“No, Gabriel,” I say sharply, “because my boyfriend and I do not live in the Dark Ages. Plus, Rodney is … ?well, Rodney. He’s Black, Southern, and gay, or as he puts it, a golden trifecta.” I look carefully at Gabriel as I say the word gay, gauging his reaction. Beatriz’s confidences are still not mine to tell, but I can’t help wondering what his reaction would be if she were brave enough to confide in him. Gabriel, however, doesn’t bat an eye. “Are there a lot of LGBTQ people here?” I ask breezily.
“I don’t know. What people do in private is what they do in private.” He shrugs, a smile tugging at his mouth. “But when I was a tour guide, the gay couples always tipped best.”
I hug my knees to my chest. “How did you become a tour guide?”
I don’t expect him to answer, since he keeps that part of his life—and his subsequent departure from it—close to his chest, but Gabriel shrugs. “When my parents honeymooned on Isabela in the eighties, there were maybe like two hundred residents on island, and they wanted to stay. So they brought Abuela in from the mainland. My father loved it here. People used to call him El Alcalde—the mayor—because he would go on and on about how amazing Isabela is to anyone and everyone who landed in Puerto Villamil. He didn’t have the scientific background to be a park ranger, so he became a tour guide.”
Gabriel looks at me across the fire. “When I was growing up, it was expected that I’d join the family business. I’d been doing it unofficially with him for years. You have to train for seven months to be certified as a guide by the government of Ecuador—studying biology, history, natural history, genetics, languages. Professors come here from all over the world—the University of Vienna, and the University of North Carolina, and the University of Miami—they ask for the help of the guides to continue research for them when they’re off-island. So you know, we might wind up taking pictures of green sea turtles, and sending them back to a scientist so he can track them around the island for his research. We might be asked to document penguin behaviors that seem unique.”
“I was bit by one,” I say, rubbing my arm. “When I first got here.”
“Well, that’s unique.” Gabriel laughs. “They usually are pretty shy around people, but with the quarantine, they seem to crave human interaction a little more. Even if it hurts the humans.” He pokes at the fire with a stick. “There was a time, believe it or not, that I thought I’d be the scientist doing marine biology. Not the tour guide doing the grunt work.”
“What happened?”
“Beatriz,” he says, smiling faintly. “My ex, Luz, got pregnant, when we were seventeen. We got married.”
“So you didn’t become a marine biologist.”
He shakes his head. “Plans change. Shit happens.”
“Beatriz told me her mother … ?left.”
“That’s a polite way of putting it,” Gabriel says. “The truth is, we didn’t stay together because we didn’t belong together. Not even for a baby. I learned the hard way that you shouldn’t stay with someone because of your past together—what matters more is if you want the same things in the future. Luz felt like she was too young to be trapped as a mother, and she was always looking for the escape hatch. I just didn’t think it was going to take the shape of a National Geographic photographer.” He glances at me. “Very different from you and your boyfriend, I’m sure.”
I am glad for the darkness, because he cannot see the flush on my cheeks. Finn and I are the couple that our friends tag #relationshipgoals. Every time Rodney has cried over another breakup, I’ve curled up in Finn’s arms in bed and silently given thanks that of all the people in the world, we found each other. I trust him and he trusts me. It’s steady and stable and I know exactly what to expect: I’ll get my promotion; he’ll get a fellowship. We’ll get married in a vineyard upstate （tasteful, no more than a hundred guests, band not DJ, justice of the peace officiating）; honeymoon on the Amalfi coast; buy a house outside the city during the first year of his fellowship; have our first child during the second year and a sibling two years after that. Honestly, the only point of contention was whether we’d get a Bernese or an English springer spaniel. I had believed that Finn and I were so attuned that even a forced separation like this one wouldn’t shake our rock-solidness. But it’s taken only three weeks for me to feel disconnected; for doubt to grow like weeds, so insidious that it’s hard to see what used to blossom in that bed instead.