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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I ask him to make us some tea instead.

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re different from them.”

“No, I’m not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re really sick, you know that?”

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

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

“Come on, I was just playing.”

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

“Where are you going?”

“Me and the bird are leaving.”

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

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

“You need a lift back to the motel?”

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

When Carlito was first taken into custody, to punish myself for being the one who pushed him into his madness, I didn’t let myself sleep. I closed the door to my room so my mother would think I’d gone to bed, but I’d sit in a chair in the center so that I couldn’t even tilt my head back to lean against a wall. Sometimes I dozed off. So I became stricter with myself, tying a string around my neck connected to the ceiling fan, taut, so if I slumped over into sleep, the tug on my neck would wake me up. But sometimes nothing could stop me, and I’d fall into a walking sleep during a break between clients at work. My boss took me aside and asked if I was on drugs. I realized this might jeopardize my source of income, so I decided to find another way to punish myself: I stopped eating.

I was satisfied by my silent hunger strike for a while. The pangs pass, the mind settles into a soft fuzz that buffers you from the world around you. My flesh shrank, my features sharpened, but these are things people compliment in women, so nobody noticed I’d only wanted to imprison myself in solidarity with my brother.

I felt Carlito’s hunger in the county jail where he was held without bail until his trial because the judge considered him a flight risk, and then when he was moved down south to the prison. I felt his disgust every time he looked at a plate of prison food, some of which Dr. Joe once told me came from bags and barrels marked NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.

I felt the inescapable noise of intercoms and alarms and howls and whispers permeating the prison walls and bars that kept him from ever getting real sleep, the hard boot steps of the guards checking his cell every fifteen minutes, the fluorescent overhead lights that never went completely out.

I stopped bathing as much to keep up with the three ten-minute showers my brother was permitted per week.

Even as I eventually let myself sleep, I kept the lights on in my bedroom to remind myself of my brother’s suffering and often only let myself rest on the floor because my brother slept on a thin plastic-coated pad set on a concrete slab with only a prickly blanket for cover.

I had a fear of forgetting, as if I ever could.

I saw my mother, with her patchwork amnesia about our father, the way she tossed out memories of Carlito too, and I thought, someone has to remember, for the sake of our family, if only to tell someone else one day what was, what could have been, and what never will be again.

And there were the dreams.

I think I was born having nightmares. My mother tells me I refused to sleep as a baby, fighting off fatigue by crying until my body gave out, and even then, my sleep was always short-lived and I’d awake in screams, a look of terror on my face.

The nightmares have stayed with me all my life, but I’m not afraid of them anymore, like an old film on repeat, scenes from our family’s darkest moments: a baby dropping from a bridge, my brother’s face when he received his death sentence, the sounds of our mother’s wails filling our house.

Sometimes I dream of my father. Though in the dreams he’s not my father but a man who looks like him and is calling my name from far away.

I dream of the old house; me, a child, sitting on the dirt patch my mother called a garden even though it refused to give her any flowers, digging into the soil with a plastic shovel, pulling out worms and lining them up as if I were reuniting them. Sometimes I would dare myself to eat dirt. Mami warned us that children who ate dirt grew up to be crazy, but I did it anyway, stuffing a handful into my mouth, telling myself she would never know.

I dream of Cartagena. Of playing in the grimy streets with my brother, of him leading me by the hand up the hidden steps to the roof of Abuela’s building where the whole city stretched out in front of us and we could see as far as La Matuna and Getsemaní. Or when he’d take me down to the third floor to spy on Doña Gabriela, who had regular male visitors. From the stairwell we could hear them grunting, pounding against the furniture, and we’d laugh and imitate them, watch the men as they came out of the apartment and wobbled down the stairs rubbing sweat from their foreheads with a kerchief, and then we’d give them dirty looks when we saw them at Mass at Santo Toribio on Sunday mornings, sitting among the church pews with their wives and children, and receiving Communion.

I dream of my grandmother. How she used to sew blouses for me with embroidered flowers on puffy sleeves while my mother watched, and when the blouses were finished and she gave them to me to wear, she would tell me she loved me better than anyone else in the world while my mother looked on, shaking her head.

For years, when we were small, Mami would talk about going back to Cartagena to live, as if this North American life were just some interlude and we ended up here by accident. But when we’d ask, “When, Mami? When are we moving back?” she would never give an answer. When Abuela died, instead of keeping her apartment in the family like Carlito and I begged her to do, Mami sold it and said now there was no need for us to ever return.

