Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

When I go back inside a while later, Nesto is already stretched out on my sofa, asleep or at least pretending to be.

I don’t fall sleep for a while though. I sit on my bed with the nightstand light on beside me and think back to the end of last year, when I still lived in the Miami house, and Carlito was still alive and waiting for my next visit. I brought him chocolates that morning but the guard took them away at the security check because someone got caught a month or two before smuggling pills inside a similar box. When I got to the visiting room to see Carlito, I only had a corny Christmas card to give him. I’d bought it at a drugstore and planned to write a nice note inside but no words came to me, so below the printed message, I’d only signed my name.

When he opened the card, Carlito traced his fingers over the letters.

“Did you know I was the one who picked your name? Mami wanted to call you María Reina de la Paz after Abuela’s favorite Virgin, but I convinced her to just call you Reina. I said you were my Reina. My little queen.”

“Carlito, how is that possible? You were only three.”

“Ask Mami. She’ll tell you.”

And for once, when I asked my mother about one of Carlito’s stories of our childhood she nodded, turning her face from me to the ground.

“Sí, Reina. Your brother named you. That much is true.”

Nesto can’t believe I’ve never been on a boat. I grew up close to the Atlantic, not on an island where you need a permit to take a boat offshore like he and Lolo did. But I’ve never even been on one of those Everglades airboats that blow through the swamps on gator tours. I’ve never even been on a canoe.

To ease my introduction to the open ocean, on the way to the marina to meet Lolo and his Boston Whaler, Nesto tells me one of his favorite patakís:

“In the beginning, the earth was made of only rocks and fire. So Olódumare in the form of Olofi, the all-powerful, turned the smoke of the flames into clouds, and from the clouds came down water, which put out the fires, and a new world was born. In the holes between the once burning rocks, oceans formed. What remained above the water was known as land . Olofi gave the oceans to Olokun and the land to Obatalá with a small pile of dirt that a chicken scratched out with its feet to form the continents. But Obatalá was jealous of Olokun’s vast domain, so he chained her to the ocean floor where she remains with a great serpent that only peeks out its head with the new moon. Olokun is vengeful, though, and still tries to steal parts of Obatalá’s land for herself, by shaking the sea floor, sending up tidal waves and tsunamis from the deep.

“When it was created, the ocean was massive and empty of life. At this time, Yemayá lived in the heavens with Olofi, complaining that her womb ached. It’s Yemayá who gave birth to the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars, and to the rivers, the lakes, and to the orishas, becoming mother to all life on earth. To show his love for her, Olofi made Yemayá queen of the oceans and gave her the rainbow to wear as a crown, which appears only when Yemayá shows herself to the world in the form of rain.”

We are only a few miles offshore when my stomach starts to quiver.

I feel the vibration of the engine under us, watch the marina shrink, the darkening of the crystalline waters bordering the islands, from my place on a padded bench on the back of the boat with Melly, Lolo’s wife, while Nesto has joined Lolo by the wheel.

Melly has already peeled off her shorts and is down to her string bikini, posing on the edge of the boat like one of those rubber truck flap girls. She’s twenty-two and Lolo’s third wife, though they have this running joke that he only married her because she’s Canadian and wanted to get her U.S. papers. She calls herself a wildlife artist, but I saw her work when Nesto and I went to meet them at Lolo’s dive shop earlier this morning, and her paintings aren’t what you’d call natural —they show dolphins and stingrays paired with big-breasted mermaids touching the animals in lusty ways. Nesto and I had to keep from spitting our laughter when we saw them all over the dive shop walls next to posters for wetsuit brands.

I’m thinking about Melly’s paintings when I throw up the first time, all my breakfast into the white waves spiking against the side of the boat. Nesto has his back to me so he doesn’t notice until Melly makes a fuss, running to my side, rubbing my shoulders. I push her away and keep on vomiting, which would be embarrassing if I were to stop and think about it, but I can only focus on the churning of my stomach and the burning of my throat as stuff keeps coming up and up.

I hear them all behind me, Lolo saying we’re hardly two miles out and I’m already tossing up hasta el último tetero. Then Nesto is beside me, telling me to concentrate on the horizon, but when I try to it looks lopsided to me and the only thing that helps is closing my eyes and forgetting where I am if for just a second.

“Do you want us to turn back?” I can tell by Nesto’s tone that he wants me to say no, so that’s what I give him, while steadying myself on the railing, and he goes back to Lolo and tells him I’ll be fine.

But I am not fine. I feel a confusion of my senses. On my back, the sun is warm and delicious; the sea salt is calming and aromatic; and the splash of the boat cutting through waves, sprinkling cool drops on my face, is a relief from the convulsions I feel from the neck down, my intestines twisting, exorcising themselves even when there is nothing left to push up. I want to forget where I am. Forget I’m on a boat heading to nowhere in the ocean, with Nesto, who, at this moment, seems more of a stranger to me than the night I met him, and his friends, who I sense mocking me as they trade glances.

And then I am not there anymore.

I am still under the winter sun, still surrounded by water, but now I am a child again, maybe five or six, swimming at the public pool Mami sometimes took us to during the free family-swim hours since Carlito didn’t hate pools as much as he hated the ocean. One afternoon, Carlito and I made friends with another kid, a girl there with her father. She had inflatable tubes, floating toys, all for her, but she shared them with us. I was drawn to this father-and-daughter twosome, mystified by the gentleness with which the father handled his daughter and how she hung on to him, her arm around his neck. When Carlito got out of the pool to sit by our mother on the lounge chairs, I stayed in the water with the girl and her father. She would invite me over to her house one day to play with her dozens of Barbie dolls, she said. I didn’t have any.

Her father picked her up and tossed her across the water and she landed with a big splash. He must have seen the envy on my face because he told me to swim over and lifted me up to do the same. I never felt such big hands on me. I never knew a person could be so strong. I didn’t remember ever being carried off the ground by anyone. He tossed me up and away and I crashed into the water. When I came up for air, I looked over at my brother to see if he’d seen me soaring but he hadn’t.

Then the father was carrying his daughter and pulling her toward the deep end, where I wasn’t allowed. “Do you want to come?” he asked, and I looked back at my mother, lying on a plastic lounge chair, reading a magazine, and back to the man, nodding. He picked me up in his other arm and we glided, all three of us, two little girls in a father’s embrace, to the deeper water, and I felt the thrill of knowing the floor was too far below for me to touch. I felt safe in this father’s arms. He led us over to the wall and we perched there, the three of us, each girl straddling one of the father’s knees. The daughter was talking about the new dress her father had bought her that morning — long and lavender with a ruffled bottom. It sounded like the most beautiful dress in the world. I could not imagine what it would be like to have a father buy me nice things and I watched her and her father and the way they loved each other. I felt something poke my leg and when I looked down, through the gloss of the pool water, I saw the father’s penis had grown and popped out of his bathing suit. I knew what a penis was because I had a brother and during our early years, we took our baths together. I said to the father, “You should fix your bathing suit,” and he looked down and said, “Yes, I should,” and put himself away. But it happened again and when I told the father this time, he said, “Why don’t you fix it for me?” I looked at the girl, who didn’t react, and then at my mother, still buried in her magazine pages, and my brother drying off with a towel on the chair beside her. I called to my mother, but she only looked up and when I said nothing else, she turned back to her magazine. I tried my brother. I called his name. He looked at me, and again I said nothing, but he stood up and came to me. He knew something was wrong. The man squirmed beneath me, and I reached my hand out to my brother and let him pull me out of the water. I said nothing and my brother saw nothing, but still looked at the man with suspicion. We went back to our mother, who still hadn’t noticed a thing.