The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  “Love is not meant for you. You will always be alone.”

  “You need a manicure,” was all I replied.

  I thought the reading was finished so I pulled my hand back to reach for my wallet to pay her, but she held my wrist firm in her swollen, arthritic fingers and told me to wait, there was more.

  “Your mother didn’t want you,” she said.

  “Neither did yours.”

  She let go of my hand and told me I owed her two hundred dollars.

  I dropped the cash onto her table and left.

  I try to resist reading Nesto’s hands. But in the early morning, when the cottage is washed with white light, when his arms are draped over me and he is snoring into my shoulder, I can’t help closing my eyes and letting my fingers touch their way to the truth on his skin.

  A faraway sensation comes over me. I don’t know what to make of it at first, but then I understand that despite his closeness, his chest so tight against my back that we are sharing sweat, his mouth resting on my neck just like last night and dozens of nights before, there is still a nameless void between us that will never dissipate.

  That’s what I get, I decide, for trying to peek at the future when it seems the present is just starting to be kind to me.

  So I stop myself and focus again, not on my touching and reading him, but on his touching and reading me.

  When we were kids, Carlito and I ate the crummy lunch provided by the school’s public assistance program. We faced our butter and baloney sandwiches and waxy apples while other kids ate lunches their parents packed for them, full of treats and last night’s dinner. Carlito would identify these kids and take their food from them, giving me half of everything, until the lunch lady caught him and turned him in to the principal.

  “I don’t care how much you hate the food they give you, stealing is wrong,” Mami told him after she got the call from the school.

  “How am I supposed to get what I want if I don’t take it?” Carlito asked.

  Mami never answered him.

  When Carlito was an altar server at the church, he started a little side business taking the flowers people left at the feet of different statues of saints, selling them outside the supermarket or at gas stations, or just to other boys from school to give to the girls they liked. One of the priests confronted him but Carlito argued he was doing no harm, and those flowers got thrown out at the end of every week anyway. The priest never told our mother, but Carlito decided to move on to cemeteries, picking bouquets off tombstones and out of the vases on the walls of mausoleums.

  Instead of selling the roses and carnations himself, he put me to work. I’d stand by gas pumps, tell people I was selling the flowers to raise money for our school so we could buy new books and pens and art supplies, while Carlito watched and waited nearby. He gave me a dollar for every five that I made. He’d be ceremonious about it when he later counted the bills on his bedroom floor, making me hold out my palms until he placed the bills on them.

  “Bien hecho, hermanita.”

  Or on days I didn’t sell so much, he’d shake his head disapprovingly.

  “You can do better, Reina. Make your big brother proud.”

  He always gave me a bonus of a few dollars to make sure I kept my mouth shut about the whole operation and didn’t start feeling guilty, confessing to Mami what we were doing. Carlito taught me there was a price to be paid for my silence and complicity, and I was honored to be his secret keeper.

  For all the new people who turn up each day in the Keys, looking for a new life, there are even more people leaving. But that doesn’t make it any easier to find work. I try every salon on Crescent and all the neighboring Keys, but I’m told there is no room for new hires. I apply for a few waitressing jobs, but they say I have no restaurant experience. I try stores up and down the islands, even ask Julie if she needs a hand selling painted coconuts and Lolo if he needs help in his shop. But people say with low season coming, they’re better off short-staffed than taking on a new employee. Nesto counts himself among the lucky ones. After he fixed the turtle habitat, Mo, the manager of the dolphinarium, kept calling him for more repair jobs until he finally offered Nesto a permanent position, since something there needs to be fixed every day.

  I spent plenty of time going along to work with Nesto before they took him on full-time, passing him his tools, just being an extra set of hands to feel useful in my unemployment. Nesto complains about working under the sun but I like the warmth, the breeze, so different from the stale recycled air and nail polish and acetone fumes I’m used to.

  I decide to apply for a job at the dolphinarium too.

  “How are you at math?” Mo asks during my interview.

  We are alone within the wood-paneled walls of the back office. Between us, a wide desk covered in a mound of loose papers and manila folders that makes him look even smaller as he sits in his swivel chair.

  “I’ve never had a problem calculating tabs, counting tips, or paying bills.”

  He looks down at my résumé in his hands. I printed it out fresh though it’s already denting in the blow of the air conditioning.

  “I see you don’t have a proper high school diploma. You’d need at least that for me to put you on the register in the gift shop.”

  “It’s never been an issue before.”

  He looks over the list of my past employment again and I notice the cut in his cheek that makes a shadow across half his face.

  “How about I put you with the cleaning and feeding crew, and just rotate you around wherever you’re needed? You’ll help prepare the animals’ food barrels, clean the pens. What do you think?”

  “I can do that, if that’s all you’ve got.”

