The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina

by Zoraida Cordova

  He bit kisses at her neck. “Te amo, Divina.”

  Orquídea took his face in her hands and said, “You can love us both, now.”

  She guided his hand to her belly.

  Bolívar laughed. He laughed the way he did with the other actors and dancers while they played cards and drank rum out of teacups. “Even I am not that good. Besides, it’s too soon to tell.”

  “No, I’ve known for three months now. Can’t you feel it?”

  His eyebrows shot up. His pants were still unzipped. He tucked in his wet, flaccid penis and buttoned up. “Are you sure, querida?”

  She didn’t like his reaction. Didn’t like the way he pulled away from her, like she’d become a lit match and he was afraid of getting burned.

  “You’re upset.”

  “No!” He kissed her cheekbones. Her nose. He kissed her left eye and then her right one. Her mother had always said that when a man kissed your eyes shut, he is lying to you. The only reason she believed Isabela Montoya Buenasuerte was because her mother had always been too righteous to be superstitious, but that saying she recited like it had been done to her, a personal curse.

  “I’m thrilled.” His eyes were soft as he squeezed her shoulder, digging his fists in the fur of her mink. “I admit. This was sooner than I expected our family to grow, but we’ll make it work.”

  “All right,” she whispered.

  He finished buttoning his trousers, shoving his shirt into the tapered waist. “Don’t wait up for me, my darling. Fedir has a game in the parlor, and he owes me.”

  Bolívar walked her back to their cabin, where he kissed her forehead and then scampered down the hall. Orquídea ran a bath. She slipped into one of his soft silk shirts. She wanted to be surrounded by his scent in her sleep.

  Was that how men reacted when they discovered their wives were pregnant? A few years later, when she was with her second child, Luis Osvaldo Galarza Pincay would weep and kiss Orquídea’s naked belly. He never did kiss her eyes.

  She woke to a metallic chime, the kind she imagined stars would make if she could hear them winking. But it was well past midnight, and when she reached out across their rumpled sheets, Bolívar was still not back.

  A tugging sensation pressed at her belly button, and out of fear that there was something wrong with the baby, she pulled on her thick robe and her slippers and went in search of Agustina. Her potent teas always soothed her.

  Instead, Orquídea took a wrong turn in the labyrinthian guts of the ship’s halls. She came upon the parlor, the door ajar. The table empty of players. Cards tossed on the green felt and cigars extinguished in the dregs of highball glasses. She would have kept going, had it not been for the deep, mournful cry of pleasure she knew so well.

  She felt weightless, brittle, hollowed out. If she was still standing on the deck of the ship, the Irish Sea winds would have blown her away. Bolívar was standing, his trousers at his ankles. One hand pulled his shirt up, the other held the girl in place. She was on her knees, taking him deep into her throat as only someone called “Mishka the Moscow Sword Eater” could.

  She was pretty, pale as cream with wide eyes that gave her the permanent expression of just having had her bottom pinched. She stared up at him then, watching as he threw his head back.

  He noticed Orquídea, like she was a phantom in the corner of the room. At least he had the decency to stop, to stutter, to cry.

  “Divina, it’s not what you think—”

  What did she think? Her husband, who had fucked her on the open deck of the ship just moments before he learned that he was going to be a father, and what did he do? Reward himself with drink. With another woman.

  Mishka wiped her swollen pink lips with one of the cloth napkins. She got up and tried to move past her.

  Possessed by her own fury, Orquídea grabbed the girl by the throat and shoved her against the wall. She was so breakable, this girl who ate fire and metal. Orquídea leaned in close and whispered, “If you tell anyone about this, if I see you here again, I will poison everything that touches your lips until there’s nothing but holes in your throat.”

  Mishka muttered something in Russian. A curse, an apology. Whatever it was, fearing Orquídea more than Bolívar’s scorn, the girl ran.

  “Orquídea, please,” he stuttered quickly. “Don’t be angry with me.”

