The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  In the end, we decided to return Carlito to the earth in our own way, tying a brick to the tin with the same rope Hector’s father had used to hang himself. I didn’t know until that day that all this time, Mami had kept it in a box in the garage. My grandfather’s body had been shipped back to Colombia for burial, but Hector had been cremated just like Carlito. Mami hadn’t wanted his ashes so Tío Jaime kept them and when he traveled back to Colombia he sprinkled them over their own parents’ graves in Galerazamba. She admitted to me that before turning them over to Tío Jaime, she’d pulled out a thimbleful for herself, which she now stitched into a sachet and placed in the tin with Carlito’s ashes.

  Around sunset, Mami and I drove to the bridge that had sealed both my father’s and my brother’s fates, walked halfway across to its highest point, and with both our hands clutching them, tossed the tin and brick and rope into the bay water, watching them disappear under the current, hoping the ashes and relics of the men of our family would be pulled down and buried in the ocean floor.

  That night Mami asked me to sleep with her in her room like I’d sometimes done as a little girl.

  I didn’t sleep. I only watched her, wondering how she could slip into such a calm slumber when even the hum of the ceiling fan blades hit me like a torrent of screams.

  She was small under the blanket, and halfway through the night she awoke, and I pretended to sleep as she touched my hair, my cheek, and whispered my name, though I didn’t move.

  In the morning, we had our coffee together at the kitchen table and then she took a long look at me standing by the front door before leaving me alone in our house for the last time.

  The house in Miami never felt like home even if it’s the only one I remember. A brown concrete cube with a red Spanish-style teja roof, and white iron bars over the windows and front door that didn’t do their job very well because we were robbed four times. Each time, the thieves just took the TV and broke some stuff. We didn’t have anything else that anybody would want. Any extra money we had, we kept in a cigar box under a broken floor tile in Carlito’s room, even after they took him away. When I was packing, I dug out our little wooden case. The family savings. There was nothing left.

  There was a time when we knew all our neighbors: Nicaraguans, Peruvians, Dominicans, and Venezuelans—everybody on the run from some dictator, broken currency, or corrupt government regime—and other Colombians like us looking to find some peace away from the narcos and guerrillas that had hijacked the country.

  They lived in houses just like ours, painted pastel colors. They took pity on Mami, the single mother of two kids, the victim, wife of “ese loco” Hector Castillo. But those neighbors stopped inviting us to their backyard parties and asados after Carlito’s arrest. It was understandable. I’d probably have done the same.

  Mami was never short on male company though. Any guy who got a look at her wanted to stick around, from the mailman to the surgeon who performed her hysterectomy, and she was equal opportunity, giving most of them a shot.

  I packed up the things in the house. There were only a few photographs I’d take with me wherever I ended up next. The rest I left to my mother, but she didn’t want most of them either, so now they’re sealed in boxes held in a storage unit in a warehouse behind the airport along with the other crap we didn’t bother trying to sell because nobody wants anything de mal agüero, that might carry the DNA of a convicted killer.

  There were no photos of my father. Mami got rid of them after he died. Only Tío Jaime kept a framed shot of Hector on the mantel of their artificial fireplace, a blown-up version of what was either his passport photo or his government ID. Hector, who was ten years older than our mother, sitting square in an unironed white button-down shirt, staring at the camera with his round wrinkled eyes and bulky lips over his blockish yellowed teeth. Con una mirada de chiflado, if we’re being honest about it, the kind of look that would make nice ladies make the sign of the cross, and even though I couldn’t describe him to you beyond that photo, just his face made me tense; the same guy Tío Jaime talked about with tears in his eyes, the little brother who, even with his bad leg, dreamed of one day becoming a champion boxer like his hero Kid Pambelé.

  Before I knew the full truth, or at least as much truth as I’ve been able to piece together so far, I used to hope that Hector’s bad leg made him somehow virtuous, that he was a patapalo like the original Mediohombre, Blas de Lezo, who, missing a leg, a hand, an eye, and an ear, managed to defend Cartagena through countless battles against the British. But Mami said I was wrong. Hector’s bad leg only made him a cagalástima, self-pitying and bitter.

  “He was no hero, mi’ja,” she said. “Not for one day of his life.”

  From the photos that remained, I kept one of Mami that our father took just after they were married. She’s standing on a beach in Rosario, wearing a frumpy bathing suit, looking shy and modest. Her hair was long and dark, tied into a loose braid. She was pretty back then but nothing remarkable. People said she was the sort of woman who got more attractive with age, all that experience worn into her expression. Another photo of Carlito and me when we were toddlers, when our mother used to bathe us together, up to our necks in bubbles, laughing like stupid.

  Then, a photo of the three of us on our last trip together to Cartagena to see Mami’s mother when she was dying. An abuela I only knew from our summer visits to Colombia, because she refused to leave her neighborhood even to visit us, convinced that in her absence the authorities would steal her home away like they’d done to the people of Chambacú, flattening their community on the marshes to fill the waterways with more traffic-filled avenues and shopping malls, and Abuela would be forced to live in some shanty in the hills.

