Later, I would learn that when you want to take someone off a ventilator, you use the acronym MOVE to gauge readiness: mental status, oxygenation, ventilation, and expectoration. You want the blood vessels in the brain to be receiving and perfusing oxygen, so that the patient can
process information and respond. You want the oxygen level to top 90 percent, and you want the patient to be able to overbreathe the ventilator. You have to make sure she can cough, so that she will not choke on her own spit when the tube is removed.
To determine this, a spontaneous breathing trial is done. First the patient is switched to pressure support mode, to see how much of a breath she is
capable of taking. Then comes a spontaneous awakening trial, to see if the patient can wake up when the amount of sedatives being pumped into her veins is lessened. Finally, the pressure support is turned off to do a
spontaneous breathing trial. If the patient can maintain low carbon dioxide levels, then she is ready for extubation.
This process is called a sedation vacation.
It is, according to my nurse, Syreta, the only vacation I’ve been on.
I am alone most of the time, but it seems there is always someone hovering outside my door, peering in. The next time Syreta comes in, I ask why, and she tells me that I’m a success story—and the staff has had
precious few of them.
Syreta tells me that it’s normal to feel wrung out. I can’t sit up on my own. I am not allowed to eat or drink—I have a feeding tube down my nose, and will until I pass something called a swallow test. I am wearing a diaper. Yet none of this is as upsetting as the fact that everyone keeps telling me this is real: the moon-suited medical team, the wonkiness of my body,
the television reports that schools and businesses are all closed and that thousands of people are dead.
Yesterday, I was on Isabela Island and I almost drowned.
But I’m the only person who believes that.
Syreta doesn’t even blink when I tell her about the Galápagos. “I had another patient who was convinced there were two stuffed animals on her windowsill, and every time I left the room, they waved at her.” She raises a brow. “There weren’t any stuffed animals on her windowsill. She didn’t even have a window.”
“You don’t understand … I lived there. I met people and made friends and I … I climbed into a volcano … I went swimming—Oh!” I try to reach my phone, on the table in front of me, but it is so heavy that it slips out of my hand and Syreta has to fish in the blankets to hand it to me. “I have pictures. Sea lions and blue-footed boobies I wanted to show Finn—”
I use my thumb to scrub across the screen, but the last picture on my phone is of Kitomi Ito’s painting, from weeks ago.
That’s when I notice the date on the screen.
“Today can’t be March twenty-fourth,” I say, the thought rolling like fog through my mind. “I’ve been away for two months. I celebrated my birthday there.”
“Guess you get to celebrate again.”
“It wasn’t a hallucination,” I protest. “It felt more real than any of this does.”
“Honestly,” Syreta mulls. “That’s a blessing.”
The Covid ICU is like a plague ward. The only people allowed to enter my room are my doctor, Syreta, and the night nurse, Betty; even the residents who do rounds talk to me from outside the plate-glass wall. There are too many patients and not enough medical staff. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I am alone, trapped in a body that will not do what I need it to do.
I keep watching through the window, but I am the bug trapped in a jar— peered at occasionally by people who are mostly just grateful I am no longer sharing their space.
I am so fucking thirsty and no one will give me water. It feels like I have been in a wind tunnel for days, unable to close my mouth. My lips are chapped and my throat is a desert.
I still have oxygen being piped into my nose. I have no recollection of getting sick.
What I do remember, vividly and viscerally, is the sparkle of the rock
walls of the trillizos, and how the dock in Puerto Villamil smells of fish and
salt, the taste of papaya warm from the sun, and the soft curves of Abuela’s voice rounding out Spanish words.
I remember Beatriz, sitting on the beach with wet sand dripping from her fist.
I remember Gabriel treading water in the ocean, grinning as he splashed me.
Whenever I think of them, I start to cry. I am grieving people who, according to everyone here, never existed.
The only explanation is that in addition to catching this virus, I have gone insane.
I realize, when I try to breathe in and can’t, when I feel the heaviness of my broken body, that I should believe everyone who tells me how sick I’ve been. But it doesn’t feel like I was sick. It feels like my reality just … changed.
I’ve read stories about people who wake up from medical sedation fluent in Mandarin despite having no Chinese background or connection to China; or about a man who emerged from a coma, asked for a violin, and went on to perform sold-out concerts as a virtuoso. I always took these stories with a grain of salt—they just sound too wild to be real. I might not have a sudden new talent, but I’m certain that the memories I have from the past two months aren’t just delirium. I know I was there.
Wherever there was.
When my anxiety peaks, causing my pulse rate to spike, Betty enters the room. It’s telling that I’m so grateful to see another person in the room with me that I even wonder if appearing sicker might mean I’d be alone less.
“What happens when you don’t get enough oxygen?” I ask.
She glances at my pulse ox levels, which are stable. “You’re fine,” Betty says.
“For now,” I clarify. “But I was bad enough to need a ventilator, right? What if it permanently messed up my brain?”
Betty’s expression softens. “Covid fog is a real thing,” she reassures me. “If you’re having trouble putting thoughts together or forgetting what you were saying, that’s not brain damage. It’s just… an aftereffect.”
“It’s not that I can’t remember,” I say. “It’s that I do remember. Everyone’s telling me I’ve been in the hospital with Covid, but I don’t remember that. All my memories are of being in a different country, with people you all say aren’t real.” My voice breaks; I don’t want to see Betty’s pity, or be viewed as someone who’s lost touch with reality. I want someone to believe me.
“Listen,” Betty says gently, “how about I page the on-call doctor? That’s what intensivists are here for. Coming out of something like this, PTSD is common; we can get you some medication to help take the edge off—”
“No,” I interrupt. “No more drugs.” I don’t want to lose these memories because of some medication that makes me feel numb. I don’t want my mind wiped out.
It sort of feels like it already has been.
When I refuse Betty’s offer to call the doctor, she suggests trying to reach Finn. She uses my phone to FaceTime him, but he doesn’t answer. Ten minutes later, though, he’s knocking on the glass outside my room. Just seeing him—someone who cares about me—fills me with relief. I wave, signaling for him to come in, but he shakes his head. He mimes holding a phone to his ear, then gestures to Betty in the hallway. She comes in to hold my phone for me, as my arms are too weak
“Hey,” Finn says softly. “I hear the patient is rowdy.”
“Not rowdy,” I correct. “Just … frustrated. And really, really lonely.” “If it’s any consolation, isolation must be doing wonders, because you
look better already.”
“You liar,” I murmur, and through the glass, he winks.
This is real, I tell myself. Finn is real.
But I feel the concavity of that statement, too: Gabriel is not.
“Finn?” I say. “What if I can’t tell the difference anymore between what was a dream and what wasn’t?”
He’s silent for a moment. “Have you had … any more … episodes?” He doesn’t want to say the word hallucination, I can tell. “No,” I reply.
What I don’t say is that every time I’ve closed my eyes today I have expected to return to where I was yesterday.
I want a do-over, even as my conscience reminds me this is one.
“Your nurse said you were getting a little worked up,” Finn says. Tears spring to my eyes. “No one will tell me anything.”
“I will,” he vows. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, Diana.” “I don’t remember getting sick,” I begin.
“You woke up in the middle of the night with a headache,” Finn says. “By the next morning, you had a fever of a hundred and three. Your breaths were so shallow, you were panting. I called an ambulance to bring you
here.”
“What about the Galápagos?” I ask.
“What about it?” he says. “We decided not to go.”
Those five words wipe clean all the noise in my mind. Did we?
“Your pulse ox was seventy-six, and you tested positive,” Finn continues. “They took you to a Covid ward. I couldn’t believe it. You were young and healthy and you weren’t supposed to be the kind of person who could get
this virus. But the biggest thing we know about Covid is that we don’t know anything about it. I was reading everything I could, trying to get you into
trials for drugs, trying to figure out how even six liters of air pushed through a cannula to you couldn’t raise your pulse ox. And meanwhile, all around me, I had patients on vents who weren’t ever coming off them.” He swallows, and I realize that he’s crying. “We couldn’t keep you lucid,” Finn says. “They called me to tell me they needed to intubate you now. So I gave them the go-ahead.”
My heart hurts, thinking of how hard that must have been.
“I’d sneak in whenever I could, sit by the bed, and talk to you—about my patients, and about how fucking scary this virus is, and how I feel like
we’re all just shooting in the dark and hoping to hit a target.”
Those sporadic emails from him, then, weren’t really emails.
“I bullied your medical team into proning you—putting you on your belly, even on the vent. I read where a doctor on the West Coast had success with Covid patients by doing that. They thought I was crazy but now some of the pulmonologists are doing it, because what the hell, it worked for
you.”
I think about all the time I spent at Concha de Perla, floating facedown with a mask and snorkel, peeking into a world undersea.
“I’d be working—rounding on my own patients, whatever—and I’d hear the call for codes, and every time, every goddamn time, I would freeze and think, Please God, not her room.”
“I … I’ve been here ten days?” I ask.
“It felt like a year to me. We tried to bring you out of sedation a few times, but you weren’t having it.”
Suddenly I remember the vivid dream I had when I was in the Galápagos:
Finn, not costumed as I had assumed, but wearing an N95 mask like
everyone else here. Telling me to stay awake, so he could save me. The woman I pictured beside him, I realize now, was Syreta.
There is one overlapping part of both realities, I realize. “I almost died,” I whisper.
Finn stares at me for a long moment, his throat working. “It was your second day on the vent. Your pulmonologist told me that he didn’t think you’d last the night. The vent was maxing out and your O-two levels were shit. Your blood pressure bottomed out, and they couldn’t stabilize you.” He draws a shuddering breath. “He told me I should say goodbye.”
I watch him rub a hand over his face, reliving something I do not even recall.
“So I sat with you … held your hand,” Finn says softly. “Told you I love you.”
One tear streaks down my cheek, catching in the shell of my ear.
“But you fought,” he says. “You stabilized. And you turned the corner.
Honestly, it’s a miracle, Diana.”
