Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

When Nesto is done fumbling through his menu I say, “You want to tell me something. I can feel it.”

“You’re right.”

“So what is it?”

“I’ve been thinking of ways to say this.” His nostrils expand with a long sigh. “I wanted us to be friends when we met. You know that. But things are different from what I expected.”

He stares at me like I’m supposed to finish his thought.

“You understand what I mean, don’t you?”

I shake my head.

“I know you like me. You know I like you. More than I would like any other girl at this point.”

He looks out to the water, up to the sky, and mumbles something I can’t make out to the clouds, then turns his eyes back on me.

“I do not want to burden you with my shit, Reina. I’ve told you about my life. It’s a disaster. The situation with my family. . está en candela.”

“Everyone’s life is a disaster.”

He’s shaking his head and I know no matter what I say, he’s decided I’ve got it all wrong.

“Since I left home, I’ve been like a lone wolf in the hole I live in. Go to work alone. Go home alone. Eat alone. Sleep alone. I don’t keep track of anyone and nobody keeps track of me. That’s the only way I can be until I restore things, until I get my kids out of there. Until that happens, I’m not a real person. I’m not even half a person. I’m a maldito shadow.”

He looks out to the water again, as if he can see them on the other side of the sunset.

“I like the time I spend with you. You’ve become important to me. And I think I’ve become important to you. But listen to me when I tell you this: I can give you nothing. I am nothing.”

“Don’t say—”

“You don’t know, Reina. You can’t understand what it is to be separated from my children. Lives you have watched since birth, that you brought into this crazy world. To have them cry to you every time you call because they don’t understand why you left them. They have this idea of this country that everyone is a millionaire and lives like a movie star. They don’t know how hard it is. They don’t know that everything I do, every day I work, everything is for them. I did everything right. I adjusted my status to get political asylum, got the green card. I filed all the papers for them to come and they still can’t get out. Every year it’s another denial. They tell everyone there to wait, wait, because there is nothing else to do, and there’s nobody better at waiting than a Cuban. But I’m here and I can’t wait anymore. Maybe I made the wrong choice. Maybe I should have stayed with them. I wonder about that every single day that I’m here without them. I would still be eating shit over there, but at least I’d see them every day and we’d still spend birthdays and holidays together. You don’t know what it is to have your family broken by a system, by old men who refuse to die, all because we were born in the wrong country at the wrong time in history, and to be able to do nothing about it.”

The waitress appears to take our order.

“Reina,” he says when she’s gone, impatiently, as if my own name irritates him. “You think I don’t want to kiss you? I’m there in your house, sleeping on your sofa, and you think it doesn’t occur to me to get in your bed with you?”

I feel heat rising to my face. So this is blushing. Something I don’t ever remember happening to me. I turn to the dock lining the water, the pelicans settling onto its posts.

“Mírame a los ojos, Reina. Why do you always look away when I have something important to tell you?”

I turn to face him.

“I do want to do all that and more with you,” he says sternly. “But it wouldn’t be right. You’ve got your own life and your own problems. You don’t need to endure mine too.”

I don’t say anything and he goes quiet too.

No more arguing against this idea of him and me. I don’t know if he expected a debate or some pained expression from me. Either way, I don’t give it.

Night’s fallen completely and the bridge is just a silver beam shooting over the ocean, dotted with car lights heading to and from Key West. I can barely see the contours of his face but the waitress sets a hurricane lantern at the center of the table and then he’s back, fuzzy in the golden light.

I think we’re at the point in the confession where we should begin to feel absolved, expectations relinquished, but none of the heaviness has lifted from his side of the table and instead Nesto exhales so long and airy I feel his breath brush my lips.

“Reina, you know me, and pretty well in the short time we’ve spent together. But when you’re with me, you’re not with only me. There are other people I carry with me everywhere I go. People you can’t see. People I left behind. You don’t know what that’s like.”

“I do know,” I whisper.

I want to tell him I am the same, with my own army on my shoulders, guarded against my chest, those I can’t shake even when I try.

“I won’t be whole until I’m with them again,” he says. “It’s all I think about.”

Something in me tightens. A sudden awareness. I feel it deep within, the same way I felt it when I entered the courtroom the day of my brother’s sentencing; despite our hopes and endless prayers that the judge would override the jury’s recommendation for capital punishment, before he even began his remarks, before he slipped on his bifocals, cleared his throat, and turned from Isabela to Carlito and said, “Mr. Castillo, you have committed one of the most monstrous acts that I have come across in my very long career,” I knew that my brother would be sentenced to death.

Maybe this is not a premonition but just an impulse for cruelty or even jealousy, my wanting to grab Nesto by the shoulders and tell him not to count on it, there is no such thing as redemption, and the day of the great reunion of his dreams may never come for him, just as mine never came for me.

The ride back up to Crescent Key is just as silent, except for Nesto humming along to “Corazón partío,” which he plays on repeat. When he pulls into the Hammerhead driveway, I hop out of the car, but his reflexes are quick and he catches me by the wrist.

“Wait, Reina.”

“I think we said everything already.”

“Not everything.”

“¿Entonces?”

“I mean it when I say I have nothing to give you. Not for a while.”

“I never asked you for anything.”

“So what are you doing with me?”

I shrug.

“Just passing time, like you told your mother the other day on the phone?”

“I just want to be here, with you, now.”

“Just tonight?”

“I don’t know. Tonight is tonight. Tomorrow is tomorrow.”

I turn and we watch each other through the shadows, but it’s too much for me, and I leave him there to make my way toward the cottage.

I stop behind the trees to watch him drive off, but he doesn’t. Not right away.

He stays parked in the driveway for a while as if waiting for something, maybe for me, to come back to him, but I don’t. Not tonight.

I find my way through the dark path I’ve memorized until I’m at my door.

Home.

There are footsteps. Soft taps at the door.

There is Nesto. A determined look in his eyes that throws me a little, but he’s already stepping through my doorway and I can’t describe the play-by-play, I just know that all at once, his lips are on me, his arms are around me, heavy and crushing, and we fall onto my bed so hard it shifts from its place along the wall. I feel his heaviness, the sharpness of his muscles and bones against mine.

Normally, I disappear into my body, into another plane of blindness where I see nothing, not even the face hovering over mine. In the tension, the rising pleasure, I feel disintegration, crumbling, and release, and I float in the nothingness, the physical exchange, the affirmations that it feels good, that he wants me. I remember nothing afterward. No longing, not even residue desire; like the moisture on my skin, once washed off, it’s gone.