The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  My mother, brother, and I held hands across my grandmother’s body. She wasn’t even that old but she was a shrunken stump of a viejita with cropped white hair, a fleshy nose, and a tropic-charred complexion. Her palm was cool in mine and I tugged at her papery skin, counted the dark spots, compared it with my own, and thought nature is a real beast, the way it robs a body of its dignity.

  She was ready to quit this life. Until a few days prior, she could still walk around okay, even without the help of the neighbor who’d taken on the role of her nurse. She survived alone with the money her daughter sent from Miami and ate well even if her body didn’t show it. She always smoked hand-rolled tobacco, and that evening kept her cigar on a porcelain plate on her nightstand. She’d been praying all her life for a good death, como buena colombiana, and knew tonight was the night. When I showed up in her doorway, she tilted her head my way and nodded slightly as if to say, Now we can get on with things.

  It took a while, but was still faster than I expected. Her breaths became longer, then shorter. Her eyes drifted to the farthest point in the room, a corner between two windowless walls.

  “Open the door,” she said, and Mami looked to Carlito and me and to the bedroom door, which was already open.

  “It’s open, Mamá. The window is open too. Are you hot? Should we bring in the fan?”

  “No,” Abuela shook her head with more force than we’d seen in a while from her. “Open the door. I want the door open.”

  Carlito stood up and closed the bedroom door and opened it again, narrating to Abuela as he did so, “It’s open, Abuela. As open as it can be.”

  “Open the door!” Abuela cried, but her voice was growing faint so it came out like a whisper.

  Her breath quickened, her eyes widened. She looked at each of us, closed her lids, and left us in the room without her.

  We did things the traditional way. That’s how I learned how to mourn the dead. We prayed over our grandmother all night like she was a saint and not the cold and rancorous woman our mother secretly hated for not defending her against the father and stepfather who’d put their hands on her; the woman she’d wanted to escape so badly she married our father; the woman she’d hoped would, in her final days, tell her daughter she was sorry, admit to having failed her in some small way, though that didn’t happen.

  We cried over her; spoke of her; as if she’d been a holy woman; waited for the priest to come administer blessings; gave her a somber funeral Mass in the Santo Toribio church, attended by all her neighbors; and buried her in the Santa Lucía cemetery, facing the ocean.

  Universo lives in Miami now. The funny thing about immigration is that people from your old neighborhood often end up right around the corner from you in your new one.

  We ran into each other at El Palacio de los Jugos and made eyes at each other through some small talk.

  “So you finally got the courage to leave your mami behind,” I teased.

  “No, they increased the taxes in San Diego so much we had to move. She went to live with her sister in Santa Marta, so I came here.”

  It was just as Abuela feared—the return of the rich to edge out the poor. Local folk who’d lived there for generations, unable to pay the higher taxes, forced to sell their homes and move.

  Universo followed me home on his motorcycle for a ­welcome-to-Miami bang on my couch. He told me he’d heard about Carlito’s crime through the inter-American gossip wires as soon as it happened. We saw each other for a while. Not in a meaningful way but in one that was easy because, even though years had passed between us without contact, he already knew the things I never tell anyone. He knew why my house was ­always empty and why I didn’t have friends to go to parties with in pretty-girl clusters, wearing new dresses, shiny with makeup and iron-curled hair.

  But he was no longer the Universo who looked at me like I was a special creature. The one who’d write me long letters in between summers saying he missed me, begging me to come back to Cartagena over the December fiestas, promising one day he’d defy his mother and move to the other side of the Caribbean and we could be together every day.

  He was casual about me now, more like the boys I’d grown up with around the neighborhood, Carlito’s friends, who came looking for me when they had nothing else to do. It was okay, though. I never asked to be taken anywhere so it was always a nice surprise when Universo suggested we go out to eat instead of me cooking up some rice and warming over whatever leftovers I had in the fridge. He had another girlfriend, a rich rola, which I thought was funny considering Universo always claimed he wasn’t colombiano but cartagenero, as if it were its own nation, because, he said, what does Cartagena have in common with Bogotá other than being manipulated and ignored by its government? Here, equally displaced on neutral ground in Miami, they were novios. Sometimes he’d talk about a new movie and say we should go see it together that weekend, but we never did. I knew stuff like that was reserved for the official novia. And Universo knew my weekends were reserved for Carlito.

  I lost touch with Universo. In the years since, I’ve hardly dated anyone in the sense that he likes me and I like him and the guy makes an effort to treat me nice by consistently taking me to public places like restaurants or movies or to a park, not just home or to a hotel room. I’ve only had that sort of treatment two or three times in my life and it’s always been short-lived, never a meet-the-parents situation. The last time was with Pedro the Peruano, who worked in the electronics store next to my salon in the Gables. He came on strong, bringing flowers to my job, until I agreed to go out with him. He took me to a steak house in the Grove and then we walked along Grand Avenue and he bought a rose for me from some guy selling them from a plastic bucket. We had a few more nights like that and I thought it was nice, this slow pace. It was something new for me. But then he stopped calling and when I went to his job to see if he was still alive, he pretended I was just another customer and asked a coworker to help me.

