The Heiress of Water: A Novel Read online

  Max dug his fingers through the sand and pulled up a broken oyster shell. He held it up to the sun, turning it slightly to let its pearly interior catch the light. “Alma, why do you want to find the Conus furiosus so badly?”

  Alma was still lying on her stomach. She raised her face, squinted, and shook her head a little. “It’s my calling, Max. You know that.”

  Max crossed his arms across his bare, hairless chest. “Since you have all the money you could ever want, Alma, what about contributing the fruit of your efforts to the poor people of this country?”

  “First of all, I’m not rich, my parents are. And secondly, I study and protect the marine environment, Max. That’s my contribution to society.”

  Max slowly shook his head. “To love nature is a luxury, Alma. When people are starving, they don’t give a crap about nature.”

  “True …,” Alma said. “And when the politicians fix the economy, then our unspoiled natural resources will be waiting. Until then, I’ll be one of its keepers.”

  “Look at me, Alma.” He raised a finger as he spoke. “Let’s say you find one of those cones. You copy the molecular structure in a lab. You turn it over to the international medical community for further study. The world will have a better painkiller, and you would have made a contribution to medicine. Wonderful.” He folded his hands on his lap. “The rich get richer and things stay the same around here.”

  “Okay, get to the point, Max.”

  Max tugged at his chin hair. “Then develop this drug locally. I can help you when it comes time to test it. You can still unveil it to the world, market it internationally, but use the profits to help the poor right here in El Salvador.”

  “That sounds awfully entrepreneurial.”

  Max shrugged. “As long as it goes to help the poor …” He pulled a bottle of Pilsener beer out of a burlap bag. He opened it and took a swig. “Aw, hell. The furiosus might be nothing but a fantasy.”

  Alma tied her bikini straps and sat up. Monica saw Max’s eyes on Alma’s breasts as she reached up to release her ponytail. “That cone isn’t a fantasy, it’s just rare. It’ll allow itself to be found by someone worthy,” she said. She opened a bottle of beer and poured most of it in her hair without taking a drink.

  “Then become worthy, Alma,” Max said.

  “I am worthy,” she said, giving Max a hard look. “I’m not insensitive to what’s going on in this country. It breaks my heart.”

  “Then come to a meeting with me,” he begged, taking her hand. “Let’s do great things together, Alma. You and I are a rare union of the warring sides of this country.” He put his hands together. “We are what joins the rich and the poor, like—”

  “Like the two halves of a bivalve,” Monica piped in.

  Alma laughed. Max nodded. “Yes, something like that.”

  “But, Mom,” Monica protested, “going to a meeting is dangerous.”

  “Being a Borrero is dangerous,” Max said, giving her an acid look. “Why do you think you live behind an electrified fence in the city?” He pointed to the land behind them. “Beyond those hills the campesinos fill their empty bellies with the scent of meat roasting in your kitchen, hating each one of you for your comforts.”

  “Max, por favor,” Alma said. “Don’t frighten her.”

  “I can get every fisherman from here to Panama to look for that creature in their nets,” Max said softly. “If you can make it lucrative for them to look.”

  In the distance, a wave rose and bashed itself against the shore. Alma waited until it stretched out across the sand in an exhausted hiss before speaking. “You inspire me,” she said softly.

  As Monica looked out to the vast field of dancing silver light, she caught the first glimpse of where this was headed, and how deep and sharp the fall ahead. Years later, she would pinpoint the shock wave of consequences that followed back to this moment, to this casual conversation that sent her whole family, and life forever after, into a sick and dizzying spin. Max somehow managed to pervert Alma’s compass, and in the weeks that followed, her true north—the sea—became inverted in the direction of the land.

  TWO MONTHS LATER, a fisherman with a sharp eye sent word that he had found an unusual cone shell in his shrimp net. Alma jumped into her Land Rover and headed to the small fishing port at La Libertad, refusing to take Monica despite a teary tantrum.

  Monica and her father began to worry as the days passed and no one had heard from Alma. The fisherman said that he had given her the cone and that she had left with it in a dishpan, clearly excited.

