I scramble to my feet, cradling my hand. My fingertips throb.
“They’re poisonous to the touch,” the man says. “The apples.” “I didn’t know.”
“You should have,” he mutters. “There are signs everywhere.”
Poison apples, like a fairy tale. Except my prince is stuck in a hospital in New York City and the evil witch is a six-foot-tall galapagueño with anger management issues. I look at the tortoises, still blissfully feasting, and he
follows my gaze. “You’re not a tortoise,” he says, as if he knows exactly what I’m thinking.
By now my skin feels like it’s on fire. “How poisonous?” I ask, starting to panic. Do I need to go to the hospital?
Is there even a hospital?
He takes my hand and peers down at my fingers. He has dark hair and darker eyes and he is wearing running shorts and a sweaty tank. “It’ll go away, the burn, the blisters. Soak in cold water if you have to.” Then his eyes narrow on my breasts. I yank my hand away and fold my arms over my chest. “Where did you get that?”
“Get what?” “That shirt.”
“I borrowed it,” I say. “My luggage got lost.”
His scowl carves deeper lines in his face. “You’re on vacation,” he mutters. “Of course you are.”
He says this like it is a great personal affront to him that I, an outsider, am on Isabela. For a country whose main source of revenue is tourism, this doesn’t exactly feel like a warm welcome.
“I hate to break this to you, but everything on the island is closed for two weeks, including this place.”
“You’re here,” I point out.
“I live here, and I’m on my way home. Like you should be. Or haven’t you heard there’s a pandemic?”
At that, I bristle. “Actually, yes, I have heard. My boyfriend is on the front lines treating it.”
“So you decided to bring the virus here.”
As if I am Typhoid Mary. As if I am intentionally trying to hurt people, instead of attempting to stay safe.
“Maldita turista,” he mutters. “Who cares what happens, as long as you get your vacation.”
My eyes widen. He might have kept me from eating something poisonous, but he’s still a complete asshole. “As a matter of fact, I don’t
have Covid. But you know, just to make sure, we can socially distance right now by putting the entire island between us.”
I pivot and march away from him. My blistered hand, dangling at my side, has its own heartbeat. I refuse to turn around to see if he’s watching me leave, or if he’s continued toward his home. I don’t stop moving until I reach the entrance of the center. Just beside the sign I saw when I first arrived is another sign, this one with a picture of an apple and a red X covering it. CUIDADO! LOS MANZANILLOS SON NATIVOS DE LAS GALÁPAGOS. SOLAMENTE LAS TORTUGAS GIGANTES SON CAPACES DE DIGERIR ESTAS
MANZANITAS VENENOSAS. And then in perfectly clear English: CAREFUL! MANCHINEEL TREES ARE NATIVE TO GALÁPAGOS. ONLY GIANT TORTOISES CAN DIGEST THESE POISONOUS LITTLE APPLES.
I hear a muffled snort and look up to see him standing ten feet away from
me, arms crossed. Then he heads off deeper into the island, until the dark swallows him whole.
By the time I return to the apartment, it’s night. Unlike in the city, where there’s always a glow from a billboard or a storefront, here the dark is comprehensive. I navigate by the moonlight, which is bouncing on the ocean like a skipping stone. When I reach the stretch of beach in front of the apartment, I take off my sneakers and wade in ankle deep, bending to hold my singed fingers in the cold surf. My stomach growls.
I retreat to the little knee wall that divides the yard from the beach and pull out my phone. It sits in my palm, bright as a star, fruitlessly searching for a signal.
I miss you, I type in a text thread to Finn, and then erase the letters one by one. Somehow, it’s worse trying and failing to send a text than to never send it at all.
If Finn were here, we would have laughed the whole way back to our hotel room, bonding over poisoned apples and rude locals.
If Finn were here, he would have given me half of the KIND bar he always carries on a plane, just in case.
If Finn were here, maybe I’d be engaged, and getting ready to start the rest of the life I’ve planned.
But Finn isn’t here.
The whole point of traveling with someone from home is to remind you where you came from, to have a reason to leave when you begin to lose yourself in the lights of Paris or the majesty of a safari and think, What if I just stay?
But given that I don’t have a hotel room and I’m starving and I have
blisters on my hand from a killer native tree, there isn’t much that makes
me want to remain on Isabela. Except for the fact that I literally can’t leave.
I am so out of my comfort zone that all I want to do is curl up in a fetal position and cry. I slip through the sliding glass door and turn on a light. On the kitchen table, beside the conch shell, is a plate covered by a tea towel.
Even from across the room, I can smell something delicious. When I pull off the towel, the table rocks unevenly. On the plate is a quesadilla of sorts, stuffed with cheese, onions, tomatoes. I eat all six slices standing up.
I take the box of G2 Tours postcards and set them on the kitchen counter.
Pulling one from the stack, I use a pen from my tote and write a message. GRACIAS, I scrawl, and sign my name, and then trudge barefoot up to the front entrance of the home. It’s dark inside, so I slip the message under the front door.
It’s possible that for every angry asshole on this island, there’s someone like Abuela.
Back in my apartment, I write a second postcard—this one to Finn— before I pull off my clothes and slip into bed and fall asleep to the bated breath of the overhead fan.
Dear Finn,
It feels really old school to be writing a postcard, but even if this island is a technology desert, the mail is supposed to work, right?
