Wish You Were Here (34 page)

This is news to me.

“I tried fertility treatments. Traditional Chinese medicine. I ate bee propolis and pomegranates and vitamin D. I wanted you so badly. I was going to be the kind of mother who took so many photos of my baby that we had a whole closet full of albums. I was going to chronicle every step of your life.”

This is so far from the Hannah O’Toole I know—that
everyone
knows. An intrepid photographer of human tragedy, who didn’t realize the shambles she’d made of her own deserted family. “What happened?”

“I forgot to take you to the pediatrician when you were a week old,” she says.

“I know. I’ve heard the story.”

“It was an appointment for
you,
and I left you sitting at home, in your little baby car seat,” she murmurs. “That’s how awful I was at being a mother.”

“You were distracted,” I say, wondering how it’s come to this: me making excuses for her.

“I was determined,” she corrects. “There couldn’t be more mistakes if I wasn’t around to make them. Your father…he was so much better at taking care of you.”

I stare at her. I think of all the times I thought that I was a distant runner-up to her career, that photography held her captive in a way I never could. I never imagined she’d had so little confidence parenting me.

“I used to get asked why I photographed catastrophes,” my mother says. “I had a whole list of stock answers—for the excitement, to commemorate tragedy, to humanize suffering. But I mostly shot disasters to remind myself I wasn’t the only one.”

There is a difference, I realize, between being driven and running away from something that scares you to death.

“I forgive you,” I say, and everything inside me shifts. I may not have had much of my mother, between her career and her dementia, but something is better than nothing. I will take what I can get.

“Do you remember the time Dad and I went with you to chase a tornado?” I ask.

She frowns, her eyes clouding.

“I do,” I say softly.

Maybe that’s enough. It’s not having the adventures or crossing off the line items of the bucket list. It’s who you were with, who will help you recall it when your memory fails.

My mother coughs again, falling back against the pillows. When she glances at me, something has changed. Her eyes are a painted backdrop, instead of a dimensional landscape. There’s nothing behind them but anxiety. “We have to get to higher ground,” she says.

I wonder where she is, what other time or place. I hope it’s more real to her than here and now. That in the end it’s where she will choose to remain.

I imagine her existence shrinking down to the point of a pin, a hole in the fabric of the universe, before she jumps into another life.

She seems to be falling asleep. Gently, I reach for her glasses and slide them from her face. I let my hand linger along the soft swell of her cheek, her paper-thin skin. I set the folded glasses beside a paperback novel on the nightstand, and notice the deckled edge of an old photo that is sticking out from between the pages, like a bookmark.

I don’t know what makes me open the book to better see the image.

It’s a terrible picture of my mother, when she was young. The top half of her head is cut off, and her wide smile is blurry. Her hand is outstretched, like she’s reaching for something.

Someone.

Me.

I remember being the one behind the shutter, when I was no more than a toddler.

Here. You try.

I must make some small noise, because my mother blinks at me. “Have we been introduced?”

Surreptitiously, I slip the photo into my pocket. “Yes,” I tell her. “We’re old friends.”

“Good,” she says firmly. “Because I don’t think I can do this alone.”

I think of the staff, who might come in to check on her at any moment. Of this virus, and how if I catch it again, I may not survive a second time. “You don’t have to,” I tell her.

I don’t realize how late I am until I am in the Uber on my way back to the apartment, and see that Finn has left me a barrage of texts and six phone messages. “Where have you been?” he says, grabbing me when I walk through the door. “I thought something terrible happened to you.”

Something already did,
I think.

I set down the toolbox I took with me. “I lost track of time,” I tell him. “My mother tested positive for Covid. There’s an outbreak at The Greens. But they told me I couldn’t visit.”

Finn’s fingers flex on my arms. “God, Diana, what can I do? It must be killing you to not be able to see her.”

I don’t say anything. My gaze slides away from his face.

“Diana?” he says softly.

