The Veins of the Ocean

ONE

When he found out his wife was unfaithful, Hector Castillo told his son to get in the car because they were going fishing. It was after midnight but this was nothing unusual. The Rickenbacker Bridge suspended across Biscayne Bay was full of night fishermen leaning on the railings, catching up on gossip over beer and fishing lines, avoiding going home to their wives. Except Hector didn’t bring any fishing gear with him. He led his son, Carlito, who’d just turned three, by the hand to the concrete wall, picked him up by his waist, and held him so that the boy grinned and stretched his arms out like a bird, telling his papi he was flying, flying, and Hector said, “Sí, Carlito, tienes alas, you have wings.”

Then Hector pushed little Carlito up into the air, spun him around, and the boy giggled, kicking his legs up and about, telling his father, “Higher, Papi! Higher!” before Hector took a step back and with all his might hoisted the boy as high in the sky as he’d go, told him he loved him, and threw his son over the railing into the sea.

Nobody could believe it. The night fishermen thought they were hallucinating but one, a sixty-year-old Marielito, didn’t hesitate and went in after Carlito, jumping feet first into the dark bay water while the other fishermen tackled Hector so that he couldn’t run away. The police came, and when all was said and done, little Carlito only had a broken collarbone, and Cielos Soto, the fisherman who saved Carlito, developed a permanent crook in his back that made him look like a big fishing hook when he walked until his death ten years later.

Hector Castillo was supposed to spend the rest of his life in prison — you know the way these things go — but he killed himself right after the sentencing. Not by hanging himself from the cypress tree in the front yard like he’d always threatened since that’s the way his own father had chosen to depart this life. No. Hector used a razor purchased off some other lifer in a neighboring unit and when they found him, the floor of his cell was already covered in blood. But Carlito and I didn’t hear about all that till much later.

Since Carlito had no memory of the whole disaster, Mami fed us a story that our father died in Vietnam, which made no sense at all because both Carlito and I were born years after Vietnam, back in Colombia. But that was before we learned math and history, so it’s no wonder she thought her story would stick. And forget about the fact that Hector was born cojo, with a dragging leg, and never would have been let into any army.

In fact, the only clue we had about any of this mess was that Carlito grew up so scared of water that Mami could only get him in the bathtub once a week, if she was lucky, which is why Carlito had a rep for being the smelliest kid on the block and some people say that’s why he grew up to be such a bully.

But then, when he was fourteen and our Tío Jaime decided it was time for Carlito to get drunk for the first time, only Jaime got drunk and he turned to Carlito over the folding card table on our back patio and said, “Mi’jo, it’s time you know the truth. Your father threw you off a bridge when you were three.”

He went on to say that Hector wouldn’t have lost it if Mami hadn’t been such a puta, and next thing you know, Carlito had our uncle pinned to the ground and smashed the beer bottle across his forehead.

He was asking for it, I guess.

Mami had no choice but to tell Carlito and me the real story that same night.

In a way, I always knew something like that had happened. It was the only way to explain why my older brother got such special treatment his whole life — everyone scared to demand that he go to school, that he study, that he have better manners, that he stop pushing me around.

El Pobrecito is what everyone called him, and I always wondered why.

I was two years younger and nobody, and I mean nadie, paid me any mind, which is why, when our mother told the story of our father trying to kill his son like we were people out of the Bible, part of me wished our papi had thrown me off that bridge instead.

All of this is to tell you how we became a prison family.

It’s funny how these things go. After Carlito went to jail, people started saying it was his inheritance — que lo llevaba en la sangre. And Dr. Joe, this prison shrink I know who specializes in murderers, told me that very often people seek to reenact the same crime that was inflicted upon them. I said that sounded a lot like fate, which I am strictly opposed to, ever since this bruja on Calle Ocho, a blue-haired Celia Cruz knockoff with a trail of customers waiting outside her shop door, told me no man was ever going to fall in love with me on account of all the curses that have been placed on my slutty mother.

What happened is that Carlito, when he was twenty-two, heard that his Costa Rican girlfriend, Isabela, was sleeping with this insurance guy from Kendall. And that’s it; instead of just dumping her like a normal person would, he drove over to her house, kissed her sweet on the lips, told her he was taking her daughter by her high school boyfriend out to buy a new doll at the toy store, but instead, Carlito drove over to the Rickenbacker Bridge and, without a second’s hesitation, he flung baby Shayna off into the water like she was yesterday’s trash going into the landfill.

But the sea wasn’t flat and still like the day Carlito had gone in. Today it was all whitecapped waves from a tropical storm moving over Cuba. There were no fishermen on account of the choppy waters, just a couple of joggers making their way over the slope of the bridge. After Shayna went in, Carlito either repented or thought better of his scheme and jumped in after the little girl, but the currents were strong and Shayna was pulled under. Her tiny body is still somewhere down there, though somebody once told me that this water is actually full of sharks, so let’s be realistic here.

When the cops showed up and dragged my brother out of the water, Carlito tried to play the whole thing off like it was one big, terrible accident. But there were witnesses in sports bras who lined up to testify that Carlito had tossed the child like a football into the angry Atlantic.

If you ask him now, he’ll still say he didn’t mean to do it; he was just showing the baby the water and she slipped out of his arms—“You know how wiggly little kids are, Reina. Tú sabes.”

I’m the only one who listens because, since they arrested him, Carlito’s been in solitary confinement for his own protection.

If there’s one thing other inmates don’t tolerate, it’s a baby killer.

This is Florida, where they’re cool about putting people to death. After the Supreme Court banned capital punishment in the seventies, this state was the first to jump back into the execution business. I used to be one of those people saying “an eye for an eye,” even when it came down to my own father, who was already dead, God save his soul. But now that my brother is on death row, it’s another story. Mami doesn’t go with me to see Carlito. She’s over it. Not one of those mothers who will stand by her son till his dying day and profess his innocence. She says she did her best to make sure he grew up to be a decent man and the day he snapped, it was clear the devil had taken over.

“Out of my hands,” she says, smacking her palms together like there’s dust on them.

The last time the three of us were together was the day of the sentencing. I begged the judge for leniency, said my brother was young and could still be of use to society, even if he got life and was stuck banging out license plates for the rest of his days. But it wasn’t enough.

After she blew Carlito her last kiss good-bye, Mami began to cry, and her tears continued all night as she knelt before the altar in her bedroom, candles lit among roses and coins offered to the saints in hopes of a softer sentence. I heard her cry all night, but when I tried to comfort her, Mami brushed me off as if I were the enemy and told me to leave her alone.

The next morning she announced her tears had run out and Carlito was no longer her son.

Mami’s got a dentist boyfriend in Orlando who she spends most of her time with, leaving me in the Miami house alone, which wouldn’t be so bad if I had any kind of life to fill this place. But I use up all my free time driving down US 1 to the South Glades Penitentiary. We’re lucky Carlito got placed in a prison just a few hours’ drive south and not in center of the state or up in the panhandle, and that he gets weekly visitation rights, not monthly like most death row killers.

I want to say you’d be surprised by the kind of people who go visit their relatives and lovers in jail, but really you wouldn’t be surprised at all. It’s just like you see on TV — desperate, broken-toothed women in ugly clothes, or other ladies who dress up like streetwalkers to feel sexy among the inmates and who are waiting for marriage proposals from their men in cuffs, even if they’re in maximum security and the court has already marked them for life or death sentences. There are women who come with gangs of kids who crawl all over their daddies, and there are the teenagers and grown-up kids who come and sit across the picnic tables bitter-lipped while their fathers try to apologize for being there.

Then there are the sisters, like me, who show up because nobody else will. Our whole family, the same people who treated my brother like he was baby Moses, all turned their backs on Carlito when he went to the slammer. Not one soul has visited him besides me. Not an uncle, a tía, a primo, a friend, anybody. This is why I take visiting him so seriously and have spent just about every weekend down there for the past two years, sleeping at the South Glades Seaside Motel, which is really a trailer park full of people like me who became transients just to be close to their locked-up sweethearts.

I’m not allowed to bring Carlito snacks or gifts since he got moved to the maximum-security prison. If I could, I would bring him candy bars because, back when he was a free man, Carlito spent a big cut of his paycheck from his job at the bank on chocolate. I mean, the boy was an addict, but you could never tell because Carlito was thin like a palm tree and had the smoothest complexion you’ve ever seen. Carlito got it together late in high school, and even made it into college and graduated with honors. I’m telling you, even Mami said it was a milagro. He got into a training program at a bank and was working as a teller, but they said after a few years he’d be a private banker, moving big money, and his dream was to work at one of the Brickell banks that hold the cash of all our Latin nations.

Carlito would move our family up — make enough so that our mother wouldn’t have to paint nails anymore. That was the plan.

Carlito, now, is fat like you’d never have predicted. He says it’s a prison conspiracy given all the mashed potatoes they feed the inmates, and he thinks everything is laced with hormones meant for cows. He has to eat his meals alone in his cell and not in the chow hall like the regular lifers. He doesn’t get to work out in the yard with the other prisoners, he just gets an hour a day to walk laps around a small fenced-in concrete cage with a chicken-wire roof they call “the kennel.”

Sometimes he gets his rec time deducted because a guard decides to write him up for some made-up offense. So he mostly does his routines in his little cell — push-ups, sit-ups, and squats — but he still looks like a two-hundred-fifty-pound troll because Carlito’s hair started to fall out the day of his sentencing. That luscious, shiny Indian hair went straight into the communal shower drain and now my brother, barely twenty-five, looks like he’s somebody’s grandfather, with anxious creases burrowed into his forehead and a nose that turned downward into a beak the day he lost his freedom.

