“I don’t remember getting sick,” I begin.
“You woke up in the middle of the night with a headache,” Finn says. “By the next morning, you had a fever of a hundred and three. Your breaths were so shallow, you were panting. I called an ambulance to bring you here.”
“What about the Galápagos?” I ask.
“What about it?” he says. “We decided not to go.”
Those five words wipe clean all the noise in my mind. Did we?
“Your pulse ox was seventy-six, and you tested positive,” Finn continues. “They took you to a Covid ward. I couldn’t believe it. You were young and healthy and you weren’t supposed to be the kind of person who could get this virus. But the biggest thing we know about Covid is that we don’t know anything about it. I was reading everything I could, trying to get you into trials for drugs, trying to figure out how even six liters of air pushed through a cannula to you couldn’t raise your pulse ox. And meanwhile, all around me, I had patients on vents who weren’t ever coming off them.” He swallows, and I realize that he’s crying. “We couldn’t keep you lucid,” Finn says. “They called me to tell me they needed to intubate you now. So I gave them the go-ahead.”
My heart hurts, thinking of how hard that must have been.
“I’d sneak in whenever I could, sit by the bed, and talk to you—about my patients, and about how fucking scary this virus is, and how I feel like we’re all just shooting in the dark and hoping to hit a target.”
Those sporadic emails from him, then, weren’t really emails.
“I bullied your medical team into proning you—putting you on your belly, even on the vent. I read where a doctor on the West Coast had success with Covid patients by doing that. They thought I was crazy but now some of the pulmonologists are doing it, because what the hell, it worked for you.”
I think about all the time I spent at Concha de Perla, floating facedown with a mask and snorkel, peeking into a world undersea.
“I’d be working—rounding on my own patients, whatever—and I’d hear the call for codes, and every time, every goddamn time, I would freeze and think, Please God, not her room.”
“I … ?I’ve been here ten days?” I ask.
“It felt like a year to me. We tried to bring you out of sedation a few times, but you weren’t having it.”
Suddenly I remember the vivid dream I had when I was in the Galápagos: Finn, not costumed as I had assumed, but wearing an N95 mask like everyone else here. Telling me to stay awake, so he could save me. The woman I pictured beside him, I realize now, was Syreta.
There is one overlapping part of both realities, I realize. “I almost died,” I whisper.
Finn stares at me for a long moment, his throat working. “It was your second day on the vent. Your pulmonologist told me that he didn’t think you’d last the night. The vent was maxing out and your O-two levels were shit. Your blood pressure bottomed out, and they couldn’t stabilize you.” He draws a shuddering breath. “He told me I should say goodbye.”
I watch him rub a hand over his face, reliving something I do not even recall.
“So I sat with you … ?held your hand,” Finn says softly. “Told you I love you.”
One tear streaks down my cheek, catching in the shell of my ear.
“But you fought,” he says. “You stabilized. And you turned the corner. Honestly, it’s a miracle, Diana.”
I feel my throat get thick. “My mother …”
“I’m taking care of everything. Your only job is to rest. To get better.” He swallows. “To come home.”
Suddenly there is a code blue over the loudspeaker and Finn frowns. “I have to go,” he says. “I love you.” He runs down the hall, presumably to the room where one of his patients is tanking. Someone who is not as lucky as me.
Betty takes the phone away from where she’s been holding it to my ear with her gloved hand. She puts it on the nightstand and a moment later presses a tissue gently to the corner of each of my eyes, wiping away the tears that won’t stop coming. “Honey, you’re through the worst of it,” she says. “You have a second chance.”
She thinks I’m crying because I nearly lost my life.
You don’t understand, I want to tell her. I did.
Everyone keeps telling me I have to focus on getting my body back in shape, when all I want to do is untangle the thicket of my mind. I want to talk about Gabriel and Beatriz and the Galápagos but （first） there is no one to listen to me—the nurses spend quick, efficient moments in my room changing me and giving meds before they step out and have to sanitize and strip off their gear—and （second） no one believes me.