The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  I let him sleep. I turn the television off, but not even my nearness or footsteps stir him awake. I take only myself to bed. I lower into the blankets, turn off the light.

  Then, I hear his weight shift.

  He must have opened his eyes, maybe he even forgot where he was for a moment and then realized I’m across the darkness under the same roof, in my bed.

  “Nesto?”

  “Go to sleep, Reina.”

  “You don’t have to leave.”

  “I know.”

  I hear him kick off his shoes and the sound of them hitting the floor. I hear the removal of his collares. He once told me that because his beads are sacred—strung on delicate cotton, blessed over seven days, and washed in a river with an ofrenda to Ochún—he must take off the necklaces to shower and to sleep, kissing them, giving thanks for their bendiciones and protection, placing them on a white handkerchief he keeps folded in his pocket, so I know that Nesto is staying with me in the cottage, at least for tonight.

  Carlito was hated in a way that can only happen with the help of the media. Beyond the nature of his crime, he was made more of a celebrity as the youngest of the nearly four hundred inmates on Florida’s death row, until a few years into his sentence when a nineteen-year-old in Jupiter killed both his parents with an ax. We used to say we had the bad luck of geography. Only sixteen states allow capital punishment and we had to live in one of them. Too bad we didn’t live in Wisconsin, Carlito once joked, where not even a guy who murders seventeen people and eats their remains is sentenced to death. At least Florida only gets around to executing someone a couple of times a year. Not like Texas or Ohio or Alabama, where they’re much more efficient about these things.

  There are killers who sit on death row for decades before they get their date. I suspect Carlito’s execution was fast-tracked because his was one of those crimes that became public obsession. Dr. Joe said people had a morbid fascination with Carlito’s case—a guy driven insane with jealousy, the stolen child, like it could happen to anyone—and watching his trial gave them a sickening, voyeuristic pleasure. People petitioned for his death more than for your average murderer’s. Joe said execution is less about the crime and more about extinguishing a social nightmare, part of the collective unconscious, like capturing the boogeyman. When Carlito took his own life before the government could, people called him a coward. I guess he ruined their fun.

  It used to be that I could hide out at home and pretend the world had forgotten my family and me. Time would pass and the newspapers would get thrown out and the only remnants of our story lived in stale gossip on the tongues of old people in the neighborhood. But the Internet is the world’s biggest backyard freezer, keeping everything fresh, and I can always count on someone finding me through the electronic portals, wondering if they can ask me a few questions about my experience as the sister of a killer. Usually these nudges come from law, criminology, or psychology students. Sometimes they come from other women trying to form networks to share stories and complain about the justice system together. Sometimes it’s a weirdo who came across an old photo of me archived online, walking outside the courthouse, on my way into another day of Carlito’s trial, wanting to know if I’m lonesome wherever I am and if I’d like some company. That’s why I don’t go on the computer much.

  I used to think that was enough to draw the line between my old life and my new one, especially down here in the Keys where the only news people care about is the daily tide report.

  Nesto wakes up before me. I hear his steps on the wooden floorboards, walking into the bathroom. By the time he gets out, I’ve pulled myself together a bit, splashed water on my face at the kitchen sink, brushed through my mess of slept-on hair. I take in his morning face—flushed, smooth, his eyes still small with sleep. I make some coffee and we take our mugs out to the veranda. He puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me half into his chest, but I stiffen in reflex and he gently releases me.

  “I almost forgot it’s Christmas,” I say.

  “Feliz Navidad, Reina.” He smiles at me, but as he turns toward the ocean, his smile disappears.

  A week ago, he sent a box full of gifts for his family with the courier agency, things they’d asked for—a pair of soccer shoes for his son, a bathing suit for his daughter, diapers for his niece’s baby, blood pressure medication and eyedrops for his aunt, the vitamins his mom requested, along with creams for his stepfather’s vitiligo since the island pharmacies were forever depleted. His mother was jubilada, retired with distinction, but her pension wasn’t enough to live on, so she made extra money as a seamstress and even had a permit to sell her creations at the Fin de Siglo department store. But it wasn’t enough to compensate for the eternal lack on the island. And even though Nesto sent a box full of his family’s requests every few weeks along with the monthly remittance, it always fell short of their needs.

  When he calls home, his kids always ask the same question: “When are you coming to see us, Papi?” and he tells them, “Soon, mis amores. Soon.”

  He doesn’t have any jobs lined up for the day but I’m due for my regular morning shift. He drives me to the hotel and says he’ll come by for me when I get off so we can do something together in the afternoon, maybe go to the beach or take a drive down to Bahia Honda. I expect it will be a slow day at the spa. I’m the only manicurist on shift and the hotel isn’t even at capacity. I check myself in the mirror in the employee locker room, my hair pulled into the required bun, dressed in my pink scrubs looking like I’m on my way to deliver a baby.

  “Your client’s at the table already,” Gemma, my boss, sticks her head in to warn me. She’s a mostly kind Trinidadian lady but her voice holds a kind of schoolteacher severity, like she might send you to detention.

