The Veins of the Ocean

THREE

Years ago, back in Havana, Nesto says he sometimes felt so confined in the city that when he couldn’t afford to put gas in the car, rather than take a guagua, he’d stand by the road haciendo botella, waiting for a local car to give him a ride on its way out of the capital, with nothing but the clothes he wore and a few pesos in his pocket. On one of those trips, he started on Avenida Maceo and caught a lift in a Pontiac to the Vía Blanca highway. The other people sharing the ride got off at the Playas del Este or Guanabo, but he stayed on, wanting to go as far as he could out of Havana.

They only made it to the Bacunayagua Bridge before the car broke down and all the travelers had to make their own way. But Nesto didn’t look for another ride. Instead he walked down from the mirador point overlooking the canyon that sank into the Straits flushing toward the Matanzas province. There were no defined trails on the slope of the hills, just some slightly foot-worn paths made by the few people who lived down in the valley. He walked and walked until he came across a bohío in a clearing near the shoreline. An old man sat in a block of shade under the grass roof overhang with a scraggy dog curled like a horseshoe at his feet. Nesto greeted him and the old man asked what he came down there for. Nesto wasn’t in uniform so the old man knew he probably wasn’t with the police, but he could have just as easily been undercover. Nesto told him he’d just come to take a look around, and asked if the old man minded if he stayed by his hut to rest for a while.

Nesto stayed for four days. He says most of the time he and the old man hardly spoke, just navigated their shared space in silence. The old man invited him to sleep on the floor of his hut, and gave Nesto a blanket and a bag of frijoles to use as a pillow.

During the day, they went for walks together. Took hikes up into the Yumuri Hills, and down toward the rocky inlet where water poured in from the Atlantic. Here, where the ocean pushed through two slabs of land, one could forget, at least for a little while, that they lived on an interminable island, with a coast that led nowhere but back to itself. A small, solitary body of earth, strangled by its own umbilical cord.

On the third day, Nesto admitted to the old man that the reason he’d come this way was that he wanted to feel like a boy again, free to wander, to get lost. He was a husband to a girl he hadn’t particularly wanted to marry, father to a boy he hadn’t been ready for. He wouldn’t trade any of it, he said, because the reward of the love one has for a child is far too great to ever give up, but there were days when he woke up to the ever-burning Cuba sun with a feeling that his life had been stolen from him before he was even born. Not by the marriage or the improvised family, but by his mere existence on that island — pilfered and poached centuries over, until its latest incarnation, as a museum of failed ideals and broken promises.

There was no past, no future, only the repeating days, dawn and the arrival of the daily mission to secure the family’s dinner. His dreams lay on the other side of an invisible bridge, but every bridge he came across, just like the famous Bacunayagua, which Cubans believed to be one of the Wonders of the World, led nowhere but back to itself.

That’s why he left his city and his family that day without a good-bye, without letting them know where he went or if he’d ever come back. It wasn’t the first time — after all, he was a son of Ogún, the lonely orisha who dwells in the forests from whom he inherited his need to flee, to clear new paths — and of course, it was hard to get very far on the island and he’d always come back so he didn’t fear his family would worry too much; a neighbor or official would have notified them if he’d been arrested or worse. He didn’t expect it would be the last time he wandered off either. It was the price of finding a little solitude and silence, for the illusion of freedom even if just for a short while.

The old man listened to Nesto and when he was done he shook his head at him the way Nesto imagined his own father would have done if he’d lived to see his son grow into a man.

“Compañero, how do you think I ended up here forty years ago? Go back to your family. And think twice before you ever leave them again.”

In the days after Christmas, I am restless. I wake before the sun, just a little while after I’ve managed to fall fully asleep. With no job, vacant hours swelling my day beyond scouring classifieds, submitting job applications, I spend time with Nesto, in between his repair calls, waiting for him in the truck when he’s on a job.

I consider going up to Orlando to see Mami. I picture her hugging me as if we are old friends, bringing me into her home, showing me the new things she’s bought, sitting me down on her new department store sofa, and offering me tea off a tray in the rehearsed way she practiced in the years of my childhood, when we’d sometimes get visits from social workers the school sent to check on my and my brother’s well-being. We were mostly normal children, but in class, I tended to go silent when spoken to and a school therapist tried to convince my mother I had selective mutism, while Carlito had a habit of back-talking his teachers, kicking over desks, and storming out of class, and they briefly tried to diagnose him with some kind of rage problem. But that was nothing; we knew boys his age who were already throwing punches at the principal, pulling knives on the lunch ladies, flashing guns they kept in their lockers, and getting sent to juvie.

In junior high a guidance counselor started calling me into her office, convinced I was being victimized or at least coerced by the older boys who trailed me in the halls trying to get me to ditch class to go fool around with them in the boys’ room or behind the school gym. The lady didn’t believe me when I told her not to worry, that everything I’ve ever done I did because I didn’t mind it, not because someone forced me. I had this idea that it was on the older boys to teach us younger girls what to do with our bodies, the same way they taught us how to dance salsa and merengue at block parties and asados.

I could tell I’d stumped her.

The school board required us to go see a therapist a couple of times. We each had to talk to the guy, a grandfather type, individually and then the three of us went in together, but I don’t think he got very far because, even back then, none of us were dumb enough to trust a shrink, and we eventually stopped going.

When Carlito was arrested, the papers mentioned those things. He was never a full-fledged delinquent but there were enough flags in Carlito’s past and people willing to be quoted for articles, saying there’d always been something “not right” about my brother, árbol que nace torcido, jamás su tronco endereza. But Carlito had been the one to graduate from high school and even go to college and get a good job, so what if people who knew him would later say he shot up like a palm tree, only to fall like a coconut.

I didn’t get so far. My grades were okay and I hung out with both the remedial crew and the jocks. But halfway through senior year I dropped out. It was right after the Christmas break and I was tired of it all. Mami and Carlito didn’t try to talk me out of it. They both said that this meant I had to find a full-timer to earn my keep. Till then I’d just swept hair off the floor of a salon after school and on Saturdays. Mami was pretty good in school herself when she was growing up, even wanted to be a teacher, but that took time and teachers didn’t get paid much in Colombia, always going on strike, and she had to work to help her mother maintain their home; they were women on their own ever since her father left them for another family in Turbaco and the stepfather that came after him got stabbed to death over some money he owed, which Mami always counted as a miracle. She said life doesn’t wait for education, and work is always the answer.

The same guidance counselor who’d tried to convince me I was victimized by the junior high boys was now an assistant principal at my high school and, after I quit, she came by the house trying to persuade me to reenroll. She didn’t say I was smart or anything, she just said that I could do better in life than be a dropout. But I told her I’d had enough. I’d get my GED and start cosmetology school. If I’d been smarter about it, maybe I’d have put in some time trying to date athletes or drug dealers like other girls I knew and get myself set up that way. But I’ve never been what they call forward thinking.

In these in-between hours, I think about those faces from my old life.

Universo, the summers in Cartagena when we’d disappear together, sneaking off on his scooter to the beaches in Bocagrande and Castillogrande, when he’d tell me, like he was an expert, one of those fancy newspaper columnists or TV news commentators and not a kid who barely finished bachillerato, that the sand and sea were dark around Cartagena’s edges because it was contaminated, not from the volcanic ash or even from the pollution of cargo boats and coastal factories, but by the blood that pooled together on its beaches from all over the Caribbean, the million souls lost on the journey to these shores. “It’s a sea of death,” Universo said. “But the water remembers what civilization tries to forget.”

Or when Universo would take me to his favorite pool hall outside the city walls in San Fernando and he’d play for pesos until he had enough to buy us ice cream on the way home. By the time we’d make it back to El Centro, it would be dark, the prostitutes already out, old-timers standing in doorways of Getsemaní while the younger crop waited by the port or around the fancy hotels hoping to “coronar,” find a foreigner to take them out of Cartagena, and Universo would joke that his mission was to coronar with me.

Sometimes I wish I’d held on a little longer, but my mother told me from the day I started running around with him in Cartagena that I should never fall in love with a boy like Universo, much less marry him. It would be like going backward, she said, and she always hoped I would at least have enough sense to marry for progress.

