The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina

by Zoraida Cordova

  “Does he have nine lives? Like a cat?” Rhiannon asked.

  “Yes, honey,” Tatinelly said, because the chances were highly likely. “He is on his fourth or fifth resurrection.”

  “I’m going to regret asking this,” Mike said, shoving his hands in his pockets. He was sweating despite the cool breeze. “But how is that rooster laying an egg?”

  “Yeah, after the fire, Jameson turned completely blue and started laying eggs,” Marimar said. “I don’t have to buy eggs anymore though. The yolks are green, but you get used to it.”

  “Do you, though?” Mike laughed nervously, and scratched a dry patch on his scalp.

  “Come inside,” Marimar offered. “I called everyone and they should be arriving soon.”

  As the Sullivans followed her inside the house, Mike noted that Marimar looked the same as she had when she was nineteen. Though she had traded her ripped jeans for cotton dresses that made her look like a wind spirit among the tall grass, she still wore her heavy leather boots, which she took off at the front door. Reymundo was different, though. More muscular, beautiful in a way that made Mike stare, pink cheeked and embarrassed.

  Marimar brought out coffee for everyone in the new sitting room. Everything about the house felt new. New trim. New paint. New wallpaper. There were some things that had survived the fire, but barely. Records and photographs Marimar had framed across an entire wall. Tatinelly smiled at the painting that hung over the fireplace, a scorch mark on the bottom half. She thought that the stain resembled the face of a man, but perhaps it was like those shrink inkblots. She poured fat sugar cubes into her coffee and milk that tasted thick and fresh. The coffee itself was different. She shouldn’t have expected Orquídea’s smells and flavors when Orquídea was not here.

  “I’m sorry about your dad,” Reymundo said, pouring bourbon into his coffee.

  “I’m sorry about everyone,” Tatinelly lamented. “My dad’s will says he wants to be cremated and scattered in the river where Orquídea went fishing as a little girl.”

  Marimar frowned, confused. “I remember one Thanksgiving when your dad said fishing was the reason grandma was so mean.”

  “It’s what he wanted.” Tatinelly chuckled. She was at ease and the pain in her bones dampened. So much so that she wondered if her sudden aches had been caused by her fear and anxiety. By being so tense that her body revolted against her. “What about Tía Florecida and Penny?”

  “They’ll be buried here in the family cemetery,” Marimar explained.

  Tatinelly nodded. She turned to the sharp scream coming from the open window. Rhiannon ran across the wild grass chasing Jameson and the dragonflies.

  “I’ll go keep her company,” Mike announced, and excused himself, leaving his empty, untouched cup behind.

  Tatinelly watched him leave, accepting the caress of his hand as he walked past. Then her face turned serious, conspiratorial as she hooked her finger in the direction of her cousins and reeled them in. “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Marimar said, biting the red skin of her thumbnail.

  “Mike doesn’t believe me. But I’ve seen a man following me.”

  “We believe you,” Rey said, sipping from his cup, etched in gold and dotted with a moon and stars. “I’ve seen him. The figure. I’m not sure what it is.”

  “Did he—I don’t know—shine?” Tatinelly let go of an anxious breath.

  Rey nodded. How could that figure be at two opposite sides of the country at once? “What does it want?”

  Marimar touched her flower bud absently. “The bargain Orquídea made. It’s coming back for us.”

  “But what was it? How do we suppose we find out the details?” Rey asked. “We looked. You know we looked. A few pictures. A theater ticket. She couldn’t say it when she was alive, how can she say it now that she’s—transformed?”

  “Have you tried to talk to Orquídea?” Tatinelly asked.

  Marimar scoffed. “She’s as responsive as she was when she was alive. Though apparently Rhiannon can hear her.”

  “So, you haven’t seen anything?” Tatinelly asked.

  “I heard a voice. It told me to open the door.”

  “What did you do?” Tati asked.

  She laughed. “Washed the floors with lemon and salt. Made an altar. Felt ridiculous because nothing happened after that. For a minute I thought it was Enrique being a dickbag.”

  “I mean, he sort of is,” Tati said. “But my mom said he had a run of bad luck. Fraud. Bankruptcy. His wife took everything.”