“She’s dying,” I say flatly. “She has a DNR. The odds of her getting through this are virtually nonexistent.” I hesitate. “No one even knows I was in her apartment.”

Yet
. Eventually someone will notice the torn screen.

He suddenly lets go of me. “You went into the room of a Covid-positive patient,” he states.

“Not just some patient—”

“Without wearing an N95 mask…”

“I took off my mask,” I admit. Now, in retrospect, it seems ridiculous. Risky. Suicidal, even. “She was scared and didn’t recognize me.”

“She has dementia and
never
recognizes you,” Finn argues.

“And I wasn’t about to let that be the last experience we had!”

A muscle leaps in his jaw. “Do you realize what you’ve done?” He spears a hand through his hair, pacing. “How long were you in contact?”

“Two hours…maybe three?”

“Unmasked,” he clarifies, and I nod. “For
fuck’s sake,
Diana, what were you thinking?”

“That I could lose my mother?”

“How do you think I felt about
you
?” Finn explodes. “
Feel
about you?”

“I already had Covid—”

“And you could get it again,” he says. “Or do you know more than Fauci? Because as far as we know right now, it’s a crapshoot. You want to know what we
do
know? The more time you spend in a closed-in space with someone contagious the more likely you are to catch the virus, too.”

My hands are shaking. “I wasn’t thinking,” I admit.

“Well, you weren’t thinking about me, either,” Finn shoots back. “Because now I have to quarantine and get tested. How many patients am I not going to be able to take care of, because you
weren’t thinking
?”

He turns like a caged animal, searching for an exit. “God, I can’t even get away from you,” Finn snaps, and he stalks into the bedroom and slams the door.

I am shaky on the inside. Every time I hear Finn moving around in the bedroom I jump. I know that he will have to come out sooner or later for food or drink or to use the bathroom, even as the shadows of the afternoon lengthen into the dark of night.

I don’t bother to turn on the lights. Instead, I sit on the couch and wait for the reckoning.

I’ve already learned today that caretaking is not a quid pro quo; that if someone neglects you in your past, that doesn’t mean you should abandon them in their future. But does it hold the other way? Finn’s as good as any other reason for why I survived such a bad case of Covid—he tethered me. So what do I owe him, in return?

Obligation isn’t love.

It stands to reason that Finn and I might have disagreements while we’re locked together during a quarantine. He’s exhausted and I’m recovering and nothing in a pandemic is easy. But our relationship used to be. I don’t know if I’m just noticing the hairline fractures for the first time, or if they’ve only just appeared. Where we used to be marching toward the future in lockstep, I’m now stumbling or trying to catch up. Something has changed between us.

Something has changed in
me
.

At about nine o’clock, the door of the bedroom opens and Finn emerges. He goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge, taking out the orange juice and drinking from the carton. When he turns around, he sees me in the blue glow of the refrigerator light. “You’re sitting in the dark,” he says.

He puts the carton down on the counter and comes to sit on the other end of the couch. He flicks on a lamp, and I wince at the sudden brightness.

“I thought maybe you left.”

At that, a laugh barks out of me. “Where would I go?”

Finn nods. “Yeah. Well.”

I look down at my hands, curled in my lap like they do not belong to me. “Did you…do you want me to leave?”

“What makes you think I’d want that?” Finn seems honestly shocked.

“Well,” I say. “You were pretty pissed off. You have every right to be.”
And I’m not paying any rent right now,
I think.

“Diana? Are you happy?”

My gaze flies to his. “What?”

“I don’t know. You just seem…restless.”

“It’s a pandemic,” I say. “Everyone’s restless.”

He hesitates. “Maybe that’s not the right word. Maybe it’s more
trapped
.” He looks away from me, worrying the seam of the couch. “Do you still want this? Us?”

“Why would you ask that?” I choose those words carefully, so that I don’t have to lie, so that he can interpret them however he wants.

