Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

I make my way toward the ladder in the corner of the pen, but the dolphin follows me, and when I am all out of the water, standing on the floorboards, she takes a last look at me before turning around and heading back to her spot by the fence. Rachel tries to lure her from the edges of the pen again, but the dolphin won’t move.

Nesto walks with me back to the locker room, giving me the same look he gave me when he found out I’d gone off on the boat with Jojo. I don’t want to hear him tell me I put myself in danger again so I walk quickly, avoiding his eyes.

When we’re far enough from the rest of the crowd, he says under his breath, “You’re going to give them a reason to get rid of you.”

“I was just trying to help her.”

“This is a job, Reina. We come here to work. Nothing more.”

On Saturday and Sunday mornings, I sometimes go out to the beach behind the cottage, remembering that I would be with my brother at the prison for that hour if he were still alive. I sit on the sand facing the ocean, trying to conjure Carlito’s memory, inviting him to sit with me. I hold my palms open before me, close my eyes, and try to remember the weight of his hands on mine, his voice before his crime, before bitterness set in, when he would throw his arms around me for no other reason than to tell me he loved me.

There were guys in his prison who’d killed several people and instead of death sentences, they received multiple stacked life sentences. Carlito told me he wondered what was worse: knowing your life was running on a short fuse and you could be called to your death any day, or having your lifetime and several more spread out before you for another two hundred years, an illusion of immortality even if it’s to be endured within prison walls.

We all have to show up for our death, but maybe it was a gift to know the date of your last day. Unlike those with eternal sentences, my brother was promised an early escape, even if, in the end, he decided to flee in his own way.

Nesto says Carlito was probably a son of Changó, who, in his mortal days, was an impulsive king and, haunted by regret, hanged himself, later ascending as an orisha. His sons on earth are said to be born with inner violence, war upon their heads, like Changó, who always carries a double-edged ax, ready to fight and to die in battle. But they are also protected by Changó’s wife, Oyá, patron of the dead, who Nesto says will help Carlito on his journey through the afterlife.

“Carlito,” I whisper, the sound of my voice buried by the tide.

In my mind, I tell him about the dolphin, how she came to me, chose me over all the others, how I felt her skin and the enormousness of her body pushing the water between us.

I have felt insignificant all my life, but in those moments with the dolphin, I was special.

I remember when we were children and Tío Jaime and Mayra bought a pet store poodle that wouldn’t let anyone touch her except Carlito, not even Mayra who tried to love her into submission. But around Carlito, the dog went limp, curling into his side, licking his hand, begging for his attention. When I put my hand near the dog, she grabbed my fingers between her teeth until Carlito pulled her off me. One day, while Carlito played with the dog in the living room, I wandered to the back patio where Mayra kept her parakeets and budgies in small metal cages arranged on shelves, mostly ignored except for when she took them in to fly around the house until they wore themselves out.

I went to each cage and opened the latch, reaching in as Mayra once taught me to do. The bird stepped onto my finger, and I pulled my hand out and shook it off into the air.

I let all eight birds go.

That night, when she realized what had happened, Mayra called our house to tell Mami. They figured it was me since I was the only one who’d gone out there, but I denied it just like Carlito had always taught me to do.

Mayra told Mami there was something wrong with me. I was worse than your ordinary fresca and way more chinche than my brother ever was. She said I had no conscience.

“Calm down, Mayra,” Mami said. “They’re birds. Where else do they belong but in the sky?”

Mayra and Tío Jaime grew so frustrated by their dog’s behavior, the way she rejected them, that they took her to a vet and had her put down. Carlito was furious. He said they didn’t give the poodle a chance to adapt, that you couldn’t blame her for being upset she got stuck with such shitty humans like Mayra and Jaime. He cried for days and told me he should have done like I did with the birds and smuggled the dog out of there.

Once, on the phone from prison, one of the rare times Carlito spoke of his death sentence, he mentioned the poodle.

“They’re going to do that to me. They’re going to euthanize me like a dog.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I wonder what it will be like,” he continued. “I think about it sometimes. The walk from the cellblock to the death house. I wonder how it will feel when they push the drugs into my veins. You don’t always die right away, you know. They say the whole thing is supposed to take less than ten minutes. But it took one guy an hour to die. His skin started to slide off his body while the poisons fried him. But he wouldn’t die, so they kept having to pump him with more.”

I remember feeling so sickened by his words that I couldn’t speak.

“They give you three injections. One to anesthetize you, one to paralyze you, and one to stop your heart. The anesthetic is supposed to keep you from feeling, but nobody knows if it really works because even if you’re still awake and your body can feel pain like you’re on fire, the paralytic keeps you from screaming and crying, until the last drug finally suffocates you and you go into cardiac arrest.”

“Who told you all this?”

“A new guard in here. A young guy. He stands outside my door and talks for hours. It’s like they shot him up with truth serum or something. You know what else he says? All the people who go into the chamber with you wear masks. Even the doctor whose job it is to stand over you and make sure you have no pulse left. That’s so nobody outside finds out that in here, they’re paid to be serial killers.”

“Carlito,” was all I could manage after several moments.

“I’d rather be shot by a firing squad. I’d rather be gassed or dropped out of an airplane. All those people sitting on the other side of the glass, waiting to watch you die in a chemical experiment, like it’s a fucking magic show. They should save the money and just take me back to the bridge and throw me over. That’s how I was supposed to die anyway.”

The line started to beep the way it does when a prison call is down to its final seconds.

“I have to find a way out of here, Reina. I can’t let them kill me.”

I thought he meant through the appeals process or our petitions for clemency, how plenty of death row folks, especially women, get their sentences lifted and are resentenced to pure life.

But now I know he meant something else.

They don’t let me back in the water with the dolphin. Whenever I go to her pen, to get a look at her progress, just like the other staff members often do, Mo comes by and tells me I’m a distraction and to get back to my work minding the park guests. The dolphin is still despondent, nonreactive , ignoring Rachel and all her attempts to entice her with fish or toys, instead remaining by the fence for hours, sometimes so still she’ll roll onto her side only to set herself upright again, until the sun sets and all of us go home.

They’re consulting with experts at other aquariums to see if they’ve dealt with similarly resistant cases. In the worst-case scenario, she’ll remain alone in a pen indefinitely, subject to more force-feedings, and still the staff maintains this is a better fate than releasing her to the wild. But they’re hopeful she’ll observe how the other dolphins around her have adapted to life in their enclosures, respond to scheduled feedings and human contact, and understand surrender is her means of survival.