I feel my throat get thick. “My mother …”
“I’m taking care of everything. Your only job is to rest. To get better.” He swallows. “To come home.”
Suddenly there is a code blue over the loudspeaker and Finn frowns. “I
have to go,” he says. “I love you.” He runs down the hall, presumably to the room where one of his patients is tanking. Someone who is not as lucky as me.
Betty takes the phone away from where she’s been holding it to my ear with her gloved hand. She puts it on the nightstand and a moment later
presses a tissue gently to the corner of each of my eyes, wiping away the tears that won’t stop coming. “Honey, you’re through the worst of it,” she says. “You have a second chance.”
She thinks I’m crying because I nearly lost my life.
You don’t understand, I want to tell her. I did.
Everyone keeps telling me I have to focus on getting my body back in shape, when all I want to do is untangle the thicket of my mind. I want to talk about Gabriel and Beatriz and the Galápagos but (first) there is no one to listen to me—the nurses spend quick, efficient moments in my room changing me and giving meds before they step out and have to sanitize and strip off their gear—and (second) no one believes me.
I remember how isolated I felt when I thought I was stuck on Isabela, and wonder if that was some strange distillation of my drugged brain filtering what it is like to be a quarantined Covid patient. I was alone a lot in the Galápagos, but I wasn’t lonely, like I am here.
I haven’t seen Finn for a whole day.
I can’t read, because words start to dance on the page and even a magazine is too heavy for me to hold. Same with a phone. I can’t call
friends because my voice is still raspy and raw. I watch television, but every channel seems to carry the president saying that this virus is no worse than
the flu, that social distancing should be lifted by Easter.
For endless hours I stare at the door and wish for someone to come in.
Sometimes, it’s so long between visits from nurses that when Syreta or Betty arrive, I find myself talking about anything I can seize upon, in the hope that it will keep them with me a few minutes longer.
When I tell Syreta that I want to try to use the bathroom, she raises a brow. “Easy, cowgirl,” she says. “One step at a time.”
So instead I beg for water, and I’m given a damp, spongy swab that’s moved around my mouth. I suck at it greedily, but Syreta takes it away and leaves me thirsty.
If I’m good, she promises, I can have a swallow test tomorrow and my feeding tube might come out.
If I’m good, physical therapy will come in today to assess me. I resolve to be good.
In the meantime, I just lie on my side and listen to the beep and whir of machines that prove I’m alive.
Even though I’m alone, when I soil my adult diaper, my cheeks burn in humiliation. I scrabble for the call button. The last time I needed to be changed (my God, even thinking that embarrasses me) it took forty minutes for Syreta to come. I didn’t ask why she was delayed; it was written all over her face: disappointment, exhaustion, resignation. Sitting in my own mess just doesn’t compare to another patient who’s crashing.
To my relief, this time the door opens almost immediately. But instead of my day nurse, the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen walks into my room.
He is young—early twenties—with raven-black hair and eyes so blue they are like looking into the sky. Beneath his mask, his jaw is square; his
shoulders are wide, and his biceps strain the sleeves of his scrubs. “Need something?” he says.
I feel like I’m going to swallow my tongue. “I … um. You’re not Syreta.” “I definitely am not,” he agrees. I can tell he is smiling from the way his
eyes crinkle, but I bet beneath that mask and shield he has perfect teeth. “I’m Chris; I’m a certified nursing assistant.”
“Why?” The word springs from my mouth before I can stop it. This man could be a movie star, a model. Why would he choose to be in a Covid ward taking care of contagious people who can’t wipe their own bottoms?
He laughs. “I actually like the work. Or I did, before it became a potential death sentence.” His cheeks darken above his mask with a fierce blush. “I’m sorry,” he says quickly. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
I imagine how, in another time or place, patients might have requested him when they wanted to be moved from the bed, or lifted into a wheelchair.
Those arms.
Suddenly I am blushing as much as he is, because I remember why I pushed the call button.
“So, what can I do for you?” Chris asks.
My voice dries up. I weigh the thought of sitting in this disgusting diaper against the mortification of telling him why I needed help.
Apparently, he is also psychic, or accustomed to women making idiots of themselves around him. Because he just nods briskly, as if we’ve had an
entire conversation, and efficiently moves to the supply cabinet to extract a fresh diaper. He gently pulls down the bedding, rips the elasticized side
panels of the diaper, and swiftly cleans me before getting me sterile and swaddled again. The whole time, I keep my eyes closed, as if I could will away this entire experience.
I hear the swish of debris in a trash can and water being run and the snap of new elastic gloves. “All set,” Chris says lightly. “Anything else?”
Before I can answer, another person comes into the room. I haven’t seen two human beings in the same space with me since I was extubated, and
Finn was there. This is a tiny woman who is swathed in PPE, like everyone else. “Stop hogging the patient,” she says. “It’s my turn.”
Chris winks at me. “See you later,” he says.
The woman watches him leave. “Hot CNA,” she muses, “is sex on legs.” “His name is Chris,” I reply.
She raises a brow. “Oh, I know.” She walks toward the bed. “I’m Prisha.
I’m a physical therapist.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say.
“We’ve met, kind of. When you were sedated, I moved your limbs around so your joints and muscles would stay healthy.” She shrugs. “You’re welcome.”
“I want to go to the bathroom,” I tell her. “I mean, not now. But when I have to.”
She nods. “That’s a great goal. But you’ve been on a vent for five days, so we have to see how you’re moving, and how you’ll respond to being upright, first.” Prisha draws one of my arms over my head, encouraging me to take a breath. Then she does this with the other arm. I can feel my rib
cage expanding. She gives me a few breathing exercises to try, and I do, until I cough. “We can try to get out of bed, but to do that, we’re going to need a second set of hands and a blood pressure cuff,” Prisha says.
“Please,” I beg. “The bathroom?”
She narrows her eyes, as if assessing me. Then she calls in Chris, the CNA, again. Prisha helps me roll and lowers my legs off the bed. With Chris’s help, she gets me to a sitting position. Prisha slides an arm around me, and at the embrace, I almost gasp. Everyone else—even Finn, that first night—is tentative about coming close to me, as if my skin itself is contaminated. To have someone touch me, so willingly and without fear, nearly brings me to tears.
Everything hurts as I move it, but I am driven. I do not want Chris wiping my ass again.
“Why,” I grind out, “is this so hard?”
“You’re lucky,” Chris says, from my other side. “The other postvent Covid patients—and there aren’t many—have a lot of complications. Renal failure, heart failure, encephalopathy, pressure ulcers …”
Prisha interrupts him just as I’m starting to get panicked hearing about complications I haven’t even anticipated. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s try sitting up on your own for a few seconds.”
Sitting? I’m not an invalid; it’s only been a few days. “I just need help standing. I haven’t been in the hospital that long—”
“Humor me,” Prisha says, and she removes her arm so that I have to support myself upright.
For about fifteen seconds, I do.
Then everything swims. Around me, inside me. Being vertical feels like hurtling through space. I see stars, start to tip forward, and Chris’s strong arms catch me and gently lower me back onto the bed.
Prisha looks down at me. “You’ve been effectively paralyzed for nearly a week. When you sit up, all the blood rushes down from your head because the muscles around the blood vessels have been on hiatus and need to remember how gravity works. Baby steps, Diana. You almost died. Cut your body a break.”
I feel exhausted, like I have run a mile. I think about how, on Isabela, I would swim or run or snorkel for hours without getting tired.
But then again, that was fake.
Prisha tugs the blanket up around me. “I’ve got patients who can’t even manage five seconds,” she says, patting my shoulder. “Fifteen seconds today. Tomorrow’s going to be better.”
When Prisha and Chris leave, I watch them through the plate-glass
window, stripping off their PPE and stuffing it into special bins for Covid- exposed gear.
The sound of my own failure pounds like a headache. I reach for the smooth plastic tail of the TV remote, fishing it closer. It slips out of my hand twice before I manage to drag it onto my belly and turn the TV on.
The channel is CNN. “At least 215 million Americans are under shelter- in-place orders,” the anchor says. “At this point, the United States has surpassed China and Italy for most known cases worldwide, with over 85,000 cases and 1,300 deaths.”
My mother being one of them.
“One of the hardest hit locations is the New York City area. A hospital official in Queens said that they have only three remaining ventilators, and that if this continues into April, patient care may have to be rationed.
Bodies are being stored in freezer trucks—”
I smack at the remote until I hit the button that turns the TV, blessedly, off.
Twice, I see a ghost.
She comes into my room so quietly that at first I am not sure what wakes me. She moves in the shadows and is gone soundlessly before I can even blink her into focus.
So the third time I am waiting. She is a dark blur of activity at the edges of the room, and I turn toward the disturbance and narrow my eyes. An older woman with dark hair and darker skin, who is holding her own
shadow in one fist.
“Hello,” I whisper, and she turns. She looks startled. “Are you real?” I ask.
Like everyone else, she is masked and gloved and gowned. She points to the trash can. I realize, then, that what she holds is just a black plastic bag. That she is an essential worker who’s come to clean the room.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
She says, haltingly, “No English.”
I tap my chest. “Diana,” I say, then point to her. “Cosima,” she replies, and she bobs her head.
It strikes me that nobody willingly connects with either of us. Cosima, because she is beneath the notice of the medical staff; me, because I’m a walking potential death sentence.
“I don’t know what’s real anymore, and what’s not,” I confess to Cosima, as she wipes down the faucets and the sink basin.
“I’ve lost time,” I tell her. “And people. And maybe my mind.”
She pulls the bag out of my garbage can and knots its neck. She nods and takes away my trash.
There aren’t clocks in hospital rooms, and your sleep keeps getting disturbed, and the lights never really go out fully, so it’s hard to get a sense of time passing. Sometimes I am not sure if hours have gone by, or days.
