Rey lit a cigarette and looked down, already done with work even though they’d just started. “She’s a tree.”
“The tree is alive.”
They went on like that for days. Marimar going through the motions; Rey trying to cheer her up. Marimar saying three things to the crew: Hello, do you want something to drink?, and see you tomorrow.
Rey tasked himself with finding out every detail of their lives. Chris was allergic to poison ivy and failed at being a Boy Scout because he wound up in the hospital after falling into a pit of the stuff. Kalvin was the seventh kid in a giant family, so another reason he hadn’t gone off to college is because, by the time they got to the third kid, his parents had run out of money. Chris sang to the classic rock station he set up in his car and was full of semi-useless information about the sex lives of rock stars, but he killed at trivia nights at the pub. Kalvin had donated a kidney to his older sister two years ago. Chris tried to pull Marimar into conversation, but she mostly just smiled politely and tucked her hair behind her ear and pushed down the fluttering sensation beneath her skin when he looked at her that way.
Marimar had found camping gear in one of the sheds from when Caleb Jr. had discovered John Muir and had wanted to hike in every National Park. He’d gone to Yosemite once and returned home the next day. His tents and sleeping bags still smelled new.
She turned the camp they set up into a little home. Kept the firepit roaring when she couldn’t sleep, and the sound of dragonflies and frogs kept her up at night. Marimar discovered it was Kalvin who was gay when she was roaming through the orchards and found him and Rey kissing among the dead trees. Part of her wished that she wanted that. But she mostly wanted to be alone. To figure out why the flower bud at her throat hadn’t bloomed but Rhiannon’s and Rey’s had. It was the part of him that Kalvin kept touching.
A week after the fire, when Rey was still asleep with Kalvin in his tent, Marimar worked up the nerve to try and talk to Orquídea.
“You owe me more than this.” She pressed her hand to the undulating roots that could have only belonged to a tree that had been in the same place for hundreds of years. Bright green leaves rustled in the summer breeze. The moonstone center gleamed against the night. Pedrito’s serene, sleeping face haunted her even when she was awake. “What happened to you?”
But Marimar got no answers.
She put the anger toward her grandmother into her work, going through the destruction of the house like she was looking for a passage to the other side of the earth. Three weeks later, there were two piles—salvageable and not.
Among the things that could be saved were several stone mortars and pestles, bottles of herbs and seeds carefully labeled and protected in a metal box. Part of the portrait that Reymundo had gifted his grandmother; only the bottom half had burned. A photo album that Orquídea had kept in her room. The deed to the house and land. A tin box of letters with paper so thin, Marimar thought it was a miracle it hadn’t burned. Not a miracle. Magic. Then there was the Virgin Mary statue from the altar, the one where she’s depicted with brown skin and three crowns of stars. Orquídea’s favorite pen. And, to Rey’s joy, a trunk of records.
It didn’t feel like enough, but it was what was left. How could her grandmother’s entire life be reduced to these memories? She’d come to touch the green bud at her throat every time she was pensive, and she was growing used to the new appendage.
Gabo the rooster, whose feathers had turned an unnatural cobalt blue, had survived, too. If Orquídea had been telling the truth, then this made it Gabo’s third resurrection. Rey found him walking around through the ash, devouring fire beetles and trying to nest in a small crook of Orquídea’s roots. Sometimes Gabo walked alongside Marimar and Rey on crisp mornings when the fire pit wasn’t enough to keep them warm, so they took to heating up by walking up the steep hills.
“I’m going to get a record player,” Rey announced.
“You should try the antique shop on Main.”
“Kalvin’s sister works there. Maybe she’ll give me a discount.”
“But where are you going to plug it in? We don’t have electricity.”
“We will.” He sounded sure, bright. “You know what’s weird? That’s all I can hear. Even now. An earworm. Those songs that I played at the funeral. Or was it a wake? Or Shiva?”
“We’re not Jewish.”
