Wish You Were Here (18 page)

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

“You’ll know,” he says. “Trust me.”

And, I realize, I do.

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

“Slim to none,” Gabriel assures me. “There are twelve geological systems tracking its tremors, and it gives out plenty of hints before it erupts, which happens every fifteen years or so. I was here the last time. My father and I hiked in and we slept on ground that was warm, like it had heated pipes underneath. He taught me how to gauge the wind and the slope, so that we wouldn’t wind up in the path of the eruption. We took pictures, when it happened. I remember you could see the orange lava in the cracks of the earth, just a foot or so below. My shoes stuck to the rocks, because the soles had melted.”

“When was this?”

“Two thousand five. I was a teenager.”

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

“If it makes you feel better, the Galápagos are moving eastward on their tectonic plate, so even though the hot spot is in the same place, the lava flows mostly to the west now…which means the eruptions aren’t as dangerous to the people living here anymore.”

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

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

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

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

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

He starts walking again, and I fall into pace with him. “You came here like every other tourist. Wound up supertight, with your checklist, to take a picture of a tortoise and a sea lion and a booby and put them on Instagram.”

“I didn’t have a
list,
” I argue.

He raises a brow. “Didn’t you?”

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

Shit. I did have a list.

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

“Gabriel Fernandez,” I say. “Was that a compliment?”

He laughs. “This
is
your birthday present,” he admits.

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

“Not too many. There were way more
turistas
who came here and saw what nature looks like when it’s wild, when you haven’t contained it and confined it into twelve square city blocks or an exhibit at a zoo, and they were just…humbled. You could see the gears turning:
How do we make sure these beautiful things are here for other people to see? How can I keep my corner of the planet alive, to help?
The best part of being a tour guide was planting a little seed in someone’s mind, and knowing you wouldn’t be there to see it, but that it would grow and grow.”

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

My nose prickles—the first clue that we have reached the fumaroles. The ground bleaches from black to white and yellow. All I can smell is sulfur. Instead of the melted ice cream whirls of cooled lava, there are endless small light rocks that shift under my sneakers with a light, tinkling noise, and steam belching from thermal vents.

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

I am six feet away from an active volcano.

“Why did you stop?” I ask.

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

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

He doesn’t answer, and I assume that he is going to ignore me, like he has before. But maybe there is something about the primeval landscape and our proximity to the beating heart of the planet, because Gabriel sinks down to the jaundiced ground, and starts from the beginning.

“We were taking out a scuba tour to Gordon Rocks,” Gabriel says, as I settle across from him, our knees nearly touching. “It was a live-aboard boat, with twelve divers. It was a gig we’d done hundreds of times. My father and I went out early to check the conditions, because that’s what you do. I was the one who went into the water, while he stayed in the boat. There was a slight current near the surface, no big deal.”

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

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

He shakes his head. “There was a clump of divers clinging to the rock face, together. After I got to them, I led them to the surface and set off a float so that the panga driver could get them. The boat was already a half mile north, picking up others who had surfaced a distance away. It went like that for a while—me treading water and trying to see the heads of the other divers and make sure the panga rounded them up. By the time that was done, I counted eleven divers and me, but my father and the last diver hadn’t come up.

“We zoomed out to the left of the rock. I had binoculars, from the panga driver, and I was staring so hard at the surface of the water looking for a bobbing head or anything that moved, but the ocean…” Gabriel’s voice caught. “It’s just so goddamn big.”

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

“After an hour, I knew he couldn’t have survived. At the depths he was at, he could have been dragged by the current a hundred feet or more. The percentage of oxygen in the tanks was meant for a shallow dive, and he knew going deeper would mess with his brain and his ability to function. He would only have had enough air for ten or fifteen minutes, that far down. Between swimming hard to catch up to the lost diver and inflating the diver’s BC and unhooking his weight belt, my dad likely had even less time than that.”

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

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

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

His gaze snaps up. “Accident? It was all my fault.”

Dumbfounded, I stare at him. “How?”

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

“Or they changed—”

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

And you wouldn’t,
I think.

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

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

Gabriel dashes a palm across his eyes, and I pretend not to notice. He stands up, using his weight to pull me to my feet. “We’d better get back,” he says. “The return trip’s not any shorter.”

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

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

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

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

It is an email, printed out on stationery from the hotel.
For immediate delivery to guest Diana O’Toole,
it reads
. From: The Greens. We have been trying to reach you. Please contact ASAP. Your mother is dying.

On the way back to Gabriel’s house, we sprint—and yet somehow, the distance seems even further than it did this morning. Distantly I hear Beatriz explain to Gabriel how the message arrived—something about Elena and an electrical short that caused a small fire in the hotel’s utility room; how when she went to the hotel with her cousin so he could rewire and fix the circuits, and to make sure everything was in working order, she had powered up the front office computers and seen a series of emails, each more urgent, trying to get in touch with me. I hear Gabriel tell Beatriz to call Elena, to have the Wi-Fi up and running by the time we get there.

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

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

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

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

There’s a lurching spin of scenery as whatever device she is holding is moved in transit. I close my eyes against a dizzy wave, expecting to see the familiar confines of my mother’s apartment, but instead, the nurse’s face appears again. “You should be prepared—she’s decompensated very fast. She has pneumonia, brought on by Covid,” the nurse says. “But at this point it’s not just her lungs that are failing. Her kidneys, her heart…”

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

“Is she…awake?”

“No,” the nurse says. “She’s sedated heavily. But you can still talk to her. Hearing is the last sense to go.” She pauses. “Now is the time to say your goodbyes.”

A moment later, I am looking at a wraith in a hospital bed, the covers pulled up to her chin. She is hollow-cheeked, faded, taking tiny sips of air. I try to reconcile this image of my mother with the woman who hid in bunkers in active war zones, so that she could chronicle the terrible things humans do to each other.

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

If her heart stops, they will do nothing, because I signed a do not resuscitate order when she became a resident at The Greens. With dementia, there was no point in prolonging her life with any extenuating measures.