“Yeah,” Marimar finished for her.
At that moment, Rey stepped back into the hall with a crystal highball glass in hand, complete with a sprig of rosemary and ice. Marimar snatched the drink and ignored the incredulity dawning on his face.
“Mike can have this one,” Marimar said. She handed it to the twin who wasn’t holding the rooster and winked at them both. “Take this up to Tati’s husband. And keep Gabo safe.”
They shared the Montoya grin that held a thousand secrets.
“I guess I’d better go and make a new drink,” Rey said. He extended his arm to Tati. “Orquídea wants to see you.”
Marimar took a step back when she saw the outline of a foot pushing right through her cousin’s shirt.
Tati rubbed her belly. “Oh! I thought she was talking to Enrique.”
“He’s off somewhere being an anthropomorphized bag of dicks,” Rey said.
With Rey and Tatinelly off to see their grandmother, the twins trying to protect the family pet, and the others cooking up a storm, Marimar needed to do her part. She needed to get to work.
For a long time after moving to New York, all Marimar wanted was to push away memories of the house and Orquídea Divina. The brutal love of the city served as a barrier to the constant reminder of her mother’s tragic drowning, or the valley and the orchards with their glistening ever-ripe fruit. But the memories inevitably found her, because putting Four Rivers out of her mind and heart was like trying to live day to day with a blindfold and her hands tied behind her back. Marimar thought she was done with Four Rivers, but Four Rivers wasn’t done with her.
Now that she was here, she couldn’t avoid it. Marimar remembered splitting her nail down the center trying to claw out the laurel leaves on the door. “This is your fault!” she’d screamed, blood spilling on the floorboards. “You didn’t protect her. You killed her.” Marimar remembered the way Orquídea’s palm had stung against her cheek, and the stillness, the silence of the house as Orquídea sat in her goddamned chair and drank her goddamned whiskey and settled into that deafening silence that could last for days. They never even said goodbye.
Pena Montoya had drowned. Marimar accepted that now, but she hadn’t wanted to believe it then. She’d needed someone to blame, and that was Orquídea. She’d loved her grandmother. Wanted to possess her magic, too. She’d wasted seven years simmering in her anger and all it took was a few hours breathing in the dusty air, seeing her grandmother in this state, and she was homesick enough to forgive.
She wondered, did everyone have such a fraught relationship with the places they came from? Did anyone else have a grandmother who might as well have been a legend, a myth, a series of miracles that took the shape of an old woman?
Orquídea wasn’t an old woman anymore. She was transforming, and Marimar couldn’t help wondering if that meant she would transform, too, one day.
She picked up a broomstick and swept away the layers of dust and decay that gathered in every corner of the downstairs rooms. Green and brown-striped snakes nestled in ceramic bowls and on the carpet, faded from exposure to the sun. She remembered Rey saying that he’d been bitten by one.
“Shoo!” she hollered.
Their eyes snapped open at her like Marimar was the bother and hissed as they slithered outside through the holes in the walls created by Orquídea’s vines.
Silvery spiderwebs glistened, entire arachnid cities stretching along the banister, up the stairs, and across the ceiling. Marimar ran the broom along those surfaces, and the spiders crawled out in quick succession. She shivered when she thought she heard them speak. But then she realized she was hearing loud chatter and laughter that came from the kitchen.
Rey returned then, with two glasses in hand. “I brought two just in case you decided to give my things away again.”
Marimar traded her broom for his cocktail. When she sipped the rum, the air carried with it the smell of burned sugar. It was strong and sweet on her tongue. “What did Orquídea want with Tatinelly?”
“I’d never eavesdrop.”
She hummed her incredulity and took another sip. “Sure.”
“I truly stopped paying attention after I realized they were going through baby names.”
“I hope she doesn’t name the kid Orquídea.”
“If grandma is handing out fortunes, I’d change my name to Orquídea.”
Marimar rolled her eyes and carried her drink and broom back down the hall. Rey followed her into the parlor where Orquídea would listen to old records. Martin would sing along to Billie Holiday or the Buena Vista Social Club, and Marimar would play with her dolls while Rey complained that the music was old, and tried to pick the lock to the closet no one could get open.