First, I should tell you that I’m fine—there’s no evidence of the virus
anywhere here. The ferries stopped running for two weeks, presumably to keep it that way. It’s not going to be the vacation I expected—
tourism (and everything else commercial) is shut down here. But I’m renting a room from a nice old lady and what’s cooler than living as a local, right?! I’m just going to have to explore Isabela on my own, but that means I’ll be an expert when you and I take a trip back here. 
It is dramatically gorgeous here—I keep thinking that a painting wouldn’t do it justice, because you’d never capture the black of the
rocks that glint in the sun, or the turquoise of the water. It feels kind of
… rugged and unfinished. There are iguanas just hanging out
everywhere, like they own the place. I’m pretty sure there are more of them than there are human residents.
Speaking of residents—I hope you’re okay. I hate not being able to hear your voice. Yes, even when you’re singing off key in the shower.
Love, Diana
From preschool, at my first easel, it was clear that I had some kind of gift for art. My father was the one who worked on paintings—from ceiling
frescoes to giant canvases, doing conservation—but he would have been the first to tell you that he was not a creator, but a re-creator. When I was a freshman at Williams and one of my paintings was chosen to be part of a student exhibition, my father proudly came to the opening, wearing the only suit he owned.
My mother did not attend. She was embedded in Somalia, chronicling their civil war.
My father spent twenty minutes absorbing my piece. He stared at it as though he had been told that the world was about to go black and white, and this was his last chance to see color. Several times I saw his hand twitch as he reached toward the frame, and then settle at his side again. Finally, he turned to me. You have your mother’s eye, he said.
The next semester, instead of signing up for more art studio classes, I filled my time with art history and media and business courses. I did not want to spend my life being compared to my mother, because I was determined to be nothing like her. If that meant finding a different branch of the art world to perch on, so be it.
I wasn’t surprised to be selected for a summer internship at Sotheby’s when I was a rising senior, because I had structured my entire college career around being accepted to their program. On my first day, I was shuttled into a large room full of equally bright-eyed summer interns. I sat down beside a Black man who—unlike the rest of us, in our conservative blazers and tailored trousers—was wearing a purple silk shirt and a midi skirt printed with enormous roses. He caught me staring, and I jerked my head toward
the front of the room, where the directors of the different departments were lining up, calling out interns’ names.
“If I didn’t want people looking,” he whispered, “I wouldn’t have worn it. McQueen.”
I held out my hand. “Diana.”
“Oh, honey,” he said. “No. The designer of the skirt is Alexander
McQueen.” He reached out his own hand—beringed, with silver polish on his nails. “I’m Rodney.” Then he cataloged me from my neat part to my
sensible heels. “Middlebury?” “Williams.”
“Hmm,” he replied, as if I might be wrong about my own college. “First rodeo?”
“Yeah. Yours?”
“Second,” Rodney said. “I was here last summer, too. They work you
like a three-legged husky at the Iditarod, but I’ve heard Christie’s is worse.” He raised a brow. “You know how this goes, right?”
I shook my head.
“It’s like Harry Potter’s sorting hat. They call out your name, and your department. No trades.” He leaned closer. “I’m a design major at RISD and last year I got placed in Fine Wine. Wine. What the hell do I know about
wine? And no, before you ask, you don’t get to drink it.”
“Impressionism,” I told him. “That’s what I’m hoping for.”
Rodney smirked. “Then you’ll probably wind up in Space Exploration.” “Musical Instruments.” I grinned.
“Handbags.”
He reached into a satchel and pulled out a foil-wrapped package. “Here,” he said, breaking off a piece of cake. “Drown your sorrows preemptively.”
“Cake makes everything better,” I said, taking a healthy bite. “So do hash brownies.”
I choked, and Rodney whacked me on the back.
Diana O’Toole, I heard, and I popped up out of my chair. “Here!” I called.
Private Collections.
I looked down at Rodney, who pushed the rest of the brownie into my hand. “Could have been Rugs and Carpets,” he murmured. “Chow down.” As it turned out, I did not finish the hash brownie, even as I sat at the front desk, where I had been assigned to answer phones and direct visitors to floors of a company I didn’t yet know. I routed calls and read obituaries
in The New York Times, circling in red pen the obits of rich people who might have estates to be auctioned. Then, one afternoon, a man who was nearly as wide as he was tall strode up to the desk holding a frame wrapped in linen. “I need to see Eva St. Clerck,” he announced.
“I can make you an appointment,” I offered.
“I don’t think you understand,” he said. “This is a Van Gogh.”
He began to unwrap his frame, and I held my breath, anticipating the signature broken brushstrokes and thick blocks of color. Instead, I found myself staring at a watercolor.
Van Gogh did paint over a hundred watercolors. But I didn’t see the explosion of color that might have confirmed the origin of the piece for me, and it wasn’t signed.
Of course, it also wasn’t my department—or my job—to assess it.
But what if? I thought. What if this is my big break, and I’m the standout intern who identifies a diamond-in-the-rough Van Gogh and becomes a legend at Sotheby’s?
“Just a moment,” I said.
With my hand wrapped around the receiver, I called Eva St. Clerck, who was a senior specialist in Imp Mod back then. I introduced myself and had barely begun to explain when she said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” and hung up the phone.
Two minutes later, she was striding out of the elevator bank. “Mr.