Reassured, Finn sighs. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” he says. “I’m really sorry about your mother.”

“I’m sorry I contaminated you.”

The corner of his mouth tips up. “I needed a vacation anyway,” he says.

Two days later, my mother is actively dying. You would think that FaceTiming her while she was unconscious would be old hat, after all the energy I expended on her while I was a child and receiving nothing in return. Instead, I only feel silly. A staff member holds up the iPad near her bed and pretends she isn’t listening. I stare at my mother’s sedated body, curled like a fiddlehead under the covers, and try to find things to talk about. Finn tells me it’s important to talk to her, and that even if I think she can’t hear me, on some level, she can.

He’s right. The message might be garbled, but it will get through. My voice might be a breeze in the weather of whatever world she’s in.

Finn sits with me, and when I run out of words, he jumps in and charms with the story of how we met and how he’s teaching me the rules of baseball and that he thinks the apartment is haunted.

The last thing I say during our call is that it’s okay for her to leave, if she has to.

I realize she’s been waiting to hear those words from me her whole life, because less than an hour later, The Greens calls to tell me she has passed away.

I make the necessary arrangements in a strange, detached way—deciding to cremate her body, deciding not to have a funeral. I remember learning, as a child, how the Shinnecock made dugout canoes—by burning out the middle of a log and carving the insides away. That’s how I feel. Hollow, scraped, raw.

For someone I was angry at for so long, someone I rarely saw—I miss her.

It’s amazing how easily someone can leave your life. It’s standing on a beach and stepping back to see the hole of your footprint subsumed by the sand and the sea as if it were never there. Grief, it turns out, is a lot like a one-sided video conversation on an iPad. It’s the call with no response, the echo of affection, the shadow cast by love.

But just because you can’t see it anymore doesn’t make it any less real.

The day that we get a message saying my mother’s ashes are ready to be picked up,
The New York Times
runs her obituary in their Covid section, Those We’ve Lost. They talk about her rise as a feature photographer and her Pulitzer Prize. There are quotes from colleagues from
The
New York Times
and
The Boston Globe
and the Associated Press, from Steve McCurry and Sir Don McCullin. They call her the greatest female photographer of the twentieth century.

The very last line of the obituary, however, is not about her art at all.

I take the paper with me into the bedroom, crawling under the covers. I read that sentence, and read it again.

She leaves behind a daughter.

For the first time since I got the call about my mother’s death, I cry.

Go away.

My eyes are swollen shut.

The sun rises.

I don’t.

Am I the only person in the world whose mother has died twice?

“All right, Rip van Winkle,” Finn says. “Let’s go.”

He yanks the covers away from me and I groan. When I scrabble for them again, he sits down and curls my hand around a mug of coffee.

I’ve been here before,
I think.

How easy it would be to follow his lead. I roll over and blink up at him.

“You’re going to take a shower,” Finn orders, “and then we’re going to go for a walk.”

We are on day nine of quarantine. We have five more left, before we can leave the apartment. “How?” I ask.

Finn smiles shyly, and I realize he is telling me that he’ll bend the rules for me. That he knows why I had to, when I visited my mother. “One step at a time,” he says.

I’ve spent three days in bed, after she died. I was asleep more than I was awake.

Not once did I ever slip back to the Galápagos, or see Beatriz’s sunburned face, or hear the lilt of Gabriel’s accent.

I am not sure why I thought, while I was drowning again—this time in grief—this alternate reality would come for me.

I’m even less sure what it means that it didn’t.

Finn and I walk along Ninety-sixth Street, under the FDR, toward the East River. We wear our masks and leave extra distance when we pass by people, because even if Finn is being a rebel, he’s still too much of a do-gooder to risk infecting anyone. We pass a couple of guys shooting up, and a lady with a jogging stroller. The grass along the edge of the walkway is lush and green, and flowers crane their throats to the sun.

