The Heiress of Water: A Novel

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  DURING THE VISIT, Monica detected a false, tense cheeriness in Sylvia’s voice that was unsettling. “Monica,” she said, stroking her arm in a way that reminded Monica of a school nurse, “the physical therapist quit, and they don’t have anyone to massage the patients.” She clasped her hands together. “Do you think you could massage my Yvette, just once, dear, could you?”

  “She didn’t come here to work, Sylvia,” Will said, his voice flat and cold. “It’s totally inappropriate for you to ask.”

  Monica surprised herself by deciding then and there that she would have to ignore her previous discomfort with the idea. This was an entirely new landscape, and encouraging peace between Will and Sylvia had suddenly become top priority. “It would be my pleasure, Sylvia.”

  Soledad stepped forward, still trying to give her presentattion. “At Clinica Caracol, we consider massage and sensory stimulation to be the sacred partner to the drug therapy. We will have a physical therapist available in a few days. I apologize.”

  Claudia stood over Yvette’s bed and put one limp hand in hers. “I’m going to call you La Bella Durmiente, because you look like you belong in a Bavarian fairy tale.” She looked up at the five other people in the room clustered around the bed. “Did anyone check this princess for a poisoned apple lodged in her throat?”

  Sylvia chuckled appreciatively, then shook her head sadly. “My Yvettte. She was so pretty.”

  Monica cringed inside, believing in her heart that Yvette had somehow heard and understood that comment from her mother, spoken in the past tense. “You’re still very beautiful, Yvette,” Monica said, a strange mix of guilt and protectiveness braiding themselves inside her stomach as she placed one hand on Yvette’s. She looked up at Claudia. “The poison apple was Blanca Nieves. Snow White.”

  “We’re going to go to the beach now,” Bruce said, pulling Claudia and Monica toward the door. He made a face, a not-so-subtle hint that it was time to leave Will and his mother-in-law alone to face each other in their battle for control over Yvette’s fate.

  MONICA, BRUCE, and Claudia Credo walked around the back of the clinic to Negrarena beach. On the way, they noticed that the Moroccan-tile swimming pool had been restored to its former glory. A light breeze ruffled its surface, and it sparkled, empty and inviting in the afternoon heat. They passed through the old gates that separated the property from the beach, and Monica had a flash vision of Alma’s slender arms pushing the gates open, then slowly turning to look behind her, as if expecting someone to call her back from the doorstep of her paradise.

  The image of Alma was marred by the presence of a newly added cement platform, apparently a sunning area, with a special ramp for wheelchair access. Monica put her hands on her hips and mumbled, “What’s the point of a sunning deck if the patients here are all in a coma? I don’t get it.”

  “I guess they figure that no one here has an excuse for pale legs,” Bruce said, pointing to one of his pasty shins.

  After a few moments on Negrarena, Monica could no longer restrain her joy. When the first monster wave rose up and crashed over the shore, Monica felt a surge of electricity, her inner fluids rising to mimic the motion of the water, diving, tumbling, and spraying her insides with a salty thrill that made her kick off her shoes and sprint across the beach. The infernally hot black sand made her hop and she had to turn around and run back to get her sandals. She opened her arms wide as she ran to meet the ocean, and she had the delirious sensation that the waves remembered her. They leaped up onto her, licking her legs and drawing her in until she dropped to her knees and let the cool, bubbly water run over her thighs, soaking her sundress. A larger wave rumbled toward her and she decided to go ahead and get good and soaked. The undertow of the wave wrapped itself around the back of her waist and pulled her toward itself like a determined lover.

  She pushed her fingers through black, viscous sand that felt like facial mud. She smeared it on her face, imagining that it looked like war paint, and when the next wave came, she leaned over it and washed it off. When she passed the tips of her fingers over her face, her skin felt smooth as a river rock.

  Farther down along the stretch of beach Monica could see the distant figure of a woman, strolling in the company of a dog. She was walking away from them, poking at the tide pools with a stick. She reminded her of Alma. Monica looked up, beyond the woman’s path, and saw a crop of houses that had sprung up where there was once only trees and scrub.