  I step out into the manicure area and, before she even lifts her head up or shows her face through the curtain of caramel hair falling into the folds of her plush white spa robe, my chest tightens in a familiar but forgotten way; I know with absolute certainty that the woman waiting for me at the table is Isabela.

  I step back into the locker room and feel my throat closing. I sit on a bench and count until I’ve got my breath under control. I don’t know why my body reacts this way. I’ve seen Isabela plenty of times over the years and even during the worst moments of the trial, like the day she was called to testify against Carlito, and the following week, when it was my turn, and I lied under oath saying there was no way Carlito could have done what he was being tried for while she watched me from her place on the wooden bench between her parents, the three of them shaking their heads at me.

  “It’s wrong to lie with your hand on the Bible, you know,” my mother warned me as I drove us to court that morning.

  “So is asking a sister to testify against her brother.”

  “It’s not just a sin, it’s a crime. You could get into very big trouble.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, because Carlito would not be taking the stand in his own defense and I knew my testimony would be his only hope.

  So I lied, as the judge, jury, and spectators watched me, but the only eyes I felt on me were Isabela’s.

  Even then, I never felt so stunned by the sight of her.

  Gemma pokes her head back in the door. “Reina, what’s taking you so long?”

  I don’t answer so she comes closer, standing over me on the bench, a small woman with a suddenly large shadow.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t take care of that client.”

  “Why not?”

  “I know her.”

  “What’s the problem? If you know her, all the better.”

  I picture myself going back into the spa, sitting down across from Isabela, taking her hand in mine to clean and prepare her nails, how I’ll try to avoid her eyes, make the burden of small talk pass as quickly as possible. She’ll ask what I’m doing
here. I’ll ask what she’s doing here, especially on Christmas, which she always spent with her parents, forever la consentida, and when she was still Carlito’s girlfriend, she even invited Mami and me to join them for their Christmas lunch. I refused to go, saying I was no arrimada and didn’t need her charity, but Mami and Carlito went without me.

  Or we’ll talk about the weather, the island scenery; she’ll ask about my mother, and I’ll ask about her parents, her new husband, and the kids she had after Carlito killed Shayna.

  The thought of it all makes me dizzy.

  “You don’t understand,” I say to Gemma. “That lady and me. We have a complicated history.”

  “I told you when I hired you, I don’t want to know anything about your personal life, and I don’t want it in my spa.”

  “I can’t go out there.”

  “I don’t have anyone else to do it, Reina. You either go in there and take care of the client or you take your things out of your locker and I’ll notify H.R. of your refusal to work. The choice is yours.”

  I keep quiet but stand up, open up my locker, and pull out my bag.

  “I’m warning you,” Gemma says as she watches me. “We don’t do second chances around here.”

  I consider telling her the truth. But what can I say? I don’t want to paint Isabela’s nails because my brother threw her daughter off a bridge?

  I hate Carlito more than ever at this moment because, even though he committed the crime, and even though he’s dead, I’m still the one who has to do the confessing.

  “So?” Nesto says when he pulls up to the lobby. “What happened?”

  I didn’t explain anything when I called to ask him to come back for me.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say once I climb into the truck.

  I try to be tough about it, bite my tongue and chew my inner cheeks until I taste blood. I don’t cry. It’s not that I’m incapable. Tears only come every few years and the last time was over Carlito’s coffin, which wasn’t so long ago. But here in Nesto’s truck, pushing along the Overseas Highway though I have no idea where we are going, I feel my throat swell and my eyes sizzle with restrained tears. I ask Nesto to pull over—­command him, really—and he eases onto a patch of road by some mangroves suspended over the marsh. A couple of bird-watchers squat a few yards down, their binoculars fixed on an ibis wading in sea grass.

  I couldn’t be further away from my brother, from the old life, but it’s as if I’m still sitting across the table from him in the visitors’ room at the prison, studying his face, looking for those features that were once identical to mine, trying to see him as he was now without forgetting who he used to be.

  And there was Isabela. Once my friend. Once my brother’s enamorada.

  Years ago, when both our families were awaiting the judge’s sentencing, Isabela came to see me at work. The jurors had already found Carlito guilty. It only took a day of deliberation. Seven out of twelve of the jurors had recommended he be sentenced to death, and in Florida you only need a majority even though practically everywhere else they still execute people the jury has to be unanimous. Mami and I were still hopeful the judge would at least offer Carlito life and maybe even with the possibility of parole. Isabela’s parents had given a statement to reporters that appeared on the front page of the newspaper that morning saying they and all their relatives prayed for my brother’s death every day. Isabela apologized to me for their hatred. She said she didn’t want Carlito to die and no way would she ever go to witness his execution, even if her parents dragged her. She said she would never wish for me the pain he’d caused her by taking her daughter away, and even though he’d never taken full responsibility and had never asked for it—not yet at least—she’d already forgiven Carlito because she had faith he could not have understood what he was doing up there on the bridge that day, to baby Shayna, to her, to us all.

  “We’ll get through this, Reina,” she said, putting her arms around me, but I’d remained limp, unable to hug her back. “You and I are like swans. We swim though shit, but we’ll come out clean.”

  I wanted to believe her.

