“Are you well, Sheriff?” Orquídea had asked, glancing back at him. She waited for his reaction, but he wasn’t sure what it was he should say.
He realized that he was still standing in front of the altar, and his cheeks were wet. His pulse was a frantic thing at his throat and wrists. He pressed his lips together and did his best impression of politeness.
“I’m peachy.” He wasn’t sure if he was, but he shook the emotion out of himself.
“Make yourself at home. I’ll be right back.” Orquídea went into the kitchen and he heard the water running. He sat in the large dining room, the barest part of the house. No wallpaper or decorations. No drapes or flowers. There were stacks of papers out on a banquet table fit for a dozen people.
Now, he wasn’t trying to pry. He believed in the rights of the people of his township, his small corner in the heart of the country. But the papers were right there inside an open wooden box. The kind his mother had once used to store old photographs and letters from her father during the war. From his cursory glance, he recognized a land deed and bank records with her name on it. Orquídea Divina Montoya. Part of him was bewildered that it was all here in plain sight. Had she been putting everything away? Had she known he would come? How could she? It didn’t make a lick of sense. But there was the proof in front of him. Documents that could not easily be forged. He was relieved. He could tell the very concerned citizens of Four Rivers that there was nothing out of the ordinary about the house and its inhabitants except—well, other than that they had appeared out of nowhere. Had they? The valley had been abandoned for so long. Maybe no one in Four Rivers had been paying attention, like the time a highway sprung up where there hadn’t been one before. Surely there was no harm done here.
“How do you take your coffee?” Orquídea asked as she walked into the dining room clutching a wooden tray offering two cups of coffee, milk in a small glass jar, and a bowl of brown sugar.
He drummed his long, thin fingers on the table. “Plenty of milk and plenty of sugar.”
They smiled at each other. Something like understanding passed between them. Neither of them wanted any trouble, he was sure of it. So, they talked about the weather. About Orquídea’s distant family, who had passed the house down to her. He didn’t remember any Montoyas from Ecuador around these parts. He wasn’t sure where Ecuador was, if he was being truly honest with himself. But then again, it was possible that he didn’t know everyone. Perhaps the world was bigger than he thought. It had to be. It certainly felt that way while he sat there drinking her strong coffee. Coffee so rich that it made him stop and sigh. It was not possible but somehow, he could taste the earth where it had been cultivated. When he smacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, he tasted the minerals in the water that helped the plant grow. He could feel the shade of the banana and orange trees that gave the beans their aroma. It shouldn’t have been possible, but he was only learning the beginning of it all.
“How did you do all of this?” he asked, setting the cup down. There was a chip on the side of the roses painted against the white porcelain.
“Do what?”
“Make coffee taste like this.”
She blinked long lashes and sighed. Afternoon light gilded her soft brown skin. “I’m biased, but the best coffee in the world is from my country.”
“I say you’ll be sorely disappointed if you stop by the diner. Don’t tell Claudia that. But the pie is to die for. Have you had pie? Is your husband home?” He knew he was rambling, so he drank his sweet coffee to quiet himself.
“He’s out back, gardening.” She sat at the head of the table, resting her chin on her wrist. “I know why you’re really here. I know what they say about me.”
“Don’t listen to them. You don’t look like a witch to me.”
“What if I told you I was?” Orquídea asked, stirring a clump of sugar into her cup. Her smile was sincere, sweet.
Embarrassed, he looked down at the dregs of his pale coffee, when a birdsong called his attention. There were blue jays at the windowsill. He hadn’t seen one of those around these parts—maybe ever. Wondrous. Who was he to judge that? To judge her. He’d sworn to protect the people of Four Rivers, and that included Orquídea.
“Then I’d say you make a bewitching cup o’ joe.”
They shared a laugh, and finished their coffee in a comfortable silence, listening to the creaking sounds of the house and the return of birds. It wouldn’t be the last time that the surrounding neighbors tried to question Orquídea’s right to take up space on that land, but that coffee and those papers would buy her a few years at least. She had traveled too far and done too many things to get where she was. The house was hers. Born from her power, her sacrifice.
Fifty-five years after Sheriff Palladino came to call, she’d sit at the same table, with the same porcelain cup, stirring the same silver spoon to cut the bitter out of her black coffee. But this time her stationery would be out, crisp egg-shell paper and ink she made herself. She’d send out letters to every single one of her living relatives that ended with: “I am dying. Come and collect your inheritance.” But that is yet to come.
As Orquídea walked the young man to the door, she asked, “Is everything in order, Sheriff Palladino?”
“Far as I can see,” the Sheriff said, returning his hat to his head.
She watched his car amble up the road and didn’t go back inside until he was gone. A strong breeze enveloped her, hard enough to make the laurel leaves on her doors and windows flutter. Someone out there was searching for her. She felt it only for a moment, but she doubled the protection charms on the house, the candles on her altar, the salt in the grain.
There would come a time when her past caught up to her and Orquídea’s debt to the universe would be collected. But first, she had a long life to live.
