Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

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.

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.