  He went on that way, trailing behind her like a kicked dog all the way back to their cabin, where he washed himself and then crawled into bed beside her. She tuned out the world. Curled in on herself so tightly she wished she could vanish into nothing.

  “I was terrified,” he whispered in her ear. “This news terrified me.”

  She knew she shouldn’t let him touch her. She knew she should throw all of his belongings in the tub and set them on fire. She knew she deserved better. The world, like he’d promised.

  “I was weak. I am so, so weak, Orquídea. When you are not with me, I am nothing. Please, I won’t be able to live if you don’t forgive me.”

  She turned around then. They faced each other. He was so solid, so strong. It was then, as her heart splintered, that she realized that he was built of a more fragile substance than she was.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  He didn’t want to hurt her the way an alcoholic didn’t want another drink.

  She said nothing, though. Bolívar held her close, desperate. And for the first time she realized, she liked seeing him scared.

  While he slept soundly, she kissed both his eyelids, and crept out of their cabin. Moved swiftly down, down, down into the hold of the ship where they kept the elephants and lions and wild beasts. The Londoño exotics and oddities. For a moment, she wondered if that was what she was to him. If that was what he couldn’t help but be drawn to and that was why, when he wasn’t at her side, he forgot about her.

  Orquídea pushed the door aside, readying her wicked tongue to lie. But Lucho wasn’t there, by some miracle. In the years to come, she wondered where he had gone and why he had chosen that specific day to abandon a post he had guarded so faithfully before. Some things were never meant to be answered.

  When she opened the ship’s cargo compartment, the Living Star slowly turned in her direction.

  “Are you ready to make a deal?” he asked, weary but amused.

  “I am. But I have a condition.”

  “What?” he snapped.

  “Show me your real face.”

  24

  THE GARDEN OF PLAGUE AND MIRACLES

  No one knew exactly what was wrong with Tatinelly and Michael Sullivan. After she’d fainted in the circus museum, they’d rushed to drive her back. Marimar had kept her discovery between herself and Rey and would do so until her cousin was well. While Tatinelly had a high fever and was dehydrated, her husband had worsened. One thing was certain, the Montoyas had to cancel their flight.

  Mike’s sickness, which had begun with the symptoms of a common cold, had progressed to something even doctors couldn’t explain. His skin had become so translucent, you could see the inner workings of him. Like his body was an aquarium for his bloody, swollen organs.

  The first doctor who had been brave enough to enter the now-quarantined Buenasuerte house, was Lola Rocafuerte, a surgeon who owed the dead Wilhelm Buenasuerte a favor and decided to pay it by coming to diagnose the foreigners locked in the guest room.

  She took their temperature, their blood to run tests, but she was positive she had never seen anything like this. And so, one by one, medical professionals arrived to the house in cohorts to try and determine the cause of the ailment.

  One doctor, round and with a face like a mole who had never seen sunlight, protested that it was a plague from God. Normally, they all would have laughed, or disregarded him as being out of his mind, but then pustules began growing in pockets across Mike Sullivan’s body. Upon closer inspection, they were pods. After the biopsy of one, they discovered the very early stages of grasshopper eggs.
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  Tatinelly, on the other hand, displayed all the textbook symptoms of typhoid fever. But when her bloodwork came back, along with her husband’s, the only abnormality displayed was high blood pressure on Mike’s part.

  The doctors all agreed to send the blood and egg samples to the CDC, and a week after that, they received the same results. There was nothing wrong with them, except Mike had become a human incubator for a biblical plague and Tatinelly’s body was an oven.

  The inhabitants of the Buenasuerte house, who had so far been immune, did everything they could to keep Tati and Mike comfortable. From teas to cold baths. Still, the only thing that would truly help Mike’s emotional and physical pain was being sedated with high levels of morphine.

  Marimar was in the rear courtyard with Rhiannon and Rey, hoping for some time away from doctors and prying eyes. A few of the medical professionals, unable to cure the Sullivans, had taken to try and analyze the three cousins with the flowers growing out of their skin, particularly Rhiannon, whose rose had turned the color of ash since the day her mother fainted. Although the surrounding neighbors did climb ladders and peek their heads up on the other side of the cement walls to ask how they were doing.