“Caleb Soledad was.”
“Don’t invoke them. Enrique might show up.”
“Fuck Enrique. Also, we haven’t discussed the fact that our grandmother had five husbands. Five. I mean, get it, Grandma, but why wouldn’t she tell anyone about the first husband? Who do you think he was?”
Marimar shook her head. “I don’t know, but his ghost wasn’t there.”
She told Rey her theory, that those hadn’t been ghosts but something more, but he brushed it away. Maybe he wanted to think that their mothers had come to see them, that the dead had risen to give Orquídea a glorious send off. But they weren’t taking her anyway. She was still here, living, but transformed.
“Maybe he’s in the photo album or her letters,” Rey suggested.
They did not get a record player. But they did investigate the matter of Orquídea’s secret first husband. Marimar had an idea to invite the Montoyas back when everything was clear and the house rebuilt. But this couldn’t wait. The salvaged items were kept in one of the sheds. They found pictures of their cousins’ graduations, Tatinelly’s wedding, baptisms. Rey held up a memorial card with a prayer on the back. “This is from my mom’s funeral. My dad’s sister must have sent one.”
“I don’t even have one.”
“You don’t have an altar, you heathen. It’s like she kept the moments she never got to attend because she wouldn’t leave Four Rivers.”
“Couldn’t leave,” Marimar reminded him.
“What about this one?” Rey pointed at a handsome Black man in Marine dress blues. “It looks aged.”
“It’s a photo, not cheese.” But still she flipped the photo to read a name on the back. “Holy shit, that’s Martin. What’s he, like eighteen? I barely recognized him without the sensible jean shirt and Cowboys baseball cap.”
For each husband, Orquídea had a photo from when they were young, and another from their weddings. She’d worn a different dress every time, which Rey respected and Marimar thought impractical for the grandmother she knew. She looked happiest in her fifth wedding, though, and Marimar gathered the photos back into the box for safe keeping. But as she closed the box, she noticed the lining paper peeling.
Carefully, Marimar tugged the paper back so as not to rip anything. There, pressed tightly against the metal tin was a photograph torn in half. There was Orquídea, so young and beautiful. A man’s hand gripped her tightly, possessively. It was all that was left of him.
“Found something.”
Rey looked at the black-and-white photo for what felt like hours, tracing the seam where the rip was. “There’s that.”
There’s that. A torn photograph from her first wedding and nothing more. Marimar had also hoped to find more pictures of her dad. But those two men had been completely removed from the family, like they’d been cut with an X-Acto knife. Or maybe they were amputated. Remove a limb to save the whole organism. She wondered, is that what Orquídea had done to herself? She’d said that she was doing this for her family, to protect them. They had to protect their magic. But from what? From whom? Who could possibly want this curse?
After a month of clearing the debris, Kalvin and Chris took away the industrial garbage bins. Everything Orquídea had built was gone. The land was clear save for the ceiba tree.
Three months after that, Rey woke up to Gabo’s crow and announced, “I need to leave.”
“I know.” Marimar said. They sat at the top of the hill like they did most days at sunset. Rey with his cigarette and Marimar with her can of cherry soda. “Do you think they’re going to take you back at the firm?”
Rey shook
his head. “You don’t really get a six-month bereavement when your grandmother dies.”
“She’s not dead.”
“She’s a tree.”
“The tree is alive.”
He took a drag and sighed. The rose at the crook of his thumb was a sharp red that beautifully contrasted against his light-brown skin. Sometimes, when he just sat there, he’d touch it the way Marimar would twirl a strand of hair or bite her fingernails. Like it was an extension of himself that had always been there. Maybe it had and they had only ever just noticed it after Orquídea’s transformation.
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shoving his hand in the pocket of his jeans. “I made her a promise. I hadn’t intended on keeping it but I’m more afraid of her finding me postmortem.”
“Use my old room as a studio.”
