The Heiress of Water: A Novel

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  She screamed and tumbled to her knees. She covered her face with her hands and imagined that she could splice time so that this moment would never have happened. She might rewind to a few hours before, and tell him, No, let’s not go to El Trovador, tell your patients to meet us at your home instead. Something, anything but this. Max dead? She peeked at the smoldering raft floating away in the current, heading in the direction of Negrarena.

  The four soldiers laughed and cheered, complimenting the shooter with a string of obscenities. One of the soldiers held up a finger and hushed the others. In the distance, the sound of another truck. They cocked their heads to listen, then smiled at each other and nodded their heads. “More comunista vermin,” one of them said. “Lopez, you secure the woman in her car. Chucho, you’ll drive the truck when we’re done,” the leader said, and they crouched down and clutched their weapons as they headed toward the house.

  The chaperone soldier made her get inside the passenger side of her Land Rover. ”Te gustaba el comunista?” he asked, licking his lips. Alma noted he used the familiar tu instead of the formal and respectful usted that every civil servant who knew his place would use to address a member of the country’s oligarchy.

  She could tell him who she was—but, no, she thought bitterly, she couldn’t use her family name to get out of this situation. She could never live with herself if she said, Do you know who you’re talking to?

  As if he had read her mind, the soldier said, “Your mother told el general that Maximiliano Campos was here at El Trovador.”

  “My mother sent you after me?”

  “Not after you,” he said, pointing at the water. “Him.”

  Alma covered her face and began to weep. But her sobs ebbed almost as soon as they’d begun. The soldier was looking at her, narrowing his eyes in voyeuristic pleasure at her display of emotion. She couldn’t cry in front of him. She stared straight ahead, ignoring his greasy stare.

  Monica. Monica was the only one who knew where she really was, or who knew the exact location of Hacienda El Trovador. Monica must have finally blown the whistle. She had told either Bruce or Magnolia or both of them or one had told the other, it didn’t matter. Maximiliano was dead because of it. Max, whom she’d known all her life, a boy who had grown up beside her, climbing trees, collecting bugs, and riding horses at Negrarena. A man who just twenty-four hours ago had woken her up from a lazy afternoon nap by dragging the tail feather of a quetzal across her belly. Max, her Max, speeding away, leaving her in the hands of the enemy. What had gone through his mind at that moment? Had he figured that she was bulletproof because of her last name? Did he still think of her as one of them? Perhaps it had come down to pure survival instinct. The latter was the only explanation she could live with, and so it was the one she chose.

  With Max dead, Alma now felt completely and utterly alone in the world. She could trust no one in her family, not even her own child. Alma understood that she too had done more than her share of betraying, but she had always expected that an enormous good would come of it, eventually. What a mistake.

  She looked out the window of the truck. In the distance, the soldiers were lining up the peasants who had just arrived in a truck full of sugarcane, which included two young boys and a pregnant woman. “No,” she lamented, and turned away, because she knew what was going to happen next. She balled her hands into fists and paid homage to the last slice of time that those six people would be alive in this world. She began to shake, digging her nails into her skin as she pressed her fists together tighter and tighter, until the nails broke through the skin of her palms.

  Time seemed to pass slowly, although it was probably less than five minutes before she heard the sound of the rifle shots. The sound traveled cleanly to a chamber within her mind that swelled open to contain them. The six echoes were swallowed and quarantined in a cold, anesthetized place that would allow her to keep them separate from all other memories. This would allow her to store them safely, until she had the courage, years later, to open the box and peer in.

  Inside the Land Rover, the soldier next to her placed his hand on her knee, leering at her, exposing a row of decaying teeth. He was too stupid and arrogant to care whose daughter she was. Alma looked down. Peeking out from under her seat was the edge of the red dishpan. As the soldier leaned over to grab her breast, she reached down with the hand closest to the door and grabbed the cone between her index finger and her thumb, holding the base away from her hand. The soldier had a lurid half-smile on his face as he mashed at her breast. She turned and leaned into him, placing the creature as gently as she could on his lap.

