Wish You Were Here (35 page)

May 2023

Ask anyone who’s nearly died: you should live in the moment.

Unfortunately, that’s impossible. Every moment keeps slipping past.

You can only go on to the next moment and the one after that, seeking out
what
you love most with
whom
you love most. All those moments, tallied up? That’s your life.

Bucket lists aren’t important. Benchmarks aren’t important. Neither are goals. You take the wins in small ways: Did I wake up this morning? Do I have a roof over my head? Are the people I care about doing okay? You don’t need the things you don’t have. You only need what you’ve got, and the rest? It’s just gravy.

It’s been three years since I recovered from Covid; two years since I was vaccinated; one year since I finished my degree in art therapy and started my own practice. I’ve been saving since then, and it’s all led to this.

I turn my face into the wind. The spray keeps hitting my sunglasses, so I take them off and let my face get wet. I laugh, just because I can.

It took a while for the country to reopen, and even longer for the borders to do so. I had to gather the courage to take the smallest of steps: Eat
inside
a restaurant. Not freak out when I left my mask at home. Fly on a plane.

The ferry is crowded. There is a family with three rowdy kids and a knot of teenagers bent over a cellphone. A tour group from Japan is listening to their leader point out the different kinds of fish they might see during a dive, complete with a flip-book of underwater photographs. The driver of the boat calls out as we approach a dock, where several water taxis are waiting to take us the final stretch.

It’s only a five-minute ride; I pay the boat driver and alight on the dock at Puerto Villamil. There is a sea lion stretched across the sand in front of me, wide and immobile as a continent. I take out my phone and snap a picture, then text it.

Immediately, Rodney pings me back.
LATINX DUDES ARE SO HOT.

My thumbs fly over the phone.
You got this message, right?

No,
Rodney writes back.

Rodney and I have been living together in Queens since I moved out of Finn’s place. Breaking up with your boyfriend is never easy, even less so during a pandemic. But two hours after I called Rodney and told him about my mother’s death and Finn’s proposal, he got on a plane. We scraped by on our unemployment checks until Sotheby’s hired Rodney back. By then, I’d matriculated at NYU.

Rodney wanted to come with me to the Galápagos, but it was something I had to do on my own. It’s the last chapter; it’s time for the book to end.

I’ve seen Finn only once since we broke up. We crossed paths, of all places, on the running path along the East River. He was coming home from the hospital and I was jogging. I hear that he’s engaged to Athena, the nurse who made me the sunflower mask.

I hope he’s happy; I really do.

Puerto Villamil is packed. There are open-air bars with music and patrons spilling into the street, and a taco stand with a long line of customers, and barefoot kids kicking a soccer ball. It has the lazy, boozy atmosphere of a tourist town, and I’m not the only person dragging a little roller bag down the gritty dust of the street.

A Gordian knot of iguanas untangles and scatters when the wheels of my bag get too close. I check my phone for the address of Casa del Cielo, but the hotels are all arranged in a neat line, like sparkling white teeth along the edge of the ocean. Mine is small—a boutique. Its stucco reflects the sun, and a blue mosaic sign spells out its name.

It looks nothing like the hotel I dreamed.

When I walk up to the front, there is a couple leaving. They hold the door for me, and I pull my bag inside and approach the front desk.

The air-conditioning blows over me as I give my name. The clerk, a college-age kid, has dyed white-blond hair and a nose ring. He speaks perfect English. “Have you ever visited before?” he asks, when I hand him my credit card.

“Not really,” I tell him, and he grins.

“That sounds like a story.”

“It is,” I say.

He gives me a room key, affixed to a little piece of polished coconut shell. “The Wi-Fi code is on the back,” he says. “It’s a little unreliable.”

I can’t help it; I laugh.

“If there’s anything you need, just dial zero,” he says.

I thank him and reach for the handle of my bag. Just before I get to the elevator, I turn around. “Does someone named Elena work here?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Not that I know of…”

“That’s okay,” I tell him. “I must have been mistaken.”

I wrote my master’s thesis on the reliability of memory, and how it fails us. In Japan, there are monuments called tsunami stones—giant tablets on the coastline that warn descendants of earlier settlers not to build their homes past a certain point. They date back to 1896, when two tsunamis killed 22,000 people. The Japanese believe that it takes three generations to forget. Those who experience a trauma pass it along to their children and their grandchildren, and then the memory fades. To the survivors of a tragedy, that’s unthinkable—what’s the point of living through something terrible if you cannot convey the lessons you’ve learned? Since nothing will ever replace all you’ve lost, the only way to make meaning is to make sure no one else goes through what you did. Memories are the safeguards we use to keep from making the same mistakes.

