The Heiress of Water: A Novel

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  It was his mother. “You’re still there?”

  “Nope. Not unless someone’s dying.”

  “I know it’s your precious sailing day. I was expecting to leave you a message. Anyway, we’re with Yvette and your father wanted me to tell you that she made a sound.” Will’s mother spoke to someone else in the room, presumably his father, then said, “It sounded like a moan, or a mumble, we’re not sure which.”

  “Okay, call me back when you decide. Gotta go, Mom.”

  “Wilfredo—” she began, but Will interrupted her.

  “Until she squeezes someone’s hand when asked a question, blinks once for no, twice for yes—something we can all agree is an attempt to communicate—we can’t read into every sound she makes. We’ve been over this, Mom, please.”

  She sighed. “Your dad says she mumbled something when he put a handful of lilacs under her nose.”

  “Well, tell him I said not to do that. He could introduce something harmful into her respiratory system. A bug, bacteria, pollen, you know how frail she is.” Will took a deep breath. “Anything else?”

  ”Solo eso,” she said, clearly annoyed.

  “Thanks, Mom, I’ll see you Sunday.”

  ”Bueno, mijo. Did you eat the leftover bacalao?”

  “I’m having it for lunch, thanks. Love you,” he said, and hung up.

  A few seconds later, it rang again. This time it was his chief project manager, who was overseeing the restoration of an old Victorian in Mystic, a bed-and-breakfast. Will searched for his boat shoes, a Windbreaker, and other miscellaneous provisions while answering questions about roofing materials. He sighed as he hung up the phone, exhausted. He raised his hand to the base of his neck, wishing he had someone to massage his tension. He thought about how relaxed Yvette’s face had looked after her massage. Heck, he needed a massage more than Yvettte. Yvette wasn’t the one trying to keep a business together; fighting insurance companies, doctors, relatives, and collection agencies. He’d have to work again this weekend, and he was so, so tired. He wondered if he had any muscle relaxants left. He looked at the clock and started to feel sorry for himself all over again.

  When the phone rang for a third time, he backed away from it, hands raised like a prisoner. The heel of his right foot stepped on something that gave a crunch, probably the death cry of his new polarized sunglasses. As the phone continued ringing, he tried to step backward, over the duffel bag, but lost his balance and slipped on the small throw rug underneath the other foot. He fell sideways, catching himself on the edge of the kitchen counter, but bumping his elbow along the way. He grimaced, while the phone continued to ring. What was it with his klutziness lately? Was his body forcing him to slow down by sabotaging his motor coordination? He knew he could only ignore it so long before he really hurt himself, so he got up, put his hands over his ears, and walked out of the kitchen, allowing the machine to pick up.

  The machine beeped and a woman’s voice came on the recorder. He felt an unexpected wave of pleasure when he heard her say her name, Mónica, which she pronounced the Spanish way, with a hard o. She wanted to know if he would consider talking to her father, who was a journalist and was interested in writing a survey of traumatic brain injury recovery for a big magazine. Will hurled himself across the room, careful not to slip again this time, and picked up the receiver. “Sure, I’ll talk to your father,” he said breathlessly. “I owe you one for fitting us into your schedule.” He sucked in air, rubbing his elbow and twisting his arm around to look at the pink gouge.

  “You hurt yourself getting to the phone,” she said flatly.

  He was silent for a few seconds before saying, “Is there a secret camera in my kitchen?”

  She laughed. “You held your breath as you spoke, then sucked it in through your teeth. I know that sound well. I’m a physical therapist. It’s my job to make people make that sound.”

  “An interesting contradiction is that you also give massages. Pain and pleasure. Hmm.”

  Monica laughed. “I never thought of it like that.” She paused and let out a deep breath. “So when would be a good time for my dad to call you?”

  “Not so fast, therapy girl. I want to get Yvettte on your calendar again. She seemed so happy and relaxed after you left. Normally her wrists and ankles are all locked up, but after you left she was like a wet noodle.”

