The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  I picked up the ball and looked back at my brother. He turned toward the woods and called out to whoever could hear us not to worry, that we were coming, and rushed ahead while I stayed behind.

  I stared back at the boy until he hid his face from me again. I wanted to help him and felt confused because in school I’d learned that police were people you went to for help, but something told me the best thing I could do for him was to leave and pretend I’d never seen him.

  “No le voy a contar a nadie,” I said, assuming he understood, and ran out of the forest toward my brother and mother, but was intercepted by a dog, barking frenetically, its sight set on the ball in my hands like it was a piece of raw meat.

  The cop took the ball from me and held it close to the dog that snapped and howled at it, but the cop just looked frustrated and stared at Mami, who’d come to my side with Carlito behind her.

  “This is your ball?” he asked me.

  “It’s my ball,” Carlito said defiantly. “She’s my sister.”

  “You brought it with you to the park today? You didn’t find it here?”

  “I bought it for my son myself,” our mother said, slipping a hand onto each of our backs. That wasn’t really true. Tío Jaime had been the one to give Carlito the ball, but it gave us a kind of thrill to see her lie to a man of the law.

  The officer yanked the dog by the leash away from the trail and started back toward the seawall. I looked at Carlito but he looked away from me, away from the woods, and sighed to our mother, “Can we go home now?”

  We never found out what happened to the rest of those migrants or even where they came from. When I was old enough to fool around with cops and academy cadets, they told me loads of people washed up on South Florida shores in crafty sailing vessels from all over the Caribbean, even after the laws changed and it became much trickier to be let in: Cuban balsas with Soviet car engines, Haitian and Dominican rafts held together with tarps and tires. Some people were just dropped off by speedboats or yachts that shuttled across the Florida Straits in the night. Some slipped right in before dawn, forever undiscovered. If they were among the lucky ones, a dry foot on land would get them amnesty or asylum. But some had the misfortune of arriving in daylight and being spotted on the water, ratted out by citizens, booked into Krome within hours, and set for deportation. But I guess that’s not as bad as drowning along the way.

  The park terrain, with the way it poked into the edges of the Atlantic and the silence and blackness that fell over it after sunset, was an easy drop-off point for those Caribbean arrivals, but also one of the more obvious and heavily patrolled ones. They came from all over, not just the northern half of the Caribbean, but from as far south as Colombia and Venezuela, as far west as Honduras and Nicaragua. But we rarely saw that stuff on the news anymore. The public had already heard enough about boatlifts and refugees and now preferred to hear about murders and cocaine busts and corrupt politicians instead.

  After the day of the planes, we stopped going to the park as often. Mami got roped into relationships with men who didn’t like having Carlito and me tag along on their outings, and Carlito and I grew old enough not to care. My brother was into bicycles and forming boy gangs with the neighborhood kids, and I was happy to be their mascot, until we got to the age when our bodies started to divide us—girls over here, boys over there—and then the rough waters of puberty when I figured out the boys didn’t mind keeping me around as long as I agreed to be their toy.

  We never told our mother about the boy in the woods. And Carlito and I never spoke of it to each other after that day. But there were times I’d wanted to bring it up to my brother. Sometimes I’d see a young guy around town or at the supermarket who looked just like the boy by the banyan and I wondered if it was him, if he’d ever made it out of the forest and into our world or if they’d hunted him into the night. I wondered if the dogs had finally sniffed him out. I thought if he’d managed to stay hidden, we could have gone back for him the next day. The planes and boats would have given up the search, and it would be old news among the rangers. Mami could have pulled up the car close and we could have sneaked him into the trunk and out of the park, taken him home, and given him food and clothes and a place to rest. Why hadn’t we done that?

  A few months ago, they made Carlito’s execution date official. They’d be moving him up to the death row prison in Raiford and I was planning to move up there too as soon as I got the matter of selling our house settled. I’d heard rents were cheap because nobody really wants to live around a bunch of murderers, in a town that’s only known for its executions, except maybe their families or their fans. I figured I could get a job easily enough because no matter where you are, there will always be women who enjoy the small luxury of having their nails painted, and it would save me the hours I spent driving south each week to see Carlito down at the Glades.

  Our mother moved up to Orlando to be with her boyfriend, Jerry. He makes enough at his dental practice for her to stop working. This is the kept-woman gig she’s been praying for all her life. She suggested I join her up there. Said I’d benefit from starting over in a city where nobody knows me or my last name. I thought she was inviting me to live with her since Jerry’s townhouse is big enough and there’s a room specifically for guests they never actually have. But she explained I could rent an apartment nearby and find a roommate or, even better, maybe with a little effort, I’d get lucky like her and find a man to take care of me.

  I told her I had to follow my brother.

  During one of my last visits at the prison with him before his transfer, I was trying to be positive about things, saying it would be a good change for Carlito, who was so sick of his prison down in the Keys, the smell of the ocean so close as if taunting him, reminding him of his crime. I didn’t acknowledge that a date had been set for him. It was still years away and I knew more appeals could push it off even further. I was already writing to law school groups, advocacy programs, doing all I could to get things delayed or hopefully overturned. And everyone knows it can take decades for the governor to sign the death warrant to put someone in the chamber.