  We stayed with her all night, holding her hand until she passed away. Mami said the greatest gift you can give someone you love is being with them as they die. I’d always planned on being at my brother’s execution for that same reason. I reminded Mami of what she’d told us, but she said this case was different, then added a prayer of thanks to God for taking her mother from this world before people from her barrio had the chance to talk about her with shame and blame, mock her, and say she was like La Candileja, the fabled and disgraced grandmother of a boy who became a murderer.

  The most recent photo: my brother, ashy and washed-out in his red death row suit, and beside him, me, looking like the gray-faced commuter-zombie I was, taken at the prison against the blue cinder block wall in the visiting room that some inmates had been given permission to paint with a mural map of Florida. I asked the guard to take the photo from the elbows up so the cuffs on my brother’s wrists wouldn’t show. You can’t see in the photo that Carlito and I are holding hands.

  With the sale of the house, my mother leaves me with half the profits, a small chunk of change she says is meant to be my herencia and help me start a new life. She pushes for me to follow her to Orlando, but I tell her living so far inland feels unnatural to me and Miami, the city I’ve lived in all my life, now feels vacant.

  I want to be forgotten.

  I want it to feel as if I’ve never existed.

  I want to be a stranger. Rootless.

  For weeks, I try to think of where I might live now that I don’t have ties to any one place. I buy a road map at the gas station and stare at the state of Florida, drawing my finger up along the red and white highway lines, across different counties, trying out the names of towns on my lips.

  Pensacola. Sebring. Valparaiso. Apalachicola. Carrabelle.

  But my finger keeps dragging southward, even farther south than where I live now, closer to the equator, down to the strand of islands held together by a series of thin bridges, the ones scientists are always saying years from now will be covered by water when the seas rise and drown all the edges of earth.

  There, I think, I might be able to disappear.

  Before I leave our house for the last time, bef
ore the final days when I hand over the keys to the real estate broker, and before the new owner arrives to demolish our dilapidated kitchen and peel out our tile floors, I decide to go back to the park on the bay for one last look.

  Years after the day of refugees, Hurricane Andrew wiped out those promiscuous nonnative pines and the state used the luck of the barren park to restore the vegetation, repopulating it with trees that were meant to be there.

  The forest is no longer a forest but a garden of palms and various types of poinciana and ficus trees, and blankets of blooming flowers mined by iguanas and chameleons; the crows and turkey vultures replaced by parakeets, cormorants, and flycatchers.

  Now there are neat trails for bicyclists and people out for a stroll, nature paths with marked signs providing brief histories of the flora and fauna.

  I hardly recognize the place but walk down one of the trails, now a wide tunnel through gently arched palms.

  It’s spider season. The path is laced with wide webs, thick golden silk spiders ready to birth at their centers, waiting for prey. I spot a baby lizard dangling by its tail from the edges of a web, still wriggling. I pluck a leaf from a tree and place it under the lizard to cushion its fall, pull it out of the web, and set it on the ground, free.

  I walk, until I remember the passageway I once took.

  I’m taller now and it’s harder to push through the undergrowth, but I manage, and soon find myself on the other side of the woods in a clearing by the lagoon and its jointed mangroves, and see another lone long-legged heron, this time a white one, perched on a rock, watching the water.

  I was brought to the United States as a baby. If you want to blame someone, you can lay it on my father’s brother, Jaime. He was the first one to cross over. He left Cartagena de Indias as a crew member on a cargo ship and spent years on Panama Canal crossings until he ended up at the Port of Miami. They gave away visas more easily in those days. Green cards too. It didn’t take much for him to convince Hector to join him on the other side.

  Our father had always been looking for a way out of Cartagena. If you weren’t rich or light-skinned, there wasn’t much for you there. Hector was a mechanic who specialized in spray-painting cars to look as new as they could against the salty corrosion of the Caribbean, a good enough skill, he thought, to take to a place like Miami. He left his new bride where he found her in her neighborhood of San Diego in Cartagena, and only came back in time to get her pregnant once a year.

  Between Carlito and me there was the lost baby, stillborn, a girl who refused to be a part of this world, and when I was bad, to punish me, my mother would say I was not an abikú after all; that dead baby was her true first daughter, and if she’d taken the breath of life like she was supposed to, Mami wouldn’t have bothered going on to have another.

  Hector came back to Cartagena to collect us all when I was three months old and Carlito was approaching three years—still long-haired because people said if you cut a kid’s hair before he speaks full sentences, he’ll be mute for life.

  Mami panicked when it was time to move. The only world she knew was there in San Diego and she was scared about the life that awaited us across the sea, but her mother told her it was her duty to follow her husband anywhere and she should be grateful because most men who leave their country alone never return for their families.

  Hector had found solid work at a body shop in West Miami and bought the crappiest house on an underdeveloped stretch of road, without sidewalks or streetlights, bordering the orange groves of Southwest Dade that have since been bulldozed and converted to housing developments and more strip malls. The house had two bedrooms but with Tío Jaime’s help he put up a thin wall to make it three. Mami didn’t work in those days. She stayed with her babies and hardly left the house. No English and no car left her dependent on the men and Jaime’s wife, Mayra, who couldn’t have children of her own. But Papi became jealous, always imagining her sneaking away to meet men. Who knows how it started? I’m not going to pretend my mother was guiltless even though she will say in those days she was only ever with our papi.

