Wish You Were Here (22 page)

If only these were normal times. If only I were an ordinary tourist. If only I didn’t have a life and a love waiting for me at home. I draw in a breath. “Gabriel,” I begin, but he shakes his head.

“You don’t have to say anything.”

I reach out my hand and catch his. I let myself look down at my fingers, curled in his. “Swim with me?” I ask.

He nods, and we pick our way back down the beach. I shuck off my shirt and shorts and wade into the surf in my bathing suit. Gabriel runs past me, splashing on purpose, and making me laugh. He dives shallowly, comes up shaking droplets off his hair, and shears a spray of water my way to soak me.

“You’re gonna be sorry you did that,” I tell him, and I dive under the water.

It is a baptism, and we both know it. A way to clean the slate and start fresh as friends, because that’s the only path that’s open to us.

The water is just cool enough to be refreshing. My eyes burn from the salt and my hair tangles in ropes down my back. Every so often Gabriel free-dives to the bottom and brings up a sea star or a piece of coral for me to admire, before letting it settle again.

I’m not sure when I realize I’ve lost sight of Gabriel. One moment his head is bobbing, like a seal’s, and then he’s gone. I turn in a circle, and try to swim closer to shore, but realize I’m getting nowhere. No matter how hard I paddle my arms, I am being pulled further out to sea.

“Gabriel?” I call, and swallow water.
“Gabriel!”

“Diana?” I hear him before I see him—a tiny pinprick, so distant I cannot imagine how he got that far away. Or maybe I’m the one who has.

“I can’t get back,” I yell out.

He cups his hands so his voice carries. “Swim with the current, on the diagonal,” he cries. “Don’t try to fight it.”

Somewhere in my consciousness I realize this must be a riptide—carrying me rapidly away from shore. I think of Gabriel’s friends, the fishermen who never came back. I think of his father, swept away in a racing current under the surface of the ocean. My heart starts pounding harder.

I take a deep breath and start windmilling my arms in a strong crawl stroke, but when I lift my head I’m no closer to the beach. The only difference is that Gabriel is speeding toward me, swimming with the riptide, in the middle of its current, seemingly approaching at superhuman speed.

He’s trying to save me.

It feels like forever, but in minutes, he reaches me. He grabs for me and snags his finger on the chain of the miraculous medal, but it snaps off and I drift further away from him. “Gabriel!” I scream, thrashing out as he floats closer. As soon as he is within reach I grab him and climb him like a vine, panicking. He shoves me under the water, and then jerks me back up.

I am sputtering, blinking. Now that he has my attention, Gabriel grabs my shoulders. “Hold on. Look at me. You are going to make it,” he commands.

He slings one arm around me, swimming for both of us, but I can feel his strokes slowing and his body getting heavier.

My God. This can’t happen to him again.

His fingers flex on my waist, trying to hike me closer to him. But I can tell he’s losing steam. Alone, he might be able to get himself out of this hellish current, but my additional weight is sapping him of energy. If he keeps trying to save me, we will both drown. So I do the only thing I can.

I slip out of his hold.

The current immediately yanks me away from him, so fast it makes me dizzy. He treads water, desperately calling my name.

The waves are so big this far out that they crash over my head. Every time I try to answer him, I swallow water.

I think of what he told me as he touched my throat. Of the airway humans have evolved, of the promises we can speak to each other, of the compromises we suffer for that.

I have heard that the hardest part of drowning is the moment just before—when your lungs seize, about to burst; when you gasp for oxygen and find only water.

Our bodies try to fight the inevitable.

I’ve heard that all you have to do to be at peace, is give in.

Help

Hold on. Look at me. You’re going to make it, Diana.

Do you know where you are?

Where is my voice.

Can you squeeze my hand? Wiggle your toes?

Do you know where you are?

Where is Gabriel

“Blink once for yes,” I hear. “Twice for no. Don’t try to talk.”

It is so bright, I have to close my eyes.

“Do you know where you are right now?”

There is something in my throat, some kind of tube. I can hear a whir and click of machines. This is a hospital. I blink once.

“Okay, Diana, cough for me.”

The moment I try, that tube slips up and out, ridge by ridge, and my throat is raw and so so so dry—

I cough and cough and remember not being able to breathe. My eyes focus on writing on the plate-glass window of my room. The letters are in reverse, for whoever’s on the outside coming in, and I have to puzzle them out in the right direction.

COVID +

Someone is holding my hand, squeezing tight. It takes all my strength to turn my face.

He is dressed like he’s an astronaut, gowned and gloved, with a thick white mask covering his nose and mouth. Behind the plastic shield he wears, tears stream down his face. “You’re going to be okay,” Finn says, crying.

