I hold my breath. Is he talking about the two of us? About Beatriz and Ana Maria? About his ex?
As he is speaking, he has shifted his weight, canting his feet for balance on the slick wall. Incrementally, he’s trying to make his way to Beatriz without startling her into doing something rash.
“You’d be better off without me,” Beatriz sobs, the sentence torn from her throat. “Everyone else is.”
Gabriel shakes his head. “You’re not alone, even if you feel like you are. And I don’t want to be alone.” His breath catches. “I can’t lose you, too.”
He stretches out his hand toward her.
Beatriz doesn’t move. “You don’t even know who I really am,” she says, her voice hushed in shame.
Their breathing circles, echoes.
“Yes I do,” Gabriel says. “You’re my baby. I don’t care what else you are … ?or aren’t. That’s the only thing that matters.”
His fingertips reach further through the void.
Beatriz meets him halfway. In the next moment, Gabriel has gathered her into his arms and lashed her tight against him with the ropes. He whispers to her in Spanish; she clings to his shoulders, drawing shuddering breaths.
Slowly, the three of us inch toward the light.
The next few hours pass in a blur. We take Beatriz down to Abuela’s, because Gabriel doesn’t want to leave her alone in the farmhouse while he ferries me back to the apartment. Abuela bursts into tears when she sees Beatriz and starts fussing over her. Beatriz is still weepy and silent and embarrassed, and Gabriel focuses all his attention and energy on her, as he should.
At some point, I slip out of Abuela’s home and walk down to my basement apartment, sitting on the short retaining wall that separates it from the beach. With all the healing that has to happen in that family, I don’t belong there.
But.
I’m starting to wonder where I do belong.
I think about the postcards in Beatriz’s drawer that weren’t sent. The things I wanted Finn to know. The things I will never tell him.
I don’t know how long I sit on the little wall, but the sun staggers lower in the sky and the tide goes out, leaving a long line of treasure on the sand: sea stars and pearled shells and seaweed tangled like the hair of mermaids.
I can sense Gabriel walking up behind me even before he speaks. Space is different when he is in it. Charged, electrical. He stops just short of the spot where I sit, staring at the orange line of the horizon. I turn my chin, acknowledging him. “How is she?”
“Asleep,” he says, and he steps forward. His hair is mussed by the breeze, as if it, too, sighs to see him.
He sits down next to me, one leg drawn up, his arm resting on his knee. “I thought you’d want to know she’s all right,” he says.
“I did,” I tell him. “I do.”
“We’ve been talking,” Gabriel says hesitantly.
“About … ?school?” About Ana Maria.
“About all of it.” He looks at me. “I’m going to stay with her tonight.” A faint blush stripes his cheekbones. “I didn’t want you to think that—”
“I wasn’t expecting you to—”
“It’s not that I don’t—”
We both stop talking. “You’re a good father, Gabriel,” I say quietly. “You do protect the people you love. Don’t second-guess that.”
He takes the compliment awkwardly, his eyes sliding away from mine. “You know, I named her. Luz wanted something from a telenovela she was obsessed with at the time—but I insisted on Beatriz. Maybe I knew what was coming.”
“What do you mean?”
“Beatriz is the one who kept Dante going when he walked through hell. And every time I’ve found myself suffering, my Beatriz is the one who pulls me back.”
This pushes on something so tender and bruised inside me, and instead of examining that reaction, I try to make light of it. “I’m shocked.”
“That I named her Beatriz?”
“That you’ve read The Divine Comedy.”
He smiles faintly. “There’s so much about me you have yet to learn,” he says, but there is a thread of sadness in the words, because we both know I never will.
He stands, blocking my view of the ocean. He holds my face in his palms and kisses my forehead. “Good night, Diana,” Gabriel says, and he leaves me alone with the stars and the surf.
I pull the night around me like a coat. I think of New York City and Finn and my mother. Of commuter sneakers and Sunday brunch at our favorite café when Finn wasn’t working and the blue Tiffany box hidden in the back of his underwear drawer. I think of the rush of relief when I manage to catch the subway car before it pulls out of the station and the taste of cheesecake I craved and bought at three A.M. and the hours I spent on Zillow dreaming of houses in Westchester we could not afford. I think of the smell of chestnuts from street vendors in the winter and asphalt sinking under my heels in the summer. I think of Manhattan—an island full of diverse, determined people hustling toward something better; a populace that doesn’t sleepwalk through their days. But it all feels a lifetime away.