  “Massage drunk,” Monica said. “It happens.”

  “Maybe I’d better get in line now. I could definitely use a shot of whatever you gave to Yvettte.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I told you I can’t take any more clients.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll be the first on your waiting list.”

  “I already have a waiting list.”

  “Well, then how about going sailing with me?” The words flew out of his mouth without his approval, before the idea had even been posted across the marquee of his brain.

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “Because it’s a Tuesday and I have to work. But I’ll take a rain check,” she said brightly. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m thinking of going to a place called Plum Island.”

  “Have you sailed to Plum Island before?”

  “No, but it’s a course I’ve been meaning to try.”

  “I don’t recommend it, it can be frustrating. You’ll spend the whole day tacking back and forth, just to sail a few miles. If you drop your anchor, it’ll drag because the crosscurrents are strong at Plum Island, especially at the Guttt. If you’re pressed for time, you might have a more pleasant day sail if you head up to Napatree Point. The winds are more favorable for a sail towards Watch Hill.”

  “You sail?” he said, astounded.

  “Nah. But let’s just say I know that old sea like a bruised woman knows her ex-husband.”

  “A very intriguing answer, Miss Winters. You’ll have to expound over coffee at the hospital cafeteria sometime.”

  Monica laughed. “You’d have to drink about fifty cups to hear the whole story.”

  “Then I’ll have to buy you dinner. A very slow dinner. How about eight courses of fondue?”

  Shocked, he thought, Jesus, did I just ask her out?

  But she seemed to take it all lightly because she just chuckled and said, “Maybe eight courses of fondue on a slow boat to China.” Then she quickly steered the conversation back to the reason for her call. Will agreed to talk to her father.

  When he hung up, Will caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror. His cheeks were flushed. He’d have to be more careful. What if she’d taken him seriously? He looked down at his dog, shook his head in confusion, and walked out the door.

  WILL HAD NAMED his twenty-six-foot Hunter after the small town in Puerto Rico where his father was born—Yegua Brava, which means “angry mare.” His brother, Eddie, had encouraged him to translate the boat’s name into English before having it painted in script on the transom of the boat. “All those rich country clubbers will say, ‘There goes the neighborhood,’ when they see your dinky sailboat with a Spanish name docked in their fancy marina.”

  But Will didn’t share Eddie’s distrust of non-Hispanic New Englanders. Will proudly flew the American and Puerto Rican flags on his boat alongside the nautical ensign. Besides, in his experience, boaters were a part of a subculture that transcends ethnic divisions. Many of them saw landlubbers as alien creatures. Beyond that was the separation between the “purists”—the sailboaters—and the “vulgar” powerboaters, whose mega-engines’ consumption of gas was rivaled only by their owners’ consumption of beer. All “real” sea folk were members of a sacred tribe, and sailors were special to one another. Might as well be related by spit and blood.

  Will motored the Yegua Brava out of the Yankee Yacht Club in New London. The first few minutes were always stressful, without anyone to help him crew the boat out of the marina. He had already put a few dings into the Yegua Brava, but it was still worth the dose
of solitude. As he sailed out into Fishers Island Sound, he could feel his blood pressure drop. He dropped anchor off the coast of Rhode Island, amused that Monica had been right about the nautical conditions. He had received the exact advice from the dockhands at the marina and so changed his course.

  After making sure that his anchor was secure, Will sat on the deck of his boat, eating his mother’s chopped codfish and drinking the cold beer. He regretted that in his haste he had forgotten to bring doggie treats. Chester licked fussily at a slice of nectarine, pushing it around the boat’s deck with his tongue without actually eating it. Will tossed a ball into the water and Chester flew off the side of the boat, legs splayed, landing in a belly flop and spraying Will with cold water. Chester paddled back to the boat, rubber ball in mouth. They spent the better part of an hour like that, just tossing the ball back and forth until Chester finally began to grow tired of it. Will pulled him back up on board, and Chester shook off salt water infused with doggie smell. Will tore off his soaked T-shirt and went below to rummage through his storage lockers for something else to wear.

