The next morning when I open the sliding door, my tote stuffed and settled on my shoulder for the walk into town to the ferry dock, Gabriel and Beatriz are waiting. Beatriz looks happier than I have ever seen her look. She throws her arms around me. “You have to stay,” she says.

  I look over her head at her father, and then hold her at arm’s length. “Beatriz,” I tell her, “you know I can’t. But I promise to—”

  “She’s right,” Gabriel states, and something deep in my chest vibrates like a tuning fork.

  I glance at my watch. “I don’t want to miss the ferry—”

  “There is no ferry,” Gabriel interrupts. “The island isn’t opening.”

  “What?” I blink. “For how long?”

  “I don’t know,” he admits. “But there aren’t any flights out of Santa Cruz…or even Guayaquil, for that matter. The government isn’t letting any incoming planes land, either.”

  I let my tote slip from my shoulder to my elbow. “So I can’t get home,” I say. The words feel like they’re being torn from my throat.

  “You can’t get home right now,” Gabriel corrects.

  “This isn’t happening,” I murmur. “There has to be a way.”

  “Not unless you swim,” Beatriz says, sunny.

  “I have to get back to New York,” I say. “What am I supposed to do about work? And Finn. Oh my God, I can’t even tell him what’s going on.”

  “Your boss can’t be mad at you if there’s no way for you to get back,” Beatriz reasons. “And you can call your boyfriend from Abuela’s landline.”

  Abuela has a landline? And they’re just telling me now?

  My life has been a series of telephone poles one after the other, benchmarks of progress. Without a road map of the steps that come next, I am floundering. I do not belong here, and I cannot shake the feeling that at home, the world is moving on without me. If I can’t get back soon, I might never catch up.

  I’ve been on an island for two weeks, but this is the first time I’ve really ever felt completely at sea.

  Gabriel looks at my face, and says something to Beatriz in Spanish. She takes the tote from my arm and carries it into the apartment while he leads me upstairs to Abuela’s. She is sitting on her couch watching a telenovela when we come in. Gabriel explains to her why I’m here, again in language I don’t understand.

  Oh, God. I’m stuck in a country where I can’t even communicate.

  He bustles me into the bedroom, where there is a phone on the nightstand. I stare at it. “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know how to call home,” I admit.

  Gabriel picks up the receiver and punches a few buttons. “What’s his number?”

  I tell him and he hands the phone to me. Three rings. This is Finn; you know the drill.

  When I glance up, Gabriel is shutting the door behind himself.

  “Hi,” I say out loud. “It’s me. My flight’s been canceled. Actually, every flight’s been canceled. I can’t get home now, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.” A sob rises like a vine through my sentences. “You were right. I shouldn’t have left.”

  I am so mad. At Finn, for telling me to go. At myself, for not telling Finn to go fuck himself when he said it. So what if we would have forfeited money on a vacation? In the grand scheme of things, losing dollars is nothing compared to losing time.

  I know I’m not thinking rationally—that Finn isn’t the only one to blame. I could have told him that if things were going to be worse, I would rather have shouldered them by his side than been somewhere less risky without him. I could even have been smart enough to get right back on the ferry that was dropping me off on Isabela as soon as I learned that the island was about to close.

  What I’m truly angry about is that when Finn told me to go, he meant the opposite. When I said I’d leave, I wanted to stay. And even though we’d been together for years, neither one of us read between the lines.

  There’s really nothing else I have to say, which surprises me, because it’s been so long since we have truly talked. But Finn is drowning in reality and I’m in a holding pattern in paradise. Be careful what you wish for, I think. When you’re stuck in heaven, it can feel like hell.

  “As soon as I find out more, I’ll tell you. Not that I know how,” I mutter. “This whole situation is just insane. I’ll keep sending postcards. Anyway. I thought you’d want to know.” I stare at the receiver for another moment and then hang it up and afterward realize I hadn’t said I love you.

