Wish You Were Here (19 page)

I am uncomfortably aware that the nurse is holding up the iPad or phone and waiting for me to speak. But what am I supposed to say to a woman who doesn’t remember me now, and actively forgot about me in the past?

When she reappeared in my life, already in the throes of dementia, I convinced myself that putting my mother in a care facility was more compassionate than any consideration she’d ever given
me
. She couldn’t move into my tiny apartment, nor would she have wanted to, when we were little more than strangers. Instead, I had figured out a way to use her own work to fund her living expenses; I had done the research and found the best memory care facility; I had gotten her settled and had patted myself on the back for my good deeds. I was so busy being self-congratulatory for being more of a daughter to her than she was a mother to me that I failed to see I had really just underscored the distance between us. I hadn’t used the time to get to know her better, or to become someone she trusted. I had protected myself from being disappointed again by not cultivating our relationship.

Just like Beatriz, I think.

I clear my throat. “Mom,” I say. “It’s me, Diana.” I hesitate and then add, “Your daughter.”

I wait, but there is absolutely no indication she can hear me.

“I’m sorry I’m not there…”

Am I?

“I just want you to know…”

I swallow down the hurt that roars inside me, the wash of memories. I see my father hanging a giant map on the wall of my bedroom, helping me press thumbtacks into each of the countries where my mother was when she wasn’t with us. I think of how, when her returns were inevitably delayed, he would distract me by letting me pick a color and then he’d cook entire meals in that monochrome. The heat of my blush at age thirteen when I had to explain to my father that I’d gotten my period. Scratchy phone connections where I pretended my mother was saying something other than
You know I’d be there for your birthday/recital/Christmas if I could.
Nights I’d lie in bed, ashamed for wanting her to just be my mother, when what she was doing was so much more important.

Feeling forgotten.

And in that second, staring through a screen at someone I never knew, I cannot trust myself to speak, because I’m afraid of what I might actually say.

You weren’t there for me when it counted, either.

Quid pro quo.

Just then, the connection dies.

Elena tries rebooting the modem three times. One of those times, the video call is picked up, but the image freezes immediately and goes black. It is when Gabriel and I climb back into his Jeep and we are driving down the main street of Puerto Villamil with its tiny sliver of cell service that the text comes in.

Your mother passed tonight at 6:35. Our deepest condolences for your loss.

Gabriel glances toward me. “Is that—”

I nod.

“Can I do anything?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I just want to go home,” I tell him.

He walks me to the door of the apartment, and I can see he is trying to find the words to ask if he should stay. Before he can, though, I thank him and tell him I just want to lie down. I wait until I hear his footsteps on the ceiling above, and I imagine him telling Abuela and Beatriz that my mother has died.

I hold my breath, waiting for the words to beat through my blood.

I pick up my phone and stare at the text from The Greens, and then swipe my thumb to delete it.

That’s how easy it is to remove someone from your life.

I realize, even as I think it, that this is not necessarily true.

This is nothing like when I lost my father. Back then, it felt like a rip in the fabric of my world, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t hold the edges together. Even now, four years later, when I am going about my day, sometimes I brush up against that seam and it hurts like hell.

I find a bottle of caña in the cupboard—Gabriel gave me my own supply after our campout, along with a box full of fresh vegetables for meals this week. Since I don’t have a shot glass, I pour a little into a juice cup, and then—shrugging—fill it to the top. I take a healthy swig, letting the fire run through me.

Right now, I just want to get fucking drunk.

I peel off my clothes, the ones in which I had hiked to the volcano (was that
today
?) and run the shower. Standing in the stream of water, needles pelting at my skin, I say the word out loud:
orphan
. I am nobody’s child now. I’m an isolated island, just like the one I’m stuck on.

There are logistics that will have to be sorted out: burial, funeral, liquidating her apartment at the facility. Right now even thinking about it is exhausting.

I pull on clean underwear and one of Gabriel’s old T-shirts, which hangs down to my thighs. I braid my hair to get it out of my face. Then I sit down at the table with the bottle of caña and pour my second full glass.

