The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  I remember being on the beach with Nesto last night. How he treated kissing me like I was asking him to walk off a cliff.

  There’s a tug on one of the lines and Lolo rushes to it while Nesto looks at the others, but they’re all slack. Lolo reels in his line and, after a small struggle, a fish turns up, flapping and fighting against the hook and line until the poor wahoo is flopping to its bloody death on the floor of the boat and Melly claps and cheers like it’s a party, as Lolo grabs the fish, ramming his fingers into its gills. I look at Nesto, who also looks pleased with the massacre, then turn my eyes back to the horizon because I know I might be sick again.

  Later, at Lolo and Melly’s house, the guys skin and gut the fish for dinner out on the patio while I help Melly make a salad in the kitchen. It’s a small house, with a lanai that opens onto a narrow canal on the edge of the ocean, and Melly’s interspecies orgy paintings cover the walls. She sends me out back to ask if we should put some rice on the stove too. I slip out the screen door, to the block of patio around the side of the house where they are filleting the fish, and that’s when I hear Lolo ask Nesto, as if he’s been waiting for an update, “¿Qué vuelta, asere? Tell me, what’s going on with the family situation?”

  I wait behind the corner of the house, curious how Nesto will respond.

  “Nothing’s happening, ’mano. They keep telling us to wait. But I can’t anymore. I have to figure something else out.”

  I stand there a moment longer to see if they’ll say more, but they don’t. When they see me come around the bend they both look at me, surprised. I ask about the rice and Lolo says it’s a good idea, but Nesto just stares at me as if we’re meeting for the first time, or as if he’s forgotten I’ve been along for the ride all afternoon.

  I leave them and go back to Melly in the kitchen. By the time we sit at the table under the sunset to eat the fish Lolo grilled for us, I’ve put the conversation I overheard out of mind, until I notice Nesto’s eyes leave me, leave all of us at the table, to stare across the Atlantic as if it holds some kind of answer.

  I’m used to disappearances.

  I’m never surprised when guys take off. It’s the opposite. I never expect them to stick around.

  I don’t hear from Nesto for a few days.

  Then I run into him, though it’s not a complete coincidence because I know he goes to check his box at the post office every Tuesday and Friday afternoon, after he fills his gas tank. I go check my mail at around that time, and there he is, pulling his blue pickup into the parking lot. I pretend not to see him right away. I want him to be the one to decide if he’s going to approach me or if we’re going to do that thing where we ignore each other until it’s clear one of us wants nothing to do with the other anymore.

  I park in front of the post office and pretend to fumble with my purse for a while, getting out of the car before walking up to the glass post office doors extra slowly to give him time to finish up and hopefully catch him on the way out. I’m a good planner because it happens exactly that way and he spots me easing out of my car, walks over like he’s not at all surprised to see me, and pulls me into his chest.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “You don’t have to be sorry for anything.” I cut him off, ducking out of his arms. “We don’t owe each other anything.”

  He looks a little confused at my words but goes on. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I went up to Miami for a few days. I just got back.”

  “I thought you hated it there.”

  “I had to take care of some things.”

  “Things?”

  “Family things.”

  “You couldn’t do that from down here?”

  “No.”

  We watch each other for a moment until Nesto asks, “Aren’t you going to go in and check your mail?”

  I shrug. “You know I hardly ever get anything.”

  “Then let’s get out of here. I did some work for a friend in Miami.” He pats his wallet in his back pocket. “Let me invite you to dinner.”

  I leave my car back at the cottage and go with Nesto in his truck. We don’t say much. He pops a disc of ballads into the stereo, singing along, and mutters between songs that he should have tried a little harder to make something of himself when he was younger and still had the chance. As a teenager, he and his friends would strum guitars and sing through apagones that shut down the city through the night until the electricity came back on. He was always told he had a good voice, rich and raw. He could have gone to a conservatory, he says, maybe even made a career of music. It would have been the smartest thing since the only Cubans who can get rich legally these days are artists and musicians.

  He drives south till we’re on the far end of Marathon, pulls off the road to a thatch-roof restaurant built on the waterfront below the start of the Seven Mile Bridge, stretching as far as anyone can see over the glassy shallows, an occasional fishing boat pushing through below its columns. The hostess, a girl who looks both faded and burned, seats us at a plastic table by the water’s edge and drops laminated menus between us.

  When Nesto is done fumbling through his menu I say, “You want to tell me something. I can feel it.”

  “You’re right.”

  “So what is it?”

  “I’ve been thinking of ways to say this.” His nostrils expand with a long sigh. “I wanted us to be friends when we met. You know that. But things are different from what I expected.”

  He stares at me like I’m supposed to finish his thought.

  “You understand what I mean, don’t you?”

  I shake my head.

  “I know you like me. You know I like you. More than I would like any other girl at this point.”

  He looks out to the water, up to the sky, and mumbles something I can’t make out to the clouds, then turns his eyes back on me.

  “I do not want to burden you with my shit, Reina. I’ve told you about my life. It’s a disaster. The situation with my family . . . está en candela.”