  When Monica turned around, Bruce and Claudia were enveloped in the cocoon of their own conversation, chatting happily. Monica suddenly wished she and Bruce were alone. She wanted to share with him a small gift of memory she had found in the sand.

  Alma had taught Monica to press her arms deep into the wet, black sand in the minutes after a volcanic temblor in order to feel the life pulse of the earth, to hear the secret and distant undulations of its great beating heart. She wanted to tell Bruce, because she had not done so back then, and she had a feeling that he still didn’t understand what magic it was to let Alma lead the way, how the natural world became powerful and amazing through her eyes.

  AFTER ANOTHER HOUR with Sylvia, Soledad, and the doctor on duty, Will agreed to give them exactly one week to show some kind of evidence of improvement.

  “… Which of course is impossible,” Bruce said to Monica and Claudia. “He figures he’s appeasing Sylvia, but Sylvia’s strategy is to use the week to work on him to give it more time.”

  After the three came out of the room, Will looked drained. He glanced at Monica, shook his head, and said, “She won’t hand over the air ambulance information to transport Yvette back home. I could take legal measures, but that would just take more time, so I’m caving in and giving it a week.” He rubbed his eyes, and Monica noticed they were rimmed with red from a lack of sleep. He ran his hands through his hair and it made his hair stick straight up on top, making him look strikingly younger, like a disheveled teenager. “I just hope I’m wrong about this place,” he said in a soft voice, almost a whisper.

  Outside, Claudia’s driver was waiting to take her back to San Salvador; he’d been waiting for four hours now. Claudia had taken the day off from work and had to get back to the city. “Who’s coming with me and who’s staying?”

  Sylvia already had accommodations at the clinic, and the rest of the party decided to stay at a rustic guesthouse a half mile down the road. Soledad agreed to send a driver to get them in the morning. She’d tracked down the mysterious Leticia Ramos, who would meet with them in the afternoon. Monica was growing more and more excited.

  Bruce, Will, and Claudia were wrapping up their affairs in the front office, and Bruce was jotting down some notes for his article, when Monica wandered out to the lobby to get another look at the shells.

  She always marveled at the individuality and artistry manifested by the shells’ architects. One could understand why they would go to such great lengths to construct such beautiful dwellings: naked, they were wretchedly unattractive. They were also helpless. The creature inside a Chilean murex, for example, constructed tall, elaborate spires with the intention of making his fortress look impenetrable to his predators. In the process, his craftsmanship achieved the grace and excellence of a tiny Renaissance cathedral, completely contradicting the measure of his intelligence. In the background of the display was a backlit silk screen printed with script text, a section of French poet Paul Valéry’s essay about nature and seashells:

  Nature has preserved her cautious methods, the inflection in which she envelops her changes of pace, direction, or physiological function. She knows how to finish a plant, how to open nostrils, a mouth, a vulva, how to create a setting for an eyeball; she thinks suddenly of the seashell when she has to unfold the pavilion of an ear, which she seems to fashion the more intricately as the species is more alert.

  On the way to the door, Monica saw the specimen catalogs, obviously dumped on top of the coffee table by the receptionist. She sat down on a wood-and-rattan sofa and l
eafed through a catalog from a showcase-specimen dealership in Brussels peddling everything from bizarre and prehistoric insects trapped in petrified beds of primordial mud, to a Neanderthal tibia, and of course shells, recent and fossilized.

  The receptionist came into the room and said, “You can take them with you if you like, I only need the current issue to place an order. I’ve never seen anyone even glance at them, never mind get as excited as you. They just gather dust. I have a few more in the back if you want them. We get new shell price lists every few months.”

  Monica smiled and thanked her. “I forgot to bring reading material for the slow moments of this trip”

  “What could possibly be more boring than reading specimen catalogs?” the young woman said. “Maybe your posada will have a television. There’s a really good novela on at eight. Amor Salvaje.” She opened her eyes wide. “Tonight we find out if the heroine is pregnant by the hacienda foreman or the effeminate husband she can’t stand.”

