Wish You Were Here(34)



If you define art as something made by the hands of men, something that makes us remember them long after they’re gone, then this wall qualifies. The fact that it is unfinished or broken doesn’t make it any less striking.

When my phone starts buzzing in my pocket, I jump. It has been so long. I pull it out with a cry of surprise and see Finn’s name.

“Oh my God,” I say. “It’s you. It’s really you!”

“Diana! I can’t believe I got through.” His voice is scratchy and pocked by static and so, so dear. Tears spring to my eyes as I struggle to hear him: “Tell me … ?and every … ?you … ?it’s been.”

I’m missing half of what he says, so I curl myself around the phone and experimentally move along the wall hoping for a stronger signal. “Can you hear me?” I say. “Finn?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he responds, and I can hear the relief in his words. “Christ, it’s good to talk to you.”

“I got your emails—”

“I didn’t know if they were going through—”

“The service here is terrible,” I tell him. “I wrote you postcards.”

“Well, nothing’s been delivered yet. I can’t believe there’s no internet there.”

“I know,” I say, but that’s not what I want to talk about, and I don’t know how long this magical, elusive signal will last. “How are you? It sounds—”

“I don’t even have words for it, Di,” he says. “It’s … ?endless.”

“But you’re safe,” I state, as if there is no alternative.

“Who knows,” he says. “I read Guayaquil’s getting slammed. That they’re stacking bodies on the streets.”

At this, my stomach turns. “I haven’t seen anyone sick here,” I tell him. “Everyone wears masks and there’s a curfew.”

“I wish I could say that.” Finn sighs. “All day long it feels like I’m sandbagging against a wave and then I walk outside and realize that it’s a fucking tsunami and we don’t stand a chance.” His voice hitches.

I look around at the curl of clouds in the sky, the sun glittering on the ocean in the distance. A picture postcard. Just a few hundred miles away this virus is killing people so fast that they don’t have room for bodies, but you would never know it from where I stand. I think of the empty shelves of the grocery mart, the people like Gabriel growing their own food in the highlands, the fishermen that have to carry the mail to the mainland, the tourism that dried up overnight. The curse of being on an island is inaccessibility, but maybe that is also its blessing.

Finn’s voice wavers, cutting in and out again. “Pregnant women … ?labor alone … ?ICU, the only time family is allowed … ?gonna die in the next hour.”

“You’re breaking up—Finn—”

“Nothing changes and …”

“Finn?”

“… all dead,” he says, those words suddenly clear and crisp. “Every time I finally get to come home and you aren’t there, it feels like another slap in the face. You don’t know how hard it is being alone right now.”

But I do. “You’re the one who told me to go,” I say quietly.

There is a silence. “Yeah,” Finn answers. “I guess I just assumed … ?you wouldn’t actually listen.”

Then you shouldn’t have said it, I think uncharitably, but my eyes are burning with guilt and frustration and anger. I can’t read your mind.

Which suddenly feels like a much bigger problem, a seed of doubt that sprouts the very moment it’s planted.

“Di—a?” I hear. “Are … ?still …?”

Although I have not budged, I’ve somehow lost the connection. The line goes dead in my hand. I slip the phone into my pocket and trudge back toward the wall to find Beatriz sitting in its shadow, scraping the edge of one pointed piece of basalt against the smooth belly of another.

“Was that your boyfriend?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“Does he miss you?”

I sit down beside her. “Yes,” I say. I watch her create a hashtag on a rock, and color in each alternate square like a chessboard. “What are you doing?”

She slants her gaze my way. “Art,” she says.

I lean my back against the sharp stones of the wall. There are endless ways to leave your mark on the world—cutting, carving, art. Maybe all of them do require payment in the form of a piece of yourself—your flesh, your strength, your soul.

I reach for a rock. I start to carve my name into another loose stone. When I’m finished, I write BEATRIZ on another. Then I stand up and pick at some of the pebbles and sand in the surface of the wall, making space to wedge the name rocks into it. “What are you doing?” Beatriz asks.

I dust my hands off on my thighs. “Art,” I reply.

She scrambles to her feet, following me as I step a distance away. The rocks I’ve carved are pale gray, completely different from the bulk of the dark wall. They are, from back here, unnoticeable. But when you walk closer, you cannot miss them. You just have to take those few steps.

The first time I saw impressionist art, I was with my father at the Brooklyn Museum. He covered my eyes with his hands and guided me up close to Monet’s Houses of Parliament. What do you see? he asked, removing his hands when I was inches from the canvas.

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