Instead, I begin to count the spaces between the fits of coughing that
leave me spent and exhausted. My lungs may have rallied enough to take me off a ventilator but they aren’t anywhere near being healthy. When I start coughing, I can’t stop; when I can’t stop, I gasp for air; when I’m gasping, the edges of my vision turn dark and starry.
It’s exactly what it felt like when I thought I was drowning.
When it happens again, I press the call button, and Chris the Hot Nursing Assistant comes in. He sees me struggling to breathe and adjusts the bed so
I am sitting up. He takes a suction tube, like the kind from the dentist, and slips it into my mouth. What comes out makes me think of hoarfrost, little crystal shards, that I’ve coughed out of my chest. No wonder I can’t breathe, if this is what’s inside me.
“Okay,” Chris soothes. “Now, try to even out those breaths.” I cough again, my ribs seizing and my eyes watering.
“In … and out. In … out,” he says. He grasps my hand firmly and looks into my eyes. I don’t blink. I hold on to his gaze like a lifeline.
My gasps level out. Chris squeezes my fingers, an acknowledgment. But I still can’t keep that tickle from my throat, that urge to cough, from taking over. “Just match me,” he instructs, exaggerating his breathing so that I can follow along.
It takes a few moments, but eventually, I am doing my best to breathe along with him.
A few more moments, and I find my voice again. Now that I am breathing, he will leave. And I don’t want to be alone again. “Are you single?”
“Are you asking?” He laughs.
I shake my head. “I have a boyfriend. But one day, you’re going to make someone an incredible partner.”
He smiles, clasping his other hand over our joined ones. Just then, the door opens, and as if I’ve conjured him, Finn enters in his PPE.
“Since you just lit up like a Christmas tree,” Chris says, “I’m guessing this is the boyfriend.”
“Dr. Colson,” Finn corrects, narrowing his eyes.
Chagrined, Chris drops my hand. “Of course,” he says, and he glances at me. “Just breathe,” he reminds me, winks, and slips out of my room.
Finn sits down in the chair Chris has vacated. “Should I be jealous?” he asks me.
I roll my eyes. “Yes, because the first thing I’m thinking about after almost dying is cheating on you.”
The sentence hasn’t even left my mouth before I feel a furious blush on my cheeks.
With the exception of how Finn and I met, I haven’t really had a chance to see him in his professional mode. It’s impressive to see him cut a swath through the hospital, but the way he just used his title to bully Chris makes
me cringe a little … even though I should probably be flattered by the fact that he was possessive.
What he said or did, though, pales by comparison to the fact that he’s
here. He’s in my room; he’s not on the other side of the glass; I’m not alone. It makes me giddy. “Where have you been?”
“Earning our rent,” he says. “But I missed you.”
I reach out my hand to touch him. Just because I can. “I missed you, too.”
I want him to take off his mask; I want to see his whole face as if everything between us is normal. But I also know that he’s already taking a risk being in this room with me, even trussed up in all that gear.
It strikes me that Covid isn’t the only thing that can take your breath away.
I remember the first time I saw Finn in a suit instead of scrubs—on an official date, waiting for me at a table at an Italian place in the Village.
When I came in, late because of subway delays, he stood up and the room narrowed to the size of just us. I had to actively remember to draw in air.
A week later, in the middle of a heated kiss, his fingers found the strip of skin between my sweater and my jeans. It was like being branded, and all
the breath rushed out of me in a sigh.
Months into our relationship as I reached for him in the dark, I remember thinking how lovely it was to have a body you knew as well as your own.
How he gasped when I touched him the way he liked; how I gasped at the miracle of knowing exactly what that was.
Suddenly I realize how lucky I’ve been to have had Finn with me when I got sick. If he hadn’t realized that I passed out from a lack of oxygen; if he hadn’t gotten me to the hospital—well, I might not be sitting here now. “Thank you,” I say, my voice thick. “For saving me.”
He shakes his head. “You did that yourself.”
“I don’t remember any of it,” I tell him. “I don’t even remember being in the hospital before going on the vent.”
“That’s normal,” Finn says. “And that’s what I’m here for.” The corners of his eyes crinkle, and I think that of all the horrible things about the masks everyone has to wear, this must be the worst: it is so hard to tell when
someone is smiling at us. “I’ll be your memory,” he promises.
A part of me wonders how his recollection could be any less faulty than mine. For one thing, he wasn’t here the whole time. And, in my mind, neither was I.
There are experiences our brains probably forget on purpose, so we don’t have to suffer through them again. But there are experiences our brains remember that serve as some kind of red flag or warning: Don’t touch that stove. Don’t eat that rotten food.
Don’t leave your boyfriend in the middle of a pandemic.
“The last thing I remember is you telling me I should go on vacation without you,” I say quietly.
He closes his eyes for a moment. “Great. That’s the part I was hoping you wouldn’t,” Finn admits. “You were pretty pissed at me for saying that.”
“I … was?”
“Uh, yeah. You asked how I could even suggest that, if I really believed things were going to get so bad here.”
In other words, everything I had felt in the Galápagos.
“You said clearly we had very different interpretations of a relationship. You kept talking about Romeo and Juliet and how if Romeo had just stayed in Verona, all the rest of the bullshit wouldn’t have happened.” He looks at me, confused. “I had no idea what you were talking about. I’ve never read
it.”
“You’ve never read Romeo and Juliet?”
Finn winces. “You said that, too.” He looks at me. “You accused me of caring more about the money we were going to lose on the vacation and
less about you. You said if I really loved you, I wouldn’t let you out of my sight when all hell was breaking loose. The truth is, I made a mistake. I
spoke without really thinking it through. I was tired, Di. And scared about working here, and taking care of patients who had the virus, and—” His
voice breaks, and he bows his head. To my shock, I see that he’s crying. “Finn?” I whisper.
Those beautiful blue eyes, the color of his scrubs, the color of the sea in a country I never flew to, meet mine. “And I’m probably the one who brought it home to you,” he forces out. “I’m the reason you got sick.”
“No,” I say. “That’s not true—”
“It is. We don’t know a lot, but it’s pretty clear some people are carriers and they never show symptoms. I work in a hospital.” He spits out that last word, and I realize he is nearly bowed over with the guilt he’s been carrying. “I almost killed you,” Finn whispers.
“You don’t know that,” I say, squeezing his hand. “I could have caught this at work or on the subway—”
He shakes his head, still steeped in remorse. “I was so tired that night that I didn’t want to fight anymore. I didn’t try to stop you when you went to bed early, and you were already asleep when I turned in for the night. When you woke up in the middle of the night to get some Tylenol I heard you and I pretended to be asleep, because I was afraid to pick up where we left off.
And then the next morning, when I wanted to apologize, I could barely wake you up.” He turns away, wiping his eyes with the shoulder of his scrubs.
Other things that leave you breathless: love so big that it tumbles you like a wave.
“I almost lost you. If I ever needed a lesson that saying goodbye isn’t something you do casually, I sure as hell got one.” Finn brings my hand to his cheek, laying my palm along it, leaning into my touch. “I will never ask you to go anywhere without me again,” he says softly. “If you swear to me you’ll never leave.”
I close my eyes and see two blue-footed boobies, bobbing and weaving in an ancient dance, then snapping at each other’s beaks.
They’re going to kill each other. Actually, they’re going to mate.
My eyes fly open, my gaze fixes on Finn. “I promise,” I say.
The intensivist comes to see me. His name is Dr. Sturgis, and Finn doesn’t know him very well; he only started in the ICU at New York–Presbyterian at Christmas. He runs down my list of medications; he says my oxygen
levels are improving. He asks me if I have any questions.
I am careful not to talk to Betty or Syreta about my memories of the Galápagos, because the response always involves Xanax or Ativan, and I don’t want any more pharmacological interference in my mind. But contrary to what they’ve said in passing about how the hallucinations
patients have on ventilators fade away, mine have not. If anything, they’ve been honed sharper and more brilliant, because I revisit them when I am
alone in my room for hours on end.
“The … dreams,” I say to the intensivist. “The ones I had while I was on the ventilator. They aren’t like any other dreams I’ve ever had.” I force myself to continue; this is a physician, he can’t dismiss my concerns as foolish. “I’m having a hard time believing they’re not real.”
He nods, as if he’s heard this before. “You’re worried about your mental state.”
“Yes,” I admit.
“Well. I can tell you there’s a physical explanation for anything that doesn’t make sense. When you’re not oxygenating right, your mental status changes. You have trouble interpreting what’s actually happening to you.
Add to that pain meds and very deep sedation—it’s a recipe for all kinds of delirium. There are even some scientists who think that the pineal gland, under stress, produces DMT—”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s the main ingredient in ayahuasca,” Dr. Sturgis says, “which is a
psychedelic drug. But that’s still just a theory. The truth is, we don’t really know what happens when we medically sedate someone, and how your mind syncs your reality with your unconscious. For example, at some point, you were likely restrained—most of the Covid patients on vents try to rip out their IVs otherwise. Your brain, in its drugged state, tried to make sense of the insensible, and maybe you hallucinated a scenario in which you were tied down.”
What I hallucinated wasn’t confinement, but freedom. Now that I’m constrained again it chafes. I want to wander to Sierra Negra. I can still smell the sulfur. I can feel Gabriel’s hand on my bare skin.
“Neurons fire and rewire during a near-death experience,” the doctor says. “But I can promise you, it was just a dream. A particularly three- dimensional one, but still a dream.” He looks down at my chart. “Now, your nurse says you’re having trouble sleeping?”
I wonder why everyone’s answer involves more medication. This will be Tylenol PM or zolpidem or something that will knock me out. But that’s not what I want. It’s not that I can’t sleep; it’s that I don’t want to.
“Is it because you’re worried about having more hallucinations?” Dr.
Sturgis asks.
After a moment, I nod. I can’t admit the truth: I’m not afraid of revisiting that other world.
I’m afraid that if I return there, I won’t want to come back.
