The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  At my old job, I could face clients, listen to all their problems like their disintegrating marriages, horrible children, financial debts, and feel for them as I looked into their eyes. But when an appointment was up and the next client sat in the chair opposite me, I’d forget about the one who came before. By day’s end, I’d shake off all their troubled words like dirty water down the sink drain and return to my little life.

  I don’t understand why I can’t do that anymore after my days at the dolphinarium, why I can’t accept what I’m told about how well they care for the animals and how they’re better off here than in the big, bad wild.

  I used to be able to walk past their pens. Now I linger beside each one, feeling guilty every time I have to peel away to move on to the rest of my day’s duties.

  I don’t need the burden of caring. I want to turn away from them, forget them when I punch out on the time clock to go home, clear my mind of the conditions and rituals of their confinement.

  When I do manage to put thoughts of the animals aside, it’s only to think of Nesto, the confession of his upcoming remarriage, still an abstraction like those predictions they give out at the start of every hurricane season speculating on either a mild or a vicious summer.

  No matter the statistics, no matter how precise the science, they’re always wrong.

  It’s a Sunday. Nesto and I are up early because we plan to meet Lolo and Melly to go out for some dives on the line and maybe stop to fish at the hump on the way back. We’re at Conchita’s eating breakfast on the small patio outside her shop when we hear the thunder of helicopters above us. Choppers often pass over the islands, low enough for us to see what color they are and if they’re blue news copters or orange medical airlifters. But the helicopters today are that familiar green and white and I know, even before Conchita comes outside to tell us she’s just heard from her husband, who heard it from a friend fishing on Barkley Beach, that some migrants have landed, and there are probably more still out on the water.

  Nesto wants to see for himself. Every now and then we catch a story on the news about rafter sightings, sometimes a cap­sizing, some people abandoned by smugglers and found clinging to tubes on the water, and others lucky enough to touch ground. There was even the story of the guy who made it to Key West floating on a windsurf board without a sail. But it’s not like any migrants ever show up on Hammerhead or in front of his motel on Crescent Key, so we jump into his truck and head down to Barkley Beach, and Nesto parks on the side of the road right behind a news van.

  We make our way down to the curve of coast where dozens of locals have already gathered, Ryan among them, though we don’t acknowledge each other because we’re already in the habit of ignoring each other all around town. I feel his eyes on me, but I’m watching the scene before us.

  Three men and a woman, all dressed up as if they’d been planning on going to church or a party and not out on a boat for five days, though their clothes are dirty, pressed against them with sweat and water stains, their complexions parched and sea-lashed. The Border Patrol guys talk to them like they’re just regular tourists, and some other beachgoers approach and offer water and sandwiches. There’s snickering from the wall of people behind us that it’s because they’re Cubans that they’re being treated so well, not like your average migrant. We hear them tell the police there were supposed to be more of them on their boat, but at the last minute, several got scared and changed their minds. One man says another boat left at the same time from the same beach in Puerto Escondido, but they lost sight of it after the first day on the water.

  Nesto watches them. He presses his lips close together, holds his arms tight across his chest, and stands with his legs wide apart, as if guarding over the spectacle on the shore. I look at the crowd around us. Pale folk with expressions of curiosity and shock at the sight of the vessel these people arrived on, a wooden thing the size of a hot tub with a cobbled-together engine, rope and tarps, cans of food, and empty water jugs littering its tin floor.

  The new arrivals look happy, despite their fatigue, grinning with shriveled lips, faces toasted by days under the sun, ringed by the salt of sea spray.

  I remember the boy under the banyan tree, his eyes burning with terror, so different from the expressions of the four before us, telling the police they each have family members in Florida who will claim them and come for them when called.

  Nesto and I stand together among the crowd but somehow apart, and when the police have the new arrivals board the white-and-green Border Patrol vans so they can be taken for processing and then released to their relatives, we begin the walk back to his truck in silence. He puts his hand to the image of Elegguá on his dashboard, starts the engine, and we head up to the marina where Lolo and Melly are waiting, though we will have a somber dive, wondering in our brief suspension in the blue-violet twilight of the ocean, where it’s easy to confuse your way back to the surface, what it must have been like for those travelers, spending days and nights alone on the water, with little beyond hope to guide them.

  That night after we’ve eaten dinner, as I straighten around the kitchenette, I look over to find Nesto standing by the sofa, looking anxious as he watches me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m going to sleep at my place tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to be alone.”

  I don’t say anything, so he quickly adds, “Please don’t be upset.”

  “No problem.” I mean it, too, even if we haven’t been adhering to what we set out to do, enjoying day by day. Instead, we count on each other’s presence each morning, and I can easily forget that while he sleeps at my place every night, he hasn’t stopped paying rent on his efficiency at the motel.

  “I need to think about things without you next to me. Please understand.”

  He comes up close and holds me in a sort of half hug. He leaves my cheek with a soft kiss, turning away without meeting my eyes, and walks out the door.