I wonder if he’s still with his wife. If they’ve had kids or bought a house.

I wonder if he ever thinks of me or if he tries to guess where I went because I never told him.

What would he say if someone from the old neighborhood in Cartagena were to ask what happened to me?

Esa Reina. No dejó ni la sombra.

She didn’t even leave a shadow.

Sometimes I even think about that dopey shrink, Dr. Joe. He left his job at the prison long before Carlito died, and even though I’d avoided the guy since the night with the dying bird, I asked the friendlier guards by the metal detectors about him, but nobody knew where he’d gone.

He came to mind again just yesterday when I asked Nesto, why, if he’d been such a reluctant father the first time, he’d gone ahead and had another kid. He’d already told me abortions were just about the only things in surplus in Cuba, and condoms — after a shortage in the eighties during which men got used to not wearing them — so plentiful they were often used to substitute as balloons for children to play with, or to make ice packs and sandbags, and during the Special Period, their plastic was even melted down to simulate cheese on pizzas.

He shrugged. “We both wanted another child, even if we couldn’t stand each other. We went to see a Santero who threw the caracoles and he said we would have a girl. Every man wants a daughter.”

I wondered if that was true.

Nesto watched me. I’d hardly mentioned Hector to him, but maybe that’s why he was able to read my thoughts in that moment.

“I’m sure your father loved you.”

It struck me because it was the exact opposite of what Dr. Joe had once told me — that the deep weight of sorrow I’d been born with was the unconscious awareness I had that my own father had never loved me, long before my mother even started telling me so, a trauma almost as severe as birth itself.

“I don’t know about that, Nesto.”

I thought this would be the end of the conversation, but he continued.

“All men love their daughters. It’s a special love. Different than that for a son.”

“Look, you can’t speak for all men any more than I can speak for all women.”

“You could if you wanted to.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“It’s the fear men feel. Sometimes it grows so big inside us, we can’t help but hurt ourselves and the people around us.”

Part of me wanted to laugh at how Nesto was comparing his failings to a part of my history unknown to him.

“You really shouldn’t be so quick to defend a man you never knew.”

“I’m not defending anyone.” He sounded disappointed at my rejection of his wisdom. “Least of all myself.”

I can guess what Dr. Joe would have to say about Nesto. He’d probably tally up his life’s errors, blaming his early promiscuity, just like he did with me, saying it arrested my development and that’s why I was so confused about normal human relations, but he argued that it wasn’t my fault since I inherited the family female burden of early puberty.

Never mind that Nesto says sexual openness was just another tool the Revolution used to get kids to warm up to its doctrine and abandon the traditions of the past, the religion of their elders, and that Escuela al Campo was a free-for-all, where secondary school girls and boys were fair game for the teachers and staff, and students quickly learned sexual favors could earn them not only better grades, but more than the small share of putrid parasite-infested food they got after hours tending crops since their parents could only make the trip out there to visit them on Sundays, walking hours in the heat to bring their children home-cooked meals to keep in their lockers throughout the week though they were usually stolen by bullies or even by the school guards and teachers.

It was a brutal life training. This was the reason Nesto gagged at the smell of strawberries and cringed at the sight of tomatoes. For the months he spent picking them, and the shit he got kicked out of him in the filthy bathroom each night by the dorm thugs. By the next year’s labor term, he came up with a plan to throw himself off the roof of his house so his ankle or arm would break or at least swell enough for a doctor to vouch that he was unfit for working the fields and give him permission to stay home. But the next year, they warned, even with a broken leg, he’d have to go back.

If there is one thing Nesto is grateful for now, he tells me, it’s that the island has depleted its resources so much that there are no crops left to be tended and kids are no longer sent away each year to work out in the campo. No more coffee. No more sugar. The only thing the island has left to export now, he says, is its people.

Dr. Joe would have things to say about Nesto’s infidelities to Yanai, too, which Nesto talks about like it’s just another fact, nothing to brag about or hide. He told me he wasn’t flagrant about it. He says he was no matatán or pinguidulce, just that sometimes he’d get caught up with other women who were between novios or maridos themselves and spend time at their homes; descargas, really — no vows or promises required.

Yanai figured it out, of course, as all women do.

Nesto says there is no room for secrets in Havana, no privacy to be had. Outside, there are the spying eyes of the DRC and surveillance cameras on street posts. Beyond the Granma newspaper propaganda, local chisme and chanchullo occupy the space of news of the rest of the world. Years pass and few things change but the lovers and pairings of the neighborhood folk.

You can’t be modest over there, he tells me. Walls are thin. Windows are always open to let in a breeze. Alleyways echo. Everyone hears everything. Every moan, every pleasure cry. Sometimes the only place a couple can go to be alone is the roof of the building, ripping into each other on a dirty azotea, under the scorching sun or maybe protected by night shadows, but even then, you can be certain somebody, from some window on some building that’s just a little bit higher, is watching.

Nesto says Yemayá was always good to him because he’s a son of Ogún, to whom she was once married. When he was a boy diving off the Malecón, he says it was Yemayá, mother of all life under the sea, who kept him safe and out of Olokun’s realm at the bottom of the ocean. She protected him from the insidious contracorriente that could pull him out to sea, and she kept the rough tide from slamming him against sharp rocks they called dientes de perro. When he was a teenager hunting in the water with only blurry goggles made out of melted boot rubber and beer bottle bottoms, Yemayá brought fish to him so he could catch them with his net or pierce them with his spear. She saved him from drowning more than once, Nesto says, always delivering him to the surface with her gentle power.

Nesto was never fully initiated to make Santo. He never had money to pay for the rites or the white wardrobe he’d have to wear for a year, all of which would have run in the thousands. Back then he’d sometimes stop in at an ilé ocha; go to a bembé or a toque de santo; watch as the musicians pounded the batás, calling to the orishas, before making their petitions and laying down their ofrendas. But he never did kariocha and was nobody’s ahijado, and he didn’t keep a canastillero or soperas for his orishas. In his room, he only kept a pair of candles, a dish full of candies, and a glass of rum he’d change every Monday in front of an image of Elegguá, master of fates.

On the last night of the year, Nesto pops open a bottle of rum inside the cottage, spilling a few drops behind my front door for Elegguá, who he says lives behind hinges, and more drops in every corner of the cottage, in remembrance of the ancestors.

I follow him out to the beach behind my cottage and sit on the sand as he steps to the water’s edge, looking to the sky, palms up, asking for the blessing of the Great One, recognizing the dead who accompany him, known and unknown, the camaché, and looks down at his feet, asking Elegguá, who controls the flow of aché, to guard his health and for his specific request, the same thing he always asks for: to bring his family across the Straits to be with him and to intercede on his behalf to Obatalá, creator of mankind, and his wife Yemayá, mother of the ocean that separates him from his children.

Then Nesto reaches down to the white cloth at his feet where he’s spread out pieces of watermelon, berries, and coffee beans, picks them up, carries them to the water’s edge, and places them in the ocean. Rather than push the offering up to the sand, the tide takes it out with the current.

When he returns to my side on the beach, we take turns sipping from the bottle and he tells me that since he received his green card almost two years ago, he’s started the paperwork to bring his kids over to be with him. But after waiting a year for their appointment to get their tarjeta blanca exit permit to leave the country, they’ve been denied and told to make another appointment, which they did, for the first available opening, three years from now. Even paying secret fees and bribes has only managed to bump the appointment up from three years to two.

Nesto gulps the rum. I’ve never seen him drink like this. He complains every other Caribbean rum tastes like candied piss compared to Havana Club, but that doesn’t stop him from swallowing more and closing his eyes, and, as if he’s forgotten I’m beside him, he whispers to the sky, “I don’t know how much longer I can live like this.”

It’s not yet midnight but we can already hear firecrackers in the distance. The Broken Coconut put out word that they’re launching fireworks from a barge offshore. I thought maybe Nesto would want to go see the display, but he said he just wants to be with the ocean tonight, and with me, if I don’t mind.

He hands me the bottle and I take a few sips. I hold the rum in my mouth for a few seconds before letting it slide down, stinging my throat.