  There have always been other men. I don’t go out looking for them. They just sort of appear. But I’m good at figuring out what they want right away, and it’s usually a quick turnaround. They want me in bed. They want the feeling of love and lust, but confined to an hour or two, or maybe, once in a while, a whole night. Sometimes I know they’re juggling me along with a few others, or maybe just just shuffling the deck with me and a wife or a girlfriend. I’m not picky about marriage or those kinds of rules. I would be if I were the married one. I think I would be the most faithful woman in the whole world. But I’ve never been given the chance.

  I don’t believe in maldiciones but I have to admit, so far that old bruja has been right about my lovelessness. Maybe somebody did a trabajo or hechizo on me to make sure I stay alone.

  I don’t want to sound like one of those girls crying about boys leaving me. I told my mother once, when she asked why I never keep a regular boyfriend, joking that all I need to do is find a guy with an even messier life than mine, that I’m like one of those dealers at the Magic City Casino blackjack tables. I know there are only a few ways for the cards to fall. I don’t like to lose, so I give only pieces of myself away. The pieces I know they like, the pieces they can handle. The girl who smiles in spite of everything. The one who can shimmy out of a bra without undoing the hooks, who knows what a guy wants even before he knows it.

  The rest, the life I lived only for my brother, the life locked in memories of what we were before, I keep only for me.

  But then Universo reappears. He hears I’ve sold the house. He stops by on one of my final days here to see for himself. He looks older, but I guess we all do, his thinning hair smoothed back with gel and about thirty new American pounds on him. He’s upgraded from his motorcycle to an old Jeep and tells me he’s now working as a forklift operator at the Port of Miami, loading and unloading the cargo of ships from China. I invite him in and it isn’t long before old habits take over. He’s not wearing a ring
but tells me, once we’re both already naked, that he’s married, not to the rich girl but to some caleña who works at a day care in Doral.

  “I don’t care,” I say, so his guilt won’t get in the way.

  Afterward, he’s in no hurry to leave my bed and holds me against his chest like we’re supposed to be falling in love or something.

  “You’re like no other girl I’ve ever known, Reina.”

  “I’m like every girl you’ve known if she’d been stuck with my life.”

  He starts getting turned on and wants to go at it again but stops abruptly, as if he’s suddenly remembered who I am and that he came here to say good-bye.

  “So where are you going to go?” He glances around my room, all packed up and spare as a cell.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could go back to Cartagena.”

  “There’s nothing there for me anymore.”

  “It’s the place where you were born. You’ll always have that.”

  There was a time when we dreamed of returning there to live, Mami, Carlito, and me. We idealized Cartagena all year long as Mami saved up for our summer trips, but when we got there, it was never the way we wanted it to be—too hot, too rainy, too full of pueblo chisme, too grim, too hopeless. Still, during our prison visits, Carlito liked to conjure stories from the Cartagena of our nostalgia and made me swear that if he never got the chance to go back, I’d go for him.

  When it was time to release his ashes, I told our mother maybe we should scatter them in Cartagena, spread Carlito onto the beaches of Bocagrande, or mix him into some concrete and push him into the pavement on our old block, mold him into the plaster or bricks of the bedroom where we slept as babies, or dust him into the trees along the hillside of La Popa.

  Maybe we should have buried him next to Abuela in Santa Lucía, or at least grounded him into the soil over her grave. But Mami insisted it was better like this—it made more sense to let him go at the bridge where he and Hector had each found their end—and by releasing him into the ocean here in Florida, we could still be sure his ashes would somehow find their way across the Caribbean back home to Cartagena.

  I will go back one day.

  For him. For me. For all of us.

  But not now. Not like this.

  “I want to go someplace where nobody knows me,” I tell Universo.

  “If things were different, I would go away with you. We could have an adventure.”

  “But they’re not different,” I say, because I hate it when men start the fantasy thing in bed. All kinds of impossibilities hardly worth contemplating.

  “Make sure you tell me before you go.”

  “Why?”

  “So I’ll know where to find you.”

  I don’t tell him the point of my leaving is that I don’t want to be found.

  We kiss because it seems like the thing to do, and lie together a while longer while night falls. Outside, I hear the cars of the neighborhood people pulling into their driveways, husbands, wives, and children home in time for dinner.

  Universo starts to fidget beside me.

  “It’s okay. You can leave if you want to.”

  “I don’t want to,” he says, and I believe him until he sits up, gives me his bare back, grabs his rumpled boxers from the floor, pulls them on, and then his jeans.

  His is a body that I knew thin and boyish, and now, thick and mannish. In some way, I think it’s nice our bodies have grown up together.

  He says he’ll come see me again before I clear out for good.

  He doesn’t, but neither does anybody else.

