide any longer, I wonder what changed.

My nose prickles—the first clue that we have reached the fumaroles. The ground bleaches from black to white and yellow. All I can smell is sulfur.

Instead of the melted ice cream whirls of cooled lava, there are endless small light rocks that shift under my sneakers with a light, tinkling noise, and steam belching from thermal vents.

“There,” Gabriel says, pointing to a spot where lime-green smoke oozes out of a pore in the earth.

I am six feet away from an active volcano. “Why did you stop?” I ask.

He turns to me. “Because swimming in magma is overrated.”

“No,” I say. “Why did you stop being a tour guide?”

He doesn’t answer, and I assume that he is going to ignore me, like he

has before. But maybe there is something about the primeval landscape and our proximity to the beating heart of the planet, because Gabriel sinks down to the jaundiced ground, and starts from the beginning.

“We were taking out a scuba tour to Gordon Rocks,” Gabriel says, as I settle across from him, our knees nearly touching. “It was a live-aboard boat, with twelve divers. It was a gig we’d done hundreds of times. My

father and I went out early to check the conditions, because that’s what you do. I was the one who went into the water, while he stayed in the boat.

There was a slight current near the surface, no big deal.”

He looks at me. “Gordon Rocks, it’s a cliff under the water, where just a little triangle of rock peeks out above the surface. We went back to the clients’ boat and we did the safety briefing. Because there were so many divers, we took two pangas. Everyone was given the same instructions for deboarding: get down twenty feet as quickly as possible, and bear to the right. But as soon as we were under the water it was clear that conditions weren’t what I’d thought they were. The current was swift, and it was

deep.”

Gabriel stares out at the flat horizon, but I know he’s not seeing what’s in front of us. “Ten divers got spread out to the right of the cliff wall. But one, who wasn’t quite as experienced at scuba, got sucked into the current to the left, and dragged down deep. My father, he pointed to the ten other divers and then he did this”—Gabriel touches his index fingers together—“he wanted me to stay close to them. I knew he was going to go after the other diver. I saw him swim into the current, and then when I couldn’t see him anymore, I went after the others.”

He shakes his head. “There was a clump of divers clinging to the rock face, together. After I got to them, I led them to the surface and set off a float so that the panga driver could get them. The boat was already a half

mile north, picking up others who had surfaced a distance away. It went like that for a while—me treading water and trying to see the heads of the other divers and make sure the panga rounded them up. By the time that was done, I counted eleven divers and me, but my father and the last diver hadn’t come up.

“We zoomed out to the left of the rock. I had binoculars, from the panga driver, and I was staring so hard at the surface of the water looking for a

bobbing head or anything that moved, but the ocean …” Gabriel’s voice caught. “It’s just so goddamn big.”

He fell silent, and I reached into his lap and squeezed his hand. I rested our fists on my knee.

“After an hour, I knew he couldn’t have survived. At the depths he was at, he could have been dragged by the current a hundred feet or more. The percentage of oxygen in the tanks was meant for a shallow dive, and he

knew going deeper would mess with his brain and his ability to function. He would only have had enough air for ten or fifteen minutes, that far down. Between swimming hard to catch up to the lost diver and inflating

the diver’s BC and unhooking his weight belt, my dad likely had even less time than that.”

I think about my own father’s death. I was not with him, and it happened too fast, but at the hospital, I was able to see his body. I remember holding his cold hand and not wanting to let it go, because I knew it would be the last time I ever got to touch him. “Did your father …” I start. “Did he ever

…” But I can’t seem to finish.

Gabriel shakes his head. “Bodies that drown in the ocean don’t surface,” he says quietly.

“I’m so sorry. What a terrible accident.”

His gaze snaps up. “Accident? It was all my fault.” Dumbfounded, I stare at him. “How?”

“I was the one who tested the conditions. Clearly I got them wrong—” “Or they changed—”

“Then I should have been the one to go after the diver,” Gabriel insists. “So my father would still be alive.”

And you wouldn’t, I think.

He turns his head away from me. “I can’t lead tours anymore, not without thinking about how bad I fucked up. I can’t scuba-dive without thinking his body is going to drift in front of me. The reason I’m building the house and farming is because I have to be goddamn exhausted at the end of the day, or I have nightmares about what he must have been thinking in those last few minutes.”

I’m quiet for a moment. “What he was thinking,” I say finally, “is that his son would be safe.”

Gabriel dashes a palm across his eyes, and I pretend not to notice. He

stands up, using his weight to pull me to my feet. “We’d better get back,” he

says. “The return trip’s not any shorter.”

All around us, fumes rise from little pockets in the ground, as if we stand in a crucible. It is prehistoric and dystopian, but if you look closely, here and there are tiny green shoots and stalks. Something, growing out of nothing.

As we walk back across the fumaroles and the dark yawn of the caldera, Gabriel doesn’t let go of my hand.

An hour later, the sun is skulking lower in the sky and we reach the crotched tree with the black lava rock where Gabriel left behind his heavier pack. We can see the huddled shape of it, propped against a tree, but there’s another shadow as well, and as we get closer, it is clear that it’s a person. I scramble in my pocket for the mask I haven’t worn when it was just me and Gabriel, only to realize that it is Beatriz. She breaks into a run as soon as

she sees us.

“You need to come now,” she says, and she pushes a piece of paper into my hand.

It is an email, printed out on stationery from the hotel. For immediate

delivery to guest Diana O’Toole, it reads. From: The Greens. We have been trying to reach you. Please contact ASAP. Your mother is dying.

On the way back to Gabriel’s house, we sprint—and yet somehow, the distance seems even further than it did this morning. Distantly I hear Beatriz explain to Gabriel how the message arrived—something about

Elena and an electrical short that caused a small fire in the hotel’s utility room; how when she went to the hotel with her cousin so he could rewire and fix the circuits, and to make sure everything was in working order, she had powered up the front office computers and seen a series of emails, each more urgent, trying to get in touch with me. I hear Gabriel tell Beatriz to call Elena, to have the Wi-Fi up and running by the time we get there.

