The Heiress of Water: A Novel

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  Will was silent for a moment, then said, “So what do you do to get your gunk out, Monica?”

  Monica paused her massaging for just a few seconds before beginning again, taking a half step back to leverage more strength. “I fish with my dad. I volunteer at the Mystic Aquarium doing educational projects for kids. I take a ferry out to Martha’s Vineyard and spend the weekend. Oh, and I hang out with my boyfriend.”

  “And what puts the gunk into your life?” he asked, his voice muffled by a towel Monica had stuffed under his neck.

  “Mostly my boyfriend.” She laughed, but her laugh sounded brittle even to herself. She felt something pass under her hand—a tensing, then releasing. He had been about to say something, then decided not to.

  “But you know what?” she said, digging her fist around his deltoids. “You’re here to relax, not to talk about problems.”

  “I’m relaxed just talking to you. But okay. I’ll shut my trap.”

  Over the next fifteen minutes, Monica thought of three things she wanted to ask him, but bit her tongue. Will was finally silent, and although she was itching to learn more about him, the ideal environment for him to reap the full impact of her hard work was silence. Monica could tell that he was, as she called it, “gelling down.” He was relaxing, releasing endorphins, a mild euphoria setting into his muscles. His thoughts were wandering freely. Soon he would start to feel sleepy.

  Next, Monica got to work on his feet. She squirted warm cream on one hand and kneaded, rubbed, and pulled his toes so they made little snapping sounds. In a moment, she heard his heavy breathing; a few moments later, light snoring.

  She always stopped at this stage, because what was the point of massaging someone who was asleep? She would let him sleep for twenty minutes, then wake him up and finish the massage. She moved about quietly, washed her hands, and went into the kitchen to get something to drink. Then, she stepped out to the deck, laced her fingers together, and did some quick stretches. She breathed in the muggy air, and even though it was sticky and uncomfortable, she decided to stay outside a few minutes.

  She looked at her watch. Kevin wasn’t due to take her out to dinner for another hour and a half. Plenty of time. Thursday and Saturday were their date nights, and Kevin was rigid about that because he watched his favorite TV shows on Mondays and Wednesdays. Tuesday and Friday nights he worked out at the gym and Monica gave massages at home.

  When the twenty minutes were up, she stepped back into the house, relieved to return to the air-conditioning. Will was still asleep, facedown. She opened a wood armoire and searched for a livelier CD. She popped in a collection of flamenco ballads and lowered the volume. Her intention was to raise the volume slowly, so as not to startle him.

  Monica heard a soft clicking sound behind her. She turned around to see Kevin, in shirt and tie, appear in the hallway, jacket tossed over one arm. In his other hand was his laptop computer bag. The hallway was carpeted, so he had not made any noise as he came in. Monica held her index finger up to her lips to hush him. But something caught his eye and he looked away for a second or two and did not see her. He stepped into the living room, his work shoes clicking on the hardwood floor as he said, in a loud, irritated voice, “Who the hell is parked in my spot?” As he spoke, he turned slightly to toss a handful of keys into a nearby ceramic bowl. The keys made a loud jangling noise.

  Will’s lids peeled open and he sat up, fists raised, muscles flexed, his face registering a wild confusion. Startled, Kevin jumped back, letting go of his computer bag to hold his hands out in front of him. The bag landed with a loud crash on his foot.

  Monica sprang to Will’s side and put her hand on his arm. “Easy, easy,” she said. “I was massaging you and you fell asleep.”

  Will shook his head and dropped back onto the table, flopping one hand over his eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” Monica said. “I didn’t expect him for another hour or so.” She shot Kevin a look. “Thanks, Kevin. All that work for nothing.”

  Will sat up again and leaned on one elbow. “Are you kidding? You were great.”

  At those last three words, Kevin turned and eyed Will’s muscular upper body. A little frown line appeared between his eyebrows.

  Will stepped off the massage table and offered his palm to Kevin. “Instincts, man. I didn’t know where I was. I’m sorry.” Kevin accepted the handshake, but his face was bright red.

