“Yeah. My father was a conservator. He restored paintings and frescoes that needed fixing.”

  “Like the Banksy?”

  “I guess, although that wasn’t glued back together. Conservationists usually focus on really old art that’s literally crumbling to pieces. He’d bring me to his sites, when I was little, and let me paint over a tiny bit that wouldn’t mess anything up. I’m sure he didn’t tell his bosses. The best days of my life were the ones where I got to go to work with him, and he’d ask me things as if my answers really mattered: What do you think, Diana, should we use the violet or the indigo? Can you make out how many claws are on that hoof?”

  I feel the same black shadow that always comes on the heels of a memory of my father: the acrid smoke of unfairness, the knowledge that the parent I wish was still here is gone.

  “Does he still let you do it? Paint with him?”

  “He died,” I say. “He’s been gone about four years now.”

  She looks at me. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “I am, too.”

  We walk a little further in silence. Then Beatriz says, “Why don’t you paint anymore?”

  “I don’t have time,” I reply, although that’s not true.

  I haven’t made time, because I haven’t wanted to.

  I remember the exact day I put away my painting supplies, the shoebox with its arthritic tubes of acrylics and the palette with layer after layer of dried moments of inspiration, like rings on a tree. It was after the student exhibition at Williams, when my father said my painting reminded him of my mother’s work. But I somehow couldn’t bring myself to throw away the tools of the trade. When I moved to New York, the shoebox came with me, still unopened. I set it on the highest shelf of my closet, behind sweatshirts from college I no longer wore but couldn’t bear to donate to Goodwill, and the winter hiking boots I bought but never used, and a box of old tax records.

  Beatriz is looking at me with sympathy. “Is it because you weren’t good at it?” she asks. “That you stopped painting?”

  I laugh. “You could argue that any time someone intentionally leaves a mark behind, it’s art. Even if it’s not pretty.”

  She tugs her sleeves down over her wrists. Even in this heat, she has chosen to hike in a sweatshirt, rather than show me the scars on her arms. “Not every time,” she murmurs.

  I stop walking. “Beatriz…”

  “Sometimes I can’t remember her. My mother.”

  “I’m sure your father could—”

  “I don’t want to remember her. But then I think…” Her voice trails off. “Then I think maybe I’m just easy to forget.”

  I reach for her arm and push her sleeve up gently. We both stare at the ladder of scars, some silver with age, and some still an angry red. “Is that why you cut?” I ask quietly.

  At first I think she is going to pull away, but then she starts speaking, fast and low. “The first time I did it, I guess. And then…I stopped for a while. At school, it was easier to distract myself. But then, right before I came back here…” She shakes her head, swallows. “How come the people who don’t even notice you exist are the ones you can’t stop thinking about?”

  “My mother was never home when I was a kid. In fact, I used to think she looked for reasons to travel so she could get away from me.”

  The words come out in a rush of air, a popped balloon of anger. I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud before to anyone. Not even Finn.

  Beatriz stares at me as if all my features have rearranged. “Did she run off with a photographer from a Nat Geo ship?” she asks drily.

  “No. She just decided that everything in the world—literally—was more important than I was. And now she has dementia and has no idea who I am.”

  “That…sucks.”

  I shrug. “It is what it is,” I tell her. “The point is, if someone abandons you, it may be less about you and more about them.”

  I stop speaking as we come upon a wall that rises from the scorched earth. It’s made of volcanic rock and towers over us a good sixty feet, stretching further than my eye can see. It does not, I realize, enclose anything. “The inmates built it in the forties and fifties,” Beatriz says. “It wasn’t for any real purpose, except to create work for punishment. Tons of prisoners died while they were building it.”

  “That’s grim,” I mutter.

  There are two ways of looking at walls. Either they are built to keep people you fear out or they are built to keep people you love in.

  Either way, you create a divide.

  “They only got one ship full of cargo a year—the prisoners and the guards were all starving. To stay alive, they hunted down land tortoises to eat. There’s rumors that the place is full of ghosts, and you can hear them crying at night,” Beatriz says. “It’s creepy as fuck.”

  I step closer, walking the length of the wall. Some of the stones are etched with symbols, letters, dates, patterns, hatch marks to count time.

  If you define art as something made by the hands of men, something that makes us remember them long after they’re gone, then this wall qualifies. The fact that it is unfinished or broken doesn’t make it any less striking.

  When my phone starts buzzing in my pocket, I jump. It has been so long. I pull it out with a cry of surprise and see Finn’s name.

  “Oh my God,” I say. “It’s you. It’s really you!”

  “Diana! I can’t believe I got through.” His voice is scratchy and pocked by static and so, so dear. Tears spring to my eyes as I struggle to hear him: “Tell me…and every…you…it’s been.”

  I’m missing half of what he says, so I curl myself around the phone and experimentally move along the wall hoping for a stronger signal. “Can you hear me?” I say. “Finn?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he responds, and I can hear the relief in his words. “Christ, it’s good to talk to you.”

  “I got your emails—”

  “I didn’t know if they were going through—”

  “The service here is terrible,” I tell him. “I wrote you postcards.”

