Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

He gathers his breath and swims over to me, looking concerned, while Lolo waits on the line rig behind him. I take his hand and guide him to where the seahorses seemed to dance under a strobe of sunlight a moment ago. We go under together and the seahorses are still there, twirling beneath the current. We watch them for a few seconds. When we come up for air, Nesto looks pleased.

“Seahorses are a sign,” he tells me.

“Of what?”

“You don’t believe in signs, remember?”

“Tell me, Nesto.”

“It’s Yemayá. She’s welcoming you. She’s giving you a place out here.”

On the way back to shore, Lolo stops the boat by the Key Largo hump where the continental shelf rises into a little mountain that pushes the smaller fish to the surface and larger fish come after them. That’s what he tells me when I ask if I can get off the boat again and go for another swim. I’m not sick anymore. Ever since I got in the water out in the blue, I feel calm, and the feeling remained even when I climbed back in the boat and it started up again, skipping and splitting waves.

Out by the hump, there are a lot more boats, most outrigged with multiple fishing poles, hoping for bites from bonefish, tarpon, or snook. As Lolo sets up a couple of poles off the back of the boat, I know we’ll be here a while. But he says I can’t go for a swim because along with barracuda, there are plenty of sharks out in the hump and once in a while even a wandering great white makes an appearance. I settle onto a bench with Melly. She’s been nice and helped me out of her wetsuit just like she’d helped me into it. She ran the freshwater hose all over me to wash off the salt and shampoo residue, and brushed out my hair.

“I’ve never seen Nesto with a girl before,” she tells me when the guys are out of earshot and deep into some story about the old days spearfishing in El Salado. “Whenever he comes around, he’s always alone. I tried to set him up with friends of mine a few times, but he’s always said no. How long have you known him?”

“About two months.”

“I knew Lolo three months when I married him. And that was three years ago.”

“Really?”

“I came to his shop looking for a job. He said, ‘I can’t give you no job if you don’t have no papers.’ I said, ‘Well, how am I supposed to get papers if I don’t have a job?’ so he said, ‘You can marry me.’ And he leaned right over the counter and pulled my face to his and kissed me right there with customers all around. That’s how he got me to go out with him. I didn’t think I’d marry him, but I like a guy who goes after what he wants.”

I remember being on the beach with Nesto last night. How he treated kissing me like I was asking him to walk off a cliff.

There’s a tug on one of the lines and Lolo rushes to it while Nesto looks at the others, but they’re all slack. Lolo reels in his line and, after a small struggle, a fish turns up, flapping and fighting against the hook and line until the poor wahoo is flopping to its bloody death on the floor of the boat and Melly claps and cheers like it’s a party, as Lolo grabs the fish, ramming his fingers into its gills. I look at Nesto, who also looks pleased with the massacre, then turn my eyes back to the horizon because I know I might be sick again.

Later, at Lolo and Melly’s house, the guys skin and gut the fish for dinner out on the patio while I help Melly make a salad in the kitchen. It’s a small house, with a lanai that opens onto a narrow canal on the edge of the ocean, and Melly’s interspecies orgy paintings cover the walls. She sends me out back to ask if we should put some rice on the stove too. I slip out the screen door, to the block of patio around the side of the house where they are filleting the fish, and that’s when I hear Lolo ask Nesto, as if he’s been waiting for an update, “¿Qué vuelta, asere? Tell me, what’s going on with the family situation?”

I wait behind the corner of the house, curious how Nesto will respond.

“Nothing’s happening, ’mano. They keep telling us to wait. But I can’t anymore. I have to figure something else out.”

I stand there a moment longer to see if they’ll say more, but they don’t. When they see me come around the bend they both look at me, surprised. I ask about the rice and Lolo says it’s a good idea, but Nesto just stares at me as if we’re meeting for the first time, or as if he’s forgotten I’ve been along for the ride all afternoon.

I leave them and go back to Melly in the kitchen. By the time we sit at the table under the sunset to eat the fish Lolo grilled for us, I’ve put the conversation I overheard out of mind, until I notice Nesto’s eyes leave me, leave all of us at the table, to stare across the Atlantic as if it holds some kind of answer.

I’m used to disappearances.

I’m never surprised when guys take off. It’s the opposite. I never expect them to stick around.

I don’t hear from Nesto for a few days.

Then I run into him, though it’s not a complete coincidence because I know he goes to check his box at the post office every Tuesday and Friday afternoon, after he fills his gas tank. I go check my mail at around that time, and there he is, pulling his blue pickup into the parking lot. I pretend not to see him right away. I want him to be the one to decide if he’s going to approach me or if we’re going to do that thing where we ignore each other until it’s clear one of us wants nothing to do with the other anymore.

I park in front of the post office and pretend to fumble with my purse for a while, getting out of the car before walking up to the glass post office doors extra slowly to give him time to finish up and hopefully catch him on the way out. I’m a good planner because it happens exactly that way and he spots me easing out of my car, walks over like he’s not at all surprised to see me, and pulls me into his chest.

“I’m sorry—”

“You don’t have to be sorry for anything.” I cut him off, ducking out of his arms. “We don’t owe each other anything.”

He looks a little confused at my words but goes on. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I went up to Miami for a few days. I just got back.”

“I thought you hated it there.”

“I had to take care of some things.”

“Things?”

“Family things.”

“You couldn’t do that from down here?”

“No.”

We watch each other for a moment until Nesto asks, “Aren’t you going to go in and check your mail?”

I shrug. “You know I hardly ever get anything.”

“Then let’s get out of here. I did some work for a friend in Miami.” He pats his wallet in his back pocket. “Let me invite you to dinner.”

I leave my car back at the cottage and go with Nesto in his truck. We don’t say much. He pops a disc of ballads into the stereo, singing along, and mutters between songs that he should have tried a little harder to make something of himself when he was younger and still had the chance. As a teenager, he and his friends would strum guitars and sing through apagones that shut down the city through the night until the electricity came back on. He was always told he had a good voice, rich and raw. He could have gone to a conservatory, he says, maybe even made a career of music. It would have been the smartest thing since the only Cubans who can get rich legally these days are artists and musicians.

He drives south till we’re on the far end of Marathon, pulls off the road to a thatch-roof restaurant built on the waterfront below the start of the Seven Mile Bridge, stretching as far as anyone can see over the glassy shallows, an occasional fishing boat pushing through below its columns. The hostess, a girl who looks both faded and burned, seats us at a plastic table by the water’s edge and drops laminated menus between us.