The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  He gives them to me and I tell him they’re beautiful: a mix of sunflowers, a few purple roses, and birds-of-paradise.

  “They’re not for you.” He touches my hair gently. “They’re for you to offer to the sea.”

  I don’t believe in these things the way he does, but I’m grateful because now I can leave something nice behind in remembrance of Carlito.

  Nesto whispers some words I don’t understand and then repeats, several times, “Yemayá awoyó, awoyó Yemayá,” and tells me to say it too.

  I whisper the words, take the flowers, and hold them over the railing.

  It’s hard to let them go. I feel Nesto’s hand on my back guiding me, until I’m able to release my fingers, let my knuckles splay wide like a starfish, and the flowers fall from my palm to the water below.

  We watch them fan into the current, some stems pulled under and others floating away from us above the waves.

  That night Nesto and I don’t tear into each other like we normally do. We lie close and quiet, letting the sound of the tide fill the cottage.

  For the first time in my life, I fall asleep and don’t wake until morning. And when I do I feel different, not lighter but heavier, as if the pieces of myself I’ve left behind at the bridge over the years, that which had been left there for me by others, have been restored to me.

  FIVE

  During a visit to see Carlito, I noticed his prison suit looked kind of dirty and realized I never thought to ask before how many changes of clothes he had, or how they got cleaned. He said the prison laundry didn’t use detergent and clothes came out smellier than they went in. So he, like a lot of guys, used shampoo bought from the commissary to wash his own clothes in his cell toilet. Another inmate had explained things like that to him a while after he arrived on his cellblock, how to make life a little easier on the inside.

  If he’d been a regular lifer, Carlito would have had a cellmate, but as death row cases, he and the others in his wing were in isolation. Most of the time, the only noises they heard were of the metal doors opening and closing on their corridor, or inmates screaming and banging on their cells’ walls until guards came in, deeming a rebellious inmate violent and buckling him by the arms and legs to the four corners of his concrete bed where he would be left for hours.

  But the inmates could also call to each other through the hall between security checks, press their ears against the slots in the steel door through which their meals were served, and when everyone else was quiet enough to let the echoes carry, they could even have what resembled a conversation.

  Sometimes Carlito got advice like that he should consider converting to Judaism in prison because the kosher food was better than the standard fare, and sometimes they even let you have a bar mitzvah party with a cake and guests. But Carlito told me even a friendly inmate, a guy you’d swear wouldn’t try to kill you if he had the chance, could turn on you in a second. Sometimes guards showed up in the middle of the night to search his room, cuffing him, pressing him hard against the door while they stripped every photo and magazine cutout he’d taped to the walls, ripping covers off books, checking every thread in that tiny cell even though they did regular room searches three times a week, just because some other inmate claimed he was hiding a weapon; if Carlito got caught with a shank or a blade or any kind of contraband, the snitch could earn favor points for ratting him out, and maybe have one of his own discipline charges or grievances against him dropped.

  The only time he got to socialize, Carlito told me, was when he got taken to a civilian hospital for pissing blood after a guard punched him in the stomach a few times, though he couldn’t tell the hospital people the truth or other guards would retaliate later. And another time, when his colon was so backed up from the prison food that he wailed in pain in his cell for three days before they agreed to send him out for tests. You had to be near death to get to go from the prison medical unit to a hospital, Carlito explained, because inmates had this idea that with only two officers to a prisoner on hospital grounds, it would be easier to take them down to escape. Some guy had pulled it off years ago and ran free for a full three months before they caught him up in Jacksonville and brought him back in.

  Some inmates just tried to get to the hospital to disrupt the routine of prison life; to see people other than the guards and shrinks and religious they were used to; to have a doctor or nurse look at them with kindness; to be touched for reasons other than being handcuffed or shackled, flesh to flesh; and to be able to look out a real window without seeing prison walls and watchtowers and barbed wire surrounding them.

  They would do anything it took to get there. Scraping an arm against a wall until they broke the skin, cultivating an infection until holes burned through their flesh warranting medical intervention. One guy Carlito met in the hospital had even chewed off his own toe.

  There in the civilian hospital, on gurneys parked in the blocked-off prison ward, Carlito would hear from other inmates—inmates awaiting treatment for tumors growing out of their bodies like new limbs, late-diagnosed cancers, necrotic wounds from neglected diabetes, pneumonia, or even organ failure from hunger striking—about death warrants already signed by the governor up in Tallahassee and those prisoners recently executed up in Raiford.

  When a nurse came by to puncture the fold of Carlito’s elbow with a needle so he could receive intravenous fluids, he’d panicked, fearing they were going to shortcut his execution and do it right there, and instead of giving him electrolytes and nutrients like they were supposed to, they’d flush his veins with chemicals and cook him from the inside out.

  He began to hyperventilate and they’d had to sedate him.

  When he woke up, Carlito told me, he was in a room alone. Then he saw the two corrections officers at the foot of his bed.

  “Am I dead?” Carlito had asked them.

  One officer looked to the other and laughed.

  “When it’s your time, Castillo, it won’t be as pretty as this.”

