“And how much did the crook charge to tell you a bunch of crap?” Will asked.
Sylvia waved one skinny finger, bent like a small hook. “Wilfredo, you have to have faith.”
Will put his hand on his chest and said, “I do have faith. I have absolute faith in the willingness of some people to profit from human misfortune.”
Bruce chuckled along with Will until Sylvia flashed them both a forbidding look.
Adam Bank said, “Oh, honey,” and squeezed Sylvia’s knee. “You’re wasting your time with apparitions and saints who drip oil out of their little plastic orifices. Alternative medicine is the way to go.”
Adam was a redheaded, balding, middle-aged man who looked more like a Midwestern farmer than a medical professional. He turned to Bruce. “Sylvia found a magazine article about the use of snail venom as a treatment for head injuries. Get this: Two years ago, a man got stung by a marine snail off the Pacific coast of Mexico. He lost feeling in his foot and had some trouble breathing, so he and his companion got in the car and headed to the hospital. On the way, the driver was so flustered that she crashed the car. The man was thrown out of the window and hit his head against a rock at a very high speed. But despite the severity of the damage to the skull, he didn’t slip into a coma, have brain swelling, or suffer any loss of function. They suspect the snail venom was present at just the right moment and prevented cell death. They’ve just now begun to study the possible correlation.”
Bruce, who had been slouching over a steaming cup of coffee, straightened. His eyes had begun to look a bit hooded after twenty minutes of politely listening to Sylvia go on about the miracles of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Now he opened his eyes wide and said, “That venom would have a very specific chemical structure to cross the blood-brain barrier without being injected directly into the spinal fluid. As far as I know, there’s only one type of cone that can do that.”
“Hey,” Adam said, slapping his hand on the table, “the article said the same thing. You read it?”
“No,” Bruce said, “I just happen to know that obscure fact. Don’t ask,” he said, putting his hand up.
Adam leaned forward and looked around him, checking to see if Dr. Bauer was around. When he saw that he wasn’t, he leaned in close. “That’s the kind of thing I would be looking at if I had a loved one in Yvette’s condition,” he whispered, making eye contact with Bruce, Will, and finally Sylvia. “There’s still hope for Yvette. She has loss of cortical, maybe some subcortical functions, and it’s obvious that conventional medicine has come to a dead halt.” He motioned toward Yvette’s bed.
Will slid into a chair, feeling the familiar wave of tiredness he always felt when the subject of “miracle” treatments came up. “It’s nothing new.” Will shook his head. “There are several new drugs being tested on humans that have already proven that they can arrest brain damage if they are dispensed immediately after the injury. The window of time is about twenty minutes, last I heard. These new drugs aren’t going to do Yvette a lick of good at this point. That’s why she hasn’t qualified for any of those studies.”
“Well, this one’s totally different,” Adam said. “They claim they can treat injuries that are years old.”
Will shrugged. “And if they can prove it works, it’ll take years before they begin to test it here in the U.S. and another decade for the FDA to approve it.”
“That’s why you would have to take her out of the country,” Adam said. “Somewhere where they have softer rules for this sort of thing.”
Will laughed. “Like hell. We’re keeping her under Dr. Bauer’s watchful eye.”
“I don’t know about that,” Sylvia declared. She stood up and went over to Yvettte’s bed and began fussing with a loose thread on the robe of the Virgin Mary lamp that stood on Yvette’s night table.
Will stared quizzically at Sylvia. “What do you mean, ‘I don’t know about that’?”
Adam raised one palm and then the other. “Sylvia has been researching the venom treatment. They think we have a shot.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Will asked, knitting his brows at Sylvia, his voice sharp.
“The people at Clinica Caracol,” Sylvia said.
“Clinica what?” Bruce said, cocking his head.
“Caracol. It means ‘seashell’ in Spanish,” Sylvia said.
“I know what it means. Where is it?”