Still, it’s two hours before we drop Beatriz at the farm and continue in Gabriel’s rusty Jeep into Puerto Villamil, to the hotel. This time, there is no flirting from Elena. She meets us at the door, her eyes dark and concerned.

My phone buzzes, automatically connecting to the network. I ignore the flood of emails and texts bursting through this tiny crack in the dam of Isabela’s radio silence. I pull up FaceTime, the last call I made to the memory care facility, and dial.

A different nurse answers this time, one I don’t recognize. She is wearing a mask and a face shield. “I’m Hannah O’Toole’s daughter,” I say. All the breath seizes in my throat. “Is my mother …?”

Those eyes soften. “I’ll bring you in to her,” the nurse says.

There’s a lurching spin of scenery as whatever device she is holding is moved in transit. I close my eyes against a dizzy wave, expecting to see the familiar confines of my mother’s apartment, but instead, the nurse’s face

appears again. “You should be prepared—she’s decompensated very fast.

She has pneumonia, brought on by Covid,” the nurse says. “But at this point it’s not just her lungs that are failing. Her kidneys, her heart …”

I swallow. It has been a couple of weeks since I saw her on video chat. I had used Abuela’s phone to call The Greens twice. Just days ago, they told me she was stable. How could so much have gone wrong since then?

“Is she … awake?”

“No,” the nurse says. “She’s sedated heavily. But you can still talk to her.

Hearing is the last sense to go.” She pauses. “Now is the time to say your goodbyes.”

A moment later, I am looking at a wraith in a hospital bed, the covers pulled up to her chin. She is hollow-cheeked, faded, taking tiny sips of air. I try to reconcile this image of my mother with the woman who hid in

bunkers in active war zones, so that she could chronicle the terrible things humans do to each other.

Anger washes over me—why isn’t anyone doing anything to help her? If she can’t breathe, there are machines for that. If her heart stops—

If her heart stops, they will do nothing, because I signed a do not

resuscitate order when she became a resident at The Greens. With dementia, there was no point in prolonging her life with any extenuating measures.

I am uncomfortably aware that the nurse is holding up the iPad or phone and waiting for me to speak. But what am I supposed to say to a woman who doesn’t remember me now, and actively forgot about me in the past?

When she reappeared in my life, already in the throes of dementia, I convinced myself that putting my mother in a care facility was more

compassionate than any consideration she’d ever given me. She couldn’t

move into my tiny apartment, nor would she have wanted to, when we were little more than strangers. Instead, I had figured out a way to use her own work to fund her living expenses; I had done the research and found the best memory care facility; I had gotten her settled and had patted myself on

the back for my good deeds. I was so busy being self-congratulatory for being more of a daughter to her than she was a mother to me that I failed to see I had really just underscored the distance between us. I hadn’t used the time to get to know her better, or to become someone she trusted. I had protected myself from being disappointed again by not cultivating our relationship.

Just like Beatriz, I think.

I clear my throat. “Mom,” I say. “It’s me, Diana.” I hesitate and then add, “Your daughter.”

I wait, but there is absolutely no indication she can hear me. “I’m sorry I’m not there …”

Am I?

“I just want you to know …”

I swallow down the hurt that roars inside me, the wash of memories. I see my father hanging a giant map on the wall of my bedroom, helping me

press thumbtacks into each of the countries where my mother was when she wasn’t with us. I think of how, when her returns were inevitably delayed, he would distract me by letting me pick a color and then he’d cook entire

meals in that monochrome. The heat of my blush at age thirteen when I had to explain to my father that I’d gotten my period. Scratchy phone

connections where I pretended my mother was saying something other than You know I’d be there for your birthday/recital/Christmas if I could. Nights I’d lie in bed, ashamed for wanting her to just be my mother, when what she was doing was so much more important.

Feeling forgotten.

And in that second, staring through a screen at someone I never knew, I cannot trust myself to speak, because I’m afraid of what I might actually say.

You weren’t there for me when it counted, either. Quid pro quo.

Just then, the connection dies.

Elena tries rebooting the modem three times. One of those times, the video call is picked up, but the image freezes immediately and goes black. It is when Gabriel and I climb back into his Jeep and we are driving down the main street of Puerto Villamil with its tiny sliver of cell service that the text comes in.

Your mother passed tonight at 6:35. Our deepest condolences for your loss.

Gabriel glances toward me. “Is that—” I nod.

“Can I do anything?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I just want to go home,” I tell him.

He walks me to the door of the apartment, and I can see he is trying to find the words to ask if he should stay. Before he can, though, I thank him and tell him I just want to lie down. I wait until I hear his footsteps on the ceiling above, and I imagine him telling Abuela and Beatriz that my mother has died.

I hold my breath, waiting for the words to beat through my blood.

I pick up my phone and stare at the text from The Greens, and then swipe my thumb to delete it.

That’s how easy it is to remove someone from your life.

I realize, even as I think it, that this is not necessarily true.

This is nothing like when I lost my father. Back then, it felt like a rip in the fabric of my world, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t hold the edges together. Even now, four years later, when I am going about my day, sometimes I brush up against that seam and it hurts like hell.

I find a bottle of caña in the cupboard—Gabriel gave me my own supply after our campout, along with a box full of fresh vegetables for meals this week. Since I don’t have a shot glass, I pour a little into a juice cup, and then—shrugging—fill it to the top. I take a healthy swig, letting the fire run through me.

Right now, I just want to get fucking drunk.

I peel off my clothes, the ones in which I had hiked to the volcano (was that today?) and run the shower. Standing in the stream of water, needles pelting at my skin, I say the word out loud: orphan. I am nobody’s child

now. I’m an isolated island, just like the one I’m stuck on.

There are logistics that will have to be sorted out: burial, funeral, liquidating her apartment at the facility. Right now even thinking about it is exhausting.

I pull on clean underwear and one of Gabriel’s old T-shirts, which hangs down to my thighs. I braid my hair to get it out of my face. Then I sit down at the table with the bottle of caña and pour my second full glass.

“Well, Mom,” I say, tasting the bitterness of that title. “Here’s to you.” I take another gulp of the liquor.

