Part 9 (1/2)
”Haven't you?” she asked softly.
”She's been making some noises, but ...” His voice trailed off.
”You might find hope,” she suggested timidly. ”In El Salvador.”
”You're starting to sound like Sylvia.” He tilted his head up and looked at the sky. ”I know that centuries of science and medicine have a thing or two to say about it.” He placed his hand over his heart and bent forward slightly. ”Sylvia thinks she's the only one who has intuition. But I have a brain and a heart, and they're both telling me that Yvette is not going to recover. Not as the old Yvette, not even as a fraction of herself. She'll never speak or look up at the sky and say, 'Wow, what a pretty moon.' I've already made peace with that. And I don't want to add any more damage to her condition.”
Monica looked down and kicked at some dirt with the edge of her flip-flops. ”It's a long shot, huh?”
”Like trying to sink a golf ball from here to a hole in Boston.” He stepped in closer and put his hands on her shoulders. ”Get ready. I have a feeling this is going to be a h.e.l.l of a fight.”
His skin was warm and fragrant, and she froze with the overwhelming temptation to touch him, to press her fingers into the hard wall of his waist. She nodded but didn't hug him back. Her arms hung wooden at her side.
”I'm glad you're coming,” he said. ”Your history with the place is going to help.” He turned and looked down the road, where Bruce's Lincoln had disappeared. He leaned down, kissed her politely on the forehead, turned around, and walked to his truck. As he opened the door, he stopped and pointed up at a window of her house. ”Kick those monkeys out and get some rest. You'll need it.”
Monica c.o.c.ked her head to the side and raised an eyebrow. His truck turned the corner and left a fading comet tail of red light in the darkness. She heard a noise from above. She looked up and saw someone's figure standing in the window frame.
”Need some rest for what?” It was Kevin, slurring his words.
”We're going to El Salvador,” Monica said calmly. Someone spoke to him from inside the room, and Monica saw Kevin step back from the window and turn his head. Kevin had been working a lot of hours over the past week, and she had the feeling he'd only been half listening when she had explained the progression of events prior to tonight. She wasn't about to explain it all now.
She found a beach blanket in the trunk of her car and took it to a hammock she had set up between two trees in the small strip of yard next to her house. She hopped in and looked out to the water and the lights of Long Island. She could hear Kevin inside the house, searching for her; Paige's protest at being woken up, then the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel of the driveway. Kevin didn't know that Monica had found a nook under a tree for a hammock. Veiled from view behind the skirts of an elm tree, Monica rocked herself, impervious to his calling. He went back upstairs. She listened to the agitated murmurs upstairs until they quieted down and the house went dark and silent.
The Connecticut coast was quiet, placid, foggy, civilized; a world away from the pounding waves that smashed the ancient volcanic boulders of Negrarena. She had always known that there was an immense difference between this crowded, domesticated seash.o.r.e and the majestic ocean of her childhood. She imagined that the difference in character of those two bodies of water was like the difference between contentment and awe.
Part TWO
chapter 9 THE FIRST DOSE.
No one noticed that Yvette Lucero mashed her jaw as the needle injected a tiny amount of clear fluid into her spine. Had anyone noticed, it would have counted as a pain response and would have represented a b.u.mp of two whole points on her Glasgow Coma Score. The pain was cold, dazzling, and pure as a plunge into ice water. She felt a stunting and weighty rage. But the pain pa.s.sed as quickly as it began, followed by a blinding deluge of snow that pattered on the roof of her brain and pulled her down into the emptiness of sleep.
Yvette squeezed through a hatch that led to unconsciousness-three levels below sleep-and hunkered down to weather the storm. She got back to the daily task of digging her way out of her prison with fingernails that were beginning to turn the bruised color of denim. No one knew that she was here. She sensed that the outside world had set sail without her, and she was alone on this island, with no way to get home. She could only feel and smell the existence of an external world. And she could think, of course. The outside world had changed, she was sure of it. The air smelled unfamiliar-like wood varnish, sea weed, and coffee. She could feel the s.h.i.+fting tide of the sea nearby in the movement of air, tasted it on the spongy fibers of her tongue every time she took a breath.
She had also been working on the reconstruction of the past. Her mind did the backbreaking work of a chain gang with its incessant digging. She had a few tattered fragments of her life, three bright strips of living material that didn't fit together or suggest anything useful. The first was an image of the yellow chiffon sleeves of an anemone, waving through the thick and distorting gla.s.s of a public aquarium tank. The second was an image of a man's leg, muscled and flexing back and forth with the effort of lifting something. And finally, there was the memory of standing in a magnificent rose garden. In this frame, a man holds a camera. The sun behind him is bright and all she can see is the outline of his figure. She is about to tell him that it's not a good angle, that she's going to look overexposed and squinting, when he shouts, ”Smile!”
Flas.h.!.+
As always, those three strips of footage were stilled and mounted against the gray cinder-block walls of her mind, loud and bright as graffiti on a subway wall. But this time, something was different. She blinked with disbelief.