“Come with me,” he said, wavering in his resolve. She felt it too. They hadn’t been apart since she was thirteen and showed up at the apartment with a duffle bag. “We should stay together.”
“I think I need to be here right now.” Her cheeks were cold, and she felt a pressure behind her eyelids.
“I wish I could be in two places at once.”
She rested her head on Rey’s shoulder. “Are you going to call Shane and try to get back together?”
“He didn’t understand why I had to stay for so long. He won’t understand me now.” He flashed his straight white teeth. Marimar thought that he had his mother’s smile. She thought that maybe they were going to be okay.
As he got in his truck and dug in his back pocket for his lighter, he gasped so loud his cigarette fell out of his mouth. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. I can’t believe I forgot this.”
“What?”
“I wanted to show you this the night—” But he didn’t finish, only handed Marimar the old theater ticket. She didn’t see why it was important, the ink had long faded leaving behind the ghost of the word Spectacular! and an eight-pointed star, just like her father’s ring.
“It was on her altar,” Rey explained.
“What does it mean?” But even as she asked her mouth felt bitter with all the things she did not know.
“I’m sorry.” He kissed her forehead and started the engine.
Don’t leave me, she thought, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud.
* * *
After Rey left, the fall chill rolled in. Marimar drove into town for supplies: food, water-cooler barrels of water, underwear, sweaters from the thrift store, and new sheets. She hired Chris to put in insulation and fix the shed door and roof. When Chris told his uncle that a Montoya was staying behind after the fire, he and two of the local farmers came by and put in a small wood-burning stove to keep her warm during the winter. They’d come by when she was clearing away the dead leaves in the orchard, and they’d gone without saying a word.
The kind gesture undid her.
“Don’t cry,” Chris told her. He was bashful in a way he hadn’t been when they were in school. It was like being in the real world had put a permanent crack in his confidence. He raked his fingers through dark waves and searched the valley for help because he didn’t know what to do when a girl was crying. “It was supposed to be a good surprise.”
She thanked him, and then she kissed him. She hadn’t planned on doing so, but he was there, and he was beautiful. He took off his T-shirt and they walked back into her refurbished shed. It didn’t smell like pigs’ blood and iron anymore. It smelled like sawdust and clean linens. She pushed him onto her air mattress, which squeaked. It made her laugh, which made him snort. They kissed for hours. Fast at first, like she wanted to devour his goodness. Then slowly, tracing the length of his neck, his torso. They kissed until she was familiar with the places that made him hiss or grunt. Until she was clawing at his back and an urgency snapped within her, a heady need to lose herself in someone. To be needed.
They’d slept curled against each other, under a wool blanket she’d bought at the general store with grizzlies and horses on it. Chris’s calloused finger traced her shoulder bone, but he always stopped just shy of touching the very alien part of her that existed at the base of her throat. He didn’t ask about it. This thing that felt more intimate than sex.
But he was working up the nerve, she could tell. He left in the morning when she’d pretended to be asleep to avoid any awkward conversation. When he was out the door and driving up the hill, she got up to do her chores.
Marimar had never so much as had a plant in the City, and now she had a valley to tend to. A house to rebuild. She made her rounds, and when everything became overwhelming, she’d climb up on the massive roots of Orquídea’s tree and sit a while, listening to the breath of the land, the flutter of wings.
That night, Chris surprised her with dinner because he’d noticed that she always forgot to eat. And she let him in because she’d liked the feel of his lips on hers. They ate burgers from the diner, and he dunked his fries in mustard, which made her wrinkle her nose. She was relieved that he did most of the talking, and when he asked things she didn’t want to answer, like about her mother’s drowning accident or what had started the fire, he didn’t press.
He’d only approach her slowly, like she was a deer he didn’t want to scare off. But she didn’t feel like the doe. She wasn’t even the hunter. She was something else. A spider, perhaps, letting him tangle himself in her.