By tomorrow, the media worldwide will be reporting on her death. The obituaries will be retrospectives of her career—from her first embedding in a war zone to the Pulitzer she won in 2008 for photos of a street demonstration in Myanmar that turned violent.

The award ceremony for that was held at a swanky luncheon in New York City in late May. My mother attended. My father did not.

He was in the bleachers at my high school graduation, cheering as I crossed the stage to get my diploma.

I put my head down on my crossed forearms and sift through my mind for one pure pearl of a memory of my mother. Surely there’s one.

I discard one after another as they start off positive—a work trip I tagged along for; an image of her opening a Mother’s Day gift I’d made in preschool; a moment where she stood in front of my canvas at a student exhibition and canted her head, absorbing it. But each of those recollections devolves quickly, pricked by a thorn of self-interest: a sightseeing promise broken when something came up; a phone call from her agent that interrupted the gift giving; a blunt and brutal criticism of proportion in my painting, instead of a crumb of praise.

Did you really hate me that much? I wonder.

But I already know the answer: No. To hate someone, you’d have to consider them worthy of notice.

Then something drips into my consciousness.

I am little, and my mother is putting film into her camera. It is a magical black box and I know I am not supposed to touch it, just like I’m not supposed to go into her darkroom, with its nightmare glow and chemical scent. She balances the little machine on her knees and gently winds the slippery film until the teeth catch. It makes soft clicking noises.

Do you want to help? she asks.

My hands are tiny and clumsy, so she covers my fingers with her own, to circle the little lever until the film is taut. She closes the body of the camera, then lifts it and focuses on my face. She snaps a picture.

Here, she says. You try.

She helps me lift it and positions my finger on the shutter. I’ve seen her do it a thousand times. Except I don’t know to frame the shot through the viewfinder. I don’t really know what to look at, at all.

My mother is laughing as I push down on the shutter so hard it takes a flurry of photos, the sound like a pounding heart.

It occurs to me that I never saw those images. For all I know she developed them and got a crazy collage of blurry wall and ceiling and rug. Maybe I didn’t capture her at all.

But maybe that doesn’t really matter. For one second, it had been my turn.

New memories are sharp, and I wait for this one to draw blood. But … nothing happens. If anything it’s even more depressing to be sitting here half a world away, clinging to five seconds of motherhood, and wishing

there had been more. “Diana?”

I lift my head up from the table to find Gabriel standing in front of me. I blink at him as he turns on the light. I hadn’t even noticed that it had gotten dark.

“I was headed back to the house,” he says, “but wanted to see how you were.”

“Still sober, that’s how I am.” I push the bottle across the table. “Join

me.” When he doesn’t at first, I refill my glass. “I suppose you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t get wasted.”

Gabriel takes a juice glass out of the cabinet and pours his own shot. He sits down across from me. “If ever there was a time to get wasted, it’s when you’re toasting someone you’ve loved and lost. I’m so sorry, Diana.”

“I’m not,” I whisper. His gaze flies to mine.

“There,” I say. “Now you know my terrible secret. I’m an awful, broken person. My mother died and I feel … nothing.” I clink my glass to his. “That is why I’m drinking.”

I gulp the alcohol, but it goes down wrong. Coughing and sputtering, I fold forward in the chair, trying—and failing—to catch my breath. It is like aspirating fire.

When I start to see stars at the edges of my vision, I feel a hand on the flat of my back, moving in circles. “Breathe,” Gabriel soothes. “Easy.”

My throat is burning and my eyes are streaming and I don’t know if it’s because I was choking or because I’m crying, and I’m not sure it matters.

Gabriel is crouched down next to me. He hands me a bandanna from his pocket so that I can wipe my face, but the tears don’t stop. A moment later,

with a soft curse, he wraps his arms around me. I sob into the curve of his neck.

I don’t know when the air starts moving in and out of my lungs again, or when I stop crying. But I start noticing the rhythmic sweep of Gabriel’s hand from the crown of my head to the tail of my braid. His lips against my temple. His breath falling in time to mine.

“You’re not broken,” Gabriel says. “You can feel.”

When he kisses me, it feels like the most natural thing in the world. My fingers push through his hair as I fight to get closer. I’m struggling for breath again, but now I want to be.

Gabriel is still kneeling beside me. In one motion he picks me up and sets me on top of the table, standing between my legs. “I’m so glad I fixed this damn thing,” he murmurs against my lips, and we both start to laugh. My

hands slide up his forearms to his shoulders and my ankles hook behind his knees. He kisses like he is pouring himself into me. Like this is his last moment on earth, and he needs to leave his mark.

His palms move from my knees to my thighs, bunching the soft T-shirt. The whole time, we kiss. We kiss. When his fingers reach the elastic of my underwear, he stops and pulls back. He looks at me, his eyes so dark that I cannot see how far I’ve fallen. I nod, and he drags the T-shirt over my head. I feel his teeth scrape against my throat, against the chain of the miraculous medal, and then he paints words onto me with his tongue, moving between my breasts, down my belly, lower. “Pienso en ti todo el tiempo,” he says, hiking me to the edge of the table before kneeling again on the floor. His mouth is wet and hot through cotton. He feasts.

I am a lightning storm, gathering energy. I pull on Gabriel’s hair, dragging him up, affixing myself to him like a second skin. The room spins as he picks me up and carries me into the bedroom, following me down onto the mattress in a tangle of limbs. He immediately rolls to his side so I don’t bear his weight, and without him covering me I shiver beneath the ceiling fan. My hair has unraveled; he pushes it back from my face and waits. “Yes?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say, and this time I crawl on top, pushing at Gabriel’s clothes until they are gone; until I can sink onto him and into him and lose myself.

It isn’t until afterward, when he has fallen asleep holding me tight, that I think maybe I’ve been found.

When I wake up, Gabriel is staring at me. I feel his hand flex on my shoulder, as if I am sand that might slip out of his grasp.

My head hurts and my mouth is dry but I know I cannot blame last night on the caña. I went into this with my mind clear, even if my heart was hurting.

Now, it’s an anchor sinking in me.

