By the time we have sorted out our clothes and hurried up to Abuela’s, Beatriz is gone.
By unspoken agreement, I climb into Gabriel’s Jeep with him. He is silent as he drives through town, scanning the empty streets for her. At the dock, he reverses direction, and heads for the highlands. “She could be back at the farm,” he says, and I nod, because thinking of the alternative is too terrifying.
But I know that, like me, he saw the look on Beatriz’s face. It wasn’t just embarrassment at finding us. It was … ?betrayal. It was the expression of someone who realized she was well and truly alone.
It was a look I hadn’t seen on her face since the very first time I saw her on the dock at Concha de Perla, watching her own blood drip from her fingertips.
In the time I’d been on Isabela, Beatriz had moved from desperation to resignation. If she hadn’t been exactly joyous about this homecoming, at least now she seemed to be less tormented. She hadn’t been cutting herself. Her old wounds were silver scars.
And now we’d ripped them open again.
I know that cutting does not always precede suicide. But I also know that sometimes, it does. Beatriz let her guard down with me; she trusted me to be her person. And then I gave myself to someone else.
A small sinkhole forms in me, filled with guilt. Finn. My mother.
There is so much wrong with what I did last night. But I push all that out of my head because right now nothing matters but finding Beatriz and talking her down from her ledge.
A whisper in my bones: Coward.
“This is a small island,” Gabriel says tightly. “Until it isn’t.”
I know what he means. There are endless trails and furrows through Isabela that aren’t accessible by car; there are poisonous plants and spined cacti in some places and thick greenery you can’t see through in others. There are countless ways you can hurt yourself—unintentionally, or on purpose.
“We’ll find her,” I tell him. I lift my hand, planning to cover his on the stick shift, but on second thought, put it back in my lap.
I stare out the passenger-side window, scanning every flutter of movement to see if it might be a girl on the run. There’s no way she could have outpaced us on foot. But maybe she took a bicycle from Abuela’s. Maybe she got a head start on us when we made a false start by turning toward town.
When we finally reach the farm, I open the Jeep’s door before we even come to a complete stop. I run into Gabriel’s house, yelling for Beatriz. He is on my heels, wildly looking around the living room and throwing open the door to her bedroom to find it empty.
I stand in the doorway as he sinks down onto the mattress. “Shit,” he mutters.
“Maybe she just needs time alone,” I say quietly, hopefully. “Maybe she’s on her way back right now.”
His haunted gaze meets mine, and I realize this is not the first time he’s searched far and wide for someone he loved who’d gone missing.
Suddenly he grabs Beatriz’s backpack from beside the bed and dumps the contents on the mattress.
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
“Something she took? Something she didn’t?” He unzips an inner pocket and stuffs his hand inside. “I don’t know.”
A clue. A hint to where, on this island, she would have gone to disappear.
I open the top drawer of the bureau, letting my hand sift through panties and bras, when my fingers brush against something that feels like a diary.
I dig deeper into the recesses of the drawer. It’s not a diary or a journal or a book at all. It’s a stack of postcards, banded together with a hair elastic.
It’s all of the postcards I wrote Finn. The ones that Beatriz told me she mailed.
I feel like I’ve been run through with a sword. I pull off the elastic and shuffle through the cards, all G2 TOURS on one side, and my cramped handwriting on the other. This was the one connection I had to Finn. Even if I couldn’t reliably speak to him or get his emails, I was hopeful that he was hearing every now and then from me.
Except … ?he wasn’t.
Finn is thousands of miles away, without any word from me. Given our last abortive phone call, he must assume I’m pissed at him. At the very least he’ll think I’ve put him out of my mind.
I look at Gabriel and realize that, last night, this was true.
The contents of Beatriz’s backpack—textbooks and a phone charger and earbuds and some granola bars—are littered around him. But Gabriel is holding a Polaroid and frowning slightly. A line of tape runs down the middle, carefully piecing together something that was previously sliced apart.
On one side of the photograph is a pretty girl, with corkscrews of blond hair. She has her arm around Beatriz, her other hand extended to take the photo. Their eyes are closed, as they kiss.
Ana Maria.
The expression on Beatriz’s face is one I’ve never seen: pure joy.
“Who is this girl?” Gabriel murmurs.