I am moved to a step-down unit that isn’t the ICU, which means I no longer have Syreta or Betty or the Hot CNA taking care of me. Instead, I am now in the ward I was in when I was first brought to the hospital, the one I don’t
remember. The nurses here are flat out, with more patients to attend to. It is impossible for Finn to sneak in to visit me here, because he’s stationed in
the Covid ICU and he’s not allowed elsewhere due to safety protocols.
If anything, I feel even more isolated. There are a lot of codes on this floor.
I realize that the vast majority of patients who move from this space to the ICU do not return. That I am the anomaly.
When a speech therapist comes in to see me, I am so grateful to interact with someone that I don’t want to tell her I can already talk—even if it’s raspy. Sara reads my mind, though, and says, “Speech therapy isn’t just about talking. You’re getting a swallow test. We’ll try different
consistencies of food to make sure you don’t aspirate. If you pass, you get to have your NG tube removed.”
“You had me at food,” I answer.
By now, I can sit up for nearly a half hour without getting dizzy, which is what makes me eligible for this swallow test. I dutifully sit with my legs swung over the side of the bed. Sara scoops some ice chips onto a spoon and places them on my tongue. “All you have to do,” she says, “is
swallow.”
It’s hard to do on command, but it almost doesn’t matter, because the ice melts in the heat of my mouth and drips blissfully down, quenching my raw throat. As I do it, Sara holds a stethoscope up to my throat and listens. “Can I have more?” I ask.
“Patience, young grasshopper,” Sara says, and I give her a blank look.
“You millennials,” she sighs, and she holds a cup with a straw to my lips. I suck up a mouthful of water, which is just as satisfying.
By the time we move on to applesauce, I am in heaven. When Sara moves to take the little dish from me I curl around it, hoarding, and hurriedly scoop another spoonful into my mouth.
I graduate to a graham cracker, which requires chewing—muscles that my jaw has to actively remember how to use. Sara watches my throat work. “Good job,” she says.
I wait until I am sure no crumbs remain. “It’s so weird,” I muse. “To have forgotten how to eat.”
She resettles the oxygen cannula into my nostrils as I lean back in bed again. “You’ll have plenty more practice. I’m going to give the green light
for the feeding tube to be removed. Tomorrow, you get to eat a whole meal while I watch.”
A half hour later, a nurse I haven’t seen before comes in to remove the nasogastric tube. “I cannot tell you,” he says as he works quickly and efficiently, “how glad I am to see you again.”
I try to read the name on the badge clipped onto his lanyard. “Zach?” I ask. “Did you take care of me before?”
He holds a hand to his heart. “You don’t remember me. I’m crushed.” My eyes fly to his, but they’re dancing. “I’m kidding. But clearly, I’m going to have to up my game.”
I rub the bridge of my nose, itchy without the tape adhering the feeding tube. “I don’t … I don’t remember being in this ward.”
“Totally normal,” Zach assures me. “Your O-two levels were so low you kept passing out. I’d be surprised if you did remember.”
I watch him briskly wash his hands in the sink and towel-dry before snapping on a new pair of gloves. He seems competent and kind, and he holds a part of my history I may never recover. “Zach?” I ask quietly.
“Would it be a surprise if I remembered things … that didn’t happen?”
His eyes soften. “Hallucinations aren’t uncommon for people who are sick enough to be in an ICU,” he says. “From what I’ve heard, Covid
patients are even more likely to have them, between the lack of oxygen and the deep sedation and the isolation.”
“What you’ve heard,” I repeat. “What else have you heard?”
He hesitates. “I’ll be honest, you’re only the second patient I’ve had who has gone to the ICU and survived to talk about it. But the other one was a man who was absolutely convinced that the roof of the hospital opened up like the Superdome, and twice a day light would shoot out of it, and one lucky person would be chosen to be lowered from a crane into that beam of light and get instantly healthy.”
I probe the corners of my mind for hallucinations that are hospital-based, like this, but cannot find any.
“I was in the Galápagos,” I say softly. “I lived on the beach and made
friends with local residents and swam with sea lions and picked fruit right off the trees.”
“That sounds like an awesome dream.”
“It was,” I say. “But it wasn’t like a dream. Not like anything I’ve ever dreamed when I’m asleep anyway. This was so detailed and so real that if
you put me on the island, I bet I could find my way around.” I hesitate. “I can see the people I met like they’re standing in front of me.”
I watch something change in his eyes, as he puts on his professional regard. “Are you still seeing them now?” Zach asks evenly.
“You don’t believe it was real,” I say, disappointed.
“I believe you believe it was real,” he says, which isn’t an answer at all.
Although I am still testing Covid-positive—which Finn assures me is
normal—he lobbies to get me out of the step-down Covid ward as fast as possible, because if you’re in the hospital long enough you wind up getting sick with something else—a UTI, hospital-acquired pneumonia, C. diff. I feel ridiculous being in a rehabilitation unit when I’m not even thirty, but I also realize that there’s no way I’m ready to go home yet. I still haven’t managed to do more than sit upright in a chair, and even that took Prisha and a Hoyer lift for the transfer. I can’t get myself to the bathroom.
To qualify for rehab, you have to be able to tolerate three hours of therapy a day. Some of it is physical therapy, some occupational, and for
those who need it, speech therapy. The silver lining is that I will see people again. The therapists are completely covered in PPE to keep them safe, but at least three times a day I will have company.
And the more time I spend with people, the less time I spend replaying my memories of Isabela.
I am moved into a small room with a private bathroom, and I haven’t been there for more than a half hour when the door opens and a tiny
hurricane with red hair and snapping blue eyes blusters in. “I’m Maggie,” she announces. “I’m your physical therapist.”
“What happened to Prisha?” I ask.
“She doesn’t leave the hospital; I don’t leave the rehab unit. It’s theoretically a single building, but it is like there’s a special force field between us.” She grins; there is a sweet gap between her front teeth. “Big Star Wars fan here. You watch The Mandalorian?”
“Um, no?”
“The guy’s hotter with his helmet on,” she says. She has approached the bed and already has stripped back the covers; her hands are firm and strong on my feet as she rotates my ankles. “My kids got me into that show. I have three. One came back home from college because of Covid. I can’t believe it. He’s a freshman; I thought I’d just gotten rid of him.” She says this with
another smile as she moves to my arms, pulling them over my head. “You got kids?”
“Me? No.”
“Significant other?”
I nod. “My boyfriend is a surgeon at the hospital.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Ooh, better be on my best behavior,” she says, and then she laughs. “I’m just kidding. I’m gonna put you through the paces like I do everyone else.”
As she moves my limbs as if I’m a rag doll (which, to be fair, I might as well be), I learn that she lives on Staten Island with her husband, who is a policeman in Manhattan, plus her displaced college student, as well as a seventh grader who wanted to be a nun last week but has, as of Tuesday, decided to convert to Buddhism, and a ten-year-old boy who will grow up to be either the next Elon Musk or the Unabomber. Maggie says she’s already had Covid, which she’s pretty sure she contracted while volunteering to sew costumes for her son’s elementary school play, which is about a T. rex afraid to tell its parents it is vegan, which is what you get when you take your retirement fund and apply it instead to a private school for the gifted and talented. She talks about her apartment building, and the constantly rotating stream of morons who live just below them. One started feeding a skunk on the fire escape. After he was evicted, a woman moved in who slipped a note under their door, asking if they’d have objections to her putting in a skylight in her ceiling—which, of course, was Maggie’s floor.
She keeps me so busy laughing that I do not realize I’ve maxed out my physical capacity until every muscle in my body is screaming.
Finally, she stops stretching my arms and my legs. I collapse against the bed, wondering how I can be so exhausted from someone else doing the motions for me. “Okay, sunshine,” she says. “Time for you to sit up.”
I push myself upright, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. It takes a lot of effort and concentration, so at first I don’t notice Maggie sliding a recliner wheelchair closer. She takes off one arm, locks the wheels, and then puts a board as a bridge from the bed to the chair. I look at it, then down at my unfamiliar body. “Oh hell no,” I say.
“If you do it, I’ll get you a Popsicle. I know where the stash is.” “Not even for a Fudgsicle,” I mutter.
Maggie folds her arms. “If you can’t transfer to a chair, you can’t get to the bathroom. If you can’t get to the bathroom, you can’t leave rehab.”
“I can’t get in that chair,” I tell her.
“You can’t do it alone,” Maggie corrects.
She leans in front of me and uses all of her compact body for me to lean into as she slides my butt onto the edge of the board. Then she shifts my
legs a bit, then leans forward again to help me amass the strength to creep
sideways on the board. We do this a few more times until I am seated in the chair, and then she pops its arm back on.
I am sweating and red-faced, shaking. “Orange,” I grind out. “Orange what?”
“Popsicle.”
She laughs. “Double or nothing. Can you kick your leg out for me? Yeah, like that. Ten times.”
But ten times with the left leg leads to ten times with the right. And then come toe tapping and arm lifting. When Maggie asks me to grip the
armrests and try to lift my body weight an inch, I can’t even budge a finger. “Come on, Diana,” Maggie urges. “You got this.”
I can’t even raise my head from the back of the chair. I could sleep for a week. “Rehab,” I say, “is staffed by sadists.”
“True,” Maggie agrees. “But when you’re a dominatrix, the pay is shit.” At that, I start to sob.
Immediately, her demeanor changes. “I’m sorry. I crossed a line. My mouth just doesn’t know when to stop—”
“I was on a vent for five days,” I wail. “Five fucking days. How could I get this bad this fast?”
Maggie crouches down in front of me. “First, it’s not as bad. Not compared to some others I’ve seen—people who’ve been on a vent or
ECMO for months; people who have suffered through amputations. It may feel ridiculous to you to sit in a chair and tap your toes, but that’s how
you’re eventually going to walk out of here. I promise you, these are small things, with exponential benefits.” She meets my gaze fiercely. “You can be pissed at your body, or you can celebrate it. Yes, it sucks that you got Covid. Yes, it sucks that you were on a vent. But a lot of people who did the same aren’t going home, and you are. You can look at this situation and feel bitter, or you can choose not to be negative. Most adults don’t have many
firsts left to them—but you get to experience yours all over again.” She
takes a deep breath. “Give me two weeks, and your body will belong to you again.”