  Carlito fell silent and stared at me across the table. He looked down at my hands cupped around his.

  “When you get out of here you can tell everyone about this place,” I said. “They should know what life is like in here.”

  “If I ever get out, I’ll never talk about this place again.”

  “What are you going to do when you get out then?”

  I was still playing at a more hopeful game, and so was Carlito. We’d had no luck getting his death penalty overturned as “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore unconstitutional. But we were working on getting another appeal on the grounds that the jury was prejudiced by the media and the trial should have been moved to another county. The new lawyer who filed the motion told us, you never know, maybe his sentence could be commuted to life so Carlito could get paroled after twenty-five or thirty years. He’d be in his fifties and still have a chance to build a real future on the outside.

  He’d be a free man again even if he might not be free in this country. By committing his crime, Carlito risked being denaturalized and potentially deported, forced onto a flight back to Colombia, which wasn’t so bad since Carlito’s plan had always been to go back to Cartagena anyway—make enough money in Miami to buy a condo facing the beaches of Bocagrande, eat in restaurants where the ricos ate—and Mami and I could join him, he said, and he’d make sure we lived like queens.

  Sometimes we’d fantasize together about what he’d do when he got out of prison because it was better than talking about what he’d request for his last meal or what he’d say in his final statement before being locked into the death chamber.

  “If I ever get out,” he’d say, “the first thing I’ll do is go home, chop down that fucking tree in the front yard, and set the house on fire. Then I’ll go to a restaurant and order myself a cold beer and a big, bloody steak.”

  Other times I’d ask the same question and he’d just shru
g.

  “Maybe it’s better if they keep me here. I have no money, and they don’t give you a pension for completing your prison time. There’s nothing for me on the outside anymore. I’ll have nowhere to live. They’ll stick me in a halfway house with a bunch of lunatics.”

  “You’ll live with me.”

  “Nobody will give me a job. People treat parolees worse than shit under their shoes. How is a man expected to turn his life around under those conditions?”

  “I’ll help you, Carlito. And you’re so smart, anyone with a brain would know they should hire you.”

  “To do what? Clean toilets? Or to pick avocados twelve hours a day at some farm in Homestead?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s just a beginning.”

  I reminded him of all the people we’d see around, so often it was like we didn’t see them at all: ladies selling fruit at intersections, guys who came knocking at the door offering to pull weeds for a few bucks.

  “There’s no shame in any work,” I told Carlito. “Those people don’t have education to fall back on like you do, and they probably get even dirtier looks than murderers when they go out looking for work.”

  “I’m not a murderer, Reina,” was all he’d answer, and I’d feel like a failure because, as usual, I’d managed to hurt him.

  “I’ll take care of you,” I tried again. “Just like you always took care of me. I promise.”

  But Carlito didn’t want to listen to me anymore. His eyes were already darting around the room, the way they often did when we were near the end of our visiting time.

  Dr. Joe once told me that one of the effects he’d observed in his subjects in solitary confinement was concentration problems, due, he suspected, to the lack of stimulation.

  Carlito would start looking past me, as if cracks in the prison walls held some code, and I knew I’d lost him for the day.

  We’d sit together in silence for the remainder of our hour together until the guard led him away.

  Mo informs me the consensus among the vets and techs is that the new dolphin, who they’re now calling Zoe, has psychological problems. They say she might even have brain damage or trauma that’s left her unable to tend to basic needs like feeding herself.

  “Maybe she’s just depressed,” I say.

  “Depressed? This place is paradise for dolphins.”

  We’re looking over the dock as Rachel stands in the pen, which is shallower than the others, no deeper than a swimming pool, and tries feeding the dolphin some fish, but she won’t take it. I know they’ve had to supplement with force-feedings through a tube. The dolphin still refuses to leave the fence. She’s worn the front of her head with the lines of the metal chain links, and turns away from Rachel whenever she approaches. Instead of just roping the area apart from the other pens, Mo had Nesto erect a huge curtain rod to wall it completely out of sight of the park visitors.

  I’m technically off today but came in to work because I wanted to see how the new girl is doing. Weeks have passed since her arrival and everyone is getting impatient. Rachel is still trying all sorts of things to catch the dolphin’s interest. Inflatable toys, hoops, mirrors—the 99-cent store stuff the staff members call enrichment tools. They’ve even brought in Coco, a gentle, older female from one of the adjacent pens, but the new girl isn’t interested so they’ve separated them. They need the new dolphin to bond with Rachel, I am told. They need her to understand that Rachel is her source of food.

  When Mo gets called on his walkie-talkie to another part of the park, I slip off my sandals, put them on the deck next to me, and drop my feet into the water. I see right away that the dolphin notices. Maybe it’s the sound of my toes breaking the surface that alerts her. She lifts her head up. But then she moves away from the fence and comes a little closer to me and Rachel starts encouraging her, trying to lead her in the direction of her own open arms but instead, the dolphin makes its way over to me.

  “Can I get in the water with her?”

  Rachel looks surprised that I’d even ask, but with the dolphin at my feet now she relents. “Okay. Go suit up. And tie back your hair.”