  He watches me, a bit of pity in his eyes, and I remember something big mouth Lolo told me; even though it’s supposed to be anonymous, everyone in the islands knows Mo is practically president of the AA chapter at the local Protestant church. He’s not married and nobody knows if he’s got a woman; people just know that he lives with a cockatiel named Dorothy. I stare at him. I used to be pretty good at appraising men. By the way he looks back at me, I estimate it’s been more than a few years since he’s slept with someone who didn’t charge him for it.

  “I’ll tell you what, Reina. You’ve worked in salons so many years you must be good with people. I can offer you a slot in our Guest Relations department. You’ll do rounds of the park property, making sure visitors are having a good experience; you’ll make sure nobody is breaking any rules like throwing trash in the habitats, touching animals, smoking, or drinking on the premises. You’ll have to always be chipper. Ready to answer any questions guests might have for you. Anything you can’t handle, you send them over to me or a senior staff member. What do you think?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  I’m proud of myself for getting hired, even if it’s entry level. Even if the last girl who had the position, who quit to go work at the big aquarium up in Largo, the dolphinarium’s main competition, was ten years younger than me.

  On my first official day on the job, I’m wearing my new uniform of blue shorts and a blue polo shirt. Mo stops me out on the patio and tells me that as part of my job, I’m also supposed to let management know if any activists show up.

  “Activists?”

  “Animal rights people, specifically. They come around from time to time.”

  “Why? This place is way nicer than the other dolphin parks around.”

  I mean it. There are places where you can find a dolphin in an aboveground backyard swimming pool or in a fountain behind a motel, kids tossing in pennies to make a wish.

  “They won’t accept that we take great care of them here. Sometimes they just want to make some noise, give the trainers a hard time, but we’ve had cases of more serious things happening. Even vandalism. We’ve found holes cut into fences and the way we usually fi
nd out isn’t because the animals get out, it’s because others get in. Last month we had a lemon shark swimming in one of the pens scaring Wilma and Betty half to death. All because of the damn activists who don’t know nothing about nothing.”

  It’s kind of a funny thing for him to say given that Lolo told Nesto and me that before he came down to the Keys to run the dolphinarium, Mo managed a sneaker outlet up in Ocala.

  “We are an accredited institution here, not some homegrown fish pen,” Mo continues. “We’ve got all our permits. These aren’t market dolphins. Most are rescues, or retired from other aquariums or circuses, and we take them in. We love these animals like family. If it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “What about back to the ocean?”

  I can see from Mo’s expression this is the wrong thing to say.

  I try again. “I mean, if they’re retired, why don’t you just release them?”

  “They don’t know how to fend for themselves. You put any of these creatures out there in that wild ocean and you’ll see they won’t last a day. They don’t have their instincts anymore. And they sure as hell won’t feel like hunting again when they get their meals here free. If these animals could talk, they’d tell you how happy they are here.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I want you to talk to the trainers and techs, Reina. They can explain the research we do here. We’re trying to learn from the animals. See what they have to teach us. We do a lot of good work, especially with our interaction programs. I see miracles happen every day when people with disabilities get in the water with the animals. That’s what the activist folk don’t understand. The dolphins here aren’t just for show.”

  He says this just as a show in the front lagoon is getting started, rockabilly music coming on loud over the speakers. Through the window behind Mo, I see a trainer cuing a dolphin into a tail walk to the small crowd’s collective wow.

  Mo looks over his shoulder to the show and back to me. “They love to perform. They love to make their trainers happy. And we love to look after them. It’s in the good book, Reina. Genesis 1:26. ‘God gave man dominion over animals.’ We know what’s best for them and the animals are so smart, they know it too.”

  “All right. I’ll keep an eye out for trouble.”

  When Mo leaves me to start my rounds, I walk along the dock from the lagoon holding the “family pod” at the front of the pen grid to the rows of pens behind it, containing pairs and trios of dolphins usually divided by gender, down to the nursery pen holding the mothers and the babies near the end. I notice one of the larger dolphins tucked into one of the front pens, its eyes following me as I pass through, floating half on its side in a way that makes it look like it’s dying or something, and when I ask Luke, one of the trainers, if the dolphin is okay, he just laughs and says that’s Sunshine’s way of spying on me.

  “How do you know that?” I ask.

  “We know these guys real well. Each animal has its own dolphinality. Sunshine likes to spy, just like Strawberry, over there, likes to fling wads of seaweed at us to get our attention sometimes. They’re having fun with us.”

  “But how do you really know that? It’s not like they can tell you.”

  “From our research.”

  I watch as he calls a dolphin over to where he stands on a platform at the center of the pen. Luke signals with his hand for the dolphin to open its mouth, and then he shoves a long tube down its throat.

  Luke calls over to me on the deck. “I’m doing this ’cause she’s thirsty. They need water just like we do.”

  Nesto later tells me that wild dolphins get their hydration from catching live fish, and the frozen food diet captive dolphins get can leave them dehydrated, so the trainers supplement it by shoving a lubricated hose down the dolphins’ throats, dumping ice into their mouths, or feeding them gelatin cubes. He learned that during his days working at the Acuario Nacional in Havana. He said that back there some of the dolphins, the ones they didn’t snatch out of local waters, were from the Black Sea, imported like so much else by los bolos, the Soviets. Just another island absurdity, he told me, Russian dolphins in the Caribbean, and it was only fitting that the aquarium was right across the road from the Soviet embassy plunging like a sword through the heart of Miramar.