Duncan,” Eva said, her words frosting over. “As I told you last week and
the week before that and the week before that, we do not believe that this is an original—”
“She said otherwise,” the man said, jabbing a finger at me. My eyes widened. “I did not.”
“She,” Eva said, “is a nobody. She is not qualified to assess a ham sandwich, much less a piece of art.”
I blinked. This was the woman I’d hoped to work for that summer; maybe I had dodged a bullet.
Suddenly a hand grabbed my arm. “Get up.” I was so caught up in the drama unfolding before me that I hadn’t even noticed my actual boss approaching from the other direction. Jeremiah was a senior specialist in Private Collections, and he had been tasked with finding things for me to do, like play receptionist at the front desk. “We need you now.”
“But the desk—”
“I don’t care.” Jeremiah pulled me away, talking as he led me down a rabbit warren of hallways. “The Vanderbilts are deciding between us and Christie’s to sell their estate. It’s all hands on deck.”
Jeremiah opened the door to a conference room. A frazzled group of
estate sales specialists looked up. “That’s the intern?” one of them said. I was led to a computer in the corner, and told to start entering the hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes on art and property and belongings that
were part of the estate. While I typed and double-checked my work and inventoried the list, the group behind me tossed out pitches that might convince the Vanderbilts to choose Sotheby’s over Christie’s.
For days I organized oils by Dutch Masters and Rolls-Royces and gilded horse carriages and listened to Jeremiah and the other senior specialists dream up a breathtaking pitch for an auction. Stepping into that room was
like being wrapped by electricity; it was the confirmation I needed that the buzz provided by art did not begin and end at its creation.
The Vanderbilts picked Sotheby’s the day before my internship ended. There was champagne and speeches and a round of applause for me, the draft horse who had labored nights and weekends on the grunt work.
No matter what Eva St. Clerck thought of me.
I stole a bottle of Moët and drank it with Rodney in the handicapped bathroom. Over the course of the summer we’d become inseparable. He had been assigned to Islamic Art, but somehow convinced his senior specialist to let him hang out with the design team that structured the rooms and
displays in which auctions took place. We wandered through the Met and
the Whitney on weekends and made it our mission to find the best avocado toast in the city. I got him drunk when his boyfriend dumped him via text; he dragged me to sample sales and Cinderella-ed me out of my chinos and into deep-discount Max Mara and Ralph Lauren. “Here’s to Fine Wines,” I said, lifting the bottle to my lips.
“Here’s to us: future graduates of the Sotheby’s master’s class of 2013,”
Rodney countered. Our plan was to matriculate in the company’s art
business degree program together, get hired for real, and take over the art world.
Privately, I also wanted Eva St. Clerck to know who I was, and what I was capable of.
Nine years and several promotions later, Eva St. Clerck knows who I am: the protégée who secured Kitomi Ito’s Toulouse-Lautrec … and lost it.
When I wake up the next morning, the sun is swollen in the sky and beating so hot it makes the air ache. I pull on the bathing suit I had the uncanny
prescience to pack in my carry-on, grab a towel, and walk to the edge of the ocean, dancing faster when the soles of my feet start to burn. The blisters on my hand have flattened into calluses.
The difference between the broiling air and the cold waves makes me gasp, but I draw in a deep breath and run into the surf, three long strides, and then dive underneath. When I surface, my hair is slicked back from my face, and I float on my back with my eyes closed. The salt dries on my cheeks, tightening my skin.
How long could I stay like this, suspended, blind? Where would I wind up?
I let my legs sink with gravity and squint at the horizon. I wonder if that’s the direction Finn’s in.
It feels like massive cognitive dissonance to be in this tropical paradise and to know, half a world away, New York City is bracing for a pandemic.
When you’re surrounded by desert, it’s inconceivable to think there are places that flood.
I wade out of the ocean, wrap myself in the towel, and wring out my ponytail. Suddenly all the hair stands up on the back of my neck, as if I am being watched. I whirl around, but there is no one on the beach. When I turn back toward the apartment, I see a blur of movement, but it is gone
before I get close enough to see.
It isn’t until I’m in the shower that I realize I have no shampoo and no soap. And of course, no food, since I ate everything that Abuela left me last night. With my skin and hair still unwashed, I pull on my jeans from yesterday and a fresh T-shirt from the stash I found in the linen closet and walk back into Puerto Villamil. I’m hoping something is open now. My
goal is to stock up on supplies and provisions, and to find a post office
where I can get stamps and mail the postcard I wrote to Finn. If I can’t get texts or emails or calls out to him, at least he will have an old-fashioned letter.
But Puerto Villamil is a ghost town. The bars and restaurants and hostels and shops are all still dark and closed. The post office has a locked metal
gate pulled down over its entryway. For a heart-stopping moment I wonder if maybe I’ve slept through an evacuation, if the entire island is empty except for me. Then I realize that one of the businesses, while still dark inside, has someone bustling around.
I knock on the door, but the woman inside shakes her head at me.
“Por favor,” I say.
She puts down the box she is holding and unlocks the door. “No perteneces aquí. Hay toque de queda.”
It is, I realize, a market. There are baskets on the counter filled with fruit, and a few narrow aisles sparsely lined with shelved dry goods. I pull cash out of my pocket. “I can pay.”
“Closed,” she says haltingly. “Please,” I say.
