Tomorrow, I will arrange to take a tour of the island. I want to see the volcano and the trillizos. But right now, because it’s been a long flight and I want to stretch my legs, I change into shorts and sneakers and a tank top, pull my hair into a ponytail, and walk down to the water’s edge. I take off my shoes and wade up to my knees, watching Sally Lightfoot crabs polka-dot the rocks. I put my hands on my hips and look up at the clouds, then across the ocean at a small island that never existed in my dream. I breathe deeply, thinking that last time I was here, I couldn’t breathe at all.
I sit on a rock with an iguana that is completely unbothered by the company and wait for my feet to dry before putting on my sneakers again. This time, I start jogging away from town. Another thing that looks nothing like it did in my imagination: the entrance to the tortoise breeding ground. It’s touristy, with signs and maps and cartoon pictures of eggs and hatching tortoises.
There’s a couple leaving; they smile at me as I pass them on my way in. “It’s closed,” the woman says, “but you can still see the babies in the pens outside.”
“Thanks,” I say, and I walk toward the horseshoe of enclosures. Beneath cacti, tortoises huddle together, stretching their old-man necks toward whatever danger lies six inches ahead. One unhinges his jaw and sticks out a triangular pink tongue.
The tortoises are arranged in size order. Some pens have only two or three, others are crammed. The babies are no bigger than my fist, and they are clambering over each other, creating their own obstacle course.
One of the little ones manages to get its feet on the shell of another, double-stacked for a breathtaking moment before it topples over onto its back.
Its feet are pedaling in the air, its head snicked back inside its shell.
I look around, wondering if there’s an attendant who will flip this poor little guy back over.
Well. They’re babies; they can’t be dangerous.
The retaining wall is only thigh-high. I put my foot on it, intending to climb over, complete a rescue mission, and leave.
I have no idea why the sole of my sneaker slips.
“Cuidado!”
I feel a hand grab my wrist the moment before I fall.
And I turn.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
Humans mark tragedy. Everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot, when the Twin Towers fell, and the last thing they did before the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
I was at a wedding in Tulum. The bride was an actress who—in a month—was going to star in the off-Broadway musical adaptation of Between the Lines, a novel I co-wrote with my daughter. I attended her wedding with the librettist and his husband, and our director and his husband. We all sat together at a table, drank margaritas, and had a wonderful time. From there, I met up with my husband in Aspen, where my son was about to propose to his girlfriend. There was buzz about coronavirus, but it didn’t seem real.
Then we got notice at our hotel that a guest had tested positive. By the time we flew home, New Hampshire was going into lockdown. My last trip to a grocery store was March 11, 2020 （and as of this moment, I still haven’t gone to one since）。 One week later I learned that all of the other people at my table at the wedding in Mexico had contracted Covid. Two were hospitalized.
I never caught it.
I have asthma, and I took quarantine very seriously. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve left my house in the past year—when, in previous years, I would travel cumulatively six months out of the year. Two of my kids and their partners came down with Covid, with fortunately mild symptoms. When my husband would go food shopping, and a clerk would dismiss the need for masks or social distancing, he always made sure to let them know that our kids had been sick. As Finn experiences in this novel—they usually jumped back a few feet, as if merely speaking of illness makes you contagious.
And me? I was at home, paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t breathe well on a good day; I couldn’t even imagine what Covid would do to my lungs. I was so anxious that I couldn’t concentrate on anything—which meant that I couldn’t distract myself with my work. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t even read. After only a few pages, I was unable to focus.
My reading slump broke first, thanks to romance novels, the only genre I could get lost in at the time. I think I needed to know there was a happy ending, albeit fictional. But writing was still elusive. I started working on a novel that I was supposed to co-write for a 2022 release, attempting to jog my muscle memory by doing research （via Zoom, this time）， and somehow my brain remembered how to craft a book. But the whole time I was working on that story, I was wondering: How are we going to chronicle this pandemic? Who will do it? How do we tell the tale of how the world shut down, and why, and what we learned?