Jorge began to perspire. He was tongue-tied for a second or two, before he straightened up and said, “Your mother has been nothing but trouble for this family.”
Monica shook her head and laughed bitterly. “You think you’re telling me something new?”
Silence. He dropped his head.
Monica tugged at his hands. She had arrived at the core of her visit with one simple and direct question: “Did you value my grandparents’ money more than me? Yes or no.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yes or no.”
“Adolfo left a lot of debt!” he burst out. “He almost ran us into the ground.”
“I don’t believe it, but I’ll grant it for now. That still leaves my grandmother’s family money. She had inherited even more than Abuelo had earned in his life.”
Jorge finally managed to yank his hands away and push himself back in his chair. “You want my story? Bien, I’ll tell you what you want to know.” He stood up and turned his back to her, facing a large window that overlooked Borr-Lac’s operations. “After Alma left, Magnolia began to show signs of dementia. I could see the loneliness and sadness that she endured at losing her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter all at once.” He turned at the waist only, a surprisingly sprite movement for an old crow. “I was running Borr-Lac alone, and I saw to it that your grandmother was cared for. You and your father were nowhere to be found.” He turned his back again.
“I was twelve!” Monica cried. “What could I do?” She refused to accept his back, so she walked up and stood in front of him, blocking the view out the window.
“Magnolia died in my arms.” He said the word my slowly. By the furtive casting down of the eyes, Monica detected the presence of something hidden. She recalled the way he had practically winced when she had mentioned his resemblance to her grandfather. Holy cow, Monica thought, was Jorge in love with my grandmother?
“Tío, I’d give anything to have been present for her when she died. I loved my grandmother very much, and I appreciate that you took care of her when she needed it. I’m also sure that you understand that I was too young at the time to be accountable for anything. But the fact remains that I am Adolfo and Magnolia’s granddaughter, and you know very well that they adored me.” Monica’s voice rose, and tears sprang up in her eyes as she pronounced the last sentence. She dared to point to the center of her uncle’s chest. “Your role in their life does not entitle you to keep everything that belonged to them.”
Jorge took a step back, bumping into his leather chair. “Magnolia left everything to your mother. Your mother desired to be considered dead, and after seven years, she was. As the executor of her estate, I reinvested the money into the family business, including the clinic. Everything is as it should be, Monica.” He pointed to the factory floor. “That money was earned here and here it will stay.”
Now Monica’s tears were flowing freely. She dried her cheeks by rubbing them against each shoulder, like a child. She stood tall and said, “Yesterday, my mother asked forgiveness for abandoning me. I’m standing here waiting for you to do the same.”
Jorge pulled his eyes away. Again he looked past Monica back down at the activity below. “And your price is monetary?”
“Don’t worry about the price. Just say you’re sorry. And mean it.”
He frowned and looked away.
After a moment of waiting, which seemed to last a thousand years, Monica stepped away. She slapped her hand on his desk and said, ”Bien. My grandparents’ money has done enough harm in the world. That’s going to have to change.”
He nodded, finally breathing easy in the familiar, combative atmosphere he had expected. He almost sounded cheerful. “Like Fernanda said, we were expecting this from you. My lawyers are ready, Monica. Go ahead and just try to touch our money.”
Despite her anger, Monica felt a string of sadness for this end. Bruce and Alma had been right, these people were unworthy. Still, she had seen that little trace of humanity at the mention of her grandmother—a little nugget of emotion, a pearl of love lost in a field of greed. It was all she needed. She could move on without the Borreros now.
chapter 23 THE ROAD BACK
Alma and Claudia took Monica to the San Salvador airport. “My guess is that it’ll be a good six months before you have to come back,” Claudia said. “We found the original will, before the family had Magnolia rewrite it. You could end up with one-third of Borr-Lac, the house in San Salvador, and Caracol. As for Fernanda and Marco, they both had their professional licenses revoked. That’s the best we can expect, given their contacts and the network of muscle behind the family. The best possible scenario is getting the venom-trial family members back here to give testimony. I’d just advise you to be careful. Stay as far away from the Borreros as possible. You never know what they’d do to hold on to their money.”
Monica said, “Will wants to help you shut them down at all cost. He said he’d fly back ten times if need be.”
“Who’s picking you up at the airport?” Alma asked.
“My friend Paige,” Monica said, then, in a soft, chaste voice, “and Will.”
“Not Kevin?” Claudia said.
“Kevin and I broke up a few days ago,” Monica said. “He got asked out by our city mayor’s daughter, a girl he knew from grade school. He said he was calling to give me a chance to stop him from going out with her. But I didn’t. I threw that fish back into the water, as they say.”
“But why?” Claudia said. “Why would you let a perfectly good man slip away?”
Monica smiled. “Kevin … Kevin was born in Milford and Kevin will die in Milford. He’s very involved in town politics. In fact, a long time ago, he told me he’d like to be mayor of Milford, so whether he knows it or not, this is the girl he’s going to marry. I took it as a sign.”
“You’re okay then?” Alma said.
“Yeah.”
“And Will?” Claudia said, giving Monica a sideways look.