  Let him go, I tell myself. This is something you need to learn to do.

  Let him go.

  I expect him to come back later in the night. He doesn’t.

  The next morning he calls.

  “I have to go home, Reina.”

  “I thought that’s where you went last night.”

  “No, I mean my real home. I have to see my family.”

  I’m back in Miami with Nesto. He’s trying to find a way back to Cuba since, for now, he can’t afford the airfare. I knew I’d be back one day. But I didn’t expect that once here, I would feel so uneasy, as if at any moment I might be discovered and asked to leave.

  We make our way off the turnpike onto the main artery of Little Havana, Calle Ocho, driving slowly past parked buses waiting for tourists photographing the viejitos playing dominoes in the park, and shopping for made-in-China guayaberas. We hit travel agency after travel agency—around here, there are tons—to see if Nesto can sign up to fly to Cuba as a mula; he’d trade his forty-four-pound luggage allowance for a free plane ticket to be a courier for people using the agencies to send packages to loved ones on the other side.

  Most agencies tell Nesto they’ve already got all the mulas they need for the year, but at the last agency we check out, a woman takes him to a desk near the back to sign him up. I wait on a folding chair by the door, taking in the posters of Havana all over the walls—faded images of the cathedral, the beaches of Varadero, the hills of Viñales, Cuba Es Amor printed in curly letters across the bottom.

  On the drive up to Miami, I pointed Carlito’s prison out to Nesto, where the main road splits and I’d turn onto a bumpy path that never seemed to get paved, toward the first gate where I’d give my name and the guard would check the approved visitors list and my ID before he’d let me through the high walls and past the gun towers.

  Seven years. Both eternal and as swift as a blink.

  I clos
ed my eyes until the barricades and barbed wires disappeared behind us, but felt as if I’d been at the prison just yesterday, spending a Sunday morning with my brother, holding his hands across the table, unaware it would be the last time I’d ever see him alive.

  “I never told you about my uncle,” Nesto began, maybe to ease the silence until we were out of prison territory and back within the ordinary coastal landscape. “He was in prison too. Not like me. They always let me out after a few days. But they kept him for good.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He didn’t do anything. It was before I was born. He was my mother’s older brother. His name was Guillermo. He wasn’t as welcoming to the Revolution as my mother and the rest of the family. They started rounding up subversives. They ordered them to El Jardín Botánico and he was among them. They called it ‘social purging.’ Purging! Like they did to us as kids, giving us aceite de ricino to shit out our worms. A neighbor denounced him for being flamboyant. In those days they would arrest you for anything—having long hair, listening to yanqui imperialist music—anything they considered undermining to the Revolution. So the family had to go to the public assembly and repudiate him. Then they transferred him to the UMAP.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It was a reeducation camp. A labor prison. They put the prisoners to work building new neighborhoods for people the Revolution brought in from the campo. People said those new buildings had blood mixed into the cement and plaster.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “The family lost track of him. They didn’t try to visit him.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s what the Revolution does. It ruins families. Parents and children each accusing the other of being traitors. Years went by. Maybe he died or was killed in prison. If he was released, we never knew it. When I came here I thought about looking for him. I like to think he got off the island when they let the prisoners onto the boatlifts. Maybe he was the lucky one and made it out before things got so much worse.”

  I hear the woman at the agency explain to Nesto that he can get on the mula waiting list but if he doesn’t go when called, with as little as two days’ notice, he’ll lose his slot and have to go to the end of the line because there’s no shortage of people wanting to travel on the agency’s dime.

  Nesto agrees to her terms, hands over his Cuban passport, and signs some forms.

  There was a gringa I once knew from work who earned herself a Christmas bonus by flying to Cuba every December. She’d stop in Mexico City, where she’d be given a purse as heavy as a bowling ball and a ticket to Havana—all of it arranged and paid for by some unknown individual. There, she’d breeze through customs where everyone was paid off to let her through, meet a guy outside the airport where they’d give each other a pretend hug as if they were family. After a handoff of the bag and a night in the Habana Libre Hotel, she’d get on a flight back to Mexico the next day with the bag full of a different kind of weight to hand off to her contact in Mexico. She was warned never to look inside the bag, but one day she did and saw heavy bundles shrouded in black plastic. It was only after she stopped making those trips that another girl involved in the same smuggle told her what was in them: gold bars on the way into Cuba, and cocaine on the way out.

  When he’s through with the final errand, Nesto and I walk back to his truck. I assume he’ll want to hang around Little ­Havana for a while, take in a little of the painted nostalgia, check out the shops on Flagler, or maybe get some Cuban food, but he doesn’t.

  “Is there anyplace you want to stop before we head back down?”

  I think for a moment. An unexpected urge comes over me.

  “There is a place. Actually, there are two.”

  That’s how we end up at the old house. Or what’s left of it.

