Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

Now, instead of meeting me in the kitchen with a plate of food on a Sunday night, she gives me a phone call. She always calls on the cottage line and rarely my cell phone since the reception is spotty out here on Hammerhead.

She says she wants to know that I’m okay.

“It’s not normal for a girl to be living on her own in the middle of nowhere, Reinita.”

She thinks I should move to a city, somewhere where there are cultured people, people going places, and I know she means people with money.

“Have you met anyone?”

“I’ve made a few friends.” I’m lying, and my mother knows it. We can leverage men well enough, and maybe keep a few women as acquaintances, but never real friends. The only contender here is Nesto, who, so far, hasn’t made a move on me, which makes me both grateful and suspicious. But maybe that’s how real friends happen.

I watch him sitting on my sofa, thumbing through an old copy of National Geographic from a stack that was in a corner of the cottage when I moved in. I twist the plastic telephone cord around my finger while my mother moves on to the next item on her agenda: Nochebuena.

“We’re expecting you. I hope you can stay with us at least a few days this time.”

“I don’t think I can get the time off from the spa.”

“Nobody works on Christmas.”

“It’s a hotel. They’re open every day, and I just started. I can’t go taking vacation days anytime I want.”

In truth, I haven’t even tried asking for the day off and I don’t plan to. Mami knows I’m no fan of Jerry, whose real name is Jerónimo. He came over from Puerto Rico as a teenager but when he’s around people he deems real gringos, pretends he doesn’t speak Spanish, as if English is the language of the gods. He treats his generic townhouse like a palace, shoes off upon entry, constantly running his finger over ledges, checking for dust the weekly cleaning lady or my mother might have left behind. He’s no beauty either, a real carechimba with smushed features like they put him facedown at birth, and teeth veneers that look like he bought them at a hardware store.

“So you’ll spend Christmas all alone?”

I’ve still got an eye on Nesto, absorbed by some photo spread on orangutans.

“I’ll figure something out.”

There’s a pause. The obvious thing would be for my mother to offer to visit me, see how her daughter lives, spend a little time together during the holidays. But I know Jerry won’t travel this far for me and Mami has entered the stage in which she’s reluctant to go too far for too long without her man. Age has made her a little paranoid. Ahora que consiguió marrano, no way is she going to risk letting him get away.

Instead she changes the subject. She tells me Jerry’s been saying this might be the year he finally proposes to her. Why he’d bother is a wonder. She’s already as wifey as she’s ever going to be, and it bugs me how he hangs it over her, like having to serve his pinga for life is some kind of honor.

Mami never had a real wedding — not the kind you celebrate. She was nineteen when Hector claimed her in Cartagena and she was already pregnant with Carlito when they had their marriage ceremony at a church in Barranquilla, where nobody knew them. There was no party because her mother thought it shameful that Mami was already showing barriga. Now, with Carlito gone, there’s no reason to remember that day, and at fifty, she might finally get her dream of wearing a white gown. She’s talking venues and color schemes, never mind that she’s got hardly anyone to invite. She says I’ll be her maid of honor. She’ll buy me a special dress and everything. I want to tell her that we are not that kind of family. We’re not of rituals or celebrations. We are people who live day by day. But I remain silent.

When we hang up, I sigh long and look out the window to the darkness over the ocean, no delineation between water and sky. It’s always disorienting when I speak to my mother, that pull of her voice back into our old life even though both of us have tried to move beyond it.

In her soft Caribbean accent I hear my brother’s laughter, see us both as children playing together in the backyard when it was still covered in crunchy green grass and our toys were new.

Mami’s voice was the song of our home, even with no father, even as we lived with that black mass of the unspoken, even with the marks on our bones we didn’t know we carried.

Through all life’s uncertainty, we felt anchored by the love in her voice.

Carlito worshipped her, always picking flowers for her, and when he was old enough, stealing jewelry for her from the local Walmart and later even nicer stores. He never dreamed that one day she would take her love away from him, that the love of a mother is not unconditional or eternal the way they say.

The voice we were raised with, the voice that lulled us through the night, was just a voice, not a promise or a prayer.

Mami was just a woman trying to take care of two kids she’d had by a man she hated. That’s all.

“¿Todo bien?” Nesto asks from behind me when I hang up the phone.

I turn to him and nod. “Yeah. Everything’s fine.”

He made his own Sunday family phone call this morning. I met him for coffee at Conchita’s and then waited for him by the post office as he used a phone card to call Cuba from a pay phone. I watched him lean into the vestibule, press his fingers to his temples, his hands moving animatedly at one point, and then his head sink while he nodded as if the person he was talking to could see him. When he came back to me at the plastic table where I was sitting, I’d asked the same thing. “¿Todo bien?”

He smiled but sighed. “Normal. Everything is normal .”

“Come on, Reina,” Nesto says to me now. “Let’s go for a walk.”

We step down the stone path toward the beach. There’s no wind so the December chill doesn’t penetrate our clothing. We walk to the water’s edge, stand on the wet sand, hard from the low tide, cold through my sneaker soles.

Nesto lives on the beach too, over on the northeast end of Crescent Key, in one of those trailer park motels I checked out when I first arrived, a single-occupancy efficiency in the main building with little furniture but a great view of the open Atlantic. The only problem is that the property is full of drunks and drifters, each night is a symphony of arguments and shouts, and he always wakes up to a garden of broken bottles.

He likes my little chunk of the Hammerhead peninsula better. Out here it’s like the world forgot us, or like we can forget the world.

I sit on a mound of dry sand while Nesto walks along the shoreline, as if looking for a road with which to cross the water.

“Reina. Can I ask you why you came down here? I mean, why did you leave where you’re from?”

It takes me a moment to respond. We’ve managed to talk around certain things so far, but I decide to try the truth tonight, or at least a part of it.

“I had no reason to stay after. .”

“After what?”

“After my brother died.”

“How did he go?”

I like the way he says it, as if Carlito just left on a trip and might still return.

“He killed himself. Our father went the same way. And our father’s father too.”

He nods as if he’s not all that surprised.

“How. . how did. .”

“My brother? He hanged himself.” I leave out that the pipe he used belonged to a prison. “Our grandfather hanged himself too.”

“And your father?”

“He slit his throat.”

Nesto draws in his breath. I can tell he’s trying not to look shocked for my sake.

“So they’re good with ropes and knives, the men in your family.”