Marimar bent down in front of the wooden chest that contained all the records. The paper was worn, but the shiny vinyl was still intact. She blew on the surface and set the needle. The record player warbled and scratched, like it was remembering that it still worked after all these years. The sounds of El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico filled the room, down the halls. Orquídea never danced—not in front of Marimar, at least—but she used to wag her foot to the beat, the congas, the brass.
Now, they cleaned and sang along, putting all the weirdness of the day into the cathartic rhythm of a song whose words they only understood tangentially. It felt like a ritual, preparing the body of the house for burial. When the record reached the crackling end, they sat on the floor and finished lukewarm drinks.
“How long do you think it’s been like this?” Rey whispered.
“A long time,” she said with certainty.
“Don’t you start feeling guilty.” Rey rested his head against the wall, slurring his words a bit. “We didn’t do this. We didn’t make her do this. She came this way. In fact, she’s the reason we’re like this.”
“Like what?” she asked, but she knew.
“Broken, Marimar. Missing pieces.”
“Maybe you should ease up on the rum.”
“Maybe you should learn to sweep. You missed a spot.”
She shoved him and he fell over laughing. A sound reverberated in the room. They looked at the record player, but the needle was raised. They looked out into the hall, but there was no one there. They were used to the strange noises of the house, the metal joints that needed to be greased, the crickets and birds that liked to gather too close. But this sound was a heavy thump. A fist against a door. It seemed to come from the locked closet in the music parlor.
They listened, just to be sure.
The sound in the room was hollow, like negative space. Like the end of the vinyl record searching for more music to play.
And the fist thumped again.
“One time she caught me trying to pick the lock,” Rey said. “Orquídea told me that was where her monster lived and if I kept bothering it, the thing would use its nails to poke my brain through the keyhole.”
“Charming.” Marimar took a deep breath, got up, and went to the closet door. It was locked, just as it had always been.
“I know there’s a key. I just never found it.” Rey started opening drawers, rummaging through tiny ceramic bowls containing everything from bits of yarn to a coyote skull and dried husks of purple corn. Marimar couldn’t recall a time her grandmother had ever knitted anything, so yarn, out of everything in the entire house, was the strangest thing they’d found so far.
“Actually,” Rey said, pointing at a blue vase in the dusty cabinet. “This thing is supposed to contain a duende who liked to steal our dreams at night.”
As a little girl, Marimar believed that the house had duendes living in the closets, making all of the sweets disappear. In her mind, the mischievous spirits had been the sworn enemies of the good fairies that lived in the tall grass of the valley.
Marimar grabbed the blue vase and stuck her hand in. She wiggled her fingers and felt nothing. Then, something metal and cold rattled against the ceramic. She fished out a skeleton key and brandished it to her cous
in.
“Look at that,” she marveled.
“I’m personally hoping whatever is behind that door is a beautiful man with a never-ending supply of booze.”
Marimar considered it. “You have to be specific. Is he holding the booze or is it coming from him?”
Rey was stumped. “I actually don’t know what I’d prefer.”
Marimar laughed nervously, turning the key between her fingers. What did Marimar hope was behind that door? A tunnel to another world? They were too old for stories like that now, but belief in the impossible never truly went away. Did it? She remembered wishing on Orquídea’s altar. Shutting her eyes so tightly she saw pinpricks of light behind her lids. She’d wished for good grades. She’d wished to meet the father that had abandoned them. She’d wished to be as magical and impossible as her grandmother.
She unlocked the door and, like so many parts of the house, it wheezed as it opened. She pulled on the chain hanging from the ceiling, while Rey peered over her shoulder and gasped.
Marimar felt heat behind her eyelids, the sting of tears that she wished she could keep back.
There were boxes and boxes, each one labeled with handwritten names—Pena. Parcha. Félix. Florecida. Silvia. Enrique. Ernesta. Caleb Jr.