He’s not your typical inmate; he doesn’t try to act remorseful or even say he’s innocent anymore because really, after the first appeal to overturn his conviction was denied, we sort of lost hope. He did the whole thing of writing letters to Isabela before the trial, apologizing even though he says it wasn’t his fault, but even then you could tell Carlito’s heart wasn’t in it.

He blames Papi for all this, and then Mami. Says maybe Tío Jaime was right, if Mami hadn’t been such a puta all those years ago, none of this would have happened.

I don’t tell my brother that Dr. Joe, who works in Carlito’s prison and sometimes meets me for drinks in the lounge of the South Glades Seaside Motel, told me it probably all comes down to brain chemistry and Carlito may have just been a ticking bomb, and that homicidal tendencies sometimes run in families. I pretended not to be worried by this, acted nonchalant, and even went so far as to lie to Dr. Joe and say, “I guess I lucked out because Carlito and I have different fathers.” I believed this for a while, but Mami said, “Lo siento, mi corazón. Hector was your papi too.”

Dr. Joe is familiar with Carlito’s case. Not just from the newspapers but because he reviewed his files when assigned to the Glades prison, hoping Carlito was in need of some kind of counseling. He says he’s doing research on the ways solitary confinement can change a person’s mind over time. He got permission to scan lifers’ brains to compare the ones who are segregated from the main prison population and those who are not. I asked him if it’s right to run them through tests like they’re animals, but Dr. Joe said, “It’s for science, Reina,” and he can already prove being in isolation makes inmates nearsighted and hypersensitive to sound and light. Solitary can also make a person psychotic, paranoid, and develop hallucinations, he says, but it’s hard to tell who is being honest about their nervous breakdowns because, even if lots of inmates check into prison as mentally ill, some just want to be labeled crazy to take or trade the free pills.

Carlito wants nothing to do with Dr. Joe or the other prison shrinks and refuses to talk to any of them. Dr. Joe tried playing the insider, standing outside Carlito’s cell door, peering through the small reinforced glass windowpane, saying he knew Carlito was innocent, and he was on his side. If only Carlito was willing to talk, maybe he could help him with his next appeal. Carlito didn’t bite.

Sometimes I suspect Dr. Joe only acts interested in me so that I’ll soften Carlito, convince him to hand himself over for Dr. Joe’s research, persuade him the way Dr. Joe tries to persuade me that since they won’t let Carlito take classes or socialize like other inmates, submitting to his study is a small way to feel useful, give something of himself, and it’s also a way to have interpersonal contact those weeks when he doesn’t exchange words with a single human besides the prison guards, and me.

“All of this has to be so hard on you, Reina,” Dr. Joe said to me the first time we met at the motel bar. “You must be overwhelmed with so many feelings.”

Dr. Joe thinks I have anger toward my brother because when I was nine he locked me in my bedroom closet for hours, told my mother I’d gone to the neighbor’s to play, and I had no choice but to pee in a shoebox. Also, because when our mother was at work, he would make me take off my clothes and sit around watching TV naked, or sometimes he’d make me get up and dance, and when I refused, he’d pull out a knife from a kitchen drawer and hold it to my neck.

But I tell Dr. Joe my brother was mostly a good brother because he never did dirty things to me like the brothers of some of my friends. And when a girl from school started bullying me in the eighth grade, saying I was an ugly junior puta, Carlito went over to her house one night with a wrestling mask on his face, crept into her room, and beat her out of her sleep.

Nobody ever found out it was him.

He did that for me.

Joe — he told me to stop calling him doctor but I keep forgetting — thinks I’m confused. He buys me beers and told me he’s thirty-two, which is really not much older than my age, twenty-three. He’s from Boston, which he says is nothing like South Florida. He might even be cute if he got a normal haircut, not his side-parted dusty brown shag, and lost those round glasses that look like they belong in 1985. He has a condo in Key Largo and sometimes invites me there. Just yesterday he said I could sleep there if I wanted, so I don’t have to spend all my money at the prison motel. I said thanks, but no thanks. I make good enough money to pay for this piece of paradise.

“You’re real pretty,” he said last night when I walked him to his car on the gravel driveway outside the lobby. “You got a boyfriend up there in Miami?”

“No, I come with a whole lot of baggage, if you know what I mean.”

I was thinking specifically about the last guy, Lorenzo, a plastic surgeon who picked me up at Pollo Tropical. We went for dinner a few times and when we finally fucked at a hotel, he told me he’d do my tetas free if I promised to tell everyone they were his work. Then he wanted to take me to Sanibel for a few days, but I said my weekends were reserved for Carlito.

I still remember his eyes when I explained.

“You’re Carlos Castillo’s sister?”

That was the end of that.

Joe laughed as if I’d meant the baggage thing as a joke, and then swallowed his smile when he realized I hadn’t.

“You’re a great girl. Any man would be lucky to be with you.”

I smiled at Joe, even though I feel like people only say shit like that when they know you’re already a lost cause.

I paint nails just like my mother and her mother before her. I just realized as I’m telling you this that we’re a family of all sorts of inheritances. Between us, we still have the house. Mami owns it free and clear even though she pawned all her jewelry years ago, and if you were to ask her, she’d say the only valuable things she has are her santos and crucifixes. After Carlito went to prison, Mami converted his room into a shrine to the pope, which is fine with me. She replaced all of Carlito’s football trophies and car posters with framed prints of His Holiness, books, and postcards of the Vatican. Her big dream is to go to Mass at St. Peter’s one day and I think that’s good for her. It’s good for you to dream about things that will probably never happen. That’s why I still have this picture in my head of the prison board recommending clemency for Carlito, and the governor waking up one morning and deciding to give a pardon to my brother, as if in his sleep God wrote onto his heart that there’s this boy down in the Glades who deserves a second chance, commuting his sentence to life, and maybe even with the possibility of parole. But stuff like that just doesn’t happen.

I work at a fancy salon in the Gables. On Fridays, I pack up my bag, stuff it in the trunk of my Camry, and, after my last client of the evening, get on the turnpike and drive south so I can spend the night at the motel and get up at four the next morning to be among the first visitors to check in for the day visits at the prison. Each visit is only an hour long and has to be approved in advance. Sometimes we get to stretch it longer if the guard is feeling merciful. Carlito is allowed two visits a week. That’s my Saturday and Sunday. The other girls at the salon tell me I should take a weekend off, do something for myself for a change, but I say, “What kind of person would I be if I abandoned my brother?” I’m the only thing that reminds him he is human and not a caged animal.

After I drive through the prison gate, past the twenty-foot walls topped with razor wire, the barren valley marked by gun towers; after the searches, filling out forms, the X-ray machine, the patting down by guards, and checking my bag into a locker, I’m sitting in a windowless concrete room, at a small table across from my brother. Most death row guys get strict noncontact visits, forced to sit behind a Plexiglas partition. But we’re fortunate that we get to sit face-to-face and he cups his hands around mine, strokes my knuckles with his fingertips, and asks me what’s going on in the world outside of this place.

“I think Mami and Jerry are going to get married. If she does, she’ll want to sell the house, which means I’ve got to find my own place.”

“You should move out of that house anyway. Start fresh somewhere. That house is full of bad spirits.”

“No, after you went away, Mami had it blessed by a priest.”

He shakes his head. There are more tiny wrinkles around his eyelids and buried in the corners of his lips than ever before.

“How’s work?”

“The same. I’m getting famous for my acrylics. Better than Mami ever was.”

“That’s my Reina.”

My brother drops his face onto the table and I stroke the back of his bald head, his bare neck, run my fingers on the edge of his blue prison suit.

“I’m dying,” he says without lifting his head.

I kiss the back of his head, and the guard who’s been watching us from his perch along the wall steps forward and slams his hand on the table.

“No contact,” he says. “I always let it slide with you two, but you always push it.”

Carlito pulls his head up and sits as erect as a man about to be executed.

“She’s my sister, man.”

I give the guard my prize eyes that make him soften and say, “One minute.”

He always does this for us.

Carlito stands and I rise and go to him. Before his cuffs get chained back to his waist, he lifts up his arms so that I can slip under them and then he drops them so I feel the bulk of his cuffs sitting on the curve of my back, on top of my hips. I press my body to his chest and Carlito’s biceps tighten around me, his head drops into my hair and I press my cheek to his neck. We stay like this until the guard bangs the surface of the table again.

“Enough, Castillo. Your time is up.”

I give my brother a kiss on the cheek before the guard pulls us apart. It’s always like this. We say good-bye with a little push of the rules. I slip out from under his cuffs and the guard leads my brother through the back door of the visiting room, down the corridor to the solitary cells.

Later, at the motel, Joe, who’s just gotten off work, asks me how my visit with my brother went.

“Same as always. But today he told me he’s dying.”

“As far as I’ve read in his files, he has no serious illnesses,” says Joe.

And then, “Reina, would you like to go for a walk on the beach with me?”

We take his car and Joe pulls off the road onto a winding path and tells me there’s a perfect patch of beach just there, beyond the mangrove trees. It’s night but with the moon so full and bright, I still feel the comfort of daylight, every breathing ripple of the sea on display — not one secret out here. I leave my sandals on the sand and Joe rolls up his khaki pants and takes off his loafers revealing pale feet with crinkly leg hairs and long toes that make me embarrassed for him. We walk along the water’s edge, the current mostly quiet except for the occasional rush of the rising tide.

I see a flutter in the sand and, as we approach, notice a gull tossing about in the shallow water, struggling to breathe, its small black legs limp under its body, its wings unable to span and lift. I scoop it up, pull it toward my chest while Joe looks on with disgust, telling me those birds carry diseases and to be careful or I’ll get bitten.

“He was about to drown,” I tell him, the bird frozen like a toy in my arms, “We need to find help for him.”

“Reina, you can’t be serious.”