I didn’t miss Cartagena anymore in my waking life, but in my sleep I still longed for it, and sometimes wandering those city walls in my dreams was the only peace I got.

In the old house in Miami, I’d wake with the feeling of a hand on my chest, my eyes open to the murky blue half-light of my bedroom. Everything quiet, though still feeling noise all around me, through my ears, behind my eyes, under my skin.

In the cottage, I fall asleep slowly, counting the sounds of the night animals — crickets, frogs, squealing raccoons, a cat in heat somewhere beyond the coco plum trees.

But mine is still a loneliness that shakes me from my sleep.

I can forget my solitude all day, through my working hours, through errands, the evening housecleaning ritual I’ve made up for the cottage.

Yet night remains a tomb, when I’m most vulnerable, lying down for rest without distraction.

Only this body and that darkness, the whispers of the never-ending noche:

You belong to no one. No one belongs to you.

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.

The dolphinarium is buzzing when I get to work. Everyone is excited about the new dolphin I’m only hearing of now. I join the small crowd of trainers and techs on the dock by the new pen they’ve constructed at the end of the row of the ones that are already occupied, watching Nesto, almost chest deep in water with a scuba tank on his back, as he makes sure all the fences are securely bound to the poles that frame the enclosure.

He sees me and waves, then goes back underwater.

Rachel, one of the trainers, comes up beside me. She’s my age, from Tampa, with long blond hair she wears in a high bun. In a colder climate, Rachel’s complexion might be a pearly rose-gold, but the tropics have made her pink and rubbery, like bubble gum, her lips chapped and peeling and coated in Vaseline. Like most of the trainers, she was a star swimmer in college, but when they aged out of competing, they found that few job prospects could keep them in the water beyond lifeguarding or giving swimming lessons to kids.

Here at the dolphinarium, she works with new arrivals, teaching them the ways of pen life, though Nesto says there’s not much to teach about living in a cage; it’s a process of submission, which any animal can figure out on its own.

“I can’t wait to meet our new girl. I hear she’s a sweet thing.” Rachel is grinning and giddy.

“Who said that?” I ask.

“Her handlers. They sent us her files.”

“How do you know if a dolphin’s being sweet as opposed to one that’s not?”

“By its general attitude. The way it interacts with us. Since they got her, they say she’s been gentle as can be. And she’ll be so much happier here than in the tank.”

It’s like she’s talking about a stray kitten, not a three-hundred-pound six-year-old dolphin, washed up from the oil spill in the gulf off Louisiana, one of the few animals that emerged from the fields of tar sheens with a remote chance of survival.

They took her in and named her for the lab in Biloxi where she’s been held until being transported here. Roxi from Biloxi.

Rachel tells me she and the other trainers were assured Roxi has potential to perform and even to breed.

“How is it you teach them tricks and flips and all that?”

“We don’t teach them tricks. We encourage them to learn new behaviors.”

I don’t really see how you can call getting a dolphin to beach itself on the dock, deliver a rose in its mouth to an audience member, and offer its fin for a “dolphin handshake” anything but tricks, but I keep that part to myself.

“Okay, the teaching of behaviors. How do you do that?”

“We practice operant conditioning.” I can tell she likes the taste of big words in her mouth. “We change or create behaviors by using positive reinforcements, like food, as a reward.”

“Do you ever punish them?”

“Of course not!” She laughs at my misstep.

“What if they don’t do what you want them to do?”

“We just don’t reinforce the behavior until they get it right.”

“So you don’t give them food till they do what you want them to do?”

“We don’t acknowledge them until they demonstrate the desired behavior.”

“You ignore them?”

She shakes her head at me. “It’s not that simple, Reina. There are decades of research behind what we do.”

With that, she finds a reason to get away from me, and walks out on the platform extending from the dock between the new pen and the older one, holding two females, Belle and Bonnet. Roxi from Biloxi will live alone till they add her to another pen with resident female dolphins or find her a new companion.

I watch Nesto work on the pen and think of when I started working full-time and Mo told me how happy the animals were. So much so that even though the fence keeping them in extends barely a foot above the water, and the dolphins can easily jump over it to get out, they never even try. Even during hurricanes, when the enclosures sometimes broke open, Mo told me, if the dolphins swam out into the gulf, they were easily coaxed by their trainer’s whistles to return to their pens the next morning.