  “Is your foot all right?” Monica said, pointing to Kevin’s foot. “That had to hurt.”

  “I’m fine,” Kevin mumbled, motioning dismissively with his hand and limping up over to the stairs, where he took his shoe off and rubbed the toes inside his black sock.

  After Will changed back into his clothes, Monica walked him out to his car. He gave her sixty dollars for the massage. Monica refused the money and apologized three times, and each time he repeated that the fright hadn’t ruined his massage and pressed the bills into her hand.

  “I really like your dad,” Will said, changing the subject. “We’ve met three times already. I imagine he told you he’s considering going down to Clinica Caracol to do some nosing around.”

  “What did you say?” Monica stopped.

  “He wants to write an article about brain—”

  “I know that part. The name of the clinic is Caracol?”

  “Yeah, the word for ‘seashell’ in Spanish.”

  “I know what it means,” she said. “Caracol was the name of the beach house I grew up in. My dad didn’t mention that detail.”

  “He said your mom was searching for a miracle snail up until the time she died. No wonder he’s so interested.”

  Monica raised an eyebrow at Will. “Really? He talked to you about my mom?”

  “Not really. I’ll stop by to see you at the office one of these days. Yvette is vocalizing, moving a little, doing some things out of the blue. Dr. Bauer is retesting.”

  “That’s great news.”

  Will shrugged. “The human body does a lot of things on a completely involuntary basis. Some activities can be misinterpreted as reactive when they’re not. Yvette’s ‘crying’ turned out to be the result of eye irritation. Some of the early signs that we saw—yawning and the opening and closing of the eyes—is a circadian rhythm directed in the brain stem and isn’t one of the upper-cortex functions we’re looking for. Same goes for the noises. They appear to be just noises, rather than attempts to communicate. The challenge is to determine if a specific activity is deliberate.”

  Monica blinked. “Sounds like a hell of a roller-coaster ride, Will.”

  Will opened the driver’s door to his truck and leaned against the open door. He examined his key ring as he spoke. “After we passed the one-year mark, I chose not to let it be a roller-coaster ride. Call it logic, call it pessimism, call it a self-defense mechanism, call it by any name. When it comes to brain injury, time is your enemy. The longer you’re out”—he pointed to his temple—”the slimmer your chances of coming back. Once a person’s been vegetative for a year, the outcome has already shown itself. What is five percent improvement? Ten percent, twenty? What does it mean if a year from now Yvette can complete a toddler’s puzzle? In ten years, she might be able to complete a slightly more difficult puzzle and say six words.” His voice trailed off at the end of the last sentence, and his face flushed. The keys fell out of his hand and Monica bent down to retrieve them and handed them to him without looking into his eyes, which she wasn’t brave enough to do.

  “Then maybe this El Salvador thing is worth looking into, Will. If Yvette already has very little to lose in terms of mental ability …,” Monica offered, daring to catch a peek of his face. “If you say there’s very little hope …”

  Will looked up toward the tops of the sparse pine trees that separated the cottage from the neighbor’s. “Trust me—nobody’s taking Yvette to El Salvador. I think it’s great to become educated on what’s being tested, maybe considering participation in a very well-controlled study at a highly reputab
le institution like Yale. But we’re not sending my Yvette to El Salvador to participate in some wild experiment. That’s just irresponsible, doing something to appease ourselves rather than doing what’s safest for her.”

  Suddenly, the tension in his face vanished, and he smiled while he was still looking up at the sky. “Hey, look, a full moon. That explains why I almost attacked your boyfriend.”

  Monica looked up, then hung her head. “I’d managed to forget the incident for a moment or two.”

  Will smiled weakly and leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Now I get to look forward to another massage.”

  She watched him get into his truck and pull out of her driveway. He stuck one arm out the window and waved. As he pulled away, Monica was surprised to see a golden retriever standing in the bed of the pickup. She waved back and the dog offered a few happy barks.

  As her hand cupped the faintest pocket of wind coming off the water, it recalled the smooth grain of his skin across the palms of her hands. She looked up at the full, silver moon. Her awareness of it was like a tip, a bonus he had generously left behind. She tried to remember the first time she had ever touched Kevin’s skin, and how it felt, but couldn’t.