In my art therapy practice, I started working with people whose lives had been affected in different ways by Covid—those who’d lost jobs or loved ones, or those who’d survived the virus and (like me) were left wondering why. Over the course of the past three years, my patients and I have created three pandemic stones—ten feet high by three feet wide, painted and carved by survivors with images and words that call forth the wisdom they have now, which they didn’t have back then. There are pictures of stick figure families, some grayed out by death. There are mantras:
Find your joy. No job is worth killing yourself for.
There are images of Black fists raised in solidarity, of a globe in the shape of a heart, of a syringe filled with stars. The first one that we finished was installed in the lobby of the MoMA on the most recent anniversary of the pandemic.

The obelisk sits three floors below one of my mother’s photos.

Exploring Isabela is a little bit like revisiting a city you toured when you were high as a kite. Some things look exactly the way I remember—like the flat black of the
pahoehoe
lava and the elbow of beach beyond the hotel. These must have been photographs I saw when I was planning my trip there that embedded themselves somewhere in my subconscious, enough for me to call them up with legitimacy. But other pieces of the island are startlingly different, like the place the pangas come with their daily fishing catch, and the architecture of the small houses that freckle the road leading out of town. Abuela’s little home, with the basement apartment, simply does not exist.

Tomorrow, I will arrange to take a tour of the island. I want to see the volcano and the trillizos. But right now, because it’s been a long flight and I want to stretch my legs, I change into shorts and sneakers and a tank top, pull my hair into a ponytail, and walk down to the water’s edge. I take off my shoes and wade up to my knees, watching Sally Lightfoot crabs polka-dot the rocks. I put my hands on my hips and look up at the clouds, then across the ocean at a small island that never existed in my dream. I breathe deeply, thinking that last time I was here, I couldn’t breathe at all.

I sit on a rock with an iguana that is completely unbothered by the company and wait for my feet to dry before putting on my sneakers again. This time, I start jogging away from town. Another thing that looks nothing like it did in my imagination: the entrance to the tortoise breeding ground. It’s touristy, with signs and maps and cartoon pictures of eggs and hatching tortoises.

There’s a couple leaving; they smile at me as I pass them on my way in. “It’s closed,” the woman says, “but you can still see the babies in the pens outside.”

“Thanks,” I say, and I walk toward the horseshoe of enclosures. Beneath cacti, tortoises huddle together, stretching their old-man necks toward whatever danger lies six inches ahead. One unhinges his jaw and sticks out a triangular pink tongue.

The tortoises are arranged in size order. Some pens have only two or three, others are crammed. The babies are no bigger than my fist, and they are clambering over each other, creating their own obstacle course.

One of the little ones manages to get its feet on the shell of another, double-stacked for a breathtaking moment before it topples over onto its back.

Its feet are pedaling in the air, its head snicked back inside its shell.

I look around, wondering if there’s an attendant who will flip this poor little guy back over.

Well. They’re babies; they can’t be dangerous.

The retaining wall is only thigh-high. I put my foot on it, intending to climb over, complete a rescue mission, and leave.

I have no idea why the sole of my sneaker slips.

“Cuidado!”

I feel a hand grab my wrist the moment before I fall.

And I turn.

Humans mark tragedy. Everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot, when the Twin Towers fell, and the last thing they did before the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

I was at a wedding in Tulum. The bride was an actress who—in a month—was going to star in the off-Broadway musical adaptation of
Between the Lines,
a novel I co-wrote with my daughter. I attended her wedding with the librettist and his husband, and our director and his husband. We all sat together at a table, drank margaritas, and had a wonderful time. From there, I met up with my husband in Aspen, where my son was about to propose to his girlfriend. There was buzz about coronavirus, but it didn't seem real.

Then we got notice at our hotel that a guest had tested positive. By the time we flew home, New Hampshire was going into lockdown. My last trip to a grocery store was March 11, 2020 (and as of this moment, I still haven't gone to one since). One week later I learned that all of the other people at my table at the wedding in Mexico had contracted Covid. Two were hospitalized.

I never caught it.

I have asthma, and I took quarantine very seriously. I can count on one hand the number of times I've left my house in the past year—when, in previous years, I would travel cumulatively six months out of the year. Two of my kids and their partners came down with Covid, with fortunately mild symptoms. When my husband would go food shopping, and a clerk would dismiss the need for masks or social distancing, he always made sure to let them know that our kids had been sick. As Finn experiences in this novel—they usually jumped back a few feet, as if merely speaking of illness makes you contagious.

And me? I was at home, paralyzed with fear. I couldn't breathe well on a
good
day; I couldn't even imagine what Covid would do to my lungs. I was so anxious that I couldn't concentrate on anything—which meant that I couldn't distract myself with my work. I couldn't write. I couldn't even read. After only a few pages, I was unable to focus.

My reading slump broke first, thanks to romance novels, the only genre I could get lost in at the time. I think I needed to know there was a happy ending, albeit fictional. But writing was still elusive. I started working on a novel that I was supposed to co-write for a 2022 release, attempting to jog my muscle memory by doing research (via Zoom, this time), and somehow my brain remembered how to craft a book. But the whole time I was working on that story, I was wondering: How are we going to chronicle this pandemic? Who will do it? How do we tell the tale of how the world shut down, and why, and what we learned?

