The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  It makes me think of my grandmother and the way she would have me stand on the wooden stepping block in her apartment so she could measure me for dresses she’d make me, how she’d examine me, warn me against sitting in the sun so I wouldn’t darken my already trigueña skin; she’d pick at my hair, “coarse as a rat’s, black as azabache,” she’d say, just like my mother’s and a remnant of our Karib roots, complaining, in the way of her generation, that such evidence of our family’s past would take generations for the bloodline to clear.

  “Nobody cares about my rat hair in the United States,” I’d tell Abuela.

  She’d shake her head at me. “You think they don’t care, Reinita. But believe me, they do.”

  My grandmother was poor. We have only ever been poor, any way you look back at those who came before us. But Abuela was ashamed of that fact and often tried to pass herself off as de mejor familia because she somehow shared a last name with one of the most distinguished families of Cartagena. But Mami says people borrow and steal last names all the time, “as easy as a Santero stealing a Mass,” and a fancy last name doesn’t mean anything anymore; the only thing that proves where you really come from is your blood.

  That first morning, Nesto was waiting for me with a plastic cup in hand. He gave it to me. I saw it was filled with thick orange liquid.

  “I brought this for you. It’s guarapo de caña. Try it.”

  I’d had sugarcane juice before and didn’t like it, but I accepted it, because Nesto was smiling, all his chunky teeth on display, and told me about the old guy in the trailer park where he lived, who takes the bus up to the Mexican market in the Redlands every weekend just so he can buy real caña to make guarapo for himself and for his Caribbean friends, to ease the homesickness, la añoranza.

  I had some time before I had to be at the spa and Nesto was still waiting for his first repair call of the day, so we stopped by Conchita’s. Conchita is a dominicana who sells coffee, pastries, and sandwiches from a little shop she built out of her front porch complete with a few tables in the adjacent yard. She’s married to a Coast Guard guy who’s never around and you can often catch her having full conversations with the chickens and stray cats that hang out on her property. I bought Nesto a cafecito of gratitude for delivering me home the night before, then back to my car today.

  That morning, I noticed the pale seams of scars around his fingers, thick as cigars. In our initial weeks as friends he would tell me his body was all marked up with clues of his youth, pointing out the map of history all over his body. His leathery feet, rough from years of playing basketball on the concrete cancha because there was only one pair of sneakers passed around among all the boys of his barrio and he never had the patience to wait his turn, his toes scarred from cuts and infections. His knuckles chafed, palms callused, from fixing, fixing—inventando, he calls it—using wires from a bicycle tire to repair the ignition on a 1952 Chevrolet, breaking down rocks to turn into fresh cement to repair a collapsed wall, or stealing bricks from an abandoned factory in Marianao to turn one room into two, two rooms into three, to accommodate his home’s growing population; fine purplish lines and keloid tracks marking where a mismanaged blade or a jumped fence pierced his skin.

  “Look at you,” he said to me when he grew more comfortable around me, telling me the stories of some of his marks, taking my wrist between his fingers and holding up my arm as if inspecting me. “It’s like you’ve been living in a glass case all your life. No marks, no scars whatsoever. How is that possible?”

  “Oh, I have plenty,” I said, amused because nobody’s ever thought me perfect in any way.

  Even though Carlito once told me our father used to hit us bad—even me, and I was just a tiny baby—I don’t have any memory of it, and no evidence on the flesh to make me wonder.

  From the day I hitchhiked, when I jumped out of the perv’s car, I’ve only got a tender, shadowy patch that shrank to the size of a quarter on my knee where the pavement dug into my bone. Other than that, it’s kind of funny how immacu­late I am.

  I pushed my hair back to show Nesto where my father sliced my ear to break the curse he was convinced I carried.

  “What is that from?”

  “My father marked me. They said I was an abikú.”

  “Is that so?” He looked surprised though he didn’t ask me to explain.

  I nodded.

  “That can’t be your only scar.”

  “I have more.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They’re the kind you can’t see.”

  When Carlito was still among the living, I’d drive back up from my weekend visiting him down at the Glades and find my mother waiting for me at home on Sunday night with some warmed-over dinner, usually just back herself from a weekend with her boyfriend. It was the only day of the week she cooked. She wasn’t a talented chef. Her meals were always the same: sancocho that would last us for days, or some kind of fried fish or pork with arroz con coco, and maybe some empanadas or carimañolas she picked up at a bakery on the way home.

  We’d sit together at the kitchen table, and she’d tell me about the nice restaurants Jerry took her to up in Orlando, show me things he bought her, brag about the promises he made to buy her a new car, a new wardrobe, to take her to Rome so she could finally see Saint Peter’s Square. She never asked about Carlito. We’d made an agreement years before that I wouldn’t talk to her about him, even to relay the messages he’d ask me to send her, his pleading questions about how a mother could forget her son, deny him, turn her back on him—he said it was as unnatural as murder. She’d just stare at me when I walked through the door and tell me I looked tired, stroke my hair, and set my plate on the table before me.