  The snail felt its way around the strange new environment of army-issue cotton. It took exactly four seconds for the soldier to cry out. He stiffened his limbs, raising his pelvis up so it crashed into the steering wheel. His hand flew to his crotch, where he picked up the innocuous-looking shell, examined it, confused, not connecting it with the coldness that was already spreading up his abdomen. Alma remembered hearing that the sting of some cones mimicked the sensation of flesh being ripped away from the grip of dry ice.

  Alma tore off her sandals and leaped out of the car. She bolted across the sand, not looking back, and headed in the direction of the beach. She knew enough about the paralyzing effects of that venom to know that the soldier would be too shocked and numb to do anything, much less fire a gun. Behind her, the other soldiers saw her run. They shouted at her and fired their guns in warning. She ran across the desolate beach, then over a stretch of rocks that ripped up the soles of her feet. When she stepped into the surf, she felt the searing pain of the salt entering open flesh. She dove into the water, pumping her arms and kicking her feet up with every last bit of energy she had, propelling herself forward, deeper and deeper into the restless waters. Only a few yards out she could already tell that the currents were exactly what she had hoped for. She filled her lungs with air and dove under, calculating her every motion to take advantage of the water’s drag, keeping in mind the direction that she had seen the flaming boat drift. She dove down deep, eyes open, and saw the shots being fired into the water around her. A foot away, a beefy parrot fish exploded into bits.

  A great undertow swept her deep and far across the gloomy landscape of black sand and swaying aquatic plants. Just as she felt she was going to pass out, the water spit her up long enough for her to fill her lungs again, then pulled her down again. The current carried her like that—up and down, concealing her yet letting her breathe, like a needle that dips into cloth and rises, stitching its way across a great distance.

  SHE RODE THE CURRENT all the way to Negrarena. The gate was locked, since her mother was in San Salvador. She scaled the wall, cutting up her legs and elbows on the razor wire, and dropped, bleeding and exhausted, into a den of rottweilers. They greeted her with whimpers and licks, all of them offspring of a puppy she had brought back with her from college.

  She snuck into Caracol undetected. The caretakers lived in the front part of the hacienda, but it was such a large property, and Alma succeeded in quickly hushing the well-trained dogs with belly rubs and baby talk. She limped over to the villa and retrieved a hidden spare key. She spent the evening alone, in one of the back guest rooms, nursing her cuts with trembling fingers. She curled up into a ball and contemplated the truth she had always known: that the ocean claims that which is sick and no longer functional. She now fit that description, and yet the sea had concealed her, carried her on the magic carpet of its currents, unharmed by sharks or rocks or jellyfish, then gently spit her back to safety. The sea had handed her a rare second chance at life, and she had not missed its significance. She would always be a daughter of privilege, she could see that now. Even the ocean made an exception for Alma Borrero. The only thing left for her to do was to give herself over to it completely, an act of gratitude and worship.

  Before dawn the next morning, she let herself out of Caracol, with a pocketful of spare cash she kept locked in one of the closets. She walked to t
he nearby town, stopped in front of Tienda La Lunita to wait for the early bus, wearing a big sugarcane cutter’s hat to shroud her face.

  Forty minutes later, she was rapping on Francisca Campos’s bedroom window in her hometown. Alma told her the whole story, minus the detail of Magnolia’s involvement. The two women wept together, and Francisca offered Alma an even more comforting explanation for his abandonment: that he presumed she would be safer alone than with him. And he had been right—after all, if she had been on the boat with him, she would have died too. Two hours after leaving Francisca, Alma was at a guerrilla camp, where she found some of Max’s friends. They helped her sneak into Honduras. The next day she placed a phone call to one of the newspapers, La Prensa Gráfica, and said, “I witnessed four soldiers murder six peasants, Maximiliano Campos, and Alma Borrero Winters at El Trovador, one hundred kilometers east of La Libertad. I wish to remain anonymous.”

