The Orchid Sister

by LeClaire, Anne D.

  She heard in his voice all the passion and conviction that had so captivated her five months back when she had arrived for the first time.

  And she heard, too, the madness. But what would happen to her if this new protocol failed? She shook off a tremor of fear and forced herself to think clearly. Time was running out.

  In the morning, when Rosa appeared with her breakfast tray, Kat smiled and continued her efforts to befriend her. Still unsure how much Spanish Rosa understood, she chatted with her, keeping the subjects neutral and speaking in a soft voice, one she might adopt when comforting a frightened or abused child. She needed an ally, and thus far Rosa was her only possibility.

  When the Mayan turned to leave, Kat stopped her. She unclasped the necklace that hung from her neck and gave it to Rosa. The woman recoiled, as if the object in her palm had burned her, and she pushed it back at Kat. But Kat smiled and shook her head, closing Rosa’s fingers around the golden K. Their eyes met, and Rosa murmured a word Kat didn’t understand. But when she left the room, she took Kat’s necklace with her.

  MADISON

  When Maddie appeared on the terrace for breakfast, Jack was already there. She joined him and he motioned for the waiter to bring her coffee. “Sleep well?” he asked.

  “Yes. Did you?” In spite of having slept nearly ten hours, she was still tired. Lethargic. She put it down to the dramatic change of climate that was taking a while to become acclimated to. They’d had a dinner at the hotel the night before and then agreed to make it an early evening. Their parting had been awkward. They had lingered for a few moments in the corridor outside their rooms, as if each were waiting for a signal from the other. A sign that never came.

  “Out cold,” he said. The waiter, different from the one who had served her yesterday, approached with the silver coffee service and handed her a menu. Jack’s breakfast was in front of him, a large plate that held salsa and scrambled eggs and sliced avocado. The travel and stress had left her with little appetite, and she ordered only fruit and coffee. Before the server left with her order, she showed him the photo of Kat, told him she was looking for her.

  “Ask Ángel,” he said, and pointed out to the waterfront to the boy standing by the ticket booth at the pier. “Ángel sees everything that happens in Playa.”

  “Gracias,” she said. When he returned with her breakfast, she nibbled at the fruit and drank the coffee. He had brought her a sweet roll, although she had not ordered it, and she pushed it aside. She glanced out to where the boy, Ángel, stood. She was eager to follow this lead, faint though it was, and waited impatiently for Jack to finish his eggs. He caught her eyes, and although she believed she had concealed her restlessness, he crumpled his napkin and tossed it on the table.

  “Let’s get going,” he said. Together they headed for the ticket booth.

  “Buenos días, señorita,” Ángel said. He nodded at Jack. “Señor.”

  “Habla inglés?” Maddie asked.

  “Sí. You would like to buy a ticket?”

  “No.”

  “You like to scuba, perhaps?” He had the street smarts and quickness of a hustler. “But you must try it. The best reefs in all of Mexico are right here in Playa.” He held out a brochure. “Is this your first time in Playa?”

  “Yes.” She had to admire his determination. Although she judged him to be no more than fifteen or sixteen, he knew the trick of engaging them with a stream of questions, each punctuated with his smile.

  “Do you work here every day?” she asked.

  “Sí. Every day. You want to buy a ticket to Cozumel?”

  “No. But perhaps you can help me with something.”

  His grin flashed again. “Sí. I am Ángel. I can help you with whatever you need. Ask anyone in Playa.”

  Maddie retrieved the photo of Kat. “Have you seen her? Mi hermana.”

  He studied the photo carefully. Something flickered in his eyes that Maddie registered as recognition, and she felt a moth-wing flutter of hope. He looked up at her and then down at the picture. “Muy bella,” he said.

  “Have you seen her? She has visited your village. She stayed here.” She pointed to the hotel. “There at the Molcas.” He continued to look at the picture. She could almost see his mind at work, figuring an angle.

  “Perhaps. Sí. Perhaps. I think so. Yes.”

