Slowly, he turns. “I’m not a tour guide anymore,” he says.
“Well, since the island is closed,” I reply, “technically … ?I’m not a tourist.”
He smiles, and it is transformative. It’s like the first time you see a falling star. Every night after that, you find yourself searching again, and if you don’t see one, you feel crestfallen. “Maybe, then, one day, I can show you my island,” Gabriel offers.
I lean against the table. It is, for the first time in a week, sturdy. “I’d like that,” I say.
FOUR
A lot of people would think a vacation alone with nothing to do is heaven.
I am not one of those people.
I do not go to movies by myself. If I walk in Central Park, it’s usually in the company of Finn or Rodney. If I travel for work, and stay overnight at a hotel, I will always choose room service over eating alone at a restaurant.
The idea of being by yourself on a desert island has a romantic cachet to it, but the reality is less attractive. I find myself looking forward to my mornings on the beach, because Beatriz meets me there almost every day, and then follows me home to collect my daily postcard to Finn. I find reasons to hover around the front door of Abuela’s place, so that we can have our odd conversation made of charades, and because it almost always ends in a dinner invitation. I engage Gabriel in discussions about when the island might reopen, when the ferry will return to take me back to the mainland.
Twice I’ve found enough of a cell signal to call Finn, but he hasn’t answered. Once, a flood of texts and emails came through, but they were garbled, symbols and gibberish instead of sentences. When I can, I send responses back into the void. I shouldn’t have gone. I miss you. I love you. Here, too, I might as well be shouting into a canyon, and hearing only an echo.
There are some days when I don’t speak a single word out loud, and I restlessly move from the apartment to the beach or go for a run just to stop myself from having to think about Finn, about how long it’s been since I heard his voice, about my job, about my future. With every passing hour, all of that feels hazier, as if the pandemic is a fog that’s rolled in from nowhere and nothing looks quite the way it used to.
When I have no alternative, I sit by myself and wonder how far I’ve been blown off course.
Dear Finn,
I’ve been thinking about how I left things at work. If the situation is really bad in the city, then maybe Kitomi was right to hold off on the private auction. But then again, if it’s really bad there, Sotheby’s is going to need that sale more than ever.
By the time I get back, I may not even have a job.
Which is … ?strange. For so long I’ve known what I want to do and who I want to be when I grow up—I can’t imagine not being an art specialist. It’s not like I’ve always secretly dreamed of being an astronaut and now this is my big opportunity to strike out in a new direction. I liked the direction I was headed.
I will say this, though—sometimes I look at the neon-orange Sally Lightfoot crabs polka-dotting black lava, or the pattern of spots on the back of a ray underwater, and I think: art is everywhere, if you know to look for it.
I miss you, goddammit.
Love, Diana
I didn’t expect to like Kitomi Ito.
Like the rest of the world, I saw her as she’d been cast: the villain in the story of the Nightjars, the quiet psychologist-turned-siren who’d ensorcelled Sam Pride and led to the breakup of arguably the best band in the history of rock and roll. Whatever she’d done with her life since then—which included opening an ashram and writing three bestsellers about expanding one’s consciousness—paled in comparison to how she had affected Sam Pride. There were die-hard Nightjars fans who blamed her for his murder, because she was the reason Sam relocated from the UK to New York City.
To be fair, I also didn’t expect my boss to take me to Kitomi Ito’s apartment when she was trying to get Kitomi to commit to an auction at Sotheby’s. But Eva had been hinting for a while that since I was now an associate specialist in Imp Mod, I should be getting more responsibility. She started dragging me to meet with art collectors and their collection managers—not because she enjoyed the pleasure of my company, but to groom me for a more senior position.