Wish You Were Here (21 page)

I do not see Beatriz or Gabriel for five days. Even Abuela seems to be missing, and I assume that they are all up at the farmhouse together. I convince myself very easily that the reason I feel relieved has everything to do with Beatriz getting help and nothing to do with me being able to avoid Gabriel. The truth is, I don’t know what to say to him.
This was a mistake
is what sits bitter on my tongue, but I’m not sure what it refers to: the night with Gabriel, or all the years that led up to it.

So every time I leave my apartment and do not see him, it is a reprieve. If I don’t see him I can pretend it didn’t happen, and postpone grappling with the consequences.

One day, I hiked to the Wall of Tears, hoping to find another miracle of cell service. When those bars appeared on my phone, I called The Greens first, arranging for my mother’s cremation and explaining that I was still stuck outside the country. Then I called Finn, only to be put through directly to his voicemail.
It’s me,
I said.
I wrote you postcards, but they…didn’t make it there. I just wanted to let you know I’m thinking of you
. And then I didn’t trust myself to say anything else.

On another sunny, perfect day on Isabela, I pull on my bathing suit, take the snorkel and mask from Gabriel’s apartment, and walk through the streets of Puerto Villamil, headed to Concha de Perla one more time. A couple of storekeepers—who, like everyone else, have become less strict with the rule about curfew—recognize me and wave, or call out hellos through their masks. A few have come up to me at the feria, trading me sunblock and cereal and fresh tortillas for portraits that they then hang in their establishments.

When I get to the dock at Concha de Perla, there is a massive sea lion lolling on one of the benches. It raises its head at my approach, twitches its whiskers, and then flings itself back into its nap. I strip to my bathing suit and walk down the stairway into the ocean, fitting the mask to my face and swimming with strong strokes into the heart of the lagoon.

A huge, dark shape rises in my peripheral vision. I turn to see a giant marble stingray moving in tandem with me. Its wings ruffle past, a hem sweeping the dance floor. It brushes my fingers gently, deliberately, as if to convince me there’s no threat. It feels like stroking the soft, wet velvet underskirt of a mushroom.

Six weeks ago this would have sent me into a conniption. Now, it’s just another living creature sharing space with me. I smile, watching it veer away from me underwater, until it becomes a dot in the deep blue field and then vanishes.

I float on my back for a while, feeling the sun warm my face, and then lazily breaststroke back toward the dock.

Once again, Beatriz is sitting on it.

She isn’t wearing her ubiquitous sweatshirt. Her arms are bare, crossed with silver lines. She hugs her knees to her chest as I climb the stairs, drop my mask and snorkel, and wring my ponytail dry. I sink down beside her. “Are you okay?” I ask quietly, the same words I first spoke to her on Isabela, a bookend.

“Yeah,” she says, and she looks into her lap.

We fall into a strained silence. Of all the time I’ve spent with Beatriz, we’ve never had nothing to say.

“What you saw…with me and your father…” I shake my head. “You know I have someone waiting at home for me. It shouldn’t have happened. I’m sorry.”

Beatriz rubs her thumbnail along a groove in the wood. “I’m sorry, too. About not sending your postcards.”

I’ve thought a lot about what might have made her lie to me about mailing them. I don’t think it was malicious…more like she wanted to keep me to herself, once she’d made me a confidante. All the more reason, of course, that she would have been shocked to find me in bed with her father.

She trusted me. Just like Finn had trusted me.

Suddenly I feel like I’m going to be sick. Because as much as I don’t want to face Gabriel to discuss what happened between us, I want even less to confess to Finn.

Beatriz looks at me. “I talked to my dad about Ana Maria.”

“How’d that go?”

“Not as bad as I made it out in my head to be,” she says ruefully.

“The mind is an amazing thing,” I reply.

She considers this. “Well, it’s not like I didn’t have a good reason to worry,” she adds. “There are a lot of people in the world who’d hate me because I…like girls. But my father isn’t one of them.” Beatriz ducks her chin. “I kind of feel bad for Ana Maria. She doesn’t have parents like him, so she has to pretend all the time. Even to herself.”

I don’t know what to say to her. She’s right. The world can be a fucked-up place, and I suppose you’re never too young to learn that.

