Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

I don’t believe in omens. I believe we choose our own signs, so I take this one as my own: with this blaze, I leave my old life up here on the mainland in ashes.

Because, for now, I’ve got no other place to go, I take a room in the South Glades Seaside Motel, dingy as ever, but I still feel a kind of loyalty to the place.

It’s Friday and the motel is already filling up with the old crew, familiar faces, the women I grew up with as a prison sister even if we never shared more than a few words. Women I waited in line with, all of us watching each other as we exited the penitentiary at the end of visiting hours with that same look of aching hope and fatigue, making our way back to the motel. Women who, unlike me, are still serving their time with the ones they love.

People have this idea that it’s hard to start a new life but it’s actually pretty easy. I tell myself if my parents could change countries without speaking the language, I can migrate too. I circle ads in the local paper and take down numbers from the bulletin board at the Laundromat, and hit a string of appointments to see a series of moldy, desolate concrete apartments in high-rises that sprouted during the housing boom and were left empty by the recession, some beachside motel efficiencies, and a couple of garden park trailers along the water that wobble under the slightest November breeze, forget about when the hurricanes come. But I know there has to be something better around here.

Before I left, a client from the job I quit back in the Gables told me to visit a friend of hers, Julie, a Canadian transplant who caught “Keys Disease” and decided to stay, running one of those shops on the Overseas Highway in Crescent Key that sell shined-up conch shells and mailboxes painted to look like flamingos. Crescent Key is one of the smallest islands, halfway down the boa of the Keys, between the marshes of Card Sound Road and the cruise ship crowds of Key West. It’s small enough to feel like an afterthought of an island, one that most people driving down the Overseas Highway don’t even notice passing through, but close enough to Marathon, one of the larger and more developed islands with big chain stores and twenty-four-hour pharmacies, and far enough from Carlito’s prison for me to sometimes forget it’s there.

“I heard you were coming,” Julie smiles at me when I arrive, as if with her whole body, from her rumrunner-paunch to her perma-flushed cheeks.

My client vouched for me. Told Julie I was clean-living and responsible. Turns out her friend Louise Hartley is looking for just that sort of tenant for a cottage on her property, a former coco plum tree plantation on the tiny island of Hammerhead that breaks off just before the bridge at Crescent Key Cut.

Julie gives a call ahead and sends me right over to see her.

Mrs. Hartley is waiting on her pebbled driveway when I pull up. She’s got straw-blond hair, wears waxy makeup, and is dressed in tennis whites. She wants to know if I’ve ever been arrested (no), if I do drugs (no), if I’ve got a husband or kids (no and no).

She leans in close and lowers her voice like she’s hoping for a confession.

“You got a man on your tail? Maybe a boyfriend you’re trying to keep away from? Anything like that?”

“There’s nobody. Only me.”

She twists her thin lips like she’s still deciding on whether to give me a shot.

“You got a job down here yet?”

“I’ll start looking once I’m settled.”

“Where are you staying for now?”

“Up at the South Glades Motel.”

“The one by the prison?”

I nod and she looks scandalized.

“Be careful. Lots of strange people pass through there. People you’ll want to avoid, if you know what I mean.”

I raise my eyebrows at the revelation.

“You got to get out of there, honey.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“How do you plan on paying rent if you don’t have a job lined up yet?”

“I’ve got some money saved.”

“I’ll need three months’ rent up front.”

“That’s fine.”

“All right then. Follow me.”

She leads me down a path framed by banana trees and palms to a cottage on the far end of the property facing the ocean and a small dock.

“I should mention the cottage has never been rented out,” Mrs. Hartley says, adding, in a tone that I think is supposed to resemble modesty, “Our family doesn’t really need the money. We just want someone on this side of Hammerhead to keep out squatters or vandals who come in on boats through the canal. I’m here alone most of the time. My husband works in Philadelphia and only comes down a few times a year.”

The vegetation is so thick it’s almost eating the cottage, which is small and yellow, with white shuttered windows and a small veranda that opens onto a narrow beach. As we get closer, the sounds in the trees grow louder, caws, the rustling of animals crossing branches. I see two flecks of red swoop through a patch of light from one tree to another.

“Holy shit.”

“Parrots,” Mrs. Hartley tells me proudly. “We’ve got a few pairs. God only knows where they came from, but they’ve made themselves right at home. Like those huge iguanas you see around, the African rats, or even those pythons everyone’s hunting in the Everglades. It’s easy to forget what’s natural to the area anymore.”

The cottage is one room with a small bathroom built into a corner and a kitchenette along one wall, definitely a step up from the places I’ve seen so far. It comes furnished too, with wicker furniture and a double bed pushed into a corner. I won’t have to take any of my own furniture out of storage. It’s a relief to start fresh.

“Don’t mind the stink,” she says, opening up all the windows and doors, though I don’t notice the faint smell of sewage till she points it out. “That’s from outside. The tide’s low and sometimes seaweed accumulates under the dock. It’ll wash away soon. That’s island living for you.”

She watches me as I poke around, open cabinets and closet doors, peek out the window, see the ocean spread beyond the thicket of trees.

“The water pressure’s good and the kitchen is stocked with more pots and pans than you’ll probably ever need. You’ll have to get a PO box in town and garbage collection is every Thursday by the main driveway. There are flashlights, flares, and a blow horn in the broom closet. You know, for the storms. But for most hurricanes we have mandatory evacuations. I assume you’ve got somewhere on the peninsula where you can go in that case.”

I nod, though I’m not sure I do.

She works a little harder at the sell, but I know this is all I need.

My first night in the cottage, I wait to see what sounds fill the evening as the sun slips behind the Hammerhead coco plum forest into the gulf. I step out onto the veranda to get a dose of sunlight before nightfall and make my way down the stone path toward the small cove of beach. Beyond it, on the other side of a coral wall and past a row of leggy mangroves, the Hartley house towers over the shoreline.

A flock of pelicans glides over me, probably some of the dozens that gather to hunt for fish and rest their wings along the valley of wooden boat stumps by the bridge at Crescent Key Cut, landing on my dock as if it already belongs to them too.

I sit on the beach and stare out at the water. Facing east, the sun disappearing behind me, I watch the sea darken with shadows, feel the sand cool under my feet.

The ocean is different down here. On the mainland, the curling bay water is a deep blue and even on the shallow edges of shore it only clears to a pale green. The waves folding into the open ocean grow thicker and peak higher as you head farther north, a menacing rush in the current, the wind splitting waves that could push you under with the force of a hundred men.