  Monica thought about Yvette and felt ashamed that she felt attracted to Will. But it was no sin, as long as she didn’t act on it or nurture it in any way. There was not a single good reason to contemplate this little crush longer than the full phase of the moon. Alma’s mantra rang though her head:

  Can he change the world? Deliver justice? Can he save what’s precious? Can he bring exceptional beauty to the world, or at the very least, relief of pain? If the answer is no, then move on.

  No, Will wasn’t curing cancer, saving whales, or sentencing criminals. But he was restoring the historical properties of Connecticut, which perhaps counted as bringing exceptional beauty to the world. Still, it was a stretch, as it was for most mortals. As if love were a board game, she thought. You love a doctor, a judge, or an environmental biologist; you pass go and collect two hundred dollars. If you love a postman, a construction worker, or a man who owns a fruit stand … shame on you for squandering your love. Go directly to jail.

  That night, Kevin and Monica spoke little over dinner. Kevin’s mood was spoiled, and although he was normally not one to hold a grudge, the incident with Will really seemed to rattle him. During the drive home he said, “Besides your dad, Adam, and me, I want you to consider having a clientele of females only. You know, for safety reasons.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

  Despite the fact that they hadn’t seen each other since the previous Sunday, Kevin dropped Monica off at her house without getting out of the car. He said he had a headache and an early morning meeting. She ran and got his laptop computer and handed it to him through the open window of his Honda. They kissed, but coolly. He drove away, and Monica went upstairs and went to bed. She lay awake, staring out at the gray horizon, at the glimmering water and the swollen moon. She had the first inkling that something about Kevin seemed to bring out her most independent and stubborn self, made her dig in her heels far more than she meant to. Most of the time, the passion of their arguments flared up into romantic ardor, and then they got to enjoy the making up. But not tonight. Tonight they were just frustrated with each other. Tonight she was glad he was gone.

  MONICA FOUND THE ARTICLE she was looking for at the hospital library. She checked it out and made three copies. She sat in the break room at work, eating a ham sandwich between appointments. She finished reading the article, which was three pages long, while holding the sandwich up in the air without taking a single bite. The article, entitled “Natural-Born Healers,” stated that BioSource, a British-owned biopharmaceutical start-up, was the financial sponsor of a clinical trial in Central America. One trial was to be held in San Salvador, while another separate trial was being held in an undisclosed rural area. Monica drew a question mark in red ink next to that sentence. The article went on to state that BioSource was synthetically mimicking a snail peptide (product prototype name: SDX-71) and hoped to offer the drug to the U.S. FDA and Europe within three years. BioSource claimed that, although there was no known substance that could reverse brain damage, SDX-71 had shown success in “energizing” stalled or extremely slow progress. The program’s recruiter and company contact was listed as Leticia Ramos.

  Monica’s attention snapped back to the name. Her mother had used that name as an alias back in the days of the war. Did Alma know this Leticia Ramos? Had she been a friend? Or was it a coincidence, with Alma having picked the name at random?

  As Monica sat and pondered the possible explanations for that old name to reappear, she felt an unexpected mix of emotions bubble up to the surface. Although nothing had yet been proven, she was proud that Alma’s life quest had been the pursuit of something wonderful and healing. There was also sadness that her mother had died before achieving anything to that end. If SDX-71 turned out to be viable, the credit would go to someone else, although surely they had stood on the back of Alma’s research. If only Alma hadn’t complicated her life with Maximiliano.

  Leticia Ramos. Monica underlined the name several times, slowly, so that the red ink bled onto the next line. She gnawed on the name like an oversize wad of chewing gum. A colleague, perhaps a mentor? El Salvador was a small place, and Leticia Ramos wasn’t a common name. Monica was so curious that when she went back to her desk, she ignored her work and began researching the name and the subject of the venom trials. She scoured the Web sites of the academic organizations that had received credit in the article, but found nothing. Surely her father would find out everything there was to know after he interviewed the staff. Monica looked at her watch. Her hip-replacement client was due in twenty minutes. She closed the magazine and decided it was time to visit with Sylvia Montenegro, alone. Monica was clumsy and distracted through her next two appointments. At three, she picked up the phone and asked to be connected to Yvettte Lucero’s room.

