The Heiress of Water: A Novel Read online

  She nodded. Yvettte’s eyes continued ping-ponging back and forth. Monica remained motionless, confused and afraid of sounding ignorant or hurting someone’s feelings. Still, if she was going to spend the next hour touching this woman’s body, she had to have some idea if someone was home behind those strange, darting eyes. “Why do her eyes …?” Monica ventured cautiously, moving her index finger between her right and left eyes.

  “No one really knows why,” Sylvia piped in. “Just that it’s typical of cortical damage.” She stood at the foot of her daughter’s bed and began to dart from one end of the bed to the other, trying to keep in the line of vision of her daughter’s mechanical, pendulum-like gaze. Monica’s earlier discomfort doubled. She looked at her watch, desperate to get the massage over with. “So,” she said, “do you want me to massage her in bed or shall we move her to my table?”

  “In bed,” Will said.

  Sylvia waved one hand dismissively. “We’ll move her to your table so she can enjoy the full effect.”

  “Not a good idea,” Will said, his voice hardening. “Remember that her seizures caused her to slide off an examining table.”

  As if she hadn’t heard a word he said, Sylvia unlatched the top of Monica’s massage table. “Did you carry this in all by yourself?” Without waiting for an answer, she moved to the doorway and called to a nurse. “Ellie? Can you help us lift Yvette onto this massage table?”

  A corpulent nurse entered the room, and Monica could tell by her posture (head back, chest inflated, hands on her hips) that she was used to ordering people around. She ruled in Will’s favor, grabbed Sylvia by one arm, and sat her down like a preschooler. She rolled Yvette onto her stomach as if she were nothing but a weightless cardboard cutout.

  “What’s that?” Monica whispered, pointing to the equipment next to the bed.

  “The doctors put her on the ventilator now and then to keep the air passages clean since she doesn’t cough,” Ellie said, pointing to her own throat. “Coughing is how we clean out our lungs.” She smiled broadly and bellowed, “You don’t have to whisper. The last thing you need to worry about around here is waking someone up.” Monica stepped away and looked out the window, pretending not to have heard.

  By the time the nurse left, Will and Sylvia were bickering again, while Monica began to set up her work space. She pushed back Yvettte’s pajama top to survey her dorsal side. The knobs of her spine stood out like stepping-stones leading across a garden. Monica squirted lavender oil onto her palms and got to work. She noticed that her fingernails, polished in red geranium, looked garishly healthy next to Yvette’s ashen skin.

  Massaging a person who was vegetative, Monica decided, felt like sneaking into someone’s home in their absence. This sensattion of being an invader was silly, she knew, but still, it felt oddly criminal to touch a stranger who was powerless to refuse. Monica ran her fingers up Yvette Lucero’s spine, checking its alignment, feeling for irregularities, noting the absence of fatty tissue, the strange topography of atrophied muscles and the intrusive presence of so many bones. She decided to begin with the neck. A hairless, six-inch scar ran up the side of Yvettte’s head, just above her left ear.

  Monica shut her eyes. It was the simple key to her legendary talent. It forced her to rely purely on the other senses—the pattern of breathing, the depths and sharpness of the client’s inhaling, all of it guided and informed. She clamped her eyes tighter still and tried to let this client’s strange body lead the way. Later, Monica would recall that something about Yvettte’s back (was it the irregular breathing? The ashy skin that felt as if it might disintegrate into sand at any moment?) made her thoughts wander back to Negrarena. Alma had taught Monica to run to the beach after a volcanic tremor and dig the full length of her arms deep into the sand. Monica would wait, motionless for what seemed like hours, until she felt the distant collisions of the earth’s seismic plates trembling their way up to the surface in timid, fleshy spasms. Real or imagined, she couldn’t say. Probably just a ploy to keep a kid busy for a while, but Monica believed that her mother was teaching her to converse with nature, to learn to ungarble its secret language by attuning all of her senses and silencing her mind. Eventually, Monica figured out that the same idea applied to the landscape of the human body.