Just one more second, I think.

I flatten my palm against Gabriel’s warm chest, and I open my mouth to speak.

“Don’t,” he begs. “Not yet.”

Because we both know what’s coming. The slow untangling, the extraction. The excuses and the apologies and the veneer of friendship we will slap over this and never peek beneath.

He kisses me so sweetly, like it is a song in a different language. Even after he pulls back, I am still humming it. “Before you say anything,” he begins.

But he doesn’t finish. Because neither of us has heard the knock or the door opening, but we cannot miss the sound of breaking glass and china as Beatriz finds us knotted together, drops the breakfast she’s kindly made me, and runs away.

By the time we have sorted out our clothes and hurried up to Abuela’s, Beatriz is gone.

By unspoken agreement, I climb into Gabriel’s Jeep with him. He is silent as he drives through town, scanning the empty streets for her. At the dock, he reverses direction, and heads for the highlands. “She could be back at the farm,” he says, and I nod, because thinking of the alternative is too terrifying.

But I know that, like me, he saw the look on Beatriz’s face. It wasn’t just embarrassment at finding us. It was … betrayal. It was the expression of

someone who realized she was well and truly alone.

It was a look I hadn’t seen on her face since the very first time I saw her on the dock at Concha de Perla, watching her own blood drip from her fingertips.

In the time I’d been on Isabela, Beatriz had moved from desperation to resignation. If she hadn’t been exactly joyous about this homecoming, at

least now she seemed to be less tormented. She hadn’t been cutting herself. Her old wounds were silver scars.

And now we’d ripped them open again.

I know that cutting does not always precede suicide. But I also know that sometimes, it does. Beatriz let her guard down with me; she trusted me to

be her person. And then I gave myself to someone else.

A small sinkhole forms in me, filled with guilt. Finn. My mother.

There is so much wrong with what I did last night. But I push all that out of my head because right now nothing matters but finding Beatriz and talking her down from her ledge.

A whisper in my bones: Coward.

“This is a small island,” Gabriel says tightly. “Until it isn’t.”

I know what he means. There are endless trails and furrows through

Isabela that aren’t accessible by car; there are poisonous plants and spined cacti in some places and thick greenery you can’t see through in others.

There are countless ways you can hurt yourself—unintentionally, or on purpose.

“We’ll find her,” I tell him. I lift my hand, planning to cover his on the stick shift, but on second thought, put it back in my lap.

I stare out the passenger-side window, scanning every flutter of movement to see if it might be a girl on the run. There’s no way she could have outpaced us on foot. But maybe she took a bicycle from Abuela’s.

Maybe she got a head start on us when we made a false start by turning toward town.

When we finally reach the farm, I open the Jeep’s door before we even come to a complete stop. I run into Gabriel’s house, yelling for Beatriz. He is on my heels, wildly looking around the living room and throwing open

the door to her bedroom to find it empty.

I stand in the doorway as he sinks down onto the mattress. “Shit,” he mutters.

“Maybe she just needs time alone,” I say quietly, hopefully. “Maybe she’s on her way back right now.”

His haunted gaze meets mine, and I realize this is not the first time he’s searched far and wide for someone he loved who’d gone missing.

Suddenly he grabs Beatriz’s backpack from beside the bed and dumps the contents on the mattress.

“What are you looking for?” I ask.

“Something she took? Something she didn’t?” He unzips an inner pocket and stuffs his hand inside. “I don’t know.”

A clue. A hint to where, on this island, she would have gone to disappear.

I open the top drawer of the bureau, letting my hand sift through panties and bras, when my fingers brush against something that feels like a diary.

I dig deeper into the recesses of the drawer. It’s not a diary or a journal or a book at all. It’s a stack of postcards, banded together with a hair elastic.

It’s all of the postcards I wrote Finn. The ones that Beatriz told me she mailed.

I feel like I’ve been run through with a sword. I pull off the elastic and shuffle through the cards, all G2 TOURS on one side, and my cramped handwriting on the other. This was the one connection I had to Finn. Even if I couldn’t reliably speak to him or get his emails, I was hopeful that he was hearing every now and then from me.

Except … he wasn’t.

Finn is thousands of miles away, without any word from me. Given our last abortive phone call, he must assume I’m pissed at him. At the very least he’ll think I’ve put him out of my mind.

I look at Gabriel and realize that, last night, this was true.

The contents of Beatriz’s backpack—textbooks and a phone charger and earbuds and some granola bars—are littered around him. But Gabriel is holding a Polaroid and frowning slightly. A line of tape runs down the middle, carefully piecing together something that was previously sliced apart.

On one side of the photograph is a pretty girl, with corkscrews of blond hair. She has her arm around Beatriz, her other hand extended to take the photo. Their eyes are closed, as they kiss.

Ana Maria.

The expression on Beatriz’s face is one I’ve never seen: pure joy. “Who is this girl?” Gabriel murmurs.

I wonder what he is thinking. “Her host sister, a friend from Santa Cruz.” “A friend,” he mutters, and at first I think he is reacting to Beatriz kissing

a girl. But when he touches a fingertip to the Scotch tape down the center of the photograph, I realize he’s angry at whoever broke Beatriz’s heart so cleanly that she would tear apart this picture, and then regretfully patch it back together. “When her school closed, Beatriz begged to come back here. Is this why?”

I love that Gabriel has shoved aside the unimportant details—his daughter falling for a girl is inconsequential; what matters is that she was hurt. That she still is. That we are just the latest in a line of people she cared for who let her down.

I think of what Beatriz said to me when we were in the trillizos.

Truth or dare. Unconditional love is bullshit. She loved me, but not like that.

I wanted to know what it would be like to just let go.

“Gabriel,” I breathe. “I think I know where she is.”

The three volcanic tunnels are not that far from Gabriel’s farm. We get as close as we can by truck and then Gabriel slings ropes and a rappelling

harness over his shoulder. As we tramp through the thick ground cover, I call out Beatriz’s name, but there is no answer.

I think about how far the ladder went into the shaft, how black it was below that. I wonder how much further she would have had to fall.

