I stop walking. “Beatriz …”
“Sometimes I can’t remember her. My mother.”
“I’m sure your father could—”
“I don’t want to remember her. But then I think …” Her voice trails off. “Then I think maybe I’m just easy to forget.”
I reach for her arm and push her sleeve up gently. We both stare at the ladder of scars, some silver with age, and some still an angry red. “Is that why you cut?” I ask quietly.
At first I think she is going to pull away, but then she starts speaking, fast and low. “The first time I did it, I guess. And then … ?I stopped for a while. At school, it was easier to distract myself. But then, right before I came back here …” She shakes her head, swallows. “How come the people who don’t even notice you exist are the ones you can’t stop thinking about?”
“My mother was never home when I was a kid. In fact, I used to think she looked for reasons to travel so she could get away from me.”
The words come out in a rush of air, a popped balloon of anger. I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud before to anyone. Not even Finn.
Beatriz stares at me as if all my features have rearranged. “Did she run off with a photographer from a Nat Geo ship?” she asks drily.
“No. She just decided that everything in the world—literally—was more important than I was. And now she has dementia and has no idea who I am.”
“That … ?sucks.”
I shrug. “It is what it is,” I tell her. “The point is, if someone abandons you, it may be less about you and more about them.”
I stop speaking as we come upon a wall that rises from the scorched earth. It’s made of volcanic rock and towers over us a good sixty feet, stretching further than my eye can see. It does not, I realize, enclose anything. “The inmates built it in the forties and fifties,” Beatriz says. “It wasn’t for any real purpose, except to create work for punishment. Tons of prisoners died while they were building it.”
“That’s grim,” I mutter.
There are two ways of looking at walls. Either they are built to keep people you fear out or they are built to keep people you love in.
Either way, you create a divide.
“They only got one ship full of cargo a year—the prisoners and the guards were all starving. To stay alive, they hunted down land tortoises to eat. There’s rumors that the place is full of ghosts, and you can hear them crying at night,” Beatriz says. “It’s creepy as fuck.”
I step closer, walking the length of the wall. Some of the stones are etched with symbols, letters, dates, patterns, hatch marks to count time.
If you define art as something made by the hands of men, something that makes us remember them long after they’re gone, then this wall qualifies. The fact that it is unfinished or broken doesn’t make it any less striking.
When my phone starts buzzing in my pocket, I jump. It has been so long. I pull it out with a cry of surprise and see Finn’s name.
“Oh my God,” I say. “It’s you. It’s really you!”
“Diana! I can’t believe I got through.” His voice is scratchy and pocked by static and so, so dear. Tears spring to my eyes as I struggle to hear him: “Tell me … ?and every … ?you … ?it’s been.”
I’m missing half of what he says, so I curl myself around the phone and experimentally move along the wall hoping for a stronger signal. “Can you hear me?” I say. “Finn?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he responds, and I can hear the relief in his words. “Christ, it’s good to talk to you.”
“I got your emails—”
“I didn’t know if they were going through—”
“The service here is terrible,” I tell him. “I wrote you postcards.”
“Well, nothing’s been delivered yet. I can’t believe there’s no internet there.”
“I know,” I say, but that’s not what I want to talk about, and I don’t know how long this magical, elusive signal will last. “How are you? It sounds—”
“I don’t even have words for it, Di,” he says. “It’s … ?endless.”
“But you’re safe,” I state, as if there is no alternative.
“Who knows,” he says. “I read Guayaquil’s getting slammed. That they’re stacking bodies on the streets.”
At this, my stomach turns. “I haven’t seen anyone sick here,” I tell him. “Everyone wears masks and there’s a curfew.”