I remember when Carlito and I were kids, an early summer tropical storm once ravaged the local aquarium, busting open the bayside wall of the dolphin cove so the six dolphins inside were released to the open water. They were quickly spotted by people on the same bridge where Carlito and baby Shayna had both been dropped, doing their routines at all their regular showtimes, flipping and tail-walking and pirouetting, waiting for their rewards. People gathered on the causeway and adjacent beaches to watch the show. The dolphins, accustomed to the sight of a crowd, came closer to shore and it wasn’t long before the aquarium people arrived in boats to collect them.

There was some noise about leaving them free, but the aquarium people used the footage of their routines in the wild to show that the animals were desperate to return to the aquarium. They loved performing, their minders told the reporters, and the aquarium was their home.

That was all it took.

Now it’s just a story that locals tell: the case of the escaped dolphins performing in the ocean the routines that humans had taught them.

I still remember Mami’s face watching the news coverage, the way she shook her head and said it was pathetic how those dumb animals had missed their one maldito chance to be free.

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.

In my dream, I lie on a crest of beach where sand meets water, my body pressing deep, carving its form into the earth; when I stand and look down, I see my silhouette has hardened despite the current rushing over it, filling the space where my body rested until the water recedes and my form in the sand fills with blood; water washes over it again, and with each wave, an exchange of blood and tide.

I tell Nesto about my dreams when he calls me at the hotel in the morning, how they’ve changed since I arrived in Cuba.

“I’m going to take you somewhere so you can make sense of them,” he tells me.

“No brujas, please.”

“She’s no bruja. She’s the best reader of dreams in Havana.”

The morning sun is hot, the air heavy with moisture. Nesto picks me up in a 1952 Chevrolet, borrowed from a cousin. He drives through Centro Habana, down cracked roads, stray dogs scampering to avoid being kicked or chased off; men hunched over popped-open car hoods trying to diagnose the day’s malfunction; buckets and baskets full of fruit or food being pulled from the street up to balconies full of laundry lines; old men sitting around improvised tables and overturned crates playing dominó; ladies young and old, some with babies in their arms, lingering in windows and doorways mirando y dejando, watching the world go by.

We come to the enclave of Cayo Hueso, webbed with wires and antennas, where Nesto parks on the corner of a tight street, asking a group of shirtless boys kicking a ball around to watch the car so it’s not stripped of any parts while we’re gone.

He calls up to a building, “Zoraida! Zoraida!” his voice filling the small avenue.

A woman pokes her head out of a third-floor window, turns her face upward to yell the same name too. Finally, on the sixth floor, another head emerges from some curtains. A man calls down to Nesto to catch, and tosses a key down to the street for him. Nesto opens the building door to a foyer wall painted over with a portrait of a dreamy-faced young Che, and we start the long walk up several flights of broken stairs, sweat gathering in the crevices of my collarbone and dripping down my spine. I stop and lean on the banister to catch my breath while Nesto flies past me, teasing that I have no stamina, until we both arrive at the top floor, which opens into a small cinder block single-room apartment on the building’s roof.

Zoraida sits in a wooden chair at the center beside an altar to Santa Barbara — Changó—with her long sword watching over a glass of white wine and a red apple. Zoraida is a small woman, her head wrapped in a ruby scarf, wearing a long white dress that reaches the floor. The door behind her opens to a concrete garden. Nesto greets her, bowing to her slightly, and introduces me; and Zoraida, who Nesto says is at least one hundred years old though nobody knows for sure but she looks about seventy, waves me over to her, takes my hand in hers, rubs it gently with her thumbs, and says, “So you are the one having trouble with your dreams.”

She turns to Nesto. “You leave us alone. Go outside. Wait in the shade until I call you.”

Nesto obeys and I see him settle onto a metal chair out on the azotea while Zoraida tells me to sit on the stool close to her.

“I’ve known Nesto, since he was a young boy. His grandmother used to bring him to me because of his nightmares. Now you, mi niña, it’s your turn.”

I begin by telling her the dreams of the past, of Cartagena until I returned, of my father, my brother, babies going over the bridge, though I don’t tell her the reason for these dreams, how they come from real memories. Then I tell her of my dreams here in Cuba, unlike any I’ve had before. The burning forest that looked so similar to the one I visited yesterday. And the most recent dream: my body in the sand, my figure form filled with blood and water.