My eyes tell him just how serious I am. We head back to his car and I sense his regret for having invited me. He mutters something about me thinking it’s my job to save every living creature from itself.

I insist he pull up next to a parked police car. The officer recognizes Joe immediately and looks to me. My face is familiar to him from standing in the long lines outside the prison waiting for visiting hours to begin, or arguing against parking tickets when I leave my car overnight outside the Glades Motel because the lot is full, and for those times I speed down US 1 to get to the Keys before sunset because my mother always told me that’s when the crazies come out.

“Do you know where we can find help for an injured bird?” I ask the officer from my place in the passenger’s seat.

The cop looks skeptical, his eyes land on the limp seagull in my lap, and he shakes his head at us, looks to Joe disapprovingly before telling us to try the marine reserve a few miles down.

“They have a bird sanctuary down there. Might be closed at this hour, or might not. Someone down there may be able to help you.”

As it happens, the place is closed, gates locked and chained. I press my face against the metal grill, call out to see if anyone is still around who can help us.

“I think you should just let the bird die a natural death,” Joe says, leaning against his car, arms folded across his chest, with a look of contempt.

I hold the bird out to him. “Does this look like a natural death to you?”

“We should put it out of its misery. Drown it or something.”

“You mean put you out of your misery because you don’t want to deal with him.”

Joe sighs at me like a father would at an unreasonable child. “So what do you want to do with it?”

“I’ll take him home with me and bring him back here first thing in the morning.”

“Reina.”

“I don’t need your help. Just drop me off back at the motel.”

“Why don’t you stay with me tonight? We’ll put the bird in a box in the bathroom and I’ll drive you back here at sunrise.”

“You don’t care about the bird.”

“But you do. And I care about you.”

I go with the doctor because, really, I’m sick of the knotty green carpet of the Glades Motel, the sad-looking people who putter around the trailers, the stragglers like me who take up the rooms in the main lodge, and the women who come down here to visit their men by day but spend their nights with the teenage hustlers who hang around the gas station on Hickory Key.

Dr. Joe’s condo is nicer than I expected. Looks like it belongs on South Beach and not in the crummy Keys. Stark white like a hospital, chrome and leather furniture, huge abstract paintings on the walls — the kind of stuff only rich boys buy.

“Shit,” I say when he leads me through the door.

“Cost of living is so cheap down here,” he says, as if I caught him in a crime. “Nothing compared with life up north.”

“Why would you leave Boston to come down here and work in a prison?”

He smiles bashfully and offers what sounds like a false confession that he just needed a change of scenery. I suspect the doctor is running from something, and he came to the Keys to hide out. I decide not to hold it against him, though, because we all have our shadows.

Joe goes off to look for a box for the bird, which I want to believe is napping in my arms but really, he looks like he’s just about had it with this world. I think his legs are broken by the way they keep bending and folding as if made of string.

Poor bird. If life were fair, the bird and I would both be living in Cartagena, not in Florida where all of the world’s crap seems to accumulate.

Joe returns with an empty box that looks like it was meant to ship electronics. I put the bird in and we take it to his guest bathroom together, rest it on the floor, and I tell the bird goodnight while I feel Joe’s hand on my shoulder.

“Let me fix us some drinks. How about a screwdriver?”

I ask him to make us some tea instead.

We sit together on his leather sofa. I can’t decide what I feel for Joe. He seems like a lonely man and this makes me like him, see bits of myself in him. But part of me also sees him as the kind of guy who gets turned on by tragic people.

“You inspire me, Reina. The way you always reach out of yourself to care for others. Your brother. Even that dying bird. You give so much.”

Hearing him talk about me like I’m some kind of saint makes me uncomfortable.

“You’ve given up your life to be present for Carlos. It’s so admirable. I don’t know anyone with that kind of loyalty.”

“There’s a whole motel full of them right where you found me.”

“You’re different from them.”

“No, I’m not.”

He takes advantage of my parted lips and puts his mouth on mine and next thing you know, we’re making out like junior high kids right on Joe’s leather sofa. His hands fumble with my blouse buttons and I reach for his belt. He’s telling me he’s been dreaming of kissing me since he saw me that first day going through the metal detector at the jail when Carlito got transferred to the federal prison.

He’s telling me to wrap my legs around him, pulls off my bra, and I rip the nerd glasses off his face. Then Joe says to me, “Tell me about the first time you got fucked, how old were you?”

“Thirteen,” I sigh into his ear while he feels around me and then he wants to know with who, where, how did I like it?

I whisper that it was with my brother’s friend Manolo and when it was over, I found out my brother had been watching the whole thing from his closet because he told me I looked good, like a real woman, finally, and I felt proud. After that, I started sleeping with all my brother’s friends. But my brother told my mother and she told me to be careful because a woman who is a good lover can make a man insane, just look what happened to our father.

Dr. Joe pulls me closer and just as we’re about to do it says, “Talk to me like I’m your brother.”

I freeze. Stare at him. His mouth wet with my saliva, his cheeks red. A loose eyelash on his nose.

“You’re really sick, you know that?”

“Reina, come on. I didn’t mean it like that. Come on.”

He’s trying to pull me back to him but I’ve already got my legs on the ground, straightening myself out, clipping my bra back on.

“Come on, I was just playing.”

He stands up, tucks himself back into his pants, and follows me toward the bathroom. I pick up the box with the bird and push past him.

“Where are you going?”

“Me and the bird are leaving.”

This is how it goes: I make it far down the road with Dr. Joe on my tail shouting, “I just want to be close to you and all I get from you are walls!” until the same cop who told us where to take the bird pulls up beside me wanting to know if there’s a problem.

The cop has one eye on me and one on Joe, who’s disheveled and looking way too desperate and guilty to be out in the middle of the night.

“You need a lift back to the motel?”

I nod and when we’re sitting alone in the cop car, Dr. Joe way behind us, walking back to his condo, the officer turns to me and says, “You know, if you want to pitch something like an assault or harassment charge, I’ll fully corroborate. I never liked that doctor guy. Not one bit.”

My seagull was poisoned.

That’s what the bird expert at the marine center told me when I brought him there this morning.

“I think his legs are broken,” I told the woman, who had a permanent-looking sunburn and wore men’s overalls.

She shook her head. “Sorry, honey. This bird’s dying. A nice thing you did keeping it from drowning and all, but we’re going to have to euthanize it.”

“You’re not even going to try to save him?”

“He’s beyond saving. Look at him. He’s suffering.”

“Suffering means you’re still living,” I told her, but I knew the bird’s destiny had been decided.

She picked him up with one hand, crushing his wings together, and left me with the empty box.

I tell the whole story to my brother during Sunday visiting hours at the prison. Everything except the flesh scene between Joe and me on the sofa. Carlito really doesn’t need to hear that. He has women writing letters to him, but he’s not allowed to meet any of them like some of the other inmates with normal privileges.

When he was still in county jail, I started sending my brother books because, believe it or not, Carlito was the biggest reader you ever met, even during the years he was doing crappy in school, before he went to a real college. My brother was the smartest guy I knew — could talk to you about ancient wars, religions, all sorts of stuff that you’d wonder what a guy like him had any business knowing. But my brother said knowing about the world was important. He said by reading you develop ideas of your own and ideas are what keep a brother alive.

I’d pack boxes full of books about whatever I could find to send him. When this old guy on the corner died, his widow said I could have all his books, which she left in boxes out on the curb, so I sent those too. Biographies, historical shit. Everything. And within those packages I’d sometimes sneak in a batch of porno magazines even though they’d likely get confiscated — I thought it was worth the effort — because I understood that a guy in jail might have urges of the kind my mother often described, and nobody to take care of them.

One day Carlito said, “No more books. No more magazines. Nothing.”

When I asked him why, he repeated what he’d said years earlier, that books give a man ideas, they make him want to live. But ever since the judge put Carlito’s last minutes on the clock, having ideas and hope were making it even harder and more painful to be alive.

My brother kisses my hand and rests his cheek on the back of my palm the way he always does.

He tells me he loves me and I say, “I love you too, hermano.”

“You know what tomorrow is,” Carlito says, and I nod, surprised that he’s still keeping a calendar.

September 8. The anniversary of the day our father threw him off the bridge.

What kind of a man can do that to a child, is what we used to say until Carlito did the same thing.

Five days later, I’m on the same journey, edging down the turnpike with the scrim of sunset lowering in the west, passing through Florida City, strip malls and car dealerships melting into swampland and fishing tackle shops, past Manatee Bay onto the Overseas Highway. It’s drifter territory, where people go to forget and to be forgotten. I’ve come to think of this land as a second home. The prison motel; familiar faces though few of us have exchanged names. Each of us serving our sentence, waiting, waiting, because prison has made us more patient than we ever knew we could be, until we get the call that it’s time; the end of the sentence, or just the end.

About a year ago, I saw Isabela at a wake for Miguel, one of Carlito’s old friends, a guy she eventually married. I waited until midnight thinking the mourner crowd would dissolve, then go to someone’s house for a meal or a drink, but there she was, sitting in a folding chair near the casket with her mother cradling her shoulders. I stood in the doorway, crossed myself, said a five-second prayer, and asked God to take Miguel straight up to heaven because he was pretty special to me when I was sixteen, and we did more talking than screwing, which back then was a rare thing. Miguel was a cop and he and Isabela fell in love during Carlito’s trial because Miguel was the type of guy to lend support. He was shot on the job by another cop during a robbery at the Dolphin Mall. Friendly fire.