  Monica raised one eyebrow. “I can tell you who the father is without watching a single episode.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” the woman said, stepping into a room behind the reception area. She emerged minutes later with eight more specimen catalogs.

  THAT NIGHT, Bruce went to bed at nine thirty and Will and Monica sat on two dirty chairs inside a tiny general store named Tienda La Lunita. The innkeeper at the posada had warned that it was not prudent for “elegant-looking people,” as she had called them, to wander around the village alone and at night. The store was only two blocks away. “Get what you need and come right back,” she said, wagging a finger. ”Peligroso.”

  ”Elegante?” Will repeated in a delayed echo, looking down at his khaki cargo pants and sale-bin T-shirt.

  Monica shrugged. She hooked her thumbs on the shoulder straps of her short overalls, suddenly feeling as if she had to speak in a Southern drawl. “What she meant was, y’all don’t look like you’re from these parts.”

  “Oh …” Will said, and looked down again, this time at his rubber and Velcro sandals. He wiggled his toes. “Thank God we’re not.”

  “My dad would kill us both if he knew we went wandering around this Podunk village at night in a quest for beer.” She held up the brown bottle of the local brew, Pilsener. “Cheers.”

  Will held up his bottle and they clinked the bottoms. “I’m glad your dad went to bed. This is kind of cool, just hanging out with you,” he said, catching her eye.

  Monica held up her bottle to his again, tilted her head to the side, and smiled widely. “To a new friendship, then.” She tipped the bottle back and took two long gulps of beer so that she wouldn’t have to look at him right away.

  “I feel like I’m in the third world, but in a good way,” Will said. “That’s a new concept to me, mind you. Sure it’s rustic, and we saw a lot of shanties and poor people on the way, but there’s something special about Negrarena. I can’t put my finger on it, it’s like there’s something in the air.”

  “Maybe you just needed a change of scenery.”

  Will raised one eyebrow. “Could be. I’m so relaxed right now I don’t know what to do with myself.” He wiggled his arms and his shoulders around, rotated his head. “My neck is sore, though.”

  Monica held up a hand. “Don’t look at me. I’m on vacation.”

  Will signaled to the shopkeeper with two fingers to bring more beer. Monica sat back in her chair and looked around the store at all the food products she hadn’t seen in years. There was something about this night—her senses were sharper, her eyes keener. Maybe it was the thick beach smells, the shadows of night, just being in El Salvador, all of it so, so intoxicating. Will was right about this place. Her whole body felt effervescent.

  When Monica looked up, she was stunned to see that Will was watching her, his head cocked to the side a bit. A faint smile passed over his lips. His dark eyes were buttery, intense, and unflinching, and without a word he handed his admiration over like a parcel, warm and squirming on her lap. By the time she recognized it, she had been staring back at him for a long time, reading his face, until she understood what they had just exchanged. She could almost hear the groaning shift of weight, the settling into place of something newly created.

  She tore her eyes away. She put her hand up to her forehead to try to cover her eyes. The skin on her face and neck was burning. “Maybe we should get back,” she said, looking around.

  “Oh, come on, just a little longer. I’m enjoying the crowd,” he said, gesturing toward the empty room behind him. “And I know for sure that you’re not anxious to get back to that decrepit guesthouse with the shore crabs staring up at you in the shower.”

  Monica smiled, amused by his reference to the creatures that populated her childhood. “I guess you met the caballeros. Gentlemen—isn’t that a funny name for crab? I used to know their Latin name. Anyway, I told you it was rustic out here.”

  Will opened his eyes wide. “I used to define rustic as camping on a beach in Rhode Island, where a distant relative to the caballero is served with drawn butter and a side of onion rings.”

  Monica chuckled and began to peel the gold-edged ace-of-hearts label off her beer bottle. There was a moment of silence between them, and she could tell Will was looking at her again. “I remember watching a caballero crawl on my mother’s back when she was asleep on the beach,” Monica said cautiously. “She mumbled in her sleep and it scared the crab away. I’ll never forget it. She revealed something I wasn’t supposed to know.”

  Will leaned forward. “What?”