  Four days later, Maximiliano Campos’s scorched body washed up onshore. The three bullet holes in his head had been washed clean by salt water.

  Monica stayed home from school while they awaited news. She convinced her father to let her wait for Alma at Negrarena, in the company of her grandmother and a trusted servant. Abuela spent the days under the spell of prescription tranquilizers, while Monica paced the shore from dawn to dusk, scanning the horizon with her mother’s binoculars. Every floating palm branch or mass of seaweed made her heart jump to her throat. She survived by retreating into a girlish fantasy world in which she was a beautiful mermaid, a girl wonder with gills who could slip down into the ocean’s recesses and find her mother. She could keep her safe in the silent depths for years if need be. They would return to land only when all the violence and death in El Salvador had stopped. Monica would rise up from the sea, her heavy fish tail peeling off in great rubbery chunks to reveal a glorious set of legs. Together, she and her mother would walk up to Caracol and wait for her father. Bruce and Alma would reconcile and have another baby. A boy. An infant who would cement her parents’ marriage together like, as Monica had previously illustrated, the two halves of a bivalve.

  Weeks passed, and Monica kept up her faithful watch as long as she was allowed to stay at Negrarena. Two months later, Bruce Winters announced that he was moving home to the States with his daughter. Alma had simply vanished.

  chapter 2 THE GENTLEMAN

  CONNECTICUT, 2000

  The first time Will Lucero entered her office, Monica Winters thought he was another one of life’s subtle but irritating road signs. She suspected he might be the pawn of a maternal voice that, as she approached thirty, frequently tapped her on the shoulder and whispered, We all know you’re with the wrong man, dear. Look. Here comes an attractive man. Go on, talk to him. Maybe he’s the one.

  When Monica looked up from her work in response to a knock on the side of her metal file cabinet, she immediately sensed that Will Lucero was here to somehow challenge the status quo. When she saw the flash of a gold wedding band a second later, she realized that it was not the meddling Mother Spirit that had made her shift uncomfortably at the sight of that handsome face, but rather, the man-on-a-mission focus in his shiny, dark eyes. He had premature salt-and-pepper hair cut close to the head, olive skin, and faint crow’s-feet that gave him the look of someone who either laughed a lot or spent a lot of time squinting at the sun.

  “You Monica Winters?”

  She nodded and stood.

  Will introduced himself and moved aside to allow a tiny woman in her sixties to step into the office. “Sylvia Montenegro,” she said with a slight Spanish accent. “I’m Will’s mother-in- law.”

  “How can I help you?” Monica gestured toward a pair of chairs in front of her desk.

  Will pulled out a chair for the woman and made sure she was comfortably seated before he sat down himself. He leaned back, placed an index finger at his temple, like an interviewer. “The entire physical-therapy staff in this hospital comes to you for massages.” He pressed one foot against her desk as he tipped his chair back. “It’s my wife’s thirtieth birthday next week.”

  “I don’t take new clients,” Monica said apologetically. “I give massages at home—for my family, coworkers, and a few close friends.”

  Will pushed back on his chair a little more. “This would only require you to walk across the street an
d down a block after work. Yvette is over in one of the long-term care facilities,” he said, pointing east.

  Sylvia leaned in. “We heard you have magic hands. That your talent is something special.”

  Will nodded in agreement. “Any day this month would be fine.”

  “We’ve been struggling to come up with a gift,” Sylvia said. “But Yvette doesn’t need anything money can buy.” She looked down and played with the buckle of her purse. “My daughter is in a persistent vegetative state … a waking coma.”

  Monica blinked twice and shook her head. “For how long?”

  “Twenty-three months,” Will answered in an oddly cheerful voice, one that obviously attempted to candy-coat what he had just said, either out of kindness to the listener or indicative of a hardy optimism.

  “Oh … I’ve heard of Yvette,” Monica said. “Her physical therapist is Adam Bank, right?” As she spoke, she tapped the tip of her mechanical pencil against the papers on her desk until the lead broke off. She had to figure out a nice way to get out of this. Her specialty was in therapy for sports injuries—head-trauma recovery was as alien to her duties as welding. Besides, she was booked.

