The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  When I came to Cuba a few days ago, the airport arrivals area was a scene of ecstatic embraces, loved ones reunited after years, maybe decades. Here at the entrance to the departures terminal, the long hugs are accompanied with tears, a feeling of families breaking apart for who knows how long.

  I tell Nesto what I’ve never told him before.

  “I’ll wait with you through it all. As long as you want me by your side. I believe you when you say you had to leave in order to help your family. But I want you to know, I will also believe you if one day you tell me you have to stay.”

  SEVEN

  We’ve been back on our island a week, in the routine of days at our jobs, watching the dolphins surrounded by metal fences, and the pen where the wild dolphin once lived, now occupied by a veteran performer, quarantined with dolphin pox that’s left her marbled with lesions. Sometimes Nesto and I talk about trying again. We’ll wait for the right kind of rain, monitor the wind, make sure the current will help carry the dolphins out rather than push them deeper into their cages. We just have to wait a bit longer. Nesto and I have become good at this kind of vigil-keeping together.

  Our nights in the cottage are quiet. Nesto has been solemn since our return, though I sense his restlessness. We’ve been looking forward to a day out in the blue, but when we go to meet Lolo at the marina on a Sunday morning, he tells us the boat is having engine trouble and we’ll have to wait another few days.

  Nesto and I decide to go to the beach instead, and head south to an unnamed wide arc of gray sand on the Atlantic side of the islands that only locals know about. A few families have already set up their towels, pulled out the plastic pails and inflatables for the kids. There is splashing in the water and the drone of laughter. We find a spot on the edge of the cove, near the barrier of sea grape trees. There aren’t many words between us, but I’m comforted to look at him as we lie on our backs, see his eyes shut to the sun, veiled in a momentary calm.

  I don’t know who on the beach spotted it first; I’m only aware that soon after I’ve fallen into my own nap, I hear the voice of a child on the beach say, “Look at that boat, Mommy.”

  A few seconds later, an adult voice comments that no boat should be coming this close to shore. I hear a putting sound, like that of an old car on its last drops of gas, and open my eyes. Just past the buoys, a run-down blue boat scrapes toward the beach, a black tail of exhaust rising from its engine, now as loud as a mower, reverberating against the flat edge of ocean.

  “Nesto.” I nudge him awake. “Look.”

  He props himself on his elbows and as we take in the sight, the sharpening figures of the boat’s passengers, more people on the beach rise to their feet and approach the water. Nesto gets up too, and I follow.

  The boat seems stalled, the dark plume of fumes thickening behind it. There’s commotion on board, bodies moving from one end of the vessel to the other. Nesto waves to the people on the boat, as do some others on the beach, while a few in the wall of voices warn that the boat had better not come any closer or somebody could get hurt.

  “Do you suppose they’re refugees?” someone asks.

  “If they are, they’d better move fast,” another voice answers.

  Nesto turns to me, his face strained with anxiety. “There’s something wrong with the boat.” He rushes to the shoreline and shouts across the water, “¡Tirense! ¡Tirense al agua! ¡Naden! ¡Naden!”

  They don’t hear him, or maybe they’re too frightened to swim as he says. It’s only a matter of minutes though each second feels suspended, the smoke cloud growing larger, Nesto’s voice louder and more urgent as he lunges deeper into the water so they’ll hear him.

  A Coast Guard boat materializes as if conjured by the waves, silent yet swift, encroaching on the blue boat while the passengers push themselves to one side of the vessel and Nesto screams louder than I ever knew him able, “¡Tirense! ¡Naden! ¡Los esperamos! ¡Naden! ¡Naden!”

  Only one man does as Nesto says and throws himself into the water, the chorus of beach voices cheering for him, but as we watch him struggle even in the stillness of a sea on a day with virtually no wind or current, it’s clear the man is much too weak to clear the distance between the boats and the shore. But Nesto is already swimming toward him, body against the tide, and he doesn’t stop, even as a smaller Coast Guard boat we didn’t even notice, pulling in from the other edge of the coast, intercepts the man.

  For a moment we lose sight of him and then see, even with the sun shining into our eyes, he’s being pulled from the water onto the boat and any chance he had to touch ground is gone.

  Nesto remains in the water, treading, his head just above the surface, watching as the officers on the larger Coast Guard boat round up the rest of the passengers onto its deck, outfit them with life jackets, and prepare to tow the blue boat behind it. Behind me, the beach chorus is silent, but quickly gives way to exchanges of empathy for what’s just occurred. One woman tells another what a shame it is that these people traveled so far, coming so close, but will be sent back to wherever they came from, repatriated, which sounds to me like such a painful word.

  There is no doubt one among us called the police to report the arrival of the migrants.

  The local news van arrives and people in bathing suits line up to be interviewed. In a few hours, we will see them on tele­vision, describing how the boat appeared suddenly on the horizon; the pity they feel that those people, having braved a week at sea, came within a hundred yards of Florida soil only to be turned away.