I narrow my eyes. I look down at my lap and grit my teeth. Then I grab the sides of the chair, squeeze, and start to push myself up.
“Atta girl,” Maggie says.
It is after a session of occupational therapy—which involves me taking off and putting on clothes, and during which I decide that socks are the work of the devil—that I see the news story: a funeral director in Queens, talking about how backed up they are for cremations; how you can pick up the
ashes of your loved one with contactless delivery.
It makes me think, again, that being sore from all this therapy is not the worst that could happen, but rather the best. The majority of people in the Covid ICU ward will only come out of it in a body bag.
Instead of ringing for help, I cantilever my body upright so that I can reach for my phone, which sits on the table hovering across my bed. After I’ve hauled my body weight around, the phone feels light as a feather—an improvement since yesterday.
I do not want to make this call, but I know I have to.
I dial the main switchboard of The Greens. “Hello,” I say, when I am connected to the business office. “I’m Diana O’Toole. My mother, Hannah, was one of your residents. I’ve been sick in the hospital, but I wanted you to know that once I’m discharged I can pick up her things. If you need to put
someone else in the room, you can store—”
“Ms. O’Toole,” the director of the facility says. “Are you saying you want to move your mother from our facility?”
“I … what?”
“I can assure you she’s being well taken care of. I know that there have been a lot of care facilities in the news recently because of Covid, but we have had zero cases here and we’re maintaining a level of vigilance—”
My heart starts galloping in my chest. “Zero cases,” I repeat. “Yes.”
“My mother is alive.”
The director hesitates. “Ms. O’Toole,” she says gently, “why would you think otherwise?”
The phone drops out of my hand, and I bury my face in my hands and burst into tears.
What else didn’t actually happen?
If my mother is alive, if I was never in the Galápagos, are there other things I believed as fact that aren’t necessarily true?
Like … do I still have a job?
I find myself logging in to my email, something I’ve avoided, because my eyes still have trouble focusing on a tiny screen and the number of unread messages is so high it makes me feel like I’m about to break out in hives.
But before I can even begin to do a specific search for work emails, a text pings from Finn, with a Zoom link and an emoji heart. It’s been two long,
endless days that I haven’t seen him or talked to him, because he’s been at work, so I immediately log on. It is the first time I’ve seen him without a mask, and there are bruises along the bridge of his nose. His hair is wet; he is freshly showered. His face lights up when I join the call.
“Why didn’t you tell me my mother was alive?” I blurt out. He blinks, confused. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
“Because when I was … sedated I thought she died.” His breath gusts out. “Oh my God, Diana.”
“I saw her on a FaceTime call, fighting to breathe,” I tell him. “And then she …” I can’t say it. I feel like I’ll jinx this unexpected resurrection. “I asked you about her, when I first woke up. You said you’d take care of everything. So I assumed that meant you knew what had happened. That you’d been talking to the memory care place and the funeral home and
everything.”
“Well,” he says tentatively, “silver lining, right?”
“When I thought she’d died, I didn’t feel anything. I thought I was a monster.”
“Maybe you didn’t feel anything because on some unconscious level you knew it wasn’t real—”
“It felt real,” I snap, and I swipe at my eyes. “I want to visit her.” “Okay. We will.”
“I think I need to go by myself,” I say.
“Then that gives you even more incentive to get better,” Finn replies, gentling his voice. “How’s rehab?”
“Torture,” I say, still sniffling. “Every inch of me aches and my bed has plastic under the sheets so I’m sweating bullets.”
“You won’t be there that long,” he says confidently. “It usually takes
three times as long to get back to where you were after you’re intubated. So
that would be fifteen days for you.”
“My physical therapist said two weeks.”
“You’ve always been an A student,” Finn says.
I peer through the screen at his face. “Did someone punch you?” I brush my finger along the orbital bones of my own face, mirroring where his is bruised.
“They’re from the N95 mask,” Finn says. “That’s how tight they have to be fitted to keep us safe. I don’t even notice it anymore. Of course, that’s probably because I’m always wearing the damn mask.”
All of a sudden, I am ashamed. I jumped all over Finn the minute the call connected, all but accusing him of not being more clear that my mother was healthy. Of course he couldn’t have known that I’d be doubting this. Plus, given the limited exposure I’ve allowed my mother in my life, she would not be anywhere near Finn’s first, fifth, or even fiftieth topic of conversation after I awakened from a medically induced coma. “I haven’t asked about your day,” I say. “How was it?”
Something in Finn changes, like a shade being drawn down, not to keep me out but to protect him from having to see what he doesn’t want to revisit. “It’s over,” Finn says. “That’s about the best thing I can say about it.” He smiles at me, and his eyes light again. “I thought maybe both of us could use a little treat right now.”
I snuggle down further in bed, curling on my side so that the phone is propped on the pillow beside me. “Does it involve a bath? Please tell me it involves a bath.”
He laughs. “I was thinking more like … porn.”
My jaw drops. “What? No! Someone could walk in here any minute …”
Finn starts typing, sharing his screen, and a moment later the Zillow website loads. “I didn’t specify what kind of porn,” he says.
I cannot help but grin. Finn and I have spent so many lazy Sunday
mornings in bed with coffee and bagels and a laptop balanced between us, surfing through the real estate of our dreams. Most homes were out of our price range, but it was fun to fantasize. Some were just ridiculous— sprawling mansions in the Hamptons, a functional ranch in Wyoming, an actual treehouse in North Carolina. We would scroll through the pictures, scripting our future: This screened porch is where we’ll eat the saved piece of wedding cake on our first anniversary. This is the alcove room we’ll paint yellow when we find out we’re having a baby. This is the yard where
we build her swing set when she’s old enough. The carpet in this room has to go, because our Bernese puppy will pee on it.
Finn loads a modest Victorian with an actual turret. “That’s cute,” I say. “Where is it?”
“White Plains,” he says. “Not a bad commute.”
The house is pink, with violet trim. “It’s a little Hansel and Gretel.” “Exactly. Perfect for a fairy-tale ending.”
He is trying so hard, and I am dragging my feet. So I throw myself into the game of it. When Finn clicks to the interior, I say, “That Aga stove will take us months to figure out. We may starve.”
“That’s okay, because look, there’s a pantry the size of Rhode Island. We can stock it with ramen.” He clicks again. “Three bedrooms … one for us, one for our daughter … but what are we going to do with the twins?”
“If you want twins, you’re going to have to have them,” I say. “Look, a claw-foot tub. You always wanted one.”
I nod, but all I can think about is that I cannot even stand in a shower; how on earth am I going to ever master climbing into a tub like that?
Finn is happily leading me on a virtual tour of the house, through the living room with the woodstove and the study that he can convert into a
home office and the cute little hidden dumbwaiter that can be retrofitted as a liquor cabinet. Then he clicks on the basement, which has a dirt floor and feels uncomfortably ominous. The last room has an iron door and metal
bars across it, like a jail cell. “This just took a turn,” I murmur.
Finn scrolls again, and we are inside the room, which is papered in red velvet, with a padded floor and walls sporting whips and iron manacles. “Look, our own sex dungeon!” he proclaims, and at the sight of my face, he bursts out laughing. “Wait, you know what’s the best part? This room is listed as the den.” He pauses. “Den of iniquity, maybe.”
I realize that, a few weeks ago, this real estate listing would have had me giggling for a full quarter of an hour. That I would have texted screenshots of it to Finn in the middle of the workday just to make him laugh. But right now, it doesn’t feel funny. All I can think of is that whoever is selling that house had a whole hidden, secret life.
“You know,” I say, forcing a smile. “I think physical therapy just caught up with me. I can’t keep my eyes open.”
Immediately, Finn pulls out of the screen share and looks at me with the assessing eyes of a physician. “Okay,” he says after a moment, apparently
finding whatever answer he needed to in my face. Then his mouth curls on one side. “Although this one might be snapped up off the market if we don’t act soon.”
I look at his beautiful, familiar face. The shock of blond hair that never stays out of his eyes, the dimple that flirts in only one cheek. “Thank you,” I say quietly. “For trying to make it all feel normal.”
“It will,” he promises. “I know how hard it must be to have to relearn everything. I know it seems like you’ve lost a whole chunk of time. But one day, you’ll barely remember any of this.”
I nod. And think: That’s what I’m afraid of.
The next morning, after Maggie bullies me into standing with a walker in spite of my Jell-O legs, I call my best friend. Rodney picks up on the first ring. “My therapist says I shouldn’t talk to people who ghost me,” he says.
“I’m in the hospital,” I tell him. “Well, rehab. I was in the hospital. With Covid. On a ventilator.”
Rodney is silent for a beat. “The fuck,” he breathes. “You are officially forgiven for not answering any of my texts and just ignore the part where I called you a faithless bitch. Jesus, Diana. How did you get it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even remember getting sick.”
I walk him through every detail Finn has given me, but it feels like trying on clothes that don’t quite fit. Then I hesitantly ask, “Rodney? Did we really get furloughed?”
He snorts. “Yup. You should have seen that bloodbath—Eva and all the other senior staff bargaining to save their salaries. There was never any question that the rest of us were expendable. And let me tell you, an apartment in Dumbo isn’t cheap. Not all of us have sexy surgeons pitching in to pay the rent.”
“What am I supposed to do without a job?” I ask.
“The same thing everyone else in the United States is doing. You sign up for unemployment and bake banana bread and hope Congress gets its shit together to pass a stimulus plan.”
“But … what did Sotheby’s say? I mean, do we get our jobs back … eventually? Or do we start looking for new ones?”
“They didn’t say shit,” Rodney answers. “Just a lot of circumstances beyond our control and we remain committed to the field of art sales blah blah blah. Didn’t you see the email?”
