Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“The guys who work the control room know how to blow out a camera for a few hours, make it look like a short circuit or a digital glitch so the other guards can do whatever they want. They’re a fucking pandilla, Reina. They’ve all got each other’s backs.”

But on those hurricane nights, after the power went out and even the generators stopped working, and prisoners howled through the blackness, the guards suffered confinement right along with them.

As a family, we’d been through plenty of bad storms. We endured the blurred, watery edges of hurricanes’ outer bands as they passed over and around Florida and even a few direct hits that blasted out power lines and flooded the streets.

But never a storm like Andrew.

Rosita from next door came over asking Mami if she was worried. She was from Puerto Rico so she understood a hurricane’s potential to destroy. But Mami was from Cartagena, where hurricanes hadn’t hit in centuries, so she waved off Rosita’s concern, said we were too far inland to be affected by storm surges and it would just be a matter of heavy rain like every summer. They ended up smoking cigarettes and sipping agua de Jamaica in the kitchen, chismeando about the other neighbors until it was dark and the wind started to change.

We spent the night in a closet. Mami, Carlito, and I huddled as far into the corner as we could get, behind an old trunk and the vacuum cleaner. Carlito had boarded the windows as best he could with cardboard and plywood he found in the garage. He blocked the front door with the coffee table turned on its side. When the house started shaking we went into the only windowless space, holding each other through the whistling and clapping and crashing of the wind.

We fell asleep in one another’s arms, curled over one another’s knees, until after daybreak when we heard people out on the street shouting, wanting to know if the Castillos were safe.

Rosita’s roof peeled and popped off like the lid on a can of sardines, but ours remained sealed to the house without even sagging where a fat palm tree fell onto it. Our windows blew out. The back door shattered. But the front door stayed intact, and this kept wind from filling the house, churning the contents like it did to many of our neighbors’ homes, splitting swimming pools, rolling cars halfway down the road. We heard on the news about people who found sharks spit from the ocean in their yards; marina boats washed onto land; houses ripped off their foundations, walls folding in like wet paper, televisions and furniture hurled miles away; trees torn from the earth; dead animals everywhere.

Our neighborhood went weeks without electricity and water but that was nothing compared with communities farther south where few homes were left standing.

Mami was celebrating because we were among the blessed and living. She said this time the santos were looking out for us.

When I go up to Miami to meet my mother, she brings up the night we spent in the closet during the hurricane.

She’s been staying with Mayra and Tío Jaime, but I told her I don’t want to see them, so we agree to meet at a restaurant on the Miami River, with a view of warehouses and passing cargo ships, saturated in the stink of the nearby fish market: a restaurant she likes because Jerry used to take her there and she wants to make it her own now. She told me on the phone she hoped I’d bring Nesto with me so she could finally meet him.

“I don’t know why you’re being so mysterious about him. Are you afraid I’ll steal him from you?”

She laughed, but I didn’t.

“He has other things to do,” I told her, and it was true. He’s officially given up his room at the motel, moved in with me, and convinced Mrs. Hartley to let him give the cottage a fresh coat of paint inside and out.

Today I find my mother sitting alone at a table by the water, sipping a cocktail. She’s cut her hair so it barely touches her shoulders, and has lost so much weight she had the nerve to put on a flamingo-pink dress with a buttoned bodice she bought twenty years ago, and a pair of strappy silver heels that I borrowed from her a few times as a teenager, before I had the cash to buy my own. Seeing her there, all dressed up and sitting alone at the restaurant, I remember how she used to say her beauty would have been better served in some other life.

A young waiter approaches the table and the way she throws her head back in laughter at something he says makes me sad for her. She doesn’t stand up to hug me when she sees me, just wraps her arms around my neck when I lean down to kiss her, and I feel the stickiness of her lipstick streaking my cheek.

When I sit down, she holds my hand across the table like she’s afraid I might make a run for it.

I hold her fingers tightly too. I’ve come prepared with things I want to say.

She starts with talk about an apartment she saw up in Aventura with two bedrooms, so I can move in whenever I’m ready. It’s on the ocean, with a pool and a tennis court, she says, and I wonder when she’s going to stop torturing herself by looking at places she can’t afford on her own. She’s started seeing another bruja — the one on Brickell all the celebrities go to, had to wait a month for the appointment and pay four hundred dollars for the hour — who predicted better fortunes for her, advising Mami that taking up tennis would be the key to meeting the next man in her life. But just as quickly as she gets excited describing her future as a lady with a condo, she becomes nostalgic for the old neighborhood, launching into the barrio gossip she picked up from Mayra and her posse of lenguonas, about people who are divorcing or having affairs, second families discovered or secret children showing up.

Then, through the appetizer and even the main course, she moves on to her list of the sick, dying, and dead.

“I almost forgot,” she says. “You know who died? La Cassiani.”

“Universo’s mother?”

“Esa misma. They took her to the hospital with chest pains and the doctors finished killing her with some infection. The son went to bury her in Santa Lucía. Mayra heard it was a beautiful funeral with a vallenato band and everything.”

She moves on to another story, about some fulano de tal, a male neighbor of Mayra and Jaime’s, who asked her on a date, but I can think only of Universo’s mother, who wasn’t much older than mine though she always seemed more aged by her life’s disappointments; how she’d stare me down as if that were enough to keep me away from her son, how she brought the daughters and granddaughters of her friends to her house, niñas de buena familia, hoping Universo would choose to be with one of them over a mala like me, as if she knew something about both my past and my future that I didn’t.

Mami stops herself in the middle of a thought about whether or not the guy is as completely divorced as he says, as if suddenly disoriented, glancing around the restaurant, then back at me.

“Listen to me. I go on and on. I’m becoming one of those viejitas who talks to themselves. Soon you’re going to find me having conversations with the television.”

She looks embarrassed, something new for her. My mother is a woman of congenital confidence, armor built into the rust of her complexion. I watch as she rearranges herself in her seat, looks down at her breasts, adjusts the straps of her bra. When finished, she reaches for my hand again, pulls it close to her mouth, and kisses my knuckles before letting go.

“I want to tell you something. Do you remember the night we spent in the closet together during the hurricane? You were both big by then, but I held you to my heart as if you were two babies. Do you remember?”

I nod. But more than that, I remember my brother and me, with all the force and strength we had, mooring her with our child bodies, holding on to her as if the gusts might tear her away and then we’d be left with no parents at all.