The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  “You’re real pretty,” he said last night when I walked him to his car on the gravel driveway outside the lobby. “You got a boyfriend up there in Miami?”

  “No, I come with a whole lot of baggage, if you know what I mean.”

  I was thinking specifically about the last guy, Lorenzo, a plastic surgeon who picked me up at Pollo Tropical. We went for dinner a few times and when we finally fucked at a hotel, he told me he’d do my tetas free if I promised to tell everyone they were his work. Then he wanted to take me to Sanibel for a few days, but I said my weekends were reserved for Carlito.

  I still remember his eyes when I explained.

  “You’re Carlos Castillo’s sister?”

  That was the end of that.

  Joe laughed as if I’d meant the baggage thing as a joke, and then swallowed his smile when he realized I hadn’t.

  “You’re a great girl. Any man would be lucky to be with you.”

  I smiled at Joe, even though I feel like people only say shit like that when they know you’re already a lost cause.

  I paint nails just like my mother and her mother before her. I just realized as I’m telling you this that we’re a family of all sorts of inheritances. Between us, we still have the house. Mami owns it free and clear even though she pawned all her jewelry years ago, and if you were to ask her, she’d say the only valuable things she has are her santos and crucifixes. After Carlito went to prison, Mami converted his room into a shrine to the pope, which is fine with me. She replaced all of Carlito’s football trophies and car posters with framed prints of His Holiness, books, and postcards of the Vatican. Her big dream is to go to Mass at St. Peter’s one day and I think that’s good for her. It’s good for you to dream about things that will probably never happen. That’s why I still have this picture in my head of the prison board recommending clemency for Carlito, and the governor waking up one morning and deciding to give a pardon to my brother, as if in his sleep God wrote onto his heart that there’s this boy down in the Glades who deserves a second chance, commuting his sentence to life, and maybe even with the possibility of parole. But stuff like that just doesn’t happen.

  I work at a fancy salon in the Gables. On Fridays, I pack up my bag, stuff it in the trunk of my Camry, and, after my last client of the evening, get on the turnpike and drive south so I can spend the night at the motel and get up at four the next morning to be among the first visitors to check in for the day visits at the prison. Each visit is only an hour long and has to be approved in advance. Sometimes we get to stretch it longer if the guard is feeling merciful. Carlito is allowed two visits a week. That’s my Saturday and Sunday. The other girls at the salon tell me I should take a weekend off, do something for myself for a change, but I say, “What kind of person would I be if I abandoned my brother?” I’m the only thing that reminds him he is human and not a caged animal.

  After I drive through the prison gate, past the twenty-foot walls topped with razor wire, the barren valley marked by gun towers; after the searches, filling out forms, the X-ray machine, the patting down by guards, and checking my bag into a locker, I’m sitting in a windowless concrete room, at a small table across from my brother. Most death row guys get strict noncontact visits, forced to sit behind a Plexiglas partition. But we’re fortunate that we get to sit face-to-face and he cups his hands around mine, strokes my knuckles with his fingertips, and asks me what’s going on in the world outside of this place.

  “I think Mami and Jerry are going to get married. If she does, she’ll want to sell the house, which means I’ve got to find my own place.”

  “You should move out of that house anyway. Start fresh somewhere. That house is full of bad spirits.”

  “No, after you went away, Mami had it blessed by a priest.”

  He shakes his head. There are more tiny wrinkles around his eyelids and buried in the corners of his lips than ever before.

  “How’s work?”

  “The same. I’m getting famous for my acrylics. Better than Mami ever was.”

  “That’s my Reina.”

  My brother drops his face onto the table and I stroke the back of his bald head, his bare neck, run my fingers on the edge of his blue prison suit.

  “I’m dying,” he says without lifting his head.

  I kiss the back of his head, and the guard who’s been watching us from his perch along the wall steps forward and slams his hand on the table.

  “No contact,” he says. “I always let it slide with you two, but you always push it.”

  Carlito pulls his head up and sits as erect as a man about to be executed.

  “She’s my sister, man.”

  I give the guard my prize eyes that make him soften and say, “One minute.”

  He always does this for us.

  Carlito stands and I rise and go to him. Before his cuffs get chained back to his waist, he lifts up his arms so that I can slip under them and then he drops them so I feel the bulk of his cuffs sitting on the curve of my back, on top of my hips. I press my body to his chest and Carlito’s biceps tighten around me, his head drops into my hair and I press my cheek to his neck. We stay like this until the guard bangs the surface of the table again.

  “Enough, Castillo. Your time is up.”

  I give my brother a kiss on the cheek before the guard pulls us apart. It’s always like this. We say good-bye with a little push of the rules. I slip out from under his cuffs and the guard leads my brother through the back door of the visiting room, down the corridor to the solitary cells.

  Later, at the motel, Joe, who’s just gotten off work, asks me how my visit with my brother went.

