The Veins of the Ocean Read online

I am mourning my sadness.

  I feel it slip away through the tranquillity of these islands, this new life, this ocean, this never-abandoning sun.

  I never expected that I would miss the pain of all that came before.

  My eyes drift near my feet where crabs stir from half-covered holes in the sand, and a little farther off, the curved silhouettes of hermit crabs drag themselves toward the dunes. The beach is rumbling with life even if nobody is around to see it.

  Again, I think of Carlito. The years I tried to serve his sentence with him, and how he let me. Maybe it was wrong of me, but sometimes I hoped that he’d see in my eyes how I’d stopped living for anything and anyone but him, and that he would tell me not to come back.

  Another memory comes to me.

  When I was a girl of maybe twelve or thirteen, one of our neighbors put the word out that a special saint was coming to her house for a week and all the mothers of the block were invited to bring their daughters to visit her. I didn’t know what this meant but Mami took me over, and the señora had all the girls sit around the tile floor of her living room while she stood beside a huge statue of the Virgin of something or other, dressed in a jeweled cloak with real human hair on her head, and told us that we should pray to this statue to bring us our future husbands, ask that they be good men, and to help keep us pure on the journey of waiting for this blessed man to appear in our lives. I remember looking all around me. The girls, some who were probably as confused as I was, quickly went for it, lowering their heads to pray. The mothers got on board too, even mine, who was as hopeful as ever in those years that she’d marry again. But I knew there was no reason for me to pray for something like purity when I’d already done things the other girls in that room hadn’t. I’d already shown my body to boys, let them touch me. In a year or so, I would be pregnant for the first time. I already suspected there was nobody above looking out for me. I knew there must be a reason people in the neighborhood, and even my own mother at times, called me La Diabla.

  As the lady at the front led the group through a round of Hail Marys, one of the girls sitting on the floor near me touched my ear.

  “What happened to you?” she said, tracing my mark of the abikú.

  “A fishhook caught me,” I lied, because I’d just heard a story about a kid who lost an eye that way.

  Before we left the lady’s house that night, she had each of us girls write on a piece of paper our deepest wishes and prayers for the Virgin, which we were supposed to fold into tiny bits and leave in a basket by the statue. I watched the girls and our mothers think carefully before they wrote down the words of their prayers. I pretended to write but the paper I left folded at the Virgin’s feet was blank.

  Mami wasn’t satisfied with laying out her wishes to only the traveling Virgin. She went to the top husband-finder of all the saints, San Antonio, and asked her statue of him to bring her someone wonderful. She tried all the tricks: she removed the baby Jesus from the saint’s arms and hid him in a drawer until her prayers were answered and San Antonio delivered a new husband for her. When that didn’t work, she tied the statue upside down to a post on her bed, but when one of her boyfriends was over, he hit his foot against it and when he looked under the bed and saw the statue there like a secuestrado held for ransom, he knew exactly what Mami was up to and didn’t come around again. But she kept praying, and told me the story of a girl, a prima of a prima of a prima back in Colombia, who also prayed to San Antonio for a husband, but one day she got so angry at him for not producing that she threw the statue out of her apartment window and a few moments later a young man came knocking on the door with the saint in his hand, saying, “Excuse me, miss. Did you lose a santo?” And of course, the guy became her husband.

  After I came to know Nesto, I learned Saint Anthony was another face of Elegguá, whom Nesto regularly asked for assistance; the wise one, the trickster who, as a boy, was the only orisha able to cure Olódumare when he was ill, and for that reason, the Great One made him the controller of destinies, the one whose blessing must be sought at the opening of every prayer to any other orisha.

  “You have to give yourself permission to believe,” Nesto once told me. “The orishas are forces of light, and you don’t have to look far to find them. The sun, nourishing us with its warmth, is Olorun. Mars and Mercury are Ogún and Elegguá, guardians over their warrior sons. The moon is the queen Yemayá, keeping vigil over her children on earth. They’re watching over us even when we don’t think they are.”

  I smiled, because my mother would often, in her way, with her own santos and prayers, say the same thing.

  When the sand becomes too chilly for my feet, I walk back to the cottage. I left the porch light on and moths gather in the glow, and I see what I haven’t noticed by day, that star spiders have been at work on a few webs under the lip of the cottage roof. I’m near the door when I look down and see what at first glance looks to be an especially huge cockroach at the threshold, but when I bend in closer, I see it’s a scorpion.

  Mami raised Carlito and me with her own childhood habit of checking our shoes for scorpions before we put them on since scorpions like to hide in small, dark places. But I’ve never seen one in Miami. Even when Carlito and his boy gang said they were going out hunting for scorpions, they never found any.

  This scorpion is dark brown or black, with large hook hands and an upward-coiling tail. I’ve heard they can jump. Mami was bitten by one as a girl and said it almost killed her, and other times just said she wished it had killed her.

  I stare at this scorpion for a few minutes.

  It doesn’t budge.

  I don’t know how else to get past it or at least nudge it on its way so I call for Nesto.

