Wish You Were Here(79)

“I think I’m in heaven,” I tell her.

She laughs. “No, we’re happy you didn’t wind up there.” Her fingers fly over my scalp in an intricate pattern. “I do French braids for my girls all the time.”

“I never learned how.”

“No?” Vee asks. “Your mama never taught you?”

I feel her weave and pull and twist. “She wasn’t around much,” I reply.

And now that she isn’t far-flung and hightailing it all over the world, I haven’t been around her much, either.

That could change.

I have always believed we are the architects of our own fates—it’s why I so carefully planned my career steps and why Finn and I dreamed in tandem about our future. It is also why I could blame my mother for choosing her career over me—because it was just that: a decision she made. I have never really subscribed to the mantra that things happen for a reason. Until, maybe, now.

If I was so sick that it nearly cost me my life … ?if I was one of only a handful to survive ventilation … ?if I returned to this world, instead of the one embedded in my mind … ?I would like to believe that there is an explanation. That it isn’t random or the luck of the draw. That this was a lesson for me, or a wake-up call.

Maybe it is about my mother.

Vee ties the braid off with a rubber band. “There,” she says. “You’re like a whole new person.”

Not yet.

But I could be.

She pulls over a wheelchair and sets the brakes and then positions Alice nearby so that I can do the stand-pivot-transfer move to seat myself. “I believe I promised you a surprise,” Vee says.

It’s probably a trip down to the multipurpose gym to do more physical therapy. “Do we have to?” I ask.

“Trust me,” Vee says, and she opens the door to my room.

She gives me a surgical mask and pushes me down the hallway, past patients who are carefully moving behind their own walkers or with four-footed canes. A couple of the nurses smile at me and comment on my appearance, which makes me wonder how terrible I looked before. Instead of heading into the elevator, though, Vee turns right at the end of the hallway and hits an automatic door button with her elbow, so that a glass panel slides open. She rolls me into a tiny courtyard that is walled in by four sides of the hospital building. It’s unseasonably warm, and the sun falls in an amber slant. “Fresh air?” I gasp, tilting my face, and that’s when I see him.

Finn stands at the far end of the narrow courtyard, holding a little bouquet of tulips.

“I think you can take it from here, Doc,” Vee says, and she winks at me and slips back inside.

Finn stares at me, and then unloops his mask so that it dangles from one wrist. The bridge of his nose is still dark and bruised, but my God. To see that smile.

I cry out, frustrated by my inability to get to him, and as if I’ve willed it, Finn is at my side a second later. He kneels, his arms coming around me. “Look who tested negative,” he says.

I unhook my mask and set it in my lap. “You read my labs?”

He grins. “Professional perks.”

Finn rests his forehead against mine. He closes his eyes. I know that this moment is too big for him, too. To hold him, to be held. It is as if I’ve been trapped underneath ice, and suddenly, I’m back in a place where there is sound and warmth and sun.

“Hi,” Finn whispers against my lips.

“Hi.”

He closes the distance between us, feathering his mouth against mine, before pulling away with a stripe of pink on his cheeks, as if he knows I’m still recovering but couldn’t help himself.

I wait for it, that last click of the lock, that satisfying final puzzle piece, that familiar sigh of reaching home.

This is where you belong, I tell myself.

“You were so lucky,” Finn says thickly, as if he’s struggling to push away the shadows of what could have happened.

“I am so lucky,” I correct. I grab both sides of his face and press my lips to his. I show him that this is what I want, what I’ve always wanted. I consume him, to convince myself.

I steal his breath for safekeeping.

Since we aren’t supposed to have visitors and Finn has bribed his way in with donuts for the staff, I get to spend only an hour with him in the courtyard. By then, it’s getting colder, and I’m getting tired. He helps me hook my mask over my ears again, wheels me back to my room, and tucks me into bed. “I wish I could stay with you,” he murmurs.

“I wish I could go with you,” I tell him.

He kisses my forehead. “Soon,” he promises.

He leaves me with a reusable grocery bag full of books—books that I asked him to bring to the front desk for me, before I knew he would be able to deliver them in person. They are the guidebooks on Ecuador and the Galápagos that I had used to plan our trip.

Obviously, they are not in a missing suitcase somewhere. They’ve been on the kitchen counter all along, with our passports and our e-ticket confirmations, ready to pack.

I take a deep breath and open one.

Isabela is the largest island in the Galápagos and much of it is unreachable, due to lava flows and thorny brush and rocky, inhospitable shores.

Puerto Villamil remains relatively untouched by visitors; it’s a tiny hamlet of sandy roads and homes bordered by cacti on one side and a gorgeous beach on the other.