“What you saw … ?with me and your father …” I shake my head. “You know I have someone waiting at home for me. It shouldn’t have happened. I’m sorry.”
Beatriz rubs her thumbnail along a groove in the wood. “I’m sorry, too. About not sending your postcards.”
I’ve thought a lot about what might have made her lie to me about mailing them. I don’t think it was malicious … ?more like she wanted to keep me to herself, once she’d made me a confidante. All the more reason, of course, that she would have been shocked to find me in bed with her father.
She trusted me. Just like Finn had trusted me.
Suddenly I feel like I’m going to be sick. Because as much as I don’t want to face Gabriel to discuss what happened between us, I want even less to confess to Finn.
Beatriz looks at me. “I talked to my dad about Ana Maria.”
“How’d that go?”
“Not as bad as I made it out in my head to be,” she says ruefully.
“The mind is an amazing thing,” I reply.
She considers this. “Well, it’s not like I didn’t have a good reason to worry,” she adds. “There are a lot of people in the world who’d hate me because I … ?like girls. But my father isn’t one of them.” Beatriz ducks her chin. “I kind of feel bad for Ana Maria. She doesn’t have parents like him, so she has to pretend all the time. Even to herself.”
I don’t know what to say to her. She’s right. The world can be a fucked-up place, and I suppose you’re never too young to learn that.
“I’m not going to go back to school,” Beatriz tells me. “My father said he’ll let me do online courses here. But I had to promise to talk to a therapist, in return. We Zoomed for the first time, yesterday.” She grimaces. “Something else that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”
“Online school?” I repeat. “And Zoom?”
“My dad paid Elena to open the stupid hotel and turn on the Wi-Fi so I could get a decent signal,” Beatriz explains.
I raise an eyebrow. “What’s he paying her with?”
Beatriz cracks a smile, and then I do, too, and we both laugh. I put my arm around her, and she lays her head on my shoulder. We watch a sea lion playing in the distance.
“You know,” Beatriz says, “you could stay. With us.”
I feel myself soften against her. “I have to go back to real life sometime.”
She pulls away, a wistful expression on her face. “For a while,” she says, “didn’t this feel real?”
Dear Finn,
It’s possible you won’t get this postcard until I come home and hand it to you myself. But there are things I need to say, and it can’t wait.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the things we do that are simply unforgivable. Like me not being with my mother when she died, or my mother not being around when I was growing up. Leaving you alone during a pandemic. You encouraging me to go.
I’ve thought a lot about that last one. When you told me you were trying to keep me safe … ?you might just have been convincing yourself it was the smartest course of action. Did you really not think I could manage to stay healthy? Did you actually believe that when the world is falling to pieces, it’s better to be apart from the person you love, instead of together?
I am overthinking this, of course, but these days I have a lot of time to think. And I can’t even blame you. I’ve said and done things, too, that I shouldn’t have.
I know everyone makes mistakes—but until recently I have held everyone to a standard where making mistakes is a weakness. Me included—I haven’t given myself the grace to screw up, to do better next time. It is exhausting, trying to never step off the path, worrying that if I do, I’ll never get back on track.
So here is what I’ve learned: if, in hindsight, you realize you’ve messed up—if you have done the unforgivable—that does not mean that the terrible thing wasn’t meant to happen. Sure, we may wish otherwise, but when things don’t happen according to plan, it may be because the plan was faulty. I’m not explaining this well. For example, take my missing suitcase: I wonder if the person who found it needed clothes more than I did. I wonder how Beatriz would have fared if I had never come to Isabela. I imagine Kitomi having her painting for company all these weeks, instead of it being crated up in a warehouse. I picture all the people you’ve saved at the hospital and the ones you couldn’t, who you still walked with all the way to the edge of death. And that’s when I realize: Maybe things didn’t get fucked up. Maybe I have been wrong all along, and this is where I was always meant to be.