“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t quite keep up. Do you want me there, or don’t you?”
“There’s a curfew.” His eyes narrow on my wet hair. “You’re dripping. Onto my shirt.”
My God, everything is a personal affront to this man.
Suddenly Gabriel’s face changes. “Jesucristo,” he swears, as he rushes past me and grabs the shoulders of someone in the street. He looks like he can’t decide whether to hug or throttle them.
I watch as relief wins out in him. His arms circle tightly, and on the porch, Abuela’s eyes fill with tears. She crosses herself.
I don’t know what Gabriel is saying, because he is speaking Spanish. But from this angle, I can see the face of the person he’s embracing. It’s the girl from the dock at Concha de Perla, her sweatshirt still pulled past her wrists, her eyes fixed on mine, silently begging me to keep her secret.
THREE
For the next few days, I slip into a routine. In the mornings, I go for runs. I go as far as I can along the beach; I hike past the tortoise breeding center and Concha de Perla; I take paths that lead me into the heart of Isabela and to its cliffed edges. Sometimes I see locals, who nod at me but don’t speak. I am not sure if they are keeping their distance because of the virus, or because I am a foreigner. I watch fishermen leave the pier in Puerto Villamil in little pangas, heading out to catch food for their families.
I wake before the sun and go to sleep before eight, because I can only spend half the day outside. After the two P.M. curfew, I stay indoors, reading on my Kindle—until I run out of downloaded books. Then I creep onto the postage-stamp yard of sand that abuts the beach, swing in the hammock, and watch Sally Lightfoot crabs scuttle away from the surf.
Abuela brings me a meal sometimes, and it is a nice alternative to the pasta that is my main food group.
I do not see her grandson or the girl.
I start talking to myself, because my voice has gone rusty with disuse. Sometimes I recite poetry I memorized in high school as I walk in the thorny desert of the center of the island: Had we but world enough, and time; this Coyness, Lady, were no crime. Sometimes I hum when I wring out my clothes, washed in the sink, and hang them to dry in the hot sun. Sometimes I let the ocean harmonize as I sing into its roar.
Always, I miss Finn.
I still haven’t been able to talk to him, but I have written him postcards every night. I hope to get stamps and mail them, and maybe find a cellphone store in town where they can work out a way for me to text internationally. I also need clothing, because rinsing out my limited supply every night isn’t ideal. The few stores that are still open do not seem to have regular hours, and I keep timing it wrong. While trekking into town, I have seen intermittent signs of life at the pharmacy, a shawarma stand, and a church. I decide that, later today, I will try my luck again in Puerto Villamil.
Before dawn, I go for a run, until my lungs are burning. When I reach a spiky black monolith of lava, I sit down on the sand and watch the stars burn out of the sky, like sparks on a hearth. By the time I walk back home, the tide is coming in. It erases my footprints. When I look back over my shoulder, it’s as if I was never there.
I take another blank postcard from the G2 Tours box and sit down on the hammock outside my apartment to finish my latest missive to Finn; then something at the edge of the water catches my eye. In the hazy blue light, rocks look like people and people look like monsters, and I find myself walking closer to get a better look. I am almost at the shoreline before I realize it’s the girl from Concha de Perla, carrying a trash bag. She straightens, as if she can sense me coming up behind her. She is holding a plastic water bottle with Mandarin characters on the label. “It’s not bad enough that the Chinese fishing fleets are poaching,” she says in perfect English. “They have to throw their crap overboard, too.”
She turns to me and jerks her chin along the rest of the beach, where other bottles have washed ashore.
She continues to pick up trash as if it’s perfectly normal for her to be here at the crack of dawn, as if I haven’t seen her cutting herself or being yelled at by Gabriel.
“Does your brother know you’re here?” I ask.
Her wide black eyes blink. “My brother?” she says, and then she huffs a sharp laugh. “He is not my brother. And it doesn’t really matter if he knows or not. It’s an island. How far away could I even get?”
When I was in school and that girl was harming herself, I felt like our paths kept crossing. Probably they had before, too, but I hadn’t been aware. One day, as we passed in the hallway, I stopped her. You shouldn’t do it, I said. You could really hurt yourself.