“What about you, Reina? Isn’t there anything you want to ask for?”

“Ask who?”

He touches the sand and kisses his fingers before saying, “Olódumare.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“God. The supreme one. Owner of the day and night.”

“I know you believe in that stuff, Nesto. But I don’t.”

“You don’t need to believe to ask.”

“Then I would be a hypocrite.”

“No, you would be honest.”

“I’ve learned asking for things doesn’t work. You have to just accept what’s given to you. Make the best of it.”

“You don’t believe in praying for things?”

I shake my head.

“You know, there was a time when all the birds of the world had feathers but no wings. They lived on the ground and leopards would come and eat them. The surviving birds prayed to Elegguá, asking him to find a way to protect them from the leopards. So Elegguá spread the birds’ feathers and gave them wings with which to fly away from all the creatures that wanted to eat them.”

“I don’t need wings.”

“I am sure there are other things you need. The only way to get what we want from life is to ask for it.”

I smile but I can see it isn’t enough for him; he wants me to say I’m willing to believe one can petition the sky and the sea and be heard.

Instead I say, “I believe there is what happens and what doesn’t happen. Hoping or praying won’t change that.”

“If that were true, I wouldn’t be here. I’d still be stuck on that island.”

“Nesto, if there were such a thing as answered prayers, I’m the one who wouldn’t be here.”

“There are worse places you could be.”

“If my prayers had been heard back when I used to say them, life wouldn’t have taken the turns it did. I wouldn’t have had to come here. I’d be somewhere else living some other life.”

I mean that I would be with my brother, but Nesto takes it differently.

“You would be living somewhere with a wonderful husband and many children.”

“Maybe.”

“Is that what you want?”

“I don’t want things the way other people do. I just take what I have, what’s already in front of me.”

“It’s good to want things, Reina. We have to want things or we’ll die.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What makes you get out of the bed every morning?”

“The fact that being awake is better than being asleep.”

“Why is that?”

“I dream too much.”

“Your dreams are messages. They are telling you to pay attention to the world around you.”

“Nesto. You have all the answers.”

“Just look out there at the sea. We can’t see below the surface but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a whole world under the current.”

“If we go for a swim we’ll see it.”

“No, we’ll see just a small piece of it. And you don’t have to see all of it, so immense it’s beyond our comprehension. You just have to know it’s there. It’s the same with everything else. If you take a chance believing, you’ll see what can happen.”

I consider telling him I once had faith. I was, for a brief time, a young girl who prayed and believed in the unseen, perhaps as much as he does, but it all fell away from me.

Instead, I shove him gently.

“You live in your world. I’ll live in mine.”

He stands up quickly and stretches his hand out to me to pull me to my feet as well.

“What is it?”

“Come on,” he says “We have to bring in this new year with happiness, not with such gloomy talk. It’s bad luck.”

“What are we going to do?” I’m standing in front of him now, still holding his hand, which he holds up, putting his other hand on my waist.

“We’re going to dance.”

He starts swaying gently, guiding me with his hands and steps, following the slow rhythm of the tide washing up the shore just inches away, and he adds his voice to it, humming the tune to “Lágrimas negras,” which he once told me was his mother’s favorite bolero. With each step he leads me a bit closer to the surf, until the cold foam covers our toes and then reaches above our ankles. He’s close enough for me to feel his warm breath pass my cheek, but his body is far, his long arms between us. I step in closer, without thinking much about it, but he steps back, and I try it again, and again he steps back.

“It’s not so bad where you ended up, Reina, is it?”

“No. It’s not.”

I lean my face forward to kiss him, but he pulls back before my lips reach his, though he never stops dancing.

“What are you doing?” I say, because he says nothing.

“I’m dancing with you.”

“You don’t want to kiss me.”

“I do.”

“But you won’t.”

He drops my hands and steps away, leaving me alone with my feet in the water.

He turns his back to me to face the moon behind us.

“Lolo invited me out on his boat tomorrow. Do you want to come?”

I walk up on the beach and sit on a mound of sand a few feet from him.

“Okay.”

“I’ll sleep here tonight, if you don’t mind.”

“No problem.”

He walks up to the cottage but I remain behind on the beach, digging my feet into the sand.

When I go back inside a while later, Nesto is already stretched out on my sofa, asleep or at least pretending to be.

I don’t fall sleep for a while though. I sit on my bed with the nightstand light on beside me and think back to the end of last year, when I still lived in the Miami house, and Carlito was still alive and waiting for my next visit. I brought him chocolates that morning but the guard took them away at the security check because someone got caught a month or two before smuggling pills inside a similar box. When I got to the visiting room to see Carlito, I only had a corny Christmas card to give him. I’d bought it at a drugstore and planned to write a nice note inside but no words came to me, so below the printed message, I’d only signed my name.

When he opened the card, Carlito traced his fingers over the letters.

“Did you know I was the one who picked your name? Mami wanted to call you María Reina de la Paz after Abuela’s favorite Virgin, but I convinced her to just call you Reina. I said you were my Reina. My little queen.”

“Carlito, how is that possible? You were only three.”

“Ask Mami. She’ll tell you.”

And for once, when I asked my mother about one of Carlito’s stories of our childhood she nodded, turning her face from me to the ground.

“Sí, Reina. Your brother named you. That much is true.”

Nesto can’t believe I’ve never been on a boat. I grew up close to the Atlantic, not on an island where you need a permit to take a boat offshore like he and Lolo did. But I’ve never even been on one of those Everglades airboats that blow through the swamps on gator tours. I’ve never even been on a canoe.

To ease my introduction to the open ocean, on the way to the marina to meet Lolo and his Boston Whaler, Nesto tells me one of his favorite patakís:

“In the beginning, the earth was made of only rocks and fire. So Olódumare in the form of Olofi, the all-powerful, turned the smoke of the flames into clouds, and from the clouds came down water, which put out the fires, and a new world was born. In the holes between the once burning rocks, oceans formed. What remained above the water was known as land. Olofi gave the oceans to Olokun and the land to Obatalá with a small pile of dirt that a chicken scratched out with its feet to form the continents. But Obatalá was jealous of Olokun’s vast domain, so he chained her to the ocean floor where she remains with a great serpent that only peeks out its head with the new moon. Olokun is vengeful, though, and still tries to steal parts of Obatalá’s land for herself, by shaking the sea floor, sending up tidal waves and tsunamis from the deep.

“When it was created, the ocean was massive and empty of life. At this time, Yemayá lived in the heavens with Olofi, complaining that her womb ached. It’s Yemayá who gave birth to the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars, and to the rivers, the lakes, and to the orishas, becoming mother to all life on earth. To show his love for her, Olofi made Yemayá queen of the oceans and gave her the rainbow to wear as a crown, which appears only when Yemayá shows herself to the world in the form of rain.”

We are only a few miles offshore when my stomach starts to quiver.

I feel the vibration of the engine under us, watch the marina shrink, the darkening of the crystalline waters bordering the islands, from my place on a padded bench on the back of the boat with Melly, Lolo’s wife, while Nesto has joined Lolo by the wheel.

Melly has already peeled off her shorts and is down to her string bikini, posing on the edge of the boat like one of those rubber truck flap girls. She’s twenty-two and Lolo’s third wife, though they have this running joke that he only married her because she’s Canadian and wanted to get her U.S. papers. She calls herself a wildlife artist, but I saw her work when Nesto and I went to meet them at Lolo’s dive shop earlier this morning, and her paintings aren’t what you’d call natural—they show dolphins and stingrays paired with big-breasted mermaids touching the animals in lusty ways. Nesto and I had to keep from spitting our laughter when we saw them all over the dive shop walls next to posters for wetsuit brands.

I’m thinking about Melly’s paintings when I throw up the first time, all my breakfast into the white waves spiking against the side of the boat. Nesto has his back to me so he doesn’t notice until Melly makes a fuss, running to my side, rubbing my shoulders. I push her away and keep on vomiting, which would be embarrassing if I were to stop and think about it, but I can only focus on the churning of my stomach and the burning of my throat as stuff keeps coming up and up.