  “He got married?” Marimar asked and was surprised that it bothered her not to know.

  “Sure, we went to the wedding. She left him for some Saudi prince. He’s living in Ernesta’s basement after she took pity on him because he was sleeping in his car. He’s still family. Anyway, I don’t think he’d have the energy to prank-call, or the money to fly out and scare us. It’s someone else.”

  Rey drained his glass, then poured another. “How do we do the opposite of find out?”

  “Why would we do that?” Tatinelly asked.

  “We’re safe here,” Rey said, clearing any lingering fear from his voice. “Besides, Marimar could use the company.”

  “I would?” She asked.

  Rey winked. “Admit it, you missed us.”

  She did. She missed his laugh. Tatinelly’s calming presence. Even the others. The twins signing and trying to burn everything in sight. The way Caleb Jr. and Ernesta competed with their knowledge of useless trivia.

  “I don’t know.” Marimar crossed the room and stood at the window. Seven years. She’d lived a quiet, good life. Now three of her family members were dead and two were being followed around by a figure only the two of them could see. She didn’t want this. She didn’t ask for this. But neither had they. She thought of something happening to Rey and it made her feel weak. She’d worked too hard to have this life and she’d do everything she could to hang on to it.

  “Orquídea always said that bad things keep on coming when you’re a Montoya.”

  “I thought it was bad things come in threes,” Rey said.

  Tati traced the edges of her mug with her index finger, her eyes fixed to where her daughter ran around the valley like a wild thing, and said, “I’ve always accepted that I’m ordinary and plain, you know. But I can’t ignore this feeling right here. It’s never been there before. It’s telling me that something is coming for us.”

  “Baby, you’re anything but plain,” Rey assured her. He almost wished he hadn’t said anything, because she broke down crying.

  Protect your magic. Those were their grandmother’s collective parting words. Instructions. But how were they supposed to protect something they didn’t know how to wield? How were they supposed to fight a man whose face they hadn’t seen?

  “I’ve tried talking to the tree,” Marimar said. “And raising her ghost. Where else do you keep secrets?”

  Rey shrugged. “What’s the last place your family would think to look?”

  “I keep them in a butter cookie tin and then I get sad when I open the tin and there aren’t any cookies inside,” Tati said.

  Rey choked on his coffee and for a ludicrous, delirious moment, they had a good laugh. They laughed so hard it hurt, so hard it cycled back to tears and then crying again. Manic, cathartic sort of laughter.

  When they were done, Marimar was drawn by Jameson’s crow. Several cars were making the way down the packed-dirt road she’d had fixed. Marimar filled the kettle and then went to greet everyone.

  There were two caskets—one for Florecida, one for Penny. A bereaved Aunt Reina carried the silver urn that held Félix’s ashes. Marimar, Rey, Juan Luis, and Gastón dug the graves. In Four Rivers, which wasn’t considered a town on its own anymore, most families kept their own plots on their land. Marimar hadn’t considered that they’d have to add more bodies so soon.

  The spring dirt was soft, giving way to their shovels. Marimar felt every strike shoot
up her arms. Insects gathered, but it wasn’t like before. They simply waited for their dinner. She hit roots, and realized that the hole wasn’t big enough. She cursed, then apologized even though she wasn’t sorry. She just knew she wasn’t supposed to swear in front of the dead. She hit and hit the ground, trying to dig through the tangle of roots in the way. Rey hit a wall and slumped to the ground.

  Then, a set of hands took the shovel from her. She followed the calloused hands all the way to Enrique’s face. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes looked like spiderwebs. His jade eyes were rimmed red. Dressed in a simple sweater and jeans that hung off his slender figure, he began to dig.

  Marimar opened her mouth to protest. Didn’t he remember what he’d said to her? What he’d said to all of them?

  “Please, Marimar,” he pleaded. “Let me.”

  And so, she let him dig, and dig, and dig.

  When it was all over, they sat down to eat the catering she’d ordered from Uncle Nino’s restaurant. Unlike the day of Orquídea’s passing, there was no cooking, no music, no ghosts. The Montoyas wept in silence and listened to the sounds of the night.