It is somewhere, I’m sure, buried under the 2,685 others I haven’t read yet. I wonder why this detail of my sedation dream would be the one that turns out to be true. “Isabela didn’t have internet service,” I reply automatically.
“Who’s Isabela?”
“Rodney,” I say quietly, “I want to tell you something. But it’s going to be hard for you to believe.”
“Like, how hard? On a scale from bike shorts and blazers during Fashion Week to Lady Gaga’s Meat Dress?”
“Just listen,” I say, and I sketch my other life: my arrival on Isabela and the closed hotel and Beatriz self-harming and her broody father. My mother’s death. The fierce and foolish night Gabriel and I spent together. The waves closing over my head.
When I finish, Rodney is silent. “Well?” “I don’t know what to say, Di.”
I roll my eyes. “Rodney, I’ve seen you pass judgment on a five-year-old’s unicorn backpack. You have thoughts. You always have thoughts.”
“Mmm. It reminds me of something … oh, I know. Remember the guy who sleeps outside the Sephora on East Eighty-sixth? The one in the
rainbow onesie who preaches End of Days?”
My face flames. “You’re an asshole. I didn’t make this up, Rodney.” “I know that,” he says. “Because as it turns out, Isabela Island in the
Galápagos did indeed close for two weeks, starting on March fifteenth.” “What?” I gasp. “How do you know that?”
“Gooooogle,” Rodney says slowly.
“That’s the day I got there, on the ferry. Or dreamed I got there.
Whatever.”
“Well, if you were running a high fever in the hospital that day, you probably weren’t doing Web searches.”
“Maybe it was in the background, on the television …” “Or maybe,” Rodney says, “it wasn’t.”
When I hear those words, my eyes fill with tears. I don’t think I realized how much I needed someone to believe me.
“Look, baby doll, I got too many relatives who dabble in the occult to not give you the benefit of the doubt. Who’s to say you didn’t tumble into some fourth-dimension shit?”
“Okay, that sounds even more insane,” I mutter.
“More insane than having an affair with a figment of your imagination?” “Shut up!” I hiss, although no one but me has heard him.
“So the million-dollar question is: have you told Finn about your, um, extracurricular excursions?”
“He thinks it’s a symptom from Covid, from the sedation on the ventilator.”
Rodney pauses. “If it was real … even just to you,” he says, “you’re going to have to tell him.”
I rub the heel of my hand between my eyebrows, where a dull ache has started up. “I can’t even see him. He’s working around the clock, and I’m not allowed to have visitors here. I feel like a leper. I can barely stand on my own feet, I haven’t had a shower in so long I can’t remember the date, and based on my experience trying to dress myself, bras may be a thing of my past. When I’m too tired to do therapy, my mind starts going in circles and I can’t remember what’s real and what’s not and then I start panicking even more.” I let out a shuddering breath. “I need a distraction.”
“Girl, I have two words for you,” Rodney says. “Tiger King.”
Other things that happen on my second day in rehab:
- I put on my own shoes and socks.
- CNN reports that eighty percent of people on ventilators have died.
I am actively fighting against my own body. My mind is laser-focused, screaming things like lift, hoist, balance. My muscles do not speak the language. Like any other kind of dissonance, it’s exhausting. The only good thing about working so hard during the day is that at night, I am so exhausted, I don’t resist sleep. It fells me with blunt force, and I am too tired to dream.
I wonder, too, if the reason that I can fall asleep here the way I did not in the step-down ward is that I know every morning, Maggie will appear with a new torture device. I may not trust her with my physical progress yet, but I do trust her to bring me back to the real world.
On my third day, my occupational therapist, Vee, comes into the room and watches me struggle to squeeze toothpaste onto a toothbrush. It’s something that I used to do without thought but now requires Zen focus. I
finish brushing my teeth just as Maggie enters. She is pushing a weird, squat box, which she sets at the side of the room. “Time to stand,” she says.
She glances around, her gaze landing on the walker she brought in for yesterday’s dose of therapy. She sets it on the side of the bed. “Let’s get up close and personal with Paul,” she says.
“Alice.” (We’ve been arguing about the best name for a walker, which is already a misnomer because I’m using it to stand, not move.) But I swing my legs over the side of the bed, and this time, I barely have to think to
make it happen. Maggie wraps a belt around me, waits till she is sure I’m not dizzy, and helps me scoot to the edge of the bed. When I stand for thirty seconds, my legs don’t quiver beneath me.
I look up at her, a smile spreading over my face. “Bring it on,” I challenge.
“What did you tell me you wanted to do when you got here?” “Leave,” I say.
“And what did I tell you you needed to be able to do first?”
Vee, I realize, has not left the room but has instead shoved the weird little box that Maggie dragged in so that it is kitty-corner to Alice the Walker.
She flips the top up, and I realize it’s a commode. “Ta-da,” Maggie says.
Day four of rehab:
- I transfer to a wheelchair by myself.
- I wheel it into the bathroom and brush my teeth.
- I get so tired, halfway through, that I put my head on the counter and fall asleep.
- That is how a nurse finds me to tell me that, finally, I’ve tested negative for Covid.
Now that I’m no longer Covid-positive, Maggie tells me that for physical therapy I will go to the gym. She wheels me into the large space, where
multiple patients are working with multiple physical therapists. It is almost shocking to see so many people in one place, after so much time in isolation. I wonder how many of these people had Covid.
She gets me settled on a mat and begins moving my arms and legs, assessing joint tightness and strength in my deltoids and biceps. The whole time, she is grilling me about my apartment. Do you live with someone
who’s there full-time? Is there an elevator? How many steps from the elevator to your apartment? Are there carpets or throw rugs? Stairs?
By the time she leads me to the parallel bars, I am grateful to concentrate on something other than rapid-fire questions. My mind still is foggy; I will start a sentence only to forget where it was going.
Maggie stands in front of me, belly to belly, with a wheelchair behind me. “Lift your left leg,” she says.
I feel sweat bead on my forehead. “If I go down,” I tell her, “you’re going with me.”
“Try me,” Maggie challenges.
I am dizzy and terrified of losing my balance, but I lift my leg an inch off the floor.
“Now your right one,” Maggie says.
I grit my teeth and try and my knee buckles. I collapse into the wheelchair, scooting back a few inches.
“That’s okay,” Maggie tells me. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” I look up at her. “Again,” I demand.
She narrows her eyes and then nods. “Okay,” she says, and she hauls me back up to my feet. “Let’s start with a knee bend.”
I do it, the world’s ugliest plié.
“Now shift your weight to your left foot,” she says, and I do. “Now. Lift your right leg.”
My knee wobbles, and I have to clutch the bars in a death grip, but I do
it.
“Good,” Maggie says. “Now … march.” Left leg. Right. Left. Right.
I force myself to move in place. I am bathed in sweat now, and
grimacing, and depending on the support of the parallel bars like they are an extension of my own skeleton. I’m so busy concentrating, in fact, that I do not realize I have advanced a foot.
Maggie whistles. “Look who’s walking.”
Vee tells me that if I can wash my own hair, she has a surprise for me. I cannot imagine anything better than the shower itself. Sitting on the little plastic stool, with water pounding against my skin, I begin to feel human again.
I feel like an Olympian when I bend down to get the shampoo bottle,
squeeze some into my palm, and scrub my scalp. I don’t fall off the chair. I hold my face up to the weak stream of water and think that this is better than any spa in a four-star hotel could ever be.
As I watch the suds spool down the drain, I think of all the things that I am washing away. This weakness. This fucking virus. The ten lost days I can’t remember.
I felt like a failure in the hospital, dependent on tubes and medications and IVs and nurses to do every little thing I’ve done independently since I was a child. But here, I’m getting stronger. Here, I’m a survivor. Survivors adapt.
I am seized by a mental image of Gabriel gesturing toward a marine iguana. I find myself folding forward into the spray, closing my eyes against it.
I rap my knuckles on the side of the shower. “I’m done,” I say thickly, wondering how long before I’m no longer ambushed by these memories. I hear the click of the door, and Vee comes in with a towel. She yanks open the plastic curtain and turns the faucet off. Not even being stark naked in front of her can rob me of the joy of finally being clean.
Vee watches me drag on my sweatpants and sweatshirt and then hands me a brush for my hair. I try, but the snarls and mats after all this time are impossible for me to deal with. She sits behind me on the bed and starts to pick through the knots, combing the hair back from my face.
“I think I’m in heaven,” I tell her.
She laughs. “No, we’re happy you didn’t wind up there.” Her fingers fly over my scalp in an intricate pattern. “I do French braids for my girls all the time.”
“I never learned how.”
“No?” Vee asks. “Your mama never taught you?”
I feel her weave and pull and twist. “She wasn’t around much,” I reply.
And now that she isn’t far-flung and hightailing it all over the world, I haven’t been around her much, either.
That could change.
I have always believed we are the architects of our own fates—it’s why I so carefully planned my career steps and why Finn and I dreamed in tandem about our future. It is also why I could blame my mother for choosing her career over me—because it was just that: a decision she made. I have never
really subscribed to the mantra that things happen for a reason. Until, maybe, now.
If I was so sick that it nearly cost me my life … if I was one of only a handful to survive ventilation … if I returned to this world, instead of the one embedded in my mind … I would like to believe that there is an explanation. That it isn’t random or the luck of the draw. That this was a lesson for me, or a wake-up call.
Maybe it is about my mother.
Vee ties the braid off with a rubber band. “There,” she says. “You’re like a whole new person.”
Not yet.
But I could be.
She pulls over a wheelchair and sets the brakes and then positions Alice nearby so that I can do the stand-pivot-transfer move to seat myself. “I
believe I promised you a surprise,” Vee says.
It’s probably a trip down to the multipurpose gym to do more physical therapy. “Do we have to?” I ask.
“Trust me,” Vee says, and she opens the door to my room.
