There’s one patient who’s been haunting me lately. She and her husband came in together; he died and she didn’t. When she was extubated, her adult kids didn’t tell her that her husband was dead. They were too afraid she’d panic and cry and her lungs couldn’t take it. So she made it all the way to rehab thinking that her husband was still in isolation at the hospital. I think about her all the time. How she thought this was temporary, the separation between them. I wonder if she knows, yet, that it’s forever.

  Jesus, Diana, come back.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes I lie in bed at night and think: What was I trying to prove? Why didn’t I turn around and get on that ferry and go back to the airport?

  Sometimes I lie in bed and think: What kind of partner was I then, if Finn wasn’t in the forefront of my mind, when I stood on the brink between staying and leaving?

  For that matter, what kind of partner am I now, when there are times he is not in the forefront of my mind? When he’s slogging through hell and I’m in a different hemisphere?

  My father’s father fought in World War II, and when he came back from it, he was never quite right. He drank a lot and wandered the house in the middle of the night, and when the car backfired once, he dropped to the ground and burst into tears. As a little girl, I was often told that the war did this to him, created an invisible scar he’d never lose. Once, I asked my grandmother what she remembered about the war. She thought for a long moment, and then finally said, It was hard to get nylons.

  There’s a part of me that thinks this is exactly what my grandfather would have wanted: to risk death every day so that my grandmother’s life could stay mostly unruffled. But there’s another part of me that recognizes how shallow, how privileged it is, to be the one who’s an ocean away.

  These days when I am swimming in pools as clear as gin or hiking green velvet mountains or frying a tortilla on a cast-iron pan in Abuela’s kitchen, there are whole swaths of time when I forget the rest of the world is suffering.

  I am not sure if that is a blessing, or if I should be cursed.

  * * *

  —

  The trillizos are three collapsed lava tunnels in the center of the island. Beatriz and I start our hike there before dawn, which means we get to watch the breathtaking artwork of the sunrise as we climb into the highlands. I’ve been on island for just over three weeks now, and it keeps surprising me with its beauty. “How old are you?” Beatriz asks me, just as the last streak of pink becomes a bruise of blue sky.

  “I’m going to be thirty on April 19,” I tell her. “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen,” Beatriz says. “But emotionally, I’m older.”

  That makes me laugh. “You’re a veritable crone.”

  We walk a little further and then, lightly, I ask if she’s heard from her friends at school.

  Her shoulders tense up. “Can’t check social media when the internet sucks.”

  “Right,” I muse. “It must be hard.”

  Beatriz doesn’t look at me. “The silver lining is that I don’t have to see what people are saying about me.”

  I stop walking. “Is that something you usually have to worry about?”

  What if her cutting is tied to bullying somehow? I still don’t know much more about Beatriz than I did when I first saw her on the ferry. She guards her secrets like her life depends on them. For a teenager, I suppose it does.

  I have been wondering if I should intercede in Beatriz and Gabriel’s relationship. From my vantage point, all I see is misunderstanding. But then I think I have no right to involve myself in someone else’s relationships when my own are a mess.

  Finn’s emails are now shorter and more desperate.

  For the past two nights, I’ve awakened in the middle of the night, convinced I hear my mother’s voice.

  “When was the last time you talked to your mother?” Beatriz asks, as if she’s reached right into my mind.

  “Before I came here. I visited her,” I say. “Although I can’t really say it was a conversation. It’s more like she talks at me and I try to keep up.”

  “My mother used to send me cards for my birthday, with money in them. But that stopped last year.” Her mouth tightens. “She didn’t want to have me.”

  “But she did.”

  “When you’re pregnant and seventeen and the guy says he’ll marry you, I guess you do it,” Beatriz muses.

  I tuck away this information about Gabriel.

  “I think unconditional love is bullshit,” Beatriz says. “There’s always a condition.”

  “Not true,” I offer. “My father would have loved me no matter what.” But is that true? I wonder. I adored the same things he did—visual art and painting. If I’d been obsessed with geology or emo rock, would we have clicked the same way? If my mother hadn’t been absent, would he have been as attentive?

  “And Finn,” Beatriz says. “Don’t forget about him. How did you know he was the one?”

  “I don’t know that,” I bluster. “I’m not married to him.”

  “But if he proposed here, weren’t you going to say yes?”

  I nod. “I think that I used to believe that love was supposed to feel like a lightning storm—superdramatic, with crashes and thunder and all the hair standing up on the back of your neck. I had boyfriends like that, in college. But Finn…he’s the opposite. He’s steady. Like…white noise.”

  “He puts you to sleep?”

  “No. He makes everything…easier.” Saying this, I feel a surge of love so fierce for Finn that my knees go weak.

  “So he’s the first person you felt that way about?” Beatriz asks, probing.

  She isn’t looking at me, but there’s a stripe of heat across her cheekbones, and I realize she isn’t really asking about me. If not for this pandemic, Beatriz would be at school and would likely be confiding in a friend her own age about her own crush.