  He finally turns up in the doorway, rubbing his eyes as they adjust to the porch light.

  “Don’t come any closer,” I warn, pointing to the scorpion between us.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  He goes back into the cottage and returns with a broom, a glass, a magazine; leans over; in one swift movement, uses the broom to scoot the scorpion into the glass, covering the opening with the magazine; and walks far from the path, liberating the scorpion in the land extending behind the cottage into the rough edges of what used to be the plantation.

  I’m still on the walkway when he comes back, and he pushes past me, tugging my elbow, mumbling, “Reina, por Dios, I really wish that when I close my eyes or I’m not around, you would just be where I think you are.”

  When we’re back in bed he lies flat, staring at the ceiling, the fan above making slow, nearly airless rotations.

  “Reina. I have to tell you something.”

  I expect him to say that the scorpion is a bad omen, because that’s what I was thinking until I reminded myself I don’t believe in omens, ever since my father decided that my very birth was the worst omen of all since some say that when abikús come back to life, the deal they make with the spirits, in order to remain among the living, is to send another person back to the death world in their place.

  “Something happened when I was in Cuba.”

  He turns his head to me. I’m almost afraid to look at him.

  “You were with someone.”

  “No.”

  I would be more relieved if I didn’t sense something just as bad behind it.

  “I decided something while I was there. We decided something.”

  “We?”

  “My family and me.”

  “Decided what?”

  “I have to get married.”

  I try my best not to react but my eyes must give me away.

  “Let me explain. You know the problems I’m having bringing my children over here. All the delays. There’s a way around it. A much faster way. Through the Family Reunification Program. But we have to be a complete family.
If I remarry their mother, I won’t have to wait for the children one by one. And they won’t have to leave their mother. She has relatives in Miami they can live with. I’ll be able to see them when I want. I can move there to be closer to them. Everything will be better. It’s the easiest thing. We won’t have to wait as long. It’s the waiting, Reina. It’s killing me.”

  “You’ll be a family again.” I want to sound like this is a great thing.

  “I’ll be able to be a real father again. Not a long-distance one. But it won’t be a real marriage. It’s just to get them all out of there.”

  He’s told me many times before how people are casually married in Cuba to ease the way for any kind of paperwork, from visas to car exchanges to housing permutas, and just as easily divorced, while people who live as married couples are often not married at all. Yanai herself went on to marry a German, hoping he’d take her and the children to Europe, but she hadn’t managed to pass the required language test, so her visa never got approved and the German divorced her to marry a Dominican girl. But even if marriages can be transactional, this doesn’t seem like one of those cases to me.

  “She doesn’t want to be with me any more than I want to be with her. It’s for the children. That’s it. Once they’re all over here and she gets the political asylum, we agreed we’ll divorce right away.”

  I don’t know if I should be joyful that he’s finally come up with a way to accomplish reuniting with his kids, or disappointed because one way or another he’ll be married to someone else.

  My silence must convey this, because he touches my arm and repeats, “It won’t be a real marriage. But it is a real family. That’s why I have to do this.”

  “So when is it going to happen, this wedding of yours?”

  “Don’t call it a wedding. It’s not going to be at El Palacio de los Matrimonios or with a party or anything. It’s just an appointment at a government office. We sign papers and that’s it, we’re married. I don’t know when it will be.”

  “Soon?”

  “I hope so. The sooner we do it, the sooner I can bring Sandro and Camila over here.”

  Nesto has told me he’s most worried about Sandro because he reminds him so much of himself, once a great student in his aula, who the teachers now report doesn’t seem to care about anything and if he keeps it up he’ll end up in an Escuela de Conducta. He’s becoming restless, intranquilo, disillusioned like Nesto was at that age, even if they’ve raised him to be a good pionero too, just as Nesto says all parents do—the typical doble-moral, patriots in public, dissidents in their hearts—so the State won’t give them a hard time. But the Revolution is old, Nesto told me, it means nothing to the young, and now Sandro sees the great Nada that awaits him if he stays on the island. Nesto fears his son falling in with las malas compañias in Buenavista, or worse, going from a reform school to El Combinadito, the jail for minors. Or maybe even ending up like one of Nesto’s best friends from childhood, a guy named Lenin who started selling Jamaican marijuana that came in through Oriente to foreigners in order to provide for his family, and was quickly turned in by the CDR, both his legs broken by police and sentenced by the court to fifteen years in prison.

  “I know I can’t ask you to wait for me, for all this to pass,” he tells me. “You have your own life to think about.”

  We are both quiet.

  “I will miss you, Reina, but I will understand it.”

  I don’t know what else to say because I know if I were in his place I would do the same, just like I would have done anything to be under the same roof as my brother for one more day before I lost him forever.

  “I will miss you too,” I say. “But I will understand it.”

  “So what do we do then?”

  I want to say this will end, the same way that everything in life does, and we will both begin again the way we’ve both done before in order to bring ourselves to this very night.

  Instead, all I say is, “I don’t know. Tonight is tonight. Tomorrow is tomorrow.”