I hear them all behind me, Lolo saying we’re hardly two miles out and I’m already tossing up hasta el último tetero. Then Nesto is beside me, telling me to concentrate on the horizon, but when I try to it looks lopsided to me and the only thing that helps is closing my eyes and forgetting where I am if for just a second.

“Do you want us to turn back?” I can tell by Nesto’s tone that he wants me to say no, so that’s what I give him, while steadying myself on the railing, and he goes back to Lolo and tells him I’ll be fine.

But I am not fine. I feel a confusion of my senses. On my back, the sun is warm and delicious; the sea salt is calming and aromatic; and the splash of the boat cutting through waves, sprinkling cool drops on my face, is a relief from the convulsions I feel from the neck down, my intestines twisting, exorcising themselves even when there is nothing left to push up. I want to forget where I am. Forget I’m on a boat heading to nowhere in the ocean, with Nesto, who, at this moment, seems more of a stranger to me than the night I met him, and his friends, who I sense mocking me as they trade glances.

And then I am not there anymore.

I am still under the winter sun, still surrounded by water, but now I am a child again, maybe five or six, swimming at the public pool Mami sometimes took us to during the free family-swim hours since Carlito didn’t hate pools as much as he hated the ocean. One afternoon, Carlito and I made friends with another kid, a girl there with her father. She had inflatable tubes, floating toys, all for her, but she shared them with us. I was drawn to this father-and-daughter twosome, mystified by the gentleness with which the father handled his daughter and how she hung on to him, her arm around his neck. When Carlito got out of the pool to sit by our mother on the lounge chairs, I stayed in the water with the girl and her father. She would invite me over to her house one day to play with her dozens of Barbie dolls, she said. I didn’t have any.

Her father picked her up and tossed her across the water and she landed with a big splash. He must have seen the envy on my face because he told me to swim over and lifted me up to do the same. I never felt such big hands on me. I never knew a person could be so strong. I didn’t remember ever being carried off the ground by anyone. He tossed me up and away and I crashed into the water. When I came up for air, I looked over at my brother to see if he’d seen me soaring but he hadn’t.

Then the father was carrying his daughter and pulling her toward the deep end, where I wasn’t allowed. “Do you want to come?” he asked, and I looked back at my mother, lying on a plastic lounge chair, reading a magazine, and back to the man, nodding. He picked me up in his other arm and we glided, all three of us, two little girls in a father’s embrace, to the deeper water, and I felt the thrill of knowing the floor was too far below for me to touch. I felt safe in this father’s arms. He led us over to the wall and we perched there, the three of us, each girl straddling one of the father’s knees. The daughter was talking about the new dress her father had bought her that morning — long and lavender with a ruffled bottom. It sounded like the most beautiful dress in the world. I could not imagine what it would be like to have a father buy me nice things and I watched her and her father and the way they loved each other. I felt something poke my leg and when I looked down, through the gloss of the pool water, I saw the father’s penis had grown and popped out of his bathing suit. I knew what a penis was because I had a brother and during our early years, we took our baths together. I said to the father, “You should fix your bathing suit,” and he looked down and said, “Yes, I should,” and put himself away. But it happened again and when I told the father this time, he said, “Why don’t you fix it for me?” I looked at the girl, who didn’t react, and then at my mother, still buried in her magazine pages, and my brother drying off with a towel on the chair beside her. I called to my mother, but she only looked up and when I said nothing else, she turned back to her magazine. I tried my brother. I called his name. He looked at me, and again I said nothing, but he stood up and came to me. He knew something was wrong. The man squirmed beneath me, and I reached my hand out to my brother and let him pull me out of the water. I said nothing and my brother saw nothing, but still looked at the man with suspicion. We went back to our mother, who still hadn’t noticed a thing.

“I want to go home,” I told our mother, afraid to look back at the girl with her father, afraid of what I’d seen under the water.

It’s a memory that hasn’t come to me in years. One I’ve never spoken of. But here it is, laid out before me in the delirium of my seasickness, until we are so far out that there is no land and no other boat to be seen in any direction. We are beyond the buoys, the pale shallow waters and sandbars along the coast emptied into to a watery lapis plateau.

Lolo drops anchor and the boat gives into bobbing over the waves that makes me lurch over the side, its engine fumes conjuring another vomit spell.

Nesto kneels beside me.

“I’m sorry, Reina. If I’d known you would get so sick, I never would have asked you to come.”

His words aren’t any consolation. I pull back, lie on the boat floor, hoping it will feel steadier, focusing on the sky above, but it doesn’t help.

“You’ve got to get in the water,” he urges me. “It will make you feel better.”

He pulls his shirt over his head and is down to his shorts, which he steps out of too, and there he is, all of him crammed into a small swimsuit — the kind most guys, except professional swimmers, avoid.

I’ve never seen so much of Nesto. So much of his skin, his limbs, the length of his legs, bare toe to bare thigh. The stretch of his waist, hip folds to armpit. I remember him telling me that in Cuba, it’s common for guys to shave their bodies from the waist up or even all over, because the weather is so hot, sometimes the water supply is cut, and it’s a way to keep from stinking between showers: Nesto, hairless except for some stubble on his chest and that mane, which he pulls back with a thick rubber band. He catches me staring at him and waves his hand at me, as if I am hypnotized, and I look away, prop myself on my knees and over the boat railing again, eyes back on that unreliable horizon, and throw up some more.

When I look back up, Lolo is stripped down to an equally small bathing suit, and I notice a tattoo across his back of what has to be one of Melly’s mermaids. He pulls a bottle of shampoo out of a bag and pours it all over Nesto’s shoulders, and then onto his own chest and they each begin rubbing themselves down. I don’t want to ask what they’re doing. I just watch as Nesto’s dark skin turns slick and shiny, but then it becomes clear they’re just lubricating themselves to make it easier to get into their wetsuits.

When he’s all wrapped in neoprene, Nesto reaches for me.

“Come, Reina.”

I take his hand and he leads me along the railing to the back of the boat, where he helps me sit down beside him, our feet hanging over the edge into the cold water.

He dips the mask he’s been holding in his other hand into the ocean, fills it with water, then puts it up to my face.

“Close your eyes,” he says, and I do.

He says some words in Lucumí, then, so I can understand, says, “Yemayá, take Reina into your arms,” before pouring the water over my head.

I feel it run down my face, cooling my neck, my back, and my chest.

When I open my eyes, Nesto is watching me.

“Get in the water. Swim. It will help you, I promise.”

He starts putting some long fins on his feet while Lolo tosses a large inflatable red tube on a long cord off the back of the boat.

“And when you get in, you do it like this.”

He launches himself sideways off the back of the boat, disappears under the water, then breaks through the surface again, grinning.

“You’ll only feel worse if you stay on board, Reina. Come in. I’m waiting for you.”

Melly lets me use her wetsuit since she’s decided to stay on the boat to work on her tan, and helps me lotion up, then pull the neoprene up over my thighs and around my hips, which is much harder than it looked when I watched Nesto do it. When I have it on properly, she zips me up from behind and I feel the suit push against my ribs up to my neck.

“Breathe,” she tells me. “You’ll get used to it. It’ll feel better in the water.”

She gives me her fins and mask too, and leads me to the ladder at the back of the boat to help me as I put them on.

“Are you scared?”

“Of what?”

“Of this,” she points to the dark water all around us.

“What do you mean?”

“Out here is where the ocean floor drops off. Didn’t you notice how clear and light the water is when we’re closer to land? That’s because it’s not so deep. Then the ocean floor takes a big hit hundreds of feet down and you’re out here, in the blue.”

“Should I be scared?”

“You’ll be fine as long as you don’t panic and start swallowing water.”

Nesto and Lolo are on the line by the buoy calling for me to come in, so Melly helps me push off the ladder into the cold water, sideways, just like Nesto said, and I feel it slip between my skin and suit. I push the fins with my legs, propelling myself along the surface, pulling myself along the line toward the buoy where Nesto waits with Lolo.

“Are you still sick?”

“I’ll be okay.” But as soon as I say it, a wave pushes against me and my stomach goes up with it, then back down, and the sickness returns.