Yvette was standing before an explosion of new, living, moving strips of imagery. She didn't know which to look at first, with all of them moving at the same time, in different directions, skateboarding across her vision faster than she could study them. She had the impression that she was looking through the eyepiece of a pair of binoculars, peering out at a distant sh.o.r.e from the bouncing position of a boat. She was excited and happy and devoured the explosion of colors and shapes. She got to work trying to group them together, comparing them to each other like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, keeping some, rejecting others. She was elated to find that each memory contained irrefutable evidence of her own existence in the world.
chapter 10 UNDULATIONS.
Bruce, Monica, and Will arrived in El Salvador three full days after Sylvia's departure, due to the unavailability of seats on flights headed into San Salvador. They eventually picked up separate connections, Will and Bruce through Miami and Monica through Atlanta. His old friend Claudia Credo came through on her offer and ended up making two separate runs out to the airport on the same day to scoop all the travelers.
They were to spend the first night with Claudia and her parents in San Salvador. Within an hour of her arrival, the phone rang for Monica. It was Kevin. He was jealous of Will, he admitted, and equally hurt that Will was now ”in” with Bruce. Not that Kevin wanted to be included in the trip-he just didn't want Will near Monica. ”Give me a break,” Monica said. ”He's here because of his wife.” wife.”
”Time can tear down anything,” Kevin warned.
”If two years hasn't done it, then two weeks certainly won't.”
”How can a man love someone who can't talk, laugh, have s.e.x, or cook a meal? He can't even get yelled at for leaving his clothes on the floor. Nothing. Nada.”
Outside, it was beginning to get dark. A small, lime-green parakeet landed on the sill of her window, scratched at something, and flew away. Monica said, ”Kevin, you should see her. The unfairness of it makes you want to drop to your knees and scream.”
She heard him take a deep breath. ”I bet.” But he persisted with his rivalry. ”Will must see you as a possible escape.”
Annoyed at the conversation, Monica said, ”Maybe he already has someone on the side. What do we know? It's none of our business, anyway.”
”Be very careful, Monica.”
Monica felt her face get hot with embarra.s.sment at the thought that someone might overhear this conversation-it presumed so much. She felt vain just entertaining the concept that Will might have felt the same flicker of attraction as she did, which at the moment seemed horribly cra.s.s even to her secret self. Was she that transparent?
”Point taken, Kevin. I'll be home in two weeks. You've been so busy lately, you won't even miss me.”
”Monica,” he said, in a long, drawn-out breath that made Monica anxious to get off the phone. ”I wasn't expecting someone like Will to come along or for you to run off to El Salvador, but it did force me to stop and appreciate what I've got. I haven't been putting in a lot of effort lately. I'm sorry about that.”
”Please, no need to apologize. You helped me with the new deck and you do all kinds of nice stuff for me.” Between yawns, she added, ”What we're looking at is called territoriality. Sociology 101. Remember?”
”It's called love. I miss you.”
She looked up at the old-fas.h.i.+oned alarm clock on the night table. ”It's eleven o'clock here, sweetie. One in the morning your time. I'm exhausted. I'll call you when I have some news.”
In bed ten minutes later, Monica realized that she had not told him that she loved him too. Its significance hunkered in the darkness long after she had hung up the phone. Monica kicked off the sheets and stared up at the blades of the ceiling fan, her arms extended at her sides as she waited for the sweet refuge of sleep.
CLAUDIA CREDO estimated that Kevin's four phone calls would cost him close to two hundred dollars if he didn't have a special international calling plan. estimated that Kevin's four phone calls would cost him close to two hundred dollars if he didn't have a special international calling plan. ”Mil seiscientos colones!” ”Mil seiscientos colones!” Claudia's elderly mother gasped, quickly computing the exchange rate and placing four bony fingers over her stretched lips. ”He must really love you,” she said with a nod of approval, then went back to rocking herself to sleep in her chair. Claudia's elderly mother gasped, quickly computing the exchange rate and placing four bony fingers over her stretched lips. ”He must really love you,” she said with a nod of approval, then went back to rocking herself to sleep in her chair.
Claudia shuffled her houseguests into the dining room, which had been set up with a linen tablecloth and casual china. Will slung one hand over Monica's back and squeezed her shoulder. ”Bruce, what do you think of this guy Kevin for your daughter? Do you see him as your future son-in-law?”
Monica turned and frowned at Will. ”He made a bad first impression, I know.”
Will raised one eyebrow. ”The second impression wasn't so great either. I really could have lived without seeing his bare a.s.s out on the seawall.”
”He had too much to drink, like everyone else.”
Will just smiled, tilting his head and holding one hand out, encouraging her to continue defending.
”Sit,” Claudia said, pulling out chairs. In the courtyard just outside the window, a huge, chesty parrot prattled incessantly, calling out for someone named Chabela, who turned out to be a housekeeper who had died over ten years ago. ”It gives us the creeps at night,” Mama Mercedes confessed.
The housekeeper rushed about, setting down plates of steaming eggs, tortillas, refried beans, and Mama Mercedes's sweet tamales. ”Adelfa,” Claudia reprimanded. ”I told you to serve the orange juice first.”
Bruce praised Mama Mercedes's tamales ad nauseam, and they all enjoyed making the old lady's ancient eyes sparkle with pride. She rang a small silver bell that sat on the table. When the maid failed to appear, she got up and shuffled off, complaining how hard it was to find a good muchacha muchacha these days. these days.