“I know this doesn’t seem like the most opportune time,” he says, “but the more I think about it, the more I realize it is. I almost lost you. And now, with your mom … ?well, every day counts. It doesn’t matter to me if nothing ever goes back to normal, because I don’t want to go backward. I want to go forward, with you. I want kids that we can bring here and push on the swings. I want the dog and the yard and all the things we’ve been dreaming about all these years.”
Finn sinks down to one knee. “Marry me?” he says. “We’ve done the sickness part. How about we try the health?”
I open the box and see the solitaire, simple and lovely, light winking at me.
Three feet away, Peter Pan is frozen in time. I wonder how many years he spent in Wendy’s company here before forgetting that he used to know how to fly.
“Di?” Finn says, laughing nervously. “Say something?”
I look at him. “Why aren’t you a magician?”
“What? Because … ?I’m a surgeon? Why are we talking about this—”
“You wanted to be a magician, you said. What changed?”
Awkwardly, he slides back into the seat beside me, knowing the moment is gone. “No one grows up to be a magician,” he mutters.
“That’s not true.”
“But it’s different. The people who do it professionally aren’t making magic happen. They’re just distracting you from what they’re really doing.”
Finn has always been my anchor. The problem is that anchors don’t just keep you from floating away. Sometimes, they drag you down.
I could paint Finn from memory—every freckle and shadow and scar. But suddenly it is like seeing someone you recognize in a crowd and getting closer to realize that the person is not who you thought he was.
He rubs his hand on the back of his neck. “Look, if you need time … ?if I misjudged …” He meets my gaze. “Isn’t this what you want? What we planned?”
“You can’t plan your life, Finn,” I say quietly. “Because then you have a plan. Not a life.”
There may not be a reason that I survived Covid. There may not be a better man than the one sitting beside me. But I’m not the same person I was when Finn and I imagined the future … ?and I don’t think I want to be.
You may not be able to choose your reality. But you can change it.
I am still holding the ring. I put it into his palm, curl his fingers around it.
Finn stares at me, broken. “I don’t understand,” he says, hoarse. “Why are you doing this?”
I feel impossibly light, like I am made of air and thought, instead of flesh. “You’re perfect, Finn,” I tell him. “You’re just not perfect for me.”
EPILOGUE
May 2023
Ask anyone who’s nearly died: you should live in the moment.
Unfortunately, that’s impossible. Every moment keeps slipping past.
You can only go on to the next moment and the one after that, seeking out what you love most with whom you love most. All those moments, tallied up? That’s your life.
Bucket lists aren’t important. Benchmarks aren’t important. Neither are goals. You take the wins in small ways: Did I wake up this morning? Do I have a roof over my head? Are the people I care about doing okay? You don’t need the things you don’t have. You only need what you’ve got, and the rest? It’s just gravy.
It’s been three years since I recovered from Covid; two years since I was vaccinated; one year since I finished my degree in art therapy and started my own practice. I’ve been saving since then, and it’s all led to this.
I turn my face into the wind. The spray keeps hitting my sunglasses, so I take them off and let my face get wet. I laugh, just because I can.
It took a while for the country to reopen, and even longer for the borders to do so. I had to gather the courage to take the smallest of steps: Eat inside a restaurant. Not freak out when I left my mask at home. Fly on a plane.
The ferry is crowded. There is a family with three rowdy kids and a knot of teenagers bent over a cellphone. A tour group from Japan is listening to their leader point out the different kinds of fish they might see during a dive, complete with a flip-book of underwater photographs. The driver of the boat calls out as we approach a dock, where several water taxis are waiting to take us the final stretch.
It’s only a five-minute ride; I pay the boat driver and alight on the dock at Puerto Villamil. There is a sea lion stretched across the sand in front of me, wide and immobile as a continent. I take out my phone and snap a picture, then text it.