Her face softens, and she holds up a hand with her fingers outstretched.
Five items? Five minutes? I point to a yellow fruit in a basket at the counter. Guava, maybe. The woman picks it up. “Soap?” I say. “Sopa?”
She reaches onto a shelf and holds out a can of soup.
Well, I’ll take it, but I can’t shower with it. I mime scrubbing my hair, and under my arms, and she nods and adds a bar of Ivory to my pile. I say every Spanish food item in my narrow vocabulary: agua, leche, café, huevo. There is little that’s fresh, which limits my options, and which makes me wonder how or if the people on Isabela will get shipments of perishables
like milk and eggs. For every item I manage to communicate, there are two that she doesn’t have; the locals must have known things were closing down and stocked up. “Pasta?” I say finally, and she finds three boxes of penne.
There are worse fates than having to eat only pasta.
“Stamps?” I ask. I hold out my postcard and point to the corner.
She shakes her head, and points across the street to the closed post office.
On the counter is a small stack of newspapers. I cannot read the Spanish headlines, but the picture makes it clear—it is a priest in a church in Italy, blessing scores of coffins filled with Covid casualties.
This is what is coming to America. This is what Finn will be dealing with.
And I am stuck here.
The shop owner holds out her hand, the universal symbol for payment. I offer a credit card and she shakes her head. I don’t have any Ecuadorian money and I still haven’t found an ATM. Panicked, I peel off two twenties and hand them to her before she can renege and take away my groceries.
She locks the door again, and I head off with my plastic bag.
I’m halfway down the main street when I hear a ping on my phone. I pull it out of my pocket and watch a torrent of messages from Finn roll onto my screen.
I lost you.
Hello?
Tried FaceTiming but …?
Bad Wi-Fi? Will try you tomorrow.
He’s texted multiple times since then, and finally seemed to realize that I still didn’t have cell service. The last message says that he’ll send an email instead, in case I find an internet café.
I look up and down the street at the tightly closed storefronts and snort. But apparently, I am sitting in the one hot spot of service in Puerto
Villamil, because when I check my inbox, somehow there is an email that has downloaded from Finn. I sit down cross-legged and start to read, absorbing his words like they are an oasis in a desert.
To: [email protected] From: [email protected]
I can’t believe it’s only been two days. The schools are already shut down here, and bars and restaurants. We’ve got 923 cases in the city alone. Ten deaths. The subway is empty. It’s like New York is a shell, and all the people are in hiding.
Not that I’d know, because I haven’t left the hospital. They scrapped the model for
surgical residents. You know how I used to bitch about being a junior resident, because I’d have to do nights and ED consults while the senior residents scrubbed in to the
actual surgeries—and how you said that one day it would be my turn? Well, nope. I may be a fourth-year resident but that’s gone. No one is doing surgery anymore. All elective procedures—and even emergent ones, like appys and gallbladders—have been canceled, because the surgical ICU is filled with Covid patients. Residents are expendable, I guess, so we’ve all been reassigned to Covid, too.
To be fair, it’s the only illness we’re seeing. But I was trained as a surgeon, and suddenly I’m supposed to be an internal med doc treating infectious disease, and I have no idea what I’m doing.
Neither does anyone else.
I’m on hour 34 of my 12-hour shift, because there aren’t enough of us to take care of the patients. They started arriving and they haven’t stopped. They all show up gasping and by the time they get here, they’re already screwed. They try to suck in air, but
there’s nowhere for the air to go, so they wind up damaging more lung—it’s this vicious cycle. Normally, we’d put patients like that on high-flow nasal cannulas, which can get them ten times as much oxygen, but they also would aerosolize the virus all over the place. So instead we use non-rebreather masks or small nasal cannulas. They don’t work. Nothing in our bag of tricks does. People are crashing left and right because they aren’t getting enough oxygen, and the only thing left to do is intubate. Which is the most dangerous thing of all, because we can’t get a patient on a vent without literally spreading the virus all over ourselves.
So we have armor, I guess, even though there’s not enough of it. Now, just to see a patient, I have to put on my hair covering, my N95 mask, then my face shield, then my paper gown over scrubs, then two pairs of gloves. We were sent videos to memorize the order, and we have spotters watching us to make sure we haven’t forgotten anything before we march into battle. It feels ridiculous, that this little filter over my face is the only thing protecting me from this virus. It takes six minutes to get into PPE, but twelve minutes to get it off, because that’s when you are more likely to infect yourself.
It’s hot and itchy and miserable and I worry what it must feel like for the patients—we are acting as if they have the plague.
Which, maybe, they do.
We try not to stay in their rooms. We don’t touch them unless we have to. No one really knows how long the virus lasts on surfaces, so we assume the worst. When we come out we take off our gloves, toss them into the trash, and wash our hands. Then the cap goes into the trash, and we wash our hands. The gown is placed in a plastic bin, and we wash our hands. Then the shield comes off, and we wash our hands. Our N95 masks we have to reuse, because there aren’t enough. So we take them off and stick them in little cubbies, tagged with our names, and wash our hands. In Italy, docs are wearing hazmat suits like they’re entering a nuclear reactor, and I’m washing down my face mask with a fucking wipe.
My knuckles are cracked and bleeding. I should not complain.