I didn’t want Isabela to see me. Not that night. It’s bad enough that she has to run into me at the supermarket, the pharmacy, and the gas station. She’s never been cruel to me like other people in the neighborhood. She always smiles, tells me she prays for my family and for me. That she forgives Carlito and she doesn’t want him to die. I believe her, too, because on the day of the sentencing, Isabela cried through her victim-impact statement with a picture of her daughter clutched against her chest — one of those department store Christmas portraits — Shayna in a new red dress; a face just like her mother’s in miniature. Isabela faced the judge, then turned from him to Carlito, who was handcuffed to a table beside his lawyer, and through her tears asked the court to go easy on him because Isabela said no matter Carlito’s crime, and no matter how much she believed in justice, one death is no cure for another.

Isabela and I were close friends once. She was a few years older but we were in the church Youth Group together and she took me for my first abortion when I was fourteen because she said it wasn’t right to bring that kind of shame on my mother who’d already been through so much, and Isabela knew of a doctor who didn’t require parental consent.

A few years later, Carlito fell in love with her.

I was jealous. Isabela with her soft smile, a blanket all the boys wanted to be wrapped in. No boy ever looked at me that way.

My brother used to say he saw a family in her gray eyes and I’d grow furious, tug on his sleeve, and say, “You already have a family.”

Something I’ve never admitted: I was the one who told Carlito about Isabela’s cheating when he was beer-drunk in front of the TV one Saturday afternoon, wondering why she took so long to return his calls.

I pumped him full of rage, told him she was giving him horns, that he was letting her play him like some kind of cabrón.

I lied.

Said everybody in town knew about her easy ways but him.

Sometimes when we run into each other Isabela invites me to her house for dinner because she knows I spend most nights home alone watching the local news, just me and a tin of pollo asado from the cantina. I never go. I appreciate the charity, but despite their daughter’s graciousness Isabela’s parents probably wouldn’t let me through the door if I showed up.

She always hugs me when she sees me, hums into my hair that even though people say we’re on opposing sides, we’re in this mierda together and her baby is an angel now watching over us all.

There was a time when Mami called my brother and me her angels.

Carlito and I would cram into bed with her at night and she’d tell us stories about Cartagena before our papi dragged us away from our grandmother’s home, across the sea to Miami, before this house with the iron security bars on the windows.

“Mis angelitos,” she’d whisper, kissing our cheeks as we curled under her wings.

We’d pretend Mami’s bed was a raft and we were castaways adrift together, floating through the Caribbean, and Carlito would point out dolphins, sea turtles, manta rays, and sharks while Mami and I played along like we could see them too. Until Carlito declared that there was land on the horizon and, at last, we were saved.

We were saved.

Like everything down here, the park used to be Tequesta land. It sits on a crusty peninsula jutting into the bay like an accusatory finger, a tropical hammock overgrown with invasive Australian pines, foreign flora that killed off the indigenous trees, keeping in all the bugs and blocking out most of the sunlight. To Carlito and me, suburban kids normally confined to small yards and patchy lots, it was a jungle.

Our mother liked to take us there on weekdays, avoiding the weekend crowds, even if it meant calling in sick at work, declaring it un día de fiesta, pulling my brother and me out of school. Mami said we all deserved our little breaks once in a while. And we were just little kids, so it’s not like we were learning anything important.

I was seven and Carlito, nine. Best friends. Still innocents.

It was a weekday morning. The sun wasn’t yet at its highest, and the park was quiet except for a few tourist families and lonely fishermen along the seawall, standing between the pelicans lined like guards on the edge of the pier. We parked the car and walked past them to the other side of the narrow cape, to the beach beyond the forest. I wore a red bathing suit that was getting too small for me, elastic pinching my nalguitas. Carlito wore swim trunks handed down from a neighbor, too big and hanging low enough to show an inch of crack, and Mami complained he should have tied a rope around his waist to keep them up.

Our mother took to the beach like it was her temple, finding a piece of shore far from the lifeguard stands, boom boxes, and smoky portable grills, spreading a blanket, smoothing the sand lumps underneath before lying down and shutting her eyes to the sun. Sometimes she forced me, never Carlito, into the ocean with her and I felt guilty leaving him behind on land. Mami said the salty air purified the lungs and seawater nourished the skin. She’d pull me in by the hand, take my head into her palms, dunk me under the surf like a baptism, and let me float in her arms. I let her because these were some of the few times I had my mother’s full attention.

“Listen to the water, Reina,” she whispered as I let myself be cushioned by the soft rush of waves. “If you trust the tide, it will always return you to shore.”

We didn’t yet know about undertows and rip currents, the many ways the ocean can turn on you.

Carlito hated getting wet and stayed away from the beach, kicking a soccer ball around on the concrete walkway toward the seawall, down dusty trails through bendy pines, dodging the swarms of mosquitoes and spiderwebs that kept most people out of those paths. I was a faithful little sister, reluctant to go anywhere without him, so I’d always pull myself out of the water and away from Mami, towel off, and follow my brother.

Sometimes Carlito let me kick around with him, but most of the time he just wanted me to cheer him on while he battered the ball, shouting, “Go Carlito! Viva Carlito!” and after he’d kick an imaginary goal, he’d do a little dance and I’d scream so hard I’d almost make myself cry.

I was shouting and clapping so loud that morning that we didn’t notice the rattle of the planes right away. It was a slow burning buzz steadily rising over the shrill song of the cicadas. We felt the vibration over the roof of the forest and saw the bowing of the treetops before we knew what it was. Through an open patch of canopy we saw the belly of a chubby gray propeller plane, the quiet, old-fashioned kind. Behind it, another plane, and the two looped over us. Carlito grabbed the ball and I knew to follow him.

Mami was already by the seawall waiting for us to appear. She pressed me into her hip but Carlito hung back, embarrassed at her affection. Our uncle had put it on him that he had to be un hombrecito, the man of the house, since our father was dead and couldn’t be referred to even in passing — our mom forbade it — not even as the kind of myth of a dad that fatherless kids like to tell, the guy who may or may not ever show up at your door one day with presents and an explanation for his absence.

The lifeguards and park rangers made everyone get out of the water, then cleared the beach, and people gathered by the pier to gossip about the commotion. Someone said it was a drug bust; a cigarette boat registered in the Bahamas had unloaded a bundle of packages into the bay once the crew spotted the Coast Guard in their wake. Someone else heard there’d been a drowning, but if there had been, I guessed they would have pulled all the beachgoers into a human chain to comb the water like they did a few years earlier when Mami thought I’d gone under but really I just went to use the public bathroom.

Someone else said it was a suicide; one of those fishermen had gotten too drunk while minding his lines, staring out at the Stiltsville houses, and decided it was his time to end things. But the water along the seawall and beneath the pier was shallow, folding into barnacle-and-urchin-covered rocks that would needle you bad while breaking your fall. It was no place for a final jump.

Then we saw the vehicles arrive. Trailers unloaded ATVs. Another truck spit out a line of cops in special gear ready to mount them and take them into the woods. I didn’t realize I was scared until I noticed a stocky green-uniformed park ranger standing next to our mother, and that somehow made me feel safer even if strange men were always trying to stand next to her. She was still beautiful then, wearing no makeup, just the sheen of humidity, her hair in natural black curls, not the coppery straightened look she took on a few years later along with a smoking habit that hardened and sallowed her golden complexion.

“You know what they’re really looking for,” he muttered to Mami like he was an old friend.

She gave him a blank look. She could appear very naive when she wanted.

“Refugees.”

I remember his tone, as if the word itself were illicit.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“We got a call from someone who spotted a boat dropping them off.”

The search vessels arrived. Official-looking ones that weren’t Coast Guard but something else with a crested seal painted onto the sides. Jail boats, Carlito called them, plowing parallel to the seawall, though it seemed to me that between the rocks and the water, there was nowhere to hide. I knelt to get a better look, but the sun was high over the bay now, water reflecting like a mirror, yet I could still make out thousands of tiny fish gleaming like blades in the current below us.

Carlito complained that he wanted to go home but the ranger warned us that the Border Patrol had the park on a hold and nobody was allowed in or out. Not till they found who they were looking for.

“For all we know, somebody’s been waiting to pick them up and drive them out of here. They’ll be checking cars and trunks before they let anyone out.”

He put his hand on Mami’s shoulder and she let him, which I didn’t like.

“Best to wait till this whole thing clears and they got those folks all accounted for. This stuff happens at least once a month around here.”

Carlito and I sat on the wall watching the planes circle overhead, the cops rushing the vegetation like soldiers at war. Then came the dogs. A parade of angry-eyed canines, eager to enter the forest to find their prize.

I looked at Carlito and he looked to the ranger, who was standing even closer to our mother now, asking her where she was from, where she got that lovely accent.

“Colombia,” she said, and the guy let out a hoot.

“We got one right here!” he shouted, pointing to Mami, then to Carlito and me. “No, we got three! Quick, bring the dogs!”

Carlito and I didn’t get that he was joking till Mami let out a soft laugh, the kind everyone believed was authentic but us. We knew it was her decoy laugh. The one she used to get people off her back, and by people, I mean men.

We heard from another bystander who heard it from another ranger that four people had been caught already and were sitting offshore on a jail boat waiting for whatever came next. There were eight more out there, they said, but those who were already in custody wouldn’t say if the others had made it to land, were on another boat, or were just floating out on the water, clinging to a buoy or an inner tube or, worse, drowned. They probably weren’t Cubans, though, someone said, or the police wouldn’t be trying to smoke them out of the park like this.

An hour or so passed. The three of us sat in a patch of shade on the seawall. I laid my head on my mother’s lap while Carlito held the soccer ball in his. She told us the story about the náufrago who washed up on the beach in Cartagena when she was a little girl. That was in the time before jail boats and police planes, when the people in charge just let castaways land where they may and stay if they felt like it. The guy told everybody he was a Spanish prince and all the girls wanted to marry him, but it turned out he was just a gambler running from debts in Panama, and his enemies eventually caught up with him because, Mami said, nobody can run from anything forever.