She gives me a surgical mask and pushes me down the hallway, past
patients who are carefully moving behind their own walkers or with four- footed canes. A couple of the nurses smile at me and comment on my appearance, which makes me wonder how terrible I looked before. Instead of heading into the elevator, though, Vee turns right at the end of the hallway and hits an automatic door button with her elbow, so that a glass panel slides open. She rolls me into a tiny courtyard that is walled in by four sides of the hospital building. It’s unseasonably warm, and the sun falls in an amber slant. “Fresh air?” I gasp, tilting my face, and that’s when I see him.
Finn stands at the far end of the narrow courtyard, holding a little bouquet of tulips.
“I think you can take it from here, Doc,” Vee says, and she winks at me and slips back inside.
Finn stares at me, and then unloops his mask so that it dangles from one wrist. The bridge of his nose is still dark and bruised, but my God. To see that smile.
I cry out, frustrated by my inability to get to him, and as if I’ve willed it, Finn is at my side a second later. He kneels, his arms coming around me.
“Look who tested negative,” he says.
I unhook my mask and set it in my lap. “You read my labs?” He grins. “Professional perks.”
Finn rests his forehead against mine. He closes his eyes. I know that this moment is too big for him, too. To hold him, to be held. It is as if I’ve been trapped underneath ice, and suddenly, I’m back in a place where there is sound and warmth and sun.
“Hi,” Finn whispers against my lips. “Hi.”
He closes the distance between us, feathering his mouth against mine,
before pulling away with a stripe of pink on his cheeks, as if he knows I’m still recovering but couldn’t help himself.
I wait for it, that last click of the lock, that satisfying final puzzle piece, that familiar sigh of reaching home.
This is where you belong, I tell myself.
“You were so lucky,” Finn says thickly, as if he’s struggling to push away the shadows of what could have happened.
“I am so lucky,” I correct. I grab both sides of his face and press my lips to his. I show him that this is what I want, what I’ve always wanted. I
consume him, to convince myself. I steal his breath for safekeeping.
Since we aren’t supposed to have visitors and Finn has bribed his way in with donuts for the staff, I get to spend only an hour with him in the courtyard. By then, it’s getting colder, and I’m getting tired. He helps me hook my mask over my ears again, wheels me back to my room, and tucks me into bed. “I wish I could stay with you,” he murmurs.
“I wish I could go with you,” I tell him.
He kisses my forehead. “Soon,” he promises.
He leaves me with a reusable grocery bag full of books—books that I asked him to bring to the front desk for me, before I knew he would be able to deliver them in person. They are the guidebooks on Ecuador and the
Galápagos that I had used to plan our trip.
Obviously, they are not in a missing suitcase somewhere. They’ve been on the kitchen counter all along, with our passports and our e-ticket confirmations, ready to pack.
I take a deep breath and open one.
Isabela is the largest island in the Galápagos and much of it is
unreachable, due to lava flows and thorny brush and rocky, inhospitable shores.
Puerto Villamil remains relatively untouched by visitors; it’s a tiny hamlet of sandy roads and homes bordered by cacti on one side and a gorgeous beach on the other.
I’ve highlighted some of the sights that I wanted to make sure Finn and I saw:
The path to Concha de Perla leads to a protected bay with good snorkeling.
After passing several small lagoons with flamingos, the turnoff to the Tortoise Breeding Center is marked.
A two-hour walk from Playa de Amor will take you to El Muro de las Lágrimas—the Wall of Tears.
Around the half-submerged lava tunnels at Los Túneles, the water is sparkling and clear and home to a variety of marine species.
One after another, I read about the places I visited while I was
unconscious and watch them blossom into fully dimensional memories full of sound and color and scent.
I put the book on the nightstand and pull Finn front and center in my mind. I think about how his hair felt, sifting through my fingers. How he smelled of pine and carbolic soap, like he always does. How his kiss wasn’t a discovery, but the reassurance that I had been on this journey before and knew where to go, what to do, what felt right.
That night, I don’t let myself fall asleep.
Rodney is angry at me because we are supposed to be watching reruns of
Survivor together on our phones and live-texting our predictions about who will be voted off the island, but I keep drifting off, trying to catch up on the rest I’m not getting.
Hello? he texts. Are you dead?
…
Too soon?
The last ding wakes me up, and I read his messages. Very funny, I type.
Imma find a new bff in NOLA.
Rodney is moving to his sister’s house in Louisiana, because he can’t afford his rent in the city. That sobers me. We are in lockdown, I know, and
I’m likely the last person anyone wants to be in close contact with, but the thought of not seeing Rodney again before he moves makes something shift in my chest.
Sorry. I won’t fall asleep again. I swear.
On my tiny phone screen I watch a contestant who is a preschool teacher climb into a barrel to be maneuvered through an obstacle course to win
some peanut butter.
#claustrophobia, Rodney types. Remember when you got locked in that vault at work and lost it?
I take this to mean I’ve been forgiven for napping.
I didn’t lose it, I just freaked out a little, I lie. Plus I’ve crawled down a tunnel that was as wide as my hips.
Like hell you did. Proof?
I hesitate. On Isabela, I write.
For a moment I watch those three dots appear and disappear while Rodney figures out what to say.
Suddenly the Survivor screen freezes and a FaceTime call pops up. I answer it and Rodney’s face swims into view. “I don’t know if it counts as conquering your fears when you do it unconscious,” he says.
“Definitely a blurry line.”
He regards me for a long moment. “You wanna talk about it?”
“It’s a place called the trillizos. They’re like these gopher holes into the middle of the earth. I guess tourists rappel down them.”
He shudders. “Give me a beach and a frozen marg.”
“Beatriz brought me there the first time, and the second time, she ran away and I crawled down to try to save her.”
“How come she needed saving?”
“She kind of found me in bed with her father and it didn’t go well.”
Rodney hoots with laughter. “Diana, only you could hallucinate yourself into an ethical mess.”
At that word—hallucinate—something in me shutters. Rodney notices, and his eyes soften. “Look, I shouldn’t have said that. Trauma is trauma. Just because someone else hasn’t experienced it themselves doesn’t make it any less real to you.”
Maggie has talked to me about other patients who have come off ECMO or the vent who suffer from PTSD. I have some of the same symptoms— that fear of falling asleep, the panic attacks when I start to cough, the
obsessive checking of my pulse ox numbers. But I can still feel what it was like to have water fill my lungs as I drowned, too. In the middle of the night, my heart pounds in my throat and I’m right back in the tunnel I shimmied down looking for Beatriz. I am having flashbacks of experiences everyone here tells me I never had, and now—more than a week after being weaned off any sedation drugs—they still haven’t gone away.
“Maybe I shouldn’t talk about it,” I mull out loud. “Maybe that’s only going to make it harder in the long run. It’s just …” I shake my head. “Remember that guy who came into Sotheby’s convinced that he had a Picasso and it wasn’t even a fake or a forgery—it was a flyer for a shitty band, and he was completely delusional?”
Rodney nods.
“I get it now. To him, that was a goddamn Picasso.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know why it hasn’t just … gone away. Or why I can’t wrap my head around it being a detailed, incredibly weird dream.”
“Maybe because you don’t want it to be?”
“If the reality is that I nearly died, then sure. But it’s more than that.
These people were so real.”
Rodney shrugs. “For a smart girl, you’re a dumbass, Di. You’re holding a phone in your hand, aren’t you? Tell me you’ve Googled them.”
I blink at him. “Oh my God.” “Yes, my child?”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you still can’t do the word scramble puzzles that OT gives you, and your brain isn’t firing right.”
I pull up the search engine, Rodney shrinking to a little green dot in the background. I type Beatriz Fernandez.
There are results, but none of them are her.
The same happens when I type in Gabriel’s name. “Well?” Rodney asks.
“Nothing.” But that’s not surprising, given the fact that the internet there was so bad that social media profiles would be useless.
Unless the internet isn’t bad there, and I just created that obstacle in my dream.
My head starts to hurt.
“Let me try something,” I murmur.
I type in Casa del Cielo Isabela Galápagos.
Immediately, a picture loads of the hotel I had booked—it looks nothing like the one I visited in my imagination. But … it exists.
My thumbs fly over my phone again. G2 TOURS. Tours/Outfitter, I read. And in red: CLOSED.
I suck in my breath. “He’s real, Rodney. Or at least his company is.” “And you don’t remember ever coming in contact with them before you
went, like when you were planning the trip?” I don’t. But maybe my brain did.
“Hang on, Rod.” I put my phone down, hoist myself up on Alice, and use the walker to make my way to the nightstand. There, I sit on the edge of the bed and pick up the guidebook I was reading the night before. Thumbing through the pages, I find the ones about Isabela Island.
I skim the categories: Arrival and Getting Around. Accommodation.
Eating and drinking. Tour operators.
The third one down: G2 TOURS. Open M–Sun 10–4. Private land/water excursions, SCUBA certified.
I did not highlight it. But I must have skimmed over it. My imagination clearly was working overtime to create a whole backstory and family around one tiny line item in a guidebook.
I shuffle back to the chair and pick up my phone again. “Gabriel’s tour company is listed in the guidebook I read.”
“He’s mentioned by name?”
“Well … no,” I say. “But why else would I have invented a place called G2 unless I’d seen something about it?”
“True,” Rodney points out. “That’s pretty basic. You’d probably have called it something like Happy Holidays or Galápagoing.”
“Do you think that’s all it was?” I ask him. “Do you think I unconsciously memorized all this while I was planning our vacation and somehow imagined it when I was on the vent?”
“I think there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know about the way the brain works,” Rodney says carefully. “But I also think there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know about how the world works.” He raises his brows. “Oh,” he adds. “And get yourself a shrink.”
