Water from My Heart (27 page)

My emotive response to both Amanda and Shelly was a deep desire to ease their pain, to not regret, to not be alone, to not have to face life without them and what that said about me. Of course, I cared for them. Deeply. And not all of my reasons for being with them were selfish but many were. What I felt for them can best be described as “deep affection.” A product of convenience. Of geography. Of my own need. Watching Leena climb the stairs inside, I couldn't honestly tell you that I loved her—I'm not sure I'd know that if and when I felt it—but whatever I felt for her was different. At every level, and the depth of it convinced me that while I'd told both Amanda and Shelly that I loved them, I knew then, sitting on that pool deck overlooking the Pacific, I had not.

Not even close.

I sat by the pool a long time. It was close to 2:00 a.m. when I thought about going to bed. I walked to the edge of the pool and was about to turn out the light when I heard a stick crack, followed by footsteps, a shuffle, and a guttural grunt. Then another footstep. Another shuffle. Another grunt. I stepped into the shadow and watched as a lone figure walked up the steps from the side of the house toward the pool. He climbed the last step, leaned against the railing, and steadied himself. I was moving toward him when he took a step and fell headlong into the pool. His still body floated facedown as a cloud of red spilled out of his side and into the water around him.

I
was screaming for Paulina before I hit the water. I dove in, caught Zaul by the shoulders, flipped him, cradled his head, and began pulling him to the side. By the time I got him to the steps, she'd turned on the light and was standing at the railing—her gown flowing in the wind. She saw us and disappeared.

I dragged his body from the water and laid him out on the pool deck. His face was busted up. Whatever piercings he'd once owned had been ripped out. His ear had been torn. Eyes were swollen. Had a nasty cut over one eye and beneath another. Someone had carved on one of his arm tattoos with a sharp object and one shoulder seemed out of place and resting lower than the other. He was clutching his rib cage, and when I pulled up his shirt, I could understand why. Deep black-and-blue contusions surrounded his entire torso. One leg seemed limp and weak. A couple of his fingers were swollen and one looked broken. But that was not the worst of it.

The worst was an open gash on the side of his stomach that wound around his back. Infected and actively bleeding—it was an ugly wound. He'd stuffed it with paper towels and a piece of cloth I couldn't make out. Based upon his ashen appearance, he'd lost a lot of blood, and based on the caked stains on his clothes and skin, he had been for a while.

Paulina landed next to me about the time I figured out he wasn't dead. Least not yet. He was delirious and fading in and out of consciousness, muttering words I couldn't understand. Her finger immediately landed on his carotid while the other hand propped open an eye. Didn't take her long. She checked his injuries, including his side, and shook her head. “He's very weak. Fighting infection.” She pointed to his face, arm, and side. “He needs about a hundred stitches. He's dehydrated. He needs a hospital, but—” She held up a finger. “If we put him in a hospital and he's done anything deserving arrest since he's been here, the police will arrest him and put him in a Costa Rican prison, and you and his mother and father will never see him again no matter how rich they are.”

Blood was trickling out of his face. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and began dialing Colin. I spoke as I dialed. “Colin can be here in an hour and either find an airport close or land his jet on the highway a few miles from the house. This time of night there won't be anyone on the road.”

As soon as I said this, Zaul's hand came up and covered both mine and the cell. He held it there, shaking his head, preventing me from dialing. His words were muffled, and I couldn't understand what he said the first time but I did the second and third. “Not going home.”

I leaned in. “Zaul, you may die tonight if we don't get you to medical care.”

He nodded. Then he shook his head again. “Not going home.” He laid his head back, but his hand remained on the cell phone.

While I sat thinking how to circumvent Zaul and get him home, Leena spoke. “If we can get to a pharmacy, I can get enough medicine to inject him and get us to León, where he will need some time to recuperate.”

“How about here?”

“His injuries are serious. Even if you could get the plane here, I'm not even sure he should fly. His blood pressure is dangerously low. He needs an IV. Antibiotics. Fluids. Morphine. X-rays. A check for internal injuries. A lot of stitches. And I can't get that in Costa Rica because they don't know me, but I can get it in León. And by the time we wait through the crowded emergency room anywhere close to here, we could get in through the back door in the clinic at León and then, if needed, right into the hospital. The doctors know me there.” Her intensity grew. “He needs care right now. And the only way I know to do that for certain starts in León.”

Zaul's eyes were closed and his breathing shallow. “Get Isabella. I'll get him to the truck.”