Curling my hand around Abuela’s miraculous medal, I pray. “Beatriz,” I scream again.

The wind whispers through the brush and whips my hair around my face. Gabriel finds a sturdy tree and wraps one end of the rope around it, tying a series of impossible knots. It is an unfairly beautiful day, with puffy white

clouds dancing across the sky and birdsong like a symphony. I stand in front of the three volcanic tunnels. If she’s even here, she could be in any of them.

At the bottom of any of them. “I’m going down,” I tell Gabriel.

“What?” His head snaps up in the middle of securing the rope. “Diana, wait—”

But I can’t. I start descending the ladder of the tunnel beside the one Beatriz and I climbed into, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The distant sun bounces off minerals in the rock walls, glowing gold. I climb deeper, swallowed by this stone throat.

The only sound is the rhythmic drip of water on rock. Plink. Plink.

And then a choked sob.

“Beatriz?” I cry, moving faster. “Gabriel!” I yell. “In here!” I lose my footing on the slick ladder in my hurry. “Hang on. I’m coming.”

A beat, and then her voice threads toward me. “Just go away,” Beatriz sobs.

Her words are disembodied, floating like ghosts. I can’t see her anywhere below me. “I know you’re upset about what you saw,” I say, climbing down and down and down, until I reach the end of the ladder, and still she’s not there. Wildly, I look between my feet on the bottom rung, wondering if I will see her broken body below me.

“I should never have talked to you,” Beatriz says. I cannot see her; I go still and listen for the bounce of sound. I follow the soft hitch of her crying and—there—a shadow moving in a shadow. She clings to another ladder on the far side of the lava tube. There are a few straggling ropes left behind by others.

“I thought … you cared. I thought you meant what you said. But you’re just like everyone else who says that and then leaves.”

“You do matter to me, Beatriz,” I say gently. “But I was always going to leave.”

“Did you tell my dad that before or after you fucked him?” I wince. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“Yeah, sure. Keep digging that hole …”

“This isn’t about him. This is about you,” I say. “And I do care about you, Bea. I do.”

Her sobs get louder. “Stop lying. Just fucking stop saying that.”

The ladder shudders as booted feet strike the wall beside me. “She’s not lying, Beatriz,” Gabriel says, falling into view in the space between me and his daughter. He has the rappelling rope wrapped around him, a link to the world above. It is taut and seems too thin to support his weight. If it snaps, he is too far to grab either of the ladders Beatriz and I stand on. “When you care about someone, it just … happens,” he says quietly. “None of us get to choose who we love.”

I hold my breath. Is he talking about the two of us? About Beatriz and Ana Maria? About his ex?

As he is speaking, he has shifted his weight, canting his feet for balance on the slick wall. Incrementally, he’s trying to make his way to Beatriz without startling her into doing something rash.

“You’d be better off without me,” Beatriz sobs, the sentence torn from her throat. “Everyone else is.”

Gabriel shakes his head. “You’re not alone, even if you feel like you are.

And I don’t want to be alone.” His breath catches. “I can’t lose you, too.” He stretches out his hand toward her.

Beatriz doesn’t move. “You don’t even know who I really am,” she says, her voice hushed in shame.

Their breathing circles, echoes.

“Yes I do,” Gabriel says. “You’re my baby. I don’t care what else you are

… or aren’t. That’s the only thing that matters.” His fingertips reach further through the void.

Beatriz meets him halfway. In the next moment, Gabriel has gathered her into his arms and lashed her tight against him with the ropes. He whispers to her in Spanish; she clings to his shoulders, drawing shuddering breaths.

Slowly, the three of us inch toward the light.

The next few hours pass in a blur. We take Beatriz down to Abuela’s,

because Gabriel doesn’t want to leave her alone in the farmhouse while he ferries me back to the apartment. Abuela bursts into tears when she sees

Beatriz and starts fussing over her. Beatriz is still weepy and silent and embarrassed, and Gabriel focuses all his attention and energy on her, as he should.

At some point, I slip out of Abuela’s home and walk down to my basement apartment, sitting on the short retaining wall that separates it from the beach. With all the healing that has to happen in that family, I don’t belong there.

But.

I’m starting to wonder where I do belong.

I think about the postcards in Beatriz’s drawer that weren’t sent. The things I wanted Finn to know. The things I will never tell him.

I don’t know how long I sit on the little wall, but the sun staggers lower in the sky and the tide goes out, leaving a long line of treasure on the sand: sea stars and pearled shells and seaweed tangled like the hair of mermaids.

I can sense Gabriel walking up behind me even before he speaks. Space is different when he is in it. Charged, electrical. He stops just short of the spot where I sit, staring at the orange line of the horizon. I turn my chin, acknowledging him. “How is she?”

“Asleep,” he says, and he steps forward. His hair is mussed by the breeze, as if it, too, sighs to see him.

He sits down next to me, one leg drawn up, his arm resting on his knee. “I thought you’d want to know she’s all right,” he says.

“I did,” I tell him. “I do.”

“We’ve been talking,” Gabriel says hesitantly. “About … school?” About Ana Maria.

“About all of it.” He looks at me. “I’m going to stay with her tonight.” A faint blush stripes his cheekbones. “I didn’t want you to think that—”

“I wasn’t expecting you to—” “It’s not that I don’t—”

We both stop talking. “You’re a good father, Gabriel,” I say quietly. “You

do protect the people you love. Don’t second-guess that.”

He takes the compliment awkwardly, his eyes sliding away from mine. “You know, I named her. Luz wanted something from a telenovela she was obsessed with at the time—but I insisted on Beatriz. Maybe I knew what was coming.”

“What do you mean?”

“Beatriz is the one who kept Dante going when he walked through hell.

And every time I’ve found myself suffering, my Beatriz is the one who pulls me back.”

This pushes on something so tender and bruised inside me, and instead of examining that reaction, I try to make light of it. “I’m shocked.”

“That I named her Beatriz?”

“That you’ve read The Divine Comedy.”

He smiles faintly. “There’s so much about me you have yet to learn,” he says, but there is a thread of sadness in the words, because we both know I never will.

