Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“Your client’s at the table already,” Gemma, my boss, sticks her head in to warn me. She’s a mostly kind Trinidadian lady but her voice holds a kind of schoolteacher severity, like she might send you to detention.

I step out into the manicure area and, before she even lifts her head up or shows her face through the curtain of caramel hair falling into the folds of her plush white spa robe, my chest tightens in a familiar but forgotten way; I know with absolute certainty that the woman waiting for me at the table is Isabela.

I step back into the locker room and feel my throat closing. I sit on a bench and count until I’ve got my breath under control. I don’t know why my body reacts this way. I’ve seen Isabela plenty of times over the years and even during the worst moments of the trial, like the day she was called to testify against Carlito, and the following week, when it was my turn, and I lied under oath saying there was no way Carlito could have done what he was being tried for while she watched me from her place on the wooden bench between her parents, the three of them shaking their heads at me.

“It’s wrong to lie with your hand on the Bible, you know,” my mother warned me as I drove us to court that morning.

“So is asking a sister to testify against her brother.”

“It’s not just a sin, it’s a crime. You could get into very big trouble.”

“I don’t care,” I said, because Carlito would not be taking the stand in his own defense and I knew my testimony would be his only hope.

So I lied, as the judge, jury, and spectators watched me, but the only eyes I felt on me were Isabela’s.

Even then, I never felt so stunned by the sight of her.

Gemma pokes her head back in the door. “Reina, what’s taking you so long?”

I don’t answer so she comes closer, standing over me on the bench, a small woman with a suddenly large shadow.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t take care of that client.”

“Why not?”

“I know her.”

“What’s the problem? If you know her, all the better.”

I picture myself going back into the spa, sitting down across from Isabela, taking her hand in mine to clean and prepare her nails, how I’ll try to avoid her eyes, make the burden of small talk pass as quickly as possible. She’ll ask what I’m doing here. I’ll ask what she’s doing here, especially on Christmas, which she always spent with her parents, forever la consentida, and when she was still Carlito’s girlfriend, she even invited Mami and me to join them for their Christmas lunch. I refused to go, saying I was no arrimada and didn’t need her charity, but Mami and Carlito went without me.

Or we’ll talk about the weather, the island scenery; she’ll ask about my mother, and I’ll ask about her parents, her new husband, and the kids she had after Carlito killed Shayna.

The thought of it all makes me dizzy.

“You don’t understand,” I say to Gemma. “That lady and me. We have a complicated history.”

“I told you when I hired you, I don’t want to know anything about your personal life, and I don’t want it in my spa.”

“I can’t go out there.”

“I don’t have anyone else to do it, Reina. You either go in there and take care of the client or you take your things out of your locker and I’ll notify H.R. of your refusal to work. The choice is yours.”

I keep quiet but stand up, open up my locker, and pull out my bag.

“I’m warning you,” Gemma says as she watches me. “We don’t do second chances around here.”

I consider telling her the truth. But what can I say? I don’t want to paint Isabela’s nails because my brother threw her daughter off a bridge?

I hate Carlito more than ever at this moment because, even though he committed the crime, and even though he’s dead, I’m still the one who has to do the confessing.

“So?” Nesto says when he pulls up to the lobby. “What happened?”

I didn’t explain anything when I called to ask him to come back for me.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say once I climb into the truck.

I try to be tough about it, bite my tongue and chew my inner cheeks until I taste blood. I don’t cry. It’s not that I’m incapable. Tears only come every few years and the last time was over Carlito’s coffin, which wasn’t so long ago. But here in Nesto’s truck, pushing along the Overseas Highway though I have no idea where we are going, I feel my throat swell and my eyes sizzle with restrained tears. I ask Nesto to pull over—command him, really — and he eases onto a patch of road by some mangroves suspended over the marsh. A couple of bird-watchers squat a few yards down, their binoculars fixed on an ibis wading in sea grass.

I couldn’t be further away from my brother, from the old life, but it’s as if I’m still sitting across the table from him in the visitors’ room at the prison, studying his face, looking for those features that were once identical to mine, trying to see him as he was now without forgetting who he used to be.

And there was Isabela. Once my friend. Once my brother’s enamorada.

Years ago, when both our families were awaiting the judge’s sentencing, Isabela came to see me at work. The jurors had already found Carlito guilty. It only took a day of deliberation. Seven out of twelve of the jurors had recommended he be sentenced to death, and in Florida you only need a majority even though practically everywhere else they still execute people the jury has to be unanimous. Mami and I were still hopeful the judge would at least offer Carlito life and maybe even with the possibility of parole. Isabela’s parents had given a statement to reporters that appeared on the front page of the newspaper that morning saying they and all their relatives prayed for my brother’s death every day. Isabela apologized to me for their hatred. She said she didn’t want Carlito to die and no way would she ever go to witness his execution, even if her parents dragged her. She said she would never wish for me the pain he’d caused her by taking her daughter away, and even though he’d never taken full responsibility and had never asked for it — not yet at least — she’d already forgiven Carlito because she had faith he could not have understood what he was doing up there on the bridge that day, to baby Shayna, to her, to us all.

“We’ll get through this, Reina,” she said, putting her arms around me, but I’d remained limp, unable to hug her back. “You and I are like swans. We swim though shit, but we’ll come out clean.”

I wanted to believe her.

I wanted to confess to her the words that filled my mind when I saw her.

Isabela, I’m the one who did this to you.

Nesto puts his hand on my shoulder and his touch, the warmth of his large hand, feels like an unbearable weight on me and I crumple forward into my palms, until I am breathless. I open the car door, lowering myself onto the grass below. Nesto’s footsteps follow me but I hide my face, swallowing hard, trying to mute my sobbing, rubbing away the tears before they hit my cheek.

I feel his body shell around me, holding me, until I finally whisper, though it comes out more like a moan, that I saw her, Isabela, and Nesto asks who that is.

“The mother,” I say. “The mother of the baby my brother killed.”

I tell him I am ashamed, so ashamed, of who I am because it’s not who I am, it’s who my brother made me.

“It’s not your fault, Reina. You’re not responsible for what he did.”

“Yes, I am,” I manage to mutter, unable to meet his face.

My cheeks press into my knees until my eye sockets ache and when the tears finally let up, I look up to see my shoes in the grass, a beetle making its way up my pants leg.