  A few moments later, Monica noticed that Yvette’s skin emitted a distinctive odor, like wet metal, probably a cocktail of anticonvulsants and amphetamines being sweated out of massage-warmed skin. Since Yvette’s muscles were so soft, it startled Monica to find a knot. Her fingertips reversed and rolled over the spot again. There was a familiar, tube-shaped inflammation of muscle tension running along the left side of the spine. The pattern of tension was a classic result of stress —Monica had dubbed it the bride’s bar because she had found it on countless clients who were freaked out by the stress of planning a wedding, although technically it wasn’t limited to brides. The knot was always two to six inches long, along the upper part of the spine, fanning up toward the neck area, usually on the left regardless of whether the person was right- or left-handed. Monica dug deeply into the knot’s center, imagining the blood flow melting the inflammation like salt dissolving the rubbery flesh of a slug. Discovering the bride’s bar on Yvette blew Monica’s theory that it was a classic sign of stress. After all, how could Yvette have stress? In this case it was more likely to be the way they’d positioned her in bed, the alignment of her neck and head. Still, it was unexpected.

  Monica opened her eyes and squirted more oil into the palm of her hand. “Either Yvette is not happy about turning thirty,” she said softly, “or she’s planning on getting married.”

  “You can feel her stress, can’t you?” Sylvia said suddenly. “She’s working so hard to emerge.” Sylvia had returned to staring out the window at the foggy, fading afternoon.

  Will, who had also been pensive and distant, turned to look at his mother-in-law, leaned against the edge of the window, and crossed his arms. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just stared at her profile for what seemed like a long time. Then he approached the bed, took his wife’s hand, and kissed it. As if he read her mind, Will turned to Monica and said, “The two-year anniversary of Yvette’s accident is coming up in six weeks.” He announced it with such a somber voice that Monica knew that this amount of time had some significance that she was missing, unless it just represented a disappointing mile-marker.

  Monica hammered the tense muscle with the fleshy bottom of her fist as if she were grinding peppercorns with a pestle. “Does two years mark something specific in terms of her progress or care?” she asked tentatively. She didn’t mean to pry, but they seemed to want to talk about it.

  Will nodded his head slowly, deliberately before he spoke. “Recovery from vegetative state more than a year after injury is highly unlikely. According to Dr. Bauer, she has a three to five percent chance of recovery.”

  “Ten percent chance of recovery,” Sylvia interrupted. “Remember the result of that new study I told you about, Will? It’s up to ten percent, they say.”

  Will continued patiently, “If she does recover, Yvette probably won’t be able to resume activity as a social human being. She might have a vocabulary of ten words, maybe less, be wheelchair bound and dependent on others.” He took a deep breath. “Years ago, she and I had a hypothetical conversation about this subject … back when it was something that happened to other people. Yvette told me that two years was the maximum she would want to be on life support.” He stroked his wife’s forehead with the backs of his fingers. “Two years.”

  There was a short sniff from Sylvia, who had still not turned toward them, but continued staring out the window. “A year goes by so fast, and then suddenly you’re coming upon two years, and … it’s your daughter. … I won’t have them stop her feeding tube. I won’t.”

  Suddenly, Monica wanted to dash across the room and embrace Sylvia, to pick up that frail and sad little bird of a woman and make everything better. But Sylvia was unreacha
ble across a chasm of unbearable pain. Monica looked at Will and held his eyes in sympathy.

  “Massage therapy has succeeded in arousing people to consciousness,” Will said, sounding a bit more cheerful. “So you see, Monica, you’re a part of the master plan.”

  Sylvia turned and said, “We’ve tried everything, Monica, and we’ll try it twice, a million times. Western medicine, Chinese medicine, Santería, Haitian voodoo. I’m considering making a pilgrimage to Mexico, to the site of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Queen of Miracles.”

  Will rolled his eyes at the last part. “Let’s just say we keep our ears to the ground on the latest in medical treatments and therapy.”

  “I’m researching the cone venom treatments we talked about the other day,” Sylvia said, her hands pressed together as if in prayer.

  Monica shrugged. “Cone venom is being studied to control chronic pain. I don’t know that it could help Yvette.”