  To which Rey would answer, “Just enjoying the biblical plague! How are you?”

  No one really tried to talk to them after that.

  “We have to do something,” Marimar said while Ana Cruz and Jefita were getting takeout. Days of worrying had drained them all. Marimar and Rey were cleared by Doctor Rocafuerte to return home, but neither of them could imagine leaving their family behind. “If it’s not a scientific ailment, then it’s a magical one.”

  “We do what we came here to do,” Rey said. “Figure out Orquídea’s shady fucking past. Let’s start with the eight-pointed star.”

  “Theory one,” Marimar said, “Bolívar Londoño is actually immortal and my father. Which, gross.”

  “In my comic book,” Rhiannon said, pulling out dead leaves in the rose bushes. “The superhero married his dad’s former girlfriend without knowing it.”

  Marimar blinked in surprise. “You let her read that?”

  Rey gestured at the glass screen separating them from the medical freak show happening in the house. “We’ve been a little busy, Mari.”

  “Fine.”

  “Theory two,” Rey said, in a hurry to bypass the conversation. “Bolívar survived the fire, had another son, and somehow that son met your mom?”

  “Too Dickensian. It could explain why Orquídea didn’t want me to know my father. And why she forbade my mom from chasing after him. Either way, he won’t survive this. I will kill him myself.”

  “Too Oedipal, Marimar.”

  “Penny is dead. Uncle Félix is dead. Aunt Florecida is dead. Tati—” She glanced at Rhiannon, then composed herself. “Whoever this is, they can’t get away with it.”

  “Do you remember how Orquídea conjured those ghosts?” Rey asked.

  “I’ve tried talking to my mom. But if she’s a ghost, she’s not coming to see me.”

  “You’re both wrong,” Rhiannon said.

  “Oh yeah, smarty-pants? Why?”

  Rhiannon dug her finger in the dirt. She loved all the same things other seven-year-olds loved. Video games and dolls. Glittery dresses and mountains of candy that she would regret in the middle of the night. She loved staying up late, fighting sleep so she wouldn’t miss a minute of her cousins’ adult conversations. She loved eavesdropping. But she also loved listening to the way creatures whispered at her, the way butterflies said hello and kissed her forehead. The strength she felt when she got dirt under her fingernails. One time, when no one was looking, she ate a mouthful of it, worms and all. Later that day, she could understand what Ana Cruz and Jefita were whispering when they spoke in Spanish. She’d never been able to understand them before that day. In a dream, Mamá Orquídea had done the same: eaten dirt and learned a language. Rhiannon was connected with her in ways she was only beginning to understand.

  “You think you want to know but you’re scared. He is scary.”

  “Who?” Rey asked.

  “The man in my dreams. Usually, Mamá Orquídea is there to protect me. But sometimes, I see him.”

  “What does he look like?” Marimar asked.

  “I can’t see his face or anything. But after we went to that place, I think he might be the same. The moon. Or maybe a star.”

  Rey felt his mouth go dry. He’d painted that light, that prism that appeared in reflective surfaces in New York. “Baby girl, circuses are tricks. It’s like magicians. Illusions.”

  “Is the flower on my forehead a trick?” she asked with a slight grin. “Were Mamá Orquídea’s miracles tricks? She shows me in my dreams. She says you both think you want to hear her, but you’re not actually listening.” Then she raised her eyebrows in a gesture that was uncannily Orquídea. “Especially you, Marimar.”

  Marimar felt a pressure in her stomach, behind her belly button. She was starting to understand that feeling meant something was on its way. Something was going to happen.

  “Can you show us, Rhiri?” she asked.

  Rhiannon held out her dirty little hands. Ladybugs crawled up her arms, but she didn’t seem to mind them. “Okay, think about Mamá Orquídea.”

