Wish You Were Here(47)

“Right,” I muse. “It must be hard.”

Beatriz doesn’t look at me. “The silver lining is that I don’t have to see what people are saying about me.”

I stop walking. “Is that something you usually have to worry about?”

What if her cutting is tied to bullying somehow? I still don’t know much more about Beatriz than I did when I first saw her on the ferry. She guards her secrets like her life depends on them. For a teenager, I suppose it does.

I have been wondering if I should intercede in Beatriz and Gabriel’s relationship. From my vantage point, all I see is misunderstanding. But then I think I have no right to involve myself in someone else’s relationships when my own are a mess.

Finn’s emails are now shorter and more desperate.

For the past two nights, I’ve awakened in the middle of the night, convinced I hear my mother’s voice.

“When was the last time you talked to your mother?” Beatriz asks, as if she’s reached right into my mind.

“Before I came here. I visited her,” I say. “Although I can’t really say it was a conversation. It’s more like she talks at me and I try to keep up.”

“My mother used to send me cards for my birthday, with money in them. But that stopped last year.” Her mouth tightens. “She didn’t want to have me.”

“But she did.”

“When you’re pregnant and seventeen and the guy says he’ll marry you, I guess you do it,” Beatriz muses.

I tuck away this information about Gabriel.

“I think unconditional love is bullshit,” Beatriz says. “There’s always a condition.”

“Not true,” I offer. “My father would have loved me no matter what.” But is that true? I wonder. I adored the same things he did—visual art and painting. If I’d been obsessed with geology or emo rock, would we have clicked the same way? If my mother hadn’t been absent, would he have been as attentive?

“And Finn,” Beatriz says. “Don’t forget about him. How did you know he was the one?”

“I don’t know that,” I bluster. “I’m not married to him.”

“But if he proposed here, weren’t you going to say yes?”

I nod. “I think that I used to believe that love was supposed to feel like a lightning storm—superdramatic, with crashes and thunder and all the hair standing up on the back of your neck. I had boyfriends like that, in college. But Finn … ?he’s the opposite. He’s steady. Like … ?white noise.”

“He puts you to sleep?”

“No. He makes everything … ?easier.” Saying this, I feel a surge of love so fierce for Finn that my knees go weak.

“So he’s the first person you felt that way about?” Beatriz asks, probing.

She isn’t looking at me, but there’s a stripe of heat across her cheekbones, and I realize she isn’t really asking about me. If not for this pandemic, Beatriz would be at school and would likely be confiding in a friend her own age about her own crush.

Then I think of what she said about being flamed on social media. I remember that Gabriel told me Beatriz begged to come back to Isabela.

Suddenly she breaks into a jog, and stops at the edge of a yawning hole that seems to reach to the belly of the earth. It’s about sixty feet wide, with a ladder mounted at the lip, twined with several thick ropes. Ferns and moss grow on the walls, which narrow and narrow to a black hole further down. I peer into the abyss but it looks only dark and endless.

“People rappel to the bottom,” Beatriz says.

I feel the walls of the tunnel pressing on me, and I’m not even inside it. “I am not rappelling to the bottom.”

“Well, you can climb partway,” she says. “Come on.”

She scrambles down the slippery wooden rungs, wrapping the ropes around her arm as a safety measure. I follow her more cautiously. The tunnel narrows around us. The vegetation smells ripe and lush as I concentrate on stepping firmly with my foot down, down, down.

When Beatriz descends into the neck of the tunnel, I lose sight of her. “Beatriz!” I call, and her voice floats up to me.

“Come on, Diana, it’s magic.”

The further down we go, the hotter it gets, as if the tunnel is tapering toward hell itself. There is no more vegetation, just lava rock that is light and porous, and that shimmers in the faint light from above. I keep moving methodically and nearly scream when I feel Beatriz’s hand close over my ankle. “Three more rungs,” she says, “and then the ladder runs out.”

She shifts so that we are clinging to the same bottom rungs, side by side. “Look up,” Beatriz says.

I do, and the sky is a tiny pinprick of hope. When I glance back down and breathe in, it feels like the air from someone else’s mouth. I can’t see at first in the dim muscle of the tunnel, and then all of a sudden I can—just the shine of Beatriz’s pupils. It feels like we’re sharing a heartbeat.

“Remind me why we’re here,” I whisper.

“We’re in the belly of a volcano,” she says. “We could hide here forever.”

For a few moments, I listen to the moan of wind from what must be a hundred feet above. Something wet drips onto my forehead. It is terrifying being here, yes, but it is also almost holy. It’s like crawling back in time. Like preparing to be reborn.