Wish You Were Here (20 page)

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

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

A whisper in my bones:
Coward.

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

I know what he means. There are endless trails and furrows through Isabela that aren’t accessible by car; there are poisonous plants and spined cacti in some places and thick greenery you can’t see through in others. There are countless ways you can hurt yourself—unintentionally, or on purpose.

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

I stare out the passenger-side window, scanning every flutter of movement to see if it might be a girl on the run. There’s no way she could have outpaced us on foot. But maybe she took a bicycle from Abuela’s. Maybe she got a head start on us when we made a false start by turning toward town.

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you looking for?” I ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except…he wasn’t.

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

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

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

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

Ana Maria
.

The expression on Beatriz’s face is one I’ve never seen: pure joy.

“Who is this girl?” Gabriel murmurs.

I wonder what he is thinking. “Her host sister, a friend from Santa Cruz.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The three volcanic tunnels are not that far from Gabriel’s farm. We get as close as we can by truck and then Gabriel slings ropes and a rappelling harness over his shoulder. As we tramp through the thick ground cover, I call out Beatriz’s name, but there is no answer.

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

Curling my hand around Abuela’s miraculous medal, I pray.

“Beatriz,” I scream again.

The wind whispers through the brush and whips my hair around my face. Gabriel finds a sturdy tree and wraps one end of the rope around it, tying a series of impossible knots. It is an unfairly beautiful day, with puffy white clouds dancing across the sky and birdsong like a symphony. I stand in front of the three volcanic tunnels. If she’s even here, she could be in any of them.

At the bottom
of any of them.

“I’m going down,” I tell Gabriel.

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

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

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

And then a choked sob.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you tell my dad that before or after you fucked him?”

I wince. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“Yeah, sure. Keep digging that hole…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gabriel shakes his head. “You’re not alone, even if you feel like you are. And I don’t
want
to be alone.” His breath catches. “I can’t lose you, too.”

He stretches out his hand toward her.

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

Their breathing circles, echoes.

“Yes I do,” Gabriel says. “You’re my baby. I don’t care what else you are…or aren’t. That’s the only thing that matters.”

His fingertips reach further through the void.

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

Slowly, the three of us inch toward the light.

The next few hours pass in a blur. We take Beatriz down to Abuela’s, because Gabriel doesn’t want to leave her alone in the farmhouse while he ferries me back to the apartment. Abuela bursts into tears when she sees Beatriz and starts fussing over her. Beatriz is still weepy and silent and embarrassed, and Gabriel focuses all his attention and energy on her, as he should.

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

But.

I’m starting to wonder where I
do
belong.

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

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

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

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

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

“I did,” I tell him. “I do.”

“We’ve been talking,” Gabriel says hesitantly.

“About…school?”
About Ana Maria.

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

“I wasn’t expecting you to—”

“It’s not that I don’t—”

We both stop talking. “You’re a good father, Gabriel,” I say quietly. “You
do
protect the people you love. Don’t second-guess that.”

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

“What do you mean?”

“Beatriz is the one who kept Dante going when he walked through hell. And every time I’ve found myself suffering, my Beatriz is the one who pulls me back.”

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

“That I named her Beatriz?”

“That you’ve read
The
Divine Comedy
.”

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

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

I pull the night around me like a coat. I think of New York City and Finn and my mother. Of commuter sneakers and Sunday brunch at our favorite café when Finn wasn’t working and the blue Tiffany box hidden in the back of his underwear drawer. I think of the rush of relief when I manage to catch the subway car before it pulls out of the station and the taste of cheesecake I craved and bought at three
A.M.
and the hours I spent on Zillow dreaming of houses in Westchester we could not afford. I think of the smell of chestnuts from street vendors in the winter and asphalt sinking under my heels in the summer. I think of Manhattan—an island full of diverse, determined people hustling toward something better; a populace that doesn’t sleepwalk through their days. But it all feels a lifetime away.

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

Here, I can’t lose myself in errands and work assignments; I can’t disappear in a crowd. I am forced to walk instead of run, and as a result, I’ve seen things I would have sped past before—the fuss of a crab trading up for a new shell, the miracle of a sunrise, the garish burst of a cactus flower.

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

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

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

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

Little did she know.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

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

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

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