She watches me as I speak though I have the impression she’s not really listening, but reading into me a different way.

Once I’m done talking she says sternly, without a trace of speculation, “You have been haunted by shame. You have been shackled. You have known violence and you have committed violence unto yourself. You must try to understand why you have placed yourself in a prison. To dream of fire is an indicator of change. You will have to let go of all that came before. You will feel an end to great pain, but only after trials of despair. To dream of sand, water, and blood shows that you feel impermanence, but it’s the opposite; something in you is taking root. Listen to the voice of your instincts. The spirits are guiding you.”

She pulls back and eyes me with sudden suspicion.

“You don’t believe in our santos or even the ones you were raised with.”

I shake my head.

“But you are a daughter of Yemayá. You must know this. She claimed you long before you were born. You must feel it. You watch the moon. You follow its glow. She is the universal mother. You are in her special favor. Anything you ask of her, she will give you.”

She calls to Nesto who comes in from the patio and stands at her side.

“Nesto, take her to see Yemayá. She will bring peace to her dreams.”

She takes Nesto’s hand, enormous next to hers, and he lowers himself onto one knee at her feet.

“And you, have patience, my dear boy. The Great One hears you. In time, you will have all that you want.”

“Gracias, Zoraida.” Nesto leans over and kisses the top of her hand.

He tries to give her some money but she refuses it, pushing his hand away. He walks to the altar of Santa Barbara and places the bills under the apple.

“For your santa, then,” he says, and she doesn’t protest.

Nesto says he wants to show me the view before we leave Zoraida’s place and leads me out to the azotea, all of Havana spread out before us in concrete cubes, homes upon homes, water tanks, electrical chords, antennas, barking dogs, and pigeon coops on nearly every rooftop.

I feel heat pressing against my chest and become breathless again. I’ve felt nauseated all morning but haven’t said so because I don’t want Nesto to think it’s caused by his mother’s cooking. I could hardly eat my breakfast at the hotel. I feel my stomach cramping, my body both burning and suddenly chilled.

“It’s so hot,” I tell Nesto, shielding my eyes from the sun as he points to where the Malecón begins and to the fortress of La Cabaña across the harbor.

Everything becomes dark but I feel his hands on me, hear him say my name. Then he’s above me and I’m not standing on the azotea looking over the city, but lying on the dusty concrete rooftop with Nesto fanning my face with his shirt, which he’s taken off, Zoraida slowly coming toward us through her doorway, one hand on a cane, the other carrying a glass of juice. He helps me prop myself on my elbows, resting my head against his knees, taking the juice from Zoraida, holding the glass to my lips until I taste mango.

“She’s more overheated than a hot dog!” Zoraida says, and returns a moment later with a wet cloth, handing it to Nesto, who slips it onto my forehead. “What have you done to this poor child? Can’t you see she’s not used to our heat?”

I sit up but my head feels heavy and I have to lie back down for another moment until Nesto helps me up and toward the door. I thank Zoraida, though I’m almost too dazed to speak.

“Take her straight to the ocean,” she tells Nesto. “Make sure she covers her whole head with water.”

When he sees me hesitate to go down the first flight of stairs, cautious with my footing so I won’t lose my balance, Nesto takes my arm, ducks his head into my chest and throws me over his shoulder, carrying me all the way down to the street where the boys wait beside the car for Nesto to pay them their chavitos.

We head east, outside the city perimeter toward the beaches. I close my eyes as Nesto drives, feel air rush past my face through the open window, the smell of gasoline and exhaust giving way to the aroma of the sea and greenery of the city outskirts.

I think of the last time I fainted, as a teenager when Universo took me to San Basilio de Palenque because he was obsessed with Benkos Biohó, the cimarron king who founded the refuge for runaway slaves like him high in the hills, surrounded by jungle, the only community in the Americas to resist colonization. We had to hitchhike out of Cartagena and caught a ride with a truck driver on his way to Mompox. He left us at the bottom of the muddy trail and we hiked through thick humidity until we came to the dusty clearing of the village plaza. Universo told me the Palenqueros were known for being reclusive, untrusting of outsiders, and reluctant to come down from their hill.

An old man came out to meet us by the road, asking what we were doing there.

