He kicks off his shoes and splashes into the water, and reluctantly I peel down to my bathing suit and wade in. The bottom drops away sharply, unexpectedly, and I find myself swallowed up by the water. Before I can even panic, a strong hand grabs my arm, holding me up as I sputter. “Okay?” Gabriel asks.
I nod, still choking a little. My fingers flex on his shoulder. This close, I realize that he has a freckle on his left earlobe. I look at the spikes of his eyelashes.
With a strong kick I free myself, and start swimming in the direction Beatriz went.
Gabriel overtakes me quickly; he is a stronger swimmer. He’s headed straight for a wall of tangled mangrove roots, or so it seems, near which Beatriz’s snorkel bobs. She lifts her face when we get closer, her eyes huge behind the plastic of the mask. The snorkel falls from her mouth as she scrambles up a makeshift ladder of roots and disappears into a fold in the brush. After a moment, her head sticks back out again. “Well?” she says. “Come on.”
I try to follow, but my foot keeps slipping on the branches below the water. Gabriel’s hands land square on my ass and he shoves, and I whip around fast with shock. He raises his brows, all innocence. “What?” he says. “It worked, yes?”
He’s right; I have cleared the surface. I bang my knee and feel a scrape on the bare skin of my thigh but after a moment, I find myself on the other side of the mangrove thicket, staring at a twin lagoon. In this one, the water is almost magenta, and in the center a sandbar rises like an oasis. On it, a dozen flamingos stand folded like origami as they dip their heads into the pool to feed.
“This,” Gabriel says from behind me, “is what I wanted you to see.”
“It’s amazing,” I say. “I’ve never seen water this color.”
“Artemia salina,” Beatriz says. “It’s a crustacean, a little shrimp, and it’s what the flamingos eat that makes them pink. The concentration in the water makes it look so rosy. I learned that in class.” At the mention of her studies, her face changes. The buoyancy of her shoulders seems to evaporate.
If I can’t get off this island to go home, she also can’t get off it to return to school.
She curls her fingers around the edges of her rash guard sleeves, pulling them more firmly down over her arms.
As if the mood is contagious, Gabriel’s face shutters, too. “Mijita,” he says quietly.
Beatriz ignores him. She snaps on her snorkel, dives into the pink pool, and kicks as far away from us as she can, surfacing on the other side of the oasis.
“Don’t take it personally,” I say.
Gabriel sighs and rubs a hand through his wet hair. “I never know the right thing to say.”
“I don’t know if there’s a right thing,” I admit.
“Well, there’s definitely a wrong thing,” Gabriel replies, “and it’s usually what comes out of my mouth.”
“I haven’t seen any new cuts,” I tell him.
“I know she talks to you,” he says, “and those conversations are for you to keep.”
I nod, thinking of what Beatriz told me about her mother, and how that doesn’t feel like a confidence I should break.
Gabriel takes a deep breath, as if he is gathering courage. “But will you tell me if she brings up suicide?”
“Oh my God, of course,” I say in a rush. “But … ?I don’t think that’s why she cuts. I think for her … ?it’s the exact opposite of being suicidal. It’s to remind her that she’s here.”
He looks at me as if he is puzzling through my English. Then he tilts his head. “I’m glad you’re staying,” Gabriel says softly, “even if it is selfish of me.”
I know he is speaking of whatever fragile thread I’ve spun between me and Beatriz, who clearly needs a confidante. But there is more to those words, a shadow crossing my senses. I feel my cheeks heating, and I quickly avert my face toward the flamingos. “What are those?” I ask, pointing to the small gray-and-white mottled birds that hop on the sand between the legs of the flamingos. “Finches?”
If Gabriel notices me trying to change the conversation with the finesse of a wrecking ball, he doesn’t comment. “That’s a mockingbird.”
“Oh. And here I was, feeling Darwinian.” I smile, trying for a joke.
Galápagos is, of course, famous for its finches—and for Charles Darwin. I’d read about him in every tour guide that was packed in my lost suitcase. In 1835, he came to the islands on the HMS Beagle, while just twenty-six and—surprisingly—a creationist who believed that all species were designed by God. Yet in the Galápagos, Darwin began to rethink how life had appeared here, on a spit of volcanic rocks. He’d assumed that the creatures had swum from South America. But then he began to realize that each island was vastly different geographically from the next, that conditions were largely inhospitable, and that new species popped up on different islands. By studying the variations in finches he developed his theory of natural selection: that species change to adapt to their circumstances—and that the adaptations which make life easier are the ones that stick.