  When I step into Abuela’s living room, Gabriel is sitting next to her on the couch. He stands when he sees me. “All good?”

  “Voicemail,” I say.

  “You’ll stay in the apartment, obviously,” he says, as if he’s trying to make up for his reaction when he first found me here.

  “I don’t have any money—” That jogs a new worry in my mind—as sick as I am of eating pasta, I don’t even have enough cash to feed myself.

  “And we’ll make sure you have food,” Gabriel says, reading my thoughts. He bends down and kisses Abuela on the cheek. “I don’t want to leave Beatriz too long.”

  I follow him out the front door, onto the porch. When he jogs down the steps, headed toward my apartment in the rear, I call his name. He turns, looking up at me, impatient.

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask.

  “Doing what?”

  “Being nice to me.”

  He grins, a streak of lightning. “I’ll try to be more of a cabrón,” he says, and when I blink, he translates. “Asshole.”

  “For real, though,” I press.

  Gabriel shrugs. “Before, you were a tourist,” he says simply. “Now, you’re one of us.”

  * * *

  —

  What I want to do: crawl underneath the covers of my bed, and pretend that when I wake up, I’ll realize this was all just a nightmare. I will breeze down to the dock, board a ferry, and begin the first leg of my journey back to New York City.

  What I do instead: accompany Gabriel and Beatriz to a swimming hole inland. Beatriz says that if I’m all by myself I will just wallow in my misery, and I cannot contradict her because it’s the rationale for every outing I’ve dragged her on this past week—when she was the one who needed distraction. She is carrying a snorkel and mask looped onto her arm, and it bounces against her hip as we hike. “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “We could tell you,” Beatriz says, “but then we’d have to kill you.”

  “She’s not entirely wrong,” Gabriel adds. “Most of the island is closed because of the pandemic. If the park rangers find you, they’ll fine you.”

  “Or take away your tour guide license,” Beatriz tosses over her shoulder.

  Gabriel’s shoulders tense, then relax again. “Which I am not using anyway.”

  She turns on a heel, walking backward. “Are we or are we not going to a secret place you used to take clients?”

  “We are going to a secret place I used to go to as a boy,” he corrects.

  We finally reach a brackish pond with water that is the color of rust and bordered by brush and thickets of fallen, twisted branches. As Isabela goes, it is far from the prettiest of landscapes. Beatriz begins to strip down to her bathing suit and long-sleeved rash guard, leaving the rest of her clothes in a pile. She fits her snorkel and mask to her face, then dives into the muddy lagoon.

  “Maybe I’ll just wait here,” I say.

  Gabriel turns in the act of pulling his shirt over his head and smiles. “Now who is judging a book by its cover?”

  He kicks off his shoes and splashes into the water, and reluctantly I peel down to my bathing suit and wade in. The bottom drops away sharply, unexpectedly, and I find myself swallowed up by the water. Before I can even panic, a strong hand grabs my arm, holding me up as I sputter. “Okay?” Gabriel asks.

  I nod, still choking a little. My fingers flex on his shoulder. This close, I realize that he has a freckle on his left earlobe. I look at the spikes of his eyelashes.

  With a strong kick I free myself, and start swimming in the direction Beatriz went.

  Gabriel overtakes me quickly; he is a stronger swimmer. He’s headed straight for a wall of tangled mangrove roots, or so it seems, near which Beatriz’s snorkel bobs. She lifts her face when we get closer, her eyes huge behind the plastic of the mask. The snorkel falls from her mouth as she scrambles up a makeshift ladder of roots and disappears into a fold in the brush. After a moment, her head sticks back out again. “Well?” she says. “Come on.”

  I try to follow, but my foot keeps slipping on the branches below the water. Gabriel’s hands land square on my ass and he shoves, and I whip around fast with shock. He raises his brows, all innocence. “What?” he says. “It worked, yes?”