“I’m not going to go back to school,” Beatriz tells me. “My father said he’ll let me do online courses here. But I had to promise to talk to a therapist, in return. We Zoomed for the first time, yesterday.” She grimaces. “Something else that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“
Online
school?” I repeat. “And
Zoom
?”

“My dad paid Elena to open the stupid hotel and turn on the Wi-Fi so I could get a decent signal,” Beatriz explains.

I raise an eyebrow. “What’s he paying her with?”

Beatriz cracks a smile, and then I do, too, and we both laugh. I put my arm around her, and she lays her head on my shoulder. We watch a sea lion playing in the distance.

“You know,” Beatriz says, “you could stay. With us.”

I feel myself soften against her. “I have to go back to real life sometime.”

She pulls away, a wistful expression on her face. “For a while,” she says, “didn’t this feel real?”

Dear Finn,

It’s possible you won’t get this postcard until I come home and hand it to you myself. But there are things I need to say, and it can’t wait.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the things we do that are simply unforgivable. Like me not being with my mother when she died, or my mother not being around when I was growing up. Leaving you alone during a pandemic. You encouraging me to go.

I’ve thought a lot about that last one. When you told me you were trying to keep me safe…you might just have been convincing yourself it was the smartest course of action. Did you really not think I could manage to stay healthy? Did you actually believe that when the world is falling to pieces, it’s better to be apart from the person you love, instead of together?

I am overthinking this, of course, but these days I have a lot of time to think. And I can’t even blame you. I’ve said and done things, too, that I shouldn’t have.

I know everyone makes mistakes—but until recently I have held everyone to a standard where making mistakes is a weakness. Me included—I haven’t given myself the grace to screw up, to do better next time. It is exhausting, trying to never step off the path, worrying that if I do, I’ll never get back on track.

So here is what I’ve learned: if, in hindsight, you realize you’ve messed up—if you have done the unforgivable—that does not mean that the terrible thing wasn’t meant to happen. Sure, we may wish otherwise, but when things don’t happen according to plan, it may be because the plan was faulty. I’m not explaining this well. For example, take my missing suitcase: I wonder if the person who found it needed clothes more than I did. I wonder how Beatriz would have fared if I had never come to Isabela. I imagine Kitomi having her painting for company all these weeks, instead of it being crated up in a warehouse. I picture all the people you’ve saved at the hospital and the ones you couldn’t, who you still walked with all the way to the edge of death. And that’s when I realize: Maybe things didn’t get fucked up. Maybe I have been wrong all along, and this is where I was always meant to be.

Diana

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

I’m really too tired to rehash everything that happened at the hospital today.

I hope you’re okay.

One of us needs to be.

Two and a half weeks after Gabriel and I sleep together, I come home from a run to find a note slipped under the door of my apartment, inviting me to join him on a hike to a place called Playa Barahona. He says he’ll be waiting at the apartment at nine
A.M.
tomorrow, in case I decide to come.

Although it would be easier to hide forever, I know I can’t. It is May 9. I’ve been here for almost two months. One day, that ferry will start running again. I can’t avoid Gabriel on an island this small. And I owe him the grace of a conversation.

The next morning, I slip out the sliding glass doors and find him waiting with two rusty bicycles and a thermos of coffee. “Hi,” I say.

His eyes drink me in. “Hi.”

I wonder how it is that you can be so shy with someone you’ve felt moving inside you.

At that, a blush rushes over me, and I cover it with conversation. “Bikes? How far are we going?”

He rubs the back of his neck. “Further than El Muro de las Lágrimas, closer than Sierra Negra,” Gabriel says. “It’s a secret spot. It’s closed to tourists
and
locals—I haven’t been since I was a kid.”

“Breaking more laws,” I say lightly. “You’re a bad influence.”

At that, his eyes fly to mine.

I turn away, grabbing one of the bikes, and clear my throat. “I saw Beatriz,” I say. “She says things are…good.”

Gabriel looks at me for a long moment before he grabs the handlebars of the second bike. “Okay,” he says softly, nodding to himself, as if he recognizes that I am signaling what we will talk about and what we won’t. He starts walking the bike toward the main road, telling me how Beatriz schooled him on the 123 baby tortoises that were stolen from the breeding center in 2018, and how he’s fighting a losing battle trying to explain to Abuela that she can’t go play
lotería
at church, even if she wears a mask. As we pedal down dusty dirt paths, he tells me that he’s almost finished building the second bedroom at his house—which is good, because Beatriz will be staying with him even after her school on Santa Cruz reopens.