Enough time passed that Carlito became bored with our mother’s stories. He took up his ball and started kicking it again.

“Come on, Reina,” he called for me, and we went back into the base of a trail already swept by the cops and rangers.

“Don’t go too far,” Mami said. “Stay where I can see you.”

Carlito zigged and zagged and I tried to steal the ball from him, but he was too quick, his legs were too long, and mine felt rubbery and knobby as I tried to keep up.

“I’m tired,” I moaned, squatting on the ground, my butt just shy of the dirt.

Carlito relented. “Just try to block my shots, okay?”

I stood up, ready to play goalie. I was small for my age, but my reflexes were quick. Carlito had trained me to read body language, to know which way a kick would come before the kicker even knew it. I watched and I waited and I blocked the first three kicks with a hand, with a foot, with my belly. But the fourth flew past me into the trees and because I was the loser, Carlito insisted I be the one to go into the bushes after it.

I should have been scared. But the need to please my brother overpowered all the terror stories we’d been raised on to keep us out of woods and jungles and swamps: legends of Madre Monte, who gets revenge on those who invade her territory by making them get lost; La Tunda, the shape-shifter, luring people into the woods in order to keep them there forever; or El Mohán, who simply loves to barbecue and eat children.

The twigs cut into my ankles and shins but I pressed through, negotiating rocks under my feet, pebbles wedging into my sandals, pushing branches from my face, slapping away bugs, slicing through spiderwebs until I was so deep into the woods that I came to the other side of a hidden inlet, a silent, still lagoon framed by mangrove trees with roots like ribs in the pooling green water.

I stood on the dusty embankment unsure of my discovery. A gray heron swooped over the water before me, and the only sound was of the planes, still rumbling over the far side of the park. A few turkey vultures and crows gathered by the edge of the brush and some instinct told me to run into them to scare them off, and search the shadowy wood behind them.

My brother called from the other side of the forest wall, “Reina, hurry up!”

I wanted to find the ball before he did, to avoid hearing him call me a useless slug, to prove I was a worthy teammate, that I was as good as any boy at keeping up a kick-around with him so he’d finally stop threatening to take me to the pulguero to trade me for a television.

And there it was: Carlito’s ball, its black-and-white mosaic waiting for me among the knotty roots of a lonely banyan smothered by prickly pines. I pushed in closer, until the ball was just beyond my reach, but behind the plastic ball I noticed a meaty form that looked to be a shoeless human foot.

It’s no secret that dead bodies turn up all over South Florida, floating in canals, along the swampy arteries of the Everglades, or tossed to the side of a road. In this very park our mother had found, washed up on the beach, what she swore was a real human jawbone, and was so moved by its white smoothness that she took it home with her, bathed it in holy water, and buried it in our backyard until the raccoons dug it up, and then Mami just surrendered and put it in a drawer somewhere.

But this foot was dark and fleshy and my eyes followed it up to a bare leg in frayed denim shorts and a shirtless torso. It belonged to a boy — a teenager, I should say — thin, crouched like an animal. He turned to me. His eyes were wide and his young face was worn and burned from seawater and sun.

He watched me and I watched him as I heard my brother’s voice grow clearer, his feet crunching through the brush, “Reina, Reina! Where are you?” until he was finally beside me, his hand closing around my wrist.

My brother’s gaze moved from me to the boy, who stared back at us, trying to make himself even smaller.

I heard Mami calling for us, heard the worry in her voice, and the cops behind her shouting for us kids to come out of the woods and stop goofing around.

I heard the dogs barking, the weight of more footsteps walking over the dried leaves and broken branches carpeting the forest floor.

I knew he was one of the ones they were looking for. I knew he didn’t want to be found. I didn’t know which was the right side or the wrong side. I only knew that I never saw eyes like that before, so dark with fear, so aware that my brother and I could betray him.

“Get the ball,” Carlito whispered, releasing his grip on me.

I stepped closer to the boy, who watched me, pulling his hand from the curl of his chest to push the ball at his feet toward me.

I picked up the ball and looked back at my brother. He turned toward the woods and called out to whoever could hear us not to worry, that we were coming, and rushed ahead while I stayed behind.

I stared back at the boy until he hid his face from me again. I wanted to help him and felt confused because in school I’d learned that police were people you went to for help, but something told me the best thing I could do for him was to leave and pretend I’d never seen him.

“No le voy a contar a nadie,” I said, assuming he understood, and ran out of the forest toward my brother and mother, but was intercepted by a dog, barking frenetically, its sight set on the ball in my hands like it was a piece of raw meat.

The cop took the ball from me and held it close to the dog that snapped and howled at it, but the cop just looked frustrated and stared at Mami, who’d come to my side with Carlito behind her.

“This is your ball?” he asked me.

“It’s my ball,” Carlito said defiantly. “She’s my sister.”

“You brought it with you to the park today? You didn’t find it here?”

“I bought it for my son myself,” our mother said, slipping a hand onto each of our backs. That wasn’t really true. Tío Jaime had been the one to give Carlito the ball, but it gave us a kind of thrill to see her lie to a man of the law.

The officer yanked the dog by the leash away from the trail and started back toward the seawall. I looked at Carlito but he looked away from me, away from the woods, and sighed to our mother, “Can we go home now?”

We never found out what happened to the rest of those migrants or even where they came from. When I was old enough to fool around with cops and academy cadets, they told me loads of people washed up on South Florida shores in crafty sailing vessels from all over the Caribbean, even after the laws changed and it became much trickier to be let in: Cuban balsas with Soviet car engines, Haitian and Dominican rafts held together with tarps and tires. Some people were just dropped off by speedboats or yachts that shuttled across the Florida Straits in the night. Some slipped right in before dawn, forever undiscovered. If they were among the lucky ones, a dry foot on land would get them amnesty or asylum. But some had the misfortune of arriving in daylight and being spotted on the water, ratted out by citizens, booked into Krome within hours, and set for deportation. But I guess that’s not as bad as drowning along the way.

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.

“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.

At first we couldn’t figure out what to do with my brother’s ashes. They returned them to us in a heart-shaped tin and Mami wrapped it in what had been his and my christening gown, sewn by her mother’s hands. But she didn’t want to take the ashes back to Orlando with her, and I didn’t feel right keeping them either.

In the end, we decided to return Carlito to the earth in our own way, tying a brick to the tin with the same rope Hector’s father had used to hang himself. I didn’t know until that day that all this time, Mami had kept it in a box in the garage. My grandfather’s body had been shipped back to Colombia for burial, but Hector had been cremated just like Carlito. Mami hadn’t wanted his ashes so Tío Jaime kept them and when he traveled back to Colombia he sprinkled them over their own parents’ graves in Galerazamba. She admitted to me that before turning them over to Tío Jaime, she’d pulled out a thimbleful for herself, which she now stitched into a sachet and placed in the tin with Carlito’s ashes.

Around sunset, Mami and I drove to the bridge that had sealed both my father’s and my brother’s fates, walked halfway across to its highest point, and with both our hands clutching them, tossed the tin and brick and rope into the bay water, watching them disappear under the current, hoping the ashes and relics of the men of our family would be pulled down and buried in the ocean floor.

That night Mami asked me to sleep with her in her room like I’d sometimes done as a little girl.

I didn’t sleep. I only watched her, wondering how she could slip into such a calm slumber when even the hum of the ceiling fan blades hit me like a torrent of screams.

She was small under the blanket, and halfway through the night she awoke, and I pretended to sleep as she touched my hair, my cheek, and whispered my name, though I didn’t move.

In the morning, we had our coffee together at the kitchen table and then she took a long look at me standing by the front door before leaving me alone in our house for the last time.

The house in Miami never felt like home even if it’s the only one I remember. A brown concrete cube with a red Spanish-style teja roof, and white iron bars over the windows and front door that didn’t do their job very well because we were robbed four times. Each time, the thieves just took the TV and broke some stuff. We didn’t have anything else that anybody would want. Any extra money we had, we kept in a cigar box under a broken floor tile in Carlito’s room, even after they took him away. When I was packing, I dug out our little wooden case. The family savings. There was nothing left.

There was a time when we knew all our neighbors: Nicaraguans, Peruvians, Dominicans, and Venezuelans — everybody on the run from some dictator, broken currency, or corrupt government regime — and other Colombians like us looking to find some peace away from the narcos and guerrillas that had hijacked the country.

They lived in houses just like ours, painted pastel colors. They took pity on Mami, the single mother of two kids, the victim, wife of “ese loco” Hector Castillo. But those neighbors stopped inviting us to their backyard parties and asados after Carlito’s arrest. It was understandable. I’d probably have done the same.

Mami was never short on male company though. Any guy who got a look at her wanted to stick around, from the mailman to the surgeon who performed her hysterectomy, and she was equal opportunity, giving most of them a shot.

I packed up the things in the house. There were only a few photographs I’d take with me wherever I ended up next. The rest I left to my mother, but she didn’t want most of them either, so now they’re sealed in boxes held in a storage unit in a warehouse behind the airport along with the other crap we didn’t bother trying to sell because nobody wants anything de mal agüero, that might carry the DNA of a convicted killer.

There were no photos of my father. Mami got rid of them after he died. Only Tío Jaime kept a framed shot of Hector on the mantel of their artificial fireplace, a blown-up version of what was either his passport photo or his government ID. Hector, who was ten years older than our mother, sitting square in an unironed white button-down shirt, staring at the camera with his round wrinkled eyes and bulky lips over his blockish yellowed teeth. Con una mirada de chiflado, if we’re being honest about it, the kind of look that would make nice ladies make the sign of the cross, and even though I couldn’t describe him to you beyond that photo, just his face made me tense; the same guy Tío Jaime talked about with tears in his eyes, the little brother who, even with his bad leg, dreamed of one day becoming a champion boxer like his hero Kid Pambelé.