“We came to see that,” Universo said, pointing to the statue of Benkos in the center of the plaza, an iron man with arms extended, broken chains hanging from his wrists.

We walked over to the statue, sweat slick down my back and my legs, sun reflecting on the white dust at our feet.

I remember telling Universo, “This must be the hottest place on earth,” and then I was on the ground.

When I came to, Universo and the old man had dragged me into a patch of shade by the church, laying me on some grass. I felt my skull crushing, heard the man shouting in Palenquero until a young boy appeared with a gallon of water that they poured over me.

“This girl doesn’t belong up here in the hills,” the old man told Universo. “She belongs at sea level. Take her back to the water.”

Nesto pulls off the highway down a winding road to Bacuranao until we are at an arc of beach, sand fine as flour, water turquoise and transparent.

“When I see this beauty, I think, How could I have ever left my homeland?” Nesto says. “Then I go back to the city, see the conditions in which the people live, and I think, How could I have stayed as long as I did?”

The beach is desolate except for a lone horse tied by a long rope in the shade of a coconut palm.

We walk to the water and Nesto reaches for me to turn my body, reminding me to always approach Yemayá with humility, from the side, never head-on.

I go into the water as far as my thighs, gathering my dress so it won’t get wet. Nesto doesn’t care, though, and goes in with his jeans on, dunking under the surf, and holds me so that I can dip my head under the water too, feel the cool foam run down my neck and chest.

We find a coconut palm for ourselves and lie on the sand, salt and water hardening onto our skin, my head cushioned on Nesto’s chest and his in the pillow of his arms.

I’m tired, I tell him, so tired, and let myself close my eyes for a little while to sleep.

Carlito told me he looked forward to hurricanes. He would watch from his cell’s narrow window slat as wind twisted palms and curled rain, flooding prison grounds so that Carlito could pretend, if only for a moment, he was looking at the sea, imagining Colombia on the other side.

He said those storms were the only times inmates and guards were close to equals, both held captive by the prison lockdown, unable to flee, taking in with fear and awe the great power of nature surrounding them. It was the only time the guards seemed human to him, not like the guys who regularly taunted inmates, forcing them to fight each other like dogs for their entertainment, placing bets on who would win.

“How can they get away with such a thing?” I’d asked Carlito. “There are cameras everywhere.” I pointed to the one in the corner of the visitors’ room that monitored all our interactions.

“The guys who work the control room know how to blow out a camera for a few hours, make it look like a short circuit or a digital glitch so the other guards can do whatever they want. They’re a fucking pandilla, Reina. They’ve all got each other’s backs.”

But on those hurricane nights, after the power went out and even the generators stopped working, and prisoners howled through the blackness, the guards suffered confinement right along with them.

As a family, we’d been through plenty of bad storms. We endured the blurred, watery edges of hurricanes’ outer bands as they passed over and around Florida and even a few direct hits that blasted out power lines and flooded the streets.

But never a storm like Andrew.

Rosita from next door came over asking Mami if she was worried. She was from Puerto Rico so she understood a hurricane’s potential to destroy. But Mami was from Cartagena, where hurricanes hadn’t hit in centuries, so she waved off Rosita’s concern, said we were too far inland to be affected by storm surges and it would just be a matter of heavy rain like every summer. They ended up smoking cigarettes and sipping agua de Jamaica in the kitchen, chismeando about the other neighbors until it was dark and the wind started to change.

We spent the night in a closet. Mami, Carlito, and I huddled as far into the corner as we could get, behind an old trunk and the vacuum cleaner. Carlito had boarded the windows as best he could with cardboard and plywood he found in the garage. He blocked the front door with the coffee table turned on its side. When the house started shaking we went into the only windowless space, holding each other through the whistling and clapping and crashing of the wind.

We fell asleep in one another’s arms, curled over one another’s knees, until after daybreak when we heard people out on the street shouting, wanting to know if the Castillos were safe.

Rosita’s roof peeled and popped off like the lid on a can of sardines, but ours remained sealed to the house without even sagging where a fat palm tree fell onto it. Our windows blew out. The back door shattered. But the front door stayed intact, and this kept wind from filling the house, churning the contents like it did to many of our neighbors’ homes, splitting swimming pools, rolling cars halfway down the road. We heard on the news about people who found sharks spit from the ocean in their yards; marina boats washed onto land; houses ripped off their foundations, walls folding in like wet paper, televisions and furniture hurled miles away; trees torn from the earth; dead animals everywhere.