  “THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED were a blur,” Alma told Monica and Bruce. “I discovered that I’m not communist or socialist, that I am in fact quite apolitical without Maximiliano to fuel my interest. I knew I had to get back to the only thing that was really mine—the sea.”

  Bruce stared up into an almond tree, listening, unnaturally still and unblinking. “The press was all over it,” he said without looking down. “I was sick with grief, and on top of that, everyone knew I was the cuckold.”

  Alma looked at him, almost apologetically, then looked at Monica. “I had squirreled away some money in an account in Miami, a good sum my father had left me. No one knew about it, and that’s how I funded my escape. It’s sad and ironic. …” She shook her head. “I went back to school. I got a Ph.D. in marine science. I began to do research on the effects of thermovolcanic changes on the environment of mollusks, and I’ve been doing research all over the globe—Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Brazil, California, Mexico, the Philippines. At one point during a graduate project, I was at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod.”

  “You never thought to come see us?” Monica asked.

  Alma smiled crookedly, then looked at her daughter. “I was in the audience when you were in Carousel in the tenth grade. I saw you graduate from high school, my dear.”

  Monica drew in her breath, and a little gasp of wonder escaped from her lips as she rolled up her eyes and searched her visual memory—in vain, of course—for confirmation. She frowned. “You did that for yourself, Mom. It did nothing for me. I didn’t know you were there.”

  Monica turned to her father, narrowing her eyes a bit. “Mom was at my high school play, publishing, and teaching, and you had no idea that she was alive all this time?”

  Bruce shook his head and turned his gaze on Alma. “There was a war going on, and in 1985 El Salvador, people weren’t trackable like they are in the States. …” He scratched his head, looked down, then up again at Alma. “What is your citizenship?”

  “I am a citizen of Costa Rica. It was important to me, at the time that I left El Salvador, to cut all ties. I surrendered my Salvadoran citizenship, and thanks to some old connections, I secured a university job in Costa Rica.”

  “So why didn’t you change your name?”

  “I did. It was Alma Winters, and I reverted to Alma Borrero.”

  “An ironic choice, no?”

  “Not at all. I wanted to be myself before I lost control of my life. I counted on the fact that once everyone thought I was dead, no one would be looking for me. Years later, I went ahead and published articles in my real name because my field is extremely obscure. I knew that even my mother, a shell collector, would never read a science journal about mollusks.” Alma smiled weakly. “Besides, I’m a marine biologist and my given name is Alma Marina. Soul of the Sea. How could I give that up?”

  Bruce nodded, then cupped his chin with one hand. “You still haven’t answered the question of why …”

  Now Alma stood, looking down at Bruce, and she spoke more softly; they could tell she was struggling to face the core of truth. “When the shock and grief wore off, all that was left was disgust at myself and a loss of hope for being able to pull off the dream without Max, without the furiosus, for that matter. I sank into a deep depression.” She looked off to the distance. “No one believed the soldiers’ story about me running off into the water, everyone thought they killed me along with Max. I heard there was a search, initiated by my mother.”

  “Even Claudia didn’t believe the soldiers,” Bruce said. “But we settled on drowning as the cause of death.”

  Alma nodded her head. “Two of the people who were murdered at El Trovador were under the age of twelve. Another victim was a girl I knew named Maria del Carmen. Remember her, Monica? We had delivered her baby at El Trovador a few years before. She was pregnant again, and they killed her, just like that.”

  Monica blinked in disbelief. “They killed Jimmy Bray’s mother?”

  Alma nodded. “Makes you sick, doesn’t it? Such a senseless waste. I was beside myself with rage at my mother for unleashing something she couldn’t control. My guess is that when she placed that call, she thought they’d put Max in prison, rough him up, and stop us from tainting the family name. But those thugs weren’t capable of keeping it reasonable. What I saw was four men becoming giddy with bloodlust after they blew Max away.”