“El Salvador,” Sylvia said. “Do you have a fax? I’ll send you a copy of the article tonight.”
Will interrupted, “Sylvia, you haven’t mentioned anything about any experimental clinics.”
“I’ll give you both a copy,” Sylvia replied.
Adam turned to Will. “She figured you’d balk. Besides, it’s frightfully expensive to transport Yvette to El Salvador.”
“El Salvador?” Will scoffed. “As in the country? Might as well be five billion bucks and the moon. Why are we even talking about this?”
“Because it’s an exciting new treatment,” Sylvia said, her eyes lighting up. “And I wouldn’t have discovered it if it wasn’t for your daughter, Bruce.”
“My Monica?” Bruce said, pulling his chin back. “Why Monica?”
“She had those cone shells on display in her office,” Sylvia said, “and she told us about some of the medicinal uses of their venom. I was intrigued.”
Will left the conversation and walked to Yvette’s bedside. Hope, in her case, was an exhausting and expensive business that never paid off. Theirs was a case of damage control. How to stop this tragedy from devouring the rest of their lives, the rest of their youth, energy, money? The lifetime treatment cost for Yvette was projected to be in the millions of dollars.
He looked up at a pewter cross that hung above the bed. On the bottom, in tiny print, it said MADE IN MEXICO. He felt the overwhelming desire to pull it off the wall. He imagined what it would feel like to sweep his forearm across the shelf above Yvette’s bed; to clear it of the pitying stares of all those saints, the creepy glass eyes of the ceramic Virgin Mary, the dried-out Easter palms, the gaudy rosaries wrapped around a lampshade like Mardi Gras beads, all of it cheesy, all of it dusty and plastic and depressing.
Will collapsed over Yvette and sank his head into the crook between her head and her shoulder, shook his head slightly, and dug his nose into the little space behind her earlobe. She didn’t even smell like the same person. Some medication, he couldn’t remember exactly what, gave off that weird metallic smell. He told himself it was what had driven away his physical desire for her. He was still able to feel it a year or so ago, back when her flesh still smelled like the woman he loved, before the medication with the metal smell robbed him of even that detail. He pulled away, closed his eyes. He wound his fingers into hers instead. They were so white, so skinny, so cold. He half opened his eyes to look at them.
And that’s when he saw it. Between his half-closed eyes he saw her lips move. Not a twitch, but lips deliberately mouthing something, wrapping themselves around each letter of a word, something like wather or perhaps other. He saw the tip of her tongue press against front teeth to pronounce the th sound, which seemed to him to be somewhat of a sophisticated sound to produce involuntarily.
His entire body prickled and he held his breath. He stared at her lips, pale and thin and dry. He ran a finger over them and whispered her name, his own lips bearing down on the soft cartilage of her ear. He suddenly became aware of the others, talking excitedly to each other at the other side of the room. He looked away just a second, just long enough to see that Bruce Winters looked mesmerized as he read the article out loud with Adam and Sylvia looking over his shoulder. Will turned back to Yvettte, squeezed her hand once, staring at her lips, waiting for the slightest repetition of movement. He waited and waited, wondering and doubting if he had seen anything at all. He squeezed her hand in pulses, whispering, “Can you squeeze back?” over and over. He blew gently into her eye. Nothing.
He remembered his mother’s words: Tour dad says she mumbl
ed when he put a bunch of lilacs from his garden under her nose. Will took a deep breath and decided to discreetly inform Dr. Bauer. The key was to avoid getting Sylvia all riled up over nothing. Will already knew what the doctor would say about Yvettte’s vocalization—something about spasms, vocal chords, air passages, sounds that seem like words, but aren’t. Still, it was unnerving to witness those occasional gestures that seemed to contain meaning. Behind him, Bruce, Adam, and Sylvia were still deep in conversation about the clinic in El Salvador, which vaguely angered him and stirred his sense of territoriality. Will excused himself and went into the hall. His hands trembled as he dialed the numbers of the doctor’s pager. It was the only outward sign that the armor that guarded his heart from false hope now bore an invisible, hairline crack.
chapter 5 JIMMY BRAY
At five thirty in the morning Monica had a Salvadoran breakfast ready for her father: coffee, eggs scrambled with onion and tomato, sweet ripe plantains, refried beans, and some authentic corn tortillas she’d bought from a Hispanic grocery in a not-quite-gentrified section of New Haven.