For a half hour or so, we bike in silence.

“The first girl I fell for was Luz,” Gabriel says suddenly. “She sat in front of me in class, alphabetically, and I stared at three freckles on her neck for months before I got the courage to speak to her.” He glances at me. “Do you remember your first crush?”

“Of course. His name was Jared and he was a vegetarian, and I didn’t eat meat for a month so that he’d notice me.”

Gabriel laughs. “Do you remember
before
that, when you made the decision to like boys?”

I look at him quizzically. “No…”

“Exactly,” he says, and his jaw sets. “No one gets to break her heart again.”

Oh, this man. “Who would dare, with you in her corner?”

His gaze catches mine and I can’t look away and I nearly crash into a tree, but Gabriel hops off his bike and interrupts the moment. “We have to hide these,” he tells me. “If the rangers see them, they’ll come after us.”

He drags his bike into a tangle of brush and rearranges the leaves to cover the rusty metal, then takes my bike and does the same. “Now what?”

“Now we walk the rest of the way,” he says. “It’s another forty-five minutes.”

As we hike, he retreats into safe space—telling me about his childhood. His father used to read
Moby-Dick
to him before he went to bed, because Melville learned about whaling while on a ship in the Galápagos. He says Melville called the Galápagos “The Enchanted Islands.” He tells me that the last time he was at Barahona, he was with a group called Amigos de las Tortugas—Friends of the Tortoises—a bunch of kids who went with the Charles Darwin Research Station to count sea turtle nests there. There were volunteers from all over the world who came to help, and one—a tourist from the United States—taught Gabriel how to surf.

When we finally crest a dune and see the beach spread below us, I catch my breath. It is beautiful in the way wild things are beautiful—with roaring sea and ungroomed sand, bordered by cacti and brush. Gabriel offers his hand, and after only a moment of hesitation I take it so that he can help me scuffle my way through the hillock to land on the beach. “Careful,” he says, tugging me to the left so that I do not step on a tiny hole in the sand, like a bubble caught underground. “There,” Gabriel says. “That’s a sea turtle nest.”

I look around, and with careful eyes spy another twenty little divots in the sand. “Really?”

“Yeah. And no matter how far they swim in the ocean, turtles come back to the same beach to lay their eggs.”

“How do they find it?”

“Magnetic field. Each part of the coast has its own special fingerprint, basically, and the babies learn it and use memory as a compass.”

“That’s really cool,” I say.

“That’s not why I wanted you to see it,” Gabriel says. He points to a wriggling line in the sand that tracks down to the water. “After the female turtles lay their eggs—around a hundred at a time—they leave.” He looks at me. “They never come back to take care of those eggs.”

I think of how the strongest memory I have of my mother is watching her pull a small carry-on out of our house.

“Here’s the incredible thing,” Gabriel says. “Two months later, those sea turtle babies hatch at night. They’ve got to get to the ocean before hawks and crabs and frigate birds can get to them. The only guide they have is the reflection of the moon on the water.” I feel him standing behind me, a wall of heat. “Not all of them make it. But, Diana…the strongest ones do.”

When my eyes sting with tears, I turn away, stumbling forward only to have Gabriel yank me back by my arm.
“Cuidado,”
he says, and I follow his gaze to the tree I nearly crashed into, a manchineel laden with poisoned apples.

I laugh, but it may just be a sob.

Gabriel’s hand gentles on my arm. “Are we ever going to talk about it?”

“I can’t,” I say, and I leave it to him to dissect all the possible meanings.

He nods, letting go of me. He scuffs at the sand, careful to avoid the sea turtle nests. “Then
I’ll
talk about it,” he says quietly. “There have been a few times in my life when I thought all the stars had aligned, and I was exactly where I was meant to be. Once, when Beatriz was born. Once when I was diving near Kicker Rock on San Cristóbal and saw fifty hammerhead sharks. Once when the volcano came alive under my feet.” He meets my gaze. “And once, with you.”