The Heiress of Water: A Novel

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  Up ahead, Yvette glimpsed a male cardinal sitting on a wood fence. He stood out like a droplet of blood against the lush dark green of the woods behind him. As the car got closer, the bird dove across the road. The instant his tiny claws pushed off the wood fence, Yvette’s reflexes computed the speed and distance between her windshield and the bird. Her foot jumped to the brake pedal.

  The tire skidded across a patch of sand, while the rear of the car fishtailed in the opposite direction. A second later, the front of the car swung in the direction of the bird. There was a dull thud, and a spray of blood and red feathers appeared across the windshield. Yvette cried out in disgust. Her left foot instinctively jumped to aid her right foot in stopping the car. When she tried to pump the brake with both feet, she recognized a second too late that it was the accelerator. The car lurched forward and climbed over an embankment. Then the car hit something from the front, and she was thrown across the seat. Within that instant of shock, she realized, with complete horror, that she had been so distracted that she had failed to use her seat belt.

  All was dark. Water began to creep up her nostrils—or was it blood dripping down? She didn’t know. She tried to call someone’s name, but it was useless, she couldn’t remember whom to call or where she had been headed. She was slipping, drowning, or fainting.

  How long ago had that accident happened? Yvette wondered. How long had she been fighting to regain her memory? It didn’t matter now, really, because she was almost on the other side. She’d find out more details later, when she arrived.

  JUST AS THE CARDINAL’S red wings had sent her into darkness, the mosquito’s paper wings were transporting her back to a world of smells and sounds. Why had she been in such a rush? This was the piece that was still missing, and she was curious to find out. She had a sense that she had been upset, or that she had been fleeing. So when the needle slid between her vertebrae, she scrambled to coil up and simplify, as she had done before. It was becoming increasingly difficult, so bloated and bulked up was she with recovered memory.

  Yvette decided that it was time to prepare herself for the inevitable ejection to the outside. She looked around at the dungeon that had been her home. She signed her name in the dirt with her torn nails. She had no idea what the date, hour, or year was, so she just wrote “Cruel Summer” next to her name.

  Maybe someone else would find it and know that there was hope for escape. In the meantime, she got down to the immediate business of forgetting that she’d ever been here.

  THAT NIGHT, a storm rolled over the coast. The water was clenched in tense clouds that roiled like the intestines of a huge animal. When the first clap of thunder rattled through everyone’s bones, Yvette wrapped her arms around herself, curled up, and began to shake. Will was standing by the door talking to a nurse. He walked up to the bed, and it was as if she had spoken, had said, Come to bed, honey. Hold me, I’m frightened.

  At first he only took her hand and leaned in, whispering that everything was okay. She thrashed her neck as if to say, No, it’s not. Will climbed into bed next to her and took her in his arms. “It’s okay, honey. It’s just thunder.” The next boom actually made her jump and Will held her tighter.

  A woman entered the room and Will hastened to get out of the bed. He explained that thunder had always frightened his wife. There was the medical talk about the impossibility of Yvette responding to the sound of thunder, but that the reverberation could activate her primal instincts.

  “Monica,” Yvette heard Will say. “Monica,” and “Monica” and “Monica.” He said the name with a mix of intimacy and urgency, as if he were speaking to someone who owed him the answer to an important question.

  Yvette clenched her teeth until her jaw hurt and her teeth wiggled in their soft pink rows. Will would be so surprised when she burst from this mental paralysis that kept her from moving or speaking or keeping the events of her life in the right order. Right now, she couldn’t tell if Will had been lying next to her a few minutes ago or if she was remembering something that happened in the distant past. Still, she was floating just below the surface, looking up. The world looked distorted and swirled, as if she were looking at it through a wall of glimmering, wet glass.

  SEEING WILL COMFORT YVETTE made Monica want to run screaming into the storm and be cleansed once and for all of her unholy desire. She felt dirty, and for the second time that she could remember, she experienced an odd combination of sadness and relief that things weren’t going to work out. She chastised herself for forgetting that the heart is an unreliable guide—its advice will always be in favor of love. Love him, it urged. But not so much that you can’t give him back.