  She exchanged a glance with Jack and tried to quiet the flutter of hope, even as it grew stronger. Was the boy just trying to please her, or had he actually seen Kat? “When?”

  “A few weeks?” He made this a question, as if uncertain.

  A few weeks? She clutched Jack’s arm and stepped closer to the ticket booth. “Where? Where did you see her?”

  He hesitated, as if considering something and then, having decided, pointed down the beach, away from the Hotel Molcas and beyond the shops where, in the distance, was a row of shacks. “There.”

  Doubt again crept in. Her hand dropped from Jack’s arm. Surely Kat would not be staying at one of those places. “You’re sure?”

  “Sí. She went to see the diver. Many people go to him.”

  “The diver?”

  “Sí. Víctor. The diver. Go down there, señorita. Past the Blue Parrot.” He took the brochure from her and pointed to a drawing on the front fold. “Vic’s Dive Shop. You go there. He will tell you what you want to know. Tell him Ángel sent you.”

  “Gracias.” Before she could fish change from her tote, Jack was handing two coins to him.

  With the quickness of a pickpocket, he took the pesos. “You go see Víctor,” he said again.

  She clutched the brochure. As they headed off toward the row of shacks, she turned to Jack. “Do you think he really saw Kat?” she asked. Her mouth was dry, and she regretted not bringing the bottle of water from her room.

  “Hard to tell,” he said. “I’m not sure if he was telling you what he thought you wanted to hear or not. If I had to go by my gut, I’d say this diver might know something.”

  Two men, clearly Americans, were setting out scuba gear in front of the first shack she passed. She knew the type. They were expatriates, older than she first thought. Hippies who had arrived to sleep in campers on the beach and live the beach life. She had seen men like them in Oaxaca and Guerrero when she’d studied the work of mask makers there right after graduation. The trip had been a graduation gift from Kat. They had traveled together—Kat had been unable to convince her to fly, and Maddie remembered the hours and hours of driving as they’d crossed the continent and down over the border. Kat had never once complained. If she resented Maddie’s fear of flying, it never showed. Once again, her sister had been there for her when she needed her. Recalling that and all the ways Kat had supported her, she was grateful to Lonnie for pushing her into this trip. Grateful, too, that Jack had come in support. It was this that made her reach for his hand as they crossed the sand. If he was surprised by this, he did not show it.

  As they neared the first shack, she wondered if it was possible that Kat had gotten involved with a man. A vacation romance. Well, what if she had? After all, Kat was an adult. She had never pretended to be a nun. She had a life of her own, a right to do whatever she wanted. Maddie remembered Tom, the trainer in the gym in Georgetown. Perhaps Kat had found another muscular guy to keep her company. Perhaps when she’d heard that Maddie was in love with Jack, she had seen that as an opportunity to start a new life chapter herself. If that was the case, the last thing she would want was to have Maddie showing up. Uninvited. Perhaps unwanted. Maybe Kat wanted more distance between them. More boundaries. Had Maddie misread their relationship? Had she been the one who, out of neediness and dependence, had clung too hard? Had she always been the one to phone Kat, demanding closeness, intruding on Kat’s life more than she realized? These thoughts felt so alien. Why would they come to her now? She wondered if it were possible to really know another, or if she had just projected her own needs and desires on what she needed Kat to be.

  “Hey,” Jack said. />
  She turned to him. “What?”

  “What’s going on?”

  She realized that at some point when she had been thinking about Kat she had stopped walking and slipped her hand from Jack’s. “I just need to think a minute. Okay?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She nearly confided in him, nearly shared the conflicting thoughts that surged through her mind, separating out what she remembered, what she knew to be true, and what she had always imagined or wanted to be so, very nearly asked him if she had been foolish to rush off to Mexico. After all, who had made her Kat’s keeper? No one. Certainly not Kat, who hadn’t even let her know where she was going. But everything was all entwined. If she had panicked, she knew that part of her reaction had been at her ending the relationship with Jack. Had this entire mission to find Kat been nothing more than a way of escaping from the pain of a broken relationship? She caught her breath as if she had been running. Hadn’t that been what she had always done? Run from pain? Run from memories? Run from Jack? None of this could she share with the man standing so patiently at her side.