There is nothing like early summer in Manhattan. There are usually pop-up concerts—boys with drums made of five-gallon containers, hip-hop dancers defying gravity; businessmen eating shawarma during fast lunch breaks; little girls with shiny white patent-leather shoes clutching their American Girl dolls. There are taxi drivers who wave instead of shout and sprays of daylilies and everyone has a dog to walk. Now, people are out and about, but moving in furtive, cautious bursts. No one lingers. The few people who wear their masks beneath their noses are glared at. It is leaner and less crowded, as if half the population has been removed, and that makes me wonder if this is the way it will always be.

The new normal.

“Do you think we’ll ever go back to the way it was?” I ask Finn.

He glances at me. “I don’t know,” he says thoughtfully. “When I used to talk to patients before surgery, they always asked if they’d be able to do everything they used to do before the operation. I mean, technically, the answer should be yes. But there’s always a scar. Even if it’s not right across your belly, it’s in your head somewhere—the brand-new knowledge that you weren’t invincible. I think that changes you for the long haul.”

We have reached Carl Schurz Park—one of my favorites. There are trees and green velvet gardens and two sets of curved stone steps that always feel like a spot where a fairy tale should start. There’s a playground for kids. A bronze of Peter Pan.

We sit down on a bench across from the statue. “You were right. I needed to get out.” I knock my shoulder against Finn’s. “Thanks for taking care of me.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” he says.

I take a deep breath through my mask. “I’ve always liked this park.”

“I know.”

He leans back, tilting his face to the sun, his hands in his jacket. If not for the fact that we are still mired in a pandemic, it would be an absolutely perfect day.

By the time I realize that Finn isn’t just relaxing, he’s no longer rummaging through his pockets. A small ring box is balanced on his knee.

“I know this doesn’t seem like the most opportune time,” he says, “but the more I think about it, the more I realize it is. I almost lost you. And now, with your mom…well, every day counts. It doesn’t matter to me if nothing ever goes back to normal, because I don’t want to go backward. I want to go forward, with you. I want kids that we can bring here and push on the swings. I want the dog and the yard and all the things we’ve been dreaming about all these years.”

Finn sinks down to one knee. “Marry me?” he says. “We’ve done the sickness part. How about we try the health?”

I open the box and see the solitaire, simple and lovely, light winking at me.

Three feet away, Peter Pan is frozen in time. I wonder how many years he spent in Wendy’s company here before forgetting that he used to know how to fly.

“Di?” Finn says, laughing nervously. “Say something?”

I look at him. “Why aren’t you a magician?”

“What? Because…I’m a surgeon? Why are we talking about this—”

“You wanted to be a magician, you said. What changed?”

Awkwardly, he slides back into the seat beside me, knowing the moment is gone. “No one grows up to be a magician,” he mutters.

“That’s not true.”

“But it’s different. The people who do it professionally aren’t making magic happen. They’re just distracting you from what they’re really doing.”

Finn has always been my anchor. The problem is that anchors don’t just keep you from floating away. Sometimes, they drag you down.

I could paint Finn from memory—every freckle and shadow and scar. But suddenly it is like seeing someone you recognize in a crowd and getting closer to realize that the person is not who you thought he was.

He rubs his hand on the back of his neck. “Look, if you need time…if I misjudged…” He meets my gaze. “Isn’t this what you want? What we planned?”

“You can’t plan your life, Finn,” I say quietly. “Because then you have a plan. Not a life.”

There may not be a reason that I survived Covid. There may not be a better man than the one sitting beside me. But I’m not the same person I was when Finn and I imagined the future…and I don’t think I want to be.

You may not be able to choose your reality. But you can change it.

I am still holding the ring. I put it into his palm, curl his fingers around it.

Finn stares at me, broken. “I don’t understand,” he says, hoarse. “Why are you doing this?”

I feel impossibly light, like I am made of air and thought, instead of flesh. “You’re perfect, Finn,” I tell him. “You’re just not perfect for me.”