  As she stood at a window watching the storm over Negrarena, Monica decided that if she couldn’t help falling in love with Will during their Salvadoran journey, she could certainly put a stop to it all when they got home. In the meantime, she promised herself that she would never sleep with Will in a moment of weakness. She remembered Yvette’s bony grip on her wrist, and it made her shudder. She had told no one about that incident, and she never would. After all, Yvette was a severely brain-damaged woman incapable of communication. Monica had heard over and over about all the meaningless, involuntary actions that were typical of her condition. What had rattled Monica was not Yvette’s grip, but the feedback that it elicited from her own conscience.

  chapter 16 AGUARDIENTE

  Bruce was standing in the lobby of Caracol when he heard a van pull up to the carport. He walked over to a stained-glass window and looked out, sighing with relief at the sight of his daughter. Sylvia told him that they had gone to a village festival, but Bruce didn’t like the idea of those two running around El Salvador unescorted, for a variety of reasons, only one of which was safety. Will could barely take his eyes off Monica, and she had been uncharacteristically guarded lately. As much as he liked and perhaps even admired Will Lucero, he didn’t want to see his daughter ensnared in a dead-end relationship with him. Perhaps, as a father, he was jumping the gun by worrying about the possibility of romance between those two, but he figured it was his parental right. Will’s load of emotional and financial baggage was simply unacceptable.

  Bruce looked at his watch. The two had been gone for four hours. Not such a long time, really, but he knew that one could change the course of one’s life in less than five minutes. He frowned as they walked in.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Monica said, looking surprised to see him as she walked in the entrance of the lobby. (When was the last time she had called him “Daddy”?) “Sorry I didn’t catch you before I left—we just had to get out of here,” Monica said, cinching her fingers around her neck. “Will’s gonna ask Sylvia to get ready for dinner. The driver will take us somewhere to eat, then he’ll drop us off at the guesthouse and return Sylvia back here. Sound okay with you?”

  Bruce nodded, his mood lightening at the mention of food. “I’m tired of pupusas every night. I heard there’s a nice little seafood place down the way.”

  “Back in about twenty,” Will called out as he disappeared in the direction of the infirmary.

  Bruce turned to his daughter and said, “So where was this festival?”

  Monica gave him a long look, took his arm, and tugged, leading him outside. “We have to talk,” she whispered. “Let’s go out on the beach.”

  They flung their shoes onto the empty sunning patio and headed out to the wide, empty strip of beach. Bruce felt a tightening in his diaphragm, so he took a deep breath to dislodge his tension. He tipped his head from side to side, making an audible crunching sound as he tried to loosen the tightness around his neck. “I’m due for a neck massage,” he said, looking for an excuse to delay a discussion that for some reason he was already instinctively dreading. “You’ve been neglecting your old man.”

  “Then sit,” she said.

  The words hadn’t left her mouth before Bruce plopped himself down on the sand and took his shirt off, bowing his head forward in anticipation of a massage. As Monica began
to rub his neck, he marveled, as he always did, at her talent for such a thing. She truly had a gift for healing. It felt as if she were plucking tightly strung strips of muscle, like guitar chords— there was pain, release, then a music-like rush of blood flooding the soreness. Pain, release, rush. Pain, release, rush. Ah, she was an artist.

  “I’m so glad I sent you to college to study therapy,” he mumbled. “Well worth it.”

  Ten minutes later, when she had relaxed the fierce grip that his sore muscles had on his withering skeleton, she said, “Now lie flat on the sand.” He obeyed. She sat down next to him, her legs folded. She faced the water. He was waiting for some kind of bonus scalp or shoulder massage. After a moment, he looked up and saw that her eyes were closed.

  “Is that it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “So what did you want to tell me?”

  Monica opened her eyes. She pursed her lips and looked down at her hands for a moment before she spoke. “I didn’t go to a festival today, Dad. I visited Francisca Campos.” She took a deep breath and said, softly, “Mom’s not dead.” She opened her eyes and looked at him. They stared at each other for a moment. “Did you know this?”