  Rey’s lips quirked slightly. They each had a different version of the woman in Four Rivers. For Marimar, she would always be the same. Half real, half legend. She imagined Orquídea Divina Montoya pulling salmon from a lake that was made for trout. She imagined her making salves and ointments for every scrape and burn that Marimar accumulated like battle scars. For Rey, she was all glamour. She was the same grandmother he’d loved and hated in equal measure at different stages of his life. The one who would never be confined and normal. He saw her as the girl she’d been in that photo, hopeful and young, like the world hadn’t quite broken her yet. Rhiannon only knew one version of Orquídea—the woman who was a tree. The voice in her dreams that sang pretty songs she was only beginning to understand.

  Together, they heard a single voice. A man Rhiannon and Rey had already heard before.

  Find me, he said.

  And then, Orquídea’s clear voice. Run.

  * * *

  When Rey opened his eyes, sweat was running down his face and neck. He crab-walked into the wall behind him but something brushed his skin. Again and again, leaves and vines shot out of the ground, growing faster than he could blink.

  “Run,” Marimar said. She hauled Rhiannon up by her hand, and they stumbled into the house. Rey was trying to close the screen door but there were too many vines. They flooded the house with green, creeping up on the ceiling and twisting around the ceiling fan, the light fixtures.

  Marimar slapped her hand on the light switch, but the electricity was dead.

  That pressure and ache behind her belly button intensified until she was on her knees. Rhiannon pulled Marimar by her shirt. Rey pulled them both back.

  “Marimar, Marimar, get up, please,” Rhiannon cried. “He’s here!”

  She could see a shape emerge in the center of the living room. The dark warbled around him, forcing their eyes to work twice as hard to focus on the outline of his silhouette. The negative of a photo filled in with moving space and time, radiating at the core with the rainbow fractures of a prism. Marimar knew. She knew Rhiannon was right.

  The Living Star.

  “Why are you doing this?” Marimar asked. She hated the sound of her voice. The fear that squeezed her vocal cords into high notes.

  He looked around, and she could make out a snarl outlined in the bright kaleidoscope of his features. “I have to take back what was stolen.”

  “We didn’t take anything!” Rey shouted.

  “But Orquídea did.” He moved fast, his hands closing around the gifts at Marimar’s throat and Rhiannon’s brow.

  Marimar and Rhiannon screamed. Marimar felt a pulsing sensation within her heart. It was like being split in half, her flesh being turned ins
ide out like skinned game. She tried to move her arms to fight back but the sensation was numbing her down to her bones. She saw the tree back home. Her valley. Clouds rolling in black and gray, punching fists of thunder into the ground. Orquídea’s tree bleeding from its heart.

  The Living Star screamed and let them go. Behind him, Rey’s eyes were manic as he released the kitchen knife he drove through their attacker’s shoulder. The Living Star fell to his knees, the light within him was a fading pulse. He reached over and removed the blade from his body.

  “I will never stop hunting you,” he said, then almost sadly, he added, “It was not supposed to be this way.”

  Marimar took up Rhiannon in her arms, thin traces of blood running from her forehead and into her eyes. They needed to get out of the house one way or another. But her mind was numb, her body ached from her hair follicles to her marrow.

  Then, Tatinelly made her way down the stairs.

  * * *

  Mike Sullivan died in the middle of the night. He felt no pain, only a deep warmth, the gentle caress of his Tatinelly, and then he was gone. The moment of his passing, his every pustule, which had served as gestation pods for the hundreds of grasshopper eggs embedded in his skin, split open. The grasshoppers molted, and shimmering green creatures bounced across every surface.

  It was their frenzied song that woke Tatinelly. She kissed her husband, but she did not have time to mourn him. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. She had work to do. The living needed her still. She’d seen glimpses of Rhiannon, her sweet Rhiannon, running from a figure in her dreams. She found that the vines that filled the house felt familiar as they wrapped around her legs and arms like armor and gave her strength. Her fever broke, her eyes cleared. Tatinelly, who had believed she was ordinary her whole life, walked out of her quarantine room.