  The reporter on the scene will show images of the blue boat, and describe in a voice-over how it was cobbled together with different metals and a car engine that failed its passengers on the final stretch of their journey.

  He will wrap up his report facing the camera, saying the thirteen migrants, now in protective custody, were rescued by the authorities, though I think the real rescue would have been letting them make their way to shore.

  Then he will turn it back over to the in-studio broadcaster who will offer her own commentary and statistics about how it’s only June and the number of asylum seekers has already surpassed last year’s figure, approaching the records of the nineties boatlift exodus, before cutting to a commercial for a used car dealership in Florida City.

  On the ride home from the beach, Nesto stops to buy a card to call his family. He wants to tell them what we’ve just witnessed, how this is the future that awaits the children if they don’t find another way sooner. When Yanai comes to the phone, I hear him beg her to reconsider marrying him as he paces the parking lot, saying it’s their best chance to give them an opportunity at a better life, then it grows to arguing, though he turns his body and steps away from me so I can’t make out much more.

  When the call ends, he kicks the back fender so hard that the truck shakes with me sitting inside it. Then he drives us up to the lagoons on Card Sound Road, where he parks along the marsh and spends an hour chucking stones through clouds of dragonflies and across the water as if trying to crack glass.

  I won’t ask what she said. I want to leave it between them, but Nesto tells me anyway.

  “She will only marry me if I can promise her a house over here as good as or better than the one she will leave behind, and a car to get around in. She says even if she’ll be a refugee on paper, she refuses to live like one.”

  “She’s scared. She feels safe there. She isn’t ready to leave.”

  “I don’t think she ever will be. I can hear it in her voice. All her excuses. It’s like she’s telling me to forget it, to stop hoping because it will never happen; I’ll never bring my family here. At least not in the way that I want, and not for a very long time.”

  He throws another stone with the force of his whole body behind but it seems to drop out of the air into the water only a few feet away.

  “Until then, what do I have?” He motions to the swamp and sea oa
ts surrounding us.

  Maybe he expects me to say nothing, and not so long ago, I probably would have.

  “You have me. And this small life we have together. I know it’s not the same, but it’s something.”

  He drops the rock in his palm and walks over to where I stand, leaning on the back of the truck.

  “Reina, I don’t tell you so because I don’t want you to think of me as a burden, but since the night we met, you have been the only thing keeping me from drowning.”

  On the drive back to Hammerhead, along the Overseas Highway, I notice a pale rainbow emerging from the ocean through the golden crest of sunset. I point it out to Nesto, its fractured prisms deepening in color for only a few moments until the clouds hide it from our side of the sky.

  He smiles in a way I haven’t seen him do since I saw him with his son and daughter.

  “Do you know what a rainbow is?”

  “The crown of Yemayá.” I want him to know I’ve listened to all he’s told me about the world as he sees it.

  “Yes, but there’s more. The seven colors of the arcoíris are the manifestations of the Siete Potencias, the seven tribes brought from Africa to the Americas, the spirits that remain to guide humanity through the troubles of life. It’s how Yemayá and all the spirits show they are watching over us, and that we are exactly where we are supposed to be.”

  In the evening, Nesto and I sit together on a mound of sand on the beach beyond the cottage, facing the low tide, water pulled from the earth like a curtain. Faint white boat lights scatter in the distance, and fat beams of helicopter searchlights fan edges of the coast—the custom whenever migrants land or are pulled from the ocean—looking for others still out on the water.

  It’s still nesting season but Nesto says the female turtles will be confused with so many lights and, unable to find the beach to make their nests, they’ll drop their eggs in the ocean. A generation, maybe even an entire bloodline, lost in one night.

  “I hate the ocean sometimes,” he says. “I hate what it does to us, and what we do to it. And I hate that I was born on an island. I’ve had nothing else to look at but that same blue horizon all my life. I’m so tired of it.”

  He grows quiet. The only sound is of the helicopters echoing against the tide.

  “I should have swum to those people sooner. I could have helped them. They weren’t that far out. I could have pulled them off the boat myself and carried two or three of them to the beach.”

  I want to find the right words to comfort him, to say there was no other way things could have gone, but the same feeling haunts me; I’m a good enough swimmer now, I could have gone out and carried someone back with me too.

  I picture the boaters in some holding facility or detention center, maybe even a jail like the first one Carlito got taken to before he was sent to the federal prison. Or maybe they are already on their way back home.

  “There wasn’t enough time,” I say, perhaps trying to convince us both. “It happened so quickly. Those police boats would have cut us off no matter what.”

  “We could have tried. We might have failed. But at least we would have tried.”

  Lighting flickers in the distance and dark clouds cover the moon’s halo. We head to the cottage as a thin rain begins to fall.

  We lie on the bed, Nesto curving himself around my body, wiping my hair from my face. I feel his heartbeat against my back. Despite the wreckage between us, the voids we carry of the missing and of the lost, though it’s just the two of us here in the darkness, tonight it feels like enough.

  The phone rings just as Nesto and I have found our way into sleep.