He is not supposed to be here.

He tells me that he begged a nurse to let him in, because even though I am in his hospital I am not his patient, and right now no visitors are allowed in the ICU. He says I gave everyone a hell of a scare. I’ve been on the ventilator for five days. He tells me that yesterday, when they dialed down the ventilator for a spontaneous breathing trial, my numbers on the gas looked good enough to extubate me.

None of this information fits into my brain.

Another nurse sticks her head into the room and taps her wrist—time’s up. Finn strokes my forehead. “I have to go now before someone gets in trouble,” he says.

“Wait.” My voice is a croak. I have so many questions but the most important one blooms. “Gabriel.”

Finn’s brows draw together. “Who?”

“In the water, with me,” I force out. “Did he…make it?” I pull air into my battered lungs; it feels like breathing broken glass.

“A lot of Covid patients experience delirium when they’re taken off the vent,” Finn says gently.

A lot of
what
?

“It’s normal to be confused when you’ve been sedated for so long,” he explains.

I’m not confused. I remember all of it—the current that swept me out to sea, the salt burning my throat, the moment I let go of Gabriel.

I clutch at the white sleeve of Finn’s doctor’s coat, and even that small motion is exhausting. “How did I get here?”

His eyes cloud. “Ambulance,” he murmurs. “When you passed out brushing your teeth I thought I—”

“No,” I interrupt. “How did I get back from the Galápagos?”

Finn blinks. “Diana,” he says, “you never went.”

Later, I would learn that when you want to take someone off a ventilator, you use the acronym MOVE to gauge readiness: mental status, oxygenation, ventilation, and expectoration. You want the blood vessels in the brain to be receiving and perfusing oxygen, so that the patient can process information and respond. You want the oxygen level to top 90 percent, and you want the patient to be able to overbreathe the ventilator. You have to make sure she can cough, so that she will not choke on her own spit when the tube is removed.

To determine this, a spontaneous breathing trial is done. First the patient is switched to pressure support mode, to see how much of a breath she is capable of taking. Then comes a spontaneous awakening trial, to see if the patient can wake up when the amount of sedatives being pumped into her veins is lessened. Finally, the pressure support is turned off to do a spontaneous breathing trial. If the patient can maintain low carbon dioxide levels, then she is ready for extubation.

This process is called a sedation vacation.

It is, according to my nurse, Syreta, the only vacation I’ve been on.

I am alone most of the time, but it seems there is always someone hovering outside my door, peering in. The next time Syreta comes in, I ask why, and she tells me that I’m a success story—and the staff has had precious few of them.

Syreta tells me that it’s normal to feel wrung out. I can’t sit up on my own. I am not allowed to eat or drink—I have a feeding tube down my nose, and will until I pass something called a swallow test. I am wearing a diaper. Yet none of this is as upsetting as the fact that everyone keeps telling me
this is real:
the moon-suited medical team, the wonkiness of my body, the television reports that schools and businesses are all closed and that thousands of people are dead.

Yesterday, I was on Isabela Island and I almost drowned.

But I’m the only person who believes that.

Syreta doesn’t even blink when I tell her about the Galápagos. “I had another patient who was convinced there were two stuffed animals on her windowsill, and every time I left the room, they waved at her.” She raises a brow. “There weren’t any stuffed animals on her windowsill. She didn’t even have a
window.
”

“You don’t understand…I
lived
there. I met people and made friends and I…I climbed into a volcano…I went swimming—Oh!” I try to reach my phone, on the table in front of me, but it is so heavy that it slips out of my hand and Syreta has to fish in the blankets to hand it to me. “I have pictures. Sea lions and blue-footed boobies I wanted to show Finn—”

I use my thumb to scrub across the screen, but the last picture on my phone is of Kitomi Ito’s painting, from weeks ago.

That’s when I notice the date on the screen.

“Today can’t be March twenty-fourth,” I say, the thought rolling like fog through my mind. “I’ve been away for two months. I celebrated my birthday there.”

“Guess you get to celebrate again.”

“It wasn’t a hallucination,” I protest. “It felt more real than any of this does.”

“Honestly,” Syreta mulls. “That’s a blessing.”

The Covid ICU is like a plague ward. The only people allowed to enter my room are my doctor, Syreta, and the night nurse, Betty; even the residents who do rounds talk to me from outside the plate-glass wall. There are too many patients and not enough medical staff. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I am alone, trapped in a body that will not do what I need it to do.

I keep watching through the window, but I am the bug trapped in a jar—peered at occasionally by people who are mostly just grateful I am no longer sharing their space.

