Wish You Were Here(80)
I’ve highlighted some of the sights that I wanted to make sure Finn and I saw:
The path to Concha de Perla leads to a protected bay with good snorkeling.
After passing several small lagoons with flamingos, the turnoff to the Tortoise Breeding Center is marked.
A two-hour walk from Playa de Amor will take you to El Muro de las Lágrimas—the Wall of Tears.
Around the half-submerged lava tunnels at Los Túneles, the water is sparkling and clear and home to a variety of marine species.
One after another, I read about the places I visited while I was unconscious and watch them blossom into fully dimensional memories full of sound and color and scent.
I put the book on the nightstand and pull Finn front and center in my mind. I think about how his hair felt, sifting through my fingers. How he smelled of pine and carbolic soap, like he always does. How his kiss wasn’t a discovery, but the reassurance that I had been on this journey before and knew where to go, what to do, what felt right.
That night, I don’t let myself fall asleep.
Rodney is angry at me because we are supposed to be watching reruns of Survivor together on our phones and live-texting our predictions about who will be voted off the island, but I keep drifting off, trying to catch up on the rest I’m not getting.
Hello? he texts. Are you dead?
…
Too soon?
The last ding wakes me up, and I read his messages. Very funny, I type.
Imma find a new bff in NOLA.
Rodney is moving to his sister’s house in Louisiana, because he can’t afford his rent in the city. That sobers me. We are in lockdown, I know, and I’m likely the last person anyone wants to be in close contact with, but the thought of not seeing Rodney again before he moves makes something shift in my chest.
Sorry. I won’t fall asleep again. I swear.
On my tiny phone screen I watch a contestant who is a preschool teacher climb into a barrel to be maneuvered through an obstacle course to win some peanut butter.
#claustrophobia, Rodney types. Remember when you got locked in that vault at work and lost it?
I take this to mean I’ve been forgiven for napping.
I didn’t lose it, I just freaked out a little, I lie. Plus I’ve crawled down a tunnel that was as wide as my hips.
Like hell you did. Proof?
I hesitate. On Isabela, I write.
For a moment I watch those three dots appear and disappear while Rodney figures out what to say.
Suddenly the Survivor screen freezes and a FaceTime call pops up. I answer it and Rodney’s face swims into view. “I don’t know if it counts as conquering your fears when you do it unconscious,” he says.
“Definitely a blurry line.”
He regards me for a long moment. “You wanna talk about it?”
“It’s a place called the trillizos. They’re like these gopher holes into the middle of the earth. I guess tourists rappel down them.”
He shudders. “Give me a beach and a frozen marg.”
“Beatriz brought me there the first time, and the second time, she ran away and I crawled down to try to save her.”
“How come she needed saving?”
“She kind of found me in bed with her father and it didn’t go well.”
Rodney hoots with laughter. “Diana, only you could hallucinate yourself into an ethical mess.”
At that word—hallucinate—something in me shutters. Rodney notices, and his eyes soften. “Look, I shouldn’t have said that. Trauma is trauma. Just because someone else hasn’t experienced it themselves doesn’t make it any less real to you.”
Maggie has talked to me about other patients who have come off ECMO or the vent who suffer from PTSD. I have some of the same symptoms—that fear of falling asleep, the panic attacks when I start to cough, the obsessive checking of my pulse ox numbers. But I can still feel what it was like to have water fill my lungs as I drowned, too. In the middle of the night, my heart pounds in my throat and I’m right back in the tunnel I shimmied down looking for Beatriz. I am having flashbacks of experiences everyone here tells me I never had, and now—more than a week after being weaned off any sedation drugs—they still haven’t gone away.
“Maybe I shouldn’t talk about it,” I mull out loud. “Maybe that’s only going to make it harder in the long run. It’s just …” I shake my head. “Remember that guy who came into Sotheby’s convinced that he had a Picasso and it wasn’t even a fake or a forgery—it was a flyer for a shitty band, and he was completely delusional?”
Rodney nods.
“I get it now. To him, that was a goddamn Picasso.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know why it hasn’t just … ?gone away. Or why I can’t wrap my head around it being a detailed, incredibly weird dream.”
“Maybe because you don’t want it to be?”
“If the reality is that I nearly died, then sure. But it’s more than that. These people were so real.”
Rodney shrugs. “For a smart girl, you’re a dumbass, Di. You’re holding a phone in your hand, aren’t you? Tell me you’ve Googled them.”
I blink at him. “Oh my God.”
“Yes, my child?”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you still can’t do the word scramble puzzles that OT gives you, and your brain isn’t firing right.”