  “Well, nothing’s been delivered yet. I can’t believe there’s no internet there.”

  “I know,” I say, but that’s not what I want to talk about, and I don’t know how long this magical, elusive signal will last. “How are you? It sounds—”

  “I don’t even have words for it, Di,” he says. “It’s…endless.”

  “But you’re safe,” I state, as if there is no alternative.

  “Who knows,” he says. “I read Guayaquil’s getting slammed. That they’re stacking bodies on the streets.”

  At this, my stomach turns. “I haven’t seen anyone sick here,” I tell him. “Everyone wears masks and there’s a curfew.”

  “I wish I could say that.” Finn sighs. “All day long it feels like I’m sandbagging against a wave and then I walk outside and realize that it’s a fucking tsunami and we don’t stand a chance.” His voice hitches.

  I look around at the curl of clouds in the sky, the sun glittering on the ocean in the distance. A picture postcard. Just a few hundred miles away this virus is killing people so fast that they don’t have room for bodies, but you would never know it from where I stand. I think of the empty shelves of the grocery mart, the people like Gabriel growing their own food in the highlands, the fishermen that have to carry the mail to the mainland, the tourism that dried up overnight. The curse of being on an island is inaccessibility, but maybe that is also its blessing.

  Finn’s voice wavers, cutting in and out again. “Pregnant women…labor alone…ICU, the only time family is allowed…gonna die in the next hour.”

  “You’re breaking up—Finn—”

  “Nothing changes and…”

  “Finn?”

  “…all dead,” he says, those words suddenly clear and crisp. “Every time I finally get to come home and you aren’t there, it feels like another slap in the face. You don’t know how hard it is being alone right now.”

  But I do. “You’re the one who told me to go,” I say quietly.

  There is a silence. “Yeah,” Finn answers. “I guess I just assumed…you wouldn’t actually listen.”

  Then you shouldn’t have said it, I think uncharitably, but my eyes are burning with guilt and frustration and anger. I can’t read your mind.

  Which suddenly feels like a much bigger problem, a seed of doubt that sprouts the very moment it’s planted.

  “Di—a?” I hear. “Are…still…?”

  Although I have not budged, I’ve somehow lost the connection. The line goes dead in my hand. I slip the phone into my pocket and trudge back toward the wall to find Beatriz sitting in its shadow, scraping the edge of one pointed piece of basalt against the smooth belly of another.

  “Was that your boyfriend?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “Does he miss you?”

  I sit down beside her. “Yes,” I say. I watch her create a hashtag on a rock, and color in each alternate square like a chessboard. “What are you doing?”

  She slants her gaze my way. “Art,” she says.

  I lean my back against the sharp stones of the wall. There are endless ways to leave your mark on the world—cutting, carving, art. Maybe all of them do require payment in the form of a piece of yourself—your flesh, your strength, your soul.

  I reach for a rock. I start to carve my name into another loose stone. When I’m finished, I write BEATRIZ on another. Then I stand up and pick at some of the pebbles and sand in the surface of the wall, making space to wedge the name rocks into it. “What are you doing?” Beatriz asks.

  I dust my hands off on my thighs. “Art,” I reply.

  She scrambles to her feet, following me as I step a distance away. The rocks I’ve carved are pale gray, completely different from the bulk of the dark wall. They are, from back here, unnoticeable. But when you walk closer, you cannot miss them. You just have to take those few steps.

  The first time I saw impressionist art, I was with my father at the Brooklyn Museum. He covered my eyes with his hands and guided me up close to Monet’s Houses of Parliament. What do you see? he asked, removing his hands when I was inches from the canvas.

  I saw blobs. Pink and purple blobs and brushstrokes.

  He covered my eyes again and drew me further away. Abracadabra, he whispered, and he let me look again.

  There were buildings, and smog, and twilight. There was a city. It had been there all along, I’d just been too close to see it.

  Squinting at the lighter shards in the wall that have our names on them, I think that art goes both ways. Sometimes you have to have the perspective of distance. And sometimes, you cannot tell what you’re looking at until it’s right under your nose.

  I turn to find Beatriz with her face tipped up to the sky. Her eyes are closed, her throat stretched like a sacrifice. “This would be,” she says, “a good place to die.”

  Dear Finn,

  By the time you get this postcard, you probably won’t even remember what you said when we finally actually got to speak to each other, even if it was only for a minute.

  I never chose to go anywhere without you.

  If you didn’t really want me to go to the Galápagos by myself, why did you say it?

  I can’t help but wonder what else you’ve said that you didn’t really mean.

  Diana

  * * *

  —

  Toulouse-Lautrec rarely painted himself, and when he did, he hid the flaws of his lower body. In At the Moulin Rouge, he put himself in the background next to his much taller cousin, but hid his deformed legs behind a group of people at a table. In a self-portrait, he depicted himself from the waist up. There is a famous photograph of him dressed as a little clown, as if to underscore that people who focused on his disabilities formed an inaccurate impression of him.

