Wish You Were Here (17 page)

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

“No, Gabriel,” I say sharply, “because my boyfriend and I do not live in the Dark Ages. Plus, Rodney is…well, Rodney. He’s Black, Southern, and gay, or as he puts it, a golden trifecta.” I look carefully at Gabriel as I say the word
gay,
gauging his reaction. Beatriz’s confidences are still not mine to tell, but I can’t help wondering what his reaction would be if she were brave enough to confide in him. Gabriel, however, doesn’t bat an eye. “Are there a lot of LGBTQ people here?” I ask breezily.

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

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

I don’t expect him to answer, since he keeps that part of his life—and his subsequent departure from it—close to his chest, but Gabriel shrugs. “When my parents honeymooned on Isabela in the eighties, there were maybe like two hundred residents on island, and they wanted to stay. So they brought Abuela in from the mainland. My father loved it here. People used to call him
El Alcalde
—the mayor—because he would go on and on about how amazing Isabela is to anyone and everyone who landed in Puerto Villamil. He didn’t have the scientific background to be a park ranger, so he became a tour guide.”

Gabriel looks at me across the fire. “When I was growing up, it was expected that I’d join the family business. I’d been doing it unofficially with him for years. You have to train for seven months to be certified as a guide by the government of Ecuador—studying biology, history, natural history, genetics, languages. Professors come here from all over the world—the University of Vienna, and the University of North Carolina, and the University of Miami—they ask for the help of the guides to continue research for them when they’re off-island. So you know, we might wind up taking pictures of green sea turtles, and sending them back to a scientist so he can track them around the island for his research. We might be asked to document penguin behaviors that seem unique.”

“I was bit by one,” I say, rubbing my arm. “When I first got here.”

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

“What happened?”

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

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

He shakes his head. “Plans change. Shit happens.”

“Beatriz told me her mother…left.”

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

I am glad for the darkness, because he cannot see the flush on my cheeks. Finn and I are the couple that our friends tag
#relationshipgoals
. Every time Rodney has cried over another breakup, I’ve curled up in Finn’s arms in bed and silently given thanks that of all the people in the world, we found each other. I trust him and he trusts me. It’s steady and stable and I know exactly what to expect: I’ll get my promotion; he’ll get a fellowship. We’ll get married in a vineyard upstate (tasteful, no more than a hundred guests, band not DJ, justice of the peace officiating); honeymoon on the Amalfi coast; buy a house outside the city during the first year of his fellowship; have our first child during the second year and a sibling two years after that. Honestly, the only point of contention was whether we’d get a Bernese or an English springer spaniel. I had believed that Finn and I were so attuned that even a forced separation like this one wouldn’t shake our rock-solidness. But it’s taken only three weeks for me to feel disconnected; for doubt to grow like weeds, so insidious that it’s hard to see what used to blossom in that bed instead.

There is still the niggling thought that Finn suggested I leave New York without expecting me to actually
do
it—as if this were some sort of relationship test I was supposed to pass, but failed. And maybe I am equally to blame for not insisting that I stay. But I also know that focusing on that one moment of miscommunication keeps me from examining a more painful, scarier truth: here on Isabela, there are times I forget to miss him.

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

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

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

And when we’re not?

“Finn,” he repeats slowly. “You know what finning is?”

“Is this a sex thing?”

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

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

Maybe that’s what Gabriel intended.

“That’s the part of paradise you don’t get to see,” he says.

“Am I a terrible person?” I ask quietly. “For being here?”

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Even if you were there,” he says, “you might not be able to do anything. There’s some shit that people have to work through on their own.”

“I know. I just feel so…powerless.”

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

“What do you mean?”

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

“That’s not a relationship,” I argue. “That’s…that’s like a beautiful piece of artwork you don’t display because you’re afraid it will get damaged. So, instead, you crate it up and stick it in storage and it doesn’t bring you any joy or any beauty.”

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

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

“When I was a boy, my father taught me to navigate by stars, just in case,” he murmurs. I hear a catch in his voice, and I think that of all he has told me tonight, the one thing he hasn’t revealed is why he is a farmer, not a tour guide.
Plans change,
he’d said.
Shit happens
.

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

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

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

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

It feels like a peek at a secret.

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

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

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

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

“The best,” I say.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever going to do an appendectomy again. I’m a surgeon. I fix things. Your gallbladder’s infected? I got it. Hernia repair? I’m your guy. If I have any ICU patients, it’s temporary, a complication from surgery that I know how to fix. But with Covid, I can’t fix anything. I’m just maintaining the status quo, if I’m lucky.

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

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

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

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

I hung up on him.

Fuck. I just remembered your birthday.

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

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

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

Finn—

Last night I had a supervivid dream of you. Someone had kidnapped me and drugged me and I was in a basement and there weren’t any doors or windows where I could escape. I was tied to something—a pole, a chair? Then all of a sudden, you were there, wearing a costume. I couldn’t see the bottom half of your face, but I knew it was you because of your eyes and because I could smell your shampoo. You kept telling me to stay awake so you could get me out of there, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Then I realized we weren’t alone. There was another woman with you, and she was in costume, too.

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

It’s somewhere around the fourth hour of a seven-hour hike to the Sierra Negra volcano that I wonder why, exactly, Gabriel thought this was a birthday gift anyone would actually enjoy. I am hot and sweaty and sunburned when we reach a small tree with a black rock in a crotch of its limbs. “This is the spot where tourists leave their overnight packs,” Gabriel says, and he shrugs off the gear he’s been shouldering. “Some of them stay overnight before hiking down into the caldera. No one’s allowed up here without a ranger or guide.”

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

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

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

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

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