I carried Zaul to the truck while Paulina woke Isabella and Paulo and then brought me some blankets and several pillows as well as an armful of towels. Ten minutes later, Paulo backed us out of the drive and was headed north up the highway to León. The highway was dark, and there wasn't another car in sight. Isabella stared through the back glass while Paulina huddled in the back with me. While I cradled Zaul and kept him from bouncing around, she did what she could with what little first aid we had to pack the gash on his side and wash his wounds. The look on her face told me she was worried. I held the flashlight and helped her as best I knew how. For his part, Zaul was mostly unconscious, which was good. If he were awake, he'd feel the pain, so unconscious was better. The last hour, she checked his pulse every few minutes and grew increasingly worried. “His fever has spiked.” She was right; Zaul was on fire and his skin was hot to the touch and his lips were blue. Paulo stopped at a gas station and bought a bag of ice, which we packed behind Zaul's neck, in his armpits, on his stomach, and around his groin.

Driving in the dark, staring back and forth between Zaul and Paulina's eyes, the occasional house light passing in the trees off the side of the road, clarity settled on me.

But the clarity did not bring me peace. How I got where I am in life was not the result of much thought or planning on my part. Nor can I tell you it was always the path of least resistance, although that was sometimes the case. More like the path of “that looks interesting” or “why not” or “wonder where that goes.” I've checked no moral compass and until recently never considered myself evil. Sitting in the back of that truck, Zaul bleeding in my arms, his life draining out of him, the whole of me pressed down on me and my reaction to the timeline and consequences of my life—and my choices—was one of disdain. Of bitterness. Of an acrid taste in my mouth. My sin had not been outright murder. I'd not defrauded millions. Not caused a holocaust. Not shot a dozen kids in a school. Not raped. Pillaged. But as I looked across my history, I wondered for the first time if my actions might be even worse.

I didn't need to ask the question. I knew the answer.

I might not be in league with other evil men, but over my life, I'd looked away, gone on my merry way, done nothing to prevent or hinder—or rescue. While not an active instigator, I'd been passive. An accomplice even. That passivity had only served to multiply. Maybe that was the toughest thought to swallow. The effect of my life had been to multiply evil, not fight it. Not eradicate it.

If my life had been spent sifting through a fog that did not allow me to see, there in the back of that truck, it lifted and daylight cracked the skyline. I could define me in one word.

I was “indifferent.”

Staring at Zaul, at the crimson stain of my decisions, I knew I could no longer claim ignorance and manifest indifference. My sins were many. I glanced at my watch to check the time, but the face was smeared and the time covered over.

As I looked at Leena and felt in my heart an ache for something more than what I'd known and maybe what I hoped for what remained of my life, I was left with only one question and I had no answer to it.

When we reached the cathedral in León, Leena ran inside, leaving me alone with Zaul. With no movement, his eyes popped open and he stared at his hands. He shook his head. “What a mess I've made.”

My words were an attempt to take his mind off the pain. Anything to divert his mind from the moment. I said, “You really went out of your way to follow in your dad's footsteps.”

His head swayed, and eyes rolled around. Forcing himself to return, he focused on me and tugged on my shirt, pulling me toward him. Through gritted teeth and a growing gurgle, he spoke, “Wasn't trying to be my dad.” A single shake. He tapped me on the chest. “Was trying to be you.” He laid back, exhausted from the effort of pulling himself up. He whispered through closed eyes, “Like you.”

I did not bother to palm away the tears as Leena returned with two priests in flowing brown robes tied with white rope. I lifted Zaul from the back of the truck, carried him inside and down a tile-covered walkway into the medical clinic full of stainless implements where a bed had been prepared. Leena immediately prepped Zaul's left arm, inserted a needle, and handed me the bag of fluids. “Squeeze this. Force them in.” As she began cutting off his clothes, she said, “The doctor will be here shortly. They have an outdated X-ray machine, but it works well enough. He's bringing some film. Between now and then, we need to get him clean and start stitching him up.”

An hour later, she and I had bathed and scrubbed most every square inch of Zaul—who was sleeping peacefully under a haze of morphine. Once clean and disinfected, she began stitching, starting with his side. Doing so required her to stitch both internally and externally. Her hand was steady and her stitches near perfect. She worked like an experienced surgeon. “Your husband teach you that?” I asked.

She shook her head but kept her eyes on her work. “No. Necessity.”

From there she worked her way up to his face, eye, and his arm. She set his broken finger and worked his dislocated shoulder back into its socket. When it popped back in, I said, “Necessity teach you that?”