  “Same as always. But today he told me he’s dying.”

  “As far as I’ve read in his files, he has no serious illnesses,” says Joe.

  And then, “Reina, would you like to go for a walk on the beach with me?”

  We take his car and Joe pulls off the road onto a winding path and tells me there’s a perfect patch of beach just there, beyond the mangrove trees. It’s night but with the moon so full and bright, I still feel the comfort of daylight, every breathing ripple of the sea on display—not one secret out here. I leave my sandals on the sand and Joe rolls up his khaki pants and takes off his loafers revealing pale feet with crinkly leg hairs and long toes that make me embarrassed for him. We walk along the water’s edge, the current mostly quiet except for the occasional rush of the rising tide.

  I see a flutter in the sand and, as we approach, notice a gull tossing about in the shallow water, struggling to breathe, its small black legs limp under its body, its wings unable to span and lift. I scoop it up, pull it toward my chest while Joe looks on with disgust, telling me those birds carry diseases and to be careful or I’ll get bitten.

  “He was about to drown,” I tell him, the bird frozen like a toy in my arms, “We need to find help for him.”

  “Reina, you can’t be serious.”

  My eyes tell him just how serious I am. We head back to his car and I sense his regret for having invited me. He mutters something about me thinking it’s my job to save every living creature from itself.

  I insist he pull up next to a parked police car. The officer recognizes Joe immediately and looks to me. My face is familiar to him from standing in the long lines outside the prison waiting for visiting hours to begin, or arguing against parking tickets when I leave my car overnight outside the Glades Motel because the lot is full, and for those times I speed down US 1 to get to the Keys before sunset because my mother always told me that’s when the crazies come out.

  “Do you know where we can find help for an injured bird?” I ask the officer from my place in the passenger’s seat.

  The cop looks skeptical, his eyes land on the limp seagull in my lap, and he shakes his head at us, looks to Joe disapprovingly before telling us to try the marine reserve a few miles down.


  “They have a bird sanctuary down there. Might be closed at this hour, or might not. Someone down there may be able to help you.”

  As it happens, the place is closed, gates locked and chained. I press my face against the metal grill, call out to see if anyone is still around who can help us.

  “I think you should just let the bird die a natural death,” Joe says, leaning against his car, arms folded across his chest, with a look of contempt.

  I hold the bird out to him. “Does this look like a natural death to you?”

  “We should put it out of its misery. Drown it or something.”

  “You mean put you out of your misery because you don’t want to deal with him.”

  Joe sighs at me like a father would at an unreasonable child. “So what do you want to do with it?”

  “I’ll take him home with me and bring him back here first thing in the morning.”

  “Reina.”

  “I don’t need your help. Just drop me off back at the motel.”

  “Why don’t you stay with me tonight? We’ll put the bird in a box in the bathroom and I’ll drive you back here at sunrise.”

  “You don’t care about the bird.”

  “But you do. And I care about you.”

  I go with the doctor because, really, I’m sick of the knotty green carpet of the Glades Motel, the sad-looking people who putter around the trailers, the stragglers like me who take up the rooms in the main lodge, and the women who come down here to visit their men by day but spend their nights with the teenage hustlers who hang around the gas station on Hickory Key.

  Dr. Joe’s condo is nicer than I expected. Looks like it belongs on South Beach and not in the crummy Keys. Stark white like a hospital, chrome and leather furniture, huge abstract paintings on the walls—the kind of stuff only rich boys buy.

  “Shit,” I say when he leads me through the door.

  “Cost of living is so cheap down here,” he says, as if I caught him in a crime. “Nothing compared with life up north.”

  “Why would you leave Boston to come down here and work in a prison?”

  He smiles bashfully and offers what sounds like a false confession that he just needed a change of scenery. I suspect the doctor is running from something, and he came to the Keys to hide out. I decide not to hold it against him, though, because we all have our shadows.

  Joe goes off to look for a box for the bird, which I want to believe is napping in my arms but really, he looks like he’s just about had it with this world. I think his legs are broken by the way they keep bending and folding as if made of string.

  Poor bird. If life were fair, the bird and I would both be living in Cartagena, not in Florida where all of the world’s crap seems to accumulate.

  Joe returns with an empty box that looks like it was meant to ship electronics. I put the bird in and we take it to his guest bathroom together, rest it on the floor, and I tell the bird goodnight while I feel Joe’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Let me fix us some drinks. How about a screwdriver?”

  I ask him to make us some tea instead.

  We sit together on his leather sofa. I can’t decide what I feel for Joe. He seems like a lonely man and this makes me like him, see bits of myself in him. But part of me also sees him as the kind of guy who gets turned on by tragic people.

  “You inspire me, Reina. The way you always reach out of yourself to care for others. Your brother. Even that dying bird. You give so much.”