  Marimar could feel their fear. It vibrated from them and into her bones. She had to do something. She had to get answers.

  “Mamá Orquídea is crying too,” Rhiannon said after a while.

  They were in the sitting room, which had once been the old parlor. The other Montoyas, who hadn’t truly noticed the fairy child among them, stared curiously.

  “You can hear her?” Enrique asked.

  Rhiannon nodded. “She said you’re supposed to play music to celebrate the dead. Rey knows the songs.”

  “Ask her if she has anything actually helpful to contribute,” Rey said, slurring his words and ignoring his aunts glaring at him.

  But Rhiannon relayed the comment through her faint connection to Orquídea’s tree. To everyone it just looked like the fairy child was listening to a distant sound. “She’s far away, I think. She said she can’t help.”

  Rey shook his head, but said, “As expected.”

  “Wait!” Rhiannon chirped. “She said you forgot everything she told you.”

  Tatinelly pulled Rhiannon closer. “What did we forget?”

  “The laurel leaves,” Enrique answered, his voice like the scratch of a record. “You never replaced them.”

  Marimar walked out of the room and out the front porch. She took in her house, the labor she’d put into finishing it after so many starts and stops. She could see the silhouettes of her family members in the sitting room. She’d never been afraid of the dark before, not out here. But on that night, moonless, cold, with grave dirt still packed under her fingernails, Marimar Montoya was afraid.

  She wondered if that was what her grandmother had felt during her trek from Guayaquil to Four Rivers. If fear was the key to every decision her grandmother had ever made. Why else put her children on a path that could lead to their deaths? Why keep them locked in a house they’d rebel from?

  Marimar wasn’t Orquídea, but she didn’t have to be. The Montoyas were now hers to protect and it started with the house. She remembered that sensation she’d only truly felt once. That night with Christian Sandoval, when her flower bud had nearly opened. It had reacted to the perceived threat, even for a moment.

  Her muscles still ached from digging the graves, and her heart hurt worse from the things she couldn’t change. She pressed her palm against the front of the door. She’d painted it a deep teal, the color of peacock feathers. She’d bloodied her knuckles sanding the wood beneath. She felt the heat at the core of her palm, and when she withdrew her hand back, there it was. A gold laurel leaf etched into the grain.

  * * *

  Marimar knew what they had to do, even if it would be difficult. The wind howled as she stepped back in and shut the door behind her. In the sitting room, she looked up at Orquídea Divina Montoya, watching them from the half of the painting that had survived the fire. That little girl had grown up. She’d had five husbands and nine children. Even when they thought her heartless and cold, she had given them these gifts. Marimar touched the closed flower bud at her throat. The thorn it grew to fight back against her. There was only one place they could go to learn their grandmother’s secrets.

  Part III

  THE HUNT FOR THE LIVING STAR

  17

  THE LONDOÑO SPECTACULAR SPECTACULAR FEATURING WOLF GIRL, ORQUÍDEA DIVINA, AND THE LIVING STAR!

  Bolívar Londoño III wanted Orquídea Montoya more than anything. But he would take his time. First, he needed to see if she was cut out for this life. The travel made the body weary. His own mother hadn’t been suited for it. His father, Bolívar Londoño II had turned a backwater country magician act into something spectacular. The first Londoño Spectacular had been nothing but a con because the very first Bolívar Londoño had been a conman.

  Born to a Galician mother and a mestizo father from Cartagena, that first Bolívar was orphaned after a fever swept through their town one particularly nasty rainy season. His father’s estranged brother had taken charge of the finances after the funeral, abandoned Bolívar in a dingy little tavern called San Erasmo, then he boarded a ship to Santo Domingo and never looked back.

  Bolívar had nothing but the clothes he was wearing as his uncle had taken everything including their last names. Celia Londoño, the barmaid who found him searching for food in the alley, took him home. Gave him her name, because she’d never had a partner or children of her own. She raised Bolívar in the tavern, and when he got old enough, he was put to work scrubbing the floors and keeping the liquor bottles stocked. He had a knack for fighting and for card tricks, but soon enough the card tricks would have a knack for him.