  The sense of purpose that had driven her during the past days drained from her. If they returned to the hotel now, she could be packed and ready to leave in minutes. At this time of year they should be able to get seats on a flight back to Boston.

  “Maybe,” she finally said. “Maybe Kat doesn’t want to be found.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She tried to explain her thoughts, her speculation of why Kat might have a need for time alone, a little independence.

  He listened thoughtfully. After a moment, he said, “Why would you think that, Maddie? I obviously don’t know Kat, but everything you’ve told me about her and about your relationship seems the opposite of what you’re suggesting.”

  She stared at the brochure as if the answers to all her questions were contained in the glossy print. Black letters on a yellow background. A photo of a couple outfitted in diving gear. A decorative border of flowers. Orchids. The flowers froze her gaze. She remembered the bone-dry soil in the flowerpots in Kat’s home. The dried blossoms on the floor.

  And then she remembered the syringe hidden in the bathroom drawer.

  “You’re right,” she said to Jack. “Of course you’re right.” Whatever she learned about Kat, whatever secrets her sister held, she would deal with them.

  The dive shop instantly reinforced the mental picture of an aging hippie that she had formed of its owner. It was a thatched-roof shanty with a half dozen plastic chairs set in the strip of sand in front. Six diving cylinders were propped against the front wall, the paint on each worn off, the steel beneath burnished dull by contact with sand and sea. At the water’s edge, a laborer bent over an upturned boat, repairing the bottom with patches of fiberglass. The chemical smell of resin floated down the beach to her. No one else was in sight. As she drew nearer she could hear the man singing, one of those brooding melodies she associated with lost love, regardless of the language. If the man was aware of them, he gave no sign. “Jeez,” she said to Jack, “What are we, invisible?” For some reason, this amused him, which only increased her indignation.

  “Hola,” she called out.

  The man looked up and laid the brush atop the resin can. He was taller than most of the native residents she had seen in Playa. There was something about the way he held his body, the set of his shoulders, that told her he was fully aware of his effect on women. For that alone she distrusted him. She was glad that Jack was with her. She waved the brochure Ángel had handed her and spoke slowly. “We are looking for Víctor, the diver.”

  He smiled, revealing teeth white and even.

  “Do you know where I can find him?” she asked, struggling to keep the impatience from her voice.

  When he spoke, his voice still held a hint of music. “Hola,” he said. “I am Víctor.”

  Jack stepped forward and held out his hand in greeting. Maddie held back, studying the diver’s face, saw in it pride. And beneath that, something it took a moment to interpret. At first, she thought it was loneliness, and then she understood: it was sorrow.

  VÍCTOR

  Víctor understood much about certain of the foreign women who came to his village. Women of the desperate eyes, he called them. They drank too much and laughed too hard, but despite their forced gaiety he did not judge them harshly. He understood their laughter hid wounds, their drinking filled emptiness. They were not so very different in that way from him. It seemed to him that these women came seeking to find some vision of their destinies. Or perhaps not. Perhaps that was only his romantic imaginings, and they simply came for a vacation.

  Still, he felt a kinship with the women. Whatever their reason for coming to Playa, he understood their restlessness. Years before, a similar discontent had caused him to leave this village. For twenty-five years he had traveled until, finally, he grew tired of wandering from one place to another, weary of holding on to the pain he wished to escape, the disappointment of not finding what he sought. After those twenty-five years, he was ready to return to Playa.

  He had been born in this village and from the time of his birth until he was fifteen, he had lived in the house of his abuela. He was known to everyone as Víctor the Orphan. And later, Víctor the Bastard. Seldom was he called by these names anymore. Now the people of Playa called him Víctor the Diver. But sometimes, inside, he still felt like Víctor the Orphan. The Bastard. Such a name, even when no longer spoken, was not one easily forgotten.

