The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  “You could decorate it yourself,” he told me. “You could buy new furniture, better than that garbage shit we grew up with. Buy yourself a real bed and some nice pictures for the walls.”

  He was no longer insistent that it was our responsibility to look after Mami, the way he’d always been until he went to prison and she turned on him. But I couldn’t picture our mother on her own, as if, without the gravity of children, she’d become so weightless she’d be carried off by the wind.

  When we lost Carlito, after we delivered his and Hector’s ashes to the ocean below the bridge, I asked my mother what happened to the body of the daughter she’d lost between Carlito and me. I wondered if she’d been buried or if Mami had held on to her ashes too.

  We were in the old house in Miami. I was helping her pack what she’d take with her to her new life with Jerry, separating it from the things she no longer wanted, everything that would be left for me to keep or to throw away.

  My mother was quiet for a few moments before answering, then said, “I don’t know what happened to her,” as if surprised by the fact herself.

  “You don’t know or your don’t want to remember?”

  “I was alone in the hospital when I delivered her, just like I was alone when your brother was born and when you were born. Hector was here in Florida. My mother was working so she couldn’t be with me. It was in the afternoon, so that was enough to scare me because my mother told me strong babies are always born before sunrise. It was so quiet in there. I knew she wasn’t alive before they told me. They let me hold her for only a minute or two. They said any longer would make me go crazy. Then they took her from me. I was crying so much I couldn’t speak, not even to ask where they were taking her. And they never told me. I started having visions of what the hospital people could have done with her. Left her in a refrigerator, or just thrown her in the garbage, or sold her remains for brujería. It was torturing me. But then your father told me it didn’t matter where they took her because her soul never wanted to belong to that body. And she was still in heaven with other babies, waiting to be born. A year later, we had you.”

  And then, without my asking more, she said, “I should have buried her. I should have given her a name.”

  Carlito told me he looked forward to hurricanes. He would watch from his cell’s narrow window slat as wind twisted palms and curled rain, flooding prison grounds so that Carlito could pretend, if only for a moment, he was looking at the sea, imagining Colombia on the other side.

  He said those storms were the only times inmates and guards were close to equals, both held captive by the prison lockdown, unable to flee, taking in with fear and awe the great power of nature surrounding them. It was the only time the guards seemed human to him, not like the guys who regularly taunted inmates, forcing them to fight each other like dogs for their entertainment, placing bets on who would win.

  “How can they get away with such a thing?” I’d asked Carlito. “There are cameras everywhere.” I pointed to the one in the corner of the visitors’ room that monitored all our interactions.

  “The guys who work the control room know how to blow out a camera for a few hours, make it look like a short circuit or a digital glitch so the other guards can do whatever they want. They’re a fucking pandilla, Reina. They’ve all got each other’s backs.”

  But on those hurricane nights, after the power went out and even the generators stopped working, and prisoners howled through the blackness, the guards suffered confinement right along with them.

  As a family, we’d been through plenty of bad storms. We endured the blurred, watery edges of hurricanes’ outer bands as they passed over and around Florida and even a few direct hits that blasted out power lines and flooded the streets.

  But never a storm like Andrew.

  Rosita from next door came over asking Mami if she was worried. She was from Puerto Rico so she understood a hurricane’s potential to destroy. But Mami was from Cartagena, where hurricanes hadn’t hit in centuries, so she waved off Rosita’s concern, said we were too far inland to be affected by storm surges and it would just be a matter of heavy rain like every summer. They ended up smoking cigarettes and sipping agua de Jamaica in the kitchen, chismeando about the other neighbors until it was dark and the wind started to change.

  We spent the night in a closet. Mami, Carlito, and I huddled as far into the corner as we could get, behind an old trunk and the vacuum cleaner. Carlito had boarded the windows as best he could with cardboard and plywood he found in the garage. He blocked the front door with the coffee table turned on its side. When the house started shaking we went into the only windowless space, holding each other through the whistling and clapping and crashing of the wind.

  We fell asleep in one another’s arms, curled over one another’s knees, until after daybreak when we heard people out on the street shouting, wanting to know if the Castillos were safe.

  Rosita’s roof peeled and popped off like the lid on a can of sardines, but ours remained sealed to the house without even sagging where a fat palm tree fell onto it. Our windows blew out. The back door shattered. But the front door stayed intact, and this kept wind from filling the house, churning the contents like it did to many of our neighbors’ homes, splitting swimming pools, rolling cars halfway down the road. We heard on the news about people who found sharks spit from the ocean in their yards; marina boats washed onto land; houses ripped off their foundations, walls folding in like wet paper, televisions and furniture hurled miles away; trees torn from the earth; dead animals everywhere.

  Our neighborhood went weeks without electricity and water but that was nothing compared with communities farther south where few homes were left standing.

  Mami was celebrating because we were among the blessed and living. She said this time the santos were looking out for us.

  When I go up to Miami to meet my mother, she brings up the night we spent in the closet during the hurricane.