  “Oye, where have you been?” my mother wants to know. “Why haven’t you answered any of my calls?”

  “I’ve been busy,” I say, because I never told her I was away. “What’s going on?”

  I step outside with the phone, leaving Nesto in the cottage alone, and sit on the last plank of the walkway before it drops off into soft sand.

  “Bueno, the truth is I can’t say it was a surprise.”

  “You’re getting married.” I try to muster a tone of enthusiasm.

  “No, mi’ja. That’s out of the question now.”

  “What happened?”

  “I knew about her. A woman always knows. I thought it would pass. I ignored it. But she’s smart. Very smart.”

  “Who?”

  “La otra, Reina. Who else? She was a patient of his. He gave her a mouthful of crowns. He says he’s in love with her. He wants to be with her. He went to stay with her while I pack my things.”

  “He’s leaving you?”

  “Don’t say it like that. I’m the one leaving.”

  “But he’s making you move out.”

  “We’re not married. My name isn’t on anything here. I have to leave so she can move in.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you had high hopes.”

  “Así es la vida. There are no guarantees. Now I have to find somewhere else to live and soon.”

  “Where are you going to go?”

  “Home,” she says, and I know she means Miami. “I’m sure I can get my old job back. Maybe you want to move in with me. We can get an apartment by the water like we always wanted. Or another house. We can start over together.”

  “I’ve already started over.”

  “What kind of life do you have down there? You take care of fish and live in a choza on some woman’s property. You need to progress, Reina. Look for opportunity. Y el muchacho con quien andas, what’s his name?”

  “Nesto.”

  “What does Nesto have to offer you?”

  I want to think of something specific to answer her, something she can understand, but all I say is, “I just want to be here.”

  “For now. Until one of you decides to leave the other. That’s what always happens.”

  I’m quiet so she moves on.

  “I’m going down next week to stay with Mayra and Jaime while I look for an apartment. You think about it. It will be like the old days but completely different. We’ll reinvent ourselves. Mother and daughter, together again.”

  It’s not hard to picture us reunited, living in a beachfront condo in Miami Beach, one of the high-rises she’d point out to Carlito and me when she took us for long drives up and down Collins Avenue. Sometimes she’d pull into the sloping circular driveway of one and make Carlito and me get out of the car and look around the lobby so we could describe it to her, tell her about the bronze and marble and leather lobby furniture, the flower arrangements on glass-top tables, the chandeliers, and all those mirrored walls. She once had a boyfriend who lived in a condo on the Intracoastal. He invited us there a few times to swim in the building’s pool. “What do you think, Reinita? Wouldn’t you want to live here?” she asked me as she helped me float in the chlorinated water. I told her I would love to, because it seemed that’s what she expected. But then we didn’t see the guy anymore and when I asked Mami what happened to our moving plans she said she didn’t know what I was talking about.

  It would be different now. Two grown women. Without the anchor of Carlito in prison to divide us.

  We could live on the water like she always dreamed. The people we know, who know us, all live in the same inland pockets on the other side of the city.

  By the sea, we can take on new identities. We can be the mother and daughter who are more like sisters, like best friends.

  We’ve both already done our running away. Maybe we belong together.

  Like Nesto says: family belongs with family.

  And my mother is the only person on this earth who shares my blood.

  Carlito and I once ran away together. It was his idea.

  He was around eleven and I was on the verge of nine. He was mad at our mother because, one night at our uncle’s house, after Carlito tried out new curse words he’
d heard from other boys in the neighborhood, Mayra had slapped him, an openhanded bofetada across the jaw that left his lower lip swollen, and Mami had done nothing to defend him in response. She was always extra sensitive when it came to Mayra, who she said suffered so much from her childlessness that she practically tried to steal Carlito from her when he was born.

  “You can’t talk to people like that, especially when you’re in their home,” Mami had explained, smoking a cigarette out the car window as she drove us home.

  Carlito protested from the passenger seat beside her, but she only turned up the radio and started singing along with El Puma.

  When we got home, Carlito told me to pack my schoolbag with clothes and anything I could sell for money. I didn’t have anything worth anything except the gold cross Abuela had given me for my First Communion so I brought that. Carlito stole all the cash out of Mami’s wallet and after we were supposed to be sleeping, came to my bedroom for me.

  We sneaked out the back door and walked to the end of our street together but couldn’t decide where to go so we returned to our backyard, lay down on the grass, heads on our knapsacks, and fell asleep until Mami found us out there in the morning.

  She wasn’t even upset. She just said, “Go inside and get ready for school,” and then served us our breakfast silently.

  When I was fifteen or sixteen and Mami and I entered the era of vicious fights, I sometimes threatened to leave. By then I had older boys and even grown men I could call who would come for me in their cars and let me stay with them as long as I played along in the ways they wanted.

  “I’m running away!” I’d shout at my mother from my bedroom door, and she’d answer, “It’s not running away if I help you pack!”

  I could never leave her. Even as I visited Carlito in prison and he urged me, as if I were the one who needed consolation, to have the courage to move out of our house into a place of my own.