  In these few, carefree moments, his reality blindsided him with a cruelty and force that left him dazed and breathless. From between the pages of a damp, outdated navigational guide—which had attached itself like a barnacle to an old polo shirt—a yellow sticky note dropped at his feet: Babe, I went to Dave’s Shanty to get whole belly clams. Be back in fifteen. Love you, Y.

  Will braced himself and waited. He anticipated that the needle on some inner gauge would rise and tremble, measuring the level of the blow. It rose to three, four, fluttered around five. Then stopped. It had been almost two years now. The days of the mean eights, nines, and tens were gone. Maybe he had become desensitized. Maybe it represented the passing of time, the eventual abandonment of hope, the scarring of the wound. He suspected that what he was experiencing was the evolution of grief and rage to acceptance and sadness. He had spent two years mourning the loss of their life together—and was entering a time where he mourned not for them, but for her alone, for an entire life that spanned beyond the brevity of her married years.

  He looked down at the note and instinctively brought it up to his nose and closed his eyes. If any fragment of that time had been trapped and pressed into the paper, it might transport him back to her, back to what still felt like home for him. He asked himself, as he had a thousand times before, what would have happened if he had interrupted the flow of events on that forgotten day she went to buy those clams, even in the smallest way. What if he had suggested that they skip the local fry shop and head home early instead? It might have averted the contact point of time and space that placed Yvette in the car almost two years ago. Maybe the ripples of alternative effect would have traveled around the world in time to nullify her impulse to drive fast, or even the decision of a simpleminded bird to push off the branch of a tree, to unfold its red wings and cross paths with Yvettte’s Mustang.

  Will passed his index finger over the round, curly handwriting and looked over his shoulder, summoning the image of her on the unknown day she had written that note. It came to him, all of a sudden, her legs dropping down the rungs of the boat’s ladder followed by the soft tap-tap of her boat shoes. The backs of her legs were splotched with several angry mosquito bites, and she had scratched a few of them raw. The rolled-up cuffs of her favorite stretch denim shorts appeared, then her narrow waist, her back, then her arms, one of them balancing two white Styrofoam boxes. He smelled the fried batter as the back of her head appeared; her short brown ponytail peeked out of the back hole of a pale pink baseball cap. He stepped forward to take the boxes from her.

  The sticky note slipped out of his hand; its edge made a quiet click sound on the wood table. When he looked up, she had vanished, but he could still smell the coconut sunscreen that clung to her freckled arms as she turned to hand him the boxes. The Yegua Brava rocked him back and forth, and he felt dizzy. A sudden, brief wave of nausea rose in his throat. He gripped the edge of the table and sat down, resting his head on his folded arms, and listened to the water lap against the hull of the boat.

  Yvette wasn’t coming back. Although Sylvia brought him newspaper clippings of miraculous recoveries from around the world almost weekly, the facts were hard to ignore. He had already said good-bye to his wife, at least to the woman he had married six years ago. He knew that in the unlikely case that she did emerge from her vegetative state, she would never be the old Yvette. The old Yvette lived only in his memory, in the eruption of blue hydrangeas she had planted in the front yard, in the red Tootsie Pop wrappers he still found wedged between furniture cushions. He thought he had found the last of her notes months ago, so he was surprised and grateful, despite all his other feelings, to find this little note addressed to him. Surely this was the last one.

  So much had happened since Yvette had slipped into her snowy silence. Lucero Restoration had grown; he had finished his MBA, finally. His sisters had three new kids between them. His black hair had become streaked with gray. They had crossed into a new millennium. Will’s family and friends had gently suggested, about a year after the accident, that it was time to begin a new life, one that assumed the inevitable reality of Yvette’s absence. What they meant by “beginning a new life,” Will knew, included dating. Dating would be the ultimate acknowledgment that he wasn’t a man whose wife was ill, but rather, that he was essentially a widower.