  All of this made Kitomi Ito’s painting even rarer. This was the only work of Toulouse-Lautrec’s where he was literally and figuratively baring himself, as if to say that love renders you naked and vulnerable. There were other differences, too. Unlike most of his work, which had been exhibited after his death in Albi, his birthplace, at a museum funded by his mother, this one disappeared from the public eye until 1908. Until then, it had been stashed away with a friend of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, an art dealer named Maurice Joyant. With the painting had come the express directive of the artist: sell this only to someone who is willing to give up everything for love.

  The first owner of the painting was Coco Chanel, who received it as a gift from Boy Capel, a rich aristocrat who bought it to lure her away from her first lover, Étienne Balsan. Chanel fell madly for Capel, who financed her foray into clothing design and her boutiques in Biarritz and Deauville. Their relationship was intense and sizzling, even though Capel was never faithful to her and married an aristocrat and kept another mistress. When he died at Christmas 1919, Chanel draped her windows with black crepe and put black sheets on her bed. I lost everything when I lost Capel, she once said. He left a void in me the years have not filled.

  Years later, Chanel had an affair with the Duke of Westminster, who took her aboard his yacht, the Flying Cloud. Long after that, the duke offered up his yacht for a friend who needed a place for a tryst—Edward VIII, briefly the king of England, who was obsessed with the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. Although they didn’t wind up using that yacht, they did have an affair—one that led him to give up the throne. Months later, in 1937, Edward VIII bought the Toulouse-Lautrec painting for Wallis Simpson, negotiating with Chanel through their mutual friend the duke. Chanel wanted it out of the house, she said, because it broke her heart.

  In 1956, Wallis Simpson was said to be jealous of Marilyn Monroe because Marilyn had pushed her off the front pages of the newspapers. She invited her nemesis for tea, choosing to keep her enemies close. While at Simpson’s home, Monroe was left breathless by the Toulouse-Lautrec painting. In 1962, when Joe DiMaggio was trying to get Monroe to remarry him, he convinced Simpson to sell him the painting. He presented it to Marilyn three days before she died.

  No one knows how Sam Pride and Joe DiMaggio crossed paths, but in 1972, Pride bought the painting from DiMaggio, and gave it to Kitomi Ito as a wedding present. It hung over their bed until he was killed, and then she moved it into the hallway of their apartment.

  There is a small matte smudge on the frame of the painting, from where Kitomi Ito touches it as she passes, drawing her like a lodestone, or a statue you rub for good luck.

  Provenance, in art, is a fancy word for the origins of a work. It’s the paper trail, the chain of evidence, the connection between then and now. It’s the unbroken link between the artist and the present art collector. The provenance of Kitomi Ito’s painting is devotion so fierce, it scorches the earth with tragedy and lays waste to those who experience it. Starting, of course, with the man who’d caught syphilis from his paramour…but who stared at her from the corner of the painting with single-minded focus, as if to say, For you, love, I would do it all again.

  To: DOToole@gmail.com

  From: FColson@nyp.org

  Six of my patients died today.

  Their families were allowed to come in here and say goodbye the hour before they died—and that’s an improvement over what it was last week, when they had to do it over FaceTime.

  This last patient was on ECMO. Everyone’s talking about vents and how we’re running out of them but no one is talking about ECMO—which is when your lungs are so bad, even the vent doesn’t work anymore. So you get a giant-ass cannula in your neck and one in your groin and the blood gets pumped through a machine that acts like your heart and lungs. You get a Foley catheter and a rectal tube and a nasal gastric tube for nutrition—we are literally outsourcing their bodies.

  This woman was twenty years old. TWENTY. All that bullshit about how the virus is killing old people? Whoever’s saying that isn’t working in an ICU. Of my six patients who died, none were over 35. Two were Hispanic women in their twenties who developed Covid bowel necrosis, which required surgical resection—they made it through surgery but died from complications. One was an overweight man, 28—overweight, but not obese. One, a paramedic, bled into her lungs. One guy I thought was gonna make it, until his pupils blew out—the heparin we gave him so the ECMO could do its work without clotting gave him a brain bleed.

  Why am I telling you all this? Because I need to tell someone. And because it’s easier than what I should be saying.

  Which is: I’m sorry for what I said to you. I know I’m the reason you’re where you are now. It’s just that nothing’s the way it is supposed to be, goddammit.

  Sometimes I sit and listen to the whir of the ECMO machine, and I think, This person’s heart is outside his body, and I understand completely.

  Because so is mine.

  * * *

  —

  The night before my two-week anniversary on Isabela, Abuela throws me a goodbye dinner. Gabriel comes with Beatriz, who clings to me when I leave to go down to my apartment. I’ve given her my cellphone number, but also my address, to stay in touch. Gabriel walks me to my door that night. “What will you do back home?” he asks.

  I shrug. “Get on with my life,” I tell him. But I am not quite sure what that is anymore. I don’t know if I’ll have a job, and I am nervous about seeing Finn again, after our weird phone conversation.

  “Well,” he says, “I hope it’s a good one, then. Your life.”

  “That’s the plan,” I say, and we say good night.

  It does not take long for me to pack—after all, I have nearly nothing—but I clean the kitchen countertops and fold the towels I’ve washed and fall asleep dreaming of my reunion with Finn. Normally, I would have checked on my flight home, but without internet, I have to just hope for the best.