FIVE

During a visit to see Carlito, I noticed his prison suit looked kind of dirty and realized I never thought to ask before how many changes of clothes he had, or how they got cleaned. He said the prison laundry didn’t use detergent and clothes came out smellier than they went in. So he, like a lot of guys, used shampoo bought from the commissary to wash his own clothes in his cell toilet. Another inmate had explained things like that to him a while after he arrived on his cellblock, how to make life a little easier on the inside.

If he’d been a regular lifer, Carlito would have had a cellmate, but as death row cases, he and the others in his wing were in isolation. Most of the time, the only noises they heard were of the metal doors opening and closing on their corridor, or inmates screaming and banging on their cells’ walls until guards came in, deeming a rebellious inmate violent and buckling him by the arms and legs to the four corners of his concrete bed where he would be left for hours.

But the inmates could also call to each other through the hall between security checks, press their ears against the slots in the steel door through which their meals were served, and when everyone else was quiet enough to let the echoes carry, they could even have what resembled a conversation.

Sometimes Carlito got advice like that he should consider converting to Judaism in prison because the kosher food was better than the standard fare, and sometimes they even let you have a bar mitzvah party with a cake and guests. But Carlito told me even a friendly inmate, a guy you’d swear wouldn’t try to kill you if he had the chance, could turn on you in a second. Sometimes guards showed up in the middle of the night to search his room, cuffing him, pressing him hard against the door while they stripped every photo and magazine cutout he’d taped to the walls, ripping covers off books, checking every thread in that tiny cell even though they did regular room searches three times a week, just because some other inmate claimed he was hiding a weapon; if Carlito got caught with a shank or a blade or any kind of contraband, the snitch could earn favor points for ratting him out, and maybe have one of his own discipline charges or grievances against him dropped.

The only time he got to socialize, Carlito told me, was when he got taken to a civilian hospital for pissing blood after a guard punched him in the stomach a few times, though he couldn’t tell the hospital people the truth or other guards would retaliate later. And another time, when his colon was so backed up from the prison food that he wailed in pain in his cell for three days before they agreed to send him out for tests. You had to be near death to get to go from the prison medical unit to a hospital, Carlito explained, because inmates had this idea that with only two officers to a prisoner on hospital grounds, it would be easier to take them down to escape. Some guy had pulled it off years ago and ran free for a full three months before they caught him up in Jacksonville and brought him back in.

Some inmates just tried to get to the hospital to disrupt the routine of prison life; to see people other than the guards and shrinks and religious they were used to; to have a doctor or nurse look at them with kindness; to be touched for reasons other than being handcuffed or shackled, flesh to flesh; and to be able to look out a real window without seeing prison walls and watchtowers and barbed wire surrounding them.

They would do anything it took to get there. Scraping an arm against a wall until they broke the skin, cultivating an infection until holes burned through their flesh warranting medical intervention. One guy Carlito met in the hospital had even chewed off his own toe.

There in the civilian hospital, on gurneys parked in the blocked-off prison ward, Carlito would hear from other inmates—inmates awaiting treatment for tumors growing out of their bodies like new limbs, late-diagnosed cancers, necrotic wounds from neglected diabetes, pneumonia, or even organ failure from hunger striking—about death warrants already signed by the governor up in Tallahassee and those prisoners recently executed up in Raiford.

When a nurse came by to puncture the fold of Carlito’s elbow with a needle so he could receive intravenous fluids, he’d panicked, fearing they were going to shortcut his execution and do it right there, and instead of giving him electrolytes and nutrients like they were supposed to, they’d flush his veins with chemicals and cook him from the inside out.

He began to hyperventilate and they’d had to sedate him.

When he woke up, Carlito told me, he was in a room alone. Then he saw the two corrections officers at the foot of his bed.

“Am I dead?” Carlito had asked them.

One officer looked to the other and laughed.

“When it’s your time, Castillo, it won’t be as pretty as this.”

Carlito fell silent and stared at me across the table. He looked down at my hands cupped around his.

“When you get out of here you can tell everyone about this place,” I said. “They should know what life is like in here.”

“If I ever get out, I’ll never talk about this place again.”

“What are you going to do when you get out then?”

I was still playing at a more hopeful game, and so was Carlito. We’d had no luck getting his death penalty overturned as “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore unconstitutional. But we were working on getting another appeal on the grounds that the jury was prejudiced by the media and the trial should have been moved to another county. The new lawyer who filed the motion told us, you never know, maybe his sentence could be commuted to life so Carlito could get paroled after twenty-five or thirty years. He’d be in his fifties and still have a chance to build a real future on the outside.

He’d be a free man again even if he might not be free in this country. By committing his crime, Carlito risked being denaturalized and potentially deported, forced onto a flight back to Colombia, which wasn’t so bad since Carlito’s plan had always been to go back to Cartagena anyway—make enough money in Miami to buy a condo facing the beaches of Bocagrande, eat in restaurants where the ricos ate—and Mami and I could join him, he said, and he’d make sure we lived like queens.

Sometimes we’d fantasize together about what he’d do when he got out of prison because it was better than talking about what he’d request for his last meal or what he’d say in his final statement before being locked into the death chamber.

“If I ever get out,” he’d say, “the first thing I’ll do is go home, chop down that fucking tree in the front yard, and set the house on fire. Then I’ll go to a restaurant and order myself a cold beer and a big, bloody steak.”

Other times I’d ask the same question and he’d just shrug.

“Maybe it’s better if they keep me here. I have no money, and they don’t give you a pension for completing your prison time. There’s nothing for me on the outside anymore. I’ll have nowhere to live. They’ll stick me in a halfway house with a bunch of lunatics.”

“You’ll live with me.”

“Nobody will give me a job. People treat parolees worse than shit under their shoes. How is a man expected to turn his life around under those conditions?”

“I’ll help you, Carlito. And you’re so smart, anyone with a brain would know they should hire you.”

“To do what? Clean toilets? Or to pick avocados twelve hours a day at some farm in Homestead?”

“Whatever it is, it’s just a beginning.”

I reminded him of all the people we’d see around, so often it was like we didn’t see them at all: ladies selling fruit at intersections, guys who came knocking at the door offering to pull weeds for a few bucks.

“There’s no shame in any work,” I told Carlito. “Those people don’t have education to fall back on like you do, and they probably get even dirtier looks than murderers when they go out looking for work.”

“I’m not a murderer, Reina,” was all he’d answer, and I’d feel like a failure because, as usual, I’d managed to hurt him.

“I’ll take care of you,” I tried again. “Just like you always took care of me. I promise.”

But Carlito didn’t want to listen to me anymore. His eyes were already darting around the room, the way they often did when we were near the end of our visiting time.

Dr. Joe once told me that one of the effects he’d observed in his subjects in solitary confinement was concentration problems, due, he suspected, to the lack of stimulation.

Carlito would start looking past me, as if cracks in the prison walls held some code, and I knew I’d lost him for the day.

We’d sit together in silence for the remainder of our hour together until the guard led him away.

Mo informs me the consensus among the vets and techs is that the new dolphin, who they’re now calling Zoe, has psychological problems. They say she might even have brain damage or trauma that’s left her unable to tend to basic needs like feeding herself.

“Maybe she’s just depressed,” I say.

“Depressed? This place is paradise for dolphins.”

We’re looking over the dock as Rachel stands in the pen, which is shallower than the others, no deeper than a swimming pool, and tries feeding the dolphin some fish, but she won’t take it. I know they’ve had to supplement with force-feedings through a tube. The dolphin still refuses to leave the fence. She’s worn the front of her head with the lines of the metal chain links, and turns away from Rachel whenever she approaches. Instead of just roping the area apart from the other pens, Mo had Nesto erect a huge curtain rod to wall it completely out of sight of the park visitors.

I’m technically off today but came in to work because I wanted to see how the new girl is doing. Weeks have passed since her arrival and everyone is getting impatient. Rachel is still trying all sorts of things to catch the dolphin’s interest. Inflatable toys, hoops, mirrors—the 99-cent store stuff the staff members call enrichment tools. They’ve even brought in Coco, a gentle, older female from one of the adjacent pens, but the new girl isn’t interested so they’ve separated them. They need the new dolphin to bond with Rachel, I am told. They need her to understand that Rachel is her source of food.

When Mo gets called on his walkie-talkie to another part of the park, I slip off my sandals, put them on the deck next to me, and drop my feet into the water. I see right away that the dolphin notices. Maybe it’s the sound of my toes breaking the surface that alerts her. She lifts her head up. But then she moves away from the fence and comes a little closer to me and Rachel starts encouraging her, trying to lead her in the direction of her own open arms but instead, the dolphin makes its way over to me.

