Water from My Heart (29 page)

When I crawled out of my hole, I found Zaul dancing—​I
sabella
in one hand and Anna Julia in the other. Leena and an audience of forty or fifty people were clapping and singing a song whose words I'd not heard, but whose melody I'd known my entire life. Paulo lifted me out, dusted me off, and then pointed to the rope with a wide smile. Not much remained. We were close. I could barely lift my arms. He squeezed my biceps. Then squeezed it again. “You good dig. You good gringo.”

That night as we sat quietly beneath the mango tree, Leena asked me, “You okay? You seem…distant.”

“Sorry. Just tired.”

She smirked. “You're lying to me.”

I nodded. “Well, I'm also tired.”

She let it go, but she was right. Something was bugging me, and I was pretty sure I knew what it was. Like it or not, I'd find out in a few hours. To be certain, I replaced the batteries in my headlamp and stuck a small penlight in my pocket.

The next morning, as Paulo checked the rope and then steadied himself against the side of the well, I turned to Leena. “You be around?”

She looked at me strangely and sort of shook her head. “Need to go check on some kids up in the barns. Might need to treat them for parasites.”

“You mind hanging around till I've been down there a few minutes?”

Her complexion changed from hope to concern. She placed the back of her hand gently on my cheek. “You okay?”

“Yeah, no, I'm good.” I waved her off. “I'll come up for lunch. Forget it.”

I dropped into the hole, but the look on her face and the one raised eyebrow told me I'd not convinced her. Which was good.

When I got to the bottom, it didn't take long. It was right where I'd left it and it was exactly what I thought. A polished stone wrapped in a gold fitting connected to a gold chain—the match to the one Leena wore. I held the stone in my hand, digging gently to loosen the chain when my shovel hit something hard beneath the surface of the water. Digging with my fingers, I lifted the obstruction and held it before my eyes. It was a bone. Shining the light below me, I realized I was standing in bones.

I held the chain in my hand, making sure it matched Leena's. It did. I wasn't quite sure what it meant, but I had a feeling that I'd just found Leena's mom, and if I dug around enough, I'd probably find her dad, too. I squatted in the hole, leaned against the wall, and considered what to do. It wasn't like I could just mix everything in the bucket and send it to the top without her knowing. I had to climb up and tell her. I had to climb up and give her the stone.

I tugged on the rope and Paulo immediately began lifting me to the surface. Something was stuck in my throat and it would not budge. The closer it got, the more it threatened to cut off my air supply. I exited the hole and Leena was there waiting. The crowd hushed because this was unusual. Previously, I'd come out only at lunch and at evening, but this morning, I'd been down there only a few minutes. Everyone knew this meant something. They didn't know what it meant but they knew it was significant. They inched closer, prompting Paulo to spread his arms and force them back.

I motioned Paulo and Leena a few feet away. I tried to speak, but what could I say? What words could I offer that would not hurt her? Not knowing what else to do, I gently placed the stone in Leena's hand. At first, she just stared at it, not making sense of it. Then, when the image in her hand matched the memory in her mind, her mouth opened and she sucked in an uncontrolled breath. She touched the stone with her fingertips as the tears rolled down her cheeks.

Soon she was shaking uncontrollably and sobbing. The crowd around us, normally joyous at our presence and the possibility that the well might one day produce water, fell to silence. No one spoke. No one moved. No one made a sound. Everyone just watched Leena cry. And after almost a minute of no breath being inhaled or exhaled, the cry and wail that she'd stuffed and held for a decade exited her body and echoed down and across the mountain. And when it did, old and young alike began to cry as well—a testimony to how they carried her and wanted so badly to share in, even carry, her pain.

Leena, the necklace woven through her fingers and the polished stone dangling beneath her hand, pressed it to her lips and kissed it, then clutched it to her chest. Finally, head bowed, she lifted it before the crowd. An offering that needed no explanation, and when she did, the older women untied the scarves from around their necks and began to cover their heads.