  I wanted to confess to her the words that filled my mind when I saw her.

  Isabela, I’m the one who did this to you.

  Nesto puts his hand on my shoulder and his touch, the warmth of his large hand, feels like an unbearable weight on me and I crumple forward into my palms, until I am breathless. I open the car door, lowering myself onto the grass below. Nesto’s footsteps follow me but I hide my face, swallowing hard, trying to mute my sobbing, rubbing away the tears before they hit my cheek.

  I feel his body shell around me, holding me, until I finally whisper, though it comes out more like a moan, that I saw her, Isabela, and Nesto asks who that is.

  “The mother,” I say. “The mother of the baby my brother killed.”

  I tell him I am ashamed, so ashamed, of who I am because it’s not who I am, it’s who my brother made me.

  “It’s not your fault, Reina. You’re not responsible for what he did.”

  “Yes, I am,” I manage to mutter, unable to meet his face.

  My cheeks press into my knees until my eye sockets ache and when the tears finally let up, I look up to see my shoes in the grass, a beetle making its way up my pants leg.

  Nesto and I sit together in the dirt until my breath becomes even again and the doom of the day seems to lift with the noon sun rising high above us.

  He doesn’t press me to say more, or tell me what he thinks about anything. He only sits with me, the gentle pressure of his arm around my back, and me, finally at ease enough to let myself lean into him.

  There were no especially happy Christmases in my past. They were always marks of something broken in our lives. My mother told me that during our first holidays in this country, she yearned for home, the music, the lanterns that lined the streets of Cartagena, candles lit in every window, from the sixth of December to el Día de los Reyes. After Hector was gone, although we always went to misa de gallo at Our Lady of Divine Providence and celebrated with Tío Jaime and Mayra, the day was just another yearly reminder of our dishonor. And when Carlito left us, it only cemented our sense that as a family, we were a failure.

  I decide I should go back to the cottage but Nesto insists there is nothing but my own thoughts waiting for me there and I should stick with him for the day. It happens that he gets an urgent repair call from the dolphinarium down on Cloud Key because it’s Christmas and their regular fix-it man is taking the day off to be with his family. Lolo is friendly with the manager of the place and put in a good word for Nesto since he’d done some work repairing tanks and plumbing at the Acuario Nacional back in Havana.

  The dolphinarium is supposed to be some kind of sanctuary, not your typical aquarium, all about bucks and flash, or one of those shabby spots littering the Keys, mom-and-pop businesses built out of canal houses with a pair of captive dolphins for tourists to swim and take pictures with. The place claims it’s no water circus, but a well-funded private research facility with a mission to better understand dolphin intelligence. But it still looks to me more like an aquatic farm, with pens carved out of Florida Bay by chain-link fences, joined by a wooden walkway from which visitors can stare down at the dolphins, and a wooden shack on a tower at the center of it all that the staff uses for broader observation.

  Before you make it out to the dolphin pens, you have to pass the sea lion enclosure, and before that, a long artificial river coiling around the front of the property, with walled-off sections of barracudas, stingrays, and sea turtles. The turtle stream is the one with the problem today, with a backed-up filtration system.

  Nesto and I watch the turtles while the manager, Mo, a bald guy in his fifties with the body of a fifteen-year-old, explains the problem. There are at least a dozen loggerheads and leatherbacks, and among them, three or four wearing partially inflat
ed life jackets like they’re part of a gang, bobbing through the current, unable to dive deep or glide as smoothly as the turtles without jackets. I ask Mo about it and he explains that before hatching, those turtles’ eggs were disturbed while in their nests, probably by beachgoers, causing air pockets that made the shells grow deformed, top or bottom heavy, which, without the jackets, would make the turtles sink and drown.

  Just a few days ago, Nesto told me about his kawama-catching days during the Special Period, when he’d drive east to Corralillo where local fishermen draped a net across the bay at Playa Ganuza to trap turtles as they came in from the sea to lay their eggs. Nesto would arrive in the early morning with a scuba tank borrowed from Lolo, and dive under to bring up whichever turtles had already drowned in the netting. “You can never kill a turtle,” he told me, “because they can be the size of tables, strong as bulls, and it would also be cruel to the animal and disrespectful to their guardian, Yemayá.” So he’d pray to the orisha, explain his family’s hunger, thank her in advance for any turtles she would give him since he knew they were sacred to her, and promise to pay the debt as soon as he was able, because he said Yemayá can have a terrible temper if you take from her without asking, but she is also fair and understanding. He waited for the turtles to drown from the struggle, and once he carried one to shore, the fishermen chopped it up for its meat and took their share, throwing the shell out to sea so there would be no trace of it for the police to find and arrest or fine them for stealing from the ocean.

  Nesto took his portion of the meat with him back to the capital to sell on the bolsa negra for three dollars a pound. His entire family could live off the profits of one turtle for over a month.

  “Pobres tortuguitas,” I’d said, with a horrified expression.

  “You don’t know hunger, Reina. You don’t know the things people will do to feed their family. I hope you never know.”

  And here he is now, ironías de la vida, assigned to fix the pump so these lucky turtle refugees in life jackets can have a nice habitat.