Since I sort of feel like it already has been.
When I refuse to let Betty call in the doctor, she suggests that we try to reach Finn. She uses my phone to FaceTime him, but he doesn’t pick up. Ten minutes later, though, he knocks on the glass outside my room. Seeing him there—seeing someone who cares about me—I am flooded with relief. I wave, trying to get him to come in, but he shakes his head. He mimes holding a phone to my ear, and then flags down Betty in the hallways. She comes inside to hold my own cellphone for me, because my arms are too weak.
“Hey,” Finn says softly. “I hear the patient is rowdy.”
“Not rowdy,” I correct. “Just … ?frustrated. And really, really lonely.”
“If it’s any consolation, isolation must be doing wonders, because you look better already.”
“You liar,” I murmur, and through the glass, he winks.
This is real, I tell myself. Finn is real.
But I feel the concavity of that statement, too: Gabriel is not.
“Finn?” I say. “What if I can’t tell the difference anymore between what was a dream and what wasn’t?”
He’s silent for a moment. “Have you had … ?any more … ?episodes?”
He doesn’t want to say the word hallucination, I can tell. “No,” I reply. What I don’t say is that every time I’ve closed my eyes today I have expected to return to where I was yesterday.
I want a do-over, even as my conscience reminds me this is one.
“Your nurse said you were getting a little worked up,” Finn says.
Tears spring to my eyes. “No one will tell me anything.”
“I will,” he vows. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, Diana.”
“I don’t remember getting sick,” I begin.
“You woke up in the middle of the night with a headache,” Finn says. “By the next morning, you had a fever of a hundred and three. Your breaths were so shallow, you were panting. I called an ambulance to bring you here.”
“What about the Galápagos?” I ask.
“What about it?” he says. “We decided not to go.”
Those five words wipe clean all the noise in my mind. Did we?
“Your pulse ox was seventy-six, and you tested positive,” Finn continues. “They took you to a Covid ward. I couldn’t believe it. You were young and healthy and you weren’t supposed to be the kind of person who could get this virus. But the biggest thing we know about Covid is that we don’t know anything about it. I was reading everything I could, trying to get you into trials for drugs, trying to figure out how even six liters of air pushed through a cannula to you couldn’t raise your pulse ox. And meanwhile, all around me, I had patients on vents who weren’t ever coming off them.” He swallows, and I realize that he’s crying. “We couldn’t keep you lucid,” Finn says. “They called me to tell me they needed to intubate you now. So I gave them the go-ahead.”
My heart hurts, thinking of how hard that must have been.
“I’d sneak in whenever I could, sit by the bed, and talk to you—about my patients, and about how fucking scary this virus is, and how I feel like we’re all just shooting in the dark and hoping to hit a target.”
Those sporadic emails from him, then, weren’t really emails.
“I bullied your medical team into proning you—putting you on your belly, even on the vent. I read where a doctor on the West Coast had success with Covid patients by doing that. They thought I was crazy but now some of the pulmonologists are doing it, because what the hell, it worked for you.”
I think about all the time I spent at Concha de Perla, floating facedown with a mask and snorkel, peeking into a world undersea.
“I’d be working—rounding on my own patients, whatever—and I’d hear the call for codes, and every time, every goddamn time, I would freeze and think, Please God, not her room.”
“I … ?I’ve been here ten days?” I ask.
“It felt like a year to me. We tried to bring you out of sedation a few times, but you weren’t having it.”
Suddenly I remember the vivid dream I had when I was in the Galápagos: Finn, not costumed as I had assumed, but wearing an N95 mask like everyone else here. Telling me to stay awake, so he could save me. The woman I pictured beside him, I realize now, was Syreta.
There is one overlapping part of both realities, I realize. “I almost died,” I whisper.
Finn stares at me for a long moment, his throat working. “It was your second day on the vent. Your pulmonologist told me that he didn’t think you’d last the night. The vent was maxing out and your O-two levels were shit. Your blood pressure bottomed out, and they couldn’t stabilize you.” He draws a shuddering breath. “He told me I should say goodbye.”
I watch him rub a hand over his face, reliving something I do not even recall.
“So I sat with you … ?held your hand,” Finn says softly. “Told you I love you.”
One tear streaks down my cheek, catching in the shell of my ear.
“But you fought,” he says. “You stabilized. And you turned the corner. Honestly, it’s a miracle, Diana.”