Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

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, before 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.