  “You said that the Indians in El Salvador believed that the substance reduced symptoms of dementia and regenerated damaged nerve cells, right?”

  “Right, but it probably wasn’t true. I mean, it’s so unlikely that …” Monica stopped. Who the hell was she to pooh-pooh the idea? No one had proved it untrue. Perhaps the local Indios had stumbled upon something special after all. And maybe the furiosus had resurfaced—mollusks did that all the time. It’s not as if she kept up with the research. “Why not?” Monica said, holding out her hands. “If something as humble as mold can give us penicillin, then rare sea snails might be able to do great things as well.”

  Sylvia winked. “Exactly.”

  After considering and rejecting about five different things to say, Monica said, “Yvette is lucky to have you both. I’m sure that she feels your love.”

  Will nodded and said, “I hope so.” He looked at his watch, then walked over to Sylvia and put his arm around her. “Come, suegra, let’s allow Monica to do her magic. We’re distracting both of them with our chatter.”

  Monica squirted more oil and continued at the base of Yvette’s spine, working her fingers in perfectly measured motions that recalled the regularity of knitting, giving the muscles supporting each vertebra a dose of soothing pressure and motion. She wondered if this massage was having any impact at all. Monica imagined Yvette as a deep-sea diver trapped below great depths of water, looking up, waiting to feel the vibration of a single, dry leaf touching down upon the surface far above.

  Where exactly, in time and space, was the woman these two loved and remembered? Monica realized she would have enjoyed posing this question to Alma because it was exactly the kind of thing her mother had loved to pontificate about. Monica had always assumed that same certainty would eventually settle into her own bones with age, but so far it didn’t look as if she would ever achieve that cocksure confidence, that gift of unshakable faith that life has an underlying structure and meaning. Twenty-seven found her full of doubt, and witnessing Yvettte’s bombed-out life made her want to scream at the unfairness of it all, at the frightening chaos of blind chance. Monica paused in her work a few minutes later, but only briefly, to turn on a CD that featured harps, flutes, and the sound of ocean waves. She closed her eyes again.

  The last thing she could have imagined was that along the eerie path of this woman’s body lay a trapdoor to the dark well of her own memory. Monica easily stepped through it, plunging unaware onto the black sand of Negrarena, back to what she had spent the last fifteen years trying to forget.

  ALMA HAD BEEN Monica’s first massage “client.” That first massage happened on the occasion of Alma’s self-pity over an argument she had had with Monica’s father, or with Maximiliano, or with both—Monica wasn’t sure. But Alma’s sense of being wronged or misunderstood was clear and must have been what triggered her defiant impulse to indulge in her family’s extraordinary wealth, to eke out beauty and drama from her resentment. She packed a bag, told Monica to hop into the passenger side of her clay-splattered vehicle, and drove to the coast.

  Alma ordered the servants at Caracol to set up a queen-size, four-post, antique canopied bed—complete with white linens and overstuffed pillows—out on the beach. Abuela was not there to impede this request, so the servants could do nothing but comply, all six of them disassembling the frame and mahogany headboard and hefting it from a second-floor guest room onto the infernally hot sand outside on the beach.

  A full, cool breeze was coming off the Pacific Ocean that afternoon. When the bed was set up, Alma and Monica put their bathing suits on and lolled in that improbable sumptuousness. Mother and daughter stretched out across starched white linen sheets as crisp as rice paper, their index fingers loosely hooked together. They gazed up at the billowing white gauze canopy as it filled and expelled the salty air, pulsing like the head of a giant jellyfish. The clinking of ice cubes preceded Francisca, who was Maximiliano’s mother and had been the nanny of two generations of Borrero children, including Alma and Monica. Francisca stumbled through the stretch of soft sand to deliver a pitcher of freshly squeezed lemonade. She placed it on a delicate wooden table next to the bed, pushing down on the surface to dig the feet of the table deeper into the sand. While Alma drank her lemonade, Monica played with her mother’s hair, raveling it into a loose braid, then unraveling it.

  Alma put her glass down and rolled onto her stomach with her face toward Monica and closed her eyes. ”Dame masaje en la espalda,” she said, suddenly arching her back and wiggling deeper into the feather mattress. “I have all this tension in my back.”