Before I knew the full truth, or at least as much truth as I’ve been able to piece together so far, I used to hope that Hector’s bad leg made him somehow virtuous, that he was a patapalo like the original Mediohombre, Blas de Lezo, who, missing a leg, a hand, an eye, and an ear, managed to defend Cartagena through countless battles against the British. But Mami said I was wrong. Hector’s bad leg only made him a cagalástima, self-pitying and bitter.

“He was no hero, mi’ja,” she said. “Not for one day of his life.”

From the photos that remained, I kept one of Mami that our father took just after they were married. She’s standing on a beach in Rosario, wearing a frumpy bathing suit, looking shy and modest. Her hair was long and dark, tied into a loose braid. She was pretty back then but nothing remarkable. People said she was the sort of woman who got more attractive with age, all that experience worn into her expression. Another photo of Carlito and me when we were toddlers, when our mother used to bathe us together, up to our necks in bubbles, laughing like stupid.

Then, a photo of the three of us on our last trip together to Cartagena to see Mami’s mother when she was dying. An abuela I only knew from our summer visits to Colombia, because she refused to leave her neighborhood even to visit us, convinced that in her absence the authorities would steal her home away like they’d done to the people of Chambacú, flattening their community on the marshes to fill the waterways with more traffic-filled avenues and shopping malls, and Abuela would be forced to live in some shanty in the hills.

We stayed with her all night, holding her hand until she passed away. Mami said the greatest gift you can give someone you love is being with them as they die. I’d always planned on being at my brother’s execution for that same reason. I reminded Mami of what she’d told us, but she said this case was different, then added a prayer of thanks to God for taking her mother from this world before people from her barrio had the chance to talk about her with shame and blame, mock her, and say she was like La Candileja, the fabled and disgraced grandmother of a boy who became a murderer.

The most recent photo: my brother, ashy and washed-out in his red death row suit, and beside him, me, looking like the gray-faced commuter-zombie I was, taken at the prison against the blue cinder block wall in the visiting room that some inmates had been given permission to paint with a mural map of Florida. I asked the guard to take the photo from the elbows up so the cuffs on my brother’s wrists wouldn’t show. You can’t see in the photo that Carlito and I are holding hands.

With the sale of the house, my mother leaves me with half the profits, a small chunk of change she says is meant to be my herencia and help me start a new life. She pushes for me to follow her to Orlando, but I tell her living so far inland feels unnatural to me and Miami, the city I’ve lived in all my life, now feels vacant.

I want to be forgotten.

I want it to feel as if I’ve never existed.

I want to be a stranger. Rootless.

For weeks, I try to think of where I might live now that I don’t have ties to any one place. I buy a road map at the gas station and stare at the state of Florida, drawing my finger up along the red and white highway lines, across different counties, trying out the names of towns on my lips.

Pensacola. Sebring. Valparaiso. Apalachicola. Carrabelle.

But my finger keeps dragging southward, even farther south than where I live now, closer to the equator, down to the strand of islands held together by a series of thin bridges, the ones scientists are always saying years from now will be covered by water when the seas rise and drown all the edges of earth.

There, I think, I might be able to disappear.

Before I leave our house for the last time, before the final days when I hand over the keys to the real estate broker, and before the new owner arrives to demolish our dilapidated kitchen and peel out our tile floors, I decide to go back to the park on the bay for one last look.

Years after the day of refugees, Hurricane Andrew wiped out those promiscuous nonnative pines and the state used the luck of the barren park to restore the vegetation, repopulating it with trees that were meant to be there.

The forest is no longer a forest but a garden of palms and various types of poinciana and ficus trees, and blankets of blooming flowers mined by iguanas and chameleons; the crows and turkey vultures replaced by parakeets, cormorants, and flycatchers.

Now there are neat trails for bicyclists and people out for a stroll, nature paths with marked signs providing brief histories of the flora and fauna.

I hardly recognize the place but walk down one of the trails, now a wide tunnel through gently arched palms.

It’s spider season. The path is laced with wide webs, thick golden silk spiders ready to birth at their centers, waiting for prey. I spot a baby lizard dangling by its tail from the edges of a web, still wriggling. I pluck a leaf from a tree and place it under the lizard to cushion its fall, pull it out of the web, and set it on the ground, free.

I walk, until I remember the passageway I once took.

I’m taller now and it’s harder to push through the undergrowth, but I manage, and soon find myself on the other side of the woods in a clearing by the lagoon and its jointed mangroves, and see another lone long-legged heron, this time a white one, perched on a rock, watching the water.

I was brought to the United States as a baby. If you want to blame someone, you can lay it on my father’s brother, Jaime. He was the first one to cross over. He left Cartagena de Indias as a crew member on a cargo ship and spent years on Panama Canal crossings until he ended up at the Port of Miami. They gave away visas more easily in those days. Green cards too. It didn’t take much for him to convince Hector to join him on the other side.

Our father had always been looking for a way out of Cartagena. If you weren’t rich or light-skinned, there wasn’t much for you there. Hector was a mechanic who specialized in spray-painting cars to look as new as they could against the salty corrosion of the Caribbean, a good enough skill, he thought, to take to a place like Miami. He left his new bride where he found her in her neighborhood of San Diego in Cartagena, and only came back in time to get her pregnant once a year.

Between Carlito and me there was the lost baby, stillborn, a girl who refused to be a part of this world, and when I was bad, to punish me, my mother would say I was not an abikú after all; that dead baby was her true first daughter, and if she’d taken the breath of life like she was supposed to, Mami wouldn’t have bothered going on to have another.

Hector came back to Cartagena to collect us all when I was three months old and Carlito was approaching three years — still long-haired because people said if you cut a kid’s hair before he speaks full sentences, he’ll be mute for life.

Mami panicked when it was time to move. The only world she knew was there in San Diego and she was scared about the life that awaited us across the sea, but her mother told her it was her duty to follow her husband anywhere and she should be grateful because most men who leave their country alone never return for their families.

Hector had found solid work at a body shop in West Miami and bought the crappiest house on an underdeveloped stretch of road, without sidewalks or streetlights, bordering the orange groves of Southwest Dade that have since been bulldozed and converted to housing developments and more strip malls. The house had two bedrooms but with Tío Jaime’s help he put up a thin wall to make it three. Mami didn’t work in those days. She stayed with her babies and hardly left the house. No English and no car left her dependent on the men and Jaime’s wife, Mayra, who couldn’t have children of her own. But Papi became jealous, always imagining her sneaking away to meet men. Who knows how it started? I’m not going to pretend my mother was guiltless even though she will say in those days she was only ever with our papi.

There must have been preludes to the disaster that broke us. I think violence must have been churning in my father like the August wind. I think he must have hurt my mother. He must have hurt us all. But when I ask her, Mami only shakes her head and says Hector’s dead now and there’s no reason to remember those days.

We were a complete family for just nine months before my father took off with my brother for the bridge.

When the three of us went back to Colombia to watch my grandmother die, our mother slept in the bed with her mother, Carlito took the sofa in the living room, and I slept in the bed that was Mami’s when she was a child and later became her marriage bed with my father until he left, promising he’d return for her.

I would lie stiffly, watching the ceiling cracks, taking in the voices from Calle de la Tablada, the sounds of horseshoes dragging carriages behind them, hitting cobblestones, and the morning bells of the Santo Toribio church echoing against the apartment walls. It was a bed that wouldn’t be fit for a child back in the States, with a mattress so thin each plank supporting it pressed against my body, but it was the bed where my parents had made my brother and me and the girl in between.

The apartment had belonged to our grandmother’s parents and before that, nobody knew. You could hear every whisper, every sneeze, every limb’s turn on a creaky bed or chair. The interior walls were of peeling plaster, the exterior walls of chipped stucco and stone, and the wooden windows were always open to dilute the humidity, hoping to catch a breeze coming over the city walls, off the Caribbean.

When we were kids and others asked about our father, Carlito would say, before any crumb of truth had a chance to slip off my lips, that our father was a millionaire. If we were in Miami he’d make up alibis, saying our father lived in a mansion in Cartagena, and when we came back to see our abuela, he’d say our father had stayed behind at our estate in Coconut Grove and gave details about the life he imagined for us, straight out of Miami Vice, full of fast boats and sports cars and money.

Till one day, during a summer visit to see our abuela, we were cooling our butts in a patch of shade in the Parque Fernández de Madrid with some other barrio kids when Carlito started on one of his favorite lies about how our papi owned hotels that we could run around in like they were our own playground, way better than the dumpy old streets of Cartagena’s walled city, which were still dusty and dirty, webbed with wiring and antennas, buildings sun-flushed and water-stained, untouched by the colorful restoration that would follow years later.

One of the boys, Universo Cassiani, scrawny, shirtless, and juggling a rubber ball, laughed at Carlito, happy to have a chance at revenge for the times my brother had mocked his name in front of the other kids, and howled that Carlito was a cochino mentiroso and our father was no millionaire. He was kind enough not to elaborate that day, but several summers later, when I was fifteen or sixteen and found myself making out with the now eighteen-year-old Universo, tall with stringy muscles, in the night shadows of the muralla overlooking the sea amid shuffling drunks and beggars, he confessed his mother had told him the story of our father as a warning of the madness that afflicts men when they leave for Gringolandia.

“It’s better down here,” his mami warned him. “Here, women know their place. Up there, they become wild and their men go crazy trying to contain them.”

He knew Hector had tried to kill my brother. He even had an explanation for it.

“Boys are the ones who carry a family name. Girls get married and fade away from a family tree. Your father probably did it to avoid the shame of your descendants.”

