This was the original ending to my manuscript, in which matters are a bit more "tied up."
My editors advised me me to keep the ending open to the reader's interpretation and that's the ending that was published in the book. But some readers have said that they want to know for sure what happens to Will and Monica. Here it is:
Negrarena, summer 2002 (Two Years Later)
In the years during the war, Monica’s girlhood fantasy was to become a mermaid so she could escape El Salvador and return when the violence was over. Her father would finally have nothing horrible to write about, Max would be out of the picture, her parents united somehow. As it turned out, Max’s banishing had come with an unimaginable price. And her wish for world peace was of course, just a wish. Even as El Salvador healed in the new millennium, another nation grew ill, and always there would be more wounds on land for the worried sea to lick.
On vacation at Negrarena, Monica and Will played with their baby. They tossed little clumps of black sand at her. The baby examined the black splashes on her pale chest and looked up at them with astonishment. Then, she burst into laughter, offering her parents a view of her four new teeth. Her eyes grew huge and she made an indecipherable sound and pointed behind them. Monica and Will both turned to see a lonely seagull. The baby garbled something and the bird cawed in response, flapped its wings in agreement, and flew away.
Marcy, Bruce’s bride-to-be in a mere five hours, was sunning herself on the sand with Paige, both of them already turning dangerously pink despite repeated warnings. Behind them, Villa Caracol, was still under construction and was soon to be inaugurated as the Yvette M. Lucero Institute of Marine Research and Children’s Environmental Education Center. The lobby was being dressed for a wedding, with bunches of white calla lilies as thick as tree trunks leaning against the seashell cases, ready to be cut and placed in vases.
Monica left Will and the baby, strolled to the edge of the water, and slowly sank her feet into the soft, viscous sand. She surged forward, diving into the cool silence that continued to be her home for as long as she could contain a breath. She heard the seaweeds’ whispers as they danced and caressed each other’s strands in the current. She heard the gurgling of a million mollusks as they lamented their solitude. She let out a rush of bubbles and let the surf spit her out onto the sand. She looked up at the land and blinked at the sight of her parents.
Normally, Alma and Bruce were icy and distant with each other, but in this rare, once-in-a-lifetime moment, they laughed and gently wrestled for control of the baby. The little girl’s arms were draped around Bruce’s neck, while her plump legs were wrapped around Alma’s waist. The baby’s belly button was exposed, it’s single blind eye boring into itself, seeing nothing, yet containing the vision of Monica’s entire life. For a split second, that tiny strip of soft, fragrant flesh joined the two ragged edges of Monica’s life, an accomplishment that no one had ever succeeded in doing. This baby was the miraculous ligament she had always wished for, the long-awaited peace-maker who bound them as a family.
Monica shielded her eyes from the sun and blinked again and again at the scene before her. She almost failed to recognize this new place, this other El Salvador. It was like viewing the world from the upside-down position of a handstand, the paradise of a former mermaid who has shed her cumbersome tail and has earned her beautiful legs. Monica ran toward her family, a family made whole--if only for a fleeting moment. Still, it was enough, it was more peace than they’d ever had, and for that she was grateful.
Monica kicked at the seawater, splashing up Alma’s fragments of liquid God. She thought about Yvette as she watched the droplets capture the light and arch down like a cascade of tiny diamonds. Monica’s true inheritance was not Negrarena—its land, its beach, nor the villa. What she had been handed down through the generations was the strange and inexplicable ability to understand the ancient language of water. In an orchestra that rose all around her, she heard the ocean moan with the exhaustion of creating. In the laborious churning of the waves she heard its story of circling the world, a journey with no beginning and no end. |
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