Immediately, Rodney pings me back. LATINX DUDES ARE SO HOT.
My thumbs fly over the phone. You got this message, right?
No, Rodney writes back.
Rodney and I have been living together in Queens since I moved out of Finn’s place. Breaking up with your boyfriend is never easy, even less so during a pandemic. But two hours after I called Rodney and told him about my mother’s death and Finn’s proposal, he got on a plane. We scraped by on our unemployment checks until Sotheby’s hired Rodney back. By then, I’d matriculated at NYU.
Rodney wanted to come with me to the Galápagos, but it was something I had to do on my own. It’s the last chapter; it’s time for the book to end.
I’ve seen Finn only once since we broke up. We crossed paths, of all places, on the running path along the East River. He was coming home from the hospital and I was jogging. I hear that he’s engaged to Athena, the nurse who made me the sunflower mask.
I hope he’s happy; I really do.
Puerto Villamil is packed. There are open-air bars with music and patrons spilling into the street, and a taco stand with a long line of customers, and barefoot kids kicking a soccer ball. It has the lazy, boozy atmosphere of a tourist town, and I’m not the only person dragging a little roller bag down the gritty dust of the street.
A Gordian knot of iguanas untangles and scatters when the wheels of my bag get too close. I check my phone for the address of Casa del Cielo, but the hotels are all arranged in a neat line, like sparkling white teeth along the edge of the ocean. Mine is small—a boutique. Its stucco reflects the sun, and a blue mosaic sign spells out its name.
It looks nothing like the hotel I dreamed.
When I walk up to the front, there is a couple leaving. They hold the door for me, and I pull my bag inside and approach the front desk.
The air-conditioning blows over me as I give my name. The clerk, a college-age kid, has dyed white-blond hair and a nose ring. He speaks perfect English. “Have you ever visited before?” he asks, when I hand him my credit card.
“Not really,” I tell him, and he grins.
“That sounds like a story.”
“It is,” I say.
He gives me a room key, affixed to a little piece of polished coconut shell. “The Wi-Fi code is on the back,” he says. “It’s a little unreliable.”
I can’t help it; I laugh.
“If there’s anything you need, just dial zero,” he says.
I thank him and reach for the handle of my bag. Just before I get to the elevator, I turn around. “Does someone named Elena work here?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not that I know of …”
“That’s okay,” I tell him. “I must have been mistaken.”
I wrote my master’s thesis on the reliability of memory, and how it fails us. In Japan, there are monuments called tsunami stones—giant tablets on the coastline that warn descendants of earlier settlers not to build their homes past a certain point. They date back to 1896, when two tsunamis killed 22,000 people. The Japanese believe that it takes three generations to forget. Those who experience a trauma pass it along to their children and their grandchildren, and then the memory fades. To the survivors of a tragedy, that’s unthinkable—what’s the point of living through something terrible if you cannot convey the lessons you’ve learned? Since nothing will ever replace all you’ve lost, the only way to make meaning is to make sure no one else goes through what you did. Memories are the safeguards we use to keep from making the same mistakes.
In my art therapy practice, I started working with people whose lives had been affected in different ways by Covid—those who’d lost jobs or loved ones, or those who’d survived the virus and （like me） were left wondering why. Over the course of the past three years, my patients and I have created three pandemic stones—ten feet high by three feet wide, painted and carved by survivors with images and words that call forth the wisdom they have now, which they didn’t have back then. There are pictures of stick figure families, some grayed out by death. There are mantras: Find your joy. No job is worth killing yourself for. There are images of Black fists raised in solidarity, of a globe in the shape of a heart, of a syringe filled with stars. The first one that we finished was installed in the lobby of the MoMA on the most recent anniversary of the pandemic.
The obelisk sits three floors below one of my mother’s photos.
Exploring Isabela is a little bit like revisiting a city you toured when you were high as a kite. Some things look exactly the way I remember—like the flat black of the pahoehoe lava and the elbow of beach beyond the hotel. These must have been photographs I saw when I was planning my trip there that embedded themselves somewhere in my subconscious, enough for me to call them up with legitimacy. But other pieces of the island are startlingly different, like the place the pangas come with their daily fishing catch, and the architecture of the small houses that freckle the road leading out of town. Abuela’s little home, with the basement apartment, simply does not exist.