  In this case, I told Carlito, time was on our side.

  We were in the private family meeting room where we ­sometimes had our visits, sitting across a wide table from each other. Carlito was in his red jumpsuit. Most of the inmates wear ­orange, but death sentence cases have to wear red. I was in a loose T-shirt and jeans because they’re picky about what women can wear when visiting prisoners. Nothing too tight, not too much skin, no shorts or dresses. I’ve seen ladies get turned away for pushing it with their too-sexy outfits, or forced to change out of their tube dresses and borrow sweats from another visitor who already knew better and came prepared. Here they were even strict about jewelry, so my earrings had to come off before I went in, left with my purse in one of the visitors’ lockers.

  I held Carlito’s hands in mine, my fingers wedged between the cuffs and his wrists because I hoped that at least for a moment he would feel me and not the cold metal against his skin. Those are things to which he’d become too accustomed. I saw it in his posture. The way the years of walking with his hands chained to his waist, his ankles shackled together by leg irons, had sloped his spine, causing him to walk with his head tilted down, in short steps, so different from the way he moved when he was free, with rhythm in his gait, a walk more like a glide.

  “Reina,” he began. “Do you remember when we were kids . . .”

  “I remember everything.”

  Sometimes Carlito liked to reimagine our childhood and I played along. He’d talk about how Papi used to play the guitar and sing us boleros or put on a record and while Mami danced with Carlito, our father would sway around the room with baby-me in his arms. I didn’t contradict him even though he was only three years old in those days and couldn’t possibly remember such things. I wanted to believe it was as he said, but I once asked Mami if any o
f that had ever happened and she shook her head slowly before changing her mind and simply shrugging: “I don’t know. It’s been so long, mi amor. Ya no me acuerdo.”

  But there were things she did remember and she’d wait until she was angry at me about something to unleash them on me like a wolverine. How my father never held me when I was a baby, either the cause or the consequence of my relentless crying—there was no way to know. When he was drunk, he’d deny he was my father, or worse, say I was a bad-luck baby, that my crying had driven his own father to suicide after his wife died and Hector brought him to live with us. When my grandfather hanged himself in our front yard one night, my father blamed me.

  Some guy Papi worked with, a part-time yerbatero, warned I was an abikú, the wandering spirit that incarnates in children and makes them die. I’d taken the soul of the baby my parents lost between Carlito’s birth and mine, only to be reborn in the form of another child because the spirit world didn’t want me either. The yerbatero warned my father an abikú that doesn’t die carries the dark spirit and has the power to make future siblings or others around them die in their place. Abikús, he said, are the children that come to destroy a family.

  Mami claimed not to believe in those pueblerino superstitions, clinging to her crucifixes and escapularios, but to satisfy my father she did as the yerbatero advised to lift the maleficio. She put a silver chain around my ankle to help with my crying, carved my footprint into the skin of a palm tree, and even let Hector clip my ear himself, with metal pliers and a blade, on the tip and though the cartilage, just as the yerbatero instructed, so they would recognize me if I were to die and be reborn again.

  These, my mother said, were reasons my father did not love me.

  But Carlito had his mind on something else that day. Something other than our family.

  “Do you remember”—he lowered his voice—“that day in the park when they were looking for those people? That kid . . . hiding?”

  I nodded. “By the tree.”

  “I think about him.”

  “You do?”

  “I’ve thought about that kid every day I’ve been in this place. I see his face.” Carlito inhaled deep, letting it all out through his nostrils. “The fucking terror. Qué mala suerte. El pobre. He knew . . . he knew . . .”

  “Knew what?”

  “He knew they were gonna get him.”

  I looked at my brother wanting to see the same in his eyes, because if there is terror there is still hope that things might work out the way you want them to, but my brother’s eyes had gone dead long ago.

  “Do you think he made it out of the park before they got him?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “I do.” I said, maybe for myself more than for my brother. “He’s probably a citizen by now, with a good job and a wife and a family.”

  “Maybe he’s right here in this prison.”

  I shook my head. “He didn’t come all that way to fuck shit up.”

  Carlito sighed and I realized I’d made him feel bad.

  “I didn’t mean it like that, Carlito. I didn’t mean you fucked things up. I know you’re not supposed to be here. Everybody knows it was a mistake.”

  I’m not sure why I was the one apologizing. Sometimes I wished my brother would take the blame, admit that he was the one who ruined everything, drove all of our lives so far off course that we’d never find solid ground again.

  I thought maybe, in that moment, since his final hour was already on the calendar, he’d take the opportunity to say something about it, not that he was sorry, but just that he knew what he’d put us through for seven years, and that he understood it hadn’t been easy for us. That would have been enough. But he was quiet for a while and when the guard told us our time was up he only said, “Te quiero, hermanita,” like he always did, but this time he didn’t look back at me as the guard led him away back to his cell.