  When the Russians left, they didn’t take the dolphins with them. But they’d die, of course, because around there, Nesto says, there’s no Reina walking around making sure people don’t throw garbage into the tanks, and sooner or later necropsies revealed plastic bottles in their bellies or too many mackerel jawbones. Some of those animals, people would say, were former military dolphins, trained to drop grenades on submarines and inject enemy divers with poison.

  During my first days at the dolphinarium I hear from a guy called Sonny on the maintenance crew that this country once had a similar project going on, and those secret navy dolphins eventually made their way onto the aquarium circuit too.

  “Might even be some here,” he says with a raised brow.

  I mention it to a couple of trainers who laugh, dismissing it as an urban myth, adding that Sonny’s a full-blooded Seminole, raised not to trust the government, so I shouldn’t listen to any of his theories.

  He’s in charge of emptying all the garbage cans and pulling seaweed and fish out of the pens. He points to the little bio the facility has posted by each pen with a picture of each animal and a cute little story about its origins, like that it’s retired from aquariums, or rescued from a mass beaching in South Carolina, and found paradise in these here pens. Lies, he says.

  I think it’s strange that Sonny has to spend half the day catching fish that swim through the fence holes from the ocean when dolphins are supposed to eat fish, but he explains they don’t want to tempt them with being able to hunt for their own catch.

  When I later ask Mo about it, he tells me to leave matters to the people who really know about this stuff; the vet techs with their diplomas, the trainers with their slick wetsuits and chirpy voices reciting a litany of facts about the species to visitors while the dolphins wait at their feet for a mouthful of dead fish.

  “And you, you’re just a newbie, sweetheart.” He takes a piece of my cheek between two knuckles. “You don’t know a dolphin from a dog off the street.”

  When my brother was old enough to get real jobs, first as a restaurant dishwasher, then as a stock boy at a grocery store till he got fired for swiping steaks, and then at the car wash where he stayed until he finished high school, he would still hit shops in his free time to see what he could take without paying.

  Sometimes he’d aim low, going for drugstore cosmetics, perfumes, sunglasses off the rack, batteries, and condoms, always bringing something extra home for me, like lipsticks or nail polish. Or he’d go into a bookstore with an empty backpack and leave with it full of new novels. Sometimes he would be more ambitious and try his luck in a department store, walking out with shirts and jackets right on his back. He never got caught and often tried to convince me to join him.

  He said I had the right kind of face for theft, inconspicuous and forgettable.

  “Nobody expects anything from you, Reina. Nobody notices you when you walk into a room. You’re like the air people don’t realize they’re breathing.”

  I didn’t like the idea of stealing even if our mother never asked where all the new things that turned up in our house came from, probably because my brother also kept her supplied with gifts.

  One day I told Mami what Carlito had said about me, and how it bothered me that I was a girl he was certain nobody gave a second thought to, as inconsequential as a flea.

  “Don’t worry, mi’jita,” she told me, caressing my face with her slim hand. “It’s to a woman’s advantage to pass through life desapercibida. Better to be underestimated.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s only in
pretending to be cross-eyed that a woman is able to see double.”

  FOUR

  Nesto says it was Yemayá who held my brother up to the surface after our father threw him into the ocean so that Cielos Soto could save him, and he’s sure Cielos had already made a pact of his own with Yemayá before casting his line off of the bridge that day, asking her to deliver fish to his bait and hook. Instead, Yemayá made him a hero. And my brother was saved.

  But there lies the debt, Nesto warns. Neither Carlito nor anyone in my family ever paid Yemayá back for her blessings, and nobody, especially the orisha, likes an ingrate.

  Yemayá only punishes when deeply offended, he says. It’s the reason why, when Carlito’s mind filled with madness and he dropped Isabela’s baby into the ocean, Yemayá did nothing to stop him and instead let the baby fall through her waters down to Olokun’s realm on the ocean floor.

  “That’s why you need to make friends with the sea,” he tells me, as we sit together on the beach behind my cottage one sunny morning. “The sea is the origin of all life and the tomb of all death. Before Obatalá claimed the land, oceans covered the earth. So all of life has aquatic origin and we need to honor it.”

  “You think we were once fish?”

  “Only Olofi knows.”

  He runs his hand through the sand at his side, grabs some into his palm, and lets it slip out through his fingers.

  “Babies breathe amniotic fluid until birth. It’s a kind of seawater. We grow into our lives on land and lose our connection to the water, but we are of the ocean.”

  Nesto takes my hand and leads me into the water stepping sideways like he says we should always do when approaching the sea.

  As we walk in deeper, he holds me, lifts me off my feet like my mother used to do, letting me float over his arms, dipping my head backward into the water.