  “Don’t be intimidated.” Sylvia smiled. “Adam’s work with Yvette is intended to prevent atrophy and pressure sores, infections, all that. None of it is intended to be enjoyable or mentally relaxing. What we want from you is no different than what you do for any ordinary client. We want pampering: scented oils, soft music, the works—like a spa.” She clasped her fingers together, bit her lower lip, and waited for an answer.

  Was it terrible to want to get out of this? Monica tapped on the surface of her electronic organizer, pretending to be checking her schedule. Tap, tap, tap, bleep, bleep. “I’m sorry but I’m all booked,” she repeated with finality. “I just don’t have time for new clients.”

  When Monica looked up, Will leaned forward. His gaze locked hers so powerfully that she thought that her eyesight was being physically gripped. She fully expected him to go for the sales kill, to try to strong-arm her into agreeing to do something she clearly didn’t want to do. She crossed her arms and pushed her spine against the back of her chair, reminded herself to stick to her guns. But what she saw in Will Lucero’s face surprised her: he opened up some part of himself, offering Monica a clear view into his pain, a humble and disarming appeal to her sense of kindness.

  When Monica managed to overcome her surprise at the strength of her own reaction and disentangle herself from that pleading look, she stared hard to the left, into the vortex of a moon-shaped stain in the carpet where she had overwatered a plant. She sighed. There was no way she could let them go empty-handed. She snapped her fingers. “You need someone from the Healing Touch,” she said, reaching for her business-card collection. “I know someone who’d be perfect. He’s booked into the next century, but I know he’d love to work with Yvette. I’ll call him right now.”

  Will abruptly stood up, and for a second Monica thought he was throwing in the towel. Instead, he pointed over her shoulder, to the bookshelf that filled the wall behind her desk. “Those are some fancy seashells. Not the kind people normally gather on a seaside vacation.”

  He was pointing to the row of Conus shells displayed on a shelf. Each specimen was suspended by gem prongs atop a six-inch metal collector’s display stick. Without turning around, Monica said, “They’re cone shells, arranged in descending order by the potency of their toxin.” She tapped her pen and looked out the window, still trying to figure out what to do.

  “They’re poisonous?”

  “They have a reserve of venom, which they inject via a harpoon with a barbed tooth,” Monica said as she turned around. She picked one up and handed it to Will. “You’re holding the deadliest of the bunch, the Australian textile cone. The ones in the center are less potent—that’s the tulip, striate, marble, and alphabet cones. The one on the end, the chestnut one with the spiraled band of blood-colored speckles, is called the cone of fury. It’s a family heirloom. Supposedly, its venom had some really wonderful medicinal properties.”

  Sylvia leaned forward. “What kind of medicinal properties?”

  “Chiefly nonopiate pain relief—meaning it’s unlike morphine in that the body doesn’t develop a resistance to its effects over time. Also, it doesn’t cause the usual mental dullness. The cone of fury may have had the capability to stimulate damaged nerve cells to regenerate. The indigenous people of El Salvador claimed that it could cure dementia and reverse memory loss.” Monica shrugged. “Who knows if any of it is true—the Conus furiosus is extinct.”

  “Are you sure?” Sylvia said, leaning forward and squinting at the row of shells. “It rings a bell.” She looked at Will. “Now where did I hear something about sea snail venom?”

  “The Conus magus, or magician’s cone, is being looked at by several biopharmaceutical companies,” Monica said. ”Sixty Minutes ran a story on it last year.”

  Sylvia snapped her fingers. “That’s it. I saw it on TV.”

  Will sat back down and leaned back in his chair again, lacing his fingers against the back of his head. Apparently satisfied with all he needed to know about cone shells, he said, “Monica, we’re here because Adam offered to give up his appointment with you if you would agree to massage Yvettte.”

  Monica suddenly understood. They really wanted her.

  “But why me?” Monica pleaded, looking from one to the other and placing one hand on her chest. “Massage therapy is a little side thing for me. I don’t even do it for a living. I’m a physical therapist. Sports injuries, hip replacements. That kind of thing.”