“Well, Mom,” I say, tasting the bitterness of that title. “Here’s to you.” I take another gulp of the liquor.

By tomorrow, the media worldwide will be reporting on her death. The obituaries will be retrospectives of her career—from her first embedding in a war zone to the Pulitzer she won in 2008 for photos of a street demonstration in Myanmar that turned violent.

The award ceremony for that was held at a swanky luncheon in New York City in late May. My mother attended. My father did not.

He was in the bleachers at my high school graduation, cheering as I crossed the stage to get my diploma.

I put my head down on my crossed forearms and sift through my mind for one pure pearl of a memory of my mother. Surely there’s one.

I discard one after another as they start off positive—a work trip I tagged along for; an image of her opening a Mother’s Day gift I’d made in preschool; a moment where she stood in front of my canvas at a student exhibition and canted her head, absorbing it. But each of those recollections devolves quickly, pricked by a thorn of self-interest: a sightseeing promise broken when something came up; a phone call from her agent that interrupted the gift giving; a blunt and brutal criticism of proportion in my painting, instead of a crumb of praise.

Did you really hate me that much?
I wonder.

But I already know the answer:
No
. To hate someone, you’d have to consider them worthy of notice.

Then something drips into my consciousness.

I am little, and my mother is putting film into her camera. It is a magical black box and I know I am not supposed to touch it, just like I’m not supposed to go into her darkroom, with its nightmare glow and chemical scent. She balances the little machine on her knees and gently winds the slippery film until the teeth catch. It makes soft clicking noises.

Do you want to help?
she asks.

My hands are tiny and clumsy, so she covers my fingers with her own, to circle the little lever until the film is taut. She closes the body of the camera, then lifts it and focuses on my face. She snaps a picture.

Here,
she says.
You try.

She helps me lift it and positions my finger on the shutter. I’ve seen her do it a thousand times. Except I don’t know to frame the shot through the viewfinder. I don’t really know what to look at, at all.

My mother is laughing as I push down on the shutter so hard it takes a flurry of photos, the sound like a pounding heart.

It occurs to me that I never saw those images. For all I know she developed them and got a crazy collage of blurry wall and ceiling and rug. Maybe I didn’t capture her at all.

But maybe that doesn’t really matter. For one second, it
had
been my turn.

New memories are sharp, and I wait for this one to draw blood. But…nothing happens. If anything it’s even more depressing to be sitting here half a world away, clinging to five seconds of motherhood, and wishing there had been more.

“Diana?”

I lift my head up from the table to find Gabriel standing in front of me. I blink at him as he turns on the light. I hadn’t even noticed that it had gotten dark.

“I was headed back to the house,” he says, “but wanted to see how you were.”

“Still sober, that’s how I am.” I push the bottle across the table. “Join me.” When he doesn’t at first, I refill my glass. “I suppose you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t get wasted.”

Gabriel takes a juice glass out of the cabinet and pours his own shot. He sits down across from me. “If ever there was a time to get wasted, it’s when you’re toasting someone you’ve loved and lost. I’m so sorry, Diana.”

“I’m not,” I whisper.

His gaze flies to mine.

“There,” I say. “Now you know my terrible secret. I’m an awful, broken person. My mother died and I feel…nothing.” I clink my glass to his. “
That
is why I’m drinking.”

I gulp the alcohol, but it goes down wrong. Coughing and sputtering, I fold forward in the chair, trying—and failing—to catch my breath. It is like aspirating fire.

When I start to see stars at the edges of my vision, I feel a hand on the flat of my back, moving in circles. “Breathe,” Gabriel soothes. “Easy.”

My throat is burning and my eyes are streaming and I don’t know if it’s because I was choking or because I’m crying, and I’m not sure it matters.

Gabriel is crouched down next to me. He hands me a bandanna from his pocket so that I can wipe my face, but the tears don’t stop. A moment later, with a soft curse, he wraps his arms around me. I sob into the curve of his neck.