Today I had to do an emergency cricothyrotomy on a Covid patient. He was crashing, minutes away from going into cardiac arrest. I called RICU—the respiratory team—stat, but the guy’s neck was too thick and the anesthesiologist couldn’t get a good visual to intubate him fast enough. It was just me and the anesthesiologist and the nurse and the man gasping for air. I had to step in and do the emergency cric to secure the airway
and get him intubated before it was too late. I was terrified, because, you know, if you do it wrong, if you miss one detail, you might get infected. I had to squeeze my hands together to keep them from shaking before I made the incision. I kept telling myself to do this efficiently and quickly and to get the fuck out of that room and sanitize myself.
When it was over the anesthesiologist and I left like we were on fire. I pulled off all
my gear in the right order and scrubbed my hands and used Purell afterward and then I realized that the nurse was still in that room, with all those airborne molecules of virus. She was all of maybe 25. She was stroking the patient’s arm, and I saw her brush a tear from the man’s cheek, even though he was fast asleep. She was talking to him, even though he was sedated and couldn’t hear her.
Here I am bitching about wearing a paper space suit and making a cut, and she was providing real, true patient care.
And I thought: She’s the fucking hero.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It feels good, though, to know you’re listening.
I don’t know how long I sit on the main street in Puerto Villamil rereading Finn’s email, the sun baking the back of my neck and the crown of my head. His description of the city and the hospital feels unreal, dystopian.
How could so much change in just forty-eight hours?
Suddenly it feels juvenile and entitled to be upset about not staying in the hotel I booked, or being hungry. There is no way in hell I’m going to complain to Finn.
It’s so beautiful here, I type. It’s hard to know where to look—there’s
water so clear you can see fish on the bottom and crazy dramatic hunks of lava rock and iguanas crossing Main Street.
The people are superfriendly too, I write.
I describe the sea lion on the dock in Santa Cruz and the choppy ferry
ride and I completely leave out the mob of frantic tourists that met me when I reached Isabela.
The only bad thing, I add, (aside from the lack of cell service) is that you’re not with me.
I hate that I’m here, and that you’re in the thick of it. I wish I could be there for you.
I do not tell him that even if I decided to head home, there’s no way for me to get there.
I hit send.
I stare at the screen, holding my breath, until the notification pops up: No internet connection.
In the field of auctions, video representation is nowhere near as important as the physical catalog. It’s far more important to have your clients pore
over the stunning photographs, read the copy about the object’s provenance, to determine—from the placement in the book—how important the piece might be. After graduating from Sotheby’s with a master’s in art business, and training for a year, I was hired in 2014 as a junior cataloger in Imp Mod. My job was to write the words that accompanied the photos. A specialist might bring in the painting, but it was my task to bring it to life.
The library at Sotheby’s isn’t really a library, but rather stacks of bookshelves that line the hallways of every floor of the office. As a cataloger, I would scour the materials, trying to piece together initial
research on the market value of a piece, how much money similar works
had sold for, and whatever little tidbits I could add. The way to hook people on a piece of art is to find a detail that sticks in their minds—something that can personalize the work: this was painted the day before he met the mentor who would sponsor him as an artist; this was the first painting he did in oils; this image was influenced by Degas, Gauguin, Cézanne. Every snippet of copy was reviewed and edited and arranged to grab the interest of the buyer and keep him turning pages.
What this meant for me, practically, was that I rarely sat down during the day, unless it was to type a revision, and then I’d run mock-ups and edits from one specialist to another, to the marketing people, and to the art department that organized the catalog for printing. Also, we were always on a strict deadline to get the catalog off to the printer in time for the actual auction.
That was the reason I didn’t take the elevator one day, three years into my tenure at Sotheby’s. By then my boss—Eva St. Clerck—was the head of sale for Imp Mod. I was running something to her to meet a deadline, and with the elevator stuck on another floor, I opted for the emergency staircase instead. But I was in such a hurry, I missed a step and found myself tumbling down the stairs, breaking my fall with my left arm outstretched.
I landed in a tangle at the landing, my tights torn, my knee skinned. As I lay sprawled, I considered running back upstairs to change into the spare pair of tights I kept in my desk to prevent Eva St. Clerck from taking one look at me and raising a disappointed eyebrow. I tried to push myself upright and nearly blacked out from the wave of pain that swallowed me.
When I could breathe again, I wriggled my phone out of the pocket of my jacket and texted Rodney with a single hand. Help.
By the time he located me in the stairwell, I was propped against the wall with my legs splayed in front of me, cradling my left arm with my right. He hauled me up and marched me toward the closest elevator bank. “We’re going to the ER,” he announced, looking down at my wrist and wincing. “That is not a natural angle.”
“I can’t just leave. Eva—”
“Does not want to incur a lawsuit because you fell down the stairs when you were trying to appease Her Majesty.” When we reached street level, Rodney bustled me through the lobby and out the front door. The emergency department of New York–Presbyterian was only a few blocks away; we heard the ambulance sirens all the time.
The waiting room was half-full: there were mothers cradling crying toddlers, an elderly man with a bad cough, a couple whispering furiously in Spanish, a man in construction gear holding a bloody towel to a gash in his thigh. The triage nurse took my information down, and forty-five minutes later, my name was called. “Do you want me to come with?” Rodney asked, and even though it was exactly what I wanted, I decided to act like a grown- up and shook my head.