“A nutritionally ideal breakfast if you’re going to spend twelve hours under the sun chopping sugarcane,” Bruce said, as he dug into the basket of warm tortillas.
“I don’t remember signing up to chop sugarcane,” Monica said. “I thought we were going fishing.”
“You’ll need the protein in those eggs to pull up all those monster fish we’re going to catch today.”
Monica poured the coffee and sat down across from him. “Let’s get back in by ten. There’s a front coming in.”
Bruce took a sip of the coffee and closed his eyes for a moment, allowing the steam of the mug to rise up along his face. He sat back, eyes still closed. “Now that’s real Salvadoran coffee.” Bruce smiled a little, lifted the mug, and took another whiff. “Reminds me of your grandmother. Doña Magnolia had her coffee brought out to her at two o’clock in the afternoon, every day.”
Monica took a sniff, inviting memories of times past, but it only smelled like coffee. “I always regret that I never got to go to her funeral. It just seems wrong. I was her only grandchild, after all.”
“I regret it as well,” Bruce said, holding his chin up with the palm of his hand like a little boy. “The Borreros called to inform me of her death after she had been buried for a month. It’s part of how they managed to cheat you out of your inheritance. Bastards.”
“It’s too early in the morning for that,” Monica said, waving one hand. “All I’m saying is that I wish I was able to attend my mother’s and my grandmother’s funerals. Most people need ceremony to get a sense of closure. Otherwise, it’s just like the person is away on a long trip or something.”
Bruce chewed faster, driving his fork through the plantains with unnecessary force. “Alma’s memorial service lasted less than fifteen minutes. We all knew that anything reeking of tradition would be an insult to her memory. If we had been able to recover her body, your grandmother and I would have cremated her and scattered her ashes at sea.” He filled his lungs up and burped into his closed fist, then pointed at his plate. “This is all very authentic.”
“I want to know where Mom’s marker is. I need to know so I can lay you to rest next to her when you die.”
Bruce choked on the last of his coffee, fumbled for some napkins, and covered his mouth as he coughed. He pounded his chest, and his eyes reddened. Finally, he cleared his throat and said in a strained voice, “I’ll be with Ma and Pa in the East Hampton Cemetery, thank you very much. Besides, what would be the point? You’d be burying me all alone, because your mother’s grave is empty.”
“Hmm. Good point.” Monica considered, rubbing her chin.
Bruce looked at his mug. “Did you poison my coffee or something? If you need cash, just ask, for God’s sake, no need to murder me.”
Monica looked hard to the left. “I guess I’m just looking for an excuse to go back to El Salvador. I know I say that every year, but I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time to actually do it.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re trying to give me a heart attack.”
“Dad, the war’s over. What’s the big deal?”
He looked at her sideways. “I find it disturbing that you should be interested in traveling to El Salvador. That place was very bad to you, Monica.”
“It wasn’t personal,” Monica said. “There was a civil war going on.”
Bruce folded his arms and looked away. “I may be going to El Salvador in the next month.”
Monica laughed, shook her head. “What are you talking about?”
“Research.”
“What?” Monica tilted her head and pulled on her earlobe, as if she were trying to shake water out of her eardrum. “I’m sorry. I must have misunderstood. I thought I just heard you say you’re going to the bad place. You know, the one I shouldn’t be allowed to even think about.”
“May be going. May be.”