His words hurt. But serves me right because back then I still had the habit of scavenging for memories even if they were false ones.

Sometimes I’d look at old photos and invent stories for them. Sometimes I heard relatos of things that really happened, like the way Hector proposed to our mother, which wasn’t really a proposal at all but a deal: “Let me marry you and I will help you get away from your mother.” Then I’d invent a cover-up; tell myself that he met her when she was out buying food for dinner. Not the truth my mother once confessed to me, that he’d forced himself on her in an alley one night when she came home from a long day of painting nails for society ladies in Manga. But they didn’t call it rape back then, and because las malas lenguas had already anointed my mother with a reputation as a loose girl, people wouldn’t have been surprised he took liberties with her even though she tried to fight him off. So instead of being known as her attacker, because she was afraid she might already be pregnant and because he said he could take her away from this life, he became her boyfriend and then her husband.

Universo Cassiani was probably the first and only boy who ever came close to being a boyfriend to me. He would hold my hand as we walked along the streets of El Centro, kiss me in the archways of the muralla once used to hold cannons shooting against invaders, tell me my lips were sweet like granadillas, and that I was different from the other girls of the neighborhood who were prudish and protected by their papis.

I was with Universo just before the final hours of my grandmother’s life. Mami sent my brother out looking for me, to bring me home because she knew her mother’s last breath was coming. Carlito ran down the seawall shouting for me until I heard his voice echo against the stone. I pulled back from Universo, who was biting at my neck, but he persisted so I let him continue until Carlito appeared next to us in the alcove where we’d been hiding. Carlito pulled Universo off me, informing me that Abuela had announced she was waiting for me to be at her side before transitioning, which may or may not have been true. I went with my brother and left Universo by the sea.

My mother, brother, and I held hands across my grandmother’s body. She wasn’t even that old but she was a shrunken stump of a viejita with cropped white hair, a fleshy nose, and a tropic-charred complexion. Her palm was cool in mine and I tugged at her papery skin, counted the dark spots, compared it with my own, and thought nature is a real beast, the way it robs a body of its dignity.

She was ready to quit this life. Until a few days prior, she could still walk around okay, even without the help of the neighbor who’d taken on the role of her nurse. She survived alone with the money her daughter sent from Miami and ate well even if her body didn’t show it. She always smoked hand-rolled tobacco, and that evening kept her cigar on a porcelain plate on her nightstand. She’d been praying all her life for a good death, como buena colombiana, and knew tonight was the night. When I showed up in her doorway, she tilted her head my way and nodded slightly as if to say, Now we can get on with things.

It took a while, but was still faster than I expected. Her breaths became longer, then shorter. Her eyes drifted to the farthest point in the room, a corner between two windowless walls.

“Open the door,” she said, and Mami looked to Carlito and me and to the bedroom door, which was already open.

“It’s open, Mamá. The window is open too. Are you hot? Should we bring in the fan?”

“No,” Abuela shook her head with more force than we’d seen in a while from her. “Open the door. I want the door open.”

Carlito stood up and closed the bedroom door and opened it again, narrating to Abuela as he did so, “It’s open, Abuela. As open as it can be.”

“Open the door!” Abuela cried, but her voice was growing faint so it came out like a whisper.

Her breath quickened, her eyes widened. She looked at each of us, closed her lids, and left us in the room without her.

We did things the traditional way. That’s how I learned how to mourn the dead. We prayed over our grandmother all night like she was a saint and not the cold and rancorous woman our mother secretly hated for not defending her against the father and stepfather who’d put their hands on her; the woman she’d wanted to escape so badly she married our father; the woman she’d hoped would, in her final days, tell her daughter she was sorry, admit to having failed her in some small way, though that didn’t happen.

We cried over her; spoke of her; as if she’d been a holy woman; waited for the priest to come administer blessings; gave her a somber funeral Mass in the Santo Toribio church, attended by all her neighbors; and buried her in the Santa Lucía cemetery, facing the ocean.

Universo lives in Miami now. The funny thing about immigration is that people from your old neighborhood often end up right around the corner from you in your new one.

We ran into each other at El Palacio de los Jugos and made eyes at each other through some small talk.

“So you finally got the courage to leave your mami behind,” I teased.

“No, they increased the taxes in San Diego so much we had to move. She went to live with her sister in Santa Marta, so I came here.”

It was just as Abuela feared — the return of the rich to edge out the poor. Local folk who’d lived there for generations, unable to pay the higher taxes, forced to sell their homes and move.

Universo followed me home on his motorcycle for a welcome-to-Miami bang on my couch. He told me he’d heard about Carlito’s crime through the inter-American gossip wires as soon as it happened. We saw each other for a while. Not in a meaningful way but in one that was easy because, even though years had passed between us without contact, he already knew the things I never tell anyone. He knew why my house was always empty and why I didn’t have friends to go to parties with in pretty-girl clusters, wearing new dresses, shiny with makeup and iron-curled hair.

But he was no longer the Universo who looked at me like I was a special creature. The one who’d write me long letters in between summers saying he missed me, begging me to come back to Cartagena over the December fiestas, promising one day he’d defy his mother and move to the other side of the Caribbean and we could be together every day.

He was casual about me now, more like the boys I’d grown up with around the neighborhood, Carlito’s friends, who came looking for me when they had nothing else to do. It was okay, though. I never asked to be taken anywhere so it was always a nice surprise when Universo suggested we go out to eat instead of me cooking up some rice and warming over whatever leftovers I had in the fridge. He had another girlfriend, a rich rola, which I thought was funny considering Universo always claimed he wasn’t colombiano but cartagenero, as if it were its own nation, because, he said, what does Cartagena have in common with Bogotá other than being manipulated and ignored by its government? Here, equally displaced on neutral ground in Miami, they were novios. Sometimes he’d talk about a new movie and say we should go see it together that weekend, but we never did. I knew stuff like that was reserved for the official novia. And Universo knew my weekends were reserved for Carlito.

I lost touch with Universo. In the years since, I’ve hardly dated anyone in the sense that he likes me and I like him and the guy makes an effort to treat me nice by consistently taking me to public places like restaurants or movies or to a park, not just home or to a hotel room. I’ve only had that sort of treatment two or three times in my life and it’s always been short-lived, never a meet-the-parents situation. The last time was with Pedro the Peruano, who worked in the electronics store next to my salon in the Gables. He came on strong, bringing flowers to my job, until I agreed to go out with him. He took me to a steak house in the Grove and then we walked along Grand Avenue and he bought a rose for me from some guy selling them from a plastic bucket. We had a few more nights like that and I thought it was nice, this slow pace. It was something new for me. But then he stopped calling and when I went to his job to see if he was still alive, he pretended I was just another customer and asked a coworker to help me.

There have always been other men. I don’t go out looking for them. They just sort of appear. But I’m good at figuring out what they want right away, and it’s usually a quick turnaround. They want me in bed. They want the feeling of love and lust, but confined to an hour or two, or maybe, once in a while, a whole night. Sometimes I know they’re juggling me along with a few others, or maybe just just shuffling the deck with me and a wife or a girlfriend. I’m not picky about marriage or those kinds of rules. I would be if I were the married one. I think I would be the most faithful woman in the whole world. But I’ve never been given the chance.

I don’t believe in maldiciones but I have to admit, so far that old bruja has been right about my lovelessness. Maybe somebody did a trabajo or hechizo on me to make sure I stay alone.

I don’t want to sound like one of those girls crying about boys leaving me. I told my mother once, when she asked why I never keep a regular boyfriend, joking that all I need to do is find a guy with an even messier life than mine, that I’m like one of those dealers at the Magic City Casino blackjack tables. I know there are only a few ways for the cards to fall. I don’t like to lose, so I give only pieces of myself away. The pieces I know they like, the pieces they can handle. The girl who smiles in spite of everything. The one who can shimmy out of a bra without undoing the hooks, who knows what a guy wants even before he knows it.

The rest, the life I lived only for my brother, the life locked in memories of what we were before, I keep only for me.

But then Universo reappears. He hears I’ve sold the house. He stops by on one of my final days here to see for himself. He looks older, but I guess we all do, his thinning hair smoothed back with gel and about thirty new American pounds on him. He’s upgraded from his motorcycle to an old Jeep and tells me he’s now working as a forklift operator at the Port of Miami, loading and unloading the cargo of ships from China. I invite him in and it isn’t long before old habits take over. He’s not wearing a ring but tells me, once we’re both already naked, that he’s married, not to the rich girl but to some caleña who works at a day care in Doral.

“I don’t care,” I say, so his guilt won’t get in the way.

Afterward, he’s in no hurry to leave my bed and holds me against his chest like we’re supposed to be falling in love or something.

“You’re like no other girl I’ve ever known, Reina.”

“I’m like every girl you’ve known if she’d been stuck with my life.”

He starts getting turned on and wants to go at it again but stops abruptly, as if he’s suddenly remembered who I am and that he came here to say good-bye.

“So where are you going to go?” He glances around my room, all packed up and spare as a cell.

“I don’t know.”

“You could go back to Cartagena.”

“There’s nothing there for me anymore.”

“It’s the place where you were born. You’ll always have that.”

There was a time when we dreamed of returning there to live, Mami, Carlito, and me. We idealized Cartagena all year long as Mami saved up for our summer trips, but when we got there, it was never the way we wanted it to be — too hot, too rainy, too full of pueblo chisme, too grim, too hopeless. Still, during our prison visits, Carlito liked to conjure stories from the Cartagena of our nostalgia and made me swear that if he never got the chance to go back, I’d go for him.

