Wish You Were Here(93)

By the time we go to bed that night, Finn has maneuvered the dresser back into position so that the lagoon I’ve drawn is flush against the wall, hidden away. I don’t mind. I like knowing there is a side to it that nobody would ever guess is there.

Finn, coming off a forty-hour shift at the hospital, is asleep nearly as soon as his head hits the pillow. He clutches me against him the way a child holds tight to a stuffed animal, a talisman to keep the monsters away from them both.

The first night Finn and I slept together, as he trailed his hands over my skin, he told me that you can never really touch anything, because everything is made of atoms, and atoms have electrons inside them, which have a negative charge. Particles repel other particles that have a similar charge. This means when you lie down in bed, the electrons that make up your body push away the electrons that make up the mattress. You’re actually floating an infinitesimal distance above it.

I had stroked my hand down the center of his chest. So you’re hallucinating this feeling? I said.

No, he replied, catching my hand and kissing it. Or so I felt. It’s our brains working overtime. The nerve cells get a message that some foreign electrons got close enough in space and time to repel our personal electromagnetic field. Our brains tell us that’s the sensation of touch.

You’re saying this is all make-believe? I asked, rolling on top of him. This is why I shouldn’t date a scientist.

He held my hips in his hands. We’re all in our own little worlds.

Come visit mine, I had said, and I let him slide inside.

Now, I feel Finn’s heat surrounding me and the rough of his skin pressed to mine and I close my eyes. Even wedged against him, I imagine that invisible seam between us.

My throat is on fire and there is an anvil on my chest. I feel hands on me, tugging and rolling and smacking me hard between the shoulder blades. My eyes are crusted and stinging and the pressure under my ribs is unbearable. Breathe, I command myself, but the mandate dies in a vacuum.

Then suddenly the heel of a hand presses on my forehead and my nose is pinched shut and my mouth is covered. A gust of heat inflates me like a balloon. I use all my strength to push away, to roll to the side, and the dam bursts. I cough and vomit fluid that burns, that cramps my belly and my sides. I cough and cough and finally gasp in the sweetest, cleanest stream of air.

I fall back, spent, becoming aware of other sensations: the rasp of sand on my skin and the bite of stones, blood coursing from a cut on my lip, the weight of the sun on my brow. A strand of hair is caught across my face and I don’t have the energy to brush it away.

Suddenly it’s gone, and the bright light shining in my eyes is, too. A shadow spreads over me like a protective wing.

Diana.

I force my eyes open and there is Gabriel, dripping wet, leaning over me. His hands frame my face, and when he smiles, it pulls at me, like we have been sewn together with invisible thread.

Everything hurts and he is the sun I shouldn’t stare into but cannot turn away from. “Dios mío,” he says. “I thought I lost you.”

Coffee. I can smell it. I burrow deeper into the covers and then I feel a warm hand on my shoulder. A kiss on the back of my neck.

I turn, a smile lighting me up from tip to toe.

I push myself up against the pillows. Finn hands me the mug and I cup my hands around the ceramic, feeling its heat and its solidity.

Then, to my shock and his, I burst into tears.





FOURTEEN


“What did you tell Finn?” Rodney asks me, when we video-chat two days later.

“The truth,” I say. “Kind of.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Girl.”

“I said that I had a dream and I thought I wasn’t going to wake up.”

“Hm,” Rodney says. “That’s like when you bought a vibrator and said it was for neck massages.”

“First, you bought me the vibrator for my birthday because you’re an asshole. Second, what was I supposed to say when Finn found it? ‘Thought you might like a little help’?”

I watch as Rodney’s adorable little niece, Chiara, toddles up to him with a baby-size plastic cup. “You sit!” she orders, pointing to the floor.

“Okay, baby,” Rodney says, plopping cross-legged onto the carpet. “I swear to Jesus, if I have to have one more tea party I’m gonna lose my shit.”

Chiara starts lining up stuffed animals and dolls around Rodney. “The thing is, I was trying,” I tell him. “I did what Dr. DeSantos said. I started making routines and sticking to them. And since I’m stuck here all day in an apartment, I now clean and cook, too. I have dinner on the table for Finn every time he comes home.”

“Wow, so you single-handedly set back womyn’s rights by like fifty years? You must be so proud.”

“The only thing I did different that day was paint from memory. A little swimming hole that Gabriel and Beatriz took me to. I’ve been out of rehab for a couple of weeks, Rodney, and I haven’t dreamed my way back there until now.” I hesitate. “I tried. I’d lie in bed and hold on to an image in my head and hope I could still hang on to it after I was asleep, but it never worked.”

“Alternative thought,” Rodney suggests. “Gabriel’s been trying this whole time to break through to you. Kind of like the way Finn was, when he sat next to you at the hospital and talked to you while you were unconscious.”