  Hearing him talk about me like I’m some kind of saint makes me uncomfortable.

  “You’ve given up your life to be present for Carlos. It’s so admirable. I don’t know anyone with that kind of loyalty.”

  “There’s a whole motel full of them right where you found me.”

  “You’re different from them.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  He takes advantage of my parted lips and puts his mouth on mine and next thing you know, we’re making out like junior high kids right on Joe’s leather sofa. His hands fumble with my blouse buttons and I reach for his belt. He’s telling me he’s been dreaming of kissing me since he saw me that first day going through the metal detector at the jail when Carlito got transferred to the federal prison.

  He’s telling me to wrap my legs around him, pulls off my bra, and I rip the nerd glasses off his face. Then Joe says to me, “Tell me about the first time you got fucked, how old were you?”

  “Thirteen,” I sigh into his ear while he feels around me and then he wants to know with who, where, how did I like it?

  I whisper that it was with my brother’s friend Manolo and when it was over, I found out my brother had been watching the whole thing from his closet because he told me I looked good, like a real woman, finally, and I felt proud. After that, I started sleeping with all my brother’s friends. But my brother told my mother and she told me to be careful because a woman who is a good lover can make a man insane, just look what happened to our father.

  Dr. Joe pulls me closer and just as we’re about to do it says, “Talk to me like I’m your brother.”

  I freeze. Stare at him. His mouth wet with my saliva, his cheeks red. A loose eyelash on his nose.

  “You’re really sick, you know that?”

  “Reina, come on. I didn’t mean it like that. Come on.”

  He’s trying to pull me back to him but I’ve already got my legs on the ground, straightening myself out, clipping my bra back on.

  “Come on, I was just playing.”

  He stands up, tucks himself back into his pants, and follows me toward the bathroom. I pick up the box with the bird and push past him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Me and the bird are leaving.”

  This is how it goes: I make it far down the road with Dr. Joe on my tail shouting, “I just want to be close to you and all I get from you are walls!” until the same cop who told us where to take the bird pulls up beside me wanting to know if there’s a problem.

  The cop has one eye on me and one on Joe, who’s disheveled and looking way too desperate and guilty to be out in the middle of the night.

  “You need a lift back to the motel?”

  I nod and when we’re sitting alone in the cop car, Dr. Joe way behind us, walking back to his condo, the officer turns to me and says, “You know, if you want to pitch something like an assault or harassment charge, I’ll fully corroborate. I never liked that doctor guy. Not one bit.”

  My seagull was poisoned.

  That’s what the bird expert at the marine center told me when I brought him there this morning.

  “I think his legs are broken,” I told the woman, who had a permanent-looking sunburn and wore men’s overalls.

  She shook her head. “Sorry, honey. This bird’s dying. A nice thing you did keeping it from drowning and all, but we’re going to have to euthanize it.”

  “You’re not even going to try to save him?”

  “He’s beyond saving. Look at him. He’s suffering.”

  “Suffering means you’re still living,” I told her, but I knew the bird’s destiny had been decided.

  She picked him up with one hand, crushing his wings together, and left me with the empty box.

  I tell the whole story to my brother during Sunday visiting hours at the prison. Everything except the flesh scene between Joe and me on the sofa. Carlito really doesn’t need to hear that. He has women writing letters to him, but he’s not allowed to meet any of them like some of the other inmates with normal privileges.

  When he was still in county jail, I started sending my brother books because, believe it or not, Carlito was the biggest reader you ever met, even during the years he was doing crappy in school, before he went to a real college. My brother was the smartest guy I knew—could talk to you about ancient wars, religions, all sorts of stuff that you’d won
der what a guy like him had any business knowing. But my brother said knowing about the world was important. He said by reading you develop ideas of your own and ideas are what keep a brother alive.

  I’d pack boxes full of books about whatever I could find to send him. When this old guy on the corner died, his widow said I could have all his books, which she left in boxes out on the curb, so I sent those too. Biographies, historical shit. Everything. And within those packages I’d sometimes sneak in a batch of porno magazines even though they’d likely get confiscated—I thought it was worth the effort—because I understood that a guy in jail might have urges of the kind my mother often described, and nobody to take care of them.

  One day Carlito said, “No more books. No more magazines. Nothing.”

  When I asked him why, he repeated what he’d said years earlier, that books give a man ideas, they make him want to live. But ever since the judge put Carlito’s last minutes on the clock, having ideas and hope were making it even harder and more painful to be alive.

  My brother kisses my hand and rests his cheek on the back of my palm the way he always does.

  He tells me he loves me and I say, “I love you too, hermano.”

  “You know what tomorrow is,” Carlito says, and I nod, surprised that he’s still keeping a calendar.

  September 8. The anniversary of the day our father threw him off the bridge.

  What kind of a man can do that to a child, is what we used to say until Carlito did the same thing.