  He’s right; I have cleared the surface. I bang my knee and feel a scrape on the bare skin of my thigh but after a moment, I find myself on the other side of the mangrove thicket, staring at a twin lagoon. In this one, the water is almost magenta, and in the center a sandbar rises like an oasis. On it, a dozen flamingos stand folded like origami as they dip their heads into the pool to feed.

  “This,” Gabriel says from behind me, “is what I wanted you to see.”

  “It’s amazing,” I say. “I’ve never seen water this color.”

  “Artemia salina,” Beatriz says. “It’s a crustacean, a little shrimp, and it’s what the flamingos eat that makes them pink. The concentration in the water makes it look so rosy. I learned that in class.” At the mention of her studies, her face changes. The buoyancy of her shoulders seems to evaporate.

  If I can’t get off this island to go home, she also can’t get off it to return to school.

  She curls her fingers around the edges of her rash guard sleeves, pulling them more firmly down over her arms.

  As if the mood is contagious, Gabriel’s face shutters, too. “Mijita,” he says quietly.

  Beatriz ignores him. She snaps on her snorkel, dives into the pink pool, and kicks as far away from us as she can, surfacing on the other side of the oasis.

  “Don’t take it personally,” I say.

  Gabriel sighs and rubs a hand through his wet hair. “I never know the right thing to say.”

  “I don’t know if there’s a right thing,” I admit.

  “Well, there’s definitely a wrong thing,” Gabriel replies, “and it’s usually what comes out of my mouth.”

  “I haven’t seen any new cuts,” I tell him.

  “I know she talks to you,” he says, “and those conversations are for you to keep.”

  I nod, thinking of what Beatriz told me about her mother, and how that doesn’t feel like a confidence I should break.

  Gabriel takes a deep breath, as if he is gathering courage. “But will you tell me if she brings up suicide?”

  “Oh my God, of course,” I say in a rush. “But…I don’t think that’s why she cuts. I think for her…it’s the exact opposite of being suicidal. It’s to remind her that she’s here.”

  He looks at me as if he is puzzling through my English. Then he tilts his head. “I’m glad you’re staying,” Gabriel says softly, “even if it is selfish of me.”

  I know he is speaking of whatever fragile thread I’ve spun between me and Beatriz, who clearly needs a confidante. But there is more to those words, a shadow crossing my senses. I feel my cheeks heating, and I quickly avert my face toward the flamingos. “What are those?” I ask, pointing to the small gray-and-white mottled birds that hop on the sand between the legs of the flamingos. “Finches?”

  If Gabriel notices me trying to change the conversation with the finesse of a wrecking ball, he doesn’t comment. “That’s a mockingbird.”

  “Oh. And here I was, feeling Darwinian.” I smile, trying for a joke.

  Galápagos is, of course, famous for its finches—and for Charles Darwin. I’d read about him in every tour guide that was packed in my lost suitcase. In 1835, he came to the islands on the HMS Beagle, while just twenty-six and—surprisingly—a creationist who believed that all species were designed by God. Yet in the Galápagos, Darwin began to rethink how life had appeared here, on a spit of volcanic rocks. He’d assumed that the creatures had swum from South America. But then he began to realize that each island was vastly different geographically from the next, that conditions were largely inhospitable, and that new species popped up on different islands. By studying the variations in finches he developed his theory of natural selection: that species change to adapt to their circumstances—and that the adaptations which make life easier are the ones that stick.

  “Everyone thinks Darwin based his work on the finches,” Gabriel says, “but everyone’s wrong.”

  I turn. “Don’t tell my AP Bio teacher that.”

  “Your what?”

  I wave my hand. “It’s an American thing. Anyway, I was taught that finches look different on different islands. You know, like one has a long beak because on one island the grubs are deep inside a tree; and on another island, their wings are stronger because they have to fly to find food…”

  “You’re right about all that,” he says. “But Darwin was a pretty shitty naturalist. He collected finches, but he didn’t tag them all properly. However—likely by accident—he did tag all the mockingbirds correctly.” He tosses a pebble, and a mockingbird takes to the air. “There are four different types of los sinsontes on Galápagos. Darwin collected them and measured their beaks and their sizes. When he got back to England, an ornithologist noticed that the mockingbirds were significantly diverse from island to island. The modifications that helped them adjust to the climate or terrain on a given island had been replicated, because the mockingbirds that had them were the ones who lived long enough to reproduce.”