2
INTRODUCTIONS TO THE PROGENY OF ORQUÍDEA DIVINA
The invitation arrived at the exact moment Marimar Montoya burned her tongue on her midnight cup of coffee. She felt a strange surge ripple through the apartment, as if a phantom had made the lights flicker, the TV turn on, and her computer screen freeze. She grimaced and set down the porcelain cup. It was part of an ancient set from her grandmother’s cabinets, one of twenty-four. She’d shoved it in her duffle bag on the morning she left Four Rivers, just after Gabo, the skeletal rooster, started to crow.
“Not now,” she muttered, slapping the translucent blue shell of her iMac G3. She’d bought it refurbished for fifty dollars from the fancy prep school on the Upper East Side after they upgraded their systems. All Marimar had needed was a way to get on the internet and a word processor where she could attempt to write a novel when she was actually supposed to be working on her college papers.
She licked the tender tip of her tongue against the roof of her mouth and fruitlessly clicked on the mouse. Then gave up and spun around in her swivel chair.
She hadn’t realized how late it was and still had five pages to go in her Gothic Literature essay about Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and his use of fucked-up families. Rey was working late at the office again. The apartment they shared was in the heart of New York City’s Spanish Harlem, and though she’d lived there for six years, she’d never gotten used to the building’s faults. The lightbulbs that blew out days after being installed, the serpentine radiator, the creaky floors, the rusted pipes that ran hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. Still, it was the place Marimar and her cousin Rey had nurtured into a home.
She was reaching for her phone to message him when she noticed the slim square envelope beside it. There was no stamp, only her name and address:
Marimar Montoya
160 East 107th Street, Apt. 3C
New York, NY 10029
She glanced around the living room for anything else out of place. The worn leather sofa with the woolen blanket depicting llamas on the Ecuadorian highlands. Rey’s paintings from high school and a print of Georgia O’Kee
ffe’s Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue she had bought in front of the Met on her first field trip. A solid mahogany coffee table her aunt had rescued from a sidewalk on Fifth Avenue and made Marimar and Rey carry for twenty blocks and three avenues. A stack of magazines, most of them stolen from the office of Hunter College’s literary journal, supermarket coupons, bubblegum-flavored gum, a moldy Nalgene emblazoned with Rey’s accounting firm logo, free NYC-branded condoms in the rotting fruit bowl, the open box housing a half-eaten pizza pie that she’d devoured after work.
Everything was as it had been when she started writing. Except the open window. Instantly, Marimar knew where the envelope had come from.
She got up and went to the window. Downstairs, a group of high school kids were talking shit and sharing chips and quarter waters out of thin black plastic bags. A strange bird lingered on the fire escape. It looked like a blue jay, but it was too big for the kind she occasionally spotted in Central Park. She leaned halfway out the window to grab it, but it flapped away from her grasp, the color leaching out of its feathers as its body rounded into the lazy mass of a common city pigeon. It made a gurgling sound and flew away.
“Tell her to use the phone like normal people,” Marimar shouted at the bird.
The kids below looked up and, realizing who it was, tittered and whisper-hissed the words bruja loca.
Shutting the window and turning the latch, Marimar returned to her desk. The computer was still frozen on the spinning rainbow wheel of death, and so she picked up the envelope. No one wrote letters anymore, not the way she’d seen her grandmother do it. Orquídea would sit at the large dining table with her stationery box, a little metal spoon, and tubes of wax she made herself. Marimar had wondered who she wrote to since Orquídea didn’t have any friends that Marimar knew of, and for a period of time, all their family lived in the same big house. Her grandmother had only ever responded with, “I’m writing letters to my past.”
Marimar peeled off the wax seal and opened the envelope. It had been six years since she’d spoken to Orquídea. Though her grandmother sent them a Christmas card every year—for some reason those did go through the United States Postal Service and always smelled of cinnamon and cloves—Marimar had never reciprocated. Now, she held the new letter to her nose, breathing in the scents of Four Rivers. Of coffee and fresh grass and the seconds before torrential rain. There was also something extra that hadn’t been there when she’d left, but she couldn’t name it.
Marimar withdrew the sturdy cardstock and read the elegant cursive. She shut her eyes and felt a tugging sensation right behind her belly button. Orquídea was so many things: evasive, silent, mean, secretive, loving, and a liar. But she wasn’t dramatic enough for this.
Wasn’t she?
When Marimar was five and chased fireflies around the hills, her grandmother told her to be careful because they could really burn. When Marimar was six and decided she didn’t want to eat chickens in solidarity with Gabo and his wives, her grandmother had told her that the dead chicken’s soul would go to chicken hell if it wasn’t completely consumed. Orquídea told her if she swam to the bottom of the lake, there would be a passageway waiting there to take her to the other side of the world where sea monsters lived. That baking during her menstruation curdled milk, and cooking while angry embittered the food. Tiny, little untruths that Marimar now chalked up to things grandmothers said.
She took a deep breath and reread the letter. No, the invitation. The time is here. I am dying. Come and collect your inheritance.