  She’s been staying with Mayra and Tío Jaime, but I told her I don’t want to see them, so we agree to meet at a restaurant on the Miami River, with a view of warehouses and passing cargo ships, saturated in the stink of the nearby fish market: a restaurant she likes because Jerry used to take her there and she wants to make it her own now. She told me on the phone she hoped I’d bring Nesto with me so she could finally meet him.

  “I don’t know why you’re being so mysterious about him. Are you afraid I’ll steal him from you?”

  She laughed, but I didn’t.

  “He has other things to do,” I told her, and it was true. He’s officially given up his room at the motel, moved in with me, and convinced Mrs. Hartley to let him give the cottage a fresh coat of paint inside and out.

  Today I find my mother sitting alone at a table by the water, sipping a cocktail. She’s cut her hair so it barely touches her shoulders, and has lost so much weight she had the nerve to put on a flamingo-pink dress with a buttoned bodice she bought twenty years ago, and a pair of strappy silver heels that I borrowed from her a few times as a teenager, before I had the cash to buy my own. Seeing her there, all dressed up and sitting alone at the restaurant, I remember how she used to say her beauty would have been better served in some other life.

  A young waiter approaches the table and the way she throws her head back in laughter at something he says makes me sad for her. She doesn’t stand up to hug me when she sees me, just wraps her arms around my neck when I lean down to kiss her, and I feel the stickiness of her lipstick streaking my cheek.

  When I sit down, she holds my hand across the table like she’s afraid I might make a run for it.

  I hold her fingers tightly too. I’ve come prepared with things I want to say.

  She starts with talk about an apartment she saw up in Aventura with two bedrooms, so I can move in whenever I’m ready. It’s on the ocean, with a pool and a tennis court, she says, and I wonder when she’
s going to stop torturing herself by looking at places she can’t afford on her own. She’s started seeing another bruja—the one on Brickell all the celebrities go to, had to wait a month for the appointment and pay four hundred dollars for the hour—who predicted better fortunes for her, advising Mami that taking up tennis would be the key to meeting the next man in her life. But just as quickly as she gets excited describing her future as a lady with a condo, she becomes nostalgic for the old neighborhood, launching into the barrio gossip she picked up from Mayra and her posse of lenguonas, about people who are divorcing or having affairs, second families discovered or secret children showing up.

  Then, through the appetizer and even the main course, she moves on to her list of the sick, dying, and dead.

  “I almost forgot,” she says. “You know who died? La Cassiani.”

  “Universo’s mother?”

  “Esa misma. They took her to the hospital with chest pains and the doctors finished killing her with some infection. The son went to bury her in Santa Lucía. Mayra heard it was a beautiful funeral with a vallenato band and everything.”

  She moves on to another story, about some fulano de tal, a male neighbor of Mayra and Jaime’s, who asked her on a date, but I can think only of Universo’s mother, who wasn’t much older than mine though she always seemed more aged by her life’s disappointments; how she’d stare me down as if that were enough to keep me away from her son, how she brought the daughters and granddaughters of her friends to her house, niñas de buena familia, hoping Universo would choose to be with one of them over a mala like me, as if she knew something about both my past and my future that I didn’t.

  Mami stops herself in the middle of a thought about whether or not the guy is as completely divorced as he says, as if suddenly disoriented, glancing around the restaurant, then back at me.

  “Listen to me. I go on and on. I’m becoming one of those viejitas who talks to themselves. Soon you’re going to find me having conversations with the television.”

  She looks embarrassed, something new for her. My mother is a woman of congenital confidence, armor built into the rust of her complexion. I watch as she rearranges herself in her seat, looks down at her breasts, adjusts the straps of her bra. When finished, she reaches for my hand again, pulls it close to her mouth, and kisses my knuckles before letting go.

  “I want to tell you something. Do you remember the night we spent in the closet together during the hurricane? You were both big by then, but I held you to my heart as if you were two babies. Do you remember?”

  I nod. But more than that, I remember my brother and me, with all the force and strength we had, mooring her with our child bodies, holding on to her as if the gusts might tear her away and then we’d be left with no parents at all.

  “I never prayed as hard in all my life as I did that night,” she says. “I prayed the wind would spare our house and the roof would stay on tight. I didn’t think it would. Your father and Jaime built that roof themselves. I thought, Tonight, Hector will succeed in killing us all. But I prayed with everything I had, Reina. I told God if He saved us that night and kept a roof on our house so we would have a place to live the next day, I would never ask for anything ever again. After that night in the closet, I believed my faith saved us, even if my prayers, enough for several lifetimes, weren’t enough to save your brother later, when he really needed them. You remember how much I prayed and prayed when Carlito was arrested. I made so many promises. But Diosito had already saved Carlito twice. Once from your father, and then from the storm. And maybe my prayers aren’t worth much after all. I’m just a stupid woman. I’ve made so many mistakes of my own. What I’m trying to tell you, what I’ve wanted to say to you for a long time, is that a mother can’t always save her children. That’s what I learned from everything that happened to us. You each had to save yourselves. Your brother couldn’t, but you did, mi Reina. You did.”