  There must have been preludes to the disaster that broke us. I think violence must have been churning in my father like the August wind. I think he must have hurt my mother. He must have hurt us all. But when I ask her, Mami only shakes her head and says Hector’s dead now and there’s no reason to remember those days.

  We were a complete family for just nine months before my father took off with my brother for the bridge.

  When the three of us went back to Colombia to watch my grandmother die, our mother slept in the bed with her mother, Carlito took the sofa in the living room, and I slept in the bed that was Mami’s when she was a child and later became her marriage bed with my father until he left, promising he’d return for her.

  I would lie stiffly, watching the ceiling cracks, taking in the voices from Calle de la Tablada, the sounds of horseshoes dragging carriages behind them, hitting cobblestones, and the morning bells of the Santo Toribio church echoing against the apartment walls. It was a bed that wouldn’t be fit for a child back in the States, with a mattress so thin each plank supporting it pressed against my body, but it was the bed where my parents had made my brother and me and the girl in between.

  The apartment had belonged to our grandmother’s parents and before that, nobody knew. You could hear every whisper, every sneeze, every limb’s turn on a creaky bed or chair. The interior walls were of peeling plaster, the exterior walls of chipped stucco and stone, and the wooden windows were always open to dilute the humidity, hoping to catch a breeze coming over the city walls, off the Caribbean.

  When we were kids and others asked about our father, Carlito would say, before any crumb of truth had a chance to slip off my lips, that our father was a millionaire. If we were in Miami he’d make up alibis, saying our father lived in a mansion in Cartagena, and when we came back to see our abuela, he’d say our father had stayed behind at our estate in Coconut Grove and gave details about the life he imagined for us, straight out of Miami Vice, full of fast boats and sports cars and money.

  Till one day, during a summer visit to see our abuela, we were cooling our butts in a patch of shade in the Parque Fernández de Madrid with some other barrio kids when Carlito started on one of his favorite lies about how our papi owned hotels that we could run around in like they were our own playground, way better than the dumpy old streets of Cartagena’s walled city, which were still dusty and dirty, webbed with wiring and antennas, buildings sun-flushed and water-stained, untouched by the colorful restoration that would follow years later.

  One of the boys, Universo Cassiani, scrawny, shirtless, and juggling a rubber ball, laughed at Carlito, happy to have a chance at revenge for the times my brother had mocked his name in front of the other kids, and howled that Carlito was a cochino mentiroso and our father was no millionaire. He was kind enough not to elaborate that day, but several summers later, when I was fifteen or sixteen and found myself making out with the now eighteen-year-old Universo, tall with stringy muscles, in the night shadows of the muralla overlooking the sea amid shuffling drunks and beggars, he confessed his mother had told him the story of our father as a warning of the madness that afflicts men when they leave for Gringolandia.

  “It’s better down here,” his mami warned him. “Here, women know their place. Up there, they become wild and their men go crazy trying to contain them.”

  He knew Hector had tried to kill my brother. He even had an explanation for it.

  “Boys are the ones who carry a family name. Girls get married and fade away from a family tree. Your father probably did it to avoid the shame of your descendants.”

  His words hurt. But serves me right because back then I still had the habit of scavenging for memories even if they were false ones.

  Sometimes I’d look at old photos and invent stories for them. Sometimes I heard relatos of things that really happen
ed, like the way Hector proposed to our mother, which wasn’t really a proposal at all but a deal: “Let me marry you and I will help you get away from your mother.” Then I’d invent a cover-up; tell myself that he met her when she was out buying food for dinner. Not the truth my mother once confessed to me, that he’d forced himself on her in an alley one night when she came home from a long day of painting nails for society ladies in Manga. But they didn’t call it rape back then, and because las malas lenguas had already anointed my mother with a reputation as a loose girl, people wouldn’t have been surprised he took liberties with her even though she tried to fight him off. So instead of being known as her attacker, because she was afraid she might already be pregnant and because he said he could take her away from this life, he became her boyfriend and then her husband.

  Universo Cassiani was probably the first and only boy who ever came close to being a boyfriend to me. He would hold my hand as we walked along the streets of El Centro, kiss me in the archways of the muralla once used to hold cannons shooting against invaders, tell me my lips were sweet like granadillas, and that I was different from the other girls of the neighborhood who were prudish and protected by their papis.

  I was with Universo just before the final hours of my grandmother’s life. Mami sent my brother out looking for me, to bring me home because she knew her mother’s last breath was coming. Carlito ran down the seawall shouting for me until I heard his voice echo against the stone. I pulled back from Universo, who was biting at my neck, but he persisted so I let him continue until Carlito appeared next to us in the alcove where we’d been hiding. Carlito pulled Universo off me, informing me that Abuela had announced she was waiting for me to be at her side before transitioning, which may or may not have been true. I went with my brother and left Universo by the sea.