  Carlito never made it to the prison in Raiford. They found him limp and suspended from a ceiling pipe the morning he was scheduled to be moved. He hanged himself with the cord from the fan they let him keep to alleviate the sweltering Florida Keys heat because he’d never been classified as a suicide risk. He didn’t leave a letter for me or for anybody. He’d met with the prison chaplain the day before, but that was nothing out of the ordinary for Carlito. He liked to talk to preachers and nuns from time to time, though he said that in prison, religions are just another gang to join for protection, like the Latin Syndicate or the Aryan Brotherhood. He liked to ask questions about life and death and sins and souls even if he didn’t agree with the answers. The chaplain says Carlito repented for his sins, which I think sounds really nice and of course Mami was happy to hear that, but I’m not sure I believe him.

  I was in the middle of showing the house to a prospective real estate broker when I got the call. I’d been hoping our house would be adopted by another family that could bring to it new happiness, but the broker, a gringa recommended to me by one of my salon clients, said investors were buying up houses all over our neighborhood to renovate and flip for profit, and that ours was run-down and ugly enough to have that kind of appeal. They’d gut it completely, she said, maybe even tear it down. When they were through, it would be unrecognizable. She was smiling when she said this, but it made me uneasy. And the best part, she said, was that most of these investors were people from other counties or from up north, unaware of our family reputation and less likely to shy away from the lore of our home.

  Then the phone rang.

  Normally phone calls from the prison start with a recording saying you’re getting a call from an inmate and asking if you’ll accept the charges, but this time it was a man’s voice saying he was the warden and I should go somewhere quiet before he said what he had to say. I thought it must have to do with the logistics of Carlito’s transfer up to Raiford. Something like that.

  “Okay,” I said, once I’d stepped out of the kitchen into the yard. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Miss Castillo, you’ll want to sit down for this,” the warden told me, but there was nowhere to sit; our patio furniture had rusted beyond function and I’d managed to get rid of it before the broker came by.

  “I’m sitting,” I said, though I was just standing in the middle of the last surviving scrap of grass in what used to be our garden. Our old swing set was still at the back of the property where our father had erected it, corroded and shaky, and only used now to hang laundry on its rails.

  “Your brother has expired, miss.”

  “What do you mean he ‘expired’?”

  “I mean he’s dead, miss. The officer on duty found him this morning. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  He explained how Carlito hanged himself and I closed my eyes, feeling the pressure of the sky pushing me down into the earth.

  I should have seen it coming. Our mother got a similar call when our father died, but the warden at that particular prison had been more sympathetic, even offering Mami some pocket-psychology nugget that men tend to express themselves through violence in suicide and she shouldn’t take it personally.

  Prisons only want their inmates alive so they turned my brother’s body over to my mother and me so we could give him a funeral, along with a few boxes containing all his worldly possessions—a few notebooks with cartoonish pencil drawings, books, letters from women, and photos I’d given him over the years of happier times before his crime, when it was him and Mami and me and we still celebrated Nochebuena and birthdays.

  Somehow, in death, Mami became Carlito’s mother again.

  We thought we could keep my brother’s passing private, but the headline hit the front page of both the English and the Spanish newspapers the next morning: CONVICTED BABY KILLER FOUND DEAD, over a picture of Carlito in his red suit, thirty years old and bald, staring at the camera as if he’d already decided it would be his final portrait.

  Th
ere were no phone calls of sympathy. No flower arrangements. Except from Isabela, remarried with two more little ones of her own, who sent us a Mass card and a note saying she’d always pray for Carlito’s soul.

  If we’d left his body with the prison, they would have buried Carlito in a state cemetery along with the other dead inmates who went unclaimed by their families, beneath a wooden cross marked not by his name but by his prison number. But we couldn’t afford our own hole in the ground for Carlito so we decided on cremation because it was cheaper.

  My mother still considered herself super Catholic—except for occasional visits to brujas, psychics, and espiritistas, and that phase when she became obsessed with the Ouija board and played with it for hours every night—but neither of us had been to church in years, maybe because those wooden pews reminded us too much of being in the courtroom, and she was too ashamed to look for a priest or minister to preside over a suicide funeral.

  She let this short guy from the funeral home read a standard prayer over Carlito’s coffin and we did our crying over his swollen and stiff body in the rented casket privately, praying for his salvation, asking that my brother be forgiven, and may we be forgiven too.

  A few of our relatives eventually showed up—Tío Jaime, his wife, Mayra, and some distant primos—which Mami appreciated, but I got the feeling they just wanted to see if Carlito was really dead and it wasn’t just a rumor.

  The bedroom that used to be Carlito’s was empty now. Mami had packed up all her saints and candles and prayer cards and taken them with her to Orlando, but most never made it out of the cardboard box because Jerry told her only ignorant peasants believe in “esas tonterías,” and I guess she decided she didn’t really need them anymore.

  At first we couldn’t figure out what to do with my brother’s ashes. They returned them to us in a heart-shaped tin and Mami wrapped it in what had been his and my christening gown, sewn by her mother’s hands. But she didn’t want to take the ashes back to Orlando with her, and I didn’t feel right keeping them either.