  Her eyes are watery and she puts a napkin to them before her eyeliner has a chance to smudge, then dips her fingers into her water glass, dabbing droplets along her neck as if it will be enough to cool her off.

  “Mami.”

  She lifts her hair off her neck and fans herself. “Why did we come to this restaurant? It’s so hot. We should have gone somewhere with air conditioning.”

  “Mami,” I try again. I want to reach for her hands as she did with me, but I can’t bring myself to do it. We are sitting at a tiny table for two, but she feels so far from me, as if I have to shout for her to hear me.

  “Mami, please listen to what I’m going to tell you.”

  I pause to make sure I have her full attention but am afraid if I wait too long, the words will slip back down my throat to the place in my gut where I’ve been holding them for so long.

  “It’s my fault Carlito did what he did. I’m the one who told him about Isabela. It was me. And it wasn’t true. I lied, Mami. I lied and he believed me.”

  I lean back, letting the truth rest on the table between us.

  My mother watches me without a trace of surprise in her eyes, though I know this doesn’t mean much. She isn’t one to give anything away; emotions are as valuable and as vital to her as money.

  “Why?” she finally whispers.

  “He loved her so much. I thought he would choose her over us. I didn’t want him to leave us.”

  She sighs and closes her eyes for several seconds. When she opens them, it’s as if we are somewhere else, not at a restaurant on the river with me confessing, but back in the old house, sitting across the wooden kitchen table, me still carrying the secret of my regret.

  Maybe if she were another kind of mother she might offer solace, words of comfort; tell me something that could release me from my shame; say something like, Reina, you could not have known he would take what you told him and do what he did. You never could have known.

  But the woman across from me is Amandina de Castillo, wife of Hector and mother of Reina and Carlito.

  The only thing she knows to say in response is, “We should make a promise to each other never to speak of those days again. No matter what.”

  “I’m not going to promise that.”

  “I don’t want to remember those things anymore. Please, if you love me at all, Reina, let me forget. Have mercy on your poor mami. I beg you.”

  We watch each other until she breaks her gaze, looks to the water and to the sky, darkening with granite clouds.

  “It looks like rain is coming.”

  I nod. “I’ve got a long drive south.”

  “I wish you would stay.”

  I don’t know if she means this afternoon, waiting out the rain together, or if she means longer, maybe forever, starting yet another life with her here in Miami.

  “I can’t. I have to go home.”

  We stand together on the street outside the restaurant, not far from the coil of lots under the interstate, once a tent city that housed Mariel refugees. My mother hugs me, her arms falling around my waist, her cheek hitting my shoulders.

  I remember when I was a child and could only reach as high as her hips, how I’d cushion myself against her thighs, lean on her as she talked to people, how she’d grip my hand tight through crowds, hold me on her lap as we watched her telenovelas and she dreamed up other lives for us.

  She seems so fragile to me now, unsteady in her heels; even her bangles and earrings look too big for her. In her face, I see traces of my grandmother and I suspect, by the way she looks back at me, as if I am a photograph and not her daughter in the flesh, that she sees one of her old faces in mine too.

  She is so small in our embrace that I feel as if I am carrying her, but when I let go, I feel her arms tighten and strengthen. Then it’s as if my mother is carrying me.

  A few months before he died, Carlito was in one of his moods. We faced each other in the visitors’ room at the prison and he waited a long
time to speak to me. I did all the talking, telling him about my dumb life painting nails. He stared back at me, his eyebrows dipped, nose wrinkled, lips tight like he was ready to spit. When I finally shut up, he shook his head at me as if I were some pitiful thing.

  “I should have died the day Hector threw me off the bridge. That fucking Cuban should have let me drown. We all would have been better off.”

  Sometimes I wondered if the reason Carlito never took the blame for his crime was that he didn’t blame himself, but blamed me, for sending him off in a rage that day. I didn’t know what he was capable of. If I had known, I would have tried to stop it. I would have called Isabela and told her Carlito was on his way to her house and not to open the door. His fury would have passed. He would have returned to his normal self and nothing would have been lost.

  That day in the prison, with my brother’s dimmed face in front of me, I said something I’d never said in all the years I spent visiting him, or through any of my letters or phone calls.

  “Forgive me, Carlito.”

  I thought he would pardon me for failing him, for failing us, but the brother I once knew, who even in his brutality could be tender, loving, and gentle, looked away from me to the guard standing by the door, and to the clock on the wall behind me.

  “What do you want me to say, Reina?”

  He shrugged so abruptly his handcuffs dragged against the metal table, making a grating sound I’ll never forget.

  I don’t know if he knew what I meant with my request, or if it meant anything to him. I wish I could have said more that day. If I’d had the right words, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so exposed yet smothered by the filthy starkness of the prison walls, the guard taking in everything we said to one another.

  We were quiet until Carlito said he had a headache. The bright lights of the visitors’ room burned his eyes too much and gave him a migraine.

  “You don’t mind if I leave our visit early, do you?”