He stands, blocking my view of the ocean. He holds my face in his palms and kisses my forehead. “Good night, Diana,” Gabriel says, and he leaves me alone with the stars and the surf.

I pull the night around me like a coat. I think of New York City and Finn and my mother. Of commuter sneakers and Sunday brunch at our favorite

café when Finn wasn’t working and the blue Tiffany box hidden in the back of his underwear drawer. I think of the rush of relief when I manage to catch the subway car before it pulls out of the station and the taste of

cheesecake I craved and bought at three A.M. and the hours I spent on Zillow dreaming of houses in Westchester we could not afford. I think of the smell of chestnuts from street vendors in the winter and asphalt sinking under my

heels in the summer. I think of Manhattan—an island full of diverse, determined people hustling toward something better; a populace that doesn’t sleepwalk through their days. But it all feels a lifetime away.

Then I think about this island, where there is nothing but time. Where change comes slowly, and inevitably.

Here, I can’t lose myself in errands and work assignments; I can’t disappear in a crowd. I am forced to walk instead of run, and as a result,

I’ve seen things I would have sped past before—the fuss of a crab trading up for a new shell, the miracle of a sunrise, the garish burst of a cactus flower.

Busy is just a euphemism for being so focused on what you don’t have that you never notice what you do.

It’s a defense mechanism. Because if you stop hustling—if you pause— you start wondering why you ever thought you wanted all those things.

I can no longer tell the sky from the sea, but I can hear the waves. A loss of sight; a gain of insight.

When Finn and I booked a trip to the Galápagos, the travel agent told us it would be life-changing.

Little did she know.

To: [email protected] From: [email protected]

Whenever someone gets extubated in the Covid ICU, “Here Comes the Sun” plays on the loudspeakers. It’s like in the Hunger Games movie, when someone dies, but the reverse. We all look up and stop what we’re doing. But then again, days go by when we don’t hear it at all.

Today, when I left the hospital for the first time in 36 hours, there was a refrigerated truck parked outside for the bodies we can’t stuff into the morgue.

I bet every single one of those people came into the ER, thinking: it will only be a day or two.

I do not see Beatriz or Gabriel for five days. Even Abuela seems to be missing, and I assume that they are all up at the farmhouse together. I

convince myself very easily that the reason I feel relieved has everything to do with Beatriz getting help and nothing to do with me being able to avoid Gabriel. The truth is, I don’t know what to say to him. This was a mistake is what sits bitter on my tongue, but I’m not sure what it refers to: the night with Gabriel, or all the years that led up to it.

So every time I leave my apartment and do not see him, it is a reprieve. If I don’t see him I can pretend it didn’t happen, and postpone grappling with the consequences.

One day, I hiked to the Wall of Tears, hoping to find another miracle of cell service. When those bars appeared on my phone, I called The Greens first, arranging for my mother’s cremation and explaining that I was still stuck outside the country. Then I called Finn, only to be put through directly to his voicemail. It’s me, I said. I wrote you postcards, but they … didn’t

make it there. I just wanted to let you know I’m thinking of you. And then I didn’t trust myself to say anything else.

On another sunny, perfect day on Isabela, I pull on my bathing suit, take the snorkel and mask from Gabriel’s apartment, and walk through the

streets of Puerto Villamil, headed to Concha de Perla one more time. A

couple of storekeepers—who, like everyone else, have become less strict with the rule about curfew—recognize me and wave, or call out hellos through their masks. A few have come up to me at the feria, trading me sunblock and cereal and fresh tortillas for portraits that they then hang in their establishments.

When I get to the dock at Concha de Perla, there is a massive sea lion lolling on one of the benches. It raises its head at my approach, twitches its whiskers, and then flings itself back into its nap. I strip to my bathing suit and walk down the stairway into the ocean, fitting the mask to my face and swimming with strong strokes into the heart of the lagoon.

A huge, dark shape rises in my peripheral vision. I turn to see a giant marble stingray moving in tandem with me. Its wings ruffle past, a hem

sweeping the dance floor. It brushes my fingers gently, deliberately, as if to convince me there’s no threat. It feels like stroking the soft, wet velvet underskirt of a mushroom.

Six weeks ago this would have sent me into a conniption. Now, it’s just another living creature sharing space with me. I smile, watching it veer away from me underwater, until it becomes a dot in the deep blue field and then vanishes.

I float on my back for a while, feeling the sun warm my face, and then lazily breaststroke back toward the dock.

Once again, Beatriz is sitting on it.

She isn’t wearing her ubiquitous sweatshirt. Her arms are bare, crossed with silver lines. She hugs her knees to her chest as I climb the stairs, drop

my mask and snorkel, and wring my ponytail dry. I sink down beside her. “Are you okay?” I ask quietly, the same words I first spoke to her on Isabela, a bookend.

“Yeah,” she says, and she looks into her lap.

We fall into a strained silence. Of all the time I’ve spent with Beatriz, we’ve never had nothing to say.

“What you saw … with me and your father …” I shake my head. “You know I have someone waiting at home for me. It shouldn’t have happened. I’m sorry.”

Beatriz rubs her thumbnail along a groove in the wood. “I’m sorry, too.

About not sending your postcards.”

I’ve thought a lot about what might have made her lie to me about mailing them. I don’t think it was malicious … more like she wanted to keep me to herself, once she’d made me a confidante. All the more reason, of course, that she would have been shocked to find me in bed with her father.

She trusted me. Just like Finn had trusted me.

Suddenly I feel like I’m going to be sick. Because as much as I don’t want to face Gabriel to discuss what happened between us, I want even less to confess to Finn.

Beatriz looks at me. “I talked to my dad about Ana Maria.” “How’d that go?”

“Not as bad as I made it out in my head to be,” she says ruefully. “The mind is an amazing thing,” I reply.

She considers this. “Well, it’s not like I didn’t have a good reason to worry,” she adds. “There are a lot of people in the world who’d hate me

because I … like girls. But my father isn’t one of them.” Beatriz ducks her chin. “I kind of feel bad for Ana Maria. She doesn’t have parents like him, so she has to pretend all the time. Even to herself.”

