Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

But I tell Dr. Joe my brother was mostly a good brother because he never did dirty things to me like the brothers of some of my friends. And when a girl from school started bullying me in the eighth grade, saying I was an ugly junior puta, Carlito went over to her house one night with a wrestling mask on his face, crept into her room, and beat her out of her sleep.

Nobody ever found out it was him.

He did that for me.

Joe — he told me to stop calling him doctor but I keep forgetting — thinks I’m confused. He buys me beers and told me he’s thirty-two, which is really not much older than my age, twenty-three. He’s from Boston, which he says is nothing like South Florida. He might even be cute if he got a normal haircut, not his side-parted dusty brown shag, and lost those round glasses that look like they belong in 1985. He has a condo in Key Largo and sometimes invites me there. Just yesterday he said I could sleep there if I wanted, so I don’t have to spend all my money at the prison motel. I said thanks, but no thanks. I make good enough money to pay for this piece of paradise.

“You’re real pretty,” he said last night when I walked him to his car on the gravel driveway outside the lobby. “You got a boyfriend up there in Miami?”

“No, I come with a whole lot of baggage, if you know what I mean.”

I was thinking specifically about the last guy, Lorenzo, a plastic surgeon who picked me up at Pollo Tropical. We went for dinner a few times and when we finally fucked at a hotel, he told me he’d do my tetas free if I promised to tell everyone they were his work. Then he wanted to take me to Sanibel for a few days, but I said my weekends were reserved for Carlito.

I still remember his eyes when I explained.

“You’re Carlos Castillo’s sister?”

That was the end of that.

Joe laughed as if I’d meant the baggage thing as a joke, and then swallowed his smile when he realized I hadn’t.

“You’re a great girl. Any man would be lucky to be with you.”

I smiled at Joe, even though I feel like people only say shit like that when they know you’re already a lost cause.

I paint nails just like my mother and her mother before her. I just realized as I’m telling you this that we’re a family of all sorts of inheritances. Between us, we still have the house. Mami owns it free and clear even though she pawned all her jewelry years ago, and if you were to ask her, she’d say the only valuable things she has are her santos and crucifixes. After Carlito went to prison, Mami converted his room into a shrine to the pope, which is fine with me. She replaced all of Carlito’s football trophies and car posters with framed prints of His Holiness, books, and postcards of the Vatican. Her big dream is to go to Mass at St. Peter’s one day and I think that’s good for her. It’s good for you to dream about things that will probably never happen. That’s why I still have this picture in my head of the prison board recommending clemency for Carlito, and the governor waking up one morning and deciding to give a pardon to my brother, as if in his sleep God wrote onto his heart that there’s this boy down in the Glades who deserves a second chance, commuting his sentence to life, and maybe even with the possibility of parole. But stuff like that just doesn’t happen.

I work at a fancy salon in the Gables. On Fridays, I pack up my bag, stuff it in the trunk of my Camry, and, after my last client of the evening, get on the turnpike and drive south so I can spend the night at the motel and get up at four the next morning to be among the first visitors to check in for the day visits at the prison. Each visit is only an hour long and has to be approved in advance. Sometimes we get to stretch it longer if the guard is feeling merciful. Carlito is allowed two visits a week. That’s my Saturday and Sunday. The other girls at the salon tell me I should take a weekend off, do something for myself for a change, but I say, “What kind of person would I be if I abandoned my brother?” I’m the only thing that reminds him he is human and not a caged animal.

After I drive through the prison gate, past the twenty-foot walls topped with razor wire, the barren valley marked by gun towers; after the searches, filling out forms, the X-ray machine, the patting down by guards, and checking my bag into a locker, I’m sitting in a windowless concrete room, at a small table across from my brother. Most death row guys get strict noncontact visits, forced to sit behind a Plexiglas partition. But we’re fortunate that we get to sit face-to-face and he cups his hands around mine, strokes my knuckles with his fingertips, and asks me what’s going on in the world outside of this place.

“I think Mami and Jerry are going to get married. If she does, she’ll want to sell the house, which means I’ve got to find my own place.”

“You should move out of that house anyway. Start fresh somewhere. That house is full of bad spirits.”

“No, after you went away, Mami had it blessed by a priest.”

He shakes his head. There are more tiny wrinkles around his eyelids and buried in the corners of his lips than ever before.

“How’s work?”

“The same. I’m getting famous for my acrylics. Better than Mami ever was.”

“That’s my Reina.”

My brother drops his face onto the table and I stroke the back of his bald head, his bare neck, run my fingers on the edge of his blue prison suit.

“I’m dying,” he says without lifting his head.

I kiss the back of his head, and the guard who’s been watching us from his perch along the wall steps forward and slams his hand on the table.

“No contact,” he says. “I always let it slide with you two, but you always push it.”

Carlito pulls his head up and sits as erect as a man about to be executed.

“She’s my sister, man.”

I give the guard my prize eyes that make him soften and say, “One minute.”

He always does this for us.

Carlito stands and I rise and go to him. Before his cuffs get chained back to his waist, he lifts up his arms so that I can slip under them and then he drops them so I feel the bulk of his cuffs sitting on the curve of my back, on top of my hips. I press my body to his chest and Carlito’s biceps tighten around me, his head drops into my hair and I press my cheek to his neck. We stay like this until the guard bangs the surface of the table again.

“Enough, Castillo. Your time is up.”

I give my brother a kiss on the cheek before the guard pulls us apart. It’s always like this. We say good-bye with a little push of the rules. I slip out from under his cuffs and the guard leads my brother through the back door of the visiting room, down the corridor to the solitary cells.

Later, at the motel, Joe, who’s just gotten off work, asks me how my visit with my brother went.

“Same as always. But today he told me he’s dying.”

“As far as I’ve read in his files, he has no serious illnesses,” says Joe.

And then, “Reina, would you like to go for a walk on the beach with me?”

We take his car and Joe pulls off the road onto a winding path and tells me there’s a perfect patch of beach just there, beyond the mangrove trees. It’s night but with the moon so full and bright, I still feel the comfort of daylight, every breathing ripple of the sea on display — not one secret out here. I leave my sandals on the sand and Joe rolls up his khaki pants and takes off his loafers revealing pale feet with crinkly leg hairs and long toes that make me embarrassed for him. We walk along the water’s edge, the current mostly quiet except for the occasional rush of the rising tide.

I see a flutter in the sand and, as we approach, notice a gull tossing about in the shallow water, struggling to breathe, its small black legs limp under its body, its wings unable to span and lift. I scoop it up, pull it toward my chest while Joe looks on with disgust, telling me those birds carry diseases and to be careful or I’ll get bitten.