I am so fucking thirsty and no one will give me water. It feels like I have been in a wind tunnel for days, unable to close my mouth. My lips are chapped and my throat is a desert.

I still have oxygen being piped into my nose.

I have no recollection of getting sick.

What I do remember, vividly and viscerally, is the sparkle of the rock walls of the trillizos, and how the dock in Puerto Villamil smells of fish and salt, the taste of papaya warm from the sun, and the soft curves of Abuela’s voice rounding out Spanish words.

I remember Beatriz, sitting on the beach with wet sand dripping from her fist.

I remember Gabriel treading water in the ocean, grinning as he splashed me.

Whenever I think of them, I start to cry. I am grieving people who, according to everyone here, never existed.

The only explanation is that in addition to catching this virus, I have gone insane.

I realize, when I try to breathe in and can’t, when I feel the heaviness of my broken body, that I should believe everyone who tells me how sick I’ve been. But it doesn’t feel like I was sick. It feels like my reality just…changed.

I’ve read about people who are medically sedated, and wake up fluent in Mandarin when there is no Chinese family history and they’ve never traveled to China; about a man who came out of a coma, demanded to have a violin, and went on to become a virtuoso who played sold-out concerts. I always took accounts like these with a grain of salt, because honestly, they sound too crazy to be true. I may not have a new linguistic or musical skill, but I would stake my life on the fact that the memories I have of the past two months are not delirium. I
know
I was there.

Wherever
there
was.

When I start to get so agitated that my pulse rate spikes, Betty comes into the room. It is telling that I am so grateful to see another human being in the same room with me that I begin to wonder if acting sicker means I will not be alone as much.

“What happens when you don’t get enough oxygen?” I ask.

She looks immediately at my pulse ox numbers, which are steady. “You’re fine,” Betty insists.

“Now,”
I clarify. “But clearly, I was bad enough that I needed a vent, right? What if it messed my brain up…permanently?”

Betty’s eyes soften. “Covid fog is a real thing,” she tells me. “If you’re having trouble stringing thoughts together or remembering the end of a sentence before you finish speaking it, that’s not brain damage. It’s just…an aftereffect.”

“The problem isn’t
not
remembering,” I say. “It’s that I
do
remember. Everyone is telling me I’ve been in the hospital and that I have Covid but I don’t have any recollection of that. All my memories are of me in a different country, with people you’re all telling me are make-believe.” My voice is thick with tears; I don’t want to see the pity on Betty’s face; I don’t want to be thought of as a patient who doesn’t have a grasp on reality. What I want is for someone to fucking believe me.

“Look,” Betty says, “why don’t I page the doctor on call? That’s what intensivists are for. Someone who’s come through the kind of experience you have is likely to experience some PTSD; and we can get you some medication to take the edge off—”

“No,” I interrupt. “No more drugs.” I don’t want to lose these memories because of a pharmaceutical that makes me a zombie. I don’t want my mind erased.

Since I sort of feel like it already
has
been.

When I refuse to let Betty call in the doctor, she suggests that we try to reach Finn. She uses my phone to FaceTime him, but he doesn’t pick up. Ten minutes later, though, he knocks on the glass outside my room. Seeing him there—seeing someone who cares about me—I am flooded with relief. I wave, trying to get him to come in, but he shakes his head. He mimes holding a phone to my ear, and then flags down Betty in the hallways. She comes inside to hold my own cellphone for me, because my arms are too weak.

“Hey,” Finn says softly. “I hear the patient is rowdy.”

“Not rowdy,” I correct. “Just…frustrated. And really, really lonely.”

“If it’s any consolation, isolation must be doing wonders, because you look better already.”

“You liar,” I murmur, and through the glass, he winks.

This is real,
I tell myself.
Finn is real.

But I feel the concavity of that statement, too: Gabriel is not.

“Finn?” I say. “What if I can’t tell the difference anymore between what was a dream and what wasn’t?”

He’s silent for a moment. “Have you had…any more…episodes?”

He doesn’t want to say the word
hallucination,
I can tell. “No,” I reply. What I don’t say is that every time I’ve closed my eyes today I have expected to return to where I was yesterday.

I want a do-over, even as my conscience reminds me this
is
one.

“Your nurse said you were getting a little worked up,” Finn says.

Tears spring to my eyes. “No one will tell me anything.”

“I will,” he vows. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, Diana.”

“I don’t remember getting sick,” I begin.

“You woke up in the middle of the night with a headache,” Finn says. “By the next morning, you had a fever of a hundred and three. Your breaths were so shallow, you were panting. I called an ambulance to bring you here.”

