On the running path, wearing a black tracksuit and a paisley mask and her trademark purple glasses, is Kitomi Ito.
“Yes!” I say, stepping forward before I remember that we are not allowed to touch, to hug. “You’re still here.”
She laughs. “Haven’t shuffled off the mortal coil yet, no.”
“I mean, you haven’t moved.”
“That, too,” Kitomi says. She nods toward the path. “Walk a bit?”
I fall into step, six feet away.
“I admit I thought I would have heard from you by now,” she says.
“Sotheby’s furloughed me,” I tell her. “They furloughed almost everyone.”
“Ah, well, that explains why no one’s been beating down the door asking for the painting.” She tilts her head. “Isn’t the big sale this month?”
It is, but it has never crossed my mind.
“I must say, I’ve never been more grateful for a decision than I was to not auction the Toulouse-Lautrec. For weeks now, it’s just been the two of us in the apartment. I would have been quite lonely, without it.”
I understand what she’s talking about. I was just staring at a man-made reservoir, after all, and pretending it was a lagoon in the Galápagos. I could close my eyes and hear Beatriz splashing and Gabriel teasing me to dive in.
I remember, again, that the last normal thing I did before getting sick was go to Kitomi’s penthouse. “Did you get the virus?” I ask, and then blush beneath my mask. “I don’t mean to intrude. It’s just—I had it. I went to the hospital the day after our meeting. I worried that I might have given it to you.”
She stops walking. “I lost taste and smell for about a week,” Kitomi says. “But it was so early that nobody knew that was a symptom. No fever, no aches, nothing else. I’ve been tested for antibodies, though, and I have them. So maybe I should be thanking you.”
“I’m just glad it was mild.”
She tilts her head. “But for you … ?it wasn’t?”
I tell her about being on the ventilator, and how I almost died. I talk about rehab, and explain that’s why I am trying to walk further and further each day. I tell her about my mother, who was dead to me, and then wasn’t. She doesn’t ask questions, she just lets me speak into the gap between us and fill it. I remember, then, that before she was married to Sam Pride, she was a psychologist.
“I’m sorry,” I say after a moment. “You should probably bill me for this.”
She laughs. “I haven’t been a therapist for a very long time. Maybe it’s a muscle memory.”
I hesitate. “Do you think that’s the only way memories work?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“What if your body or your brain remembers something you haven’t done before?”
She looks at me. “You know, I used to study different states of consciousness. It’s how I met Sam, as a matter of fact. That was during the hard drug years of the Nightjars, and after all, what’s an acid trip but an altered state?”
“I think I was in two places at one time,” I say slowly. “In the hospital, on a ventilator. And in my head, somewhere completely different.” I do not look at her as I sketch the story of my arrival on Isabela, my adoption by Abuela, my conversations with Beatriz.
My time with Gabriel.
Including the moment I let myself drown.
“I used to do past life regressions for clients,” Kitomi says. “But this isn’t a past life, is it? It’s a simultaneous one.”
She says this mildly, like she’s pointing out that there’s a lot of humidity today. “Have you returned there?” she asks.
“Once,” I admit.
“Do you want to go back?”
“I feel …” I begin, trying to choose the right words. “I feel like I’m on loan here.”
“You could go to the Galápagos,” Kitomi points out.
“Not now,” I say wryly.
“One day.”
I don’t have a response. Kitomi and I walk a little further. We are passed by a jogger with a headlamp. “I could have moved to Montana during any of the past thirty-five years,” Kitomi says. “But I wasn’t ready yet.” She tilts her head to the sky, and the rising sun glints off the lenses of her glasses. “When I lost Sam, I lost all my joy. I tried to find it—through music and art and therapy and writing and Prozac. Then I realized I’d been looking in the wrong place all along. I was trying to find meaning in his death—and I couldn’t. It was violent and tragic and random and wrong. It always will be. The truth is, it doesn’t matter how or why Sam died. It never will.”
Just then, the sun breaks over the tree line, setting the trees aflame. It is the kind of art that no master could ever capture on canvas, but it’s here for the viewing every single day.
I understand what Kitomi is telling me: Trying to figure out what happened to me isn’t important. It’s what I do with what I’ve learned that counts.
There are more people on the reservoir trail now.
All of us are grieving something.
But while we are, we’re putting one foot in front of the other. We’re waking up to see another day. We’re pushing through uncertainty, even if we can’t yet see the light at the end of the tunnel.