“Put the mask on and go under,” Nesto instructs me, and I do as he says.

Nesto and Lolo have weight belts on and lower another weighted line off the tube and start timing each other, doing ventilation patterns, so they can better hold their breath to dive on air. I don’t have a weight belt, just the mask and snorkel and fins, so I remain on the surface but once I turn my face downward, I gasp at the immensity of the realm below, slivers of sunlight shooting through the blue like lightning.

I don’t see small fish like the ones you see in tropical aquariums or when you snorkel by the reefs or close to the beach, with the stripes and dots. I see nothing, really, just a big slow-moving fish several meters under me, the outlines of a few small jellyfish bouncing along. Otherwise it’s quiet, still, shadows and blueness and emptiness as far as I can see in any direction, which isn’t very far, it turns out, because Lolo later tells me no matter how good the day’s visibility, sunlight only penetrates the first two hundred meters of the ocean and beyond that it’s an eternal midnight.

Even on the most perfect sunny day, the ocean lit up like a chandelier, Nesto says there is an underworld of inverted mountains far beneath the shimmering surface sea, valleys and canyons miles beyond the faintest trace of light.

I feel a tug on my suit and pop my head up to see Nesto tying a rope around my waist.

“You’re drifting. I don’t want to lose you out here.”

Maybe it’s because I feel a little safer knowing I am tied to him and to the tube that I spit the snorkel out and try to dive under, though my wetsuit makes me buoyant and I don’t go very far. But being underwater soothes me. My stomach and my nerves calm. The boat fumes dissipate. My body turns and curls as it wants, weightless, with the ease of an acrobat.

I think of my mother and how, when I was a child, she’d take me into the water with her and I felt time suspended in her embrace. How badly I’ve wanted to return to those moments. We remained under the same roof, but the years pulled us apart, so we could never recover the softness I felt from her under the sun, amid the waves.

Here, in the open ocean, with nobody to hold me at the surface but myself, I become sad for what’s become of my mother and me, the ways life hardened us to one another.

I turn and see Nesto a few meters away, lowering himself headfirst down the line, one hand on the rope, the other pinching his nose. A pair of sea horses comes into my line of vision, then floating close, just in front of my mask. I’ve never seen them swimming free like this. At the dolphinarium, there is a display near the entrance with a few sea horses that usually coil their small tails onto the seaweed at the bottom of the tank. They’re supposed to prefer shallow waters, but here, this pair glides along, tails tied in courtship, and I almost do what Melly warned me against, swallow water, in my effort to call to Nesto, who is back up on the surface, gasping for air.

He gathers his breath and swims over to me, looking concerned, while Lolo waits on the line rig behind him. I take his hand and guide him to where the seahorses seemed to dance under a strobe of sunlight a moment ago. We go under together and the seahorses are still there, twirling beneath the current. We watch them for a few seconds. When we come up for air, Nesto looks pleased.

“Seahorses are a sign,” he tells me.

“Of what?”

“You don’t believe in signs, remember?”

“Tell me, Nesto.”

“It’s Yemayá. She’s welcoming you. She’s giving you a place out here.”

On the way back to shore, Lolo stops the boat by the Key Largo hump where the continental shelf rises into a little mountain that pushes the smaller fish to the surface and larger fish come after them. That’s what he tells me when I ask if I can get off the boat again and go for another swim. I’m not sick anymore. Ever since I got in the water out in the blue, I feel calm, and the feeling remained even when I climbed back in the boat and it started up again, skipping and splitting waves.

Out by the hump, there are a lot more boats, most outrigged with multiple fishing poles, hoping for bites from bonefish, tarpon, or snook. As Lolo sets up a couple of poles off the back of the boat, I know we’ll be here a while. But he says I can’t go for a swim because along with barracuda, there are plenty of sharks out in the hump and once in a while even a wandering great white makes an appearance. I settle onto a bench with Melly. She’s been nice and helped me out of her wetsuit just like she’d helped me into it. She ran the freshwater hose all over me to wash off the salt and shampoo residue, and brushed out my hair.

“I’ve never seen Nesto with a girl before,” she tells me when the guys are out of earshot and deep into some story about the old days spearfishing in El Salado. “Whenever he comes around, he’s always alone. I tried to set him up with friends of mine a few times, but he’s always said no. How long have you known him?”

“About two months.”

“I knew Lolo three months when I married him. And that was three years ago.”

“Really?”

“I came to his shop looking for a job. He said, ‘I can’t give you no job if you don’t have no papers.’ I said, ‘Well, how am I supposed to get papers if I don’t have a job?’ so he said, ‘You can marry me.’ And he leaned right over the counter and pulled my face to his and kissed me right there with customers all around. That’s how he got me to go out with him. I didn’t think I’d marry him, but I like a guy who goes after what he wants.”

I remember being on the beach with Nesto last night. How he treated kissing me like I was asking him to walk off a cliff.

There’s a tug on one of the lines and Lolo rushes to it while Nesto looks at the others, but they’re all slack. Lolo reels in his line and, after a small struggle, a fish turns up, flapping and fighting against the hook and line until the poor wahoo is flopping to its bloody death on the floor of the boat and Melly claps and cheers like it’s a party, as Lolo grabs the fish, ramming his fingers into its gills. I look at Nesto, who also looks pleased with the massacre, then turn my eyes back to the horizon because I know I might be sick again.

Later, at Lolo and Melly’s house, the guys skin and gut the fish for dinner out on the patio while I help Melly make a salad in the kitchen. It’s a small house, with a lanai that opens onto a narrow canal on the edge of the ocean, and Melly’s interspecies orgy paintings cover the walls. She sends me out back to ask if we should put some rice on the stove too. I slip out the screen door, to the block of patio around the side of the house where they are filleting the fish, and that’s when I hear Lolo ask Nesto, as if he’s been waiting for an update, “¿Qué vuelta, asere? Tell me, what’s going on with the family situation?”

I wait behind the corner of the house, curious how Nesto will respond.

“Nothing’s happening, ’mano. They keep telling us to wait. But I can’t anymore. I have to figure something else out.”

I stand there a moment longer to see if they’ll say more, but they don’t. When they see me come around the bend they both look at me, surprised. I ask about the rice and Lolo says it’s a good idea, but Nesto just stares at me as if we’re meeting for the first time, or as if he’s forgotten I’ve been along for the ride all afternoon.

I leave them and go back to Melly in the kitchen. By the time we sit at the table under the sunset to eat the fish Lolo grilled for us, I’ve put the conversation I overheard out of mind, until I notice Nesto’s eyes leave me, leave all of us at the table, to stare across the Atlantic as if it holds some kind of answer.

I’m used to disappearances.

I’m never surprised when guys take off. It’s the opposite. I never expect them to stick around.

I don’t hear from Nesto for a few days.

Then I run into him, though it’s not a complete coincidence because I know he goes to check his box at the post office every Tuesday and Friday afternoon, after he fills his gas tank. I go check my mail at around that time, and there he is, pulling his blue pickup into the parking lot. I pretend not to see him right away. I want him to be the one to decide if he’s going to approach me or if we’re going to do that thing where we ignore each other until it’s clear one of us wants nothing to do with the other anymore.

I park in front of the post office and pretend to fumble with my purse for a while, getting out of the car before walking up to the glass post office doors extra slowly to give him time to finish up and hopefully catch him on the way out. I’m a good planner because it happens exactly that way and he spots me easing out of my car, walks over like he’s not at all surprised to see me, and pulls me into his chest.

“I’m sorry—”

“You don’t have to be sorry for anything.” I cut him off, ducking out of his arms. “We don’t owe each other anything.”

He looks a little confused at my words but goes on. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I went up to Miami for a few days. I just got back.”

“I thought you hated it there.”

“I had to take care of some things.”

“Things?”

“Family things.”

“You couldn’t do that from down here?”

“No.”

We watch each other for a moment until Nesto asks, “Aren’t you going to go in and check your mail?”

I shrug. “You know I hardly ever get anything.”

“Then let’s get out of here. I did some work for a friend in Miami.” He pats his wallet in his back pocket. “Let me invite you to dinner.”

