Gabriel stares out at the flat horizon, but I know he’s not seeing what’s in front of us. “Ten divers got spread out to the right of the cliff wall. But one, who wasn’t quite as experienced at scuba, got sucked into the current to the left, and dragged down deep. My father, he pointed to the ten other divers and then he did this”—Gabriel touches his index fingers together—“he wanted me to stay close to them. I knew he was going to go after the other diver. I saw him swim into the current, and then when I couldn’t see him anymore, I went after the others.”
He shakes his head. “There was a clump of divers clinging to the rock face, together. After I got to them, I led them to the surface and set off a float so that the panga driver could get them. The boat was already a half mile north, picking up others who had surfaced a distance away. It went like that for a while—me treading water and trying to see the heads of the other divers and make sure the panga rounded them up. By the time that was done, I counted eleven divers and me, but my father and the last diver hadn’t come up.
“We zoomed out to the left of the rock. I had binoculars, from the panga driver, and I was staring so hard at the surface of the water looking for a bobbing head or anything that moved, but the ocean …” Gabriel’s voice caught. “It’s just so goddamn big.”
He fell silent, and I reached into his lap and squeezed his hand. I rested our fists on my knee.
“After an hour, I knew he couldn’t have survived. At the depths he was at, he could have been dragged by the current a hundred feet or more. The percentage of oxygen in the tanks was meant for a shallow dive, and he knew going deeper would mess with his brain and his ability to function. He would only have had enough air for ten or fifteen minutes, that far down. Between swimming hard to catch up to the lost diver and inflating the diver’s BC and unhooking his weight belt, my dad likely had even less time than that.”
I think about my own father’s death. I was not with him, and it happened too fast, but at the hospital, I was able to see his body. I remember holding his cold hand and not wanting to let it go, because I knew it would be the last time I ever got to touch him. “Did your father …” I start. “Did he ever …” But I can’t seem to finish.
Gabriel shakes his head. “Bodies that drown in the ocean don’t surface,” he says quietly.
“I’m so sorry. What a terrible accident.”
His gaze snaps up. “Accident? It was all my fault.”
Dumbfounded, I stare at him. “How?”
“I was the one who tested the conditions. Clearly I got them wrong—”
“Or they changed—”
“Then I should have been the one to go after the diver,” Gabriel insists. “So my father would still be alive.”
And you wouldn’t, I think.
He turns his head away from me. “I can’t lead tours anymore, not without thinking about how bad I fucked up. I can’t scuba-dive without thinking his body is going to drift in front of me. The reason I’m building the house and farming is because I have to be goddamn exhausted at the end of the day, or I have nightmares about what he must have been thinking in those last few minutes.”
I’m quiet for a moment. “What he was thinking,” I say finally, “is that his son would be safe.”
Gabriel dashes a palm across his eyes, and I pretend not to notice. He stands up, using his weight to pull me to my feet. “We’d better get back,” he says. “The return trip’s not any shorter.”
All around us, fumes rise from little pockets in the ground, as if we stand in a crucible. It is prehistoric and dystopian, but if you look closely, here and there are tiny green shoots and stalks. Something, growing out of nothing.
As we walk back across the fumaroles and the dark yawn of the caldera, Gabriel doesn’t let go of my hand.
An hour later, the sun is skulking lower in the sky and we reach the crotched tree with the black lava rock where Gabriel left behind his heavier pack. We can see the huddled shape of it, propped against a tree, but there’s another shadow as well, and as we get closer, it is clear that it’s a person. I scramble in my pocket for the mask I haven’t worn when it was just me and Gabriel, only to realize that it is Beatriz. She breaks into a run as soon as she sees us.
“You need to come now,” she says, and she pushes a piece of paper into my hand.
It is an email, printed out on stationery from the hotel. For immediate delivery to guest Diana O’Toole, it reads. From: The Greens. We have been trying to reach you. Please contact ASAP. Your mother is dying.
On the way back to Gabriel’s house, we sprint—and yet somehow, the distance seems even further than it did this morning. Distantly I hear Beatriz explain to Gabriel how the message arrived—something about Elena and an electrical short that caused a small fire in the hotel’s utility room; how when she went to the hotel with her cousin so he could rewire and fix the circuits, and to make sure everything was in working order, she had powered up the front office computers and seen a series of emails, each more urgent, trying to get in touch with me. I hear Gabriel tell Beatriz to call Elena, to have the Wi-Fi up and running by the time we get there.