  Will looked up to the ceiling, as if carefully selecting his choice of words. “We want you because Adam Bank is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to alternative methods of healing. His knowledge and intuition are razor sharp and we trust him immensely. Adam told us that your talent for massage is nothing short of extraordinary. And we happen to be in need of someone extraordinary.”

  Damn, Monica thought. She let out a deep breath, summoning the nerve to just say no. Will continued to push back on his chair, waiting. Just as Monica parted her lips to warn him that that chair had a weak leg, a look of utter surprise flashed across his face, as if he had heard a loud noise she had not. The bad leg must have given under his weight, because he tumbled back against the wall of the office cubicle. He cried out and his arm flailed back and he tried to grab on to something. His chair slid back and landed with a loud crash, while the woolly, five-foot cubicle partition collapsed behind him. Monica bolted up to help, but the desk blocked her. The metal hardware of the wall’s edge clanked against the drawer handles of a file cabinet on its way down, and it all landed with a dusty thud.

  Monica stood with her mouth open. “Are you okay?” The mother-in-law remained unfazed, her hands primly clutching her purse. “He’s a klutz,” she said. Heads began to pop over partitions to ask if everything was all right. Luckily, no one had been on the other side.

  “I’m okay,” Will said, accepting Monica’s hand when she finally got to him. He was a big guy, well over six feet, muscular, probably two hundred pounds. He looked around the collapsed office partition, shook his head in disbelief, and began to laugh. Then, he bared his teeth at his mother-in-law, growling and pawing at the air with elbows drawn close to his chest in an imitation of what he must have meant to be Godzilla, while Sylvia defended herself with her purse.

  After they all shared a good chuckle, Will and Monica got to work reassembling the modular wall. Monica thought about his wife, the famously unlucky Yvette Lucero. Her name had come up among the staff, and Monica recalled Adam’s description of her: A beautiful Puerto Rican woman flipped her vintage Mustang, went down a hill, no seat belt. According to Doc Bauer, there is diffuse damage to the cerebral cortex, possibly some midbrain damage too. No improvement in almost two years.

  When they had rehabilitated the partition, Sylvia put her small hand over Monica’s. “So what day are you available, dear? I r
eally hate to take Adam’s appointment, but I will if it’s all you have.”

  “Saturday the seventeenth,” Monica said wearily, wondering, just for a second, if they hadn’t choreographed the fall.

  * * *

  MONICA ARRIVED at the long-term care facility a few blocks south of Yale-New Haven Hospital. Mylar balloons with “Happy Birthday” messages hovered over Yvettte Lucero like watchful ghosts. The room was fragrant with the scent of several flower arrangements placed along the base of a large window. Will and Sylvia were standing at opposite ends of the window, half-turned, like twin archangels guarding a gateway. Already Monica could tell, by their stiff posture, that their mood was altered from a week ago. Her colleague Adam Bank had explained that the family members of brain-injured patients are often on an emotional roller coaster, swinging between the extremes of willful optimism and complete despair. Surely the moody New England weather that evening didn’t help—early-summer rain, gray skies, and fog.

  Monica approached the bed. She was shocked to see Yvette Lucero’s eyes wide-open and darting from side to side. Will must have been familiar with the expression he saw on Monica’s face because he said, “The sleeping phase of her coma only lasted three weeks. You can imagine our joy when she opened her eyes.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But nothing else has happened since.”

  Desperate to lighten the mood and create ambience for the massage, Monica chirped, “Hi there, Yvette,” in a voice that sounded as if she were talking to a toddler, which she desperately regretted. She put her hands on her cheeks, feeling them grow warm. Her mind went blank. This was such a mistake.

  Will reached over and tugged at one of Yvette’s toes, then gently slapped the bottom of her socked foot. “Hey, baby, pay attention. This is Monica Winters. She’s going to massage your old bones until you’re nothing but a pile of happy, quivering jelly. Happy birthday.” He lifted her calf off the bed and brought her foot up to his mouth. He closed his eyes and slowly kissed the arch of her foot. Still holding her foot, he turned his head and looked at Monica. “Make her feel really good, please.”