Dead man's float.

That's what they call it in swim lessons. Face down, arms loose, the body doing nothing at all. You don't fight the water, you let it hold you.

I learned it at the Vanderbilt Y in New York, sometime in the nineties. First swimming lesson. It's still all I know.

At a wedding last weekend, someone didn't believe me. A grown man from an island, who can't swim.

I can float. That's the whole trick I know. Enough to feel what passes for swimming, out past where my feet can find the bottom.

I told them I was nine the first time I saw the sea. I'd seen mountains, rivers with names I no longer remember. But the sea only existed in textbooks, in movies, in the mouths of people who had been.

My cousin Ricardo took me. We called him Calito. He was the first on either side of the family to make it to college. The one that could, the one we all counted on. My grandmother was enamorada with him, his smarts, his kindness. I was too.

Visiting from New York, he caught wind of it somehow, a nine year old who had never seen the sea. He took me by the hand one night and we walked. Thirty minutes down Avenida San Martín, in the dark, his hand doing the deciding for both of us.

I couldn't see the water yet. Only, eventually, the white stripes where it broke.

He was twenty-five when the water took him back.

Riis Park, in the Rockaways. A Sunday, the beach crowded. He was found on his back, the water beating against his feet. That's what alerted the people near him. Not a struggle. Not a call for help. Just his feet, moving with the water like they belonged to it, until someone realized he wasn't moving on his own.

I think about that image more than I think about his face now.

The feet that walked me down Avenida San Martín so I could see white stripes in the dark. The feet the water kept beating long after he'd stopped deciding anything.

I still can't swim. I float.

Lately, that feels less like a failure than it used to.