She almost smiled. “No.” She massaged his shoulder to manipulate the bloodflow. “My husband did.”

When the doctor showed with the unexposed film, the priests rolled in the X-ray machine, flipped the camera head horizontally, and I helped position Zaul to get the best pictures, of which they took several. Once developed, she and the doctor examined them and determined he had four broken ribs, but they had cracked along the line of the rib and not across, which meant that while painful, they weren't poking into his lungs and demanded no treatment other than rest. The doctor also felt rather certain that Zaul did not appear to have multiple internal injuries other than severe contusions, but time would be a better indicator. At first, given the sight of his torso, he feared a burst spleen but that did not materialize. For the next hour, she and the doctor gave Zaul a rather thorough exam from head to toe, which was made all the more difficult by his being asleep, preventing him from answering the “Does this hurt?” line of questioning.

By 10:00 a.m., Leena and the doctor had done what they could. Zaul needed rest, fluids, antibiotics, and freedom from the fear of further harm. “And make no mistake,” the doctor said, holding a finger in the air. “Someone has caused him great bodily harm.” The doctor lifted the sheet off Zaul's stomach, exposing deep blue-and-purple contusions. He waved his hand across Zaul. “Grey Turner's and Cullen's sign.”

“I'm not familiar with either of—”

“Intra-abdominal bleeding caused from blunt trauma. May indicate hemorrhage.” He turned to Leena. “Monitor carefully.”

Leena nodded as if she understood. The doctor returned to the hospital, promising to check on Zaul later that evening. Walking out, he turned and cautioned us that Zaul would be laid up a while. And that we should make plans for an extended recuperation.

I stood over the sink, scrubbing my arms and watch. Trying to get the blood out of the cracks in the bezel where it had caked and dried. Again. While we'd found him, things had gone from bad to worse.

Time to check in.

I
put in the call, said “George,” and waited a few seconds for the return call. When he did, I answered, “We found him. Or rather, he found us. Anyway, he's here.”

“How is he?”

“Well…he's alive and he'll recover, but he's in pretty bad shape.”

“I'll send the plane. I can be there—”

“I don't think that would be helpful.”

He was quiet a moment. “You need money?”

“No. I'm good. The doctor just left. Leena is taking care of him. We're probably looking at a week or two of bed rest. Somebody really worked him over. He's in a bad way.”

“You talked with him?”

“Not much. He's been in and out. Sleeping now. Doc gave him a pretty heavy dose of something to help him sleep.” I swallowed. “He's got a bit of a recovery ahead of him so rest easy. I'll take some pics with my phone and send them your way over the next few days. Give you something to have hope in.”

“That'd be good. That'd be good.”

“I'll be in touch.”

He cleared his throat. “You know that other matter?”

“Yeah.”

“It's complicated.”

“How so?”

“You can get it, but I'm not sure you're going to want to go where you're going to have to go to get it. Or, that you can afford it.”

As Colin explained, I sat quietly listening while the ramifications of his explanation settled in me and the ripple effects spread out across my mind.

When he finished, he said, “Send us some pics if you think about it. Marguerite will like that.”

Colin hung up and I sat there with my head in my hands, certain that I'd never felt so empty in my entire life.

Leena spent the day by Zaul's bed, charting his progress—​t
emperatu
re, blood pressure, medications administered, and any change in his condition. Paulo, seeing he could do nothing here, took Isabella home, leaving the two of us at the cathedral, where we would spend the night before trying to move him tomorrow.

Toward evening, my stomach reminded me that we hadn't eaten all day. I stuck my head in the room where she was listening to Zaul's heartbeat with a stethoscope. “I'm going to get some dinner. You want anything?”

She nodded, smiled, and said, “Yes, but stay away from fresh salsa.”

I held up a finger. “Note to self.”

She laughed.

I struck out, walked the streets of León, bought two to-go plates at Meson Real and a couple bottles of water, and then returned to the dark clinic. Paulina was asleep in a cot next to Zaul's bed. I left a plate on a table next to her and covered her with a blanket. From there, I walked into the cavernous cathedral. I picked a pew that lined the back wall and sat, staring at all the stained glass, and picked at my dinner.

Across from me hung a painting. Maybe eight or ten feet tall and half as wide. It was old, cracked, and had been poorly repaired. It depicted a slave market where a naked man, bloody with the stripes of a scourge, stood on a block, the auctioneer next to him. A bloody spear hung horizontally above his head. It dripped into the dirt at his feet. Around him, angry men shouted bids while he stood helpless. At the bottom, a plaque had been engraved:
SOLD UNDER THE SPEAR
.

