Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

He can’t cry anymore. No sound comes from his throat, but I feel him scream from within, calling for Mami, calling for me.

In the morning, Nesto meets me at the hotel, his eyes ringed with fatigue, and I know he hasn’t slept. He will take me to the airport though he won’t leave on his flight to Miami until tonight.

“She said she’ll think about it,” he tells me, once we are in the car, yet another borrowed Lada, on our way to the airport. “I asked her how much more time she needs. It’s been years already. By the time she’s done thinking, the kids will be grown and have their own children to struggle to feed or Sandro will have already thrown himself to the sharks to bring himself over. I know she has a new boyfriend. My sister told me he works in the kitchen of a paladar. But Yanai says she’s not staying for him. She says this is her country and it breaks her heart to think of leaving it. She blames me. She says I should never have left. She says, ‘If you love your children as much as you say, why don’t you come back?’”

“Do you ever think about doing that? Of moving back instead of trying to bring them over?”

“Every day. Even my mother tells me maybe Yanai is right, and the children are better off here. They won’t know the pain of leaving their country. They know only the pain of being left behind. She says to let it be, to let time take care of everything. But just look around this island. Anyone can see time is our enemy. We are already four generations deep into this mierdero of a revolution. I was born into it. I didn’t have a choice. But am I supposed to surrender my children and all my descendants too?”

We slow at an intersection and Nesto turns to face me.

“This island causes blindness. I know because I was blind for a long time too. But I can’t let things just be. I have to keep trying.”

At the airport, we say good-bye though it’s only for a matter of hours because we will meet tonight back at the Miami airport, after my detour through Colombia and his short flight from Havana, and take the bus together back to the cottage in the Keys.

When I came to Cuba a few days ago, the airport arrivals area was a scene of ecstatic embraces, loved ones reunited after years, maybe decades. Here at the entrance to the departures terminal, the long hugs are accompanied with tears, a feeling of families breaking apart for who knows how long.

I tell Nesto what I’ve never told him before.

“I’ll wait with you through it all. As long as you want me by your side. I believe you when you say you had to leave in order to help your family. But I want you to know, I will also believe you if one day you tell me you have to stay.”

We’ve been back on our island a week, in the routine of days at our jobs, watching the dolphins surrounded by metal fences, and the pen where the wild dolphin once lived, now occupied by a veteran performer, quarantined with dolphin pox that’s left her marbled with lesions. Sometimes Nesto and I talk about trying again. We’ll wait for the right kind of rain, monitor the wind, make sure the current will help carry the dolphins out rather than push them deeper into their cages. We just have to wait a bit longer. Nesto and I have become good at this kind of vigil-keeping together.

Our nights in the cottage are quiet. Nesto has been solemn since our return, though I sense his restlessness. We’ve been looking forward to a day out in the blue, but when we go to meet Lolo at the marina on a Sunday morning, he tells us the boat is having engine trouble and we’ll have to wait another few days.

Nesto and I decide to go to the beach instead, and head south to an unnamed wide arc of gray sand on the Atlantic side of the islands that only locals know about. A few families have already set up their towels, pulled out the plastic pails and inflatables for the kids. There is splashing in the water and the drone of laughter. We find a spot on the edge of the cove, near the barrier of sea grape trees. There aren’t many words between us, but I’m comforted to look at him as we lie on our backs, see his eyes shut to the sun, veiled in a momentary calm.

I don’t know who on the beach spotted it first; I’m only aware that soon after I’ve fallen into my own nap, I hear the voice of a child on the beach say, “Look at that boat, Mommy.”

A few seconds later, an adult voice comments that no boat should be coming this close to shore. I hear a putting sound, like that of an old car on its last drops of gas, and open my eyes. Just past the buoys, a run-down blue boat scrapes toward the beach, a black tail of exhaust rising from its engine, now as loud as a mower, reverberating against the flat edge of ocean.

“Nesto.” I nudge him awake. “Look.”

He props himself on his elbows and as we take in the sight, the sharpening figures of the boat’s passengers, more people on the beach rise to their feet and approach the water. Nesto gets up too, and I follow.

The boat seems stalled, the dark plume of fumes thickening behind it. There’s commotion on board, bodies moving from one end of the vessel to the other. Nesto waves to the people on the boat, as do some others on the beach, while a few in the wall of voices warn that the boat had better not come any closer or somebody could get hurt.

“Do you suppose they’re refugees?” someone asks.

“If they are, they’d better move fast,” another voice answers.

Nesto turns to me, his face strained with anxiety. “There’s something wrong with the boat.” He rushes to the shoreline and shouts across the water, “¡Tirense! ¡Tirense al agua! ¡Naden! ¡Naden!”

They don’t hear him, or maybe they’re too frightened to swim as he says. It’s only a matter of minutes though each second feels suspended, the smoke cloud growing larger, Nesto’s voice louder and more urgent as he lunges deeper into the water so they’ll hear him.

A Coast Guard boat materializes as if conjured by the waves, silent yet swift, encroaching on the blue boat while the passengers push themselves to one side of the vessel and Nesto screams louder than I ever knew him able, “¡Tirense! ¡Naden! ¡Los esperamos! ¡Naden! ¡Naden!”

Only one man does as Nesto says and throws himself into the water, the chorus of beach voices cheering for him, but as we watch him struggle even in the stillness of a sea on a day with virtually no wind or current, it’s clear the man is much too weak to clear the distance between the boats and the shore. But Nesto is already swimming toward him, body against the tide, and he doesn’t stop, even as a smaller Coast Guard boat we didn’t even notice, pulling in from the other edge of the coast, intercepts the man.

For a moment we lose sight of him and then see, even with the sun shining into our eyes, he’s being pulled from the water onto the boat and any chance he had to touch ground is gone.

Nesto remains in the water, treading, his head just above the surface, watching as the officers on the larger Coast Guard boat round up the rest of the passengers onto its deck, outfit them with life jackets, and prepare to tow the blue boat behind it. Behind me, the beach chorus is silent, but quickly gives way to exchanges of empathy for what’s just occurred. One woman tells another what a shame it is that these people traveled so far, coming so close, but will be sent back to wherever they came from, repatriated , which sounds to me like such a painful word.

There is no doubt one among us called the police to report the arrival of the migrants.

The local news van arrives and people in bathing suits line up to be interviewed. In a few hours, we will see them on television, describing how the boat appeared suddenly on the horizon; the pity they feel that those people, having braved a week at sea, came within a hundred yards of Florida soil only to be turned away.