I think about my own father’s death. I was not with him, and it happened too fast, but at the hospital, I was able to see his body. I remember holding his cold hand and not wanting to let it go, because I knew it would be the last time I ever got to touch him. “Did your father …” I start. “Did he ever …” But I can’t seem to finish.
Gabriel shakes his head. “Bodies that drown in the ocean don’t surface,” he says quietly.
“I’m so sorry. What a terrible accident.”
His gaze snaps up. “Accident? It was all my fault.”
Dumbfounded, I stare at him. “How?”
“I was the one who tested the conditions. Clearly I got them wrong—”
“Or they changed—”
“Then I should have been the one to go after the diver,” Gabriel insists. “So my father would still be alive.”
And you wouldn’t, I think.
He turns his head away from me. “I can’t lead tours anymore, not without thinking about how bad I fucked up. I can’t scuba-dive without thinking his body is going to drift in front of me. The reason I’m building the house and farming is because I have to be goddamn exhausted at the end of the day, or I have nightmares about what he must have been thinking in those last few minutes.”
I’m quiet for a moment. “What he was thinking,” I say finally, “is that his son would be safe.”
Gabriel dashes a palm across his eyes, and I pretend not to notice. He stands up, using his weight to pull me to my feet. “We’d better get back,” he says. “The return trip’s not any shorter.”
All around us, fumes rise from little pockets in the ground, as if we stand in a crucible. It is prehistoric and dystopian, but if you look closely, here and there are tiny green shoots and stalks. Something, growing out of nothing.
As we walk back across the fumaroles and the dark yawn of the caldera, Gabriel doesn’t let go of my hand.
An hour later, the sun is skulking lower in the sky and we reach the crotched tree with the black lava rock where Gabriel left behind his heavier pack. We can see the huddled shape of it, propped against a tree, but there’s another shadow as well, and as we get closer, it is clear that it’s a person. I scramble in my pocket for the mask I haven’t worn when it was just me and Gabriel, only to realize that it is Beatriz. She breaks into a run as soon as she sees us.
“You need to come now,” she says, and she pushes a piece of paper into my hand.
It is an email, printed out on stationery from the hotel. For immediate delivery to guest Diana O’Toole, it reads. From: The Greens. We have been trying to reach you. Please contact ASAP. Your mother is dying.
On the way back to Gabriel’s house, we sprint—and yet somehow, the distance seems even further than it did this morning. Distantly I hear Beatriz explain to Gabriel how the message arrived—something about Elena and an electrical short that caused a small fire in the hotel’s utility room; how when she went to the hotel with her cousin so he could rewire and fix the circuits, and to make sure everything was in working order, she had powered up the front office computers and seen a series of emails, each more urgent, trying to get in touch with me. I hear Gabriel tell Beatriz to call Elena, to have the Wi-Fi up and running by the time we get there.
Still, it’s two hours before we drop Beatriz at the farm and continue in Gabriel’s rusty Jeep into Puerto Villamil, to the hotel. This time, there is no flirting from Elena. She meets us at the door, her eyes dark and concerned.
My phone buzzes, automatically connecting to the network. I ignore the flood of emails and texts bursting through this tiny crack in the dam of Isabela’s radio silence. I pull up FaceTime, the last call I made to the memory care facility, and dial.
A different nurse answers this time, one I don’t recognize. She is wearing a mask and a face shield. “I’m Hannah O’Toole’s daughter,” I say. All the breath seizes in my throat. “Is my mother …？”
Those eyes soften. “I’ll bring you in to her,” the nurse says.
There’s a lurching spin of scenery as whatever device she is holding is moved in transit. I close my eyes against a dizzy wave, expecting to see the familiar confines of my mother’s apartment, but instead, the nurse’s face appears again. “You should be prepared—she’s decompensated very fast. She has pneumonia, brought on by Covid,” the nurse says. “But at this point it’s not just her lungs that are failing. Her kidneys, her heart …”