“Good,” he said, “because this People magazine from 2006 is impossible to put down.”
I was brought through the double doors to a little curtained cubicle,
where I sat on a gurney, trying not to jostle my arm. It felt like fire under my skin, and all of a sudden it was too much: the pain, the catalog deadline, a potentially broken bone. Tears streamed down my cheeks, my nose started running, and when I tried to reach out with my nondominant hand for a
tissue beside the gurney, the box fell onto the floor, and I started to cry harder.
Which was the moment the doctor entered. He was tall and blond, with hair that kept falling in his eyes. “Ms. O’Toole? I’m Dr. Colson, and I’m a resident in …” he said, looking down at my chart. “I understand that you fell—” He glanced at my face, and his brows shot up. “Are you okay?”
“If I was okay,” I sobbed, “I would not be in the emergency room.” “Tell me what happened,” he said.
So I did, as he gently touched my elbow and wrist, moving it incrementally, stopping when I gasped in pain. His fingers were warm and sure. He asked me questions as he checked me for concussion, examined
the scrape on my knee, and a bruise that was blooming on my hip. “So are you always in a hurry?” he asked.
The question surprised me out of my discomfort. “I guess?”
For the first time since he had entered the cubicle, his eyes met mine. “I suppose that’s not a bad thing, if you know where you’re headed,” he said.
“Is that the current way of saying take two aspirin and call me in the morning?”
“No. You’re not getting out of here without an X-ray.” He smiled a little, the corner of his mouth quirking up on one side. “The bad news is I’d lay
odds that your arm is broken. The good news is that if you can make jokes, you probably won’t die on my watch.”
“Great,” I murmured.
“It is,” he said. “I’d hate to see my Yelp rating tank.” He leaned out of the cubicle and spoke with a passing nurse. “We’ll get you down to radiology for imaging, and then I’ll come back.”
I nodded. “My friend’s in the waiting room,” I said. “Can someone tell him what’s going on?”
He straightened. “I can get word to your boyfriend.”
“He’s just a co-worker,” I corrected. “Rodney. He brought me here. He’ll be the only one in the waiting room wearing couture.”
The doctor grinned. “You gotta love a hero in Prada.”
It took an hour for my X-ray to be performed and read and for Dr. Colson to come back to my cubicle. I was lying down by then, trying not to move my arm. He showed me the scans on an iPad, the clean white line of the break in my bone. “It’s a simple break,” he said.
“It doesn’t feel simple.”
“That means you don’t need an ortho consult. I can put a cast on you, and you can be on your way.”
He showed me how to hold up my arm, thumb out, while he gently slipped a stockinette on like an evening glove. He took a roll of cotton and wound it up and down again, mummifying my arm. The whole time, he asked me questions: How long had I been at Sotheby’s? Did I study art at school? Did I prefer modern art, or impressionist art? He told me that he was a surgical resident, but that it was his first year, and he was doing a two-week rotation in the ED. He confessed that this was his first cast.
“Mine, too,” I said.
The fiberglass wrap he used was already stiffening in place. For the final layer, he offered me a choice of blue, hazard orange, camouflage, hot pink.
“I get to pick?”
He smiled. “A perk for our first-time customers.”
“Pink,” I said. “Although Rodney would say that’ll clash with my wardrobe.”
“Choose something you won’t get sick of looking at for the next six
weeks,” he suggested. “If you want something matchy, go with blue. It’s the same color as your eyes.”
As soon as he said it, he flushed and ducked his head, laser-focused on the last layer of wrap.
Finally, I was able to turn my wrist a little to look at his handiwork. “Not bad for a novice,” I said. “Five stars on Yelp for sure.”
He laughed. “Whew.”
“So,” I said, looking up at him. “That’s it?”
“One more thing,” he said, and he took a black marker from his white coat pocket. “Can I sign your cast?”
I nodded, smiling.
FINN, it read. And a phone number.
“In case there are complications,” he said, meeting my gaze. “I feel like that’s a HIPAA violation or something,” I said.
“Only if you’re my patient. And lucky for me,” he said, handing me my discharge papers, “you are no longer my patient.”
By the time I walked into the waiting room again, we’d planned to meet for dinner the following night, and I barely noticed the throbbing in my arm. Rodney was lying on his back across four chairs. He took one look at my face, and the signature on my cast. “Girl,” he said.
After reading Finn’s email I decide I’m going to get back to America if I have to swim. I return to the apartment to get my carry-on tote and then double back into Puerto Villamil. There are very few signs of life on
Isabela, but I have the best chance of finding an exit to the mainland if I’m in town.
I have to wait only an hour on the pier before a small boat approaches, its engine chugging. There is one person in it, but I can’t see him clearly from this distance. I hurry down the dock, waving, as the man hops out of the boat, turns away from me, and ties it securely on a mooring.
“Hola,” I say tentatively, wondering how I am going to communicate beyond a simple greeting.
When he stands and wipes off his damp hands on his shorts, then turns around, I realize it is the man from the tortoise breeding site who tackled me yesterday. “No es cierto,” he mutters, closing his eyes for a second, as if he could blink me away.
Well. At least I already know he speaks English.
“Hello again,” I say, smiling. “I wonder if I could rent your boat.”
He shakes his head. “Sorry, it’s not my boat,” he says, and he shoulders past me, walking away.