  Sometimes the visits were particularly tough, like when Carlito would tell me about days he spent in “the hole,” a solitary confinement even worse than the one he was already used to, in an empty, unlit, windowless cell with nothing but his hands to talk to. He got sent there for fighting with a guard who taunted him as he pushed the food cart down the death row hall every morning around five, saying, “Enjoy the taste of my piss in your grits, Castillo,” as he slid Carlito’s breakfast through the door slot, purposely breaking the plastic spork that came with it. The same guard who complimented the thickness of my lips when I came to visit, saying he’d like to see what I could do with them, and who once left a note for me at the Glades Motel front desk saying that he’d like to take me out sometime.

  I can guess what sort of things he said to provoke my brother into trying to attack him with his bare hands while being led to the shower room in handcuffs. The thought of my brother crouched on the dirty floor of a prison dungeon made me ill for days but I never told Mami about these things because it’s not what she wanted.

  I never understood how she could cast Carlito away, forgetting he was the baby she’d coddled and kissed, fed from her breast, and whom she always favored above me.

  I wished she could be more like Isabela, almost pathological in her grace, sending Carlito a birthday card every year saying she knew that beyond his hardened heart, he was still the boy she once loved and believed she’d marry, and she forgave him for killing her daughter.

  My mother was a woman who was capable of performing happiness no matter what. There were times when I knew she felt sorrow, her body withering away from anxiety, but she put on her painted smiling face and no stranger could guess what she carried within. Only I knew. But she never permitted the kind of closeness that would allow us to commiserate, to help each other, to give each other strength. We were each on our own.

  Now, instead of meeting me in the kitchen with a plate of food on a Sunday night, she gives me a phone call. She always calls on the cottage line and rarely my cell phone since the reception is spotty out here on Hammerhead.

  She says she wants to know that I’m okay.

  “It’s not normal for a girl t
o be living on her own in the middle of nowhere, Reinita.”

  She thinks I should move to a city, somewhere where there are cultured people, people going places, and I know she means people with money.

  “Have you met anyone?”

  “I’ve made a few friends.” I’m lying, and my mother knows it. We can leverage men well enough, and maybe keep a few women as acquaintances, but never real friends. The only contender here is Nesto, who, so far, hasn’t made a move on me, which makes me both grateful and suspicious. But maybe that’s how real friends happen.

  I watch him sitting on my sofa, thumbing through an old copy of National Geographic from a stack that was in a corner of the cottage when I moved in. I twist the plastic telephone cord around my finger while my mother moves on to the next item on her agenda: Nochebuena.

  “We’re expecting you. I hope you can stay with us at least a few days this time.”

  “I don’t think I can get the time off from the spa.”

  “Nobody works on Christmas.”

  “It’s a hotel. They’re open every day, and I just started. I can’t go taking vacation days anytime I want.”

  In truth, I haven’t even tried asking for the day off and I don’t plan to. Mami knows I’m no fan of Jerry, whose real name is Jerónimo. He came over from Puerto Rico as a teenager but when he’s around people he deems real gringos, pretends he doesn’t speak Spanish, as if English is the language of the gods. He treats his generic townhouse like a palace, shoes off upon entry, constantly running his finger over ledges, checking for dust the weekly cleaning lady or my mother might have left behind. He’s no beauty either, a real carechimba with smushed features like they put him facedown at birth, and teeth veneers that look like he bought them at a hardware store.

  “So you’ll spend Christmas all alone?”

  I’ve still got an eye on Nesto, absorbed by some photo spread on orangutans.

  “I’ll figure something out.”

  There’s a pause. The obvious thing would be for my mother to offer to visit me, see how her daughter lives, spend a little time together during the holidays. But I know Jerry won’t travel this far for me and Mami has entered the stage in which she’s reluctant to go too far for too long without her man. Age has made her a little paranoid. Ahora que consiguió marrano, no way is she going to risk letting him get away.

  Instead she changes the subject. She tells me Jerry’s been saying this might be the year he finally proposes to her. Why he’d bother is a wonder. She’s already as wifey as she’s ever going to be, and it bugs me how he hangs it over her, like having to serve his pinga for life is some kind of honor.

  Mami never had a real wedding—not the kind you celebrate. She was nineteen when Hector claimed her in Cartagena and she was already pregnant with Carlito when they had their marriage ceremony at a church in Barranquilla, where nobody knew them. There was no party because her mother thought it shameful that Mami was already showing barriga. Now, with Carlito gone, there’s no reason to remember that day, and at fifty, she might finally get her dream of wearing a white gown. She’s talking venues and color schemes, never mind that she’s got hardly anyone to invite. She says I’ll be her maid of honor. She’ll buy me a special dress and everything. I want to tell her that we are not that kind of family. We’re not of rituals or celebrations. We are people who live day by day. But I remain silent.

  When we hang up, I sigh long and look out the window to the darkness over the ocean, no delineation between water and sky. It’s always disorienting when I speak to my mother, that pull of her voice back into our old life even though both of us have tried to move beyond it.

  In her soft Caribbean accent I hear my brother’s laughter, see us both as children playing together in the backyard when it was still covered in crunchy green grass and our toys were new.