“Can I get in the water with her?”

Rachel looks surprised that I’d even ask, but with the dolphin at my feet now she relents. “Okay. Go suit up. And tie back your hair.”

I always keep a swimsuit in my bag now, for days when Nesto and I steal away from work at lunchtime or after we finish the day and go for a swim at Hemlock Beach before sunset. I go into the locker room to change and take one of the spare wetsuits they keep on hangers in the corner, and walk back to the pen as fast as I can, hoping Mo or any of the vets won’t stop me to ask questions.

The dolphin is back by the fence when I get there, and when I lower myself off the deck into the water at the shallow end, feeling the mushy sand under my feet, she turns again and comes directly toward me.

“You’re not pregnant, are you?” Rachel asks.

“No. Why?”

“Sometimes they’re attracted to pregnant women. They can sense it with their echolocation.”

Now the dolphin is in front of me, dipping her head into my side. I let my fingers run against her dorsal fin, along her rubbery back.

“Just relax,” Rachel tells me, though she doesn’t need to. I feel the power in the dolphin’s body, the way the water parts at her slightest movement and rushes against me, but I stand there, letting her swim circles around me, weaving through the water, kicking up her fluke, and back to my side again.

Rachel steps back toward the deck and returns to the spot I’ve claimed with the dolphin at the center of the pen, handing me a bucket of fish, telling me to try feeding her. I take one fish at a time out of the bucket, offering them to the dolphin, and she pulls the fish out of my fingers with her teeth until I go through all of them and leave the bucket empty. I expect Rachel to be happy with this, but she watches me with her hands on her hips, her lips tightly screwed. She says she next wants to see if with my help we can get the dolphin interested in some of the toys, and we take turns tossing an inflatable ball to each other. But the dolphin goes underwater, shooting to the deeper corners of the pen, only to reappear in front of me, tossing her head up, making clicking noises.

“She’s showing off for you,” Rachel says, sounding even more annoyed.

By now, a few others from the staff have gathered on the deck, including Nesto.

Mo comes to the front of the group on the deck, eying me with disapproval.

“I think you should get out of the water now, Reina. Leave Rachel to get back to her work with Zoe.”

“I got her to eat a whole bucket of fish,” I call back to him.

“You’re not trained to be in the water with the animals. Do me a favor and get out of there now.”

I make my way toward the ladder in the corner of the pen, but the dolphin follows me, and when I am all out of the water, standing on the floorboards, she takes a last look at me before turning around and heading back to her spot by the fence. Rachel tries to lure her from the edges of the pen again, but the dolphin won’t move.

Nesto walks with me back to the locker room, giving me the same look he gave me when he found out I’d gone off on the boat with Jojo. I don’t want to hear him tell me I put myself in danger again so I walk quickly, avoiding his eyes.

When we’re far enough from the rest of the crowd, he says under his breath, “You’re going to give them a reason to get rid of you.”

“I was just trying to help her.”

“This is a job, Reina. We come here to work. Nothing more.”

On Saturday and Sunday mornings, I sometimes go out to the beach behind the cottage, remembering that I would be with my brother at the prison for that hour if he were still alive. I sit on the sand facing the ocean, trying to conjure Carlito’s memory, inviting him to sit with me. I hold my palms open before me, close my eyes, and try to remember the weight of his hands on mine, his voice before his crime, before bitterness set in, when he would throw his arms around me for no other reason than to tell me he loved me.

There were guys in his prison who’d killed several people and instead of death sentences, they received multiple stacked life sentences. Carlito told me he wondered what was worse: knowing your life was running on a short fuse and you could be called to your death any day, or having your lifetime and several more spread out before you for another two hundred years, an illusion of immortality even if it’s to be endured within prison walls.

We all have to show up for our death, but maybe it was a gift to know the date of your last day. Unlike those with eternal sentences, my brother was promised an early escape, even if, in the end, he decided to flee in his own way.

Nesto says Carlito was probably a son of Changó, who, in his mortal days, was an impulsive king and, haunted by regret, hanged himself, later ascending as an orisha. His sons on earth are said to be born with inner violence, war upon their heads, like Changó, who always carries a double-edged ax, ready to fight and to die in battle. But they are also protected by Changó’s wife, Oyá, patron of the dead, who Nesto says will help Carlito on his journey through the afterlife.

“Carlito,” I whisper, the sound of my voice buried by the tide.

In my mind, I tell him about the dolphin, how she came to me, chose me over all the others, how I felt her skin and the enormousness of her body pushing the water between us.

I have felt insignificant all my life, but in those moments with the dolphin, I was special.

I remember when we were children and Tío Jaime and Mayra bought a pet store poodle that wouldn’t let anyone touch her except Carlito, not even Mayra who tried to love her into submission. But around Carlito, the dog went limp, curling into his side, licking his hand, begging for his attention. When I put my hand near the dog, she grabbed my fingers between her teeth until Carlito pulled her off me. One day, while Carlito played with the dog in the living room, I wandered to the back patio where Mayra kept her parakeets and budgies in small metal cages arranged on shelves, mostly ignored except for when she took them in to fly around the house until they wore themselves out.

I went to each cage and opened the latch, reaching in as Mayra once taught me to do. The bird stepped onto my finger, and I pulled my hand out and shook it off into the air.

I let all eight birds go.

That night, when she realized what had happened, Mayra called our house to tell Mami. They figured it was me since I was the only one who’d gone out there, but I denied it just like Carlito had always taught me to do.

Mayra told Mami there was something wrong with me. I was worse than your ordinary fresca and way more chinche than my brother ever was. She said I had no conscience.

“Calm down, Mayra,” Mami said. “They’re birds. Where else do they belong but in the sky?”

Mayra and Tío Jaime grew so frustrated by their dog’s behavior, the way she rejected them, that they took her to a vet and had her put down. Carlito was furious. He said they didn’t give the poodle a chance to adapt, that you couldn’t blame her for being upset she got stuck with such shitty humans like Mayra and Jaime. He cried for days and told me he should have done like I did with the birds and smuggled the dog out of there.

Once, on the phone from prison, one of the rare times Carlito spoke of his death sentence, he mentioned the poodle.

“They’re going to do that to me. They’re going to euthanize me like a dog.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I wonder what it will be like,” he continued. “I think about it sometimes. The walk from the cellblock to the death house. I wonder how it will feel when they push the drugs into my veins. You don’t always die right away, you know. They say the whole thing is supposed to take less than ten minutes. But it took one guy an hour to die. His skin started to slide off his body while the poisons fried him. But he wouldn’t die, so they kept having to pump him with more.”

I remember feeling so sickened by his words that I couldn’t speak.

“They give you three injections. One to anesthetize you, one to paralyze you, and one to stop your heart. The anesthetic is supposed to keep you from feeling, but nobody knows if it really works because even if you’re still awake and your body can feel pain like you’re on fire, the paralytic keeps you from screaming and crying, until the last drug finally suffocates you and you go into cardiac arrest.”

“Who told you all this?”

“A new guard in here. A young guy. He stands outside my door and talks for hours. It’s like they shot him up with truth serum or something. You know what else he says? All the people who go into the chamber with you wear masks. Even the doctor whose job it is to stand over you and make sure you have no pulse left. That’s so nobody outside finds out that in here, they’re paid to be serial killers.”

“Carlito,” was all I could manage after several moments.

“I’d rather be shot by a firing squad. I’d rather be gassed or dropped out of an airplane. All those people sitting on the other side of the glass, waiting to watch you die in a chemical experiment, like it’s a fucking magic show. They should save the money and just take me back to the bridge and throw me over. That’s how I was supposed to die anyway.”

The line started to beep the way it does when a prison call is down to its final seconds.

“I have to find a way out of here, Reina. I can’t let them kill me.”

I thought he meant through the appeals process or our petitions for clemency, how plenty of death row folks, especially women, get their sentences lifted and are resentenced to pure life.

But now I know he meant something else.

They don’t let me back in the water with the dolphin. Whenever I go to her pen, to get a look at her progress, just like the other staff members often do, Mo comes by and tells me I’m a distraction and to get back to my work minding the park guests. The dolphin is still despondent, nonreactive, ignoring Rachel and all her attempts to entice her with fish or toys, instead remaining by the fence for hours, sometimes so still she’ll roll onto her side only to set herself upright again, until the sun sets and all of us go home.