Orquídea had always said that she gave her mother’s things away. Marimar had seen the local church ladies drive over to collect boxes of donations. Orquídea wasn’t sentimental about things like booties and baby clothes. But as Marimar rummaged through the eighties prom dresses and little league jerseys and cleats too small to fit even Juan Luis and Gastón, she considered that perhaps her grandmother was an ocean of sentiment. She just didn’t want anyone to see it.
“Well, she never fails to surprise.” Rey yanked a photo album from his mom’s box and sat in Orquídea’s favorite chair. “Yes! Embarrassing photos.”
When he flipped to the first page, there was only a tan residue where photos had been stuck once and the crinkle of a sheer plastic protector. He flipped and flipped. There was nothing for a few pages until he landed on a grainy photograph.
“Is that—” Marimar sat on the arm of the chair and stared at the picture. Pena and Parcha Montoya were so young, possibly nineteen or eighteen. Cheesy smiles, cropped halter tops, high-waisted jeans, and big hoop earrings.
“Your mom never changed,” Marimar said to Rey.
He traced his finger across the bright spot beside them. A light that cast them in an incandescent glow. There were more pictures on the following pages, each one with an overexposed flash taking up space. They were at a local carnival, the one the church and high school always put on to raise money over the summer.
“Is that a double date?” Rey laughed. “This is definitely my dad. Holy fuck, why haven’t I ever seen this one before?”
“Wait.” Marimar plucked the picture off the sticky sheet and peered closer. Beneath the flash was a fourth person. Obstructed. But he was there, an arm wrapped around her mother’s shoulder. The blurry outline of a hand, a silver ring with an eight-pointed star engraved at the center.
“Is that—?” Rey started to ask.
The pressure behind Marimar’s belly button returned, then extended across her skin, wound around her muscles. She was being pulled apart. After nineteen years, this photo, developed at the Four Rivers drug store and stored in a box, was all she had of the man she’d never met.
“I think that’s my father.”
9
THE GIRL AND THE MOONLIT PATH
After Isabela’s wedding to Wilhelm Buenasuerte, Orquídea’s life changed, just as her mother had promised. The entire city was changing, too. Every time Orquídea walked to school there was new construction. New bridges and ramps. Ships in the Guayaquil harbor loading thousands and thousands of bananas for export.
Wilhelm Buenasuerte led the charge to developing La Atarazana, starting with the single-road town where he’d first met Orquídea and fallen in love at first sight with Isabela. A contract with the city had allowed him to modernize and pave the streets. Isabela had turned over the modest plot of land she’d bought when she had no one but her daughter, and Wilhelm used that land to build a great big house with a courtyard, and two levels that overlooked the river. He pushed out smaller, poorer families, but there were some who stayed put. Who’d empty out their bedpans full of shit and urine every time the “German Engineer” swung by. But Wilhelm would not give up his new claim on the neighborhood and he was a patient man.
Despite all the changes, La Atarazana still felt like it belonged to Orquídea. She’d carved her name on a small boulder on the river shore and it was her name that the locals acknowledged when she went on strolls with her pregnant mother and stepfather, a fact that gave Wilhelm Buenasuerte a permanent scowl between his brows.
Orquídea had been forbidden from fishing or swimming in the river, especially by herself. But the fishermen knew her. They protected her more than the Buenasuertes did. And besides, she was still the only one in her little pier who could catch the most fish. Sometimes she snuck the fish home and handed them to Jefita, the housekeeper. But mostly, she took her pail down the row of shanty houses and offered her catch to la viuda Villareal, to Jacinto, who’d lost his leg at the border war with Peru, to Gabriela, whose husband left her too bruised and beaten to leave the house. They didn’t care that she smelled like fish and mud. They blessed her, but not even those blessings could counteract Orquídea’s cosmic bad luck, or the treatment she endured in the Buenasuerte house.