  Then I think of what she said about being flamed on social media. I remember that Gabriel told me Beatriz begged to come back to Isabela.

  Suddenly she breaks into a jog, and stops at the edge of a yawning hole that seems to reach to the belly of the earth. It’s about sixty feet wide, with a ladder mounted at the lip, twined with several thick ropes. Ferns and moss grow on the walls, which narrow and narrow to a black hole further down. I peer into the abyss but it looks only dark and endless.

  “People rappel to the bottom,” Beatriz says.

  I feel the walls of the tunnel pressing on me, and I’m not even inside it. “I am not rappelling to the bottom.”

  “Well, you can climb partway,” she says. “Come on.”

  She scrambles down the slippery wooden rungs, wrapping the ropes around her arm as a safety measure. I follow her more cautiously. The tunnel narrows around us. The vegetation smells ripe and lush as I concentrate on stepping firmly with my foot down, down, down.

  When Beatriz descends into the neck of the tunnel, I lose sight of her. “Beatriz!” I call, and her voice floats up to me.

  “Come on, Diana, it’s magic.”

  The further down we go, the hotter it gets, as if the tunnel is tapering toward hell itself. There is no more vegetation, just lava rock that is light and porous, and that shimmers in the faint light from above. I keep moving methodically and nearly scream when I feel Beatriz’s hand close over my ankle. “Three more rungs,” she says, “and then the ladder runs out.”

  She shifts so that we are clinging to the same bottom rungs, side by side. “Look up,” Beatriz says.

  I do, and the sky is a tiny pinprick of hope. When I glance back down and breathe in, it feels like the air from someone else’s mouth. I can’t see at first in the dim muscle of the tunnel, and then all of a sudden I can—just the shine of Beatriz’s pupils. It feels like we’re sharing a heartbeat.

  “Remind me why we’re here,” I whisper.

  “We’re in the belly of a volcano,” she says. “We could hide here forever.”

  For a few moments, I listen to the moan of wind from what must be a hundred feet above. Something wet drips onto my forehead. It is terrifying being here, yes, but it is also almost holy. It’s like crawling back in time. Like preparing to be reborn.

  It feels like the place to confide a secret.

  “Truth or dare,” I whisper, and I hold my breath, waiting.

  “Truth,” Beatriz says.

  “Your father told me you wanted to come back here, but you don’t want to be here.”

  “What’s your question?”

  I don’t answer.

  She sighs. “Neither of those,” Beatriz says, “is untrue.”

  I wait for her to elaborate in this cocoon of darkness, but instead, she turns the game on me. “Truth or dare,” she says.

  “Truth.”

  “If you could change your mind three weeks ago and take the ferry home, would you?”

  “I don’t know,” I hear myself answer, and it physically hurts to say it out loud, in the way that truth can sometimes be a knife.

  The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve told myself that being stuck on Isabela was a mistake. But there is also a small, new part of me that wonders if it was meant to be. If I’m delayed because the universe decided Beatriz needed someone to depend on; if I had to distance myself from Finn to see our relationship more clearly—its strengths, and its flaws.

  Unconditional love is bullshit. “Truth or dare. Is there someone at school you wish you could be with?”

  I have wondered if, when I eventually leave, Beatriz will go back to Santa Cruz, back to her host family and, maybe, this crush. If that would stop the cutting. Would make her happy.

  “Yes.” The syllable is no more than a breath. “But she doesn’t want to be with me.”

  She.

  I hear the quiet hitch of Beatriz’s breath. She’s crying, and I’m pretending not to notice, which I suspect is what she wants.

  “Tell me about her,” I say softly.

  “Ana Maria’s my host sister,” Beatriz whispers. “She’s two years older than me. I think I’ve always known how I feel but I never said anything, not until there were rumors that school might close because of the virus. When I thought about not seeing her, like even just at breakfast, or walking back from classes, I couldn’t breathe. So I kissed her.” She curls herself closer to the ladder rungs.

  “It didn’t go well,” I state.

  “It did at first. She kissed me back. For three days—it was…perfect.” Beatriz shakes her head. “And then she told me she couldn’t. She said her parents would kill her, if they found out. That she loved me, but not like that.” She swallows. “She said I was…I was a mistake.”

  “Oh, Beatriz.”

  “Her parents wanted me to stay during lockdown. I told them my father wouldn’t let me. How could I live in the same house as her, and pretend it was all fine?”

  “What will you do when school opens?”

  “I don’t know,” Beatriz says. “I ruined it. I can’t go back there. And there’s nothing for me here.”

  There’s something for you here, I think. You just can’t see it.

  “Will you tell my father?” she whispers into the dark.

  “No,” I promise. “But I hope you will, one day.”

  We cling to the ladder in the hot throat of the world. Her breathing evens again, in counterpoint to mine. “Truth or dare,” she says, so softly I can barely hear it. “Do you ever wish you could do part of your life over?”