“I’m sure we’ll be friends for life” is all Monica would volunteer for now. She turned to her mother. “Mom, do you remember your credo on how to judge a man?”
Alma squinted. “What credo?”
“You said that as women we should only choose men who can change the world, deliver justice, save what’s precious, bring exceptional beauty to the world, or at the very least, deliver it of pain.”
Alma shook her head. “I said that? Really? … No wonder I’m still alone.” The flight attendant announced the seating groups. “Christmas break,” she said, grabbing Monica by the elbows. “Think about it. I know you would love Costa Rica.”
Monica felt a flood of relief as she walked down the Jetway and onto the aircraft that would transport her back home to Connecticut. She looked over her shoulder and saw the two women waving good-bye. She felt so emotionally raw that she longed to go home, to be alone for a few days to go grocery shopping, do her laundry, clean out the freezer—to examine the last few weeks’ events from the safe perch of distance and solitude. Up in the air, Monica stared out the tiny window of the airplane. Below, the quilt of farms and the musculature of El Salvador’s mountains and volcanoes pulled away from her vision and evaporated into mist.
Monica would tell Paige and Will, on the ride home, that she hadn’t forgiven her mother yet, nor did she completely trust her. But she admitted that she had begun to feel something akin to peace after the ceremony on the boat. “She looked so sad when she tossed the flowers in her mother’s name,” Monica said. “I saw a level of pain and regret in her face that made me turn away, like I was invading her privacy. Later, I thought, ‘Good, it should hurt. We used to be a family.’ ”
NOW THAT THE FOG of mystery that had surrounded Alma’s disappearance was cleared, Monica felt that it was her duty to correct all the mistakes of the past as best she could. Alma had rejected the role of heiress, and she obviously had no regrets. But Monica had so many loving memories of her grandparents and her childhood (an idyllic t
ime she thought of as “BA”—”before the affair”) that she didn’t share the same repulsion toward inheriting her grandparents’ property. Monica knew in her heart that her grandparents had never intended to disinherit their only granddaughter. They would gladly have skipped a generation and given it all to Monica had they foreseen the events that would follow Abuela’s death.
The living Borreros were a formidable legal opponent—but between Bruce, Alma, and Claudia there was an impressive arsenal of contacts and long-buried friendships in high places that could possibly level the battlefield. Monica was back home, putting away her folded laundry, when she started to plan what she would do with all that money.
Monica wanted to convert the land around Negrarena into a preserve. She wanted to re-create her paradise so that other children could experience it as she had. She wanted to travel back and forth as she pleased between her two worlds, Connecticut and El Salvador. To have a baby someday. To roam the beach and teach her child to identify sea creatures, to pass on the secrets that those seashells were still whispering in her ear.
Perhaps Negrarena’s destiny was locked in the past, in the mire of mistakes and betrayals of the Borrero family. Perhaps it was no coincidence that her maternal great-grandfather had been a doctor and that she was a physical therapist. Maybe her destiny as the abandoned child was a cleansing of the family greed, a purification of the past into a future of simplicity—a return to the old values of land and sea, of family, community, and healing.
chapter 24 THE LANGUAGE OF WATER
Several days after she arrived back in Connecticut, Monica put on a swimsuit and sat on the rock wall just outside her cottage, facing Long Island Sound. The sound of nearby voices made her turn her head. Her neighbors were on their patio preparing to barbecue. They waved and shouted, lifting their glasses to her. Monica waved but declined their invitation to join them. She turned back to the water. Her heart was heavy.
Since Monica had chosen to remain in El Salvador for an extra week, she had missed Yvette’s burial. Two days after returning to Connecticut, Monica had cut an armful of blue hydrangeas from her garden, got in her car, and followed Sylvia’s directions to the cemetery until she found the landmark she was looking for. She got out of her car and walked up a grassy, sloping hill. A short distance away, at the bottom of the slope, she saw Will. His back was to her, and he was seated on a white folding chair across from Yvette’s marker. His head was bowed in grief or prayer, and Monica couldn’t tell if his shoulders were shaking or if it was just the wind rippling across the light fabric of his shirt. Her first instinct was to comfort him; to shout his name and run down the hill to embrace him. Instead, she put the flowers down in the middle of the path and took a step back. She quietly slipped into her car and went home.
The gray water lapped at the edge of the rock wall and Monica dipped in a foot, then the other, and slipped off the wall into the knee-high water. She winced. Even in summer, the Sound was so much colder than Negrarena. The breeze sweeping over the water carried the scent of fresh seaweed, and Monica imagined the motion of their strands as they swayed in the liquid wind below. Once her feet no longer touched bottom, she filled her lungs, dropped her head, and kicked down into the dim silence. She immediately sensed the presence of a million mollusks gurgling and burrowing deeper into their hideaways just below the surface of the sand.
I’m becoming one of them, she thought, recalling the generational chain of shell seekers—Alma, Abuela, and the greatgrandfather who had studied the still-at-large furiosus. Back in El Salvador, Alma had told Monica that her research into the family tree had yielded even more ancestral connections to the sea, and especially to seashells. “Our bones are coated with mother-of-pearl,” Alma had said. “Our aquatic intelligence is just the delay of our evolution, a mutant inability to forget our lives as lower forms.”