  Monica took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, trying to decide whether she should share. She sipped her beer and looked at his face. Even though it was half-lit, she still glimpsed a confidence and maturity that she wasn’t accustomed to seeing in men under fifty: that paternally driven instinct to protect, to identify problems at the root and fix them.

  Monica picked up a napkin and began to fold it into ever smaller triangles before she spoke. “My mother confirmed my suspicion that she was having an affair with a married man. It was the saddest moment of my life, next to the day my father told me she had drowned.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twelve.”

  “That’s a lot for a kid to deal with. Supposedly, most kids feel responsible for their parents’ marriages.”

  “Exactly.” Monica nodded. “And I don’t know why, but my father is vague about anything having to do with my mother, her death, our life here.” She gestured behind her, in the direction of the beach. “Marcy told me that she got blasted by my dad for giving me the airline ticket. They had a big blowout over it. But when I ask him point-blank what the big deal is, he just brushes me off?’ She tossed the napkin back into the center of the table, then watched it, the way you toss a stick into a bonfire and wait for it to burn. She narrowed her eyes. “I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s afraid I’m going to find something out about my mother that will hurt me.” She looked up at Will. “But what could be worse than her affair?”

  Will drew his eyes down to the dusty tiles of the floor. “Something about her death?”

  Monica shrugged, looked up to the exposed wood beams of the room.

  “I think this conversation calls for cigars,” Will said. “Will you indulge me? We’re going to be here awhile.”

  “Where are you going to get a cigar?”

  Will held up a finger and summoned the shopkeeper, and a few minutes later she produced two dried-out Dominican cigars, which she said she kept in stock for one of the doctors at the clinic who came by infrequently. She chopped off the ends and handed the cigars over with a book of matches. Will lit both cigars in his mouth and handed one to Monica. When she took the cigar into her mouth, the moisture he’d left behind on the tip felt like an unintentionally intimate exchange. She closed her eyes as the smoke rolled back toward her face.

  “Okay,” he said, settling back in his chair. He took a puff of his cigar, tilted his head
back, and blew upward. “Take me back to the days just before she disappeared, to the first domino that knocked everything else down. Start with what you had for breakfast that morning.” He pointed the cigar at her. “And I bet you still remember that detail.”

  Monica closed her eyes against the screen of smoke that rose from her own mouth. She thought it was interesting that her family’s past was somehow becoming a part of Will’s present.

  chapter 11 EL CADEJO

  On a damp morning in June of 1985, Bruce was in his study, furiously tapping away at his electric typewriter. He was a correspondent for the Associated Press then, and he was covering the Zona Rosa massacre: thirteen people, including four U.S. marines, were gunned down in cold blood in San Salvador’s lively strip of upscale eateries and bars. The photos strewn about Bruce’s desk showed bloodied corpses lying at the foot of a sidewalk cafe. Someone had covered the victims’ faces with linen restaurant napkins. On the phone a few minutes later, Monica heard her father shout, “Of course the shooters weren’t real militares; they were communists in stolen military uniforms”

  Monica stared at her mushy Cap’n Crunch cereal, unable to eat. She knew it wasn’t the right time to talk to her dad about her mother and Max, but seeing the color photos sitting on his desk had triggered something, a realization of what Max and his friends were a part of. All the talk of fairness for the poor and equality among citizens didn’t add up to those horrifying photos: the old lady who had been selling roses just minutes before the shooting now lay dead next to the man who had been waiting for his chauffeur. Each victim had sprayed the sidewalk with the same red blood. What more proof did anyone need of equality?

  Everyone was so anesthetized from all the violence. In fact, Monica was sure that the witnesses who had spilled out of the Mexican restaurant across the street had eventually gone back to stuff themselves with chimichangas and margaritas. But Monica’s own numbness had just worn off at the sight of those crime-scene photos. She felt dirty from exposure; from knowing people who believed that the importance of their beliefs stood above the right of others to be alive. If her mother’s philosophy was true about the ocean claiming that which was unclean and making it pure, then El Salvador was due for a flood of biblical proportions. Downtown, thirteen people were dead. It wouldn’t be long before something terrible happened, and Alma was right in the middle of it.