Marimar picked up her phone and went to text Rey, but the screen glitched.
“Fucking hell,” she muttered. The flickering lights, the computer, her phone. It was all Orquídea’s doing. Certain technology just didn’t pair well with things that came from her grandmother, not even Marimar herself.
This couldn’t wait. She pulled her jean jacket from the back of her chair, grabbed her keys, Walkman, and headphones. When she attempted to lock the door, the key jammed for two minutes before she was able to turn it. Crossing the street, a cab took an extra sharp turn and nearly rammed into her even though she’d had the right of way. As she hurried across the crosswalk, she stepped into an ankle-deep puddle that she swore hadn’t been there before.
Finally safe on the other side, she took a moment to hit play on her Sony CD player and press the foam headphones against her ears. The heavy bass blared as she made the uphill trek along Lexington Avenue to Rey’s office. It was only thirty blocks and she needed the fresh air anyway. She made this walk every day to school. It hadn’t been much different than walking up the hills around her grandmother’s house in Four Rivers, except she’d traded rocks and grass for glittering concrete. Both had cut the strong muscles of her calves and thighs.
El Barrio came alive after sundown like the goblin markets she’d read about in poems. Here, the streets were loud and always smelled of fried meat, dough, plantains, and the underlying rot that rose in billowing steam from New York City’s sewers. She stopped at the kosher deli crammed between two buildings that looked like they might cave in overhead. Outside, four old men played cards and checkers on rickety tables and plastic chairs. Two boys not old enough to shave whistled as she stepped inside. She bought two bagels with extra cream cheese and ignored the same boys who sucked their teeth, accusing her of thinking she was all that. One of the men wearing a bright blue Mets jersey looked up and caught her eye, telling her, “Dios te bendiga, mamita.”
To him and his blessing, she said, “Goodnight.”
When she got to the corner of the street, a homeless man flashed his penis and tried to chase her with his stream of urine.
Marimar couldn’t quite figure out why New York City refused to love her. She’d moved there for high school, after her mother’s tragic and untimely death. She was thirteen and she’d loved Four Rivers once. Still did. With its green hills and clusters of dragonflies that went with her everywhere. But after her mom died, Orquídea left Marimar no choice but to leave.
Most kids would want to trade Nowhere, USA, for the Big City. Four Rivers was technically somewhere. It just wasn’t somewhere most people wanted to be. Only Marimar wasn’t sure she was a Big City kind of girl. Back then, she didn’t know what kind of girl she was, except an orphan living with her tía Parcha and cousin Reymundo in a cluttered apartment facing a street that was always crowded with traffic like one of Manhattan’s clogged arteries. The city’s tough love provided a series of lessons that a soft place like Four Rivers could never teach her. She’d learned how to arm her face the minute she stepped out the door because of boys and men who cast lines her way like she was another fish in that filthy Hudson they called a river. She learned New York evolved because it survived on blood. It was loud because it was a symphony of people shouting their dreams and hoping to be heard. Marimar had longed to add her dreams to that song but when she tried, her voice was a whisper.
New York City, six years later, would not be claimed by Marimar. It was not a place that could be claimed, though many tried. New York seemed to reject her like she was the wrong blood type. She’d been mugged twice before she learned to fight back and discovered that when someone didn’t like you, they’d tell you to your face. When she’d started working at sixteen, she realized she couldn’t keep a job. There was something about her that her employers didn’t like after a while. Things would start off fine. She’d say the right things, go above and beyond. Then, like clockwork, after three months or so, something flipped. Suddenly, she was too pretty, too ugly, too smart, too dim, too short, too quiet, too loud, too—everything, and not enough at the same time. There was always a reason. Once, a manager at the college bookstore told her she was distracting paying customers because people came in just to look at her.
Marimar was stunning like her mother, with hair that fell in rippling dark waves and framed impossibly dark eyes. Brows that were once bushy and would be on trend years later. A nose that had been deemed “ñata” by her grandmother, t
hough she’d never explained the meaning. Small but round at the tip and a little flat. It made her look too young. Button-like. Her skin was the brown of hazelnut shells and running up and down her arms and across her chest were beauty marks in the same pattern as her mother and grandmother.
Sometimes Marimar felt like there was this hole inside of her, amorphous like the negative impression of a tumor. When she was in Four Rivers, she didn’t notice it as much. New York made her notice it for sure. Maybe it was that everyone in this city could see right through her, see the parts of her that were incomplete. Maybe it wasn’t New York’s fault. Maybe she wasn’t unlucky, cursed like Tía Parcha liked to claim. Maybe Marimar just needed to figure out how to accept that this is who she is—a girl with missing pieces.
At least here she didn’t stick out like she had in Four Rivers, where she’d gone to school with seventeen boys named John and thirty-two Mary-Somethings. Even she was, technically, a “Mary Something” too. People thought it was Mari-Mar. María of the sea. But her mother had meant “mar y mar.” Sea and sea.
Why had her mother named her that, of all things? Why hadn’t she asked when she had the chance?
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina Page 2