  “Everyone’s life is a disaster.”

  He’s shaking his head and I know no matter what I say, he’s decided I’ve got it all wrong.

  “Since I left home, I’ve been like a lone wolf in the hole I live in. Go to work alone. Go home alone. Eat alone. Sleep alone. I don’t keep track of anyone and nobody keeps track of me. That’s the only way I can be until I restore things, until I get my kids out of there. Until that happens, I’m not a real person. I’m not even half a person. I’m a maldito shadow.”

  He looks out to the water again, as if he can see them on the other side of the sunset.

  “I like the time I spend with you. You’ve become important to me. And I think I’ve become important to you. But listen to me when I tell you this: I can give you nothing. I am nothing.”

  “Don’t say—”

  “You don’t know, Reina. You can’t understand what it is to be separated from my children. Lives you have watched since birth, that you brought into this crazy world. To have them cry to you every time you call because they don’t understand why you left them. They have this idea of this country that everyone is a millionaire and lives like a movie star. They don’t know how hard it is. They don’t know that everything I do, every day I work, everything is for them. I did everything right. I adjusted my status to get political asylum, got the green card. I filed all the papers for them to come and they still can’t get out. Every year it’s another denial. They tell everyone there to wait, wait, because there is nothing else to do, and there’s nobody better at waiting than a Cuban. But I’m here and I can’t wait anymore. Maybe I made the wrong choice. Maybe I should have stayed with them. I wonder about that every single day that I’m here without them. I would still be eating shit over there, but at least I’d see them every day and we’d still spend birthdays and holidays together. You don’t know what it is to have your fam
ily broken by a system, by old men who refuse to die, all because we were born in the wrong country at the wrong time in history, and to be able to do nothing about it.”

  The waitress appears to take our order.

  “Reina,” he says when she’s gone, impatiently, as if my own name irritates him. “You think I don’t want to kiss you? I’m there in your house, sleeping on your sofa, and you think it doesn’t occur to me to get in your bed with you?”

  I feel heat rising to my face. So this is blushing. Something I don’t ever remember happening to me. I turn to the dock lining the water, the pelicans settling onto its posts.

  “Mírame a los ojos, Reina. Why do you always look away when I have something important to tell you?”

  I turn to face him.

  “I do want to do all that and more with you,” he says sternly. “But it wouldn’t be right. You’ve got your own life and your own problems. You don’t need to endure mine too.”

  I don’t say anything and he goes quiet too.

  No more arguing against this idea of him and me. I don’t know if he expected a debate or some pained expression from me. Either way, I don’t give it.

  Night’s fallen completely and the bridge is just a silver beam shooting over the ocean, dotted with car lights heading to and from Key West. I can barely see the contours of his face but the waitress sets a hurricane lantern at the center of the table and then he’s back, fuzzy in the golden light.

  I think we’re at the point in the confession where we should begin to feel absolved, expectations relinquished, but none of the heaviness has lifted from his side of the table and instead Nesto exhales so long and airy I feel his breath brush my lips.

  “Reina, you know me, and pretty well in the short time we’ve spent together. But when you’re with me, you’re not with only me. There are other people I carry with me everywhere I go. People you can’t see. People I left behind. You don’t know what that’s like.”

  “I do know,” I whisper.

  I want to tell him I am the same, with my own army on my shoulders, guarded against my chest, those I can’t shake even when I try.

  “I won’t be whole until I’m with them again,” he says. “It’s all I think about.”

  Something in me tightens. A sudden awareness. I feel it deep within, the same way I felt it when I entered the courtroom the day of my brother’s sentencing; despite our hopes and endless prayers that the judge would override the jury’s recommendation for capital punishment, before he even began his remarks, before he slipped on his bifocals, cleared his throat, and turned from Isabela to Carlito and said, “Mr. Castillo, you have committed one of the most monstrous acts that I have come across in my very long career,” I knew that my brother would be sentenced to death.

  Maybe this is not a premonition but just an impulse for cruelty or even jealousy, my wanting to grab Nesto by the shoulders and tell him not to count on it, there is no such thing as redemption, and the day of the great reunion of his dreams may never come for him, just as mine never came for me.

  The ride back up to Crescent Key is just as silent, except for Nesto humming along to “Corazón partío,” which he plays on repeat. When he pulls into the Hammerhead driveway, I hop out of the car, but his reflexes are quick and he catches me by the wrist.

  “Wait, Reina.”

  “I think we said everything already.”

  “Not everything.”

  “¿Entonces?”

  “I mean it when I say I have nothing to give you. Not for a while.”

  “I never asked you for anything.”

  “So what are you doing with me?”

  I shrug.

  “Just passing time, like you told your mother the other day on the phone?”

  “I just want to be here, with you, now.”

  “Just tonight?”

  “I don’t know. Tonight is tonight. Tomorrow is tomorrow.”

  I turn and we watch each other through the shadows, but it’s too much for me, and I leave him there to make my way toward the cottage.

  I stop behind the trees to watch him drive off, but he doesn’t. Not right away.