  After Celia died, he stopped working at San Erasmo and made his fortune cheating at cards. The older he got, and the more money he earned, the more he spent on women, liquor, and gambling. When he lost it all, because he always lost it all, he’d go back and make more. Bolívar would have been devastatingly handsome if he bathed, but there was still something about him. Reckless, easy to provoke into defending his honor, if he’d actually had any. The women who had the misfortune of loving him said there was something of Satan himself in that smile, the jeweled blue of his eyes. He was always half sober, and migrating across the city, coming hard and fast and ruinous as a hurricane.

  Bolívar Londoño never married but fathered a boy, whom he trained in the art of cards. One night, after cheating a merchant out of a small fortune, and even later that night taking the merchant’s wife to bed, Bolívar had a price on his head. A two-wagon traveling variety act called The Spectacular rolled through town the next day, and Bolívar and his boy left Cartagena with them as a father-and-son act who were so clever, so deft at sleight of hand, they were often accused of witchcraft. What the audiences didn’t see was that Bolívar II was so practiced because if he wasn’t, if he fumbled, the father would beat his son within an inch of his life. After the beatings, he’d have to go back out and perform.

  Bolívar, the first one, could have been great. He had the seeds of potential, but there truly was something about him. Not the devilish grin. Not the misfortune or loss. There were some kind of men who could turn a gift into ruin if they weren’t careful, and that was Bolívar. When the Spectacular returned to Cartagena years later, the city remembered Bolívar’s crimes because, even when men don’t remember, the earth does. He was found dead exactly where he was left orphaned all those years ago, only this time there was a dagger in his back. His son, who hadn’t shed a tear, not a single one, for his father, left with the Spectacular, only to inherit it and rename it the Londoño Spectacular.

  Bolívar II was just as handsome as his father. But where his father had cared only about his own needs, Bolívar II care too much about everyone else’s. He gave too much. Too much of his profit. Too much of himself. A happy drunk. Funny. Gullible. Soft. The Londoño Spectacular was his gift to the towns and cities they traveled to, and he would have rather
earned the smile on a child’s face than a dime. But all would change with his son.

  Bolívar Londoño III trained his whole life to be a performer, watching his father’s sideshow turn into a full-blown circus. But he’d always longed for more. He learned how to use alchemy in a way most people could only dream of. He discovered how to make those dreams transmutable, tangible. Under his reign, he transformed the show he inherited into the Londoño Spectacular Spectacular.

  From a very early age, Agustina, the fortune-teller from Málaga, predicted his future. He’d live to be eighty-seven and father one son, but the Londoño line would end with him. Still, he’d be adored by audiences around the world. Just like his father, and his father before him, Bolívar III had the same devil in his smile. Sapphire eyes. A jawline that could have been engraved on a coin. He’d shatter hearts in every continent, and on several seas. He’d grow to be charismatic beyond belief, and well endowed, though some would say too well endowed, and even then, others might say it was really a matter of endurance. Bolívar III’s good fortune would only be marred by a small flaw, his Achilles’ heel, and that was his weak heart. Not fragile, but brittle. Incapable of carrying the weight of love, even when he wanted it to.

  When he met Orquídea, he desperately wanted it to.

  He loved everything about her. The shape of her legs, the burnt sienna of her skin, the way her innocent smile made him want to stop breathing. So enchanted was he by Orquídea Montoya, that he smuggled her on the ship to Paris, and figured out a way to procure her documents. She’d had a small backpack to her name, carried her birth certificate folded into a little square. She had no passport, no family. She had no table manners, and swore like the stable boys, but none of that mattered.

  On her first night as La Sirena del Ecuador, he missed his cues several times. Only his crew noticed, of course. Bolívar III didn’t make it a habit of bedding the new performers. The idea of having a family felt like something better suited for other men. After all, he was left in his own father’s dressing room after his mother ran off with the Ukrainian contortionist. Before that, his father had been orphaned. And before that, his grandfather had been abandoned. He knew there was a weakness in his heart—his lineage—and took great care to not spill his seed where he did not want it to grow. Not after the Italian Knife Thrower had nearly bludgeoned him to death when their tryst fizzled. And so, he did his best not to linger at Orquídea’s set.