The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina

by Zoraida Cordova

  What no one—except Rhiannon and Mike—knew was that Tatinelly had never truly shed the gift Orquídea had given her seven years ago. After giving birth to Rhiannon, a branch remained, and a single golden laurel leaf sprouted out of her belly button. She took strength from it every day. Tatinelly would never be a painter, a writer, a celebrity, a scientist. She didn’t want to be any of those things, and that was okay. Some people were meant for great, lasting legacies. Others were meant for small moments of goodness, tiny but that rippled and grew in big, wide waves. Tatinelly might have been ordinary, but she was not weak. And she’d been saving the gift Orquídea had given her for a moment that mattered.

  “Leave my family in peace,” Tatinelly told the monster hunting her family.

  Using the very last of her power, Tatinelly called the vines to her. More and more, there was infinite life within her. Vines broke the skin of her belly button and wrapped around the Living Star, choking him until he began to fade. She felt the fire of his light, fighting against her. Grasshoppers leaped down the stairs. Hundreds of them descended on him, a cloud of locusts.

  “This is not over,” the Living Star hissed and vanished in a breathless wave of darkness.

  After, there was the crunch of glass, the panting of breaths, the crackle of locusts. Tatinelly Sullivan Montoya staggered into the arms of her cousins and her daughter. They brushed her hair back.

  “I want to stay here.” And with her final breath, she said, “This is a lovely place to rest.”

  25

  ORQUÍDEA DIVINA’S VOW

  The Living Star shone brighter within his iron cage. He turned away from Orquídea. “I will show you my face when we have a deal.”

  Orquídea pulled her robe tighter. It was a flimsy armor, but she would work on finding a better one, a stronger one. “Fine, stay in that cage for another decade. What do I care?”

  The air chimed in that celestial way of his. “Wait. Wait. Wait, please!”

  She froze. Please, Orquídea, please. That’s how Bolívar had begged her, too. She shut her eyes against the onslaught of tears. But she didn’t turn around. Didn’t let him see.

  He extinguished his glow, so the only source was a phosphorescent bulb overhead and the strange gleam of his manacles. They had blended into the brightness, except at certain angles where she saw color, the streak of a rainbow. The sheen of water on an oil slick.

  Orquídea blinked until her eyes adjusted to the shadows. She was surrounded by sleeping beasts, by the flap of restless caged birds, the stench of animal shit, and the hay and cedarwood shavings that could never quite cover it up.

  Then, she faced him.

  The most surprising thing was that the Living Star was a man almost like any other. His hair was as dark as the longest night, with thick waves that tumbled down his pale, naked shoulders. His hooked nose was proportionate for his rectangular face, like every imperfection was tailored to make it impossible to look away. Orquídea took another step closer and was able to see the pearlescent beauty marks on his pectorals, his abdomen.

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Lázaro.”

  She stepped closer yet. Her fear giving way to curiosity. “What are you?”

  “What are you?” His mouth tugged with a smile. “Flower. Mermaid. It seems you have to be anything, other than yourself.”

  “I’m just a girl.”

  “No wonder you cry out for help.”

  Heat coiled in the pit of her belly. “If I’m here for your insults, I’d rather just go.”

  He grew sullen. “I would have thought your darling husband would have told you already.”

  “He said you’re a real, true star.”

  “I am so much more than that,” Lázaro said softly. “There are beings across the heavens, above and below, in the between. Sometimes, we find planets and rule over them. Become gods and saints and prophets. Other times, we become weapons.”

  “How?” she paced the perimeter of his cage and he turned to keep her in his line of sight.

  “I will tell you when we have a deal. When you agree to set me free.”

  “I can’t accept a deal without knowing what I’m walking into.”

  Lázaro’s laugh was the distant roll of thunder. “And yet is that not what your marriage was? A deal with a man you barely knew.”

  Orquídea hardened her heart and it showed in her smile. “Mock me one more time. Do it. As soon as we arrive in Guayaquil I’m leaving, and I don’t have to take you with me.”

  His light became inverted, a silhouette of shadow and prisms of light in every color. “Think it through, Orquídea. You have done this once before. You ran with nothing to your name, and you found Bolívar. Will you do that once again?”

  “I’m not the same girl who left.”

  “That is not what your deepest wishes tell me.” He relinquished his dark light and appeared human again. His skin shimmered as she’d imagined stardust would. The more he moved, the more he looked like a supernova living under his skin.

  “You truly are a wishing star that walks the earth.”

  He leaped to the bars and gripped them tight. He shook. “If the earth is this cell block.”

  She took several steps back reminding herself that they were alone, and she was pregnant, and he was naked.

  “I apologize,” he said. “I have been here so long. But yes, I hold the power of wishes. Desires. True, unfathomable want. When I fell here, to this planet, your sun and moon solidified my corporeal form.”

  “Is that why you are so very shiny?”

  “Luminous,” he corrected, and laughed, despite how much he did not want to.

  “How old are you?”

  He resumed pacing again and traced long, elegant fingers across his torso. “This form is perhaps two decades old. But my consciousness is older than that, though I have begun to forget the longer I am locked in this place.”

  “Are you cold?” she asked.

  “I no longer feel it.”

  “Is your light not warm?”

  He looked up. His strange eyes never left her face. “For you, but not for me.”

  Orquídea finally sat on a crate. Her body ached, down to her bones. She shivered, but she removed her scarf, thin as it was, and offered it through the bars.

