There’s one patient who’s been haunting me lately. She and her husband came in together; he died and she didn’t. When she was extubated, her adult kids didn’t tell her that her husband was dead. They were too afraid she’d panic and cry and her lungs couldn’t take it. So she made it all the way to rehab thinking that her husband was still in isolation at the hospital. I think about her all the time. How she thought this was temporary, the separation between them. I wonder if she knows, yet, that it’s forever.
Jesus, Diana, come back.
Sometimes I lie in bed at night and think: What was I trying to prove? Why didn’t I turn around and get on that ferry and go back to the airport?
Sometimes I lie in bed and think: What kind of partner was I then, if Finn wasn’t in the forefront of my mind, when I stood on the brink between staying and leaving?
For that matter, what kind of partner am I now, when there are times he is not in the forefront of my mind? When he’s slogging through hell and I’m in a different hemisphere?
My father’s father fought in World War II, and when he came back from it, he was never quite right. He drank a lot and wandered the house in the middle of the night, and when the car backfired once, he dropped to the ground and burst into tears. As a little girl, I was often told that the war did this to him, created an invisible scar he’d never lose. Once, I asked my grandmother what she remembered about the war. She thought for a long moment, and then finally said, It was hard to get nylons.
There’s a part of me that thinks this is exactly what my grandfather would have wanted: to risk death every day so that my grandmother’s life could stay mostly unruffled. But there’s another part of me that recognizes how shallow, how privileged it is, to be the one who’s an ocean away.
These days when I am swimming in pools as clear as gin or hiking green velvet mountains or frying a tortilla on a cast-iron pan in Abuela’s kitchen, there are whole swaths of time when I forget the rest of the world is suffering.
I am not sure if that is a blessing, or if I should be cursed.
The trillizos are three collapsed lava tunnels in the center of the island. Beatriz and I start our hike there before dawn, which means we get to watch the breathtaking artwork of the sunrise as we climb into the highlands. I’ve been on island for just over three weeks now, and it keeps surprising me with its beauty. “How old are you?” Beatriz asks me, just as the last streak of pink becomes a bruise of blue sky.
“I’m going to be thirty on April 19,” I tell her. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen,” Beatriz says. “But emotionally, I’m older.”
That makes me laugh. “You’re a veritable crone.”
We walk a little further and then, lightly, I ask if she’s heard from her friends at school.
Her shoulders tense up. “Can’t check social media when the internet sucks.”
“Right,” I muse. “It must be hard.”
Beatriz doesn’t look at me. “The silver lining is that I don’t have to see what people are saying about me.”
I stop walking. “Is that something you usually have to worry about?”
What if her cutting is tied to bullying somehow? I still don’t know much more about Beatriz than I did when I first saw her on the ferry. She guards her secrets like her life depends on them. For a teenager, I suppose it does.
I have been wondering if I should intercede in Beatriz and Gabriel’s relationship. From my vantage point, all I see is misunderstanding. But then I think I have no right to involve myself in someone else’s relationships when my own are a mess.
Finn’s emails are now shorter and more desperate.
For the past two nights, I’ve awakened in the middle of the night, convinced I hear my mother’s voice.
“When was the last time you talked to your mother?” Beatriz asks, as if she’s reached right into my mind.
“Before I came here. I visited her,” I say. “Although I can’t really say it was a conversation. It’s more like she talks at me and I try to keep up.”
“My mother used to send me cards for my birthday, with money in them. But that stopped last year.” Her mouth tightens. “She didn’t want to have me.”
“But she did.”
“When you’re pregnant and seventeen and the guy says he’ll marry you, I guess you do it,” Beatriz muses.
I tuck away this information about Gabriel.
“I think unconditional love is bullshit,” Beatriz says. “There’s always a condition.”