Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

I lost touch with Universo. In the years since, I’ve hardly dated anyone in the sense that he likes me and I like him and the guy makes an effort to treat me nice by consistently taking me to public places like restaurants or movies or to a park, not just home or to a hotel room. I’ve only had that sort of treatment two or three times in my life and it’s always been short-lived, never a meet-the-parents situation. The last time was with Pedro the Peruano, who worked in the electronics store next to my salon in the Gables. He came on strong, bringing flowers to my job, until I agreed to go out with him. He took me to a steak house in the Grove and then we walked along Grand Avenue and he bought a rose for me from some guy selling them from a plastic bucket. We had a few more nights like that and I thought it was nice, this slow pace. It was something new for me. But then he stopped calling and when I went to his job to see if he was still alive, he pretended I was just another customer and asked a coworker to help me.

There have always been other men. I don’t go out looking for them. They just sort of appear. But I’m good at figuring out what they want right away, and it’s usually a quick turnaround. They want me in bed. They want the feeling of love and lust, but confined to an hour or two, or maybe, once in a while, a whole night. Sometimes I know they’re juggling me along with a few others, or maybe just just shuffling the deck with me and a wife or a girlfriend. I’m not picky about marriage or those kinds of rules. I would be if I were the married one. I think I would be the most faithful woman in the whole world. But I’ve never been given the chance.

I don’t believe in maldiciones but I have to admit, so far that old bruja has been right about my lovelessness. Maybe somebody did a trabajo or hechizo on me to make sure I stay alone.

I don’t want to sound like one of those girls crying about boys leaving me. I told my mother once, when she asked why I never keep a regular boyfriend, joking that all I need to do is find a guy with an even messier life than mine, that I’m like one of those dealers at the Magic City Casino blackjack tables. I know there are only a few ways for the cards to fall. I don’t like to lose, so I give only pieces of myself away. The pieces I know they like, the pieces they can handle. The girl who smiles in spite of everything. The one who can shimmy out of a bra without undoing the hooks, who knows what a guy wants even before he knows it.

The rest, the life I lived only for my brother, the life locked in memories of what we were before , I keep only for me.

But then Universo reappears. He hears I’ve sold the house. He stops by on one of my final days here to see for himself. He looks older, but I guess we all do, his thinning hair smoothed back with gel and about thirty new American pounds on him. He’s upgraded from his motorcycle to an old Jeep and tells me he’s now working as a forklift operator at the Port of Miami, loading and unloading the cargo of ships from China. I invite him in and it isn’t long before old habits take over. He’s not wearing a ring but tells me, once we’re both already naked, that he’s married, not to the rich girl but to some caleña who works at a day care in Doral.

“I don’t care,” I say, so his guilt won’t get in the way.

Afterward, he’s in no hurry to leave my bed and holds me against his chest like we’re supposed to be falling in love or something.

“You’re like no other girl I’ve ever known, Reina.”

“I’m like every girl you’ve known if she’d been stuck with my life.”

He starts getting turned on and wants to go at it again but stops abruptly, as if he’s suddenly remembered who I am and that he came here to say good-bye.

“So where are you going to go?” He glances around my room, all packed up and spare as a cell.

“I don’t know.”

“You could go back to Cartagena.”

“There’s nothing there for me anymore.”

“It’s the place where you were born. You’ll always have that.”

There was a time when we dreamed of returning there to live, Mami, Carlito, and me. We idealized Cartagena all year long as Mami saved up for our summer trips, but when we got there, it was never the way we wanted it to be — too hot, too rainy, too full of pueblo chisme, too grim, too hopeless. Still, during our prison visits, Carlito liked to conjure stories from the Cartagena of our nostalgia and made me swear that if he never got the chance to go back, I’d go for him.

When it was time to release his ashes, I told our mother maybe we should scatter them in Cartagena, spread Carlito onto the beaches of Bocagrande, or mix him into some concrete and push him into the pavement on our old block, mold him into the plaster or bricks of the bedroom where we slept as babies, or dust him into the trees along the hillside of La Popa.

Maybe we should have buried him next to Abuela in Santa Lucía, or at least grounded him into the soil over her grave. But Mami insisted it was better like this — it made more sense to let him go at the bridge where he and Hector had each found their end — and by releasing him into the ocean here in Florida, we could still be sure his ashes would somehow find their way across the Caribbean back home to Cartagena.

I will go back one day.

For him. For me. For all of us.

But not now. Not like this.

“I want to go someplace where nobody knows me,” I tell Universo.

“If things were different, I would go away with you. We could have an adventure.”

“But they’re not different,” I say, because I hate it when men start the fantasy thing in bed. All kinds of impossibilities hardly worth contemplating.

“Make sure you tell me before you go.”

“Why?”

“So I’ll know where to find you.”

I don’t tell him the point of my leaving is that I don’t want to be found.

We kiss because it seems like the thing to do, and lie together a while longer while night falls. Outside, I hear the cars of the neighborhood people pulling into their driveways, husbands, wives, and children home in time for dinner.

Universo starts to fidget beside me.

“It’s okay. You can leave if you want to.”

“I don’t want to,” he says, and I believe him until he sits up, gives me his bare back, grabs his rumpled boxers from the floor, pulls them on, and then his jeans.

His is a body that I knew thin and boyish, and now, thick and mannish. In some way, I think it’s nice our bodies have grown up together.

He says he’ll come see me again before I clear out for good.

He doesn’t, but neither does anybody else.

My coworkers at the salon see me off on my last day with a cake as if we are celebrating a birthday. From Tío Jaime and Mayra, I get a phone call. “We just want to wish you well,” Mayra says. We don’t talk much these days. I think when they see me they see a souvenir of pain. So it’s not like I expect a farewell party, but I’d hoped somebody would be there to watch me go, to somehow mark the moment of my leaving my lifelong home.

Instead, nothing happens.

The sky is cloudless and empty except for the autumn sun and a sliver of daytime moon, the neighborhood hum uninterrupted by my loading the car trunk with two suitcases like I’m going on vacation, not shopping for a new life, locking the house behind me, and pulling out of the driveway for the last time.

I am my only witness.

The Everglades are on fire on my final drive down to the Keys. On the curve of the turnpike where the pineapple groves end and marshland begins, I watch the green horizon burn with helicopters bobbing overhead, fighting the flames. It’s too late in the season to be a wildfire. The radio says some thrill-torcher is responsible.