“I wish I could say that.” Finn sighs. “All day long it feels like I’m sandbagging against a wave and then I walk outside and realize that it’s a fucking tsunami and we don’t stand a chance.” His voice hitches.
I look around at the curl of clouds in the sky, the sun glittering on the ocean in the distance. A picture postcard. Just a few hundred miles away this virus is killing people so fast that they don’t have room for bodies, but you would never know it from where I stand. I think of the empty shelves of the grocery mart, the people like Gabriel growing their own food in the highlands, the fishermen that have to carry the mail to the mainland, the tourism that dried up overnight. The curse of being on an island is inaccessibility, but maybe that is also its blessing.
Finn’s voice wavers, cutting in and out again. “Pregnant women … ?labor alone … ?ICU, the only time family is allowed … ?gonna die in the next hour.”
“You’re breaking up—Finn—”
“Nothing changes and …”
“Finn?”
“… all dead,” he says, those words suddenly clear and crisp. “Every time I finally get to come home and you aren’t there, it feels like another slap in the face. You don’t know how hard it is being alone right now.”
But I do. “You’re the one who told me to go,” I say quietly.
There is a silence. “Yeah,” Finn answers. “I guess I just assumed … ?you wouldn’t actually listen.”
Then you shouldn’t have said it, I think uncharitably, but my eyes are burning with guilt and frustration and anger. I can’t read your mind.
Which suddenly feels like a much bigger problem, a seed of doubt that sprouts the very moment it’s planted.
“Di—a?” I hear. “Are … ?still …？”
Although I have not budged, I’ve somehow lost the connection. The line goes dead in my hand. I slip the phone into my pocket and trudge back toward the wall to find Beatriz sitting in its shadow, scraping the edge of one pointed piece of basalt against the smooth belly of another.
“Was that your boyfriend?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“Does he miss you?”
I sit down beside her. “Yes,” I say. I watch her create a hashtag on a rock, and color in each alternate square like a chessboard. “What are you doing?”
She slants her gaze my way. “Art,” she says.
I lean my back against the sharp stones of the wall. There are endless ways to leave your mark on the world—cutting, carving, art. Maybe all of them do require payment in the form of a piece of yourself—your flesh, your strength, your soul.
I reach for a rock. I start to carve my name into another loose stone. When I’m finished, I write BEATRIZ on another. Then I stand up and pick at some of the pebbles and sand in the surface of the wall, making space to wedge the name rocks into it. “What are you doing?” Beatriz asks.
I dust my hands off on my thighs. “Art,” I reply.
She scrambles to her feet, following me as I step a distance away. The rocks I’ve carved are pale gray, completely different from the bulk of the dark wall. They are, from back here, unnoticeable. But when you walk closer, you cannot miss them. You just have to take those few steps.
The first time I saw impressionist art, I was with my father at the Brooklyn Museum. He covered my eyes with his hands and guided me up close to Monet’s Houses of Parliament. What do you see? he asked, removing his hands when I was inches from the canvas.
I saw blobs. Pink and purple blobs and brushstrokes.
He covered my eyes again and drew me further away. Abracadabra, he whispered, and he let me look again.
There were buildings, and smog, and twilight. There was a city. It had been there all along, I’d just been too close to see it.
Squinting at the lighter shards in the wall that have our names on them, I think that art goes both ways. Sometimes you have to have the perspective of distance. And sometimes, you cannot tell what you’re looking at until it’s right under your nose.
I turn to find Beatriz with her face tipped up to the sky. Her eyes are closed, her throat stretched like a sacrifice. “This would be,” she says, “a good place to die.”
Dear Finn,
By the time you get this postcard, you probably won’t even remember what you said when we finally actually got to speak to each other, even if it was only for a minute.
I never chose to go anywhere without you.
If you didn’t really want me to go to the Galápagos by myself, why did you say it?