They’re consulting with experts at other aquariums to see if they’ve dealt with similarly resistant cases. In the worst-case scenario, she’ll remain alone in a pen indefinitely, subject to more force-feedings, and still the staff maintains this is a better fate than releasing her to the wild. But they’re hopeful she’ll observe how the other dolphins around her have adapted to life in their enclosures, respond to scheduled feedings and human contact, and understand surrender is her means of survival.

It reminds me of Carlito’s prison days when Dr. Joe told me that even though most inmates fantasize about the day they’ll be released, a lot of them don’t actually want to be freed; they’ve been in the system too long and in some cases, through generations, the claw of the law present from the cradle.

“Incarceration is contagious,” Joe said. “It becomes a state of mind, and once it penetrates a prisoner’s psyche, it’s very hard to remove. Inmates will become so emotionally destroyed that they will internalize their surroundings and forget about the world outside, and where they came from. They start to believe prison is their natural habitat.”

“I don’t think prisoners ever forget where they are.”

“You would be surprised, Reina.”

“You try living the rest of your days in a cell. See how natural it feels to you.”

“That’s exactly the point. Isolation is designed to break a person’s consciousness. For some, the only way to endure it is by losing one’s mind.”

I wake earlier and earlier, dreams pulling me out of sleep. I dream of the Santo Toribio church, of the muralla where I used to hide from my mother and grandmother and slip off to with Universo. It is always night in my dreams and I am always alone.

I shake awake to find Nesto beside me. In the morning, I’ve gotten into the habit of telling him my dreams, which he says come through Olokun, orisha of the deepest part of the sea, who brings messages from the ancestors.

Then I think of my mother, who believed it was no good to ponder dreams. “It’s like looking for hairs in your soup,” she’d say. “You’ll never be happy with what you find.”

Cartagena. Always Cartagena.

After his sentencing, Carlito made me promise to go back to Cartagena for him, so I could tell him about the colors, the smells, and the sounds, and he could close his eyes and pretend for a moment he’d been there with me.

“Maybe your dreams are telling you it’s time to go back,” Nesto says.

“I guess it would be nice to see if it’s as I remember.”

“Nothing is ever as one remembers it. That’s the point of memory. So you can keep the pictures of your life you want to keep and forget what you need to forget. The only reason to go back is to see the place as it is now, and to see how you feel in it.”

On our next Sunday phone call, I ask my mother if she’d be interested in going back to Cartagena with me, tell her it’s something Carlito always asked me to do. I hope she thinks there might be something special about taking that kind of journey together, maybe it could give us peace to move forward with, but she says she won’t leave Jerry alone to go on vacation anywhere.

I tell her she can bring him along though the last thing I want is to travel with the guy, but Mami dismisses me and finally admits Jerry refuses to travel to a country he considers “uncivilized.” Maybe in the future we can all go, she offers, after they’re married.

“What about you?” I ask Nesto. “Would you go with me?”

“I would. But I have to go home first.”

He’s still waiting to hear from the agency if a slot has opened up for him to go as a mula. Mo agreed to give him the days off without pay.

Mornings my dreams wake us up, Nesto and I don’t go back to sleep. We lie in the cool predawn darkness, listening to the morning birds make their calls, waiting for sunrise to lift away the night.

On one of those mornings, I tell Nesto to come with me out to the dock. Dawn has broken and I know Jojo will be coming around the bend of the canal any moment on his boat. Nesto kicks his feet around the dock impatiently.

“What are we doing out here, Reina?”

“Just wait another minute with me.”

Sure enough, there’s Jojo, turning out of the canal passage. I wave him down and he comes closer to the dock. I ask if he can take both of us out with him. I want Nesto to see what I’ve seen the few mornings I’ve gone out with Jojo.

Nesto and I sit together on the bench at the back of the boat while Jojo drives out. The morning sky swirls with orange and pink. Jojo calls to us to look to the right and there, just like the first time, a group of dolphins swims against the waves to keep up with the boat. Jojo finally cuts the engine and the water slowly flattens, the dolphins turning over the surface, their backs glowing in the light of dawn.

Nesto stands up to get a better look and I see his tired face brighten. We watch for a while as the dolphins vanish underwater, reemerging on the other side of the boat, and rushing against each other.

The sun is higher now, and we know it’s time to go back so we can make it to work on time.

While Nesto gets his things together to head to work, I lay out the morning grapes for the iguanas, something he always laughs at. There are no iguanas left in Cuba, according to Nesto, because they were all skewered during the Special Period along with the banana rats, squirrels, and just about every other edible species one could catch and slaughter to feed one’s family. Even the zoo population thinned out in those days, pigeons and tortolas picked off park grass, manatees pulled out of canals to feed a whole barrio, and the pasteles sold on street corners were rumored to be packed with vulture and totí meat. But it happened a long time ago. These were things people didn’t talk about over there anymore.

“Then why do you talk about it over here?” I asked.

“Because if I don’t tell you, you will never know. And I think it’s important that you do know. It’s part of who I am. I had to eat things I never thought I’d eat too.”

A pair of red parrots fly over the cottage and land atop a high palm leaning over the roof, birds that might even have come from as far Colombia, before they could be stolen from the rainforest, wrapped in newspapers, stuffed into suitcases, and smuggled out of the country to be sold for thousands in North America: exotic pets turned escapees.

When Nesto finally comes out of the cottage, keys in hand, to head for the truck, I reach for his arm to stop him on his way and tell him what I’ve had on my mind for days.

“I think we should let her go.”

“Let who go?”

“The new dolphin.”

He looks at me sideways, his brow high. “Let her go where?”

“Set her free.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s not trained. She won’t even eat. She hits her head against the fence all day and all night. She knows where she is and what’s outside the pen. She knows the gulf is her home. She wants to get out. We just have to give her the way.”

“She’s their property, Reina.”

“She’s nobody’s property. She belongs in the ocean. You know that.”

He takes a few steps away, turning his face from me to the path that leads to the beach.

“And how are we supposed to get her out of there? Build her a ladder?”

“You put that fence up. You know how to take it down.”

Nesto sighs so long it turns into a whistle.

“I’m not a citizen yet. I can’t commit crimes. If I got arrested, I’d risk everything.”

“Just listen,” I say, walking toward him, reaching for his hand so he’ll come back to my side by the porch railing. “During one of your maintenance checks, all you have to do is unscrew the clasps from the fence to the poles. Then, at night we’ll take Lolo’s boat, drive around to the back of the pen, and we’ll dive under and pull it apart so the fence wall falls down and she can swim out.”

“You know they say they won’t swim through anything. They can’t tell it’s an opening.”

“She will.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know it.”

“What if she doesn’t come out? We’ll be wasting our time.”

“I’ll swim with her. You saw how she was with me in the water. I know she’ll follow me. When she’s out far enough, she’ll know to go the rest of the way alone.”

Nesto shakes his head at me. “I don’t think so.”

“Listen, just like you walked across that border in Mexico, that dolphin is going to swim through that gap in the fence.”

As I say the words, I realize how silly I sound.

“Estás loca, Reina.”

“If we don’t get her out of there, either she’ll starve herself or she’ll be tortured into accepting she has to live in that pen forever. That’s no kind of life either.”

“The other dolphins seem to be doing okay there.”

“They’ve already been made into zombies.”

“They don’t try to escape.”

“Some people are better at being prisoners than others.”

“They’re not people, Reina.”

I turn from him. The biggest of the iguanas, with a high ridge extending from its head to its tail, swallows grapes a few feet away.

“Reina. Did you hear what I said? They’re not people.”

“Imagine they build a fence around this property we’re sitting on and tell us we can never leave it. Never, for as long as we live, only eating the shitty little food they let us eat after we perform whatever stupid chores they want us to perform. This tiny patch of land has to be the only world we’ll know forever. How would you feel?”

“I already know a place like that.”

“Then you know why we need to do this.”

“Look, we can talk about this later. We’re going to be late for work.”

When we’re in the truck, before he turns the key in the ignition, I say, “If you don’t help me, I’m going to cut a hole in that fence myself. It will be much harder to do alone. But I’ll do it.”

He covers his face with his hands, fingers long and cracked with calluses. His body looks especially tired to me that morning.

I start to feel bad for what I am asking but don’t stop myself.

“I’ve thought about this for a long time. I’m not going to change my mind.”

“Reina, por Dios santo. Can you just let this go?”

“I can’t. She’s not like the rest of them. She knows where she belongs.”