  The truth is yes.

  But…it’s not these past three weeks. Instead, it’s everything leading up to them. The more time I spend on this island, the more clarity I have about the time leading up to it. In a strange way, being stripped of everything—my job, my significant other, even my clothing and my language—has left only the essential part of me, and it feels more real than everything I have tried to be for years. It’s almost as if I had to stop running in order to see myself clearly, and what I see is a person who’s been driving toward a goal for so long she can’t remember why she set it in the first place.

  And that scares the fuck out of me.

  “Dare,” I reply.

  A beat. “Let go of the ladder,” Beatriz says.

  “Absolutely not,” I answer.

  “Then I’ll do it.”

  I hear her release her fingers from the rung, feel the shift in the air as she falls backward.

  “No,” I cry, and I somehow manage to snatch a handful of her shirt. With the ropes wrapped tight around my free arm, I feel her deadweight dangling.

  Don’t let go don’t let go don’t let go

  “Bea,” I say evenly, “you have to grab on to me. Can you do that? Can you do that for me?”

  A thousand years later, I feel her fingers clutching my forearm. I grab back, forming a tighter link, until she is close enough to the ladder to grasp it again. A moment later, with a sob, she falls against me and I wrap my free arm around her. “It’s okay,” I soothe. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “I wanted to know what it would be like,” she cries, “to just let go.”

  I stroke her hair and think: You cannot trust perception. Falling, at first, feels like flying.

  Six

  Four weeks after I arrive on Isabela, I get an early birthday present: a strange and unlikely dump of old emails into my inbox. I have no idea why some were coming through, yet not others—but there are several from Finn, and two from my mother’s facility, updating me on her health (no significant change, which I figure is good news). There is also a note from Sotheby’s, saying that I have been furloughed, along with two hundred other employees, because of a massive downturn in the art sales industry. I stare at this for a while, wondering if Kitomi wasn’t the only one to delay her auction, and trying to rationalize that being furloughed is better than being fired. There’s also an email from Rodney, telling me that Sotheby’s can suck a dick, and that the only people who weren’t furloughed were tech support, because they’re pivoting to online sales. He never thought he’d have to return to his sister’s house in New Orleans, but who can afford rent in the city on unemployment?

  The last line of his email is Girl, if I were you, I’d stay in paradise as long as I could.

  On my actual birthday a week later, I am invited to Gabriel’s farm. It’s twenty minutes by car into the highlands, and he comes to pick me and Abuela up in a rusty Jeep with no side doors. “You don’t look a day over forty,” he deadpans when he sees me, and when I shove at him he starts laughing. “Women are so sensitive about their age,” he jokes.

  As we drive, we see more galapagueños out and about than I have in weeks. At first, when the island closed down, I could walk the beach or hike into the highlands and not see another soul. But now, by the fifth week of lockdown, with no actual cases of Covid on Isabela and no one new arriving to spread it, people have begun to sneak out of their houses and break curfew.

  As we wind into the center of the island, the scrub and desert landscape at the shoreline gives way to lush, thick vegetation. The shipments of food and supplies to the island have been extremely limited, and I know that Gabriel isn’t the only person here to rely on family farmland to supplement them during the pandemic. We pass dirty sheep in pens, goats, a lowing cow with an udder as full as the moon. There are banana trees, with green fruit defying gravity to grow upward, and girls squatting in fields pulling weeds. Finally Gabriel turns onto a dusty path that winds toward a small house. Beatriz had led me to believe that it was nothing more than a glorified tent, but only half of it is under construction. Gabriel isn’t building a house as much as he is expanding it.

  For Beatriz, I bet.

  I’ve been thinking nonstop about her confession to me in the trillizos. I’d said that if Beatriz talked to me about suicide, I’d tell Gabriel—and her recklessness in the tunnel truly worried me. But I couldn’t confess to Gabriel what had happened unless I explained why, and that would mean talking about Ana Maria not returning Beatriz’s affections. That, I know, is not my secret to share. Gabriel doesn’t strike me as the kind of parent who’d be upset if his daughter came out, but then, I do not truly know him. Whatever strides the LGBTQ+ community has made in the United States, they are not universal; moreover, this is a predominantly Catholic country and gay rights aren’t exactly the mainstay of that dogma. I think about Abuela’s house, where painted crosses decorate every bit of wall space. In the absence of church services, suspended because of Covid, she has created a small altar where she prays and lights candles.

  Instead, I’ve found ways to see Beatriz every day, to take her emotional temperature, and hope I don’t have to betray her in order to protect her.

  Beatriz comes bounding out of the front of the house as Gabriel pulls the emergency brake on the Jeep. “Felicidades!” she says, smiling at me.

  “Thanks.”

  I realize something is tugging at me and I turn to find a little white goat with brown ears chewing on the hem of my T-shirt. “Ooh,” I say, kneeling down to rub its knobby horns. “Who’s this?”