  He stays parked in the driveway for a while as if waiting for something, maybe for me, to come back to him, but I don’t. Not tonight.

  I find my way through the dark path I’ve memorized until I’m at my door.

  Home.

  There are footsteps. Soft taps at the door.

  There is Nesto. A determined look in his eyes that throws me a little, but he’s already stepping through my doorway and I can’t describe the play-by-play, I just know that all at once, his lips are on me, his arms are around me, heavy and crushing, and we fall onto my bed so hard it shifts from its place along the wall. I feel his heaviness, the sharpness of his muscles and bones against mine.

  Normally, I disappear into my body, into another plane of blindness where I see nothing, not even the face hovering over mine. In the tension, the rising pleasure, I feel disintegration, crumbling, and release, and I float in the nothingness, the physical exchange, the affirmations that it feels good, that he wants me. I remember nothing afterward. No longing, not even residue desire; like the moisture on my skin, once washed off, it’s gone.

  Nesto finds the deepest places in me, his lips never leaving me, his lashes soft against my cheek, his breath warming me. I want to say Nesto is the first man I was ever with. He’s not. Not even close. So then I want to say he is the last. And by being the last he is the first.

  Since the first night, there have been many more like it. And mornings. And afternoons. In my bed, on the sofa until we drop onto the floor of my cottage, against the hard corners of the shower stall, out on my beach under the discreet cover of night, shells and twigs burrowed into our backs. At his place, testing the wobbly futon frame, in that run-down chair, on the cold metal of the back of his truck parked out on a desolate road at the end of Indigo Key. And on Lolo’s boat, on days when there is no dive group for him to take out to the wrecks and reef, when he lends it to Nesto, so that he can break me of my seasickness forever.

  He wants me to feel as at home on and in the water as he does, he says, and once we are docked, far enough that no other human can lay eyes on us, he drops anchor and tosses out a float and a line. He kisses me while the water holds me up to him. My senses are amplified. When I open my eyes, instead of wondering what we’re doing out in the middle of the ocean, I feel I don’t need land or even air anymore, as long as I am with him.

  “Why did we wait so long for this?” he says.

  And then, “I don’t understand how you ended up so alone in this world, Reina. I don’t understand how anybody ever let you go.”

  Our only promise is to not make any, never to speak of tomorrow, only this day and this night.

  Now, when my sleep breaks, instead of falling into memory, I’m pulled only as far as the body sleeping beside me. He stirs, eyes closed, to reach for me, to wrap himself around me, pulls me into him. He always wakes before morning comes, so we can enjoy the last bits of each other before the day pushes us apart.

  My mother taught me to read hands at the same time she taught me to apply polish. Not by reading the lines of a palm, but the way she’d learned from her mother and her mother before her, by touch, decoding the curves of the hand without looking. Carlito never knew about our ability. Our mother never shared those things with him. She said there were some things that were meant to stay between mothers and daughters. It was by holding my brother’s hands, once when I went to see him at the jail during the first days after his arrest, running my fingers over the rough swells at the base of his fingers, that I knew that even though Carlito was still screaming injustice, he was guilty and would never again walk free. I lived my life differently, always wearing the costume of hope, but that’s just an example of how easy it is to ignore intuition and betray oneself.


  I asked my mother once if she ever read our father’s hands. She thought about it before admitting she didn’t remember ever feeling his hand in hers. He was always grabbing her, touching her, but always on her body, or pulling her by the arm down the street, as if this might be the moment she’d flee. There was never intimacy, the sort you assume exists between married people. The more she considered it, the more she was sure she’d never touched his hands. Not until he was dead and she saw him in the morgue when the prison turned him over. She’d gone with Tío Jaime and Mayra. She didn’t want to, but they’d forced her to go to bid him a proper adios since she was the wife and there were vows between them. Tío Jaime and Mayra thought that was the moment Mami should have told Carlito and me the truth about our papi, and given us a chance to see him off ourselves, but Mami refused, and held on to the secret for a few more years.

  After Hector, though, Mami started reading the hands of every guy she dated. And when Jerry came onto the scene, she fingered his palm across a restaurant table on their first date and knew right away that he had enough money for two, plus square fingertips, which any clairvoyant worth a dime knows are given to those who are born to count cash. She didn’t care about love or romance. She only wanted a guy who could make her life a little easier.

  She never read my hands and I wasn’t allowed to read hers. She warned me that to do so was courting bad luck, like burning the wings of a butterfly. But I didn’t listen, always trying to read my own palms, but then my intuition grew cloudy, and I could only sense that the solitude I lived with, even before my brother left us, the loneliness I felt even when surrounded by my own family, would never leave me.

  Then I went to the blue-haired bruja because I figured she was a professional and people came from other states to see her and she even had her own international hotline. And she, with her tarot cards, candles, and long fingernails painted with chipped purple polish, pushed hard into the lines of my hand and told me my mother was cursed because of her sins and I, as the daughter, would pay her debts; that the devil had followed my family all the way from Cartagena to Miami, and then, what I had suspected for a long time: