The last line of his email is Girl, if I were you, I’d stay in paradise as long as I could.
On my actual birthday a week later, I am invited to Gabriel’s farm. It’s twenty minutes by car into the highlands, and he comes to pick me and Abuela up in a rusty Jeep with no side doors. “You don’t look a day over forty,” he deadpans when he sees me, and when I shove at him he starts laughing. “Women are so sensitive about their age,” he jokes.
As we drive, we see more galapague?os out and about than I have in weeks. At first, when the island closed down, I could walk the beach or hike into the highlands and not see another soul. But now, by the fifth week of lockdown, with no actual cases of Covid on Isabela and no one new arriving to spread it, people have begun to sneak out of their houses and break curfew.
As we wind into the center of the island, the scrub and desert landscape at the shoreline gives way to lush, thick vegetation. The shipments of food and supplies to the island have been extremely limited, and I know that Gabriel isn’t the only person here to rely on family farmland to supplement them during the pandemic. We pass dirty sheep in pens, goats, a lowing cow with an udder as full as the moon. There are banana trees, with green fruit defying gravity to grow upward, and girls squatting in fields pulling weeds. Finally Gabriel turns onto a dusty path that winds toward a small house. Beatriz had led me to believe that it was nothing more than a glorified tent, but only half of it is under construction. Gabriel isn’t building a house as much as he is expanding it.
For Beatriz, I bet.
I’ve been thinking nonstop about her confession to me in the trillizos. I’d said that if Beatriz talked to me about suicide, I’d tell Gabriel—and her recklessness in the tunnel truly worried me. But I couldn’t confess to Gabriel what had happened unless I explained why, and that would mean talking about Ana Maria not returning Beatriz’s affections. That, I know, is not my secret to share. Gabriel doesn’t strike me as the kind of parent who’d be upset if his daughter came out, but then, I do not truly know him. Whatever strides the LGBTQ+ community has made in the United States, they are not universal; moreover, this is a predominantly Catholic country and gay rights aren’t exactly the mainstay of that dogma. I think about Abuela’s house, where painted crosses decorate every bit of wall space. In the absence of church services, suspended because of Covid, she has created a small altar where she prays and lights candles.
Instead, I’ve found ways to see Beatriz every day, to take her emotional temperature, and hope I don’t have to betray her in order to protect her.
Beatriz comes bounding out of the front of the house as Gabriel pulls the emergency brake on the Jeep. “Felicidades!” she says, smiling at me.
“Thanks.”
I realize something is tugging at me and I turn to find a little white goat with brown ears chewing on the hem of my T-shirt. “Ooh,” I say, kneeling down to rub its knobby horns. “Who’s this?”
“I don’t name my food,” Gabriel says, and I gasp.
“You are not eating this sweetheart,” I tell him, “and he has to have a name.”
“Fine.” He grins. “Stew.”
“No.” I fold my arms. “Promise me. Consider it my birthday gift.”
Gabriel laughs. “Only because Stew’s a terrible name for a lady goat. As long as we can milk her, she’s safe. We trade her milk to the neighbor for eggs.”
He helps Abuela up the steps into his house. The livable area is two rooms: one with a small kitchen, a tiny table, two mismatched wooden chairs, and a beanbag chair; the other a bedroom. I don’t see a bathroom, just a little outhouse in the distance. While Gabriel and Abuela stand at the table, unpacking the food she’s brought to cook and talking in Spanish, Beatriz pulls me into the bedroom.
There is a mattress on the floor and a scarred chest of drawers, but there is also a mirror with mosaic glass around it, and a quilt with flowers embroidered on it, and fairy lights strung on a series of nails that have been tacked to the wall. This must have been Gabriel’s room, I realize. I wonder if he transformed it into this little oasis for her, hoping for the best before she came here from school. I wonder where he sleeps now.
“Oh,” I say, pulling several postcards from my tote. “I brought some more.”
“Cool.” Beatriz takes them, setting them in front of the mirror.
Since our day at the trillizos, we haven’t talked about the girl she left behind on Santa Cruz, or if she still feels like cutting. Only once in the past two weeks has she even alluded to what transpired. We were sitting in Puerto Villamil, watching boobies torpedo into the water to catch fish, our legs dangling off the pier, just letting the afternoon settle around us like cotton batting. “Diana?” Beatriz had said, apropos of nothing. “Thanks. For catching me.”