I leave my car back at the cottage and go with Nesto in his truck. We don’t say much. He pops a disc of ballads into the stereo, singing along, and mutters between songs that he should have tried a little harder to make something of himself when he was younger and still had the chance. As a teenager, he and his friends would strum guitars and sing through apagones that shut down the city through the night until the electricity came back on. He was always told he had a good voice, rich and raw. He could have gone to a conservatory, he says, maybe even made a career of music. It would have been the smartest thing since the only Cubans who can get rich legally these days are artists and musicians.

He drives south till we’re on the far end of Marathon, pulls off the road to a thatch-roof restaurant built on the waterfront below the start of the Seven Mile Bridge, stretching as far as anyone can see over the glassy shallows, an occasional fishing boat pushing through below its columns. The hostess, a girl who looks both faded and burned, seats us at a plastic table by the water’s edge and drops laminated menus between us.

When Nesto is done fumbling through his menu I say, “You want to tell me something. I can feel it.”

“You’re right.”

“So what is it?”

“I’ve been thinking of ways to say this.” His nostrils expand with a long sigh. “I wanted us to be friends when we met. You know that. But things are different from what I expected.”

He stares at me like I’m supposed to finish his thought.

“You understand what I mean, don’t you?”

I shake my head.

“I know you like me. You know I like you. More than I would like any other girl at this point.”

He looks out to the water, up to the sky, and mumbles something I can’t make out to the clouds, then turns his eyes back on me.

“I do not want to burden you with my shit, Reina. I’ve told you about my life. It’s a disaster. The situation with my family. . está en candela.”

“Everyone’s life is a disaster.”

He’s shaking his head and I know no matter what I say, he’s decided I’ve got it all wrong.

“Since I left home, I’ve been like a lone wolf in the hole I live in. Go to work alone. Go home alone. Eat alone. Sleep alone. I don’t keep track of anyone and nobody keeps track of me. That’s the only way I can be until I restore things, until I get my kids out of there. Until that happens, I’m not a real person. I’m not even half a person. I’m a maldito shadow.”

He looks out to the water again, as if he can see them on the other side of the sunset.

“I like the time I spend with you. You’ve become important to me. And I think I’ve become important to you. But listen to me when I tell you this: I can give you nothing. I am nothing.”

“Don’t say—”

“You don’t know, Reina. You can’t understand what it is to be separated from my children. Lives you have watched since birth, that you brought into this crazy world. To have them cry to you every time you call because they don’t understand why you left them. They have this idea of this country that everyone is a millionaire and lives like a movie star. They don’t know how hard it is. They don’t know that everything I do, every day I work, everything is for them. I did everything right. I adjusted my status to get political asylum, got the green card. I filed all the papers for them to come and they still can’t get out. Every year it’s another denial. They tell everyone there to wait, wait, because there is nothing else to do, and there’s nobody better at waiting than a Cuban. But I’m here and I can’t wait anymore. Maybe I made the wrong choice. Maybe I should have stayed with them. I wonder about that every single day that I’m here without them. I would still be eating shit over there, but at least I’d see them every day and we’d still spend birthdays and holidays together. You don’t know what it is to have your family broken by a system, by old men who refuse to die, all because we were born in the wrong country at the wrong time in history, and to be able to do nothing about it.”

The waitress appears to take our order.

“Reina,” he says when she’s gone, impatiently, as if my own name irritates him. “You think I don’t want to kiss you? I’m there in your house, sleeping on your sofa, and you think it doesn’t occur to me to get in your bed with you?”

I feel heat rising to my face. So this is blushing. Something I don’t ever remember happening to me. I turn to the dock lining the water, the pelicans settling onto its posts.

“Mírame a los ojos, Reina. Why do you always look away when I have something important to tell you?”

I turn to face him.

“I do want to do all that and more with you,” he says sternly. “But it wouldn’t be right. You’ve got your own life and your own problems. You don’t need to endure mine too.”

I don’t say anything and he goes quiet too.

No more arguing against this idea of him and me. I don’t know if he expected a debate or some pained expression from me. Either way, I don’t give it.

Night’s fallen completely and the bridge is just a silver beam shooting over the ocean, dotted with car lights heading to and from Key West. I can barely see the contours of his face but the waitress sets a hurricane lantern at the center of the table and then he’s back, fuzzy in the golden light.

I think we’re at the point in the confession where we should begin to feel absolved, expectations relinquished, but none of the heaviness has lifted from his side of the table and instead Nesto exhales so long and airy I feel his breath brush my lips.

“Reina, you know me, and pretty well in the short time we’ve spent together. But when you’re with me, you’re not with only me. There are other people I carry with me everywhere I go. People you can’t see. People I left behind. You don’t know what that’s like.”

“I do know,” I whisper.

I want to tell him I am the same, with my own army on my shoulders, guarded against my chest, those I can’t shake even when I try.

“I won’t be whole until I’m with them again,” he says. “It’s all I think about.”

Something in me tightens. A sudden awareness. I feel it deep within, the same way I felt it when I entered the courtroom the day of my brother’s sentencing; despite our hopes and endless prayers that the judge would override the jury’s recommendation for capital punishment, before he even began his remarks, before he slipped on his bifocals, cleared his throat, and turned from Isabela to Carlito and said, “Mr. Castillo, you have committed one of the most monstrous acts that I have come across in my very long career,” I knew that my brother would be sentenced to death.

Maybe this is not a premonition but just an impulse for cruelty or even jealousy, my wanting to grab Nesto by the shoulders and tell him not to count on it, there is no such thing as redemption, and the day of the great reunion of his dreams may never come for him, just as mine never came for me.

The ride back up to Crescent Key is just as silent, except for Nesto humming along to “Corazón partío,” which he plays on repeat. When he pulls into the Hammerhead driveway, I hop out of the car, but his reflexes are quick and he catches me by the wrist.

“Wait, Reina.”

“I think we said everything already.”

“Not everything.”

“¿Entonces?”

“I mean it when I say I have nothing to give you. Not for a while.”

“I never asked you for anything.”

“So what are you doing with me?”

I shrug.

“Just passing time, like you told your mother the other day on the phone?”

“I just want to be here, with you, now.”

“Just tonight?”

“I don’t know. Tonight is tonight. Tomorrow is tomorrow.”

I turn and we watch each other through the shadows, but it’s too much for me, and I leave him there to make my way toward the cottage.

I stop behind the trees to watch him drive off, but he doesn’t. Not right away.

He stays parked in the driveway for a while as if waiting for something, maybe for me, to come back to him, but I don’t. Not tonight.

I find my way through the dark path I’ve memorized until I’m at my door.

Home.

There are footsteps. Soft taps at the door.

There is Nesto. A determined look in his eyes that throws me a little, but he’s already stepping through my doorway and I can’t describe the play-by-play, I just know that all at once, his lips are on me, his arms are around me, heavy and crushing, and we fall onto my bed so hard it shifts from its place along the wall. I feel his heaviness, the sharpness of his muscles and bones against mine.

Normally, I disappear into my body, into another plane of blindness where I see nothing, not even the face hovering over mine. In the tension, the rising pleasure, I feel disintegration, crumbling, and release, and I float in the nothingness, the physical exchange, the affirmations that it feels good, that he wants me. I remember nothing afterward. No longing, not even residue desire; like the moisture on my skin, once washed off, it’s gone.

Nesto finds the deepest places in me, his lips never leaving me, his lashes soft against my cheek, his breath warming me. I want to say Nesto is the first man I was ever with. He’s not. Not even close. So then I want to say he is the last. And by being the last he is the first.

Since the first night, there have been many more like it. And mornings. And afternoons. In my bed, on the sofa until we drop onto the floor of my cottage, against the hard corners of the shower stall, out on my beach under the discreet cover of night, shells and twigs burrowed into our backs. At his place, testing the wobbly futon frame, in that run-down chair, on the cold metal of the back of his truck parked out on a desolate road at the end of Indigo Key. And on Lolo’s boat, on days when there is no dive group for him to take out to the wrecks and reef, when he lends it to Nesto, so that he can break me of my seasickness forever.