Accustomed to having to pry information out of her father, Monica took a few seconds to calculate the degree of delicacy required to get the full picture. She stood up and consolidated the food remains on both their plates. She strolled over to the sink, dumped the food, and briefly ran the garbage disposal. “So you’re writing an article,” she said. “Tell me more.”
Bruce cleared his throat. “Well, I got a nibble from Urban Science and the Cutting Edge on the brain-injury article I told you I was pursuing. But it wasn’t until after I had ended the interview with the Lucero crew and we were sitting around gabbing that I realized that something far more interesting was going on. Yvette’s mother is willing to give any kind of superstitious voodoo a chance. Did you see Yvette’s hospital room? It’s full of religious paraphernalia. What’s interesting to me now is the extremes we go to when conventional medicine fails to deliver.”
Monica blinked and turned to look at her father. “What does this have to do with El Salvador?”
Bruce pursed his lips and stared down at the table, as if trying to decide what to say, or what not to say. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, then looked up at her. “Sylvia found a clinic in El Salvador that promises to ‘fix’ her daughter.”
Monica shook her head. “Fix?”
“The Salvadoran government doesn’t consider this natture-based treatment a narcotic, so therefore it’s not regulated. In theory, that means that if there’s something out there that can help someone like Yvette, these folks can isolate the solution a lot faster than we can here. That’s the sliver of hope.” He paused and held up a finger. “Now here’s the interesting part, Monica.”
Monica bounced on her heels. “Tell me. You’re driving me crazy,” she said, forgetting her resolve to approach him gingerly.
“This clinic is using cone toxins to attempt to jolt the injured brain into regenerating new cells.” He opened his eyes even wider. “Cone venom, Monica. Cone venom. The same damn snail juice your mother drowned over.”
“Is it the Conus furiosus?” she whispered.
“Yep. And Sylvia found this program because of you.” He pointed at Monica. “Said you gave her a minicourse on the miracles of cone venom the other day.”
Monica dropped a handful of the silverware into the suds. She blinked several times and put her wet hands together, as if in prayer. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
She never swore, and so Bruce raised his eyebrows and gave her a half smile. “Nope,” he said, as he poured himself more coffee. “I admit that fact has added a personal touch to my curiosity.”
Monica had to blink several times before she could even speak. “How could you sit across from me and discuss the authenticity of these refried beans when you knew someone found the Conus furiosus? Are you from another planet or something?”
Bruce shrugged and looked away. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to know that you’re causing huge arguments between Will and Sylvia.”
“Where on God’s earth did they find it?”
Bruce turned hi
s back to her and walked toward the living room and the picture window that, at this early hour, only reflected back his own image. “Mexico. Apparently mollusks can be declared extinct for a half century, then pop up in droves somewhere.”
“The Conus gloriamaris,” Monica said, following him into the room. “Abuela paid thousands of dollars to have an officially extinct seashell in her collection; now you can get one for thirty bucks.”
“The truth is, I don’t know if it’s really the Conus furiosus, but it sure sounds like it. They’re very secretive about the source for this treatment. The woman I talked to on the phone down there claims that the treatment is a ‘blend’ of venoms.”
“What, like cheap wine?”
“All she would say was that one of the cones in the ‘blend’ was considered extremely rare to extinct, but that a small colony of them was discovered on the Pacific coast, near Oaxaca. Someone was stung, and the subsequent effects imply that the substance was chemically able to break the blood-brain barrier.”
“Sounds like the furiosus to me,” Monica said. “So what do they claim they’re going to do for Yvettte? Restore dead brain cells?”
Bruce nodded. “They have her mother convinced that they can offer some level of improvement.”
“That just seems so far-fetched.”
“That’s what I say, but they claim that they have advanced lucidity in some cases like Yvette’s.”
“What does Will say about it?”
“He thinks it’s ludicrous and dangerous. So do the doctors.”
“Poor Will. It can’t be easy to manage Sylvia on top of everything else. He seems like a nice guy. Patient. Kind,” Monica said, and looked away.
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