  The new dolphin arrives the next day. They close the dolphinarium because I guess they want to keep the truth of how animals come to the facility a mystery to the public. And you’d never know it if you were driving along the Overseas Highway, that next to you, in that big white truck that looks like it should be moving furniture or fruit from Central America, there is a dolphin lying on a stretcher, its fins poking through holes cut through the canvas, with water being poured over its back by its human handlers, having just been flown from Biloxi to the Key West airport.

  They keep us lower staff on the sidelines, far from the commotion of the dolphin being carried in, the trainers anxious and excited, the vets and techs leaning over their clipboards, comparing notes. Nesto and I find a spot in the shade below the stilted hut that looks over all the pens.

  We didn’t talk much this morning at the cottage. Normally he wakes up full of energy, but today he moved about heavily, and instead of showering like he usually does, he just dipped his face under the bathroom faucet and put on his clothes from the day before.

  He had to come in early again for the final once-over of the fencing. In the case of the other dolphins, Mo once told me, even the time activists came in at night and cut out a part of the fence, the dolphins hardly budged, unable to understand they could swim through the gap in the fence and be in open water. But the new dolphin isn’t so far removed from her wild days so they aren’t going to chance her ability to free herself.

  When the dolphin handlers get to the pen, Mo asks Nesto to come help them. He’s not even in his work wetsuit but ends up in the water in his jeans, helping steer the stretcher to the center of the pen until it’s announced they can lower it and help the dolphin swim out. It takes a bit for her to move. She seems reluctant, with all those people watching, holding their breath like she’s a child about to take her first steps. But then she squirms enough to be out of their circle and as the handlers retreat to the edge of the pen, they watch the new girl slowly take inventory of her new surroundings and everyone starts clapping and whistling, as if they’ve all done something amazing together.

  Later, when I’m sent to help out the interns in the fish house, separating the mangled mackerel from the pretty-looking complete ones that are used for shows, fattening them up by injecting them with water, Mo comes in to get a fresh bucket for the new dolphin and I ask how she’s doing.

  “Good,” he says, sliding his hand onto my back. “We’re going to change her name though. We already had a Roxi here who passed away in ninety-four. We want something new for this girl. Any ideas?”

  I shrug. “It doesn’t really matter what you call her. I mean, the names are for us, not for her.”

  Then I let slip out something that Jojo told me: mother dolphins imprint a name on a baby dolphin with a language of sounds and the baby can recognize it with its sonar from miles away.

  Mo and the interns watch me, surprised.

  “Well, she needs a name we can pronounce,” he says, now, clutching my shoulder. “We’re her parents now.”

  For days they keep the new dolphin’s pen cordoned off from the rest of the walkway so visitors can’t check her out, but sometimes I wander in, lower myself onto the dock, and watch Rachel or one of the other trainers in the water with her, rubbing her side when she lets them, and trying to get her attention when she swims to the edge of the pen facing the gulf. They’re still excited about her, even if a little worried that she’s not as sweet as promised, as eager to engage. In fact, she doesn’t seem interested in them at all.

  When they leave her alone, I stay behind. The dolphin never leaves the fence, only letting herself drift along its periphery, and I’m not sure at first, but then it becomes clear to me that she’s pushing her head against the wiring, softly, and then with more force, as if trying to get out.

  Years ago, when I was sitting across from Carlito in the visitor
s’ room at the prison, he told me about the orca at the aquarium in Miami, that, so miserable in his tiny pool, so far from his northern Pacific home and family pod, took to bashing his head against the walls of his tank so hard he sometimes cracked the glass, and eventually caused the brain hemorrhage that killed him. I was too young to remember when it happened, but it was local lore, like our family’s crimes.

  That day during our visit, Carlito said he understood why the whale did that to himself. He told me he, too, had the urge at times to throw his own head against the walls of his prison cell, against the bulletproof glass window on the steel door that contained him, and if all the pain in his heart could be translated to physical strength, he knew he would have been able to break free.

  But it wasn’t the case. The glass and the walls were too thick.

  There was no way home.

  Not for the whale. Not for Carlito.

  When I got the call about Carlito’s suicide, I remembered how Carlito had told me, because he was the smarter one who’d read philosophy books and learned about so many things I hadn’t, that the great minds of the world say the instinct of any living being is to survive. But Carlito had another theory; he said once freedom is taken away along with one’s basic dignities, a living being either has to deny its own instincts and surrender to the oppressor, or be consumed by a new instinct: to reach for its own death.

  I watch Roxi, or whatever they’re going to call her, since they’ve decided to let the public submit names, then put it to a vote. Rachel comes up behind me and sees me with my eyes on the dolphin, still trying to push her way out of the pen.

  “Don’t worry,” she says, though by her tone, it sounds like she’s trying to reassure herself more than me. “She’ll settle in here in no time. They all do.”

  “I guess she doesn’t have a choice,” I say, but Rachel is already lowering herself into the water to try her work again with the dolphin, cooing toward her. The dolphin doesn’t respond and remains with her back to us, by the fence, eyes on the water on the other side.