Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

The park terrain, with the way it poked into the edges of the Atlantic and the silence and blackness that fell over it after sunset, was an easy drop-off point for those Caribbean arrivals, but also one of the more obvious and heavily patrolled ones. They came from all over, not just the northern half of the Caribbean, but from as far south as Colombia and Venezuela, as far west as Honduras and Nicaragua. But we rarely saw that stuff on the news anymore. The public had already heard enough about boatlifts and refugees and now preferred to hear about murders and cocaine busts and corrupt politicians instead.

After the day of the planes, we stopped going to the park as often. Mami got roped into relationships with men who didn’t like having Carlito and me tag along on their outings, and Carlito and I grew old enough not to care. My brother was into bicycles and forming boy gangs with the neighborhood kids, and I was happy to be their mascot, until we got to the age when our bodies started to divide us — girls over here, boys over there — and then the rough waters of puberty when I figured out the boys didn’t mind keeping me around as long as I agreed to be their toy.

We never told our mother about the boy in the woods. And Carlito and I never spoke of it to each other after that day. But there were times I’d wanted to bring it up to my brother. Sometimes I’d see a young guy around town or at the supermarket who looked just like the boy by the banyan and I wondered if it was him, if he’d ever made it out of the forest and into our world or if they’d hunted him into the night. I wondered if the dogs had finally sniffed him out. I thought if he’d managed to stay hidden, we could have gone back for him the next day. The planes and boats would have given up the search, and it would be old news among the rangers. Mami could have pulled up the car close and we could have sneaked him into the trunk and out of the park, taken him home, and given him food and clothes and a place to rest. Why hadn’t we done that?

A few months ago, they made Carlito’s execution date official. They’d be moving him up to the death row prison in Raiford and I was planning to move up there too as soon as I got the matter of selling our house settled. I’d heard rents were cheap because nobody really wants to live around a bunch of murderers, in a town that’s only known for its executions, except maybe their families or their fans. I figured I could get a job easily enough because no matter where you are, there will always be women who enjoy the small luxury of having their nails painted, and it would save me the hours I spent driving south each week to see Carlito down at the Glades.

Our mother moved up to Orlando to be with her boyfriend, Jerry. He makes enough at his dental practice for her to stop working. This is the kept-woman gig she’s been praying for all her life. She suggested I join her up there. Said I’d benefit from starting over in a city where nobody knows me or my last name. I thought she was inviting me to live with her since Jerry’s townhouse is big enough and there’s a room specifically for guests they never actually have. But she explained I could rent an apartment nearby and find a roommate or, even better, maybe with a little effort, I’d get lucky like her and find a man to take care of me.

I told her I had to follow my brother.

During one of my last visits at the prison with him before his transfer, I was trying to be positive about things, saying it would be a good change for Carlito, who was so sick of his prison down in the Keys, the smell of the ocean so close as if taunting him, reminding him of his crime. I didn’t acknowledge that a date had been set for him. It was still years away and I knew more appeals could push it off even further. I was already writing to law school groups, advocacy programs, doing all I could to get things delayed or hopefully overturned. And everyone knows it can take decades for the governor to sign the death warrant to put someone in the chamber.

In this case, I told Carlito, time was on our side.

We were in the private family meeting room where we sometimes had our visits, sitting across a wide table from each other. Carlito was in his red jumpsuit. Most of the inmates wear orange, but death sentence cases have to wear red. I was in a loose T-shirt and jeans because they’re picky about what women can wear when visiting prisoners. Nothing too tight, not too much skin, no shorts or dresses. I’ve seen ladies get turned away for pushing it with their too-sexy outfits, or forced to change out of their tube dresses and borrow sweats from another visitor who already knew better and came prepared. Here they were even strict about jewelry, so my earrings had to come off before I went in, left with my purse in one of the visitors’ lockers.

I held Carlito’s hands in mine, my fingers wedged between the cuffs and his wrists because I hoped that at least for a moment he would feel me and not the cold metal against his skin. Those are things to which he’d become too accustomed. I saw it in his posture. The way the years of walking with his hands chained to his waist, his ankles shackled together by leg irons, had sloped his spine, causing him to walk with his head tilted down, in short steps, so different from the way he moved when he was free, with rhythm in his gait, a walk more like a glide.

“Reina,” he began. “Do you remember when we were kids. .”

“I remember everything.”

Sometimes Carlito liked to reimagine our childhood and I played along. He’d talk about how Papi used to play the guitar and sing us boleros or put on a record and while Mami danced with Carlito, our father would sway around the room with baby-me in his arms. I didn’t contradict him even though he was only three years old in those days and couldn’t possibly remember such things. I wanted to believe it was as he said, but I once asked Mami if any of that had ever happened and she shook her head slowly before changing her mind and simply shrugging: “I don’t know. It’s been so long, mi amor. Ya no me acuerdo.”

But there were things she did remember and she’d wait until she was angry at me about something to unleash them on me like a wolverine. How my father never held me when I was a baby, either the cause or the consequence of my relentless crying — there was no way to know. When he was drunk, he’d deny he was my father, or worse, say I was a bad-luck baby, that my crying had driven his own father to suicide after his wife died and Hector brought him to live with us. When my grandfather hanged himself in our front yard one night, my father blamed me.

Some guy Papi worked with, a part-time yerbatero, warned I was an abikú, the wandering spirit that incarnates in children and makes them die. I’d taken the soul of the baby my parents lost between Carlito’s birth and mine, only to be reborn in the form of another child because the spirit world didn’t want me either. The yerbatero warned my father an abikú that doesn’t die carries the dark spirit and has the power to make future siblings or others around them die in their place. Abikús, he said, are the children that come to destroy a family.

Mami claimed not to believe in those pueblerino superstitions, clinging to her crucifixes and escapularios, but to satisfy my father she did as the yerbatero advised to lift the maleficio. She put a silver chain around my ankle to help with my crying, carved my footprint into the skin of a palm tree, and even let Hector clip my ear himself, with metal pliers and a blade, on the tip and though the cartilage, just as the yerbatero instructed, so they would recognize me if I were to die and be reborn again.

These, my mother said, were reasons my father did not love me.

But Carlito had his mind on something else that day. Something other than our family.