Paulo held Isabella, who clutched his neck, while Zaul and I stood helpless. After a moment, Leena fell on me and soaked my shoulder, clutching me. I wrapped my arms around her and offered what I could but I fear I was little consolation. The wound was deep and my friendship only reached so far. The wounds of the mudslide, the loss of so many friends and family, the loss of her parents, the loss of the plantation, the loss of her husband—all of it landed in her hand when I set that stone in it. She was inconsolable. When she collapsed, I caught her. We slid together down onto the ground and leaned against the well. Mango tree above us. Her parents entombed below us. Surrounded by a quiet and rapidly growing community, Leena cried.

After a few minutes, she stood and was stepping into my harness, speaking incoherently and instructing Paulo to lower her into the hole when I touched her hand. “Leena.” No response. “Leena.” Still nothing. “Paulina.”

She turned to look at me. I said, “Please let me do that.”

She shook her head. “No, my father—”

“Leena, if he's down there with your mother, you should be here to receive them. Not us.”

That stopped her and she knew I was right.

I buckled in and descended. Once at the bottom, I tried not to disturb the manner in which the bones lay. Gently I picked my way around. Trying to delicately pry them loose. I knew I'd found her father when I uncovered a wedding ring. I looked at that ring and remembered the one and only time I'd ever seen Leena's father.

When Marshall had first sent me to make the offer to the Cinco Padres what seemed a lifetime ago, I took the offer to the attorney who was acting as our middleman, and I remember sitting at a café across the street, hiding behind my Costa Del Mars, wanting to see the owner's reaction. I watched him walk into the office, and then about three minutes later, he walked out. He walked down the steps wearing a frayed straw hat, a farmer's tan, and the weight of the world on his shoulders. I remember thinking how strong his hands appeared and how his broad shoulders were no stranger to hard work. How the crow's-feet beneath his temples made it appear as though his eyes were smiling. I remember him walking down those steps, and despite the look of pain on his face, he stopped to talk to an older woman. He took off his hat and smiled and bowed slightly. After that it was a man of about the same age. Then an older couple. By the time he'd reached the sidewalk, he'd stopped to talk with seven different sets of people. Everyone wanted to say hello. Shake his hand. I remember thinking that despite worn boots, a tattered, dirty shirt, and fraying jeans, he had more distinction than Marshall. Than any of us. He had not bought the honor bestowed on him by those he passed in the street. He'd earned it. I also remember one more thing that came to mind—I didn't know him, never met him and never would, but one thing that afternoon on the street taught me…that man was beloved. The proof was in the faces of the people he met. He'd given them something, and each wanted a chance to thank him. As he walked away, I realized what it was. What he'd given them. It was something neither Marshall nor I could ever offer. Something we didn't know the first thing about.

He'd given them hope. In comparison to that coffee farmer, we were subsistence farmers and he the billionaire.

I sat here in the mud, tears rolling down my cheeks, remembering that time in my life when I'd worked for a man who pretended to be great, who thought his money made him significant, yet walking across the street in front of me had been a man whose boots Marshall wasn't qualified to polish. Marshall didn't hold a candle to Alejandro Santiago Martinez. The reaction of those he met spoke volumes about his greatness. I stared down in the mud, wishing I'd stood, taken off my hat, and shaken his hand.

Marshall had never had that effect on me. Ever.

At the bottom of that hole, tethered to the world via a wet, muddy rope, I took off my headlamp, cleared my throat, and spoke to those bones. “I want to tell you both, and you especially, sir, that while I had nothing to do with this mud, I had a lot to do with what happened after this. Your family has suffered a lot, and it's safe to say that I'm the cause of that. If I were you, I'd be real mad at me. I'm sorry for what we did. For what I did. For not being a better man.” I paused, not knowing what to say next. “You'd be real proud of Leena. She's…well, she doesn't know any of this about me and I've been living most my whole life with half-truths and no truths, and every time I'm around her I want to be around her a lot more but there are a few things she doesn't know about me—namely that I did all this.” I glanced at myself, at the mud covering every inch of me. “I've been like this my whole life.” I shook my head. “I want you to know that I'm sorry for the pain I've caused you and”—I glanced up toward the pinhole of light some three hundred–plus feet above me—“will cause.”

