Gabriel shrugs. “Before, you were a tourist,” he says simply. “Now, you’re one of us.”
What I want to do: crawl underneath the covers of my bed, and pretend that when I wake up, I’ll realize this was all just a nightmare. I will breeze down to the dock, board a ferry, and begin the first leg of my journey back to New York City.
What I do instead: accompany Gabriel and Beatriz to a swimming hole inland. Beatriz says that if I’m all by myself I will just wallow in my misery, and I cannot contradict her because it’s the rationale for every outing I’ve dragged her on this past week—when she was the one who needed distraction. She is carrying a snorkel and mask looped onto her arm, and it bounces against her hip as we hike. “Where are we going?” I ask.
“We could tell you,” Beatriz says, “but then we’d have to kill you.”
“She’s not entirely wrong,” Gabriel adds. “Most of the island is closed because of the pandemic. If the park rangers find you, they’ll fine you.”
“Or take away your tour guide license,” Beatriz tosses over her shoulder.
Gabriel’s shoulders tense, then relax again. “Which I am not using anyway.”
She turns on a heel, walking backward. “Are we or are we not going to a secret place you used to take clients?”
“We are going to a secret place I used to go to as a boy,” he corrects.
We finally reach a brackish pond with water that is the color of rust and bordered by brush and thickets of fallen, twisted branches. As Isabela goes, it is far from the prettiest of landscapes. Beatriz begins to strip down to her bathing suit and long-sleeved rash guard, leaving the rest of her clothes in a pile. She fits her snorkel and mask to her face, then dives into the muddy lagoon.
“Maybe I’ll just wait here,” I say.
Gabriel turns in the act of pulling his shirt over his head and smiles. “Now who is judging a book by its cover?”
He kicks off his shoes and splashes into the water, and reluctantly I peel down to my bathing suit and wade in. The bottom drops away sharply, unexpectedly, and I find myself swallowed up by the water. Before I can even panic, a strong hand grabs my arm, holding me up as I sputter. “Okay?” Gabriel asks.
I nod, still choking a little. My fingers flex on his shoulder. This close, I realize that he has a freckle on his left earlobe. I look at the spikes of his eyelashes.
With a strong kick I free myself, and start swimming in the direction Beatriz went.
Gabriel overtakes me quickly; he is a stronger swimmer. He’s headed straight for a wall of tangled mangrove roots, or so it seems, near which Beatriz’s snorkel bobs. She lifts her face when we get closer, her eyes huge behind the plastic of the mask. The snorkel falls from her mouth as she scrambles up a makeshift ladder of roots and disappears into a fold in the brush. After a moment, her head sticks back out again. “Well?” she says. “Come on.”
I try to follow, but my foot keeps slipping on the branches below the water. Gabriel’s hands land square on my ass and he shoves, and I whip around fast with shock. He raises his brows, all innocence. “What?” he says. “It worked, yes?”
He’s right; I have cleared the surface. I bang my knee and feel a scrape on the bare skin of my thigh but after a moment, I find myself on the other side of the mangrove thicket, staring at a twin lagoon. In this one, the water is almost magenta, and in the center a sandbar rises like an oasis. On it, a dozen flamingos stand folded like origami as they dip their heads into the pool to feed.
“This,” Gabriel says from behind me, “is what I wanted you to see.”
“It’s amazing,” I say. “I’ve never seen water this color.”
“Artemia salina,” Beatriz says. “It’s a crustacean, a little shrimp, and it’s what the flamingos eat that makes them pink. The concentration in the water makes it look so rosy. I learned that in class.” At the mention of her studies, her face changes. The buoyancy of her shoulders seems to evaporate.
If I can’t get off this island to go home, she also can’t get off it to return to school.
She curls her fingers around the edges of her rash guard sleeves, pulling them more firmly down over her arms.
As if the mood is contagious, Gabriel’s face shutters, too. “Mijita,” he says quietly.
Beatriz ignores him. She snaps on her snorkel, dives into the pink pool, and kicks as far away from us as she can, surfacing on the other side of the oasis.
“Don’t take it personally,” I say.
Gabriel sighs and rubs a hand through his wet hair. “I never know the right thing to say.”
“I don’t know if there’s a right thing,” I admit.
“Well, there’s definitely a wrong thing,” Gabriel replies, “and it’s usually what comes out of my mouth.”
“I haven’t seen any new cuts,” I tell him.
“I know she talks to you,” he says, “and those conversations are for you to keep.”
I nod, thinking of what Beatriz told me about her mother, and how that doesn’t feel like a confidence I should break.