Later, at work, I see Nesto by the new pen. I’m talking to some visitors by Belle and Bonnet’s enclosure when he passes me, and ducks behind the curtain dividing the new dolphin from the dock. When I finish with the visitors, I go to the other side of the curtain and see him, his eyes fixed on the dolphin, her head still pressed to the fence, while Rachel and some techs sit on the dock nearby with clipboards, discussing new strategies to get her to integrate.

At night, back at the cottage, Nesto throws himself onto the bed without any dinner. He pulls off his beaded collares and places them on his handkerchief on the bedside table. I climb onto the bed and kneel at his side. He runs his hands on the fabric of my jeans, over my thighs down to my knees, and reaches for my hand.

“If we get caught, I’ll take the blame for everything,” I tell him. “I’ll say you were just driving the boat and had no idea what I was planning. But we won’t get caught. They don’t have any security cameras out there. They can’t afford it. And we can make it look like an accident, like the fence just came apart.”

“I did not come to this country to free a dolphin, Reina.”

“Neither did I.”

“What about the dolphins in the other pens? And what about all those other parks in these islands? There are dolphins just as miserable as that one everywhere. Letting one go isn’t going to make a difference.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t leave her there. I have to try.”

“It’s like trying to block the sun with a finger.”

“Two fingers,” I say. “There are two of us.”

He closes his eyes and shakes his head. When he opens them, he touches my hair, lightly, as if it’s made of light rather than my messy strands.

“I’ll help you. But only because you have a debt to pay to Yemayá for your family. You’re going to settle it by returning that dolphin to her waters.”

“I don’t know about debts, but I know it’s still the right thing to do.”

“We should wait until it rains. Just before or after a storm. Or even better, during one. So the guard on duty won’t hear the boat coming.”

“So we’ll do it?” I just want to be sure of what he’s saying.

“We’ll try, Reina. That’s all I can promise you. We’ll try.”

I put my arms around him and whisper my thanks into his ear, though it doesn’t seem like enough, not because of what he’s agreed to do, but for what it will mean to me if we are able to pull it off.

“You’re not scared?” he asks me.

I shake my head and smile though I feel heaviness in my chest, knowing the real reason I have any courage at all is that I have so little to lose.

The spring sun flames out later and later, but even on cloudy days when underwater visibility is poor, we go in for a swim. Once out in the blue, Nesto says, there is no way you can refuse it.

It’s there, while Nesto makes his own offerings to the ocean—watermelon, fruta bomba, or just a banana peel he casts off into the current with a question for Yemayá and Olokun, waiting to see if it floats or sinks—that I make my own petitions to the water, asking for help to guide me through the darkness, find my way through the night tide past the metal fence, so I can clear the way for the dolphin, lead her through the path to her freedom. Most of all, I ask the ocean to keep us all, Nesto, the dolphin, and me, unafraid.

A week or so later, two guys from Switzerland turn up at the dolphinarium and when I stop to ask if they’re enjoying the place like I’m directed to do, they start asking, not about the animals or the facility, but about my life, how I got lucky enough to end up working here, and where I’m from since I don’t look like any of the other girls around Crescent Key.

They ask what there is to do at night around here and if I’d like to go out with them.

“You look like you know how to have a good time,” one guy says. When I decline, they become even flirtier, playing the clown for me.

Mo stops me on the walkway as soon as I part from them.

“What was that all about? Looked like they were trying to pick you up.”

“They were just asking about the place.”

“Asking what?”

I realize I have an opportunity.

“About the new dolphin mostly. I guess word’s out she’s not doing so good here.”

Mo’s empty hairline shoots up and he looks back at the Swiss guys who’ve moved onto Dottie and Diana’s pen. Mo studies them, and I know I’ve planted a seed of suspicion that will serve me later.

It’s maintenance day. I walk over to the new dolphin’s pen and see that Nesto is already underwater, checking the bearings on the fence like he does on all the pens, and he’s doing what we agreed he’d do—instead of tightening the bolts holding the clamps to the corners and support posts, he’s actually loosening them. He works around the dolphin, still at her place along the fence. Rachel is out in the front lagoon working one of the shows. I notice Mo has followed me.

“What do you supposed she finds so fascinating about that fence?” Mo says, though I’m not sure if he’s posing the question to me or to himself.

“What’s on the other side. The sea.”

He pulls his hand out of his pocket and cups my shoulder, his palm warm through the cotton of my shirt.

“Let me explain something to you, Reina.” He points across the fence. “That out there is the gulf. Behind us is the ocean. And way down there, south of the Florida Straits, is the sea. We use the correct terminology around here. You got that, doll?”

“Got it.”

I don’t tell him there are no fences out there marking where the oceans end and the seas begin. It’s the same water flowing free. I read in one of the cottage magazines that a single wave can travel around the whole world before it hits shore. There are no borders, no security checkpoints to inhibit a wave’s journey. The world’s oceans are one body of life. Only land separates water, but land, too, is rooted in the ocean.

I don’t tell him that a few nights ago, as we sat together watching a storm from the cottage veranda, lightning filling the sky like arteries over distant columns of rain, Nesto told me Yemayá’s realm in the ocean is the greatest energy conductor, able to absorb the temperature of Changó’s lightning strikes, each one hotter than the sun.

“It’s power beyond our understanding,” Nesto said.

Then he added that the only things we can count as truth are two prophecies of the diloggún that rest against each other:

No one knows what lies at the bottom of the ocean.

And the next prophecy:

Blood that flows through the veins.

It’s a simple plan. Nesto is slotted by the agency for a flight to Havana next weekend. We have to do it quickly or risk having to wait until he returns.

We know we are breaking laws starting with trespassing and vandalism.

We have a cloudy moonless night and a cold rainstorm on our side, though without wind, thunderclaps, or lightning.

This, Nesto reassures me, means that Olódumare, the Creator, owner of the world’s secrets, who pours rain, is offering us cover.

We’ve had Lolo’s boat for a few days after taking it out for some dives. During this time, Nesto and I practiced, running it slowly down the canal along Hammerhead, each of us suited up and jumping off, to time how long we thought it would take to undo all the clamps on two poles, for both of us to pull the sheet of fence fabric down into the sand and clear the way for the dolphin to come out. It was faster than having to cut a hole with pliers, a bolt cutter, and a saw. We’ll have our wetsuits, fins, masks, and gloves, because Nesto knows the fence is already scabbed with sharp barnacles. We won’t take oxygen though, because we know the noise and bubbles would probably make the dolphin even more apprehensive.

The night we go out, we do ventilation patterns to open our lungs, to oxygenate, and to relax our bodies. I’ve looked forward to this night, imagining the dolphin swimming out of the pen and away from us. But the journey from our dock, around the island, under the bridge to the gulf side of the Keys, feels especially long. Nesto promises that with our lights off and rain muffling the sound of the boat’s engine, we won’t be noticed by anyone onshore.

We’ve rehearsed aloud many times. Nesto made drawings of what the fence looks like underwater so I could memorize it because we can’t use a big flashlight and risk attracting attention. We know there is only one security guard on duty at the dolphinarium at night. We’re banking on him tiring of his rounds by three in the morning, taking shelter from the rain under one of the canopies at the front of the facility.

As we get closer to the pen, Nesto and I try not to speak to each other. In the darkness, we rely on the silhouettes of hand gestures, touching each other, or whispering deep into each other’s ears if we have to be heard. He stops the boat about twenty meters from the pen and I lower myself into the water, cold seeping through my wetsuit. I slip my mask over my face, and as I fear, I see only blackness. We’ll have to use the tiny flashlights we’ve brought with us that only illuminate the span of a hand. I swim ahead, feeling for the fence, setting my intentions in my mind the way Nesto taught me to do whenever we approach the ocean for a dive. And because Jojo told me he learned dolphins can sense our motives, we have to make it clear to them, articulate it to ourselves so they can read it in our being, that we mean no harm.

It’s a matter of minutes, my breath shortening the more I try to push it longer, and I struggle to keep myself from gasping loudly every time I come up for air. I work on one pole, the tiny lights guiding us through the unscrewing of bolts and clamps, cutting the fence ties with the wire cutter while Nesto works on the other, but he finishes before me and slides over to finish my part of the job. The fence begins to wobble and falls over us. Nesto warned me we’d have to back up quickly to pull it down from the top or it could pin us under.

We’ve prepared for this in his drawings and I do as I was instructed until the fence hits the sand at our feet. I swim over to the dolphin, still in the same spot she claimed when the fence was up. I go to her, hoping she’ll smell me or see me or sense me with her sonar the way she did that first day I went into the water with her. I fear she won’t recognize me in this darkness like she did before, or she won’t follow me. But then she starts moving and I do, too, while Nesto clears out of the way and heads back to the boat.

