Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“He was about to drown,” I tell him, the bird frozen like a toy in my arms, “We need to find help for him.”

“Reina, you can’t be serious.”

My eyes tell him just how serious I am. We head back to his car and I sense his regret for having invited me. He mutters something about me thinking it’s my job to save every living creature from itself.

I insist he pull up next to a parked police car. The officer recognizes Joe immediately and looks to me. My face is familiar to him from standing in the long lines outside the prison waiting for visiting hours to begin, or arguing against parking tickets when I leave my car overnight outside the Glades Motel because the lot is full, and for those times I speed down US 1 to get to the Keys before sunset because my mother always told me that’s when the crazies come out.

“Do you know where we can find help for an injured bird?” I ask the officer from my place in the passenger’s seat.

The cop looks skeptical, his eyes land on the limp seagull in my lap, and he shakes his head at us, looks to Joe disapprovingly before telling us to try the marine reserve a few miles down.

“They have a bird sanctuary down there. Might be closed at this hour, or might not. Someone down there may be able to help you.”

As it happens, the place is closed, gates locked and chained. I press my face against the metal grill, call out to see if anyone is still around who can help us.

“I think you should just let the bird die a natural death,” Joe says, leaning against his car, arms folded across his chest, with a look of contempt.

I hold the bird out to him. “Does this look like a natural death to you?”

“We should put it out of its misery. Drown it or something.”

“You mean put you out of your misery because you don’t want to deal with him.”

Joe sighs at me like a father would at an unreasonable child. “So what do you want to do with it?”

“I’ll take him home with me and bring him back here first thing in the morning.”

“Reina.”

“I don’t need your help. Just drop me off back at the motel.”

“Why don’t you stay with me tonight? We’ll put the bird in a box in the bathroom and I’ll drive you back here at sunrise.”

“You don’t care about the bird.”

“But you do. And I care about you.”

I go with the doctor because, really, I’m sick of the knotty green carpet of the Glades Motel, the sad-looking people who putter around the trailers, the stragglers like me who take up the rooms in the main lodge, and the women who come down here to visit their men by day but spend their nights with the teenage hustlers who hang around the gas station on Hickory Key.

Dr. Joe’s condo is nicer than I expected. Looks like it belongs on South Beach and not in the crummy Keys. Stark white like a hospital, chrome and leather furniture, huge abstract paintings on the walls — the kind of stuff only rich boys buy.

“Shit,” I say when he leads me through the door.

“Cost of living is so cheap down here,” he says, as if I caught him in a crime. “Nothing compared with life up north.”

“Why would you leave Boston to come down here and work in a prison?”

He smiles bashfully and offers what sounds like a false confession that he just needed a change of scenery. I suspect the doctor is running from something, and he came to the Keys to hide out. I decide not to hold it against him, though, because we all have our shadows.

Joe goes off to look for a box for the bird, which I want to believe is napping in my arms but really, he looks like he’s just about had it with this world. I think his legs are broken by the way they keep bending and folding as if made of string.

Poor bird. If life were fair, the bird and I would both be living in Cartagena, not in Florida where all of the world’s crap seems to accumulate.

Joe returns with an empty box that looks like it was meant to ship electronics. I put the bird in and we take it to his guest bathroom together, rest it on the floor, and I tell the bird goodnight while I feel Joe’s hand on my shoulder.

“Let me fix us some drinks. How about a screwdriver?”

I ask him to make us some tea instead.

We sit together on his leather sofa. I can’t decide what I feel for Joe. He seems like a lonely man and this makes me like him, see bits of myself in him. But part of me also sees him as the kind of guy who gets turned on by tragic people.

“You inspire me, Reina. The way you always reach out of yourself to care for others. Your brother. Even that dying bird. You give so much.”

Hearing him talk about me like I’m some kind of saint makes me uncomfortable.

“You’ve given up your life to be present for Carlos. It’s so admirable. I don’t know anyone with that kind of loyalty.”

“There’s a whole motel full of them right where you found me.”

“You’re different from them.”

“No, I’m not.”

He takes advantage of my parted lips and puts his mouth on mine and next thing you know, we’re making out like junior high kids right on Joe’s leather sofa. His hands fumble with my blouse buttons and I reach for his belt. He’s telling me he’s been dreaming of kissing me since he saw me that first day going through the metal detector at the jail when Carlito got transferred to the federal prison.

He’s telling me to wrap my legs around him, pulls off my bra, and I rip the nerd glasses off his face. Then Joe says to me, “Tell me about the first time you got fucked, how old were you?”

“Thirteen,” I sigh into his ear while he feels around me and then he wants to know with who, where, how did I like it?

I whisper that it was with my brother’s friend Manolo and when it was over, I found out my brother had been watching the whole thing from his closet because he told me I looked good, like a real woman, finally, and I felt proud. After that, I started sleeping with all my brother’s friends. But my brother told my mother and she told me to be careful because a woman who is a good lover can make a man insane, just look what happened to our father.

Dr. Joe pulls me closer and just as we’re about to do it says, “Talk to me like I’m your brother.”

I freeze. Stare at him. His mouth wet with my saliva, his cheeks red. A loose eyelash on his nose.

“You’re really sick, you know that?”

“Reina, come on. I didn’t mean it like that. Come on.”

He’s trying to pull me back to him but I’ve already got my legs on the ground, straightening myself out, clipping my bra back on.

“Come on, I was just playing.”

He stands up, tucks himself back into his pants, and follows me toward the bathroom. I pick up the box with the bird and push past him.

“Where are you going?”

“Me and the bird are leaving.”

This is how it goes: I make it far down the road with Dr. Joe on my tail shouting, “I just want to be close to you and all I get from you are walls!” until the same cop who told us where to take the bird pulls up beside me wanting to know if there’s a problem.

The cop has one eye on me and one on Joe, who’s disheveled and looking way too desperate and guilty to be out in the middle of the night.

“You need a lift back to the motel?”

I nod and when we’re sitting alone in the cop car, Dr. Joe way behind us, walking back to his condo, the officer turns to me and says, “You know, if you want to pitch something like an assault or harassment charge, I’ll fully corroborate. I never liked that doctor guy. Not one bit.”

My seagull was poisoned.

That’s what the bird expert at the marine center told me when I brought him there this morning.

“I think his legs are broken,” I told the woman, who had a permanent-looking sunburn and wore men’s overalls.