I lay on the bench. Another painting hung above me. Below it, some words had been carved into the massive stones:
YOU HAVE SOLD YOURSELVES FOR NOTHING. AND YOU SHALL BE REDEEMED WITHOUT MONEY
.

I closed my eyes and shook my head. I could not wrap my hands around that. Couldn't see how that was possible.

Leena shook me some twelve hours later. A priest was mopping the floor nearby. She was smiling. “He's asking for you.”

Zaul was sitting up when I walked in. His face was still puffy. He spoke when I walked in. His voice was ragged. “How's Maria?”

“She's better. Been asking for you.”

“How's her face?”

“Your dad said Shelly did a really great job. Can hardly tell.”

I stood next to him, letting him speak, not pressing him. He looked away and tears cascaded down his face. “You tell her I'm sorry?”

“You can tell her yourself.”

“I'm not going home.”

On the surface, Zaul was a muscled, tough-talking seventeen-year-old. Inside, he was still very much a kid. I pulled the cell phone out of my pocket. “Little over a hundred years ago, some really smart guy invented a thing called the phone. It's been through a few versions but I have one here. It allows you to talk to people who are a long way away.” I pointed to the earpiece. “When you put your ear here, it sounds like they're sitting right next to you. And when you talk in this part”—another point—“you can tell them things like you're sorry and that you love them…That you hope they're okay.”

He nodded, laughed, nodded, wiped the tears on his sheet. “Guess I made a mess of things.”

I rolled the stool up next to the bed and sat. “You did.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “But if we're comparing messes, mine's bigger.”

As tough as he liked to pretend to be, Zaul had his mother's heart. He tried to mask it with steroids, tattoos, piercings, and four-letter epithets, but all that had been exposed for what it was. Just a cover. Something to mask his own insecurity. The kid sitting before me was none of that, and his hard shell had been cracked. Exposed for what it was. He was like the kid who walked into the living room wearing his dad's robe and slippers. It just didn't fit.

He shook his head, exhaled, and clutched his ribs. “I feel like I've been hit by a Mack truck.”

“Want to tell me what happened?”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“How about the beginning. After I made the drop.”

Zaul glanced at Leena, not knowing how honest he could be.

“She knows about me. I told her.”

Zaul explained how he'd been tracking my drops through his dad's phone. Learning where, when, how much, etc. I made it a lot easier for him one afternoon when he saw me lift the SIM card out of my locker in the back hall of their house and then drop the old one in the trash can. I'd never known he was there. Since then, he'd been following me, trying to learn how I did what I did. He was also trying to figure out where his dad kept the bulk of his drugs, so he could skim a little off the top and make some money on his own. He thought, after all his many screwups, that his dad would appreciate his entrepreneurial efforts. He also explained how when his losses mounted and he realized he wasn't all that good at poker that he started hanging out with some guys who ran a dogfighting operation. Hence, pit bulls. Easy money. Thought he'd pay one gambling debt with another sure bet. So he bought a dog and paid some guy to train it, but when he put it in its first fight, it lost badly. As did he. He'd bet a good bit at bad odds. Poker losses compounded with dogfighting losses meant they'd come to collect. So on the night he took Maria for what he told her and us would be a moonlight stroll, they'd followed him and caught him off guard. The dog was meant for him. He called 911, then waited until Life Flight landed in the street, afraid to look at his sister's face. Zaul paused here a long time. He said his mom and dad had bailed him out so many times that he couldn't face them again, so he fled to the only place he could think of. When he landed in Costa Rica, he called some guys he'd met the summer prior. Career surfers. Things soon spiraled out of control, and before he knew it, there were two hundred people trashing his folks' house. Again, trying to be like us, he thought he'd buy and sell and try and make good on all he'd lost, which took him to León. He actually had visions of walking back into his parents' home in Miami with enough money to repay all they'd spent to bail him out. Once in León, he heard about the poker game and flashed around enough money to get invited. He quickly lost, and when he tried to run, the foreman unleashed his bouncer on him. Low on funds and without a vehicle, he and his surfer “friends” began living in hostels and a few resorts, which they left in worse condition than when they arrived. Somewhere in there he got in a drunken fight with a man wielding a knife, which explained his stomach. When he ran out of money and wouldn't call his dad for more, his friends turned on him—which explained the cuts above his eyes and broken ribs. Like a pack of wolves, they'd attacked when he was wounded and literally kicked him when he was down. The result was what we saw before us. They took what little money he had left, left him in a ditch, and he crawled his way to the highway, hitchhiked south, and then walked once the truck entered Costa Rica. He said he knew I'd be looking for him, and sooner or later, I'd either find him or his body at the house.