I don’t know when the air starts moving in and out of my lungs again, or when I stop crying. But I start noticing the rhythmic sweep of Gabriel’s hand from the crown of my head to the tail of my braid. His lips against my temple. His breath falling in time to mine.

“You’re not broken,” Gabriel says. “You can feel.”

When he kisses me, it feels like the most natural thing in the world. My fingers push through his hair as I fight to get closer. I’m struggling for breath again, but now I want to be.

Gabriel is still kneeling beside me. In one motion he picks me up and sets me on top of the table, standing between my legs. “I’m so glad I fixed this damn thing,” he murmurs against my lips, and we both start to laugh. My hands slide up his forearms to his shoulders and my ankles hook behind his knees. He kisses like he is pouring himself into me. Like this is his last moment on earth, and he needs to leave his mark.

His palms move from my knees to my thighs, bunching the soft T-shirt. The whole time, we kiss. We kiss. When his fingers reach the elastic of my underwear, he stops and pulls back. He looks at me, his eyes so dark that I cannot see how far I’ve fallen. I nod, and he drags the T-shirt over my head. I feel his teeth scrape against my throat, against the chain of the miraculous medal, and then he paints words onto me with his tongue, moving between my breasts, down my belly, lower.
“Pienso en ti todo el tiempo,”
he says, hiking me to the edge of the table before kneeling again on the floor. His mouth is wet and hot through cotton. He feasts.

I am a lightning storm, gathering energy. I pull on Gabriel’s hair, dragging him up, affixing myself to him like a second skin. The room spins as he picks me up and carries me into the bedroom, following me down onto the mattress in a tangle of limbs. He immediately rolls to his side so I don’t bear his weight, and without him covering me I shiver beneath the ceiling fan. My hair has unraveled; he pushes it back from my face and waits. “Yes?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say, and this time I crawl on top, pushing at Gabriel’s clothes until they are gone; until I can sink onto him and into him and lose myself.

It isn’t until afterward, when he has fallen asleep holding me tight, that I think maybe I’ve been found.

When I wake up, Gabriel is staring at me. I feel his hand flex on my shoulder, as if I am sand that might slip out of his grasp.

My head hurts and my mouth is dry but I know I cannot blame last night on the caña. I went into this with my mind clear, even if my heart was hurting.

Now, it’s an anchor sinking in me.

Just one more second,
I think.

I flatten my palm against Gabriel’s warm chest, and I open my mouth to speak.

“Don’t,” he begs. “Not yet.”

Because we both know what’s coming. The slow untangling, the extraction. The excuses and the apologies and the veneer of friendship we will slap over this and never peek beneath.

He kisses me so sweetly, like it is a song in a different language. Even after he pulls back, I am still humming it. “Before you say anything,” he begins.

But he doesn’t finish. Because neither of us has heard the knock or the door opening, but we cannot miss the sound of breaking glass and china as Beatriz finds us knotted together, drops the breakfast she’s kindly made me, and runs away.

By the time we have sorted out our clothes and hurried up to Abuela’s, Beatriz is gone.

By unspoken agreement, I climb into Gabriel’s Jeep with him. He is silent as he drives through town, scanning the empty streets for her. At the dock, he reverses direction, and heads for the highlands. “She could be back at the farm,” he says, and I nod, because thinking of the alternative is too terrifying.

But I know that, like me, he saw the look on Beatriz’s face. It wasn’t just embarrassment at finding us. It was…betrayal. It was the expression of someone who realized she was well and truly alone.

It was a look I hadn’t seen on her face since the very first time I saw her on the dock at Concha de Perla, watching her own blood drip from her fingertips.

In the time I’d been on Isabela, Beatriz had moved from desperation to resignation. If she hadn’t been exactly joyous about this homecoming, at least now she seemed to be less tormented. She hadn’t been cutting herself. Her old wounds were silver scars.

And now we’d ripped them open again.

I know that cutting does not always precede suicide. But I also know that sometimes, it does. Beatriz let her guard down with me; she trusted me to be her person. And then I gave myself to someone else.