  Bruce let out a great breath and shook his head. “And do you feel you were responsible in any way for these events, Alma?”

  “Of course I do, Bruce. That was the hardest part of all. It’s why I left my family,” Alma said, looking at Monica. “Because I was driven to punish my mother and exile myself to keep from doing any more harm to anyone.”

  Monica sat with that for a moment, running her mind’s fingers over the surface of her mother’s words, searching for the rough edges of an excuse. For now, it all rang true emotionally, but she would give herself time to evaluate it, to let it all sink in. Monica spoke the truth that lay before her: “I told Dad the location of the hacienda, Dad told Abuela, and Abuela made the phone call that put it all in motion. All of us have blood on our hands.” Monica looked at her father, then down at her own hands, as if indeed she expected to find them to be coated and dripping with red. “I guess this is what you’ve been protecting me from all these years, Dad.”

  “Except I believed that we caused your mother’s death,” he said, looking as if he was about to cry. “I didn’t want you to live with that guilt, as I had. Imagine …,” he whispered, shook his head a little, and let the sentence trail off as he looked away from them.

  Monica looked at Alma and said, “I don’t understand how you could walk away from me. That’s the one part that defies my understanding. When the dust settled, you were alive and could have stayed at Caracol for as long as you needed. You could have come home. You could have divorced Dad, and we could have all moved on, in separate directions if that’s what you wanted. But instead you vanished from my life. Help me with that part, Mami.”

  Alma turned to look at her, stared at her wide-eyed, her eyes gleaming with memory. “I felt that I didn’t deserve you, and that you would be better off in the sole care of your father. I don’t have any other answer than that, Monica. I wanted to sever all ties with my former life. A life of research and study was the only anesthesia I knew. I had always wanted to find a painkiller from the sea and I found it—in the achievements of my students, in scholarly journals, on dives, under microscopes, and aboard a research vessel. After a while, the decision to let everyone back home believe I was dead became a way of life, and it became harder and harder to undo. Two years later, I had essentially become someone new.”

  Monica nodded to acknowledge that she had heard. Thick, hot tears spilled down her face. “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever known,” she said, waiting for the shocked look to rise in her mother’s face, but it didn’t. Alma just looked at her with eyes that were hungry for anything Monica had to say, so Monica tried harder to shake her. “You figured your role of scientist was so much more impo
rtant than the simple job of being a mother to one child.” Monica held up a finger. “One quiet girl who didn’t take up much room or eat much or ask for anything but love. You didn’t even bother to say good-bye. Your heart belongs entirely to something that will never love you back.”

  Alma stared into her own hands and nodded her head. “I disagree with the last part. The sea does love me back. But, Monica, all I can say is that I thrive on my work—I buried myself in it—although I admit there are days that I can’t keep it all from seeping in. On those days, I lock the door and take a little blue pill that dulls the ache of my regrets. I had always told myself that I’d contact you when you became an adult, but when I thought about it over the last few years, it seemed like such an intrusion, such a shock, I figured you would never forgive me. And yet, here we are. You found me, you did all the work.”

  “And here we are,” Monica echoed.

  Alma sat down next to Monica again and grabbed Monica’s hand, squeezing it until her own knuckles turned white. “You can’t imagine how happy I am that you found me, Monica. I’m still as marooned as ever, somewhere out at sea. I’ve never found my way home, I’ve never learned to trust anyone. I never remarried. I never had any more kids. But I would like to have something on land worth coming home for.”

  Monica looked into her mother’s eyes then, looked at her as an adult for the first time. She didn’t intend to judge, at least not in that moment—but rather to understand her mother from the perspective of a woman, a grown woman who was now entangled in her own morally dubious relationship. In those dark, terribly familiar eyes she saw Alma’s shame at using Monica, at asking her own child to lie to her father, at failing to shield her from lust, from disaster, from pain and war and death. Perhaps she had been right to go away, Monica thought. She was indeed unfit.