  “TELL ME ABOUT EL SALVADOR.” Sylvia patted the space on the vinyl couch next to her. “I know very little about it. I just remember it was in the news around the time that President Reagan was in office.” She unfolded an oversize, soft-cover book of world maps and spread it out on her lap. Her bony finger traced an outline of the small Central American country. “I see here it borders with Guatemala on the north and west, Honduras to the north and east. The Pacific Ocean to the south.”

  Monica peered over her shoulder at the map. “Twenty years ago, when I came to visit my relatives here in Connecticut for the summer, people around here would say, ‘So, I hear you’re from Ecuador. What’s it like living right on the equator?’” Monica said, then laughed. “Anyway, the civil war did a lot to put it on the map in terms of the public’s general sense of geography.”

  “As wars always do,” Sylvia said, with a thicker accent than normal.

  Monica used a pen she had clipped to the breast pocket of her suit jacket to point to the country’s belly button, a star with a circle around it. “That’s the capital city, San Salvador. The whole country is sitting right in the middle of a seismic zone. It has more than twenty volcanoes, some extinct, some active. See that lake? Lago de Coatepeque. It’s sitting in the crater of a dead volcano. Nobody has been able to discern the depth at the center … like it’s this orifice that leads to the earth’s center.”

  Sylvia raised one eyebrow. “Is El Salvador still unsafe?”

  Monica shrugged. “It recovered a great deal from its civil war and subsequent disasters, which included a huge earthquake. But I wouldn’t know firsthand. I haven’t been there in fifteen years.”

  “You should go, Monica. When was the last time you visited the land you came from? You have to return to your mama’s lap.” Sylvia patted her hands on her thighs, as if she were inviting a child or a small dog to dive in.

  Monica rested her chin on her knuckles. “My mama wasn’t really the lap type, Sylvia. Anyway, she’s dead and my dad is
estranged from her family. He hates them.”

  “Then it’s your father’s baggage, not yours. It’s like my husband used to say, time waits for no one.”

  Monica sighed. “The wounds go pretty deep between them.”

  Sylvia turned and pointed to a framed photo next to Yvettte’s bed that Monica had not seen before, one of Will and Yvette on their wedding day. “I find that a lot of men close the door on the past more tightly than women. They turn away from the scary stuff, they keep their feelings locked up. Not us,” she said, patting Monica on the leg. “We stare it down, don’t we?”

  Monica nodded. “Yes, we do.”

  “If you feel you have to go, then go. To hell with your father, he’ll get over it when he sees that you’re fine. He’ll realize then that you didn’t automatically inherit his old traumas. He’ll probably be relieved.”

  “I don’t have to go,” Monica said. “I said I’d like to go. Under the right circumstances. In reality, it’s always been something I just talked about, complained that I had no one to go with, no one to go see. Blah, blah, blah.” She opened her eyes wide. “I’m not sure if I actually meant to follow through.” She crossed her elbows over her chest and rubbed her arms, trying to iron out the gooseflesh that had erupted underneath the sleeves of her blue cotton blouse. “What about you? Are you feeling like you have to take Yvette?”

  Sylvia raised a thin, penciled-in eyebrow and stated primly, “I’m feeling like I have to know everything there is to know about this treatment, especially the specifics they don’t get into in the article.”

  Monica glanced at Yvette’s bed, then back at Sylvia. “Did you know my dad’s talking about going down there to research their claims?”

  Sylvia stared at the tile floor for a moment, as if to arrange her thoughts. She nodded, then folded her hands over her lap. “I’m ahead of him. I’ve been corresponding with a woman named Leticia Ramos.” She stopped speaking, looked around. She got up and closed the door to the room.

  “Yes, Leticia Ramos,” Monica practically shouted after Sylvia had pressed the door shut. “Who is she?”