I blink up at him. He’s showered and a towel is wrapped around his waist. “You’re home,” I say.
“And you’re painting.” A smile ghosts over his lips. “On our bureau.”
“I didn’t have a canvas,” I tell him.
“I see.” Finn moves to stand behind me, so that he can view what I’ve done. I try to stare at it, too, through a stranger’s eyes.
The sky is an unholy cobalt, with breaths of clouds like afterthoughts. They’re mirrored in the still surface of a lagoon. Flamingos goose-step across a sandbar, or sleep with their legs bent into acute angles. A manchineel tree squats like the old crone in a fairy tale, poison at her fingertips.
Finn crouches down beside me. He stretches out a hand toward the art, but acrylics dry so quickly I know he cannot smudge anything. “Diana,” he says after a moment. “This is … ?I didn’t know you could paint like this.” He points to two small figures, far in the distance, so tiny they would easily be overlooked if you weren’t paying attention.
“Where’s this supposed to be?” Finn asks.
I don’t answer. I don’t have to.
“Oh,” he says, standing again. He takes a step away, and then another, until he has found a smile to wear. “You’re a very good artist,” Finn says, keeping his voice light. “What else are you hiding from me?”
By the time we go to bed that night, Finn has maneuvered the dresser back into position so that the lagoon I’ve drawn is flush against the wall, hidden away. I don’t mind. I like knowing there is a side to it that nobody would ever guess is there.
Finn, coming off a forty-hour shift at the hospital, is asleep nearly as soon as his head hits the pillow. He clutches me against him the way a child holds tight to a stuffed animal, a talisman to keep the monsters away from them both.
The first night Finn and I slept together, as he trailed his hands over my skin, he told me that you can never really touch anything, because everything is made of atoms, and atoms have electrons inside them, which have a negative charge. Particles repel other particles that have a similar charge. This means when you lie down in bed, the electrons that make up your body push away the electrons that make up the mattress. You’re actually floating an infinitesimal distance above it.
I had stroked my hand down the center of his chest. So you’re hallucinating this feeling? I said.
No, he replied, catching my hand and kissing it. Or so I felt. It’s our brains working overtime. The nerve cells get a message that some foreign electrons got close enough in space and time to repel our personal electromagnetic field. Our brains tell us that’s the sensation of touch.
You’re saying this is all make-believe? I asked, rolling on top of him. This is why I shouldn’t date a scientist.
He held my hips in his hands. We’re all in our own little worlds.
Come visit mine, I had said, and I let him slide inside.
Now, I feel Finn’s heat surrounding me and the rough of his skin pressed to mine and I close my eyes. Even wedged against him, I imagine that invisible seam between us.
My throat is on fire and there is an anvil on my chest. I feel hands on me, tugging and rolling and smacking me hard between the shoulder blades. My eyes are crusted and stinging and the pressure under my ribs is unbearable. Breathe, I command myself, but the mandate dies in a vacuum.
Then suddenly the heel of a hand presses on my forehead and my nose is pinched shut and my mouth is covered. A gust of heat inflates me like a balloon. I use all my strength to push away, to roll to the side, and the dam bursts. I cough and vomit fluid that burns, that cramps my belly and my sides. I cough and cough and finally gasp in the sweetest, cleanest stream of air.
I fall back, spent, becoming aware of other sensations: the rasp of sand on my skin and the bite of stones, blood coursing from a cut on my lip, the weight of the sun on my brow. A strand of hair is caught across my face and I don’t have the energy to brush it away.
Suddenly it’s gone, and the bright light shining in my eyes is, too. A shadow spreads over me like a protective wing.
Diana.
I force my eyes open and there is Gabriel, dripping wet, leaning over me. His hands frame my face, and when he smiles, it pulls at me, like we have been sewn together with invisible thread.
Everything hurts and he is the sun I shouldn’t stare into but cannot turn away from. “Dios mío,” he says. “I thought I lost you.”
Coffee. I can smell it. I burrow deeper into the covers and then I feel a warm hand on my shoulder. A kiss on the back of my neck.