My mother never told me that story directly, but I had seen so many interview clips on the internet that I knew where she paused for dramatic effect, the part where she smiled wryly, the bit where she rolled her eyes in self-deprecation. It was an act, and my mother never broke character. She and the interviewer would both laugh, in a charming, what-can-you-do way.
What about the baby, I used to think, as if it were not me, as if I were a mere observer. What about this is remotely funny?
Finn—
Last night I had a supervivid dream of you. Someone had kidnapped me and drugged me and I was in a basement and there weren’t any doors or windows where I could escape. I was tied to something—a pole, a chair? Then all of a sudden, you were there, wearing a costume. I couldn’t see the bottom half of your face, but I knew it was you because of your eyes and because I could smell your shampoo. You kept telling me to stay awake so you could get me out of there, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Then I realized we weren’t alone. There was another woman with you, and she was in costume, too.
I was the only one who hadn’t been invited to the party.
It’s somewhere around the fourth hour of a seven-hour hike to the Sierra Negra volcano that I wonder why, exactly, Gabriel thought this was a birthday gift anyone would actually enjoy. I am hot and sweaty and sunburned when we reach a small tree with a black rock in a crotch of its limbs. “This is the spot where tourists leave their overnight packs,” Gabriel says, and he shrugs off the gear he’s been shouldering. “Some of them stay overnight before hiking down into the caldera. No one’s allowed up here without a ranger or guide.”
We are breaking curfew, Gabriel isn’t really a guide anymore, and the volcano happens to be active. What could possibly go wrong?
Till this point, the climb has taken us along dirt paths, through lush, thick greenery. The trail begins 800 meters above sea level, Gabriel tells me, and by the time you reach the volcano, you’re 1,000 meters up. From the pack he’s carried, he takes out a lunch Abuela has made and spreads it between us. There are plastic bowls of rice and chicken, and a chocolate bar that is already soft with heat, which we share. I stretch my legs out in front of me, looking at the dust on my sneakers. “How much further?” I ask him.
He grins at me, his eyes shaded by a baseball cap. “You sound like Beatriz, when she was little.”
I try to imagine Beatriz, smart and demanding, as a little girl. “I bet she was a handful.”
Gabriel thinks for a moment. “She was just the right amount.”
I open my mouth to explain the idiom to him, but then realize his answer is already perfect. “Don’t think I didn’t notice that you avoided my question …”
“You’ll know,” he says. “Trust me.”
And, I realize, I do.
We gather up our trash and put it into Gabriel’s pack, falling into an easy rhythm as we hike to the top of the caldera. “What are the odds,” I ask, “that this is going to go all Mount St. Helens on us?”
“Slim to none,” Gabriel assures me. “There are twelve geological systems tracking its tremors, and it gives out plenty of hints before it erupts, which happens every fifteen years or so. I was here the last time. My father and I hiked in and we slept on ground that was warm, like it had heated pipes underneath. He taught me how to gauge the wind and the slope, so that we wouldn’t wind up in the path of the eruption. We took pictures, when it happened. I remember you could see the orange lava in the cracks of the earth, just a foot or so below. My shoes stuck to the rocks, because the soles had melted.”
“When was this?”
“Two thousand five. I was a teenager.”
I do the math. “So … ?this volcano is overdue to blow?”
“If it makes you feel better, the Galápagos are moving eastward on their tectonic plate, so even though the hot spot is in the same place, the lava flows mostly to the west now … ?which means the eruptions aren’t as dangerous to the people living here anymore.”
It does not make me feel better, but before I can tell him that, the caldera comes into view.
The crater stands out in stark relief to the lush green that cradles it. It’s black, six miles of it, sprawled beneath a cloud of mist. It looks desolate and barren, otherworldly. From where we hike along the precipice, I can see the ocean and the rich emerald of the highlands to the right, but also the ropy, frozen black swirls of the caldera to the left. It feels like standing on the line between life and death.
We have to climb down into the caldera, trek across it, and then hike up to the fumaroles—the active part of the volcano. As we walk across the scorched belly of the crater, with its melted eddies of charred lava, it feels like we are navigating a distant planet. I follow behind Gabriel, stepping where he steps, as if one wrong move might plummet me to the middle of the earth.