Several months into the pandemic I stumbled across an article about a Japanese man who got stranded in Machu Picchu during Covid. He was trapped there due to travel restrictions and, out of necessity, stopped being a tourist and became a resident of the community. Eventually the locals petitioned the government to open the historic site just for him, and he finally got to experience it as a visitor. Suddenly, I knew how to write about Covid.

The most pervasive emotion that we have all felt this past year is isolation. What's odd is that it's a shared experience, but we still feel alone and adrift. That got me thinking of how isolation can be devastating…but can also be the agent of change. And
that
made me think of Darwin. Evolution tells us that adaptation is how we survive.

I had never been to Machu Picchu…and I obviously couldn't go there to do any research. But I
had
been to the Galápagos years ago, and I wondered whether there might have been a tourist stranded there during the pandemic. Sure enough, a young Scottish tourist named Ian Melvin found himself on Isabela Island in the Galápagos for months while travel was restricted. I tracked down Ian to interview him, as well as some of the residents he met there—Ernesto Velarde, who works with the Darwin Foundation, and Karen Jacome, a naturalist guide. I wanted to write about what it felt like to be stuck in paradise while the rest of the world was going to hell.

But I also wanted to talk about
survival
. About the resilience of humans. It is impossible to attribute meaning to the countless deaths and smaller losses we have all suffered—and yet, we're going to have to make sense of this lost year. For that, I began by interviewing the medical professionals who have been in the trenches fighting Covid from the beginning. I heard their frustration, their exhaustion, and their determination to not let this damn virus win. I poured their hearts into Finn's voice, and I hope I've done them justice. We will never be able to thank them for what they've done, or to erase the memories of what they've seen.

Then I turned to those who had such severe Covid that they were on ventilators—and who lived to tell me about it. It is worth noting that when I put out a social media call for survivors who had been on vents, I received over one hundred responses in an hour. Overwhelmingly, the people I spoke with (who were all ages, sizes, races—this virus doesn't discriminate) wanted others to know that Covid
isn't
“just the flu”; that there's a reason for masking up and social distancing, and politics has no role in it. Like Diana, nearly every person I interviewed experienced incredibly detailed, lucid dream states—some that were snippets of time and others that lasted for years.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person so far cataloging these experiences, because there's much more important stuff we need to know about Covid, but I found it fascinating that these dreams could mostly be categorized into four types: something involving a basement, an experience of restraint or kidnapping, a dead loved one reappearing, or a loved one dying (who, when the Covid patient returned to consciousness, turned out to be very much alive). The lucid dreams of my interview subjects became the Facebook posts that Diana reads. Caroline Leavitt, an author I love, has written multiple times about her own experience in a medically induced coma, and shared details with me about this “other place” she still visits in her sleep sometimes—where she is not a writer but a teacher; where she is unmarried; where she looks different but knows it's her; where she has spent
years
. There are all sorts of explanations for these lucid, unconscious experiences—the bottom line is that we just don't know enough about the brain to understand why they happen and what they mean.

The last question I asked each of my interview subjects was
How has this experience changed the way you think about the rest of your life?

Their responses brought me right back to the concept of isolation. When you find yourself utterly alone—on a rocky outcropping or on a ventilator—the only place to find strength is in yourself. As one woman told me, “I'm not looking for anything outside of me anymore. I'm like, this is it. I've got everything I need.” Whether or not we have been hospitalized for Covid in the past year, we all have a much clearer sense of what matters. Go figure—it's not the promotion, or the raise, or the fancy car, or the private jet. It's not getting into an Ivy League school or completing an Ironman or being famous. It's not adding an extra shift or staying late because your boss expects it of you. Instead, it is taking the time to see how beautiful frost looks on a window. It's being able to hug your mom or hold your grandchild. It's having no expectations but taking nothing for granted. It's understanding that an extra hour at your desk is an hour you don't spend throwing a ball with your kid. It's realizing that we could wake up tomorrow and the world could shut down. It's knowing that at the very end of life, no matter what your net worth is and the length of your CV, the only thing you want is someone beside you, holding your hand.

When I try to make sense of the past year, it feels to me like the world pressed pause. When we stopped moving, we noticed that the ways we have chosen to validate ourselves are lists of items or experiences we need to have, goals that are monetary or mercenary. Now, I'm wondering why those were ever even goals. We don't need those things to feel whole. We need to wake up in the morning. We need our bodies to function. We need to enjoy a meal. We need a roof over our head. We need to surround ourselves with people we love. We need to take the wins in a much smaller way.

And we need to remember this, even when we're no longer in a pandemic.

—Jodi Picoult, March 2021