  I always keep a swimsuit in my bag now, for days when Nesto and I steal away from work at lunchtime or after we finish the day and go for a swim at Hemlock Beach before sunset. I go into the locker room to change and take one of the spare wetsuits they keep on hangers in the corner, and walk back to the pen as fast as I can, hoping Mo or any of the vets won’t stop me to ask questions.

  The dolphin is back by the fence when I get there, and when I lower myself off the deck into the water at the shallow end, feeling the mushy sand under my feet, she turns again and comes directly toward me.

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?” Rachel asks.

  “No. Why?”

  “Sometimes they’re attracted to pregnant women. They can sense it with their echolocation.”

  Now the dolphin is in front of me, dipping her head into my side. I let my fingers run against her dorsal fin, along her rubbery back.

  “Just relax,” Rachel tells me, though she doesn’t need to. I feel the power in the dolphin’s body, the way the water parts at her slightest movement and rushes against me, but I stand there, letting her swim circles around me, weaving through the water, kicking up her fluke, and back to my side again.

  Rachel steps back toward the deck and returns to the spot I’ve claimed with the dolphin at the center of the pen, handing me a bucket of fish, telling me to try feeding her. I take one fish at a time out of the bucket, offering them to the dolphin, and she pulls the fish out of my fingers with her teeth until I go through all of them and leave the bucket empty. I expect Rachel to be happy with this, but she watches me with her hands on her hips, her lips tightly screwed. She says she next wants to see if with my help we can get the dolphin interested in some of the toys, and we take turns tossing an inflatable ball to each other. But the dolphin goes underwater, shooting to the deeper corners of the pen, only to reappear in front of me, tossing her head up, making clicking noises.

  “She’s showing off for you,” Rachel says, sounding even more annoyed.

  By now, a few others from the staff have gathered on the deck, including Nesto.

  Mo comes to the front of the group on the deck, eying me with disapproval.

  “I think you should get out of the water now, Reina. Leave Rachel to get back to her work with Zoe.”

  “I got her to eat a whole bucket of fish,” I call back to him.

  “You’re not trained to be in the water with the animals. Do me a favor and get out of there now.”

  I make my way toward the ladder in the corner of the pen, but the dolphin follows me, and when I am all out of the water, standing on the floorboards, she takes a last look at me before turning around and heading back to her spot by the fence. Rachel tries to lure her from the edges of the pen again, but the dolphin won’t move.

  Nesto walks with me back to the locker room, giving me the same look he gave me when he found out I’d gone off on the boat with Jojo. I don’t want to hear him tell me I put myself in danger again so I walk quickly, avoiding his eyes.

  When we’re far enough from the rest of the crowd, he says under his breath, “You’re going to give them a reason to get rid of you.”

  “I was just trying to help her.”

  “This is a job, Reina. We come here to work. Nothing more.”

  On Saturday and Sunday mornings, I sometimes go out to the beach behind the cottage, remembering that I would be with my brother at the prison for that hour if he were still alive. I sit on the sand facing the ocean, trying to conjure Carlito’s memory, inviting him to sit with me. I hold my palms open before me, close my eyes, and try to remember the weight of his hands on mine, his voice before his crime, before bitterness set in, when he would throw his arms around me for no other reason than to tell me he loved me.

 
There were guys in his prison who’d killed several people and instead of death sentences, they received multiple stacked life sentences. Carlito told me he wondered what was worse: knowing your life was running on a short fuse and you could be called to your death any day, or having your lifetime and several more spread out before you for another two hundred years, an illusion of immortality even if it’s to be endured within prison walls.

  We all have to show up for our death, but maybe it was a gift to know the date of your last day. Unlike those with eternal sentences, my brother was promised an early escape, even if, in the end, he decided to flee in his own way.

  Nesto says Carlito was probably a son of Changó, who, in his mortal days, was an impulsive king and, haunted by regret, hanged himself, later ascending as an orisha. His sons on earth are said to be born with inner violence, war upon their heads, like Changó, who always carries a double-edged ax, ready to fight and to die in battle. But they are also protected by Changó’s wife, Oyá, patron of the dead, who Nesto says will help Carlito on his journey through the afterlife.

  “Carlito,” I whisper, the sound of my voice buried by the tide.

  In my mind, I tell him about the dolphin, how she came to me, chose me over all the others, how I felt her skin and the enormousness of her body pushing the water between us.

  I have felt insignificant all my life, but in those moments with the dolphin, I was special.

  I remember when we were children and Tío Jaime and Mayra bought a pet store poodle that wouldn’t let anyone touch her except Carlito, not even Mayra who tried to love her into submission. But around Carlito, the dog went limp, curling into his side, licking his hand, begging for his attention. When I put my hand near the dog, she grabbed my fingers between her teeth until Carlito pulled her off me. One day, while Carlito played with the dog in the living room, I wandered to the back patio where Mayra kept her parakeets and budgies in small metal cages arranged on shelves, mostly ignored except for when she took them in to fly around the house until they wore themselves out.