  Monica complied with her mother’s request by imitating what she’d seen her father do—she pushed her fingers into Alma’s back, kneading the shoulder blades. She stopped occasionally to pet the back of Alma’s head so softly and lovingly that some of the strokes only brushed the air. She listened to the sound of the waves crashing and rolling to shore and noticed her mother’s back rising and falling in perfect timing with the rhythm of each wave. Soon Monica’s mind was still and she was aware of only a few small details of her surroundings, such as the clean smell of detergent exhaled by the gauzy cloth of the canopy and the incessant scratching of a farm mutt hiding under the shade of a cluster of beach scrub. Monica didn’t know it at that moment, but she was the happiest she would be for another twenty years. Alma, now fast asleep, offered an occasional snore.

  The scuttle of something small caught Monica’s eye at the far corner of the bed. She sat up. An electric-blue-and-red shore crab, commonly known as a caballero, or “gentleman,” appeared from under the linens. The crab was about the size of Monica’s hand and was regal in his medieval armor. He charged up the back of Alma’s leg, leaving little white scratch marks on her tanned skin. Alma had taught Monica that if you stay perfectly still, few creatures will harm you. Confident that her mother would sleep through it, Monica watched with complete absorption, waiting to see what it would do.

  Alma continued to breathe slowly, her head resting on the backs of her folded arms, oblivious to the nasty pincers dragging across her bare skin. The crab reached the small of Alma’s back, ascended the stepladder of her spine. As he climbed over her bathing-suit strap, Monica observed the toothlike bumps on the claws, the chela. She searched her memory for the correct term for those toothlike bumps, wanting to be ready to report the anatomical details when her mother woke up. The crab eyed her with detached, floating orbs before he scaled Alma’s loosely roped hair, then stopped and rested on the base of her neck. The chela are denticulate, Monica thought, suddenly remembering the correct term. The crab spread his spindly appendages across Alma’s neck, scarlet rays radiating from a core of electric blue, wet and gleaming in the sun. Monica’s heart skipped as her mother’s eyes darted from side to side under lightly freckled lids, seen in profile. Alma mumbled softly in her sleep.

  Perhaps this otherworldly place, this dreamlike moment, was too beautiful to remain unblemished, too pure not to tempt the outside world to intrude. It was as if this “gentleman”—a scaveng
er whose territory included the farmhands’ latrine—had come to deposit the refuse of the outside world. The creature pressed itself against Alma’s ear, and she knitted her eyebrows together as she listened to what it had to say. Disturbed, she cried out in her sleep.

  “Max,” she said in a breathy voice. There was a silence, as if to give time for a reply, and Monica had the sensation that she was overhearing one side of a telephone conversation. Suddenly Alma shuddered and said, “If I don’t leave right now, your wife is going to kill us both.” Her sun-swollen lips continued to move, speaking inaudibly, ending in a great, inconsolable sigh. After she spoke, the startled crab turned opaque, folded up his appendages, and scurried off, like an unlicensed peddler shooed away by police. Alma rolled over to one side, her back to Monica.

  Monica slipped off the edge of the bed and stood on the hot sand, staring at the wall of her mother’s back, which might as well have been made of concrete. One of the panels of the canopy broke loose of its tie and slid between them. Monica watched over her sleeping mother through the fog of rippling translucent cloth. Monica grabbed a handful of it and wept silently into the cloth, because now she knew for sure what was going on. She looked up toward the mountain where so many campesinos lived. It all moved closer, somehow. Somewhere beyond those hills was a wife, someone who would kill to protect what her mother was dreaming about at this very moment.

  Monica understood that the knowledge she now possessed was dangerous. If she could just keep her mouth shut, if she stood very still, maybe no one would get hurt. The peril might pass, slip quietly out of the white linens and into someone else’s bed. That is, if there could ever be another bed quite like this, in which a beautiful woman napped under a billowing cloud of silk gauze, unaware of the real clouds gathering in the distance. Or another place on earth like Negrarena, where secrets dribbled out like saliva, leaving no trace on the parched sand of its desolate shore.