I don’t know what to say to her. She’s right. The world can be a fucked- up place, and I suppose you’re never too young to learn that.

“I’m not going to go back to school,” Beatriz tells me. “My father said he’ll let me do online courses here. But I had to promise to talk to a therapist, in return. We Zoomed for the first time, yesterday.” She grimaces. “Something else that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“Online school?” I repeat. “And Zoom?”

“My dad paid Elena to open the stupid hotel and turn on the Wi-Fi so I could get a decent signal,” Beatriz explains.

I raise an eyebrow. “What’s he paying her with?”

Beatriz cracks a smile, and then I do, too, and we both laugh. I put my arm around her, and she lays her head on my shoulder. We watch a sea lion playing in the distance.

“You know,” Beatriz says, “you could stay. With us.”

I feel myself soften against her. “I have to go back to real life sometime.” She pulls away, a wistful expression on her face. “For a while,” she says,

“didn’t this feel real?”

Dear Finn,

It’s possible you won’t get this postcard until I come home and hand it to you myself. But there are things I need to say, and it can’t wait.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the things we do that are simply

unforgivable. Like me not being with my mother when she died, or my mother not being around when I was growing up. Leaving you alone during a pandemic. You encouraging me to go.

I’ve thought a lot about that last one. When you told me you were trying to keep me safe … you might just have been convincing yourself it was the smartest course of action. Did you really not think I could

manage to stay healthy? Did you actually believe that when the world is falling to pieces, it’s better to be apart from the person you love, instead of together?

I am overthinking this, of course, but these days I have a lot of time to think. And I can’t even blame you. I’ve said and done things, too, that I shouldn’t have.

I know everyone makes mistakes—but until recently I have held everyone to a standard where making mistakes is a weakness. Me

included—I haven’t given myself the grace to screw up, to do better next time. It is exhausting, trying to never step off the path, worrying that if I do, I’ll never get back on track.

So here is what I’ve learned: if, in hindsight, you realize you’ve messed up—if you have done the unforgivable—that does not mean that the terrible thing wasn’t meant to happen. Sure, we may wish otherwise, but when things don’t happen according to plan, it may be

because the plan was faulty. I’m not explaining this well. For example,

take my missing suitcase: I wonder if the person who found it needed clothes more than I did. I wonder how Beatriz would have fared if I had never come to Isabela. I imagine Kitomi having her painting for

company all these weeks, instead of it being crated up in a warehouse. I picture all the people you’ve saved at the hospital and the ones you couldn’t, who you still walked with all the way to the edge of death.

And that’s when I realize: Maybe things didn’t get fucked up. Maybe I

have been wrong all along, and this is where I was always meant to be.

Diana

To: [email protected] From: [email protected]

I’m really too tired to rehash everything that happened at the hospital today.

I hope you’re okay. One of us needs to be.

Two and a half weeks after Gabriel and I sleep together, I come home from a run to find a note slipped under the door of my apartment, inviting me to join him on a hike to a place called Playa Barahona. He says he’ll be waiting at the apartment at nine A.M. tomorrow, in case I decide to come.

Although it would be easier to hide forever, I know I can’t. It is May 9.

I’ve been here for almost two months. One day, that ferry will start running again. I can’t avoid Gabriel on an island this small. And I owe him the

grace of a conversation.

The next morning, I slip out the sliding glass doors and find him waiting with two rusty bicycles and a thermos of coffee. “Hi,” I say.

His eyes drink me in. “Hi.”

I wonder how it is that you can be so shy with someone you’ve felt moving inside you.

At that, a blush rushes over me, and I cover it with conversation. “Bikes?

How far are we going?”

He rubs the back of his neck. “Further than El Muro de las Lágrimas, closer than Sierra Negra,” Gabriel says. “It’s a secret spot. It’s closed to tourists and locals—I haven’t been since I was a kid.”

“Breaking more laws,” I say lightly. “You’re a bad influence.” At that, his eyes fly to mine.

I turn away, grabbing one of the bikes, and clear my throat. “I saw Beatriz,” I say. “She says things are … good.”

Gabriel looks at me for a long moment before he grabs the handlebars of the second bike. “Okay,” he says softly, nodding to himself, as if he

recognizes that I am signaling what we will talk about and what we won’t. He starts walking the bike toward the main road, telling me how Beatriz schooled him on the 123 baby tortoises that were stolen from the breeding center in 2018, and how he’s fighting a losing battle trying to explain to

Abuela that she can’t go play lotería at church, even if she wears a mask. As we pedal down dusty dirt paths, he tells me that he’s almost finished building the second bedroom at his house—which is good, because Beatriz will be staying with him even after her school on Santa Cruz reopens.

For a half hour or so, we bike in silence.

“The first girl I fell for was Luz,” Gabriel says suddenly. “She sat in front of me in class, alphabetically, and I stared at three freckles on her neck for months before I got the courage to speak to her.” He glances at me. “Do you remember your first crush?”

“Of course. His name was Jared and he was a vegetarian, and I didn’t eat meat for a month so that he’d notice me.”

Gabriel laughs. “Do you remember before that, when you made the decision to like boys?”

I look at him quizzically. “No …”

“Exactly,” he says, and his jaw sets. “No one gets to break her heart again.”

Oh, this man. “Who would dare, with you in her corner?”

His gaze catches mine and I can’t look away and I nearly crash into a tree, but Gabriel hops off his bike and interrupts the moment. “We have to hide these,” he tells me. “If the rangers see them, they’ll come after us.”

He drags his bike into a tangle of brush and rearranges the leaves to cover the rusty metal, then takes my bike and does the same. “Now what?”

“Now we walk the rest of the way,” he says. “It’s another forty-five minutes.”

As we hike, he retreats into safe space—telling me about his childhood. His father used to read Moby-Dick to him before he went to bed, because Melville learned about whaling while on a ship in the Galápagos. He says

Melville called the Galápagos “The Enchanted Islands.” He tells me that the last time he was at Barahona, he was with a group called Amigos de las

Tortugas—Friends of the Tortoises—a bunch of kids who went with the

Charles Darwin Research Station to count sea turtle nests there. There were

volunteers from all over the world who came to help, and one—a tourist from the United States—taught Gabriel how to surf.