  I thought when the realtor told me the new owners planned to renovate and remodel, they’d at least leave the walls, but there is nothing left. No trace of the rooms where my brother and I once slept, the tiles I learned to walk on. Just the foundation, the grass pulled out all around it leaving a kind of moat. All that remains that is familiar to me is the cypress tree at the front of the yard, with roots that still seem to boil up from the earth, the tree my grandfather climbed with a shaky ladder to hang himself from one of its long branches.

  I don’t want to get out of the truck. I don’t want any of the neighbors to see me, and I think if I keep my feet off the ground of the old block, it’s like I’m not really here at all.

  Nesto leans over me from his spot in the driver’s seat to get a better look.

  “So this is your house.”

  “It was. Our house.”

  I anticipated sadness at the sight of what became of the only home I remember living in before the cottage. Instead, I feel emptiness, as if the wind ruffling the tops of the palm trees could blow right through me, no flesh, no bones, no heart in its way.

  Nesto senses it’s time to leave and starts the truck without my asking.

  The house, and everything in it, is behind me now.

  Gone.

  * * *

  And then we come to the bridge.

  Nesto parks in the lot meant for fishermen and beachgoers on one of the flat ends of land joining the bases of the bridge. I remember the last time I came here with my mother. As I did then, I try to feel the footsteps on the concrete pathway, try to conjure a piece of my brother, and of my father, on the walk they each took to catapult a small life over the railing, sending so many other lives into the water with it.

  I remember standing at the highest point of the bridge’s arc with my mother, half our family’s ashes in our hands. Two lives reduced to dust.

  This time, I stand with Nesto.

  He looks at me as if to ask if this is the place where it all happened and I nod.

  The sea below us is a foggy green, dotted with a few small sailboats trailing each other. The bay stretches for miles, until the two strips of land lining it fade and the horizon becomes all water, the sun dipping toward it.

  “Nesto, what do you think happens to us when we die?”

  “I believe what the diloggún says. Life feeds on life. For every life that ends, a new one begins.”

  “Do you believe in souls?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think they go somewhere else?”

  “I do.”

  “People say if there’s a heaven, Carlito wouldn’t have gotten in.”

  “Nobody can know those things.”

  He points straight ahead of us.

  “You see that out there, where the sky meets the sea? When the world was made, there was no separation between heaven and earth. There on the horizon was the gate to heaven and it was wide open so humans could go into it whenever they wanted. These were the first generation of humans. They were still immortal. They didn’t yet know death. One day a man and a woman noticed that the animals were different from them. They couldn’t walk into heaven whenever they wanted but they could create life from their own bodies, and make babies. So the man and woman told Olofi they didn’t want to be divine anymore. They wanted to be like the animals and make life too. Olofi said if he gave them the power to make life from their flesh, their child would be of this earth, not carved by the hands of Obatalá or given the breath of life by Olódumare like they were. The child would have flaws and failures. It would be able to create life, too, but it would one day have to die. The man and woman wanted to have their own child more than anything so they agreed. Then Olofi broke the open path between heaven and earth so that humans could only cross into heaven in death.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I believe the message.”

  “What is it?”

  “We can’t be both human and divine. To be human is to be imperfect.”

  When we were children, I was terrified of los
ing Carlito, even before I learned that he’d already almost been taken from us. After our mother went to bed, I would sneak into his room, and if he didn’t let me into his bed with him, I’d sleep on the floor beside it, to make sure that nothing happened to him in the night.

  “Don’t worry, hermanita,” he would say. “I will never leave you in this world alone.”

  As we got older and he grew reckless, drag racing his beat-up car on the empty roads of the Redlands he and his friends used as speedways, I would make him promise that if he died before me, he would give me signs to let me know his spirit was still with me even though our mother warned us it was mala suerte to talk about our own deaths.

  When he was arrested, we stopped those types of conversations, and instead I forced myself to believe that my brother’s death would never come.

  “There is something else the diloggún says,” Nesto tells me. “‘Death is but a journey into life, and life is but a journey into death.’”

  He reaches for me. I think he’s going to hold me, but he just touches my arm and tells me to wait there, he’ll be right back.

  I am alone at the top of the bridge for what feels like a long time.

  Me and the metal railing, smooth under my fingertips, the whistle of the salty high wind in my ears, burning my eyes, tangling my hair, with just the occasional jogger passing behind me, admiring the view on the other side of the bridge of the crowded Miami skyline, the bank where Carlito once worked folded somewhere into it.

  I stare down at the water rushing beneath me, its swirling silver-crested tide pulling against both sides of the bay and out toward the mouth of the Atlantic. I become dizzy, leaning against the railing, close my eyes, and see the image of my own body falling over the railing into the ocean just as the words fill my ears and leave my lips:

  “Forgive me,” I say over and over. “Forgive me.”

  When he comes back to me, Nesto has in his hands a bouquet of flowers, which he says he bought from the vendor selling them at the underpass just before the turn to the bridge.