Once a week, without fail, Wilhelm and Isabela Buenasuerte hosted the elite of the city. Lawyers and doctors. Actors and soccer players. Ambassadors and artists. They opened their home to host brilliant minds. There was Alberto Wong, a philosopher who’d spend an entire month with the Buenasuertes theorizing on the happiness quotient in coastal populations versus those of the colder regions. There was a socialist poet from Bolivia who spent every dinner shouting with Wilhelm, and then laughing between puffs of cigars late into the night. It was the summer of Orquídea’s fifteenth birthday when he’d shared his cigars with her and written several poems about her skin, her hair, her lips. Her mother had locked her in every night, and even though Orquídea had no interest in men yet, she did as her mother said and occupied her time caring for her four siblings.
The Buenasuerte-Montoyas were a large brood. Isabela got pregnant on her wedding night and didn’t stop being pregnant until her sixth child, Ana Cruz, was born prematurely, and her uterus slithered out of her body with the baby.
By the sixth child, Isabela had settled well into the role of a celebrated engineer’s wife. She was still a beauty, turned plump and delicate like the macarons Wilhelm surprised her with on his returns from Paris. She never corrected her guests when they assumed Orquídea was another housemaid. She never let Orquídea sit at large banquets or put her in too-pretty dresses so that men wouldn’t leer at her. Perhaps in some way, Isabela believed she was protecting her first daughter from the cruelty of the world she’d become a part of. But the first cruelties Orquídea learned were the ones Isabela doled out herself.
When Orquídea was fourteen, she wouldn’t stop going to the river, so her mother marched to the shore, ripped the net out of her hands, and heaved it into the water, where it sank and snagged on a tangle of reeds. Orquídea still went to the river’s edge and stood by the pier, but she didn’t fish. She talked to no one. She simply watched the canoes, the ships in the distance, and the clouds swallowing the skyline of Guayaquil and Durán across the way.
The summer when her mother had Ana Cruz, and lost her uterus, Wilhelm’s family came to stay, and Orquídea lost any chance she had to visit the river. Instead, her days were occupied with tending to the colicky Ana Cruz. She’d had to give up her room to the guests and sleep on a cot in the nursery. When she wasn’t caring for the baby, she was helping Jefita do everything from peel potatoes to slaughter two dozen turkeys. She cleaned every part of the house, but as soon as she was finished mopping, the Buen
asuerte cousins—Mila and Marie—would stomp around with muddy shoes. They threw bloody underwear to be laundered when they caught her in the courtyard. They taught little Wilhelm Jr. and Maricela that Orquídea’s skin was made out of polished wood, like a marionette, and couldn’t bleed, and so they tested that theory by pinching her so hard they drew blood with their jagged, bitten nails. Mila and Marie stayed for two years.
Some people were born evil, some people were taught. Her siblings were both. Orquídea had been born cursed and adrift, but at least she hadn’t been born evil. She still had that. Her siblings—though they were only between the ages of six and one—were her own personal demons. They ran wild, red-faced from the heat, trailing after German-speaking cousins and repeating every insult they could toward their half-sister.
Once, when Wilhelm Jr. refused to get dressed for school, he shoved Orquídea down the stairs. The doctor who came to the house told her she had a concussion and a sprained ankle and needed to stay off it. Isabela told her to be less clumsy. They had a feast in a month’s time to prepare for. During the two weeks she spent off her feet, Wilhelm was tasked with taking food up to his sister.
“She’s not my sister.” He’d repeat the words he’d heard his father use: “She’s a bastard.”
But the little boy went anyway. He’d leave her food outside the nursery door, and in his pure childish boredom decided to make things more interesting. He found the raw carcass of a fish in the garbage and added it to her soup as a garnish.
After that, Orquídea got her own meals, limping her way to the kitchen three times a day. She didn’t mind because that way she could sit in the courtyard gardens. There, in Orquídea’s arms, while swinging back and forth in the hammock with a radio crackling the latest boleros, it was the only time Ana Cruz didn’t cry.
On October 9, Guayaquil’s Independence Day, the streets were flooded with parades of cars and revelers. Fireworks burst from alleyways and street corners. The pale blue and white of Guayaquil’s flag waved proudly from the front of the Buenavista home. Anyone who was anyone in the city attended the feast.
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