I swim away from the fence slowly, looking back to make sure she’s behind me. In the night I can only see the occasional gloss of her dorsal, feel the water moving around me. But then I feel the pressure of her slipstream and know she’s beside me and I swim a little faster, careful not to kick up water with my fins. We push farther out, past the boat, toward the small mangrove islands dotting the bay until it unfolds into the gulf. She doesn’t touch me, but I feel her through the water, her weight moving against the current, and then, when we are so far out that my body starts to feel much heavier, my breath even shorter, I have to let her go.

I turn, make my way back to the boat, trusting she won’t come back with me, refusing to look behind me so she won’t think to follow. I feel something near my legs and hope it isn’t the dolphin. When I come to the back of the boat, I give Nesto my fins and he reaches out his arms to lift me in.

We don’t speak. We don’t say a word. He starts the boat and we head back for the cottage.

It’s only later when we stand on the bathroom tile and peel out of our wetsuits that we each take in the stunned look on the other’s face.

I am certain we’ve done the right thing, but we can’t know until the morning if we’ve been successful. For now, we have to wait.

I don’t know what to say to him, how to thank him for helping me do what I asked. I reach my arms around him and put my face against his chest. We don’t shower off. Tonight, we go to bed as we are, sticky, salty with the sea.

By the time we get to work the next morning, the dolphinarium is erupting with scandal. Mo’s been calling Nesto for more than an hour already, telling him to hurry up and come in to work though he won’t say why. A local news van is parked out front, along with several police cars. The employees, from the gift shop ladies to the maintenance workers to the trainers and vets, are in disbelief. Nesto and I approach the crowd at the end of the walkway, where the curtain stood, though it’s been removed. Charlie, one of the techs, tells us the fence collapsed and the dolphin escaped out of the pen. Rachel and some of the other staff members are already out on the boats trying to find her, so far with no luck.

Mo, the park owners, and the cops take Nesto aside, since he was the one to erect the fence and was in charge of making sure it was sound. I watch as they question him for their police and incident reports, asking him to explain the exact procedures he used to build and check the fence. Nesto tells them on his last check the fence was in perfect condition, not a screw out of place.

Soon, Mo tells everyone to get back to work. He says he’s sure it wasn’t an accident that the fence collapsed; it’s too unlikely all the hinges would come undone at the same time and it would fall uniformly to the ground. That’s how he knows it was a deliberate breakout and not that the rain or winds pulled the fence open, or that the dolphin pushed the fence down herself.

The only suspicious activity Mo can think of to tell the cops about is the Swiss guys who came the other day, asking questions about the new dolphin.

“Goddamn,” he says. “They probably came here to scout the place.”

In the afternoon, I overhear Rachel telling Mo that maybe they should try taking me out on the boat with them to look for the dolphin. They’re standing in the shade under the observation tower and don’t see me coming down the stairs behind them.

“She’s the only person Zoe let get near her,” Rachel reminds him.

“She doesn’t know the first thing about those animals or how to be in the water with them. We don’t need that kind of liability right now.”

Then their talk turns to Nesto.

“We’ll have to get someone to double-check the Cuban’s fence work from now on,” Mo says. “Got to make sure he’s not the one getting sloppy on us.”

Nesto and I stay late that afternoon. He’s rebuilding the pen we’ve taken apart, working diligently to ease the day’s chaos, and I’m talking to the last guests to leave before closing, Iowans wondering if it’s true what the news said that afternoon, that a dolphin escaped.

I give them what Mo said would be the official story: the fence broke open during the storm and the dolphin probably got disoriented, but will surely return to her home here.

“They always come back,” I say, hoping that I’m lying.

At home, Nesto and I don’t speak of what we’ve done, as if, even by admitting our culpability to each other, we’ll be discovered.

Paranoia sets in. Nesto feels eyes on him everywhere. The police call him in to question him again and he always gives the same answers.

The trainers still go out on the boat, believing their own tale that the dolphin has just lost her way.

The investigation turns up no evidence. The security guard who was on duty that night swears he did his complete rounds, checked the pen several times, and didn’t hear anything unusual out on the water.

Nesto and I float together in a strange state of hyperawareness.

I feel no regret or pride, just relief and a quiet satisfaction, as if Nesto was right after all—I’ve begun to settle my debt, and somehow things are falling into balance.

One morning, I see Jojo’s boat come up the canal and pass me on the dock where I sit with my legs hanging over the edge, dangling above the water. He slows down, waves to me, and cuts the engine as the boat bobs a bit closer to the dock.

“You still working over at the dolphinarium?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard about the animal that got out. They recover her yet?”

“Not yet.”

“What are they saying about it?”

“The whole fence came down. Looks like it toppled over in the rains.”

“We’re talking about a hundred-thousand-dollar animal here. That’s the going rate for wild-caught these days. No question somebody broke her out. Maybe even stole her for another facility.”

“But she was a rescue.”

“It’s animal laundering just the same,” he says, touching his beard, starting the engine up again. “Secondhand dolphins are still worth a pretty penny.”

“Where would somebody hide a dolphin?”

“There are houses on water all over these coasts. Somebody would just need to build a pen. It’s easy. And it’s been done before.”

He stares at me so long I wonder if my face is giving anything away.

“They think it might have been activists,” I tell him.

“Could be. Last summer a couple of them tried to free a dozen manatees that were stranded from the red tide and held in a pen up in Islamorada.”

“Did they get away with it?”

“Only two or three manatees made it out. But someone turned the folks in. They got arrested. I think they got probation and had to pay some fines. No matter. I’m sure if you’d ask them, they’d say it was worth it.”

“I’m sure they would.”

“There’s also the chance the animal died and they’re saying it’s stolen so they don’t have to report the death.”

“Why wouldn’t they want to report it? Aren’t the animals insured?”

“Sure, but they also want to keep down their official animal turnover numbers. Lots of places do that. Nobody likes hearing about dead dolphins, or wants to draw attention to the fact that captives are lucky if they live ten years, and wild ones can easily live up to fifty.”

“How do you get rid of a dead dolphin?”

“How you think? You wrap it in a net, drag it out on a boat, load it with big rocks and sink it far out in the ocean.” He points toward the horizon. “You’d find yourself a dolphin boneyard not too far out there if you only knew where to look.”

The dolphin doesn’t return.

A few nights later, I hold on to Nesto tight, put my mouth to his neck, and whisper as softly as I can into his ear, “Nobody will ever know it was you and me.”

He nods, kissing me. Then he tells me a story, a patakí, of the Ibeyís, los jimaguas, the divine twin children of Changó and Ochún who were raised by Changó’s mother, Yemayá. The twins, a boy and a girl, were playing in the forest when they encountered the devil who set traps for humans and, after catching them, would eat them. The twins were trapped now themselves, and one of them hid while the other stepped forward and made a deal with the devil that if the child could dance longer than the devil, the child would be freed. But the devil didn’t realize there were two children, and the twins played their tambourine and danced and danced with the devil, and when one child became tired, they switched places and danced and danced until the devil grew so exhausted he had to give up. With the devil on the ground gasping, barely able to speak, the Ibeyís made him promise to stop his hunting and trapping of humans and let them roam the earth free as they wished. And so the Ibeyís became known as the protectors of all creatures, forever revered as the two young ones who, with their cleverness, together outsmarted the devil.

Tonight, hours before he’s due to leave for Cuba in the morning, Nesto does an ebbó to Elegguá, asking for assistance with his plan to reunite his family. I watch as he arranges four coconuts on the edge of the mattress, places a card with Elegguá’s image on the table beside the bed, and lowers his head before it, making the sign of the cross. He takes a coconut in hand, rubbing it along his body from head to foot until he’s done so with all four coconuts, asking Elegguá, controller of paths, to change his fortune and bring his family to him. Then he goes outside and I follow, watching from the veranda as he places a coconut on each of the four points of the Hammerhead property surrounding the cottage. He starts in the east, facing the ocean, smashing each coconut with a hammer until it’s a mess of meat and juice, jumping over the broken shells until he finishes the last one, and returns to the cottage, careful not to look back over his shoulder or he’ll break the ebbó. Thunder rolls over just as he passes me on the veranda, and I know Nesto is pleased because thunder is a sign from Elegguá’s friend Changó, galloping through the heavens on his white horse, that his petitions have been heard and will be answered.

We are both at the airport in Miami, after a long bus ride up from the Keys before sunrise, about to board flights to opposite ends of the Caribbean.