  He looked away, not having a clue what words should be coming out of his mouth. He was glad to be lying down. “No,” he said finally. “I know no such thing.”

  “I asked Paige to do some research on a seashell discovery, an uninteresting little murex found off the coast of Costa Rica last year. The discoverer was listed as ‘Borrero.’ Paige followed the trail of professional memberships and found an Alma Borrero, born in 1949, now a marine biologist working for the University of Costa Rica. Francisca just confirmed it, Mom’s alive.”

  He sat up and said, “That’s ridiculous,” even as the idea was already settling into his bones, fizzing up like a hard, white tablet plunked into his bloodstream. Alma had told him, the first time he’d ever been to Negrarena, that she both loathed and craved her parents’ moneyed world. She had said that she wished she could start anew somewhere else, somewhere where she wasn’t a Borrero and where she wasn’t expected to be someone she wasn’t and would never be. And if Francisca said Alma was alive, then it was true.

  “Dad, you never buried a body.”

  He took a deep breath. “I don’t even know what to say, Monica. All I can say is that I need proof. Besides, why would she …?” His voice trailed off, the sentence severed by the weight of the questions bearing down. He pulled himself up and sat next to Monica, keeping his eyes focused on one house in the distance, with its giant slanted roof. A bird, brown with a white breast, landed a few feet away on the sand and looked at them as if fascinated by their conversation.

  Monica said, “If you made her go away, let’s say by reporting her and Max to the militates &” She turned and looked at him, and it took him a moment to understand that this was in fact a question. He felt a sickness rising in his stomach, a tiny spot, shiny and round like a black olive, gleaming and burning in the sponginess of his entrails.

  He didn’t have a chance to process his answer. She dove upon him in a fierce embrace, a gesture so sudden and unexpected that she knocked him off-balance and he had to put an arm out to support his torso. He opened his arms—the great, broken wings of a raven, flimsy shields of armor that encircled his daughter’s shoulders. “I didn’t turn them into the militares, Monica,” he said. “That would have been murder.”

  Monica dug at the sand with a finger. “Then she just left us?” She looked at him, and he saw that her eyes were filling with tears, begging him to come up with a plausible excuse for her mother.

  “If it’s true she’s alive, then, yes, Monica, she just left us.”

  The bird cawed as if in response and continued to watch them. “She didn’t love us, then,” Monica whispered.

  Bruce grabbed her shoulder and looked into the eyes that were so like his own. “She loved you.”

  “Not enough,” Monica said, pretending to smile. She wiped her tears and hopped onto her feet, folding her arms at her chest. Will appeared in the distance. “We’re over here,” she shouted, then turned to Bruce. “Will knows. And now he has a stake in finding Mom because Francisca told us that Mom is trying to shut down Caracol.” She pointed behind her, toward the building. “I’m starting to think that everyone in that clinic is in danger.”

  THE RESTAURANT was up on a second story, built on stilts over an inlet of water. It was rustic, with wood picnic tables and benches. Beefy, torpid black flies circled the colorful plastic baskets of food left behind at another table. The sole decoration was a hand-painted map of El Salvador on the far wall.

  Will, Monica, and Bruce picked at their grilled red snapper. Will draped a paper napkin over his fish head because, he said, he couldn’t “perform surgery with the patient staring back.” Sylvia, on the other hand, ate with the delicate, methodical appetite of a cat, pulling up the spine structure like the separator in a metal ice-cube tray.

  “Two patients were aroused out of their comas in the last week,” Sylvia announced cheerfully. “One of them is a questionable success—a young woman who was already reacting to music and voices when she was admitted. But the other was out cold for a year.”

  “How did the treatment go this morning?” Bruce asked.

  “Incredible,” Sylvia said, smiling and opening her eyes wide. “Yvettte’s Glasgow score has gone up two points.”

