Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

Nesto finds the deepest places in me, his lips never leaving me, his lashes soft against my cheek, his breath warming me. I want to say Nesto is the first man I was ever with. He’s not. Not even close. So then I want to say he is the last. And by being the last he is the first.

Since the first night, there have been many more like it. And mornings. And afternoons. In my bed, on the sofa until we drop onto the floor of my cottage, against the hard corners of the shower stall, out on my beach under the discreet cover of night, shells and twigs burrowed into our backs. At his place, testing the wobbly futon frame, in that run-down chair, on the cold metal of the back of his truck parked out on a desolate road at the end of Indigo Key. And on Lolo’s boat, on days when there is no dive group for him to take out to the wrecks and reef, when he lends it to Nesto, so that he can break me of my seasickness forever.

He wants me to feel as at home on and in the water as he does, he says, and once we are docked, far enough that no other human can lay eyes on us, he drops anchor and tosses out a float and a line. He kisses me while the water holds me up to him. My senses are amplified. When I open my eyes, instead of wondering what we’re doing out in the middle of the ocean, I feel I don’t need land or even air anymore, as long as I am with him.

“Why did we wait so long for this?” he says.

And then, “I don’t understand how you ended up so alone in this world, Reina. I don’t understand how anybody ever let you go.”

Our only promise is to not make any, never to speak of tomorrow, only this day and this night.

Now, when my sleep breaks, instead of falling into memory, I’m pulled only as far as the body sleeping beside me. He stirs, eyes closed, to reach for me, to wrap himself around me, pulls me into him. He always wakes before morning comes, so we can enjoy the last bits of each other before the day pushes us apart.

My mother taught me to read hands at the same time she taught me to apply polish. Not by reading the lines of a palm, but the way she’d learned from her mother and her mother before her, by touch, decoding the curves of the hand without looking. Carlito never knew about our ability. Our mother never shared those things with him. She said there were some things that were meant to stay between mothers and daughters. It was by holding my brother’s hands, once when I went to see him at the jail during the first days after his arrest, running my fingers over the rough swells at the base of his fingers, that I knew that even though Carlito was still screaming injustice, he was guilty and would never again walk free. I lived my life differently, always wearing the costume of hope, but that’s just an example of how easy it is to ignore intuition and betray oneself.

I asked my mother once if she ever read our father’s hands. She thought about it before admitting she didn’t remember ever feeling his hand in hers. He was always grabbing her, touching her, but always on her body, or pulling her by the arm down the street, as if this might be the moment she’d flee. There was never intimacy, the sort you assume exists between married people. The more she considered it, the more she was sure she’d never touched his hands. Not until he was dead and she saw him in the morgue when the prison turned him over. She’d gone with Tío Jaime and Mayra. She didn’t want to, but they’d forced her to go to bid him a proper adios since she was the wife and there were vows between them. Tío Jaime and Mayra thought that was the moment Mami should have told Carlito and me the truth about our papi, and given us a chance to see him off ourselves, but Mami refused, and held on to the secret for a few more years.

After Hector, though, Mami started reading the hands of every guy she dated. And when Jerry came onto the scene, she fingered his palm across a restaurant table on their first date and knew right away that he had enough money for two, plus square fingertips, which any clairvoyant worth a dime knows are given to those who are born to count cash. She didn’t care about love or romance. She only wanted a guy who could make her life a little easier.

She never read my hands and I wasn’t allowed to read hers. She warned me that to do so was courting bad luck, like burning the wings of a butterfly. But I didn’t listen, always trying to read my own palms, but then my intuition grew cloudy, and I could only sense that the solitude I lived with, even before my brother left us, the loneliness I felt even when surrounded by my own family, would never leave me.

Then I went to the blue-haired bruja because I figured she was a professional and people came from other states to see her and she even had her own international hotline. And she, with her tarot cards, candles, and long fingernails painted with chipped purple polish, pushed hard into the lines of my hand and told me my mother was cursed because of her sins and I, as the daughter, would pay her debts; that the devil had followed my family all the way from Cartagena to Miami, and then, what I had suspected for a long time:

“Love is not meant for you. You will always be alone.”

“You need a manicure,” was all I replied.

I thought the reading was finished so I pulled my hand back to reach for my wallet to pay her, but she held my wrist firm in her swollen, arthritic fingers and told me to wait, there was more.

“Your mother didn’t want you,” she said.

“Neither did yours.”

She let go of my hand and told me I owed her two hundred dollars.

I dropped the cash onto her table and left.

I try to resist reading Nesto’s hands. But in the early morning, when the cottage is washed with white light, when his arms are draped over me and he is snoring into my shoulder, I can’t help closing my eyes and letting my fingers touch their way to the truth on his skin.

A faraway sensation comes over me. I don’t know what to make of it at first, but then I understand that despite his closeness, his chest so tight against my back that we are sharing sweat, his mouth resting on my neck just like last night and dozens of nights before, there is still a nameless void between us that will never dissipate.

That’s what I get, I decide, for trying to peek at the future when it seems the present is just starting to be kind to me.

So I stop myself and focus again, not on my touching and reading him, but on his touching and reading me.

When we were kids, Carlito and I ate the crummy lunch provided by the school’s public assistance program. We faced our butter and baloney sandwiches and waxy apples while other kids ate lunches their parents packed for them, full of treats and last night’s dinner. Carlito would identify these kids and take their food from them, giving me half of everything, until the lunch lady caught him and turned him in to the principal.

“I don’t care how much you hate the food they give you, stealing is wrong,” Mami told him after she got the call from the school.

“How am I supposed to get what I want if I don’t take it?” Carlito asked.

Mami never answered him.

When Carlito was an altar server at the church, he started a little side business taking the flowers people left at the feet of different statues of saints, selling them outside the supermarket or at gas stations, or just to other boys from school to give to the girls they liked. One of the priests confronted him but Carlito argued he was doing no harm, and those flowers got thrown out at the end of every week anyway. The priest never told our mother, but Carlito decided to move on to cemeteries, picking bouquets off tombstones and out of the vases on the walls of mausoleums.

Instead of selling the roses and carnations himself, he put me to work. I’d stand by gas pumps, tell people I was selling the flowers to raise money for our school so we could buy new books and pens and art supplies, while Carlito watched and waited nearby. He gave me a dollar for every five that I made. He’d be ceremonious about it when he later counted the bills on his bedroom floor, making me hold out my palms until he placed the bills on them.