Digging out that man and his wife broke something loose in me. I loaded them through tears in ragged, bony chunks into the five-gallon bucket. I cannot tell you why, but as I did, I remembered something that happened to me as a kid. I was five. Maybe six. Coming off the beach. Surfboard tucked under my arm. The taste of salt on my lips. Sun-bleached hair draped across my face. I walked up through the dunes and began walking across the grass toward our house. My first three steps onto the grass were uneventful. My fourth stopped me and sent a bloodcurdling scream out of my mouth that brought my mom running out the front door. Sandspurs are a small weed that grow among the blades of grass, and they're tough to pick out if you're not looking. They produce small balls with fifteen or twenty spikes per ball. They can pierce hardened leather and stepping on them is like sliding across shards and splinters of glass. They are also known to grow quickly and without warning. I'd walked across that grass a thousand times and never stepped foot on a sandspur, but for some reason on that day, they'd sprouted and I stepped into the center of them. I knew when my foot touched down that I had just driven about five hundred little spikes into the sole of my foot, and what's worse, I couldn't move. I had to stand there and take this until someone with shoes walked across the land mine and lifted me out of that patch of grass. Mom ran across the street, lifted me, and carried me inside, where she spent the next two hours plucking them out of the base of my foot with a pair of tweezers. She pulled out several hundred. With each one, she'd pluck it and then hold it to the light, making sure she got the whole thing.

Loading that man and his wife into that bucket and then tugging on the rope and watching it rise to the surface was a lot like that experience with my mom. It plucked the shards of glass from my heart, and as it lifted toward the light above me, I got to stand there and wonder if I'd gotten all of it or if a portion remained.

I filled and sent up five buckets with large pieces of volcanic mud turned rock, which held the skeletal remains of Leena's parents like ancient fossils telling a story of tenderness, of a final hug that had been a decade or better in the making, of love lived out. Once I was certain I'd unearthed them, I surfaced and found Leena staring at a piece of rock, which she'd just rinsed in a bucket of water. Protruding from the edges of the porous stone were the bones of a hand. As she picked away at it, chunks of mud fell off, revealing two intertwined hands. The larger holding the smaller. And on the larger, Leena found her father's wedding band.

The effect of that on Leena was more than any of us could hold. Some turned away. Others covered their mouths. I knelt next to her not knowing what to offer. Finally, she turned to me, holding the hands in both of hers. She didn't need to speak. Through painful tears, she cracked a broken smile. The image was clear—they had died together. The crowd around us formed a firemen's line from the creek sending bucket after bucket of water, allowing us to rinse the piles of rocks and bones clumped together. As we rinsed and then pieced together the rocks much as they had been in the hole, we were able to make sense of her parents' last moments. Or moment. Somehow, with the wall of mud approaching, they'd climbed into the well thinking it would provide protection. And it had until a wave of mud thirty feet high swallowed the hole, pressing them down. Leena's dad was only able to hold them so long. Judging from the protective halo of white bone encircling the smaller frail bones of her mother, he had cradled her mom as the caustic mud filled around them and then carried them to the bottom, where their last minute together had been forever entombed. I never knew them, so I cannot comment on how they lived, but I can comment on how they died. Her mom's head was resting on her father's shoulder. It was an undeniable picture. Their fingers were intertwined. Locked within each other's. When those around us saw it, they gasped and shook their heads. Old women cried. Young girls covered their mouths. Old men took off their hats and crossed themselves. My uneducated guess was that they'd died near the top, engulfed in a wall and pool of mud. Then, in the following moments, when the mud cooled and dried and hardened into rock, it pulled away from the sides of the well and shot toward the center of the earth. Given its weight, it descended the shaft of the well like a giant cylindrical bullet, lubricated by the water. The column of rock fell nearly four hundred feet, then it slammed into the cap rock of the spring below, stopping up the well like a stone cork, cutting off the water supply and burying her parents.