Wish You Were Here(46)
She was interrupted by the ring of her phone. Eva narrowed her eyes, warning me to be quiet under penalty of death, as she answered. “Kitomi,” she said warmly. “We were just discussing how much—” Her voice broke off, and her eyebrows shot to her hairline. “Well, yes! Sotheby’s is honored to know you trust us to showcase your painting at auction—” Her voice broke off as she listened to Kitomi speak. “Absolutely,” she said, after a moment. “Not a problem.”
Eva hung up and frowned down at her phone for a moment. “We got the account,” she said.
I hesitated. “Isn’t that … ?a good thing?”
“Kitomi had two conditions. She wants a private auction for couples only,” Eva said. “And she insists that you’re the specialist in charge.”
I was stunned. This was my break; this was the moment I would talk about years later, when I was interviewed by magazines about how I’d advanced in my career. I had a vision of Beyoncé hugging me after she placed the winning bid. Of a corner office, where Rodney and I would close the door at lunchtime and share bowls from the Halal Guys and gossip.
I felt heat creeping up my collar and turned to find Eva staring, as if she was seeing me for the first time.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Before I forget: The Greens called again and left a message at home.
It’s 72 hours old, though, because that’s how long I’ve been at the hospital.
Of course, a shift that long is technically against the rules, but there aren’t rules anymore. It’s Groundhog Day, over and over. We have it down to a routine. There’s me, a junior resident, and four nurses. My job is to put in central lines and arterial lines, to manage a patient’s other comorbidities. I put in chest tubes when they get air around their lungs, caused by the vents. I call the families, who ask for readings they don’t understand on oxygenation, blood pressure, ventilation levels. I hope she’s getting better, they say, but I can’t answer because I know she’s a mile from better. She’s dying. All I hope is that she gets off the vent or ECMO, and that there’s not a cytokine storm that sends her back to square one. The families can’t visit, so they can’t see the patients hooked up to wires and machines. They can’t see with their own eyes how sick they are. To them the patient is someone who was perfectly healthy a week ago, with no chronic illness. They keep hearing on the news that there’s a 99% survival rate; that it’s no worse than the flu.
There’s one patient who’s been haunting me lately. She and her husband came in together; he died and she didn’t. When she was extubated, her adult kids didn’t tell her that her husband was dead. They were too afraid she’d panic and cry and her lungs couldn’t take it. So she made it all the way to rehab thinking that her husband was still in isolation at the hospital. I think about her all the time. How she thought this was temporary, the separation between them. I wonder if she knows, yet, that it’s forever.
Jesus, Diana, come back.
Sometimes I lie in bed at night and think: What was I trying to prove? Why didn’t I turn around and get on that ferry and go back to the airport?
Sometimes I lie in bed and think: What kind of partner was I then, if Finn wasn’t in the forefront of my mind, when I stood on the brink between staying and leaving?
For that matter, what kind of partner am I now, when there are times he is not in the forefront of my mind? When he’s slogging through hell and I’m in a different hemisphere?
My father’s father fought in World War II, and when he came back from it, he was never quite right. He drank a lot and wandered the house in the middle of the night, and when the car backfired once, he dropped to the ground and burst into tears. As a little girl, I was often told that the war did this to him, created an invisible scar he’d never lose. Once, I asked my grandmother what she remembered about the war. She thought for a long moment, and then finally said, It was hard to get nylons.
There’s a part of me that thinks this is exactly what my grandfather would have wanted: to risk death every day so that my grandmother’s life could stay mostly unruffled. But there’s another part of me that recognizes how shallow, how privileged it is, to be the one who’s an ocean away.
These days when I am swimming in pools as clear as gin or hiking green velvet mountains or frying a tortilla on a cast-iron pan in Abuela’s kitchen, there are whole swaths of time when I forget the rest of the world is suffering.
I am not sure if that is a blessing, or if I should be cursed.
The trillizos are three collapsed lava tunnels in the center of the island. Beatriz and I start our hike there before dawn, which means we get to watch the breathtaking artwork of the sunrise as we climb into the highlands. I’ve been on island for just over three weeks now, and it keeps surprising me with its beauty. “How old are you?” Beatriz asks me, just as the last streak of pink becomes a bruise of blue sky.
“I’m going to be thirty on April 19,” I tell her. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen,” Beatriz says. “But emotionally, I’m older.”
That makes me laugh. “You’re a veritable crone.”
We walk a little further and then, lightly, I ask if she’s heard from her friends at school.
Her shoulders tense up. “Can’t check social media when the internet sucks.”