For a moment I watch those three dots appear and disappear while Rodney figures out what to say.
Suddenly the Survivor screen freezes and a FaceTime call pops up. I answer it and Rodney’s face swims into view. “I don’t know if it counts as conquering your fears when you do it unconscious,” he says.
“Definitely a blurry line.”
He regards me for a long moment. “You wanna talk about it?”
“It’s a place called the trillizos. They’re like these gopher holes into the middle of the earth. I guess tourists rappel down them.”
He shudders. “Give me a beach and a frozen marg.”
“Beatriz brought me there the first time, and the second time, she ran away and I crawled down to try to save her.”
“How come she needed saving?”
“She kind of found me in bed with her father and it didn’t go well.”
Rodney hoots with laughter. “Diana, only you could hallucinate yourself into an ethical mess.”
At that word—hallucinate—something in me shutters. Rodney notices, and his eyes soften. “Look, I shouldn’t have said that. Trauma is trauma. Just because someone else hasn’t experienced it themselves doesn’t make it any less real to you.”
Maggie has talked to me about other patients who have come off ECMO or the vent who suffer from PTSD. I have some of the same symptoms—that fear of falling asleep, the panic attacks when I start to cough, the obsessive checking of my pulse ox numbers. But I can still feel what it was like to have water fill my lungs as I drowned, too. In the middle of the night, my heart pounds in my throat and I’m right back in the tunnel I shimmied down looking for Beatriz. I am having flashbacks of experiences everyone here tells me I never had, and now—more than a week after being weaned off any sedation drugs—they still haven’t gone away.
“Maybe I shouldn’t talk about it,” I mull out loud. “Maybe that’s only going to make it harder in the long run. It’s just …” I shake my head. “Remember that guy who came into Sotheby’s convinced that he had a Picasso and it wasn’t even a fake or a forgery—it was a flyer for a shitty band, and he was completely delusional?”
Rodney nods.
“I get it now. To him, that was a goddamn Picasso.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know why it hasn’t just … ?gone away. Or why I can’t wrap my head around it being a detailed, incredibly weird dream.”
“Maybe because you don’t want it to be?”
“If the reality is that I nearly died, then sure. But it’s more than that. These people were so real.”
Rodney shrugs. “For a smart girl, you’re a dumbass, Di. You’re holding a phone in your hand, aren’t you? Tell me you’ve Googled them.”
I blink at him. “Oh my God.”
“Yes, my child?”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you still can’t do the word scramble puzzles that OT gives you, and your brain isn’t firing right.”
I pull up the search engine, Rodney shrinking to a little green dot in the background. I type Beatriz Fernandez.
There are results, but none of them are her.
The same happens when I type in Gabriel’s name.
“Well?” Rodney asks.
“Nothing.” But that’s not surprising, given the fact that the internet there was so bad that social media profiles would be useless.
Unless the internet isn’t bad there, and I just created that obstacle in my dream.
My head starts to hurt.
“Let me try something,” I murmur.
I type in Casa del Cielo Isabela Galápagos.
Immediately, a picture loads of the hotel I had booked—it looks nothing like the one I visited in my imagination. But … ?it exists.
My thumbs fly over my phone again. G2 TOURS.
Tours/Outfitter, I read. And in red: CLOSED.
I suck in my breath. “He’s real, Rodney. Or at least his company is.”
“And you don’t remember ever coming in contact with them before you went, like when you were planning the trip?”
I don’t. But maybe my brain did.
“Hang on, Rod.” I put my phone down, hoist myself up on Alice, and use the walker to make my way to the nightstand. There, I sit on the edge of the bed and pick up the guidebook I was reading the night before. Thumbing through the pages, I find the ones about Isabela Island.
I skim the categories: Arrival and Getting Around.
Accommodation.
Eating and drinking.
Tour operators.
The third one down: G2 TOURS. Open M–Sun 10–4. Private land/water excursions, SCUBA certified.
I did not highlight it. But I must have skimmed over it. My imagination clearly was working overtime to create a whole backstory and family around one tiny line item in a guidebook.
I shuffle back to the chair and pick up my phone again. “Gabriel’s tour company is listed in the guidebook I read.”
“He’s mentioned by name?”
“Well … ?no,” I say. “But why else would I have invented a place called G2 unless I’d seen something about it?”