Our neighborhood went weeks without electricity and water but that was nothing compared with communities farther south where few homes were left standing.

Mami was celebrating because we were among the blessed and living. She said this time the santos were looking out for us.

When I go up to Miami to meet my mother, she brings up the night we spent in the closet during the hurricane.

She’s been staying with Mayra and Tío Jaime, but I told her I don’t want to see them, so we agree to meet at a restaurant on the Miami River, with a view of warehouses and passing cargo ships, saturated in the stink of the nearby fish market: a restaurant she likes because Jerry used to take her there and she wants to make it her own now. She told me on the phone she hoped I’d bring Nesto with me so she could finally meet him.

“I don’t know why you’re being so mysterious about him. Are you afraid I’ll steal him from you?”

She laughed, but I didn’t.

“He has other things to do,” I told her, and it was true. He’s officially given up his room at the motel, moved in with me, and convinced Mrs. Hartley to let him give the cottage a fresh coat of paint inside and out.

Today I find my mother sitting alone at a table by the water, sipping a cocktail. She’s cut her hair so it barely touches her shoulders, and has lost so much weight she had the nerve to put on a flamingo-pink dress with a buttoned bodice she bought twenty years ago, and a pair of strappy silver heels that I borrowed from her a few times as a teenager, before I had the cash to buy my own. Seeing her there, all dressed up and sitting alone at the restaurant, I remember how she used to say her beauty would have been better served in some other life.

A young waiter approaches the table and the way she throws her head back in laughter at something he says makes me sad for her. She doesn’t stand up to hug me when she sees me, just wraps her arms around my neck when I lean down to kiss her, and I feel the stickiness of her lipstick streaking my cheek.

When I sit down, she holds my hand across the table like she’s afraid I might make a run for it.

I hold her fingers tightly too. I’ve come prepared with things I want to say.

She starts with talk about an apartment she saw up in Aventura with two bedrooms, so I can move in whenever I’m ready. It’s on the ocean, with a pool and a tennis court, she says, and I wonder when she’s going to stop torturing herself by looking at places she can’t afford on her own. She’s started seeing another bruja — the one on Brickell all the celebrities go to, had to wait a month for the appointment and pay four hundred dollars for the hour — who predicted better fortunes for her, advising Mami that taking up tennis would be the key to meeting the next man in her life. But just as quickly as she gets excited describing her future as a lady with a condo, she becomes nostalgic for the old neighborhood, launching into the barrio gossip she picked up from Mayra and her posse of lenguonas, about people who are divorcing or having affairs, second families discovered or secret children showing up.

Then, through the appetizer and even the main course, she moves on to her list of the sick, dying, and dead.

“I almost forgot,” she says. “You know who died? La Cassiani.”

“Universo’s mother?”

“Esa misma. They took her to the hospital with chest pains and the doctors finished killing her with some infection. The son went to bury her in Santa Lucía. Mayra heard it was a beautiful funeral with a vallenato band and everything.”

She moves on to another story, about some fulano de tal, a male neighbor of Mayra and Jaime’s, who asked her on a date, but I can think only of Universo’s mother, who wasn’t much older than mine though she always seemed more aged by her life’s disappointments; how she’d stare me down as if that were enough to keep me away from her son, how she brought the daughters and granddaughters of her friends to her house, niñas de buena familia, hoping Universo would choose to be with one of them over a mala like me, as if she knew something about both my past and my future that I didn’t.

Mami stops herself in the middle of a thought about whether or not the guy is as completely divorced as he says, as if suddenly disoriented, glancing around the restaurant, then back at me.

“Listen to me. I go on and on. I’m becoming one of those viejitas who talks to themselves. Soon you’re going to find me having conversations with the television.”

She looks embarrassed, something new for her. My mother is a woman of congenital confidence, armor built into the rust of her complexion. I watch as she rearranges herself in her seat, looks down at her breasts, adjusts the straps of her bra. When finished, she reaches for my hand again, pulls it close to her mouth, and kisses my knuckles before letting go.

“I want to tell you something. Do you remember the night we spent in the closet together during the hurricane? You were both big by then, but I held you to my heart as if you were two babies. Do you remember?”

