Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“How?”

“Your brother told me.”

“When?”

“I tried to visit him in prison. It was a while after the trial ended, after the sentencing. I didn’t know visits had to be planned in advance and you had to be approved. I just showed up so they turned me away. I wrote to him and asked if I could come see him, just to talk to him, just to see if he was okay because I worried about him being in there all alone. But he never answered me. I kept writing to him anyway. A few times a year. For his birthday, Christmas, things like that. A few weeks before he died he called me. He said it was you who pushed him to do what he did to my baby. I always imagined it was something like that. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to upset you.”

“It’s my fault,” I say, though my voice has gone faint.

“No, it’s not. You’re not the one who took her to the bridge. He did.”

A small boy opens the door behind Isabela and pokes his head out from behind it.

“Mami,” he says. “Who’s that?”

“This is my friend, Reina. Dale un besito.”

He steps toward me, also barefoot, in his small blue jeans and T-shirt, and I bend so he can kiss my cheek. This child and the one inside, babies whose innocence Carlito stole before they were born because there will be a day when their mother will have to explain to them what happened to the older sister they will never have the chance to know.

“This is Rafaelito,” she says, slipping her hand onto his back. “Go inside and watch your sister for me, papi.”

When her son is gone, Isabela sighs.

“I knew how you felt about me, Reina. When Carlito and I got together you thought I was going to take him away from your family. He said you were jealous. But I was the one who was jealous of you. I never had a brother or a sister to love me the way your brother loved you. I felt so alone in my childhood. But Carlito would do anything for you. He told me so many times.”

She lowers her voice and steps in a bit closer.

“I blamed myself for a long time too. I told myself that if I hadn’t let him take my baby girl with him that day, if I had just kept her home with me, she would still be alive. I thought if it was anyone’s fault it was mine, because I am the mother, I’m the one who was supposed to protect her, and I am the one who let my daughter go.”

She looks around and checks the door behind her to make sure it’s shut tight.

“I found out I was pregnant right after Carlito was arrested. He never knew. Nobody knew. Only my parents. They said God wouldn’t want me to have his baby, and they were afraid that if I showed up pregnant to the trial it would influence the verdict. They even took me to see a priest and he said my case was an exception because nobody should have to give birth to the child of a murderer. They made me get rid of it. I didn’t want to. I tried to fight them but I was so weak in those days. I thought I would die of sadness. I was sure I wouldn’t live through the pain of it all. And the trial hadn’t even started yet.”

Both of us have tears in our eyes. She pauses, draws in her breath, and looks all around us, as if searching for someone to stop her from saying more.

“I can never tell this to anyone except you. I still love your brother. He killed me along with my daughter. He broke my soul into pieces. He destroyed the happiness of my family. But I still love him because I remember the boy I knew, the Carlito I fell in love with.”

I can’t manage any words so I reach for her hand, as if asking permission to hold her.

She takes me into her arms and I feel her tremble against me.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper into her hair.

We pull apart and she gathers her breath, her eyes drying and brightening as I wipe mine with my hands.

“I forgive you for everything, Reina, like I forgive your brother and I forgive myself. You and I are the ones still standing. We’ve outlived our penance. I’m free. You’re free too.”

“I don’t feel free.”

“But you are.”

Rafaelito pries the door open again and checks on his mom. She looks back at him and then to me.

“I have to go. It’s almost time for the kids’ dinner. My husband will be home soon.”

She reaches for me and we embrace again for a long time.

“Take care of yourself, Reina. This time, when you leave, don’t look back.”

The long blazing days of summer grow shorter. Nesto and I take in what they call an acoustic or electrical storm. A song of thunder with no rain. Torches of lighting ignite the black night. Fiery veins rooted in both sky and ocean.

We’ve already lost power in the cottage. We open the windows to let air through and sit on a mound of eroded beach. These storms are our night symphonies. We watch sparks and flashes thread the horizon, traveling along the water, knowing there are others who also watch and wait for Changó’s strikes from the other side of the sea.

I dig my toes into the soft sand, eyes on the ocean like a blanket covering the earth. Nesto reaches for me, and leads me by the hand to the water’s edge where he raises his palms to the white light of the moon, both of us stepping sideways into the shallow tide.

I feel the Atlantic pool at my ankles, soft sand cradling my feet, embracing my legs and torso as the water pulls us in. I lean into Nesto’s arms and he dips me under the tide, seven times, whispering an orikí to Yemayá, protector of maternity, asking for her blessings. Then we swim together as the ocean floor drops out from below.

All my life I have wondered if I am the true abikú, as predicted and as marked by my father with the cut in my ear, unworthy and inhospitable to life.

I wondered it as recently as yesterday, before I learned that within me I’ve been carrying a hidden being, something I didn’t know I could want this much.

It was this temporary magical state, this biological trick, that, as suspected, likely made the wild dolphin look to me with recognition and led her to follow me out of her pen to open water. I thought I was special that night though I didn’t yet know how.

Of course there were signs all along. But we didn’t see them, because they weren’t the signs we were looking for.

When I found out, I couldn’t stop myself from offering Nesto a way out, but he wouldn’t take it. He said we belong to each other now.

He told me he knew from the first time he took me out to the blue — when I showed him the sea horses in the water, because they’re solitary creatures and to see them in courtship is extremely rare — that we would be together for a long time.

Maybe I wasn’t aware of it, but I think I knew then too.

I hear Nesto’s breath, the sound of his body breaking the waves behind me as I swim ahead, and I know he will never let me go too far.

It’s no longer just the two of us out here in the water.

He watches as I give myself to the current, the way my mother taught me to do when I was a child in her arms, and let the water ease me back to shore, back to him.

A few nights ago, Nesto called me out to the beach. He pointed to the turtle nest he marked months ago with coconuts and shells, and that he’s looked over to make sure it remained undisturbed. The sand was beginning to move. We watched from behind the dune as hatchlings climbed their way out of the nest their mother made for them, following the path marked by moonlight, leaving behind them a tiny trail of prints like stars in the sand, dipping into the tide, struggling to swim against it until finally carried out by the ocean.

Nesto and I were quiet, amazed at their instincts, the way the celestial compass of nature and the night guided them home.

Nesto stands on the edge of Lolo’s boat, hands on his hips, afternoon sun burning his back. When he gets that look about him, I wonder if one day he’ll carry out the fantasy he’s told me about, sailing a boat across the Straits to collect his children himself.