He wants me to feel as at home on and in the water as he does, he says, and once we are docked, far enough that no other human can lay eyes on us, he drops anchor and tosses out a float and a line. He kisses me while the water holds me up to him. My senses are amplified. When I open my eyes, instead of wondering what we’re doing out in the middle of the ocean, I feel I don’t need land or even air anymore, as long as I am with him.

“Why did we wait so long for this?” he says.

And then, “I don’t understand how you ended up so alone in this world, Reina. I don’t understand how anybody ever let you go.”

Our only promise is to not make any, never to speak of tomorrow, only this day and this night.

Now, when my sleep breaks, instead of falling into memory, I’m pulled only as far as the body sleeping beside me. He stirs, eyes closed, to reach for me, to wrap himself around me, pulls me into him. He always wakes before morning comes, so we can enjoy the last bits of each other before the day pushes us apart.

My mother taught me to read hands at the same time she taught me to apply polish. Not by reading the lines of a palm, but the way she’d learned from her mother and her mother before her, by touch, decoding the curves of the hand without looking. Carlito never knew about our ability. Our mother never shared those things with him. She said there were some things that were meant to stay between mothers and daughters. It was by holding my brother’s hands, once when I went to see him at the jail during the first days after his arrest, running my fingers over the rough swells at the base of his fingers, that I knew that even though Carlito was still screaming injustice, he was guilty and would never again walk free. I lived my life differently, always wearing the costume of hope, but that’s just an example of how easy it is to ignore intuition and betray oneself.

I asked my mother once if she ever read our father’s hands. She thought about it before admitting she didn’t remember ever feeling his hand in hers. He was always grabbing her, touching her, but always on her body, or pulling her by the arm down the street, as if this might be the moment she’d flee. There was never intimacy, the sort you assume exists between married people. The more she considered it, the more she was sure she’d never touched his hands. Not until he was dead and she saw him in the morgue when the prison turned him over. She’d gone with Tío Jaime and Mayra. She didn’t want to, but they’d forced her to go to bid him a proper adios since she was the wife and there were vows between them. Tío Jaime and Mayra thought that was the moment Mami should have told Carlito and me the truth about our papi, and given us a chance to see him off ourselves, but Mami refused, and held on to the secret for a few more years.

After Hector, though, Mami started reading the hands of every guy she dated. And when Jerry came onto the scene, she fingered his palm across a restaurant table on their first date and knew right away that he had enough money for two, plus square fingertips, which any clairvoyant worth a dime knows are given to those who are born to count cash. She didn’t care about love or romance. She only wanted a guy who could make her life a little easier.

She never read my hands and I wasn’t allowed to read hers. She warned me that to do so was courting bad luck, like burning the wings of a butterfly. But I didn’t listen, always trying to read my own palms, but then my intuition grew cloudy, and I could only sense that the solitude I lived with, even before my brother left us, the loneliness I felt even when surrounded by my own family, would never leave me.

Then I went to the blue-haired bruja because I figured she was a professional and people came from other states to see her and she even had her own international hotline. And she, with her tarot cards, candles, and long fingernails painted with chipped purple polish, pushed hard into the lines of my hand and told me my mother was cursed because of her sins and I, as the daughter, would pay her debts; that the devil had followed my family all the way from Cartagena to Miami, and then, what I had suspected for a long time:

“Love is not meant for you. You will always be alone.”

“You need a manicure,” was all I replied.

I thought the reading was finished so I pulled my hand back to reach for my wallet to pay her, but she held my wrist firm in her swollen, arthritic fingers and told me to wait, there was more.

“Your mother didn’t want you,” she said.

“Neither did yours.”

She let go of my hand and told me I owed her two hundred dollars.

I dropped the cash onto her table and left.

I try to resist reading Nesto’s hands. But in the early morning, when the cottage is washed with white light, when his arms are draped over me and he is snoring into my shoulder, I can’t help closing my eyes and letting my fingers touch their way to the truth on his skin.

A faraway sensation comes over me. I don’t know what to make of it at first, but then I understand that despite his closeness, his chest so tight against my back that we are sharing sweat, his mouth resting on my neck just like last night and dozens of nights before, there is still a nameless void between us that will never dissipate.

That’s what I get, I decide, for trying to peek at the future when it seems the present is just starting to be kind to me.

So I stop myself and focus again, not on my touching and reading him, but on his touching and reading me.

When we were kids, Carlito and I ate the crummy lunch provided by the school’s public assistance program. We faced our butter and baloney sandwiches and waxy apples while other kids ate lunches their parents packed for them, full of treats and last night’s dinner. Carlito would identify these kids and take their food from them, giving me half of everything, until the lunch lady caught him and turned him in to the principal.

“I don’t care how much you hate the food they give you, stealing is wrong,” Mami told him after she got the call from the school.

“How am I supposed to get what I want if I don’t take it?” Carlito asked.

Mami never answered him.

When Carlito was an altar server at the church, he started a little side business taking the flowers people left at the feet of different statues of saints, selling them outside the supermarket or at gas stations, or just to other boys from school to give to the girls they liked. One of the priests confronted him but Carlito argued he was doing no harm, and those flowers got thrown out at the end of every week anyway. The priest never told our mother, but Carlito decided to move on to cemeteries, picking bouquets off tombstones and out of the vases on the walls of mausoleums.

Instead of selling the roses and carnations himself, he put me to work. I’d stand by gas pumps, tell people I was selling the flowers to raise money for our school so we could buy new books and pens and art supplies, while Carlito watched and waited nearby. He gave me a dollar for every five that I made. He’d be ceremonious about it when he later counted the bills on his bedroom floor, making me hold out my palms until he placed the bills on them.

“Bien hecho, hermanita.”

Or on days I didn’t sell so much, he’d shake his head disapprovingly.

“You can do better, Reina. Make your big brother proud.”

He always gave me a bonus of a few dollars to make sure I kept my mouth shut about the whole operation and didn’t start feeling guilty, confessing to Mami what we were doing. Carlito taught me there was a price to be paid for my silence and complicity, and I was honored to be his secret keeper.

For all the new people who turn up each day in the Keys, looking for a new life, there are even more people leaving. But that doesn’t make it any easier to find work. I try every salon on Crescent and all the neighboring Keys, but I’m told there is no room for new hires. I apply for a few waitressing jobs, but they say I have no restaurant experience. I try stores up and down the islands, even ask Julie if she needs a hand selling painted coconuts and Lolo if he needs help in his shop. But people say with low season coming, they’re better off short-staffed than taking on a new employee. Nesto counts himself among the lucky ones. After he fixed the turtle habitat, Mo, the manager of the dolphinarium, kept calling him for more repair jobs until he finally offered Nesto a permanent position, since something there needs to be fixed every day.

I spent plenty of time going along to work with Nesto before they took him on full-time, passing him his tools, just being an extra set of hands to feel useful in my unemployment. Nesto complains about working under the sun but I like the warmth, the breeze, so different from the stale recycled air and nail polish and acetone fumes I’m used to.

I decide to apply for a job at the dolphinarium too.

“How are you at math?” Mo asks during my interview.

We are alone within the wood-paneled walls of the back office. Between us, a wide desk covered in a mound of loose papers and manila folders that makes him look even smaller as he sits in his swivel chair.

“I’ve never had a problem calculating tabs, counting tips, or paying bills.”

He looks down at my résumé in his hands. I printed it out fresh though it’s already denting in the blow of the air conditioning.

“I see you don’t have a proper high school diploma. You’d need at least that for me to put you on the register in the gift shop.”

“It’s never been an issue before.”

He looks over the list of my past employment again and I notice the cut in his cheek that makes a shadow across half his face.

“How about I put you with the cleaning and feeding crew, and just rotate you around wherever you’re needed? You’ll help prepare the animals’ food barrels, clean the pens. What do you think?”

“I can do that, if that’s all you’ve got.”

He watches me, a bit of pity in his eyes, and I remember something big mouth Lolo told me; even though it’s supposed to be anonymous, everyone in the islands knows Mo is practically president of the AA chapter at the local Protestant church. He’s not married and nobody knows if he’s got a woman; people just know that he lives with a cockatiel named Dorothy. I stare at him. I used to be pretty good at appraising men. By the way he looks back at me, I estimate it’s been more than a few years since he’s slept with someone who didn’t charge him for it.