  It was true that he had been attracted to a couple of women since the accident, and he admitted he wasn’t immune to a pretty face. In fact, Monica Winters had lingered in his thoughts during his drive to the marina. But so many things, like the note, kept him tied to the limbo of caring for Yvettte’s body and comforting her mother, working to pay the bills and keep the rest of their support system afloat. In any case, he couldn’t imagine crossing the chasm that led to a new place, to whatever lay beyond his hectic and lonely routine.

  The note flapped and tumbled across the table. A gust of wind lifted it and blew it out the open hatch. Will leaped after it, stubbing a toe and grimacing as he climbed the ladder and stepped onto the deck. Chester’s claws scratched across the deck of the boat as he chased the scrap of paper. It fluttered, then dropped, then flickered up again as if to tease him. It hovered just above Chester’s nose for a second, brushed his forehead once, making the dog snap at the air in vain. It lifted and crossed over the side of the boat, floating, floating, until it crashed down like a kite, sliding sideways onto the surface of the water. Chester turned back to look at Will. The dog’s muscles were tensed and he whined for permission to jump in after it. But Will came up behind him and grabbed his collar. “Let it go,” he said, and pulled the dog back.

  The last thing he did before packing up and heading back was to pull out his binoculars and scan the view of Watch Hill. He admired the proud, water-view Victorian homes dotting the village. He saw the circuslike tent of the old carousel, where he and Yvette had taken his nephews for afternoon rides. The figures of fathers and mothers and children and dogs bounced up and down and sideways across his vision. For the millionth time, he wished that he and Yvette had had a child.

  “YOUR DAUGHTER HAS YOUR EYES,” Will said to the tall, thin man sitting in the lobby of DiSanttis Center. Bruce Winters and his daughter, Monica, had the same green irises rimmed by a pencil-thin black edge. But on Bruce Winters, those eyes looked weary and noble as a police dog’s. On Monica, as Will recalled, the same eyes looked fresh as cut grass. As Will began to recount the story of his wife’s accident, he searched for more traces of the pretty therapist in this tall, thin man with wide, Germanic angles to his chin, nose, and forehead. Monica, Will decided, must have gotten all her soft stuff from her mama.

  Bruce Winters was well informed and crisply professional, and placed a small recording device between them while he scratched away at a notebook. After forty-five minutes, Will escorted him over to room M42. Eventually Sylvia appeared, as did Yvette’s neurologist, Dr. Forest Bauer. The doctor, who
was normally in a rush, paused to answer Bruce Winters’s questions in great detail and, to Will’s surprise, even invited Bruce to follow him on his rounds later on. Yvette, he explained, was currently scoring a five out of fifteen possible points on the Glasgow Coma Scale, which measures the ability to respond to commands or sensations of pain, along with scores for eye-opening and verbal abilities. An eight or below was generally considered to be “severe.” Yvette had made no progress on the Glasgow since the accident. Rarely did a patient like Yvette remain under expensive, professional care for so long, the doctor explained. But Yvette had been absorbed into a variety of medical studies that helped defray the cost of her care and retesting.

  After the doctor left, Bruce was left with Sylvia and Adam Bank, Yvette’s physical therapist. By the time Will came back from the cafeteria with four cups of coffee, Sylvia had steered the conversation over to her favorite subject: miracle healings. Since the fact-gathering portion of the interview was over, Bruce put away his notebook and recorder and folded his arms across his chest. Sylvia confessed to calling a psychic, whose 1-900 number she had seen on a coma-recovery discussion board on the Internet. “This psychic said she was getting visions from a woman in a coma who is trying to communicate with her family from another plane of consciousness,” she explained. “So I called.”