My trip was planned on impulse, another piece of restitution, the final trip my brother was never able to take to witness for one last time the first home we both knew.

I am also leaving because I don’t want to be alone in the cottage wondering what’s on the other side of Nesto’s journey.

A representative from the travel agency meets Nesto and the other mulas outside the airport, handing him a duffel filled with parcels to be dropped off with its agent in Havana for delivery.

We stand in the check-in area, halfway through the crowd of passengers waiting to have their luggage weighed at the counter, enormous packages shrouded in plastic, overstuffed suitcases, store-boxed television monitors, and toasters. In front of us, a man pushes along a metal airport cart with a plastic car tire on it, and when Nesto asks what he’s going to do with only one tire, he says he’s already brought the other four over and this one is just the spare.

I stand with him in the convolution of lines. Airport taxes to be paid, forms to fill out, before they give him a boarding pass.

“It’s like this every time,” Nesto says. “It’s harder to get out of this country than it is to get in.”

He once told me about when he arrived at the Matamoros border crossing into the United States. He was told it was a dangerous city, full of trapaleros and paqueteros eager to scam or rob anyone passing through. He called some friends of friends, Cubans who’d settled there and made a living renting rooms to migrants getting ready for the crossing. They warned Nesto it was best to walk over with nothing on him but his Cuban passport because border guards were as bad as bandidos and would confiscate his money, clothes, whatever he had on him. He should leave his things with them, they told him; they’d keep it all safe till he called from the other side with an address, and then would send his stuff over to him. When he made it into Brownsville—no thieves at the gate, no hostile Border Patrol agents—then to Miami, he tried to call the friends in Matamoros to give them his uncle’s address, but the number was wrong and he never heard from them again.

His arrival in Miami was full of similar deceptions. The amigo who helped him open his first bank account, write a check, and use an ATM machine also stole his pass code and robbed him dry. That blue truck he drives now isn’t the first one he bought in the United States. The first, purchased from an acquaintance, died a day after he brought it home. And during his first year here, when he went out looking for work, he was shocked to hear employers tell him without hesitation, without asking as much as his name, “I don’t hire Cubans,” which is why he decided to start working for himself.

I see Nesto is embarrassed when he tells me these stories. I can’t picture him so vulnerable. Until I see him at the airport this morning, his eyes nervous and uncertain as they search mine when we stand by the security checkpoint before we part ways to catch our separate flights at different ends of the airport.

He pulls me into his arms. I close my eyes tight, wishing us back to last night, in the cottage, when we lay close and quiet, neither of us speaking the truth that he will return from this trip married to someone else.

“I hope everything works out the way you want it to,” I tell him.

He closes his eyes and nods.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for in Cartagena.”

There is already an appointment for his marriage at some government office, where the person in charge will ask a bunch of questions, like why, if he and Yanai divorced years ago, they’ve decided to remarry, and they’ll say they fell in love again on one of his visits home, realized they can’t live without one another, and want to make their family whole again. The way he rehearsed it aloud in the cottage, peppering his story with details like that being far away in Los Yunay Estey made him understand he can only ever love her, the mother of his children, even had me convinced. But then Nesto broke character; shook his head; looked down at the floor, moaning as if suddenly ill; then tried the monologue all over again, trying to sound even more authentic.

“I can’t ask you to wait for me.”

“I know.”

He steps out of my embrace. My arms fall off his shoulders before I understand this is the last time I’ll touch him and these will be our last words to each other before we part. He’s turned away from me and become a part of the crowd drifting toward the security X-ray machines. I don’t want him to see me watching him, so I walk away quickly, and if he turns back to look at me one last time, he’ll have found me gone.

The taxi drops me at my hotel, a former hostel upgraded to a boutique hotel on Calle de la Soledad. I wash my face, change out of my jeans and into a light dress that won’t stick to me with humidity, place myself on the street, and try to see if by memory I can lead myself to my grandmother’s home, back to the first bed I slept in as a newborn, cradled by my mother’s arms, while my brother slept beside us.

The streets are even more colorful now than years ago when Carlito and I came with our mother to see Abuela through her final days. A basket of fuchsia, turquoise, and banana yellow, with dark wood balconies dripping with bougainvillea, stone streets pounded by horse-drawn carriages like the one Carlito and I once saw turn over right in the Plaza de los Coches. One second the horse shuffled along mechanically, and the next, it collapsed, flat on its side, the carriage buckled over. Shopkeepers and street vendors rushed over to help the passengers to their feet. The horse was dead. Its ribs and pelvis protruded and tourists asked when was the last time the driver fed the horse, talking about animal abuse and fair labor. Others just blamed the heat.

I was quiet the rest of the day and Carlito laughed at me for being so sentimental, said nobody was going to miss a ratty old horse that was probably diseased anyway. I was surprised he could be so callous. He’d always been nice to animals, not like some of the weirder kids from the neighborhood who used to kill squirrels to give them shoebox funerals in their backyards. Carlito even saved a rodent or two from certain death at those kids’ hands, but that day he was strutting new teenage macho heartlessness.

“How would you like it if somebody said that about you after you’re gone? Ese pendejo comemierda. We’re better off without him.’”

Carlito laughed arrogantly. “Everybody knows I was saved from the water by angels. Nobody would dare say something like that about me.”

When my mother was a girl, the whole neighborhood knew when a norteamericano set foot in El Centro. Now, there are so many tourists beyond the moneyed folks who stay at the fancy hotels, a daily extranjero flood of cruise ship passengers doubling the population between the city walls. Street vendors toss around English and Italian phrases to get their attention, and even the kids rapping verses to tourists sucking on fruity drinks at the café tables in the Plaza Santo Domingo conclude their performances with “Come on, amigo, a dollar for my song.”

I find my way through the pedestrian crowds to Abuela’s building, which I remember as whitewashed, rain-stained gray where its fachada merged with the pavement, now painted the color of guava, fresh tejas on the roof, its balconies newly honey-stained. A sign beside the door that once led to the stairwell spiraling to the apartments above reads, Inquire Within About Sales and Rentals.

Above the street, the window where Abuela used to sit at her sewing machine table is open. I can ask the building’s new management if I can see the home that belonged to my family. See how it’s changed, maybe take some pictures to show my mother. I’ll tell Carlito about it too. I still report to him. I don’t believe in much, but I believe he hears me, still see his face across from me at the prison listening to me as I’d describe the feeling of being drenched by a sudden rainstorm, the warm sizzle of sun on my skin, the sweet and tart smell of the orange and pineapple groves I’d pass on the drive down to see him.

I want to see if I feel the same as I did when I saw the house in Miami ripped out of its soil.

But I hesitate. I’m not ready to step within those walls, identify myself to the new owners, say the words this was once my home.

I used to blame my mother for having taken us away. I imagined that if we’d never left, the darkness wouldn’t have found us, and even if my brother had grown up to be a killer just the same, at the very least, because there is no capital punishment in Colombia, Carlito wouldn’t have been sentenced to death, and probably not even to cadena perpetua, which is not even a life sentence like the name implies, but a maximum of sixty years. But Mami told me I was wrong, even if in Colombia it seemed like a person could get away with more for less. She said there’s another kind of justice down here and sooner or later, the streets would have made him pay for his crime.

I step away from my grandmother’s building down to the tree-lined plaza at the corner, still glistening from fresh afternoon rain. The Parque Fernández de Madrid has been cleaned up, but the same old guys stand in the shade at its fringes selling candies and frituras out of carts, arguing about fútbol teams, a solitary vago fishing for scraps in garbage cans. When my grandmother’s hand joints stiffened and she became too old to care for the beauty of other women’s nails and hair, she sold mamoncillos and ciruelas de campo from baskets to passersby. In this park, I used to spend hours with my brother and the neighborhood children because anywhere was better than the stiff heat of Abuela’s apartment, which always smelled of her tobacco and the incense she used to camouflage it. Here, I met Universo and came with him often when we were older, listening to him talk about his plans for his life, how jealous he was that I was lucky enough to grow up far from Cartagena and how one day, even though his mother forbade it, he’d leave too.

Besides the tourists, the foreign men with preening local girls, the slouching backpackers, are the ordinary faces of tired people whose names I may have once known, who may have known me when I was still considered una hija del barrio even though my parents had taken me to the other side of the ­Caribbean, because back then people still believed, for a long time after you left, that you might still come home.

