Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

No matter the statistics, no matter how precise the science, they’re always wrong.

It’s a Sunday. Nesto and I are up early because we plan to meet Lolo and Melly to go out for some dives on the line and maybe stop to fish at the hump on the way back. We’re at Conchita’s eating breakfast on the small patio outside her shop when we hear the thunder of helicopters above us. Choppers often pass over the islands, low enough for us to see what color they are and if they’re blue news copters or orange medical airlifters. But the helicopters today are that familiar green and white and I know, even before Conchita comes outside to tell us she’s just heard from her husband, who heard it from a friend fishing on Barkley Beach, that some migrants have landed, and there are probably more still out on the water.

Nesto wants to see for himself. Every now and then we catch a story on the news about rafter sightings, sometimes a capsizing, some people abandoned by smugglers and found clinging to tubes on the water, and others lucky enough to touch ground. There was even the story of the guy who made it to Key West floating on a windsurf board without a sail. But it’s not like any migrants ever show up on Hammerhead or in front of his motel on Crescent Key, so we jump into his truck and head down to Barkley Beach, and Nesto parks on the side of the road right behind a news van.

We make our way down to the curve of coast where dozens of locals have already gathered, Ryan among them, though we don’t acknowledge each other because we’re already in the habit of ignoring each other all around town. I feel his eyes on me, but I’m watching the scene before us.

Three men and a woman, all dressed up as if they’d been planning on going to church or a party and not out on a boat for five days, though their clothes are dirty, pressed against them with sweat and water stains, their complexions parched and sea-lashed. The Border Patrol guys talk to them like they’re just regular tourists, and some other beachgoers approach and offer water and sandwiches. There’s snickering from the wall of people behind us that it’s because they’re Cubans that they’re being treated so well, not like your average migrant. We hear them tell the police there were supposed to be more of them on their boat, but at the last minute, several got scared and changed their minds. One man says another boat left at the same time from the same beach in Puerto Escondido, but they lost sight of it after the first day on the water.

Nesto watches them. He presses his lips close together, holds his arms tight across his chest, and stands with his legs wide apart, as if guarding over the spectacle on the shore. I look at the crowd around us. Pale folk with expressions of curiosity and shock at the sight of the vessel these people arrived on, a wooden thing the size of a hot tub with a cobbled-together engine, rope and tarps, cans of food, and empty water jugs littering its tin floor.

The new arrivals look happy, despite their fatigue, grinning with shriveled lips, faces toasted by days under the sun, ringed by the salt of sea spray.

I remember the boy under the banyan tree, his eyes burning with terror, so different from the expressions of the four before us, telling the police they each have family members in Florida who will claim them and come for them when called.

Nesto and I stand together among the crowd but somehow apart, and when the police have the new arrivals board the white-and-green Border Patrol vans so they can be taken for processing and then released to their relatives, we begin the walk back to his truck in silence. He puts his hand to the image of Elegguá on his dashboard, starts the engine, and we head up to the marina where Lolo and Melly are waiting, though we will have a somber dive, wondering in our brief suspension in the blue-violet twilight of the ocean, where it’s easy to confuse your way back to the surface, what it must have been like for those travelers, spending days and nights alone on the water, with little beyond hope to guide them.

That night after we’ve eaten dinner, as I straighten around the kitchenette, I look over to find Nesto standing by the sofa, looking anxious as he watches me.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m going to sleep at my place tonight.”

“Why?”

“I need to be alone.”

I don’t say anything, so he quickly adds, “Please don’t be upset.”

“No problem.” I mean it, too, even if we haven’t been adhering to what we set out to do, enjoying day by day. Instead, we count on each other’s presence each morning, and I can easily forget that while he sleeps at my place every night, he hasn’t stopped paying rent on his efficiency at the motel.

“I need to think about things without you next to me. Please understand.”

He comes up close and holds me in a sort of half hug. He leaves my cheek with a soft kiss, turning away without meeting my eyes, and walks out the door.

Let him go , I tell myself. This is something you need to learn to do.

Let him go.

I expect him to come back later in the night. He doesn’t.

The next morning he calls.

“I have to go home, Reina.”

“I thought that’s where you went last night.”

“No, I mean my real home. I have to see my family.”

I’m back in Miami with Nesto. He’s trying to find a way back to Cuba since, for now, he can’t afford the airfare. I knew I’d be back one day. But I didn’t expect that once here, I would feel so uneasy, as if at any moment I might be discovered and asked to leave.

We make our way off the turnpike onto the main artery of Little Havana, Calle Ocho, driving slowly past parked buses waiting for tourists photographing the viejitos playing dominoes in the park, and shopping for made-in-China guayaberas. We hit travel agency after travel agency — around here, there are tons — to see if Nesto can sign up to fly to Cuba as a mula; he’d trade his forty-four-pound luggage allowance for a free plane ticket to be a courier for people using the agencies to send packages to loved ones on the other side.

Most agencies tell Nesto they’ve already got all the mulas they need for the year, but at the last agency we check out, a woman takes him to a desk near the back to sign him up. I wait on a folding chair by the door, taking in the posters of Havana all over the walls — faded images of the cathedral, the beaches of Varadero, the hills of Viñales, Cuba Es Amor printed in curly letters across the bottom.

On the drive up to Miami, I pointed Carlito’s prison out to Nesto, where the main road splits and I’d turn onto a bumpy path that never seemed to get paved, toward the first gate where I’d give my name and the guard would check the approved visitors list and my ID before he’d let me through the high walls and past the gun towers.

Seven years. Both eternal and as swift as a blink.

I closed my eyes until the barricades and barbed wires disappeared behind us, but felt as if I’d been at the prison just yesterday, spending a Sunday morning with my brother, holding his hands across the table, unaware it would be the last time I’d ever see him alive.

“I never told you about my uncle,” Nesto began, maybe to ease the silence until we were out of prison territory and back within the ordinary coastal landscape. “He was in prison too. Not like me. They always let me out after a few days. But they kept him for good.”

“What did he do?”

“He didn’t do anything. It was before I was born. He was my mother’s older brother. His name was Guillermo. He wasn’t as welcoming to the Revolution as my mother and the rest of the family. They started rounding up subversives. They ordered them to El Jardín Botánico and he was among them. They called it ‘social purging.’ Purging! Like they did to us as kids, giving us aceite de ricino to shit out our worms. A neighbor denounced him for being flamboyant . In those days they would arrest you for anything — having long hair, listening to yanqui imperialist music — anything they considered undermining to the Revolution. So the family had to go to the public assembly and repudiate him. Then they transferred him to the UMAP.”