“But you were just in—” I run after him, to catch up. “Look. I realize we got off on the wrong foot. But this is an emergency.”
He stops, folding his arms.
“I’ll pay you,” I try again. “I’ll pay as much as you want to get me to
Santa Cruz.” I don’t have very much cash left, but there have to be ATMs there, at least.
He narrows his eyes. “What’s in Santa Cruz?” “The airport,” I say. “I have to get home.”
“Even if you got to Santa Cruz, there are no flights in or out.” “Please,” I beg.
His face softens, or maybe it’s just an illusion. “I can’t take you there,” he says. “We’re in the middle of a strict quarantine. There are federal
officials enforcing it.”
By now, I’m fighting back tears. “I know you think I’m a stupid tourist,” I admit. “I should have left with the last ferry. You’re right. But I can’t stay here for God knows how long while people I love are stuck …” My words evaporate; I swallow hard. “Haven’t you ever made a mistake?”
He flinches as if I’ve hit him.
“Look, I don’t much care what happens to me,” he says. “But if you’re arrested for traveling to Santa Cruz, that’s not going to get you home, either.” His eyes roam over me, from the crown of my head to my sneakers. “I hope you figure something out,” he adds, and with a brief nod, he leaves me standing alone on the pier.
By the late afternoon, I am not only wondering if I can get off this island, I’m wondering if I’m the only one on it.
Even though I know it can’t be true, it feels like I’m the last person on earth. Since being dismissed by the man from the tortoise breeding center, I have not seen a single soul. There is no movement or light in Abuela’s part of the house; the beach is entirely empty. Even if there are no tourists descending on Isabela Island—even if people are being cautious because of coronavirus—it feels as if I’ve been dropped onto the set of a dystopian movie. A beautiful set, but a very lonely one.
I find myself walking in the same direction I went yesterday, toward the tortoise breeding center, except I get lost and wind up instead on a wooden walkway through a mangrove forest, with long-fingered tree branches bleached and twisted above me, knuckles bent. It is desolate and oddly beautiful; it’s the place in the fairy tale where the witch appears. Except
there is only me, and an iguana perched on the handrail of the walkway, its Godzilla hackles rising as I walk past.
When I see the sign for Concha de Perla, my memory is jogged: I had bookmarked this page in the travel guide that is still lost somewhere with my luggage, as a place for Finn and me to visit. It’s known as a snorkeling haunt, arms of lava encircling a small part of the ocean to create a natural lagoon. I do not have a snorkel with me, but I am sweaty and hot, and diving into cool water becomes a mission.
I read the sign diligently, thinking of poisoned apples, but there is nothing warning me off. The walkway ends in a small, enclosed dock that looks out over the water. Two sea lions are sprawled on the boards, the wood still wet around their bodies, like a crime scene outline. They do not even twitch as I pass to lean over the railing and peer at the water: green- tinted but clear, with a family of sea turtles swimming just below me.
Well. If I’m the last person in the world, there are worse places to be.
I toe off my sneakers and peel off my socks, hiding them under the bench of the dock. It feels exhibitionistic to undress, but there’s no one else here, and I have too limited a supply of clothing to get it wet. When I’m down to my athletic bra and panties, I start descending the staircase into the water. I let it lap at my shins, and then do a shallow dive into the lagoon.
The water is cool on my skin, and when I stand, I can almost brush the sandy bottom with my toes. There are mangrove trees at the edge of the pool, and through the ripple of the water are black shadows of lava. Some of them are large enough to rise from the surface, jagged as teeth. I tread water for a few moments and then start to swim in the direction of the lava outcroppings. The sun is so strong that it feels like a coronation. I lean back, floating, blinking up at the clouds that drift across the sky.
When I feel myself being poked, I startle violently, swallow water, and come up sputtering. Two penguins bob in front of me, seemingly as surprised to see me as I am to see them.
“Hey there,” I whisper, grinning. They are the size of my forearm, tuxedoed formally, their pupils yellow dots. I stretch out my hand gently, inviting them to swim closer. One of the penguins dives under the water and reappears to my left.
The other one pecks me hard enough to draw blood.
“Jesus Christ!” I cry out, kicking away from the penguin, clapping a hand over my shoulder. It’s barely a scrape, but it hurts.
I think of all the children’s stories about penguins, which are clearly doing a disservice by making them seem friendly and cuddly. Maybe in real
life they’re territorial; maybe I’ve committed an infraction by swimming into their part of the lagoon. I distance myself from them, moving a little further out of reach of the dock toward the tangled roots of the mangroves.
I paddle around lazily, wary of penguins. I also have the sensation again that I’m being watched.
I’m wearing my underwear, which is basically equivalent to a bikini, but it’s still not the way I’d like to be discovered unawares. Twice, I glance over my shoulder, but even from this distance I can see there’s no one on the dock.
Splash.
The sound comes from behind me and when I whip around, the spray of water keeps me from seeing anything.
I turn away and it happens again.
But this time when I turn, I’m a foot away from the curious stare of a sea lion.
His eyes are black and soulful, his whiskers bob. Under the water his body looks like one compact, undulating muscle, the tail sweeping powerfully to keep him upright.
One flat platter of a fin breaks the water and he splashes me again. So I splash him back.
For a moment we just stare at each other. His nose twitches. He slaps his fin on the surface again and sends a shear of water into my face.