An old man sits with a paper bag in his hands, tossing crumbs to the crows and pigeons and sparrows at his feet. There’s a commotion among birds between the benches. A furious chirping grows louder near me, a pair of sparrows split from the hungry swarm, pecking each other with their beaks, wrestling against each other, rolling on the ground, their claws joined, until one rises above the other, jabbing at the other bird’s beak and back. I stomp by them so they’ll separate, but they go back at each other with more fury. I shoo them with my hands, but they meet in the air and pull each other down into the dust, and it’s clear these birds are fighting to the death.

“Déjelos, mi niña,” the old man with the crumbs calls to me. “You’ll never stop one animal from trying to kill another. Nature is wiser than we are.”

I leave the birds to their massacre, the old man and the park behind me. I walk until I pass the cafetería on the corner of Calle de la Universidad where Mami would sometimes escape to, usually a few days into our visit every summer, after a standoff with our grandmother. Mami would always threaten to pack up and leave, though she never did. I’d sit with her, chewing on a pan de bono as she sipped aguardiente, saying she never belonged here and it was a mistake to keep coming back.

Though we came to spend time with Abuela, Mami often had dates with men she knew from her girlhood who were already tired of their wives, or she’d go for a drink at a hotel bar and find a tourist or businessman to take her out that night. She never brought men home, but on nights she stayed out, Abuela would sit by the window and watch over the street to see if she was coming. If she stayed out all night, Abuela would lock the door, refusing to let Mami in the next morning, making Carlito and me swear to do the same because Abuela said we had to be unified in our punishment.

Mami would plead to us through the door. Carlito always caved in first, slowly undoing the lock. But her shame was complete and she’d move around our shared space careful as a mouse, going into the bathroom for a long shower until one of the neighbors screamed that the building water tank had run out.

“Don’t ever become like your mother,” Abuela warned me regularly, whether Mami was out of sight or right in front of her.

My mother would look at me with hurt eyes, but would never argue or defend herself.

Years later, when it was me who disappeared with boys, mostly Universo, sometimes not coming home until sunrise while Mami slept because she didn’t get as many dates anymore, Abuela would taunt her daughter, tell Mami it was obvious she was jealous of me because she couldn’t attract quality men, just the barrio bums.

“What would a decent man want with a trash dump like you?” she’d hiss. “Only pigs like garbage.”

Abuela had a way of silencing us. Carlito and I watched as she humiliated our mother, never sticking up for her, never mentioning that it didn’t matter how flawed she was, she was our mamita and we loved her.

Once back at our house in Miami, our mother would make me hand over the dresses Abuela spent all summer sewing for me with the best fabrics she could find at the shops on Badillo, taking scissors to them, ripping the seams, slicing the dresses into long rags she’d put on the end of a wooden pole and use to wash the floors.

If my grandmother could know me as I am now, she’d say I missed my golden window in life. She’d say I threw it all away to look after my brother, the years I should have been busy making my way in the world. She’d say I squandered my feminine currency by hanging around a prison for so long.

She advised me when I was still a teenager, instead of going back for another year of school, to stay with her in San Diego and marry Universo so I could get marriage and children out of the way. Abuela had faith Universo was a good boy raised by good women, and wouldn’t grow up to be the typical sinvergüenza husband who disappears Friday through Sunday. Even so, at the time, I couldn’t imagine a worse fate.

It’s a wonder Universo never got me pregnant since I was never more careless than with him. He might have loved me. He never said it, but it’s possible. But he was a boy a bit like my brother, wild with loyalty to his mami. Universo’s vieja never let me beyond the front rooms of their house on Calle del Cuartel. I pass by it now and see it’s been converted into a hotel too, the front sala where the tías once crocheted and gossiped made into a lobby, the wall that once held a cabinet of their finest china now studded with room key slots behind a bulky reception desk. But every now and then, when his mother and all her sisters were out visiting parientes in San Pedro, he’d sneak me inside and we’d do it all over the house.

“That malparida Castillo girl,” la vieja would tell Universo, her sisters, and anybody from the neighborhood who would listen, “she’s more dangerous than a bullet to the ear.”

To keep her son busy and away from me, Universo’s mother would send him on endless errands. She didn’t trust the modern supermarkets popping up all over the city, selling packaged meats and imported shined-up fruit. She preferred to send Universo outside the city walls to Bazurto. Sometimes I went with him. We’d make our way through the maze of vendors, pinch our noses through the odors, until we arrived at the shaded section where they kept the live animals. Universo would pick out a chicken, watch as the vendor broke its neck, dunking it in a pot of boiling water to loosen the flesh, making it easier to pull out the feathers. I’d hide my shock so I wouldn’t have to hear from Universo how sheltered I was by my North American life, and how what goes on in those big gringo meat factories was far worse than this. Behind us, rows of cows and pigs hung on hooks for people to pick out their cuts—not a single part going to waste, down to the eyes, tails, and hooves. I’d stay with him until I couldn’t stand it anymore, then wander out through the fish stalls to the road, crossing the traffic of trucks and horse carts to the polluted lagoon, and watch the scavenging seabirds until Universo came to find me.

I remember the look he gave me every time he found me after I’d slipped off into a crowd. Relief, happiness, a kind of peace. I felt it too.

Sometimes Universo took me with him on the back of his motorcycle all the way to San Juan Nepomuceno, through hillside roads scattered with guerrilla checkpoints, past marshy ciénegas bleeding into green and blue mountains. When we arrived, we’d sit at the bottom of the church steps for hours, waiting to see if Universo could spot his father, who he heard lived there now with his second family, but we never saw him.

On the way back into Cartagena’s city walls, we’d stop at the feet of La Popa, the white monastery on the mountain that hovers over the city like a cloud, where Universo’s mother, who we all called La Cassiani, told her son the Karib and Calamarí Indians worshipped Buziraco, the devil in the form of a golden goat, until the friar who wanted to build the monastery and shrine to la Virgen de la Candelaria showed up, confronting the devil and his worshippers, throwing the golden goat off the side of the mountain. The devil retaliated with hurricanes and storms until the church was completed, and then relented, moving deeper into the continent. It’s for that reason, Universo’s mother told him, that Cartagena has always remained protected, and the rest of Colombia so troubled, already half a century under the thumb of its latest civil war.

Our grandmother told Carlito and me a different story: After Buziraco was thrown off the mountain, the devil of La Popa had lingered in the shadows of the hills, so quiet people didn’t notice he was there. But when our father took us away from Cartagena, the devil followed our family across the Caribbean, waiting to see how he could make us fall. She’d meant it to scare us into being good children but Carlito and I only laughed at her story, though it turned out to be the same warning I’d receive from the blue-haired bruja so many years later.

I climb the muralla steps up to the wall where I used to sit with Universo, where I can still hear my brother’s voice echoing against the stone corridor calling for me to come home, watching the sun fall like an orb into the dark ocean.

Carlito wanted to bring Isabela to Cartagena. He planned to marry her and the day he went to the bridge with her baby, he was already close to having all the money he’d need to buy her a nice engagement ring. He’d been saving for a year, and before that, even longer, for a down payment on a home. Isabela said she would take his last name, but told Carlito she wouldn’t give him a baby until after the wedding. On their honeymoon, he’d take Isabela to Cartagena, where Carlito predicted, his eyes shining with hope, they’d conceive their first child.

“But Cartagena is ours,” I’d insist.

I hated when he talked about a future with Isabela, but hated even more that he’d peddle our past to her.

“Don’t be jealous, Reina. One day you’ll love someone as much as I love Isabela and you’ll want to share everything with that person too.”

Years later, I’d try to understand how Carlito had once wanted to give Isabela so much, yet had still managed to take everything away from her. But Dr. Joe told me the prison was filled with guys like Carlito, who’d committed terrible crimes against the person they professed to love the most.

“It’s a mixed-up, messy sort of love,” Dr. Joe said.

I remember wondering if there was any other kind.

I don’t go to my grandmother’s grave. But for three days, I walk the narrow passages from Santo Toribio to what was her home. I lean along the wall of the building across the street, watching to see if anyone goes in or comes out of the doorway. Her window is open and I stare at it for a long while to see if I can will the image of my grandmother’s figure into the frame, how she’d perch there to check on my brother and me playing in the park. I look down the block, see a pack of young boys walking together, and, as they press past me on the narrow sidewalk, I check their faces, aching in that way I’ve lived with for so long, trying to see my brother as he used to be, exploding with youthful curiosity, wrestling with the best and worst parts of himself.

If not today, I may never have the chance to see my grandmother’s place again.

I ring the bell beside the door and an intercom voice answers.

“I’m interested in a property,” I say.

The door buzzes open and I let myself in.

