Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

The reporter on the scene will show images of the blue boat, and describe in a voice-over how it was cobbled together with different metals and a car engine that failed its passengers on the final stretch of their journey.

He will wrap up his report facing the camera, saying the thirteen migrants, now in protective custody, were rescued by the authorities, though I think the real rescue would have been letting them make their way to shore.

Then he will turn it back over to the in-studio broadcaster who will offer her own commentary and statistics about how it’s only June and the number of asylum seekers has already surpassed last year’s figure, approaching the records of the nineties boatlift exodus, before cutting to a commercial for a used car dealership in Florida City.

On the ride home from the beach, Nesto stops to buy a card to call his family. He wants to tell them what we’ve just witnessed, how this is the future that awaits the children if they don’t find another way sooner. When Yanai comes to the phone, I hear him beg her to reconsider marrying him as he paces the parking lot, saying it’s their best chance to give them an opportunity at a better life, then it grows to arguing, though he turns his body and steps away from me so I can’t make out much more.

When the call ends, he kicks the back fender so hard that the truck shakes with me sitting inside it. Then he drives us up to the lagoons on Card Sound Road, where he parks along the marsh and spends an hour chucking stones through clouds of dragonflies and across the water as if trying to crack glass.

I won’t ask what she said. I want to leave it between them, but Nesto tells me anyway.

“She will only marry me if I can promise her a house over here as good as or better than the one she will leave behind, and a car to get around in. She says even if she’ll be a refugee on paper, she refuses to live like one.”

“She’s scared. She feels safe there. She isn’t ready to leave.”

“I don’t think she ever will be. I can hear it in her voice. All her excuses. It’s like she’s telling me to forget it, to stop hoping because it will never happen; I’ll never bring my family here. At least not in the way that I want, and not for a very long time.”

He throws another stone with the force of his whole body behind but it seems to drop out of the air into the water only a few feet away.

“Until then, what do I have?” He motions to the swamp and sea oats surrounding us.

Maybe he expects me to say nothing , and not so long ago, I probably would have.

“You have me. And this small life we have together. I know it’s not the same, but it’s something.”

He drops the rock in his palm and walks over to where I stand, leaning on the back of the truck.

“Reina, I don’t tell you so because I don’t want you to think of me as a burden, but since the night we met, you have been the only thing keeping me from drowning.”

On the drive back to Hammerhead, along the Overseas Highway, I notice a pale rainbow emerging from the ocean through the golden crest of sunset. I point it out to Nesto, its fractured prisms deepening in color for only a few moments until the clouds hide it from our side of the sky.

He smiles in a way I haven’t seen him do since I saw him with his son and daughter.

“Do you know what a rainbow is?”

“The crown of Yemayá.” I want him to know I’ve listened to all he’s told me about the world as he sees it.

“Yes, but there’s more. The seven colors of the arcoíris are the manifestations of the Siete Potencias, the seven tribes brought from Africa to the Americas, the spirits that remain to guide humanity through the troubles of life. It’s how Yemayá and all the spirits show they are watching over us, and that we are exactly where we are supposed to be.”

In the evening, Nesto and I sit together on a mound of sand on the beach beyond the cottage, facing the low tide, water pulled from the earth like a curtain. Faint white boat lights scatter in the distance, and fat beams of helicopter searchlights fan edges of the coast — the custom whenever migrants land or are pulled from the ocean — looking for others still out on the water.

It’s still nesting season but Nesto says the female turtles will be confused with so many lights and, unable to find the beach to make their nests, they’ll drop their eggs in the ocean. A generation, maybe even an entire bloodline, lost in one night.

“I hate the ocean sometimes,” he says. “I hate what it does to us, and what we do to it. And I hate that I was born on an island. I’ve had nothing else to look at but that same blue horizon all my life. I’m so tired of it.”

He grows quiet. The only sound is of the helicopters echoing against the tide.

“I should have swum to those people sooner. I could have helped them. They weren’t that far out. I could have pulled them off the boat myself and carried two or three of them to the beach.”

I want to find the right words to comfort him, to say there was no other way things could have gone, but the same feeling haunts me; I’m a good enough swimmer now, I could have gone out and carried someone back with me too.

I picture the boaters in some holding facility or detention center, maybe even a jail like the first one Carlito got taken to before he was sent to the federal prison. Or maybe they are already on their way back home.

“There wasn’t enough time,” I say, perhaps trying to convince us both. “It happened so quickly. Those police boats would have cut us off no matter what.”

“We could have tried. We might have failed. But at least we would have tried.”

Lighting flickers in the distance and dark clouds cover the moon’s halo. We head to the cottage as a thin rain begins to fall.

We lie on the bed, Nesto curving himself around my body, wiping my hair from my face. I feel his heartbeat against my back. Despite the wreckage between us, the voids we carry of the missing and of the lost, though it’s just the two of us here in the darkness, tonight it feels like enough.

The phone rings just as Nesto and I have found our way into sleep.

“Oye, where have you been?” my mother wants to know. “Why haven’t you answered any of my calls?”

“I’ve been busy,” I say, because I never told her I was away. “What’s going on?”

I step outside with the phone, leaving Nesto in the cottage alone, and sit on the last plank of the walkway before it drops off into soft sand.

“Bueno, the truth is I can’t say it was a surprise.”

“You’re getting married.” I try to muster a tone of enthusiasm.

“No, mi’ja. That’s out of the question now.”

“What happened?”

“I knew about her. A woman always knows. I thought it would pass. I ignored it. But she’s smart. Very smart.”

“Who?”

“La otra, Reina. Who else? She was a patient of his. He gave her a mouthful of crowns. He says he’s in love with her. He wants to be with her. He went to stay with her while I pack my things.”

“He’s leaving you?”

“Don’t say it like that. I’m the one leaving.”

“But he’s making you move out.”

“We’re not married. My name isn’t on anything here. I have to leave so she can move in.”

“I’m sorry. I know you had high hopes.”

“Así es la vida. There are no guarantees. Now I have to find somewhere else to live and soon.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“Home,” she says, and I know she means Miami. “I’m sure I can get my old job back. Maybe you want to move in with me. We can get an apartment by the water like we always wanted. Or another house. We can start over together.”

“I’ve already started over.”