  His madre had died when he was four months old. Naturally he held no memory of her face, but as a boy he had discovered two things about her. The first was that she had been beautiful. Her loveliness was a legend in Playa, so much so that even now, all these years later, the old ones still used her as the measure against which to judge all beauty. “The youngest daughter of Hector and María is pretty,” they would agree, “but she cannot compare to the loveliness of Consuelo Díaz. Never has there been another such beauty in our village.”

  If there existed photographs of his madre, he had not seen them. There was nothing to validate these claims, but from what others had told him, he held images of what she must have been like, pictures developed in his heart. From old Juan, he learned that his mother’s hair was long and thick and as black as a moonless midnight sky. Her eyes, he heard from the madre of Carlos Mendes, were as black as her hair. And as shining. Her voice, José Ventura told him, rivaled the song of birds. And her skin—this, too, from José—her skin was smooth like the flesh of a mango. Luis, the fisherman, remembered that her laugh was as light as the flight of the hummingbird. And the scent of her skin, his abuela said on the few times he could persuade her to talk of it, her scent could be found deep in the blossom of the vanilla bark. Only one person, his tía Clara, had refused his requests to speak of his mother, her sister. From these pieces he’d gathered from the others, he put together an icon of his madre, and wherever he went in the village, whatever his eyes fell on—sky and mango and hummingbird—and whatever familiar smells and sounds he sensed—of birdsong and vanilla blossoms, he recognized some part of her.

  This was the other truth he had learned. His madre had not been wed when he was born. He’d heard the whispers, but no one would tell him who his padre had been. At sixteen, Víctor stood taller than the other men, nearly five foot ten, and from this he concluded that his padre must have been an outsider. When he left Playa del Pedro, it was not only to escape the fate of being known as Víctor the Bastard, but to find as well a tall man in whose face he could see traces of his own.

  At forty-one, he had returned. His grandmother was gone then, and his only other living relative was his aunt, Tia Clara, the half-mad fortune-teller who wanted nothing to do with him. He built a shack close to the sea, to the blue and green waters that he had missed every day he had been away. He was a strong swimmer, a good laborer. Soon Luis the fisherman offered him a job, and in this way he came to know the reefs along
the coast as well as he did the contours of his own heart. He fished and saved, putting away money until he had enough to buy his own boat and some equipment. Then he began to take tourists out in his boat, to show them the magic world of the reefs. To the women, he taught other pleasures. At night, in the cantina or on the moonlit beach, he would sing to them and, sometimes, and only if they wanted, he took them to his bed. During such times he saw their loneliness ease and their desperate eyes soften. But only for a short while, for there was a hunger in them, an emptiness that he could not fill. Just as they could not fill his. Until one day he had met the one who could.

  He regarded the couple who stood before him, seeing the quiet strength in the man and the sadness in the woman with the scarred face.

  “Hola,” she said. “We are looking for a diver named Víctor.”

  “Hola,” he said. She held in her hand a brochure, and he understood that Ángel had sent them to him. “I am Víctor.”

  The man offered his hand first. “Jack,” he said. “This is Madison.”

  Víctor wiped his hands on a rag and shook both of their hands.

  “People call me Maddie,” the woman said. At that moment, Kuko scurried from his shelter beneath the overturned boat and darted across the sand. The iguana nearly touched the feet of the gringa, and Víctor waited for the inevitable scream. They were so nervous, these women.

  But she did not yell. Or even move. He had yet to see her smile. He concluded that she was not like an ordinary gringa, and not just because she bore such scars on her face.

  “You take people out to the reefs or the island?” the man asked.

  “Yes. You are interested?”

  “No.” The woman reached into her bag and pulled out a picture, which she handed to him. “Mi hermana,” she said.

  His eyes widened in the shock of recognition as he looked at the photo.