In the morning she pretended to be asleep again, and he pressed a kiss on her naked shoulder before leaving. She thought that he knew what she was doing, and she wondered if he was genuinely giving her time and space or if he was perhaps a little more clueless than she thought.
The next day, after she’d set fire to the heaping pile of mulch, she grinned at the sound of his giant truck ambling down the hill. Her heart gave a tiny flutter when he stepped out of it, jean shirt open over a tight white T-shirt. She pulled him onto the grass and they fucked right there on the side of the hill. Every day he arrived a little earlier, always bringing food. Drinks. A crate of used books to keep her entertained, even if she didn’t want stories or music or movies. She wanted him and silence.
Eventually, he’d stay completely, and she couldn’t pretend to be asleep in the morning. He’d wake up and make coffee and start her chores. They’d bathe in the freezing cold lake and warm up in her shed. When he’d suggest that she could stay at his house, that his parents would love her, she’d go quiet again.
Marimar knew she needed to end things with Chris. That she hadn’t healed enough yet to give him what he needed. That she didn’t even consider what she wanted. But he was beautiful and charming, and he felt good inside her.
“Is this a family thing?” he finally asked. They’d brought a blanket out to the clearing near the orchard. The trees looked like witch claws coming out of the dirt, but Chris said they looked more like chicken feet. He made a fire and then they lay side by side to watch a meteor shower. He propped himself on his elbow and traced the collar of her sweater, careful not to touch the flower bud at the base of her throat.
“Sort of,” Marimar said. The fire crackled and she rested her head on his bare shoulder. He had a leopard tattoo on his side. It was shoddy work and faded.
“Some of my cousins have webbed feet,” he said. “And I have the same mole on my belly button that every one of my brothers and sisters have. You should meet them one day.”
“This one?” she asked, dragging her finger around the beauty mark. He shut his eyes and lost himself to the sensation of her on his abdomen, his erection, his entire being. She was going to run out of excuses to not drive twenty minutes to meet his family, who sent her food and socks to make sure she was warm in that little shed of hers. The Sandovals were Mexican before there was an America and new borders to modify their identity as Mexican American. Like her, they didn’t speak Spanish either. But there was something warm and familiar. Familiar enough that she should have wanted what Chris was offering her.
> She would have given in, too, if she hadn’t scared herself that night when she was astride him, his fingers digging into her hips harder than he’d ever done before, so hard she felt the indentations they’d leave. She reeled her head back and looked at the shower of stars, felt his hands wrap around her throat. The sweet, bright pain of it unraveled something within her, and when she opened her eyes Chris was screaming and pulling out of her. Thick vines of ivy had wrapped around his ankles and up around his muscular calves, all the way to his inner thighs and his perineum. Needles prickled at her throat and when she touched the bud, she felt it opening.
“What the fuck?” Chris breathed hard and scrambled for his pocketknife on the floor to cut the vines off. The skin was instantly red, and yellow pustules bloomed where the poison leaves had touched him.
She drove him to the hospital with him lying on his belly in the bed of his truck because he was too tall and wouldn’t fit anywhere else and she couldn’t stop crying as several people had to get him on a gurney. Without having to ask, he lied and told the doctor he was clearing a patch in the valley, even though no one gardened in the middle of the night while naked. And if they did, it certainly wouldn’t have been the pint of vanilla ice cream that was Christian Sandoval. The doctor cocked his brow at Marimar, mouth still swollen from kissing him. He wasn’t a complete idiot, but it was like he’d decided he didn’t want to know the truth when a Montoya was involved.
Chris got a shot and some cream and slept in his own house after dropping Marimar off.
She called Rey right away. “Has anything weird happened?”
“Define weird.”
She hesitated, shoving a log into her stove. Then she told him everything. Marimar hadn’t known what to expect from Rey. A mild joke. Gratitude for having brought Chris into her life in the first place. Anything but unadulterated laughter. She’d watched cartoon witches laugh with less glee.
“Oh, Mari,” he mused.
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina Page 14