  Will put down his fork and cleared his throat. “We’re suspending the treatments and starting the arrangements to take her home. I have reason to believe—”

  “We’re not suspending anything,” Sylvia said, chuckling falsely. “I’m not going to listen to rumors. The treatment is working.” She thumped her index finger down on the table. “Working, working, working.”

  “A man staying at the inn told us one patient woke up a raving lunatic,” Will said, his face bright red. “Is that what you want? To trade one altered state for another? Better to let her body continue to reconstruct itself naturally. That place is really beginning to scare me.”

  “We heard some bad things about it today,” Monica said, looking at Sylvia. “Maybe it’s prudent to hold off until we know more.”

  “And how long do you think I can afford to stay here?” Sylvia snapped back. “I have bills stacking up back home. It’s now or never.” She put down her fork and looked at Will defiantly.

  “I’m not backing down.”

  Will closed his eyes and looked away, apparently counting silently. After ten seconds he turned and looked at his mother-in-law. “Sylvia, it’s not your decision to make.”

  Bruce and Monica shared a worried look.

  “I have the airline tickets,” Sylvia said softly. “Unless you have five thousand dollars in your pocket …”

  “We’re gambling with Yvette’s health,” Will said. “Dr. Mendez is playing with people’s lives. If the enterprise fails, there are no consequences, no accountability. The patients die or go crazy, oh, well. Dr. Mendez doesn’t have to worry about being sued in this country because she’s not doing anything illegal. And no consequences means the freedom and ability to take high medical risks for high rewards.”

  Sylvia slurped her bottled water, avoiding Will’s gaze.

  There was a moment when no one spoke, and Monica guessed they were all too emotionally exhausted to argue any more. “Did they hire a new therapist yet?” Monica asked, trying to redirect the conversation.

  “Not yet, darling,” Sylvia said, patting Monica’s hand. “God will repay you for your hard work. They don’t need to be massaged every day. Every other day is fine. And if you’re really tired, you can massage just Yvette.” Sylvia quickly glanced at Will, or rather, at his neck, and said, “Yvette knows when you’re in the room. Maybe you should spend the nights with her at Caracol. I can go stay at the guesthouse with Monica. Will, you can take my bed.” In a low voice she said, “I’m sure Yvette would appreciate some attention from her husband.” And with that, she cut th
e head off her red snapper and got back to eating its delicate white flesh.

  Bruce looked at Will, who was staring unhappily out at the water, looking trapped.

  Without looking up, Sylvia said, “So shall we make the swap tonight?”

  Monica stole a glance at Will for a second, then she quickly returned to the task of stirring her Cola Champán with a straw, as if cream soda needed to be stirred.

  “Maybe tomorrow night,” he mumbled.

  “It’s a great idea, Sylvia,” Bruce said, suddenly recognizing the benefits of her plan. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before.”

  AFTER DINNER, Monica sat with her father in the hallway facing the courtyard. “Leticia,” Monica said, “was Maximiliano’s wife. Did you pick up on that?”

  “No,” Bruce said, suddenly arresting the agitated rocking of his chair on the long corridor of the guesthouse. “I never met Maximiliano’s wife.”

  Monica put her hand out. “Weren’t you listening? Dr. Mendez said her grandmother was the nanny—that’s Francisca.”

  “I didn’t make the connection.”

  Monica shook her head. “You’re an award-winning journalist. You’re either lying or the old German’s coming to get you.”

  “What old German?”

  “Alzheimer.”

  Bruce eyed his daughter. “Okay, Nancy Drew, then why do mother and soon-to-be-married daughter have different surnames?”

  Monica shrugged. “Dunno. Marriages. Lack of marriages. Divorces. Death. Take your pick.”

  Bruce stopped rocking. “Would you consider not going to find out about your mother?” He leaned over and crunched a beetle with his shoe, then kicked it away.

  “Do you honestly think that’s a fair thing to ask? Put yourself in my shoes.”

  He took a deep breath, raised his fingers to his mouth, and began to pull gently on his lower lip. “Then I guess there’s something you should know.”