I nod. But more than that, I remember my brother and me, with all the force and strength we had, mooring her with our child bodies, holding on to her as if the gusts might tear her away and then we’d be left with no parents at all.

“I never prayed as hard in all my life as I did that night,” she says. “I prayed the wind would spare our house and the roof would stay on tight. I didn’t think it would. Your father and Jaime built that roof themselves. I thought, Tonight, Hector will succeed in killing us all. But I prayed with everything I had, Reina. I told God if He saved us that night and kept a roof on our house so we would have a place to live the next day, I would never ask for anything ever again. After that night in the closet, I believed my faith saved us, even if my prayers, enough for several lifetimes, weren’t enough to save your brother later, when he really needed them. You remember how much I prayed and prayed when Carlito was arrested. I made so many promises. But Diosito had already saved Carlito twice. Once from your father, and then from the storm. And maybe my prayers aren’t worth much after all. I’m just a stupid woman. I’ve made so many mistakes of my own. What I’m trying to tell you, what I’ve wanted to say to you for a long time, is that a mother can’t always save her children. That’s what I learned from everything that happened to us. You each had to save yourselves. Your brother couldn’t, but you did, mi Reina. You did.”

Her eyes are watery and she puts a napkin to them before her eyeliner has a chance to smudge, then dips her fingers into her water glass, dabbing droplets along her neck as if it will be enough to cool her off.

“Mami.”

She lifts her hair off her neck and fans herself. “Why did we come to this restaurant? It’s so hot. We should have gone somewhere with air conditioning.”

“Mami,” I try again. I want to reach for her hands as she did with me, but I can’t bring myself to do it. We are sitting at a tiny table for two, but she feels so far from me, as if I have to shout for her to hear me.

“Mami, please listen to what I’m going to tell you.”

I pause to make sure I have her full attention but am afraid if I wait too long, the words will slip back down my throat to the place in my gut where I’ve been holding them for so long.

“It’s my fault Carlito did what he did. I’m the one who told him about Isabela. It was me. And it wasn’t true. I lied, Mami. I lied and he believed me.”

I lean back, letting the truth rest on the table between us.

My mother watches me without a trace of surprise in her eyes, though I know this doesn’t mean much. She isn’t one to give anything away; emotions are as valuable and as vital to her as money.

“Why?” she finally whispers.

“He loved her so much. I thought he would choose her over us. I didn’t want him to leave us.”

She sighs and closes her eyes for several seconds. When she opens them, it’s as if we are somewhere else, not at a restaurant on the river with me confessing, but back in the old house, sitting across the wooden kitchen table, me still carrying the secret of my regret.

Maybe if she were another kind of mother she might offer solace, words of comfort; tell me something that could release me from my shame; say something like, Reina, you could not have known he would take what you told him and do what he did. You never could have known.

But the woman across from me is Amandina de Castillo, wife of Hector and mother of Reina and Carlito.

The only thing she knows to say in response is, “We should make a promise to each other never to speak of those days again. No matter what.”

“I’m not going to promise that.”

“I don’t want to remember those things anymore. Please, if you love me at all, Reina, let me forget. Have mercy on your poor mami. I beg you.”

We watch each other until she breaks her gaze, looks to the water and to the sky, darkening with granite clouds.

“It looks like rain is coming.”

I nod. “I’ve got a long drive south.”

“I wish you would stay.”

I don’t know if she means this afternoon, waiting out the rain together, or if she means longer, maybe forever, starting yet another life with her here in Miami.

“I can’t. I have to go home.”

We stand together on the street outside the restaurant, not far from the coil of lots under the interstate, once a tent city that housed Mariel refugees. My mother hugs me, her arms falling around my waist, her cheek hitting my shoulders.

I remember when I was a child and could only reach as high as her hips, how I’d cushion myself against her thighs, lean on her as she talked to people, how she’d grip my hand tight through crowds, hold me on her lap as we watched her telenovelas and she dreamed up other lives for us.

She seems so fragile to me now, unsteady in her heels; even her bangles and earrings look too big for her. In her face, I see traces of my grandmother and I suspect, by the way she looks back at me, as if I am a photograph and not her daughter in the flesh, that she sees one of her old faces in mine too.

She is so small in our embrace that I feel as if I am carrying her, but when I let go, I feel her arms tighten and strengthen. Then it’s as if my mother is carrying me.