  Mami’s voice was the song of our home, even with no father, even as we lived with that black mass of the unspoken, even with the marks on our bones we didn’t know we carried.

  Through all life’s uncertainty, we felt anchored by the love in her voice.

  Carlito worshipped her, always picking flowers for her, and when he was old enough, stealing jewelry for her from the local Walmart and later even nicer stores. He never dreamed that one day she would take her love away from him, that the love of a mother is not unconditional or eternal the way they say.

  The voice we were raised with, the voice that lulled us through the night, was just a voice, not a promise or a prayer.

  Mami was just a woman trying to take care of two kids she’d had by a man she hated. That’s all.

  “¿Todo bien?” Nesto asks from behind me when I hang up the phone.

  I turn to him and nod. “Yeah. Everything’s fine.”

  He made his own Sunday family phone call this morning. I met him for coffee at Conchita’s and then waited for him by the post office as he used a phone card to call Cuba from a pay phone. I watched him lean into the vestibule, press his fingers to his temples, his hands moving animatedly at one point, and then his head sink while he nodded as if the person he was talking to could see him. When he came back to me at the plastic table where I was sitting, I’d asked the same thing. “¿Todo bien?”

  He smiled but sighed. “Normal. Everything is normal.”

  “Come on, Reina,” Nesto says to me now. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  We step down the stone path toward the beach. There’s no wind so the December chill doesn’t penetrate our clothing. We walk to the water’s edge, stand on the wet sand, hard from the low tide, cold through my sneaker soles.

  Nesto lives on the beach too, over on the northeast end of Crescent Key, in one of those trailer park motels I checked out when I first arrived, a single-occupancy efficiency in the main building with little furniture but a great view of the open Atlantic. The only problem is that the property is full of drunks and drifters, each night is a symphony of arguments and shouts, and he always wakes up to a garden of broken bottles.

  He likes my little chunk of the Hammerhead peninsula better. Out here it’s like the world forgot us, or like we can forget the world.

  I sit on a mound of dry sand while Nesto walks along the shoreline, as if looking for a road with which to cross the water.

  “Reina. Can I ask you why you came down here? I mean, why did you leave where you’re from?”

  It takes me a moment to respond. We’ve managed to talk around certain things so far, but I decide to try the truth tonight, or at least a part of it.

  “I had no reason to stay after . . .”

  “After what?”

  “After my brother died.”

  “How did he go?”

  I like the way he says it, as if Carlito just left on a trip and might still return.

  “He killed himself. Our father went the same way. And our father’s father too.”

  He nods as if he’s not all that surprised.

  “How . . . how did . . .”

  “My brother? He hanged himself.” I leave out that the pipe he used belonged to a prison. “Our grandfather hanged himself too.”

  “And your father?”

  “He slit his throat.”

  Nesto draws in his breath. I can tell he’s trying not to look shocked for my sake.

  “So they’re good with ropes and knives, the men in your family.”

  “Good enough, I guess.”

  “You must be descended from sailors . . . or mercenaries.”

  “All I know is that mother says I come from a long line of bastards on both sides.”

  “We all do.”

  He leans over and dips his palms into the tide, pulls them out, and runs his wet fingers over his face and hair, water dripping off his shoulders like feather plumes.

  He walks back over to me and bends over, touching one hand to my cheek so I can feel how co
ld the water is on his skin.

  “You know why I came down here, Reina?” He steps back toward the water.

  “To get away,” I say, figuring Crescent Key is the kind of place people just turn up, coughed up from some other broken life.

  “No. I came to get closer.”

  “To what?”

  “To there.” He points to the black horizon. There is no moon tonight. “Home.”

  There’s the sudden rumble of thunder above us. Nesto looks to the sky and raises a hand, then brings it back down to cover his heart.

  “Bendición, Changó.”

  He turns to me with a wide smile.

  “That thunder means he hears me.”

  When Carlito was first taken into custody, to punish myself for being the one who pushed him into his madness, I didn’t let myself sleep. I closed the door to my room so my mother would think I’d gone to bed, but I’d sit in a chair in the center so that I couldn’t even tilt my head back to lean against a wall. Sometimes I dozed off. So I became stricter with myself, tying a string around my neck connected to the ceiling fan, taut, so if I slumped over into sleep, the tug on my neck would wake me up. But sometimes nothing could stop me, and I’d fall into a walking sleep during a break between clients at work. My boss took me aside and asked if I was on drugs. I realized this might jeopardize my source of income, so I decided to find another way to punish myself: I stopped eating.

  I was satisfied by my silent hunger strike for a while. The pangs pass, the mind settles into a soft fuzz that buffers you from the world around you. My flesh shrank, my features sharpened, but these are things people compliment in women, so nobody noticed I’d only wanted to imprison myself in solidarity with my brother.

  I felt Carlito’s hunger in the county jail where he was held without bail until his trial because the judge considered him a flight risk, and then when he was moved down south to the prison. I felt his disgust every time he looked at a plate of prison food, some of which Dr. Joe once told me came from bags and barrels marked NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.