When it was time to release his ashes, I told our mother maybe we should scatter them in Cartagena, spread Carlito onto the beaches of Bocagrande, or mix him into some concrete and push him into the pavement on our old block, mold him into the plaster or bricks of the bedroom where we slept as babies, or dust him into the trees along the hillside of La Popa.

Maybe we should have buried him next to Abuela in Santa Lucía, or at least grounded him into the soil over her grave. But Mami insisted it was better like this — it made more sense to let him go at the bridge where he and Hector had each found their end — and by releasing him into the ocean here in Florida, we could still be sure his ashes would somehow find their way across the Caribbean back home to Cartagena.

I will go back one day.

For him. For me. For all of us.

But not now. Not like this.

“I want to go someplace where nobody knows me,” I tell Universo.

“If things were different, I would go away with you. We could have an adventure.”

“But they’re not different,” I say, because I hate it when men start the fantasy thing in bed. All kinds of impossibilities hardly worth contemplating.

“Make sure you tell me before you go.”

“Why?”

“So I’ll know where to find you.”

I don’t tell him the point of my leaving is that I don’t want to be found.

We kiss because it seems like the thing to do, and lie together a while longer while night falls. Outside, I hear the cars of the neighborhood people pulling into their driveways, husbands, wives, and children home in time for dinner.

Universo starts to fidget beside me.

“It’s okay. You can leave if you want to.”

“I don’t want to,” he says, and I believe him until he sits up, gives me his bare back, grabs his rumpled boxers from the floor, pulls them on, and then his jeans.

His is a body that I knew thin and boyish, and now, thick and mannish. In some way, I think it’s nice our bodies have grown up together.

He says he’ll come see me again before I clear out for good.

He doesn’t, but neither does anybody else.

My coworkers at the salon see me off on my last day with a cake as if we are celebrating a birthday. From Tío Jaime and Mayra, I get a phone call. “We just want to wish you well,” Mayra says. We don’t talk much these days. I think when they see me they see a souvenir of pain. So it’s not like I expect a farewell party, but I’d hoped somebody would be there to watch me go, to somehow mark the moment of my leaving my lifelong home.

Instead, nothing happens.

The sky is cloudless and empty except for the autumn sun and a sliver of daytime moon, the neighborhood hum uninterrupted by my loading the car trunk with two suitcases like I’m going on vacation, not shopping for a new life, locking the house behind me, and pulling out of the driveway for the last time.

I am my only witness.

The Everglades are on fire on my final drive down to the Keys. On the curve of the turnpike where the pineapple groves end and marshland begins, I watch the green horizon burn with helicopters bobbing overhead, fighting the flames. It’s too late in the season to be a wildfire. The radio says some thrill-torcher is responsible.

I don’t believe in omens. I believe we choose our own signs, so I take this one as my own: with this blaze, I leave my old life up here on the mainland in ashes.

Because, for now, I’ve got no other place to go, I take a room in the South Glades Seaside Motel, dingy as ever, but I still feel a kind of loyalty to the place.

It’s Friday and the motel is already filling up with the old crew, familiar faces, the women I grew up with as a prison sister even if we never shared more than a few words. Women I waited in line with, all of us watching each other as we exited the penitentiary at the end of visiting hours with that same look of aching hope and fatigue, making our way back to the motel. Women who, unlike me, are still serving their time with the ones they love.

People have this idea that it’s hard to start a new life but it’s actually pretty easy. I tell myself if my parents could change countries without speaking the language, I can migrate too. I circle ads in the local paper and take down numbers from the bulletin board at the Laundromat, and hit a string of appointments to see a series of moldy, desolate concrete apartments in high-rises that sprouted during the housing boom and were left empty by the recession, some beachside motel efficiencies, and a couple of garden park trailers along the water that wobble under the slightest November breeze, forget about when the hurricanes come. But I know there has to be something better around here.

Before I left, a client from the job I quit back in the Gables told me to visit a friend of hers, Julie, a Canadian transplant who caught “Keys Disease” and decided to stay, running one of those shops on the Overseas Highway in Crescent Key that sell shined-up conch shells and mailboxes painted to look like flamingos. Crescent Key is one of the smallest islands, halfway down the boa of the Keys, between the marshes of Card Sound Road and the cruise ship crowds of Key West. It’s small enough to feel like an afterthought of an island, one that most people driving down the Overseas Highway don’t even notice passing through, but close enough to Marathon, one of the larger and more developed islands with big chain stores and twenty-four-hour pharmacies, and far enough from Carlito’s prison for me to sometimes forget it’s there.

“I heard you were coming,” Julie smiles at me when I arrive, as if with her whole body, from her rumrunner-paunch to her perma-flushed cheeks.

My client vouched for me. Told Julie I was clean-living and responsible. Turns out her friend Louise Hartley is looking for just that sort of tenant for a cottage on her property, a former coco plum tree plantation on the tiny island of Hammerhead that breaks off just before the bridge at Crescent Key Cut.

Julie gives a call ahead and sends me right over to see her.

Mrs. Hartley is waiting on her pebbled driveway when I pull up. She’s got straw-blond hair, wears waxy makeup, and is dressed in tennis whites. She wants to know if I’ve ever been arrested (no), if I do drugs (no), if I’ve got a husband or kids (no and no).

She leans in close and lowers her voice like she’s hoping for a confession.

“You got a man on your tail? Maybe a boyfriend you’re trying to keep away from? Anything like that?”

“There’s nobody. Only me.”

She twists her thin lips like she’s still deciding on whether to give me a shot.

“You got a job down here yet?”

“I’ll start looking once I’m settled.”

“Where are you staying for now?”

“Up at the South Glades Motel.”

“The one by the prison?”

I nod and she looks scandalized.

“Be careful. Lots of strange people pass through there. People you’ll want to avoid, if you know what I mean.”

I raise my eyebrows at the revelation.

“You got to get out of there, honey.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“How do you plan on paying rent if you don’t have a job lined up yet?”

“I’ve got some money saved.”

“I’ll need three months’ rent up front.”

“That’s fine.”

“All right then. Follow me.”

She leads me down a path framed by banana trees and palms to a cottage on the far end of the property facing the ocean and a small dock.

“I should mention the cottage has never been rented out,” Mrs. Hartley says, adding, in a tone that I think is supposed to resemble modesty, “Our family doesn’t really need the money. We just want someone on this side of Hammerhead to keep out squatters or vandals who come in on boats through the canal. I’m here alone most of the time. My husband works in Philadelphia and only comes down a few times a year.”

The vegetation is so thick it’s almost eating the cottage, which is small and yellow, with white shuttered windows and a small veranda that opens onto a narrow beach. As we get closer, the sounds in the trees grow louder, caws, the rustling of animals crossing branches. I see two flecks of red swoop through a patch of light from one tree to another.

“Holy shit.”

“Parrots,” Mrs. Hartley tells me proudly. “We’ve got a few pairs. God only knows where they came from, but they’ve made themselves right at home. Like those huge iguanas you see around, the African rats, or even those pythons everyone’s hunting in the Everglades. It’s easy to forget what’s natural to the area anymore.”

The cottage is one room with a small bathroom built into a corner and a kitchenette along one wall, definitely a step up from the places I’ve seen so far. It comes furnished too, with wicker furniture and a double bed pushed into a corner. I won’t have to take any of my own furniture out of storage. It’s a relief to start fresh.

“Don’t mind the stink,” she says, opening up all the windows and doors, though I don’t notice the faint smell of sewage till she points it out. “That’s from outside. The tide’s low and sometimes seaweed accumulates under the dock. It’ll wash away soon. That’s island living for you.”

She watches me as I poke around, open cabinets and closet doors, peek out the window, see the ocean spread beyond the thicket of trees.

“The water pressure’s good and the kitchen is stocked with more pots and pans than you’ll probably ever need. You’ll have to get a PO box in town and garbage collection is every Thursday by the main driveway. There are flashlights, flares, and a blow horn in the broom closet. You know, for the storms. But for most hurricanes we have mandatory evacuations. I assume you’ve got somewhere on the peninsula where you can go in that case.”

I nod, though I’m not sure I do.

She works a little harder at the sell, but I know this is all I need.

My first night in the cottage, I wait to see what sounds fill the evening as the sun slips behind the Hammerhead coco plum forest into the gulf. I step out onto the veranda to get a dose of sunlight before nightfall and make my way down the stone path toward the small cove of beach. Beyond it, on the other side of a coral wall and past a row of leggy mangroves, the Hartley house towers over the shoreline.

A flock of pelicans glides over me, probably some of the dozens that gather to hunt for fish and rest their wings along the valley of wooden boat stumps by the bridge at Crescent Key Cut, landing on my dock as if it already belongs to them too.

I sit on the beach and stare out at the water. Facing east, the sun disappearing behind me, I watch the sea darken with shadows, feel the sand cool under my feet.

The ocean is different down here. On the mainland, the curling bay water is a deep blue and even on the shallow edges of shore it only clears to a pale green. The waves folding into the open ocean grow thicker and peak higher as you head farther north, a menacing rush in the current, the wind splitting waves that could push you under with the force of a hundred men.

Down here the tide is calm, pulsing softly even under a heavier wind. The water bleeds turquoise and only darkens out past the reefs.

I sleep with the window slats open, something I never would have done back home. I hear only the sounds of the night animals. Owls. The wrestling of branches by raccoons or possums. There are no police sirens. No car horns or screeching tires. No shouting neighbors. No arguments between the old couple living next door or screaming teens. No sounds of a creaking older house, leaking pipes, no rain beating on a roof in need of repairs. No television reporting the crimes of the city, no radio voices of late-night advice shows where people call in with their sad stories: the noise my mother relied on to fill our emptiness. No sounds of Mami in what used to be my brother’s bedroom, on her knees at her homemade altar, saying prayers, making promises, bargaining with her saints to set us all free.