Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“Do you remember”—he lowered his voice—“that day in the park when they were looking for those people? That kid. . hiding?”

I nodded. “By the tree.”

“I think about him.”

“You do?”

“I’ve thought about that kid every day I’ve been in this place. I see his face.” Carlito inhaled deep, letting it all out through his nostrils. “The fucking terror. Qué mala suerte. El pobre. He knew. . he knew. .”

“Knew what?”

“He knew they were gonna get him.”

I looked at my brother wanting to see the same in his eyes, because if there is terror there is still hope that things might work out the way you want them to, but my brother’s eyes had gone dead long ago.

“Do you think he made it out of the park before they got him?”

“Not a chance.”

“I do.” I said, maybe for myself more than for my brother. “He’s probably a citizen by now, with a good job and a wife and a family.”

“Maybe he’s right here in this prison.”

I shook my head. “He didn’t come all that way to fuck shit up.”

Carlito sighed and I realized I’d made him feel bad.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Carlito. I didn’t mean you fucked things up. I know you’re not supposed to be here. Everybody knows it was a mistake.”

I’m not sure why I was the one apologizing. Sometimes I wished my brother would take the blame, admit that he was the one who ruined everything, drove all of our lives so far off course that we’d never find solid ground again.

I thought maybe, in that moment, since his final hour was already on the calendar, he’d take the opportunity to say something about it, not that he was sorry, but just that he knew what he’d put us through for seven years, and that he understood it hadn’t been easy for us. That would have been enough. But he was quiet for a while and when the guard told us our time was up he only said, “Te quiero, hermanita,” like he always did, but this time he didn’t look back at me as the guard led him away back to his cell.

Carlito never made it to the prison in Raiford. They found him limp and suspended from a ceiling pipe the morning he was scheduled to be moved. He hanged himself with the cord from the fan they let him keep to alleviate the sweltering Florida Keys heat because he’d never been classified as a suicide risk. He didn’t leave a letter for me or for anybody. He’d met with the prison chaplain the day before, but that was nothing out of the ordinary for Carlito. He liked to talk to preachers and nuns from time to time, though he said that in prison, religions are just another gang to join for protection, like the Latin Syndicate or the Aryan Brotherhood. He liked to ask questions about life and death and sins and souls even if he didn’t agree with the answers. The chaplain says Carlito repented for his sins, which I think sounds really nice and of course Mami was happy to hear that, but I’m not sure I believe him.

I was in the middle of showing the house to a prospective real estate broker when I got the call. I’d been hoping our house would be adopted by another family that could bring to it new happiness, but the broker, a gringa recommended to me by one of my salon clients, said investors were buying up houses all over our neighborhood to renovate and flip for profit, and that ours was run-down and ugly enough to have that kind of appeal. They’d gut it completely, she said, maybe even tear it down. When they were through, it would be unrecognizable. She was smiling when she said this, but it made me uneasy. And the best part, she said, was that most of these investors were people from other counties or from up north, unaware of our family reputation and less likely to shy away from the lore of our home.

Then the phone rang.

Normally phone calls from the prison start with a recording saying you’re getting a call from an inmate and asking if you’ll accept the charges, but this time it was a man’s voice saying he was the warden and I should go somewhere quiet before he said what he had to say. I thought it must have to do with the logistics of Carlito’s transfer up to Raiford. Something like that.

“Okay,” I said, once I’d stepped out of the kitchen into the yard. “Let’s hear it.”

“Miss Castillo, you’ll want to sit down for this,” the warden told me, but there was nowhere to sit; our patio furniture had rusted beyond function and I’d managed to get rid of it before the broker came by.

“I’m sitting,” I said, though I was just standing in the middle of the last surviving scrap of grass in what used to be our garden. Our old swing set was still at the back of the property where our father had erected it, corroded and shaky, and only used now to hang laundry on its rails.

“Your brother has expired, miss.”

“What do you mean he ‘expired’?”

“I mean he’s dead, miss. The officer on duty found him this morning. I’m sorry for your loss.”

He explained how Carlito hanged himself and I closed my eyes, feeling the pressure of the sky pushing me down into the earth.

I should have seen it coming. Our mother got a similar call when our father died, but the warden at that particular prison had been more sympathetic, even offering Mami some pocket-psychology nugget that men tend to express themselves through violence in suicide and she shouldn’t take it personally.

Prisons only want their inmates alive so they turned my brother’s body over to my mother and me so we could give him a funeral, along with a few boxes containing all his worldly possessions — a few notebooks with cartoonish pencil drawings, books, letters from women, and photos I’d given him over the years of happier times before his crime, when it was him and Mami and me and we still celebrated Nochebuena and birthdays.

Somehow, in death, Mami became Carlito’s mother again.

We thought we could keep my brother’s passing private, but the headline hit the front page of both the English and the Spanish newspapers the next morning: CONVICTED BABY KILLER FOUND DEAD, over a picture of Carlito in his red suit, thirty years old and bald, staring at the camera as if he’d already decided it would be his final portrait.

There were no phone calls of sympathy. No flower arrangements. Except from Isabela, remarried with two more little ones of her own, who sent us a Mass card and a note saying she’d always pray for Carlito’s soul.

If we’d left his body with the prison, they would have buried Carlito in a state cemetery along with the other dead inmates who went unclaimed by their families, beneath a wooden cross marked not by his name but by his prison number. But we couldn’t afford our own hole in the ground for Carlito so we decided on cremation because it was cheaper.

My mother still considered herself super Catholic — except for occasional visits to brujas, psychics, and espiritistas, and that phase when she became obsessed with the Ouija board and played with it for hours every night — but neither of us had been to church in years, maybe because those wooden pews reminded us too much of being in the courtroom, and she was too ashamed to look for a priest or minister to preside over a suicide funeral.

She let this short guy from the funeral home read a standard prayer over Carlito’s coffin and we did our crying over his swollen and stiff body in the rented casket privately, praying for his salvation, asking that my brother be forgiven, and may we be forgiven too.

A few of our relatives eventually showed up — Tío Jaime, his wife, Mayra, and some distant primos — which Mami appreciated, but I got the feeling they just wanted to see if Carlito was really dead and it wasn’t just a rumor.

The bedroom that used to be Carlito’s was empty now. Mami had packed up all her saints and candles and prayer cards and taken them with her to Orlando, but most never made it out of the cardboard box because Jerry told her only ignorant peasants believe in “esas tonterías,” and I guess she decided she didn’t really need them anymore.