“What about the Galápagos?” I ask.

“What about it?” he says. “We decided not to go.”

Those five words wipe clean all the noise in my mind. Did we?

“Your pulse ox was seventy-six, and you tested positive,” Finn continues. “They took you to a Covid ward. I couldn’t believe it. You were young and healthy and you weren’t supposed to be the kind of person who could get this virus. But the biggest thing we know about Covid is that we don’t know anything about it. I was reading everything I could, trying to get you into trials for drugs, trying to figure out how even six liters of air pushed through a cannula to you couldn’t raise your pulse ox. And meanwhile, all around me, I had patients on vents who weren’t ever coming off them.” He swallows, and I realize that he’s crying. “We couldn’t keep you lucid,” Finn says. “They called me to tell me they needed to intubate you
now
. So I gave them the go-ahead.”

My heart hurts, thinking of how hard that must have been.

“I’d sneak in whenever I could, sit by the bed, and talk to you—about my patients, and about how fucking scary this virus is, and how I feel like we’re all just shooting in the dark and hoping to hit a target.”

Those sporadic emails from him, then, weren’t really emails.

“I bullied your medical team into proning you—putting you on your belly, even on the vent. I read where a doctor on the West Coast had success with Covid patients by doing that. They thought I was crazy but now some of the pulmonologists are doing it, because what the hell, it worked for you.”

I think about all the time I spent at Concha de Perla, floating facedown with a mask and snorkel, peeking into a world undersea.

“I’d be working—rounding on my own patients, whatever—and I’d hear the call for codes, and every time, every
goddamn
time, I would freeze and think,
Please God,
not
her room
.”

“I…I’ve been here ten days?” I ask.

“It felt like a year to me. We tried to bring you out of sedation a few times, but you weren’t having it.”

Suddenly I remember the vivid dream I had when I was in the Galápagos: Finn, not costumed as I had assumed, but wearing an N95 mask like everyone else here. Telling me to stay awake, so he could save me. The woman I pictured beside him, I realize now, was Syreta.

There is one overlapping part of both realities, I realize. “I almost died,” I whisper.

Finn stares at me for a long moment, his throat working. “It was your second day on the vent. Your pulmonologist told me that he didn’t think you’d last the night. The vent was maxing out and your O-two levels were shit. Your blood pressure bottomed out, and they couldn’t stabilize you.” He draws a shuddering breath. “He told me I should say goodbye.”

I watch him rub a hand over his face, reliving something I do not even recall.

“So I sat with you…held your hand,” Finn says softly. “Told you I love you.”

One tear streaks down my cheek, catching in the shell of my ear.

“But you fought,” he says. “You stabilized. And you turned the corner. Honestly, it’s a miracle, Diana.”

I feel my throat get thick. “My mother…”

“I’m taking care of everything. Your only job is to rest. To get better.” He swallows. “To come home.”

Suddenly there is a code blue over the loudspeaker and Finn frowns. “I have to go,” he says. “I love you.” He runs down the hall, presumably to the room where one of his patients is tanking. Someone who is not as lucky as me.

Betty takes the phone away from where she’s been holding it to my ear with her gloved hand. She puts it on the nightstand and a moment later presses a tissue gently to the corner of each of my eyes, wiping away the tears that won’t stop coming. “Honey, you’re through the worst of it,” she says. “You have a second chance.”

She thinks I’m crying because I nearly lost my life.

You don’t understand,
I want to tell her. I
did
.

Everyone keeps telling me I have to focus on getting my body back in shape, when all I want to do is untangle the thicket of my mind. I want to talk about Gabriel and Beatriz and the Galápagos but (first) there is no one to listen to me—the nurses spend quick, efficient moments in my room changing me and giving meds before they step out and have to sanitize and strip off their gear—and (second) no one believes me.

I remember how isolated I felt when I thought I was stuck on Isabela, and wonder if that was some strange distillation of my drugged brain filtering what it is like to be a quarantined Covid patient. I was alone a lot in the Galápagos, but I wasn’t lonely, like I am here.

I haven’t seen Finn for a whole day.

I can’t read, because words start to dance on the page and even a magazine is too heavy for me to hold. Same with a phone. I can’t call friends because my voice is still raspy and raw. I watch television, but every channel seems to carry the president saying that this virus is no worse than the flu, that social distancing should be lifted by Easter.

For endless hours I stare at the door and wish for someone to come in. Sometimes, it’s so long between visits from nurses that when Syreta or Betty arrive, I find myself talking about anything I can seize upon, in the hope that it will keep them with me a few minutes longer.