Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“I never prayed as hard in all my life as I did that night,” she says. “I prayed the wind would spare our house and the roof would stay on tight. I didn’t think it would. Your father and Jaime built that roof themselves. I thought, Tonight, Hector will succeed in killing us all. But I prayed with everything I had, Reina. I told God if He saved us that night and kept a roof on our house so we would have a place to live the next day, I would never ask for anything ever again. After that night in the closet, I believed my faith saved us, even if my prayers, enough for several lifetimes, weren’t enough to save your brother later, when he really needed them. You remember how much I prayed and prayed when Carlito was arrested. I made so many promises. But Diosito had already saved Carlito twice. Once from your father, and then from the storm. And maybe my prayers aren’t worth much after all. I’m just a stupid woman. I’ve made so many mistakes of my own. What I’m trying to tell you, what I’ve wanted to say to you for a long time, is that a mother can’t always save her children. That’s what I learned from everything that happened to us. You each had to save yourselves. Your brother couldn’t, but you did, mi Reina. You did.”

Her eyes are watery and she puts a napkin to them before her eyeliner has a chance to smudge, then dips her fingers into her water glass, dabbing droplets along her neck as if it will be enough to cool her off.

“Mami.”

She lifts her hair off her neck and fans herself. “Why did we come to this restaurant? It’s so hot. We should have gone somewhere with air conditioning.”

“Mami,” I try again. I want to reach for her hands as she did with me, but I can’t bring myself to do it. We are sitting at a tiny table for two, but she feels so far from me, as if I have to shout for her to hear me.

“Mami, please listen to what I’m going to tell you.”

I pause to make sure I have her full attention but am afraid if I wait too long, the words will slip back down my throat to the place in my gut where I’ve been holding them for so long.

“It’s my fault Carlito did what he did. I’m the one who told him about Isabela. It was me. And it wasn’t true. I lied , Mami. I lied and he believed me.”

I lean back, letting the truth rest on the table between us.

My mother watches me without a trace of surprise in her eyes, though I know this doesn’t mean much. She isn’t one to give anything away; emotions are as valuable and as vital to her as money.

“Why?” she finally whispers.

“He loved her so much. I thought he would choose her over us. I didn’t want him to leave us.”

She sighs and closes her eyes for several seconds. When she opens them, it’s as if we are somewhere else, not at a restaurant on the river with me confessing, but back in the old house, sitting across the wooden kitchen table, me still carrying the secret of my regret.

Maybe if she were another kind of mother she might offer solace, words of comfort; tell me something that could release me from my shame; say something like, Reina, you could not have known he would take what you told him and do what he did. You never could have known.

But the woman across from me is Amandina de Castillo, wife of Hector and mother of Reina and Carlito.

The only thing she knows to say in response is, “We should make a promise to each other never to speak of those days again. No matter what.”

“I’m not going to promise that.”

“I don’t want to remember those things anymore. Please, if you love me at all, Reina, let me forget. Have mercy on your poor mami. I beg you.”

We watch each other until she breaks her gaze, looks to the water and to the sky, darkening with granite clouds.

“It looks like rain is coming.”

I nod. “I’ve got a long drive south.”

“I wish you would stay.”

I don’t know if she means this afternoon, waiting out the rain together, or if she means longer, maybe forever, starting yet another life with her here in Miami.

“I can’t. I have to go home.”

We stand together on the street outside the restaurant, not far from the coil of lots under the interstate, once a tent city that housed Mariel refugees. My mother hugs me, her arms falling around my waist, her cheek hitting my shoulders.

I remember when I was a child and could only reach as high as her hips, how I’d cushion myself against her thighs, lean on her as she talked to people, how she’d grip my hand tight through crowds, hold me on her lap as we watched her telenovelas and she dreamed up other lives for us.

She seems so fragile to me now, unsteady in her heels; even her bangles and earrings look too big for her. In her face, I see traces of my grandmother and I suspect, by the way she looks back at me, as if I am a photograph and not her daughter in the flesh, that she sees one of her old faces in mine too.

She is so small in our embrace that I feel as if I am carrying her, but when I let go, I feel her arms tighten and strengthen. Then it’s as if my mother is carrying me.

A few months before he died, Carlito was in one of his moods. We faced each other in the visitors’ room at the prison and he waited a long time to speak to me. I did all the talking, telling him about my dumb life painting nails. He stared back at me, his eyebrows dipped, nose wrinkled, lips tight like he was ready to spit. When I finally shut up, he shook his head at me as if I were some pitiful thing.

“I should have died the day Hector threw me off the bridge. That fucking Cuban should have let me drown. We all would have been better off.”

Sometimes I wondered if the reason Carlito never took the blame for his crime was that he didn’t blame himself, but blamed me, for sending him off in a rage that day. I didn’t know what he was capable of. If I had known, I would have tried to stop it. I would have called Isabela and told her Carlito was on his way to her house and not to open the door. His fury would have passed. He would have returned to his normal self and nothing would have been lost.

That day in the prison, with my brother’s dimmed face in front of me, I said something I’d never said in all the years I spent visiting him, or through any of my letters or phone calls.

“Forgive me, Carlito.”

I thought he would pardon me for failing him, for failing us, but the brother I once knew, who even in his brutality could be tender, loving, and gentle, looked away from me to the guard standing by the door, and to the clock on the wall behind me.

“What do you want me to say, Reina?”

He shrugged so abruptly his handcuffs dragged against the metal table, making a grating sound I’ll never forget.

I don’t know if he knew what I meant with my request, or if it meant anything to him. I wish I could have said more that day. If I’d had the right words, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so exposed yet smothered by the filthy starkness of the prison walls, the guard taking in everything we said to one another.

We were quiet until Carlito said he had a headache. The bright lights of the visitors’ room burned his eyes too much and gave him a migraine.

“You don’t mind if I leave our visit early, do you?”

“No,” I said, though it hurt me since we had half an hour left and it would be lost time we would never have the chance to make up.

He looked to the guard to signal that he was ready to leave me. This guard was an extra rigid one, so instead of hoping for a contraband hug, I kissed my fingertips and quickly pressed them against my brother’s cheek before the guard could pull him away and reprimand me for making physical contact with a death row case.

A few days later, he called me. I’d just gotten home from work and kicked my shoes off in the foyer. The house was quiet, lonely but familiar, and after a day of making conversation with clients, I longed for its muteness. But then I heard the noise of the prison behind Carlito’s voice and all I wanted was more of his chaos, more of him.