  My coworkers at the salon see me off on my last day with a cake as if we are celebrating a birthday. From Tío Jaime and Mayra, I get a phone call. “We just want to wish you well,” Mayra says. We don’t talk much these days. I think when they see me they see a souvenir of pain. So it’s not like I expect a farewell party, but I’d hoped somebody would be there to watch me go, to somehow mark the moment of my leaving my lifelong home.

  Instead, nothing happens.

  The sky is cloudless and empty except for the autumn sun and a sliver of daytime moon, the neighborhood hum uninterrupted by my loading the car trunk with two suitcases like I’m going on vacation, not shopping for a new life, locking the house behind me, and pulling out of the driveway for the last time.

  I am my only witness.

  The Everglades are on fire on my final drive down to the Keys. On the curve of the turnpike where the pineapple groves end and marshland begins, I watch the green horizon burn with helicopters bobbing overhead, fighting the flames. It’s too late in the season to be a wildfire. The radio says some thrill-torcher is responsible.

  I don’t believe in omens. I believe we choose our own signs, so I take this one as my own: with this blaze, I leave my old life up here on the mainland in ashes.

  Because, for now, I’ve got no other place to go, I take a room in the South Glades Seaside Motel, dingy as ever, but I still feel a kind of loyalty to the place.

  It’s Friday and the motel is already filling up with the old crew, familiar faces, the women I grew up with as a prison sister even if we never shared more than a few words. Women I waited in line with, all of us watching each other as we exited the penitentiary at the end of visiting hours with that same look of aching hope and fatigue, making our way back to the motel. Women who, unlike me, are still serving their time with the ones they love.

  People have this idea that it’s hard to start a new life but it’s actually pretty easy. I tell myself if my parents could change countries without speaking the language, I can migrate too. I circle ads in the local paper and take down numbers from the bulletin board at the Laundromat, and hit a string of appointments to see a series of moldy, desolate concrete apartments in high-rises that sprouted during the housing boom and were left empty by the recession, some beachside motel efficiencies, and a couple of garden park trailers along the water that wobble under the slightest November breeze, forget about when the hurricanes come. But I know there has to be something better around here.

  Before I left, a client from the job I quit back in the Gables told me to visit a friend of hers, Julie, a Canadian transplant who caught “Keys Disease” and decided to stay, running one of those shops on the Overseas Highway in Crescent Key that sell shined-up conch shells and mailboxes painted to look like flamingos. Crescent Key is one of the smallest islands, halfway down the boa of the Keys, between the marshes of Card Sound Road and the cruise ship crowds of Key West. It’s small enough to feel like an afterthought of an island, one that most people driving down the Overseas Highway don’t even notice passing through, but close enough to Marathon, one of the larger and more developed islands with big chain stores and twenty-four-hour pharmacies, and far enough from Carlito’s prison for me to sometimes forget it’s there.

  “I heard you were coming,” Julie smiles at me when I arrive, as if with her whole body, from her rumrunner-paunch to her perma-flushed cheeks.

  My client vouched for me. Told Julie I was clean-living and responsible. Turns out her friend Louise Hartley is looking for just that sort of tenant for a cottage on her property, a former coco plum tree plantation on the tiny island of Hammerhead that breaks off just before the bridge at Crescent Key Cut.

  Julie gives a call ahead and sends me right over to see her.

  Mrs. Hartley is waiting on her pebbled driveway when I pull up. She’s got straw-blond hair, wears waxy makeup, and is dressed in tennis whites. She wants to know if I’ve ever been arrested (no), if I do drugs (no), if I’ve got a husband or kids (no and no).

  She leans in close and lowers her voice like she’s hoping for a confession.

  “You got a man on your tail? Maybe a boyfriend you’re trying to keep away from? Anything like that?”

  “There’s nobody. Only me.”

  She twists he
r thin lips like she’s still deciding on whether to give me a shot.

  “You got a job down here yet?”

  “I’ll start looking once I’m settled.”

  “Where are you staying for now?”

  “Up at the South Glades Motel.”

  “The one by the prison?”

  I nod and she looks scandalized.

  “Be careful. Lots of strange people pass through there. People you’ll want to avoid, if you know what I mean.”

  I raise my eyebrows at the revelation.

  “You got to get out of there, honey.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

  “How do you plan on paying rent if you don’t have a job lined up yet?”

  “I’ve got some money saved.”

  “I’ll need three months’ rent up front.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “All right then. Follow me.”

  She leads me down a path framed by banana trees and palms to a cottage on the far end of the property facing the ocean and a small dock.

  “I should mention the cottage has never been rented out,” Mrs. Hartley says, adding, in a tone that I think is supposed to resemble modesty, “Our family doesn’t really need the money. We just want someone on this side of Hammerhead to keep out squatters or vandals who come in on boats through the canal. I’m here alone most of the time. My husband works in Philadelphia and only comes down a few times a year.”

  The vegetation is so thick it’s almost eating the cottage, which is small and yellow, with white shuttered windows and a small veranda that opens onto a narrow beach. As we get closer, the sounds in the trees grow louder, caws, the rustling of animals crossing branches. I see two flecks of red swoop through a patch of light from one tree to another.