  “Survival of the fittest,” I confirm. We are sitting now on the edge of the sand oasis, watching flamingos tightrope-walk along the water. Beatriz is at the far end of the lagoon, diving and surfacing, over and over. Gabriel’s lips move in silence, and I realize that he is counting the seconds she stays beneath the water.

  “Do you ever wonder what animals we’ll never know about?” I ask. “The ones that didn’t make it?”

  Gabriel’s eyes stay on the surface of the water, until Beatriz appears again. “History is written by the winners,” he says.

  Five

  The day after I learn that the island is not reopening, I walk into town to the bank, hoping to figure out a way to transfer money from my account in New York here. The bank is closed, but near the docks a bright collection of tables have been set up underneath a tent. Masked for safety, locals move up and down the aisles, picking up wares and chatting with each other. It looks like a flea market.

  I hear my name, and I turn to see Abuela waving at me.

  Although Abuela and I do not speak a common language, I’ve learned a few Spanish phrases, and the rest of our communication is still gestures and nods and smiles. She worked, I now know, at the hotel where I was going to stay, cleaning the rooms of guests. With the business closed, she is happy to cook and watch her telenovelas and take an unscheduled vacation.

  She is standing behind a card table that has been draped with an embroidered cloth. On it are a few folded aprons, a box of some men’s clothing, two pairs of shoes. There is also a cake pan and a small crate of vegetables and fruits like the ones Gabriel brought me. A word-search magazine is open in front of her, with a little sheaf of G2 postcards (does everyone have these?) stuck inside as a placeholder.

  Abuela smiles widely and points to the folding lawn chair she has set up behind the table. “Oh, no,” I say. “You sit!” But before she can respond, another woman approaches us. She picks up a pair of the shoes, looking at the tongue for the size, and through her mask asks Abuela a question.

  They exchange a few more sentences, and then the woman sets on the table a large tote. Inside are jars of preserves, pickled garlic, red peppers. Abuela takes out one jar of jam and another of peppers. The woman slips the shoes into her tote and moves off to the next table.

  I glance around and realize that although transactions are going on all around me under this tent, no one is exchanging money. The locals have figured out a barter system to combat their limited supply chain from the mainland. Abuela pats my arm, points to the chair, and then wanders down the aisle to survey the wares other locals have carted from home.

  I can see double-jointed racks of used clothing, mud boots lined up in size order, kitchen utensils, paper goods. Some tables groan heavy with homemade bread or sweets, jars of beets and banana peppers. There are fresh cuts of lamb and plucked chickens. Sonny, from Sonny’s Sunnies, has brought a full array of bathing suits and batteries and magazines and books. A fisherman with a cooler full of the catch of the day wraps up a fish in newspaper for a woman who hands him, in return, a bouquet of fresh herbs.

  I could trade, too. But I don’t have a surfeit of clothing or food I’ve grown or the ability to cook anything worth bartering for.

  I run my hand back over my hair, smoothing my ponytail. I wonder what I could get for a scrunchie.

  Just then, a zephyr of boys blows between the rows of tables. One small one straggles at the back, like the tail of a kite. He’s red-faced and clearly trying to catch up to the bigger boys, the leader of whom is waving a battered comic book. As I watch, another boy sticks out his foot and trips the little one, who goes flying and lands headfirst under one of the tables. His crash stops the chase. Rolling onto his back, he sits up and shouts at the boy still holding the book. Even in Spanish, it’s clear he has a lisp—which the bigger boy mocks. The bully rips the comic book in half and tosses it onto the smaller boy’s chest before sauntering away.