“I’ll tell you what, Reina. You’ve worked in salons so many years you must be good with people. I can offer you a slot in our Guest Relations department. You’ll do rounds of the park property, making sure visitors are having a good experience; you’ll make sure nobody is breaking any rules like throwing trash in the habitats, touching animals, smoking, or drinking on the premises. You’ll have to always be chipper. Ready to answer any questions guests might have for you. Anything you can’t handle, you send them over to me or a senior staff member. What do you think?”

“Sounds good to me.”

I’m proud of myself for getting hired, even if it’s entry level. Even if the last girl who had the position, who quit to go work at the big aquarium up in Largo, the dolphinarium’s main competition, was ten years younger than me.

On my first official day on the job, I’m wearing my new uniform of blue shorts and a blue polo shirt. Mo stops me out on the patio and tells me that as part of my job, I’m also supposed to let management know if any activists show up.

“Activists?”

“Animal rights people, specifically. They come around from time to time.”

“Why? This place is way nicer than the other dolphin parks around.”

I mean it. There are places where you can find a dolphin in an aboveground backyard swimming pool or in a fountain behind a motel, kids tossing in pennies to make a wish.

“They won’t accept that we take great care of them here. Sometimes they just want to make some noise, give the trainers a hard time, but we’ve had cases of more serious things happening. Even vandalism. We’ve found holes cut into fences and the way we usually find out isn’t because the animals get out, it’s because others get in. Last month we had a lemon shark swimming in one of the pens scaring Wilma and Betty half to death. All because of the damn activists who don’t know nothing about nothing.”

It’s kind of a funny thing for him to say given that Lolo told Nesto and me that before he came down to the Keys to run the dolphinarium, Mo managed a sneaker outlet up in Ocala.

“We are an accredited institution here, not some homegrown fish pen,” Mo continues. “We’ve got all our permits. These aren’t market dolphins. Most are rescues, or retired from other aquariums or circuses, and we take them in. We love these animals like family. If it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“What about back to the ocean?”

I can see from Mo’s expression this is the wrong thing to say.

I try again. “I mean, if they’re retired, why don’t you just release them?”

“They don’t know how to fend for themselves. You put any of these creatures out there in that wild ocean and you’ll see they won’t last a day. They don’t have their instincts anymore. And they sure as hell won’t feel like hunting again when they get their meals here free. If these animals could talk, they’d tell you how happy they are here.”

I don’t say anything.

“I want you to talk to the trainers and techs, Reina. They can explain the research we do here. We’re trying to learn from the animals. See what they have to teach us. We do a lot of good work, especially with our interaction programs. I see miracles happen every day when people with disabilities get in the water with the animals. That’s what the activist folk don’t understand. The dolphins here aren’t just for show.”

He says this just as a show in the front lagoon is getting started, rockabilly music coming on loud over the speakers. Through the window behind Mo, I see a trainer cuing a dolphin into a tail walk to the small crowd’s collective wow.

Mo looks over his shoulder to the show and back to me. “They love to perform. They love to make their trainers happy. And we love to look after them. It’s in the good book, Reina. Genesis 1:26. ‘God gave man dominion over animals.’ We know what’s best for them and the animals are so smart, they know it too.”

“All right. I’ll keep an eye out for trouble.”

When Mo leaves me to start my rounds, I walk along the dock from the lagoon holding the “family pod” at the front of the pen grid to the rows of pens behind it, containing pairs and trios of dolphins usually divided by gender, down to the nursery pen holding the mothers and the babies near the end. I notice one of the larger dolphins tucked into one of the front pens, its eyes following me as I pass through, floating half on its side in a way that makes it look like it’s dying or something, and when I ask Luke, one of the trainers, if the dolphin is okay, he just laughs and says that’s Sunshine’s way of spying on me.

“How do you know that?” I ask.

“We know these guys real well. Each animal has its own dolphinality. Sunshine likes to spy, just like Strawberry, over there, likes to fling wads of seaweed at us to get our attention sometimes. They’re having fun with us.”

“But how do you really know that? It’s not like they can tell you.”

“From our research.”

I watch as he calls a dolphin over to where he stands on a platform at the center of the pen. Luke signals with his hand for the dolphin to open its mouth, and then he shoves a long tube down its throat.

Luke calls over to me on the deck. “I’m doing this ’cause she’s thirsty. They need water just like we do.”

Nesto later tells me that wild dolphins get their hydration from catching live fish, and the frozen food diet captive dolphins get can leave them dehydrated, so the trainers supplement it by shoving a lubricated hose down the dolphins’ throats, dumping ice into their mouths, or feeding them gelatin cubes. He learned that during his days working at the Acuario Nacional in Havana. He said that back there some of the dolphins, the ones they didn’t snatch out of local waters, were from the Black Sea, imported like so much else by los bolos, the Soviets. Just another island absurdity, he told me, Russian dolphins in the Caribbean, and it was only fitting that the aquarium was right across the road from the Soviet embassy plunging like a sword through the heart of Miramar.

When the Russians left, they didn’t take the dolphins with them. But they’d die, of course, because around there, Nesto says, there’s no Reina walking around making sure people don’t throw garbage into the tanks, and sooner or later necropsies revealed plastic bottles in their bellies or too many mackerel jawbones. Some of those animals, people would say, were former military dolphins, trained to drop grenades on submarines and inject enemy divers with poison.

During my first days at the dolphinarium I hear from a guy called Sonny on the maintenance crew that this country once had a similar project going on, and those secret navy dolphins eventually made their way onto the aquarium circuit too.

“Might even be some here,” he says with a raised brow.

I mention it to a couple of trainers who laugh, dismissing it as an urban myth, adding that Sonny’s a full-blooded Seminole, raised not to trust the government, so I shouldn’t listen to any of his theories.

He’s in charge of emptying all the garbage cans and pulling seaweed and fish out of the pens. He points to the little bio the facility has posted by each pen with a picture of each animal and a cute little story about its origins, like that it’s retired from aquariums, or rescued from a mass beaching in South Carolina, and found paradise in these here pens. Lies, he says.

I think it’s strange that Sonny has to spend half the day catching fish that swim through the fence holes from the ocean when dolphins are supposed to eat fish, but he explains they don’t want to tempt them with being able to hunt for their own catch.

When I later ask Mo about it, he tells me to leave matters to the people who really know about this stuff; the vet techs with their diplomas, the trainers with their slick wetsuits and chirpy voices reciting a litany of facts about the species to visitors while the dolphins wait at their feet for a mouthful of dead fish.

“And you, you’re just a newbie, sweetheart.” He takes a piece of my cheek between two knuckles. “You don’t know a dolphin from a dog off the street.”

When my brother was old enough to get real jobs, first as a restaurant dishwasher, then as a stock boy at a grocery store till he got fired for swiping steaks, and then at the car wash where he stayed until he finished high school, he would still hit shops in his free time to see what he could take without paying.

Sometimes he’d aim low, going for drugstore cosmetics, perfumes, sunglasses off the rack, batteries, and condoms, always bringing something extra home for me, like lipsticks or nail polish. Or he’d go into a bookstore with an empty backpack and leave with it full of new novels. Sometimes he would be more ambitious and try his luck in a department store, walking out with shirts and jackets right on his back. He never got caught and often tried to convince me to join him.

He said I had the right kind of face for theft, inconspicuous and forgettable.

“Nobody expects anything from you, Reina. Nobody notices you when you walk into a room. You’re like the air people don’t realize they’re breathing.”

I didn’t like the idea of stealing even if our mother never asked where all the new things that turned up in our house came from, probably because my brother also kept her supplied with gifts.

One day I told Mami what Carlito had said about me, and how it bothered me that I was a girl he was certain nobody gave a second thought to, as inconsequential as a flea.

“Don’t worry, mi’jita,” she told me, caressing my face with her slim hand. “It’s to a woman’s advantage to pass through life desapercibida. Better to be underestimated.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s only in pretending to be cross-eyed that a woman is able to see double.”