Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“What kind of life do you have down there? You take care of fish and live in a choza on some woman’s property. You need to progress, Reina. Look for opportunity. Y el muchacho con quien andas, what’s his name?”

“Nesto.”

“What does Nesto have to offer you?”

I want to think of something specific to answer her, something she can understand, but all I say is, “I just want to be here.”

“For now . Until one of you decides to leave the other. That’s what always happens.”

I’m quiet so she moves on.

“I’m going down next week to stay with Mayra and Jaime while I look for an apartment. You think about it. It will be like the old days but completely different. We’ll reinvent ourselves. Mother and daughter, together again.”

It’s not hard to picture us reunited, living in a beachfront condo in Miami Beach, one of the high-rises she’d point out to Carlito and me when she took us for long drives up and down Collins Avenue. Sometimes she’d pull into the sloping circular driveway of one and make Carlito and me get out of the car and look around the lobby so we could describe it to her, tell her about the bronze and marble and leather lobby furniture, the flower arrangements on glass-top tables, the chandeliers, and all those mirrored walls. She once had a boyfriend who lived in a condo on the Intracoastal. He invited us there a few times to swim in the building’s pool. “What do you think, Reinita? Wouldn’t you want to live here?” she asked me as she helped me float in the chlorinated water. I told her I would love to, because it seemed that’s what she expected. But then we didn’t see the guy anymore and when I asked Mami what happened to our moving plans she said she didn’t know what I was talking about.

It would be different now. Two grown women. Without the anchor of Carlito in prison to divide us.

We could live on the water like she always dreamed. The people we know, who know us, all live in the same inland pockets on the other side of the city.

By the sea, we can take on new identities. We can be the mother and daughter who are more like sisters, like best friends.

We’ve both already done our running away. Maybe we belong together.

Like Nesto says: family belongs with family.

And my mother is the only person on this earth who shares my blood.

Carlito and I once ran away together. It was his idea.

He was around eleven and I was on the verge of nine. He was mad at our mother because, one night at our uncle’s house, after Carlito tried out new curse words he’d heard from other boys in the neighborhood, Mayra had slapped him, an openhanded bofetada across the jaw that left his lower lip swollen, and Mami had done nothing to defend him in response. She was always extra sensitive when it came to Mayra, who she said suffered so much from her childlessness that she practically tried to steal Carlito from her when he was born.

“You can’t talk to people like that, especially when you’re in their home,” Mami had explained, smoking a cigarette out the car window as she drove us home.

Carlito protested from the passenger seat beside her, but she only turned up the radio and started singing along with El Puma.

When we got home, Carlito told me to pack my schoolbag with clothes and anything I could sell for money. I didn’t have anything worth anything except the gold cross Abuela had given me for my First Communion so I brought that. Carlito stole all the cash out of Mami’s wallet and after we were supposed to be sleeping, came to my bedroom for me.

We sneaked out the back door and walked to the end of our street together but couldn’t decide where to go so we returned to our backyard, lay down on the grass, heads on our knapsacks, and fell asleep until Mami found us out there in the morning.

She wasn’t even upset. She just said, “Go inside and get ready for school,” and then served us our breakfast silently.

When I was fifteen or sixteen and Mami and I entered the era of vicious fights, I sometimes threatened to leave. By then I had older boys and even grown men I could call who would come for me in their cars and let me stay with them as long as I played along in the ways they wanted.

“I’m running away!” I’d shout at my mother from my bedroom door, and she’d answer, “It’s not running away if I help you pack!”

I could never leave her. Even as I visited Carlito in prison and he urged me, as if I were the one who needed consolation, to have the courage to move out of our house into a place of my own.

“You could decorate it yourself,” he told me. “You could buy new furniture, better than that garbage shit we grew up with. Buy yourself a real bed and some nice pictures for the walls.”

He was no longer insistent that it was our responsibility to look after Mami, the way he’d always been until he went to prison and she turned on him. But I couldn’t picture our mother on her own, as if, without the gravity of children, she’d become so weightless she’d be carried off by the wind.

When we lost Carlito, after we delivered his and Hector’s ashes to the ocean below the bridge, I asked my mother what happened to the body of the daughter she’d lost between Carlito and me. I wondered if she’d been buried or if Mami had held on to her ashes too.

We were in the old house in Miami. I was helping her pack what she’d take with her to her new life with Jerry, separating it from the things she no longer wanted, everything that would be left for me to keep or to throw away.

My mother was quiet for a few moments before answering, then said, “I don’t know what happened to her,” as if surprised by the fact herself.

“You don’t know or your don’t want to remember?”

“I was alone in the hospital when I delivered her, just like I was alone when your brother was born and when you were born. Hector was here in Florida. My mother was working so she couldn’t be with me. It was in the afternoon, so that was enough to scare me because my mother told me strong babies are always born before sunrise. It was so quiet in there. I knew she wasn’t alive before they told me. They let me hold her for only a minute or two. They said any longer would make me go crazy. Then they took her from me. I was crying so much I couldn’t speak, not even to ask where they were taking her. And they never told me. I started having visions of what the hospital people could have done with her. Left her in a refrigerator, or just thrown her in the garbage, or sold her remains for brujería. It was torturing me. But then your father told me it didn’t matter where they took her because her soul never wanted to belong to that body. And she was still in heaven with other babies, waiting to be born. A year later, we had you.”

And then, without my asking more, she said, “I should have buried her. I should have given her a name.”

Carlito told me he looked forward to hurricanes. He would watch from his cell’s narrow window slat as wind twisted palms and curled rain, flooding prison grounds so that Carlito could pretend, if only for a moment, he was looking at the sea, imagining Colombia on the other side.

He said those storms were the only times inmates and guards were close to equals, both held captive by the prison lockdown, unable to flee, taking in with fear and awe the great power of nature surrounding them. It was the only time the guards seemed human to him, not like the guys who regularly taunted inmates, forcing them to fight each other like dogs for their entertainment, placing bets on who would win.

“How can they get away with such a thing?” I’d asked Carlito. “There are cameras everywhere.” I pointed to the one in the corner of the visitors’ room that monitored all our interactions.