When we finally crest a dune and see the beach spread below us, I catch my breath. It is beautiful in the way wild things are beautiful—with roaring sea and ungroomed sand, bordered by cacti and brush. Gabriel offers his hand, and after only a moment of hesitation I take it so that he can help me scuffle my way through the hillock to land on the beach. “Careful,” he says, tugging me to the left so that I do not step on a tiny hole in the sand, like a bubble caught underground. “There,” Gabriel says. “That’s a sea turtle

nest.”

I look around, and with careful eyes spy another twenty little divots in the sand. “Really?”

“Yeah. And no matter how far they swim in the ocean, turtles come back to the same beach to lay their eggs.”

“How do they find it?”

“Magnetic field. Each part of the coast has its own special fingerprint, basically, and the babies learn it and use memory as a compass.”

“That’s really cool,” I say.

“That’s not why I wanted you to see it,” Gabriel says. He points to a wriggling line in the sand that tracks down to the water. “After the female

turtles lay their eggs—around a hundred at a time—they leave.” He looks at me. “They never come back to take care of those eggs.”

I think of how the strongest memory I have of my mother is watching her pull a small carry-on out of our house.

“Here’s the incredible thing,” Gabriel says. “Two months later, those sea turtle babies hatch at night. They’ve got to get to the ocean before hawks and crabs and frigate birds can get to them. The only guide they have is the reflection of the moon on the water.” I feel him standing behind me, a wall of heat. “Not all of them make it. But, Diana … the strongest ones do.”

When my eyes sting with tears, I turn away, stumbling forward only to have Gabriel yank me back by my arm. “Cuidado,” he says, and I follow

his gaze to the tree I nearly crashed into, a manchineel laden with poisoned apples.

I laugh, but it may just be a sob.

Gabriel’s hand gentles on my arm. “Are we ever going to talk about it?” “I can’t,” I say, and I leave it to him to dissect all the possible meanings.

He nods, letting go of me. He scuffs at the sand, careful to avoid the sea turtle nests. “Then I’ll talk about it,” he says quietly. “There have been a

few times in my life when I thought all the stars had aligned, and I was exactly where I was meant to be. Once, when Beatriz was born. Once when I was diving near Kicker Rock on San Cristóbal and saw fifty hammerhead sharks. Once when the volcano came alive under my feet.” He meets my gaze. “And once, with you.”

If only these were normal times. If only I were an ordinary tourist. If only I didn’t have a life and a love waiting for me at home. I draw in a breath.

“Gabriel,” I begin, but he shakes his head. “You don’t have to say anything.”

I reach out my hand and catch his. I let myself look down at my fingers, curled in his. “Swim with me?” I ask.

He nods, and we pick our way back down the beach. I shuck off my shirt and shorts and wade into the surf in my bathing suit. Gabriel runs past me, splashing on purpose, and making me laugh. He dives shallowly, comes up shaking droplets off his hair, and shears a spray of water my way to soak me.

“You’re gonna be sorry you did that,” I tell him, and I dive under the water.

It is a baptism, and we both know it. A way to clean the slate and start fresh as friends, because that’s the only path that’s open to us.

The water is just cool enough to be refreshing. My eyes burn from the salt and my hair tangles in ropes down my back. Every so often Gabriel

free-dives to the bottom and brings up a sea star or a piece of coral for me to admire, before letting it settle again.

I’m not sure when I realize I’ve lost sight of Gabriel. One moment his head is bobbing, like a seal’s, and then he’s gone. I turn in a circle, and try to swim closer to shore, but realize I’m getting nowhere. No matter how hard I paddle my arms, I am being pulled further out to sea.

“Gabriel?” I call, and swallow water. “Gabriel!”

“Diana?” I hear him before I see him—a tiny pinprick, so distant I cannot imagine how he got that far away. Or maybe I’m the one who has.

“I can’t get back,” I yell out.

He cups his hands so his voice carries. “Swim with the current, on the diagonal,” he cries. “Don’t try to fight it.”

Somewhere in my consciousness I realize this must be a riptide— carrying me rapidly away from shore. I think of Gabriel’s friends, the fishermen who never came back. I think of his father, swept away in a racing current under the surface of the ocean. My heart starts pounding harder.

I take a deep breath and start windmilling my arms in a strong crawl stroke, but when I lift my head I’m no closer to the beach. The only

difference is that Gabriel is speeding toward me, swimming with the riptide, in the middle of its current, seemingly approaching at superhuman speed.

He’s trying to save me.

It feels like forever, but in minutes, he reaches me. He grabs for me and snags his finger on the chain of the miraculous medal, but it snaps off and I drift further away from him. “Gabriel!” I scream, thrashing out as he floats closer. As soon as he is within reach I grab him and climb him like a vine, panicking. He shoves me under the water, and then jerks me back up.

I am sputtering, blinking. Now that he has my attention, Gabriel grabs my shoulders. “Hold on. Look at me. You are going to make it,” he commands.

He slings one arm around me, swimming for both of us, but I can feel his strokes slowing and his body getting heavier.

My God. This can’t happen to him again.

His fingers flex on my waist, trying to hike me closer to him. But I can tell he’s losing steam. Alone, he might be able to get himself out of this hellish current, but my additional weight is sapping him of energy. If he keeps trying to save me, we will both drown. So I do the only thing I can.

I slip out of his hold.

The current immediately yanks me away from him, so fast it makes me dizzy. He treads water, desperately calling my name.

The waves are so big this far out that they crash over my head. Every time I try to answer him, I swallow water.

I think of what he told me as he touched my throat. Of the airway

humans have evolved, of the promises we can speak to each other, of the compromises we suffer for that.

I have heard that the hardest part of drowning is the moment just before

—when your lungs seize, about to burst; when you gasp for oxygen and find only water.

Our bodies try to fight the inevitable.

I’ve heard that all you have to do to be at peace, is give in.