Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

Our mother liked to take us there on weekdays, avoiding the weekend crowds, even if it meant calling in sick at work, declaring it un día de fiesta, pulling my brother and me out of school. Mami said we all deserved our little breaks once in a while. And we were just little kids, so it’s not like we were learning anything important.

I was seven and Carlito, nine. Best friends. Still innocents.

It was a weekday morning. The sun wasn’t yet at its highest, and the park was quiet except for a few tourist families and lonely fishermen along the seawall, standing between the pelicans lined like guards on the edge of the pier. We parked the car and walked past them to the other side of the narrow cape, to the beach beyond the forest. I wore a red bathing suit that was getting too small for me, elastic pinching my nalguitas. Carlito wore swim trunks handed down from a neighbor, too big and hanging low enough to show an inch of crack, and Mami complained he should have tied a rope around his waist to keep them up.

Our mother took to the beach like it was her temple, finding a piece of shore far from the lifeguard stands, boom boxes, and smoky portable grills, spreading a blanket, smoothing the sand lumps underneath before lying down and shutting her eyes to the sun. Sometimes she forced me, never Carlito, into the ocean with her and I felt guilty leaving him behind on land. Mami said the salty air purified the lungs and seawater nourished the skin. She’d pull me in by the hand, take my head into her palms, dunk me under the surf like a baptism, and let me float in her arms. I let her because these were some of the few times I had my mother’s full attention.

“Listen to the water, Reina,” she whispered as I let myself be cushioned by the soft rush of waves. “If you trust the tide, it will always return you to shore.”

We didn’t yet know about undertows and rip currents, the many ways the ocean can turn on you.

Carlito hated getting wet and stayed away from the beach, kicking a soccer ball around on the concrete walkway toward the seawall, down dusty trails through bendy pines, dodging the swarms of mosquitoes and spiderwebs that kept most people out of those paths. I was a faithful little sister, reluctant to go anywhere without him, so I’d always pull myself out of the water and away from Mami, towel off, and follow my brother.

Sometimes Carlito let me kick around with him, but most of the time he just wanted me to cheer him on while he battered the ball, shouting, “Go Carlito! Viva Carlito!” and after he’d kick an imaginary goal, he’d do a little dance and I’d scream so hard I’d almost make myself cry.

I was shouting and clapping so loud that morning that we didn’t notice the rattle of the planes right away. It was a slow burning buzz steadily rising over the shrill song of the cicadas. We felt the vibration over the roof of the forest and saw the bowing of the treetops before we knew what it was. Through an open patch of canopy we saw the belly of a chubby gray propeller plane, the quiet, old-fashioned kind. Behind it, another plane, and the two looped over us. Carlito grabbed the ball and I knew to follow him.

Mami was already by the seawall waiting for us to appear. She pressed me into her hip but Carlito hung back, embarrassed at her affection. Our uncle had put it on him that he had to be un hombrecito, the man of the house, since our father was dead and couldn’t be referred to even in passing — our mom forbade it — not even as the kind of myth of a dad that fatherless kids like to tell, the guy who may or may not ever show up at your door one day with presents and an explanation for his absence.

The lifeguards and park rangers made everyone get out of the water, then cleared the beach, and people gathered by the pier to gossip about the commotion. Someone said it was a drug bust; a cigarette boat registered in the Bahamas had unloaded a bundle of packages into the bay once the crew spotted the Coast Guard in their wake. Someone else heard there’d been a drowning, but if there had been, I guessed they would have pulled all the beachgoers into a human chain to comb the water like they did a few years earlier when Mami thought I’d gone under but really I just went to use the public bathroom.

Someone else said it was a suicide; one of those fishermen had gotten too drunk while minding his lines, staring out at the Stiltsville houses, and decided it was his time to end things. But the water along the seawall and beneath the pier was shallow, folding into barnacle-and-urchin-covered rocks that would needle you bad while breaking your fall. It was no place for a final jump.

Then we saw the vehicles arrive. Trailers unloaded ATVs. Another truck spit out a line of cops in special gear ready to mount them and take them into the woods. I didn’t realize I was scared until I noticed a stocky green-uniformed park ranger standing next to our mother, and that somehow made me feel safer even if strange men were always trying to stand next to her. She was still beautiful then, wearing no makeup, just the sheen of humidity, her hair in natural black curls, not the coppery straightened look she took on a few years later along with a smoking habit that hardened and sallowed her golden complexion.

“You know what they’re really looking for,” he muttered to Mami like he was an old friend.

She gave him a blank look. She could appear very naive when she wanted.

“Refugees.”

I remember his tone, as if the word itself were illicit.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“We got a call from someone who spotted a boat dropping them off.”

The search vessels arrived. Official-looking ones that weren’t Coast Guard but something else with a crested seal painted onto the sides. Jail boats , Carlito called them, plowing parallel to the seawall, though it seemed to me that between the rocks and the water, there was nowhere to hide. I knelt to get a better look, but the sun was high over the bay now, water reflecting like a mirror, yet I could still make out thousands of tiny fish gleaming like blades in the current below us.

Carlito complained that he wanted to go home but the ranger warned us that the Border Patrol had the park on a hold and nobody was allowed in or out. Not till they found who they were looking for.

“For all we know, somebody’s been waiting to pick them up and drive them out of here. They’ll be checking cars and trunks before they let anyone out.”

He put his hand on Mami’s shoulder and she let him, which I didn’t like.

“Best to wait till this whole thing clears and they got those folks all accounted for. This stuff happens at least once a month around here.”

Carlito and I sat on the wall watching the planes circle overhead, the cops rushing the vegetation like soldiers at war. Then came the dogs. A parade of angry-eyed canines, eager to enter the forest to find their prize.

I looked at Carlito and he looked to the ranger, who was standing even closer to our mother now, asking her where she was from, where she got that lovely accent.

“Colombia,” she said, and the guy let out a hoot.

“We got one right here!” he shouted, pointing to Mami, then to Carlito and me. “No, we got three! Quick, bring the dogs!”

Carlito and I didn’t get that he was joking till Mami let out a soft laugh, the kind everyone believed was authentic but us. We knew it was her decoy laugh. The one she used to get people off her back, and by people, I mean men.

We heard from another bystander who heard it from another ranger that four people had been caught already and were sitting offshore on a jail boat waiting for whatever came next. There were eight more out there, they said, but those who were already in custody wouldn’t say if the others had made it to land, were on another boat, or were just floating out on the water, clinging to a buoy or an inner tube or, worse, drowned. They probably weren’t Cubans, though, someone said, or the police wouldn’t be trying to smoke them out of the park like this.