Monica had laughed and said, “Where do you get these ideas?” But she’d cast her eyes to one side because it also sounded perfectly true.
Underwater, Monica opened her eyes, feeling the sharp sting of salt. She swam near the rocky bottom, following its gentle downward slope. She looked up at the wall of light floating above her. She saw the shape of a single maple leaf touch down on the surface. Monica was suddenly struck with a sense of déjà vu—coupled with the certainty that what she was looking at somehow held an echo of Yvette Lucero’s life, and even more so when she swam up toward the leaf and it hastened its drift away from her reach.
When Monica’s foot touched bottom again, she lifted her face up to the sun, filling her aching lungs with the damp summer air. How strange and inexplicable, she thought, for a human being to understand the language of water. And there, in the lackluster gray chop of the Connecticut shore, Monica received her inheritance—or perhaps just now fully recognized the rarity and wonder of that gift. In the curling symmetry of the waves all around her, she deciphered a kind of handwriting in motion. It told of the sea’s precision, of its unbroken circling of the world, of its solemn duty to clean, kill, and create. She was astonished that her mother had been right about so many things. Now Monica saw the obvious parallel between the sea and the life span of a soul: it paraded across the horizon in a hurried and glimmering journey with no beginning and no end.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my husband, Bob Barron, who gifted me with several invaluable commodities: time to write, a writer’s sanctuary in our home, instant readership, and great in-house editing. Thank you, Bob, for all your love and support.
I wish to thank the bookends of my life—my father, Juan A. Rodriguez, who taught me to love reading, and my mother, Yolanda del Cid de Rodriguez, whose job it was to make sure that this passion didn’t render me completely antisocial.
When the student is ready, the master will appear. And indeed, they did. A million thanks to John Dufresne for his superb coaching and infinite patience; to James W. Hall and Meri-Jane Rochelson for their editorial advice; and to the faculty and students at FIU who shaped my writing and made the MFA experience one of the highlights of my life.
For consultation on the scientific and medical aspects of the book, I would like to thank Dr. José H. Leal and the staff at the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum in Sanibel, Florida, and Dr. Jeffrey L. Horstmyer, chief of neurology at Mercy Hospital in Miami, for taking the time to speak with me. I also wish to acknowledge my reliance on the cone shells and conotoxins Web site maintained by Dr. Bruce Livett at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Any fabrications in these areas are my own and certainly not attributable to these sources.
I also wish to thank my aunt and uncle, Ana and Perry Pederson, for fond (and useful) memories aboard their sailboats, and for advising me on matters involving sailing off the New England coast.
For the final phase of this journey, I wish to thank my agent, Julie Castiglia, who found the perfect home for my manuscript. Special thanks to René Alegria and the dream team at Rayo, and especially my editor, Melinda Moore. Seeing all of you transform my manuscript into this beautiful book has been like watching a couturier dress a bride. I am amazed and grateful.
To friends and family members who encouraged me to write and for those who offered editorial and publishing advice, thank you.
About the Author
SANDRA RODRIGUEZ BARRON was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in El Salvador and Connecticut. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University, and now lives in Connecticut with her husband and young son. This is her first novel.
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bonus PAGES
READING GROUP GUIDE
Questions for Discussion 3
A Conversation with Sandra Rodriguez Barron 5
READING GROUP GUIDE
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Seashells are ever present in this novel. How are these objects a controlling metaphor in the story? Are there any similarities between the nature of s
eashells and the nature of any of the characters?
2. Monica is said to have an unusual talent for massage that is based on a razor-sharp tactile intuition. How does this characteristic relate to, lead to, and perhaps foreshadow the unusual talent that she discovers in the end?
3. Will Lucero and his mother-in-law both love and care for Yvette, yet are constantly at odds about the decisions relating to her care. Were your sympathies weighted with one character more than the other?
4. Will Lucero is torn between his loyalty to his wife and the hopelessness of her medical condition. At what point do you think the spouse of a mentally incapacitated person can move on emotionally to love another person?
5. The object of Alma’s quest, the Conus furiosus, is never found in the span of the story. Do you think the pursuit of something that could potentially do so much good is worth a lifetime of sacrifice, even if it is never found?
6. Monica falls in love with Will first because of his physical appeal, then his humanity, then the intimacy of their situation as they struggle together in El Salvador.
Did you feel conflicting loyalties toward Monica and Yvette?
7. Do you think that the subconscious can influence the body during a traumatic event or illness? Did the cone venom treatment ultimately free Yvette or did it kill her?
8. Monica was herself a victim of adultery. When she reports her mother’s errant behavior to her father, she unwittingly sets off a chain of events that cause a tragedy. Was Bruce Winters wise in hiding that fact from Monica all these years?
9. The sea is as much a character in this novel as are the people. Have you ever lived in a place where nature affects the routines, work, emotional, or spiritual nature of the humans who live nearby? How does Monica’s description of her life in Connecticut set up the contrast to the mystical aura of Negrarena?
The Heiress of Water: A Novel Page 27