I burst out laughing and he does a backward dive, reappearing a few feet away from me. With a grin, I fling myself backward underwater, too. When I come up, pushing the hair out of my face, the sea lion is a foot away. This time, I hold my breath and somersault underwater, opening my eyes beneath the surface to watch him do the same thing.
It’s almost like we’re having a conversation.
Delighted, we play together, mimicking motions. Worn out, I start swimming back to the dock. For a while, the sea lion follows me. We
surface underneath the raised wooden dock, breathing hard. He smells of fish.
I slowly stretch out my hand, thinking that maybe he will let me pet him, now that we have established a friendship of sorts. But before I can reach
the silk of his wet fur, a drop of blood materializes in the center of my palm. Shocked, I pull my hand back—Did I cut it on lava? Was it the penguin?
—just as a second drop splats into the water, diffusing like dye.
I glance up and realize it’s coming from above the dock.
Scrambling up the slippery steps I see a girl sitting with her back to the post that forms a corner of the dock. She is young, on the cusp of being a teenager. She seems just as surprised to see me as I am to see her, and she immediately yanks down the sleeve of her sweatshirt, but not before I get a glimpse of the ladder rungs of cuts, one still bleeding.
“Are you okay?” I ask, moving toward her, but she hunches up her knees and slips her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt.
I never self-harmed, but I remember a girl from my high school who did. Her mother was dying of ovarian cancer and once, we were both waiting for the guidance counselor on a bench outside her office. I looked over and saw the girl picking at scars on her forearm that reminded me of the height
marks my father made on my bedroom doorframe every year on my birthday to chart my growth. She stopped when she saw me staring. What? she said.
This girl has black hair in a messy braid, and she isn’t crying. In fact, she looks pissed off to have had her hiding spot trespassed upon. “What are you doing here?” she accuses.
“Swimming,” I say, and my cheeks burn as I remember what I’m wearing, and what I’m not. I grab my borrowed T-shirt from where it sits, under the bench, and pull it over my head.
“It’s closed,” the girl says, and suddenly I realize why she looks familiar: she was the third passenger on the ferry yesterday. The one who was crying.
“Did you hurt yourself?” I ask.
She continues as if I haven’t spoken at all. “The whole island is closed,” she says. “Because of the virus there’s a curfew after two P.M.”
I look at the sun, slung low in the sky. I begin to understand why the island feels like a ghost town. “I didn’t know,” I say honestly. Then my brows draw together. “If there’s a curfew, what are you doing here?”
She stands up, her hands still buried in her pockets. “I didn’t care,” she says, and she runs down the wooden walkway.
“Wait!” I cry, trying to follow her, but the wood burns the bare soles of my feet and, wincing, I have to stop in a puddle of shadow. By the time I limp back to the dock to put on my jeans and sneakers, the sea lion has disappeared, too.
I am halfway back home before I realize that this mystery girl spoke English.
I hear the shouting before I even reach Abuela’s house. She is standing on
the front porch, trying to placate a man who is arguing with her. Every time she touches his arm, trying to calm him down, he releases a torrent of Spanish. “Hey!” I yell, jogging faster as I watch Abuela bend like a willow under his frustration. “Leave her alone!”
They both turn at the sound of my voice, surprised. It’s that same guy … again. “You?” I say.
“This is not your business—” he says.
“I think it is,” I interrupt. “What gives you the right to scream at a woman who’s—”
“My grandmother,” he says.
Abuela’s face creases into the soft lines of a thousand wrinkles. “Mijo,”
she says, patting his arm. “Gabriel.”
I shake my head. “I’m Diana. Your grandmother very kindly offered me an apartment when my hotel closed down.”
“It’s my apartment,” he says.
Is he kicking me out? Is that why they’re arguing?
“My apartment,” he repeats, as if I am too slow to understand. “The one you’re currently squatting in.”
“I can pay you,” I say, scrabbling in my jeans pocket for money. I peel off most of what’s left.
Abuela sees the money in my hand and shakes her head, pushing back at my fist. Her grandson—Gabriel—turns slightly, speaking quietly to her. “Tómalo; no sabes por cuánto tiempo serán las cosas así.”
She nods and flattens her mouth into a thin line. She takes the money from my hand, folding it and tucking it inside her dress pocket.
Abuela responds to Gabriel, her eyes flashing, and for a moment, he has the grace to look embarrassed. “My grandmother,” he says, “wants me to tell you that I moved out a month ago and that she can give the space to
anyone she wants.” He narrows his eyes at me. “Why aren’t you in the apartment?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t quite keep up. Do you want me there, or don’t
you?”
“There’s a curfew.” His eyes narrow on my wet hair. “You’re dripping.
Onto my shirt.”
My God, everything is a personal affront to this man.
Suddenly Gabriel’s face changes. “Jesucristo,” he swears, as he rushes past me and grabs the shoulders of someone in the street. He looks like he can’t decide whether to hug or throttle them.
I watch as relief wins out in him. His arms circle tightly, and on the porch, Abuela’s eyes fill with tears. She crosses herself.
I don’t know what Gabriel is saying, because he is speaking Spanish. But from this angle, I can see the face of the person he’s embracing. It’s the girl from the dock at Concha de Perla, her sweatshirt still pulled past her wrists, her eyes fixed on mine, silently begging me to keep her secret.