When he finished, he was tired. He leaned back and closed his eyes. The telling had exhausted him. Leena pulled up a blanket, and I told him to get some sleep. We'd talk more later.

He was asleep before I left the room. Leena met me outside the door. “He's weak. Needs another day here.” She held her hands behind her back and rocked back and forth on her tiptoes. “Don't you think a chocolate-filled croissant would be really good right now?”

I needed some time to process. “Be right back.”

The day passed and Zaul slept through most all of it. Late in the evening, after all the priests had shut the huge doors of the cathedral and gone to bed, Leena found me napping on my pew. She shook my foot. “Got a second?”

I sat up. “Sure.”

“Not to be overly pushy, but what's your plan?”

A shrug. “He doesn't want to go home. I can make him, but I'm not sure how long that'd stick or what it would accomplish. I can take him to the house in Costa Rica and let him recuperate, but that's a constant reminder of where he's messed up, of the ongoing tension with his folks, and there would be no one there but us. I think we'd get cabin fever once he got healthy. I can get a room at the hotel here, but once he got up and about, we'd run into the same problem. Not to mention that he'd be more likely to bump into some of his friends around here, which neither he nor we need. I can take him with me back to Bimini, but I think that would just reinforce the whole drug runner thing. Plus, I'm pretty sure I don't need that, either.”

Leena sat next to me. “What about spending a few weeks in Valle Cruces? With us? We could add a bed to the chicken coop. You and Paulo could fix it up a bit. I've seen what you can do with wood. Maybe you could make it less…” She laughed. “Barn-like.”

“I paid you to help me find him. Not nurse him back to health.”

“I'm not asking you to pay us.”

“I know, I didn't mean—”

“Zaul's wounds are much deeper than his skin and bones. He's a scared kid who has no idea who he is.”

She was right. I nodded. “You're really perceptive.”

“I'm a woman.”

I smiled. “That you are.”

“When I was young, younger than Isabella, my father would walk me up in the mountains where he was tending to his coffee plants. Sometimes, he would come upon a plant that would not flourish. No matter what he did to it, it just produced no fruit. No coffee. So rather than just ripping it out by the root and throwing it off the mountain, he'd gingerly dig it up and transplant it to another place where the soil was different. Then, he'd stake it up with something stronger than itself, he'd water it, fertilize it, and give it a chance to put down roots someplace new. Sometimes a change of soil is all that's needed.”

“With all deference to your father, a change in geography does not necessarily mean an improvement in circumstances. In my experience, problems have a tendency to follow you whether you're in Boston, Miami, Bimini, or Nicaragua.”

She laid a towel across her lap, pulled a mango the size of a small football from her bag, and began peeling it, while the juice dripped off the knife and onto the towel. She offered me a slice, which I accepted. She then cut herself a slice and placed it in her mouth. She spoke with her mouth full. “In my experience, I usually run into some trouble when I let my experience dictate another's.” She turned to me. “I don't have the corner on the market, but I have known some pain in my life. And I see the same when I look in that kid's eyes. His body will heal, but it's his heart that's in question.”

I smiled as she gave me another slice. I, too, spoke with my mouth full. “Did your father teach you all this?”

“Which part?” A sly smile. “The peeling part or the giving of unsolicited advice part?”

“The advice part.”

A single shake of her head as mango juice trailed from her lip to her chin. “Mom.”

“Smart woman.”

She pointed the knife at me. “She'd have liked you.”

“I highly doubt that.”

She laughed and stood. “So, it's settled then?”

“I'm pretty sure you had it settled before we started talking, but just so I can feel like I had some say in this situation, I need to run it by Colin. I think he'll agree—and I imagine you've already thought about that.”

“I have.”

“I know what I'd do if he were my son but he's not, so in a very real sense, I'm stuck between Zaul on this end of the phone and Colin on the other.”

“If Colin is smart, he'll see that you have more influence in Zaul's life right now.”

“He's pretty smart.”

“Evidently he's pretty dumb if he's the one that suckered you into the family business.”

“Well, yeah. There's that.” I sat back, crossed my legs, and folded my hands over my knees. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Was it your mother who taught you this leading line of conversation, which not even the experts at Harvard ever mentioned to me?”