The ground-floor apartment, which used to belong to a guy everyone called “El Viejo Madrigal,” a retired army captain who liked to sit around in his old uniform drinking whiskey, is now an office and a slim woman, speaking Spanish with a French accent, welcomes me in. I planned to lie, tell her I’m looking to rent an apartment, but I try honesty instead, tell her the apartment on the fourth floor had been in my family for generations.

She doesn’t seem to believe me, or maybe she thinks I’ve come here to make a claim on the place, so I drop the name of the guy Mami sold it to, a lawyer from Medellín whose name I remember because she had a fling with him before transferring the deed.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I say. “I won’t be back again. I would be grateful if you would let me see it for just a minute. Then I’ll go.”

She looks around the office, maybe looking for an excuse to say no, but it’s otherwise empty beyond the two of us, not even a phone ringing.

She sighs, a little embarrassed, and stands up.

“Follow me. Just a few minutes though. I’ve got to mind the office and I can’t leave you up there alone.”

The stairwell and landings have been painted and retiled; our footsteps are the only sounds in a building that used to ­vibrate with voices. But the aroma of locked-in dusty moisture on the third and fourth floors is still the same—a smell my mother hated and said was full of spores that would one day kill us.

My grandmother’s door is no longer blue but tangerine, and the woman tells me the apartment has been recently vacated and is available should I want to live there again.

Without furniture it should appear larger, but the apartment feels so small. I can’t believe we lived here, the four of us.

The walls are a fresh white, the splintered wooden floors sanded down and varnished. The agent waits in the hall as I walk through the rooms, stand in the places that used to hold beds, where I slept and where my grandmother died.

I don’t know what to feel. I long for some sort of sensation that will bring all my lost pieces together, but I only feel the inertia of the space, the light breeze coming in through the window I’ve been watching for days from the street.

“Carlito,” I whisper his name, but I am overwhelmed with solitude.

There is nobody here but me.

Here on the equator, darkness falls evenly for twelve long hours of night. I don’t take myself to restaurants or to the champeta or salsa clubs the front desk guy recommends to the other hotel guests. I buy a bakery sandwich and a soda, and settle into my room, the sounds of the horse carriages and music of the Plaza Simón Bolívar reverberating against the terra-cotta tiles and stone walls the color of burned bone.

The TV news talks about a homeless man set on fire near the university in Bogotá, about the peace negotiations between the guerrilla forces and the government being carried out on neutral ground in Havana.

I think of Nesto.

By now he would have gone to the appointment from which he would have left a newly married man. I wonder if they kissed or took photos. I wonder if the children looked on with renewed hope at the sight of their parents together again.

My mother, despite all her boyfriends, never managed to make a new father of anyone for Carlito and me. She longed for a handsome and rich gentleman to show up and marry our whole family, give us a new last name. I think she still dreams of it.

I wonder what Yanai thinks of their reunion. I wonder if she’ll be willing to let him go in the end and if he will be willing to walk away.

Nesto gave me the number of his mother’s place the last time he went home because his American cell phone would be blocked from working on this island. He said to call if I needed him. He said to take that any way I wanted.

I consider it for a while before I dial.

He told me he never would have left his family if he hadn’t had to. He would trade everything to be with his kids again.

Would you trade me? I thought, selfishly, though I knew better, because not so long ago, I would have traded anything and anybody in my life, even my own mother, to have Carlito walking free beside me.

It takes a few tries, sorting out the tangle of numbers and country codes on the hotel room phone.

The buzzy ringing, the voice of an older woman answering.

“This is Reina. Nesto’s friend,” I say, feeling foolish.

She responds as if I’m just a neighbor calling from around the corner, “Oh, yes. Hold on, hold on.”

I hear her footsteps, as if she’s walking with the phone, other voices in the background, and I try to pick out who they are from how he described his family members to me—could that girl’s voice belong to his cousin, or his niece? The man, maybe his stepfather, or an uncle? But then I hear only Nesto, telling me to wait one more moment, he’s going somewhere quiet. The other voices fade, and he says he’s taken the phone to his bedroom at the back of the house, which, no matter how many years he’s been away, has remained his room, as he left it, the same way we maintained Carlito’s room for him until Mami occupied it with her saints and crucifixes.

“I hoped you’d call. How did you find your city?”

“Not really mine anymore. How are things over there?”

“You know. The same.”

We are both quiet.

“It’s not the same though. You’re married now.”

For a moment, I think the line has gone dead. I hear nothing, not even his breath, until the line comes alive again with his voice.

“No. It didn’t happen.”

“Why not?”

I imagine another case of postponed appointments, bureaucratic delays.

“Let’s just say that plans have changed. But I can’t talk about it on the phone. ¿Me explico?”

I know he means that over there you never know who is listening in on a call.

“I’m sorry. I know how much you were hoping this would work out.”

“It might still. It might not.”

I don’t know how to respond so I just listen.

“I wish you could see how things are here. I wish you could experience life as a Cuban. No, I take it back,” he laughs. “Nobody deserves that.”

He stops himself and I hear him take a deep breath.

“I wish you could come, though. See my house. Meet my family. You would see that everything I’ve told you is true.”

“I’ve always believed you.”

“You can hear about it from me all day long, you can read about it in your magazines, watch it on TV Martí, but you won’t understand until you see it for yourself.”

He pauses.

“You could come here. You have the two passports. You could postpone your ticket and fly into and out of Havana from Colombia. You’d face no issues when you get back to the States.”

“I’m supposed to go back home tomorrow.” But the word home feels odd leaving my lips and even stranger sitting heavy on the airwaves between us.

“Reina, I’m inviting you. Come see my island. I would be so happy if you came.”

Nesto has never asked me for anything. And until now, I’ve never felt there was anything I could give him.

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

“Don’t think about it. Just come.”

I tell myself, it’s not a big deal, simply going to visit a friend for a few days, but of course it’s more than that; it’s to carve out another space in whatever little time we may have left together, to meet him at his origin, the way I returned to Colombia to meet myself in mine.

Now, to go to him in Havana seems like the only choice, continuing on the same path that brought me back to Cartagena:

The only way to hold on.

The only way to let go.

Afew nights before we left for our separate journeys, Nesto and I went out to the beach and saw, on the path illuminated by the moon, the long tracks left by a turtle that came ashore to lay her eggs. We followed the lines until we found her nest far from the tide in a knoll at the foot of the dunes. Nesto marked the area with coconuts and seashells. There were times he and his family were forced to survive on turtle meat and now that he was no longer hungry, he said, he’d show his gratitude by looking after this turtle’s babies in her absence.

In Florida I dream of Cartagena, but here, I dream I am lost among night waters trying to swim back to the cottage, to Nesto, gasping, my limbs fatigued. But then I feel myself buoyed from underneath by a giant loggerhead turtle who carries me on her back. I hold tight to her shell as she breaks through the current, and though I feel safe in her care, in my dream the moonless night is unending, and we never reach the shore.

There are no direct flights from Cartagena de Indias to Havana. Less than a thousand miles separate the cities but, instead of heading north across the Caribbean, I’m on a plane heading south, over the rippling cordillera of the Andes into the city built on the savanna, Bogotá.

I remember making the same stopover with my mother and brother. Mami always seemed nervous and said it was because she didn’t like being so far inland, the singsong accent of la costa with its swallowed syllables, the sweet air fresh with salt and sun, so unlike the guttural voices of the capital and the thin air high on the plateau, the atmospheric pressure change we felt upon touching ground that made our heartbeats jumpy—the same fluttering I feel in my chest now—and which, if we’d ever stayed longer than our layovers, would cause headaches and dizziness until the body and blood adjusted to the altitude and the soroche passed.

The man sitting in the seat next to me, a guy in a wrinkled suit who so far hasn’t spoken a word, gathers his things to get off after we land.

When he sees I haven’t budged from my seat by the window he turns to me.

“This isn’t your stop too?”

“I’m staying on until Havana.”

“¿Y qué se te perdió por allá?”

“I didn’t lose anything over there,” I say, smiling, because it’s true, I haven’t lost Nesto yet, “but you never know what I might find.”

A short while after the first man leaves, another old man arrives in his place. He settles into his seat, pulls a worn prayer book from his bag, and sets it on his lap, gently caressing a small photograph between his fingers. It’s an image of the same young boy with a staff I saw on Nesto’s dashboard the first night I climbed into his truck under that full moon. The one I recognized that first night as El Santo Niño de Atocha, rescuer of victims of circumstance, safe keeper of travelers, but whom Nesto claimed as Elegguá, opener of paths, so living beings can accomplish their destiny.