Since the days in rehab bleed into each other, I mark time by progress. I stop using a death grip on the bars and instead graze my palm over them while I take steps. I graduate to using Alice the Walker, keeping my own
balance and pushing it forward. Maggie helps by giving me verbal progress reports: “Yesterday I had to help you and you lost your balance three times, but today you’re doing it all by yourself. Yesterday I was right next to you, today I’m within shouting distance.” Vee brings me puzzles, word searches, and a deck of cards. I start by sorting cards by suit and color and number, and then move on to playing solitaire. She has me tie my own sneakers and braid my own hair. She makes me pull beads out of putty to finesse my fine motor skills, and by the next afternoon, when I text on my phone my fingers are flying the way they used to. She brings me to a fake kitchen, where I
use my walker to move from dishwasher to cabinet, putting away plastic glasses and dishes.
On the twelfth day of rehab, I maneuver Alice into the bathroom, assess my balance, tug down my sweatpants, and pee on an actual toilet. I get to my feet, straighten my clothing, wash my hands.
When I step out into my room, Maggie and Vee are cheering.
There is a checklist of things I must be able to accomplish before I can
leave rehab. Can I brush my hair? Can I walk with a device? Can I dial my phone? Can I go to the bathroom? Can I shower? Can I balance? Can I do light meal prep? Can I walk up and down steps?
On the day I’m discharged, Finn comes to take me home. “How did you get the day off?” I ask.
He shrugs. “What were they gonna do? Fire me?”
It’s true, they need him too much right now to risk him leaving for good.
Which reminds me I will be alone in the apartment when he goes back. Which makes me terrified.
Even though I’ve been able to walk for a few days—even trading up from Alice for a quad cane—the protocol for rehab is that I be wheeled out. I’ve packed my limited stash of clothing and toiletries and the travel guides in a small duffel. “Your chariot,” Finn says, with a flourish, and I gently lower myself into the sling seat. I put on the blue surgical mask I’ve been given, and Finn sets the duffel on my lap.
Maggie comes rushing into the room. “I’d hug you if I could do it from six feet away,” she says.
“You’ve been up in my face for weeks,” I point out.
“But that was when you were a patient,” she says. “I brought you a gift.” She pulls out what she’s hidden behind her back—a shiny new quad cane for me to take home. “Candis,” she says, and I burst out laughing. Candis Cayne.
“Perfect.”
“So much cooler than Citizen.”
“For sure,” I tell Maggie. “I’m going to miss you.”
“Ah, fuck it,” she says, and she gives me a quick, fierce hug. “I’m gonna miss you more.”
She opens the door to my room and Finn pushes me into the hall. It is lined with people.
They are all masked and gowned, with their hair restrained in surgical caps. And they are all staring at me.
Someone starts clapping. Someone else joins in.
There is a rolling wave of applause as Finn wheels me past. I see tears in some of the eyes of the staff and I think: They’re not doing this for me. They are doing it for themselves, because they need hope.
I feel my cheeks heat underneath my mask, with embarrassment, with unease. I am reentering a society that has moved one month ahead without me, a place where every emotion is now hidden—a casualty of safety.
I keep my eyes straight ahead. I am the world’s loneliest soldier, limping back from war.
Getting home is an adventure. After I settle into the Uber, Finn squirts hand sanitizer into my palms and his, too. We lower the windows for ventilation even though it’s only fifty degrees out, because he’s read studies about aerosol transmission and viral droplets. Driving is eerie; the city is a ghost town. Stores are shuttered and the streets are so empty that we make record time. New York City is usually teeming with people—businessmen, tourists, dreamers. I wonder if they’re locked in the high-rises or if, like Rodney, they’ve just given up and left town. I think about the Empire State Building and Central Park and Radio City, the iconic locations that stand
resolute and lonely. I used to get so frustrated when the subways were packed solid or when Times Square was swarming with sightseers. I didn’t
realize how much I actually loved the congestion of Manhattan until I saw the alternative.
When we reach our apartment building, Finn hovers at my side until I shout at him because he’s making me nervous. We have to wait for two elevator cycles before we get a car to ourselves, which Finn insists on,
because not everyone is taking precautions as seriously as he is.
There was a time when I thought having an apartment at the end of the hall, away from the ding of the elevator, was a bonus, but now it feels Herculean to make it all the way there. Finn unlocks the door and helps me take off my coat and then immediately goes to wash his hands. He washes them like a surgeon, long minutes elapsing, scrubbing under his nails and up past his wrists. I follow his lead.
I see the pile of household bills that Finn’s been too busy to pay and take a deep breath. All of this I can deal with tomorrow. The only thing I have to do now is remember how to live a normal life.
Finn carries my duffel into the bedroom and unpacks my things. “Are you hungry?” he asks.
“Can we get Thai?” I ask, and then I frown. “Is there still delivery?” “If there wasn’t I’d be dead by now,” Finn says. “The usual?”
Spring rolls, satay, and massaman curry. I love that I don’t have to tell him. I nod and glance toward the bathroom. “I’m going to take a shower,” I announce, more to myself than to him, because there’s a tub I have to lift my leg over. But I’m going to have to do it sooner or later, and it might as well be while Finn is home to help me if I wind up sprawled on the floor.
As it turns out, I do fine. I am so proud—and so grateful to smell like my own soap and shampoo, instead of hospital versions. I brush and braid my hair, thinking of Vee, and put on clean leggings and my softest sweatshirt.
When I come into the living room, Finn grins. “You clean up nicely.” “I really have nowhere to go but up.”
I sit down on the couch and turn on the television, skipping quickly away from MSNBC to a rerun of Friends. “Have you watched Tiger King?” I call out.
“Tiger what?” Finn asks.
“Never mind.” I remind myself that the whole time I’ve been fighting for my life, Finn has been fighting for other people’s.
Suddenly he’s standing in front of me, holding out a steaming mug. “What’s this?”
“Hot milk.”
“I don’t like hot milk,” I say.
Finn frowns. “You drank it the last time you were sick.”
Because he’d made it for me without asking if I wanted it. Because his mom used to make it for him, when he was feeling under the weather.
Because I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t grateful. “I’m not sick,” I tell him.
He looks at me skeptically.
“You’re a doctor. You should know,” I say. With a sigh I pat the couch next to me and set the mug on the side table. Finn sits down. “I know something really bad almost happened,” I say quietly. “But it didn’t. And I’m here. And I’m better.”
I slide closer to him and feel him go still. Immediately, I pull back to look at Finn’s face. “Are you worried you’ll catch it from me?”
A shadow of pain crosses his face. “More like the other way around.” “If I just beat this motherfucker,” I say, “my veins must be full of
antibodies.” I flex my arm. “I’m basically a superhero.” That, finally, makes him smile. “Okay, Wonder Woman.”
I lean a little closer. “I wonder if antibodies are contagious.” “I can categorically tell you they’re not,” Finn says.
“I mean, just in case,” I murmur against his neck. “Maybe we should try to get some into you.” I loop my arms around his neck and press my mouth against his. Finn hesitates, then kisses me back. I slide my hands under his sweater, feeling his heart beat against my palm.
“Diana,” he breathes, a little desperate. “You just got out of rehab.” “Exactly,” I say.
I don’t know how to explain to him that when you find out you nearly died, there is a crucial need—a compulsion, really—to make sure you’re alive. I need to feel healthy and vital and desired. I need to burn with something that is not fever.
“Let me show you what I’ve learned,” I say to Finn, and I pull my sweatshirt over my head. I shimmy my leggings down to my ankles and kick them off. “And watch this.” I get to my feet, turn to face him, and sit down on his lap with my knees on either side of him. “Stand, pivot, transfer,” I whisper.
Finn’s arms come around me as I grind against him. It is a matter of
moments before his clothes are off, before the feel of his skin against mine
sets me on fire. Teeth and lips and fingertips, my nails on his scalp, his
palms bracketing my hips. I sink onto Finn and he flips us so that I am lying on the couch, dissolving around him. I succumb to the here and the now, focusing on the symphony of our breath, the percussion of our bodies, the crescendo.
When the buzzer rings, we are both so surprised we roll onto the floor. “Shit,” Finn says. “Dinner.”
He scrambles to his feet and I am jealous of his easy, unthinking movement. In his hurry, he pulls on my sweatshirt instead of his own, and it stretches too tight across his chest. As Finn hops into his boxers, I watch. “Don’t forget the … tip,” I say.
A laugh bursts out of him. “I cannot believe you said that.”
He is back a few minutes later, holding a brown paper bag full of Thai food. He looks at me, almost shyly. “Hungry?”
“Starving,” I say.
I watch him put the food on the counter, take out some disinfectant spray and paper towels, and start wiping everything down. “What … what are you doing that for?”
He blinks at me. “Oh, right. You don’t know. It’s for safety. You should use gloves, too, when you go to the mailbox, and let the mail sit for two days, just to make sure—”
“To make sure of what?” “That there’s no virus on it.”
He washes his hands again vigorously as I stand up and walk toward him. “You know what has no virus on it?” I ask, and I pull his head back down to mine.
The food cools on the counter as we tangle ourselves on the couch. When I finally unspool in Finn’s arms, I open my eyes to find him watching me.
He brushes my hair off my face. “Something’s different about you,” he murmurs.
“I like being back here,” I whisper.
What he likely thinks I mean: not in the hospital.
What I actually mean: not wandering in my clouded, confused thoughts.
In his embrace and wholly, blissfully present.
Finn is, and always has been, my anchor.
We eat in our underwear, and make love again, knocking over the sanitized cartons of food. At some point, we stumble to the bedroom and
crawl under the covers. Finn’s arm comes around me, holding my back tight against his front. It’s not the way we usually sleep—we have a king bed and we tend to retreat to our corners; I get cold too easily and Finn throws the
covers off. But, oddly, I don’t mind. If he is holding me tight, I can’t disappear.
I wait until he falls asleep, until I feel his breath falling in even puffs on the back of my shoulder. “I have to tell you something,” I whisper. “Everything I dreamed in the hospital? I think it was … real.”
There is no response.
“I was in the Galápagos,” I say, testing the words out loud. “There was a man there.”
Almost imperceptibly, Finn’s arm tightens around me. I hold my breath. “As long as you know who you’re really having sex with,” he murmurs. He does not let go of me. And I do not sleep.