  Lázaro stared at it for so long she waved it like a flag. He accepted warily, but wrapped it around his shoulders and sat cross-legged on the hay to make her less scared of him.

  “Do you get to choose?” she asked.

  “Choose?”

  “What you become. If you’re raw power hurtling through the galaxy, and you don’t know what you’ll become or who you’ll become until the planet gives you form—isn’t that disappointing?”

  Lázaro toyed with the fringe of her scarf. “There is nothing brighter than a wish. It comes from true hope. Humanity is so full of that. Desperate hope. Joyous hope. Even those in anguish, especially those in anguish, I should say, have hope. The anticipation that tomorrow will be better than the next day. I find it terribly amusing.”

  “Then you’re cruel,” she stated simply, without a trace of accusation.

  “Humans put me in here. Well, one human. Did your darling husband tell you how he came upon me?”

  She nodded. “He said his father found you in a crater.”

  Lázaro turned away, looking at the other beasts in the cages beside him. “When I fell to this planet, I came in a meteor shower. I fell outside his encampment. I was weak and recovering from the crash. I told the man I would give him a wish in exchange for his help. All I had with me was precious alloy from my galaxy, my armor, and my sword. Ah, and my clothes, for I did wear clothes once. While I slept, his son melted it all down and made these manacles for me and a ring. It is the only thing in this world that can restrain me.”

  “If I break you out of here, then you’re free?”

  “Not quite,” Lázaro said, a sad smile. “Even if I break free, he can call upon me. Control me.”
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  Orquídea let out a frustrated breath. She hadn’t thought betraying her husband would be easy. She rubbed her belly then. Could she really do it, when the days passed, and her anger ebbed? When he looked at her as he did the first day they met?

  “Your heart need not be metal to be strong,” Lázaro told her.

  “Stay out of my thoughts,” she hissed.

  He chuckled lightly. “Ah, but that is the very core of it. I can sense what is in your heart and mind. That is how I know that this is the only deal which will make you whole, if you keep your word. I know you desire more than this. Even the ocean we travel across is not big enough to fill the desire in your heart. Neither is Bolívar.”

  “You said, if I gave you your freedom, you’d give me a taste of your power.” Her mouth had gone dry with a hunger she’d never felt.

  He stood slowly, watching her with his night-sky eyes. “And I meant it.”

  “I don’t want a taste. I want a piece of it. I want a sliver of your power to keep for always. And I want you to teach me how to use it.” She should have thought about it more. Been more careful about the eagerness in her voice. But it was out there, and she couldn’t reel it back.

  He thought about this as he silently prowled the cage. Two decades he’d spent imprisoned, bested by a monstrous boy of only ten. Now, he was haggling for his freedom with a girl who had so easily given away her heart. And yet, he knew that it would be Bolívar’s true love, the one he’d called forth on a wish, who would set the Living Star free. Agustina had decreed it, and though he doubted the capability and honesty of humankind, he did not doubt her gift.

  “You have a deal, Orquídea.” He held out his hand and waited. She seized it. His touch was firm, cold, like the first time she held snow.

  “Deal.”

  A sound came from the end of the hall. Voices. The guard, or perhaps Bolívar himself.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Bring me the ring, and find the key. It is the same color as my chains.” He gripped the bars in front of his face.

  “Wait,” she stalled, glancing back at the door. “What does his ring do?”

  Lazáro held up his palm, and her eye went to his left hand. “It is how he controls me.”

  Steal a key and a ring that her husband kept on his person at all times. It was impossible. But as she made her way back, she imagined the taste of that power, even the smallest bit. She was Bolívar Londoño III’s wife. La Sirena del Ecuador. Orquídea Divina, Bastard Daughter of the Waves. She’d seen parts of the world she’d never imagined, and when she was done, she’d see it all. And why stop at the world, when she might have a chance to see the galaxy?

  Part IV

  HASTA LA RAÍZ

  26

  INGREDIENTS TO CALL ON THE DEAD

  The grasshoppers were hard to catch. When they thought they’d gathered them all, they appeared in cups of coffee, in Jefita’s purse as she rushed out to make arrangements. They hid in the underside of the car and in the engine. Ana Cruz’s approach was to step on them, crush them, but eventually she grew accustomed to the sight of their green faces in the kitchen cupboard and in the tins of cereal and rice.

  Ana Cruz was not devout, not the way Jefita was. She’d been baptized, had her first communion. She went to church when her father was alive, but not since. She kept reliquaries of the Virgin Mary in her home, a cross in her bedroom. Sometimes she wondered if it was because she truly had faith or because she feared the alternative. But when she’d come down the stairs to find Tatinelly dead, she prayed harder than she ever had before. She prayed for the Montoyas, the living and the dead. Ana Cruz had been so stunned she simply stared at Tatinelly’s lifeless body. The slight girl looked like a princess out of a fairy tale resting on a bed of vines after her sacrifice.

  The vines had been another problem. They’d grown out of the garden and out of her stomach. No one had wanted to take the bodies. Not to the hospital and not to the morgue. There were too many officials, too many gawkers standing outside the house. Reporters and helicopters. Vultures, all of them. Even priests made the pilgrimage, getting past the enclosed neighborhood’s guards because no one, not even the guards, would deny a priest.

  The official story was this. Intruders attempted to kidnap Mike and Tatinelly Sullivan, tourists from the United States. The perpetrators were chased away by other members of the family and were in the wind. The police had no suspects.

  That was the official story.

  Others, those who had visited the Montoyas, those who had marveled at the God-given gifts growing out of their skin, knew different. They called it a miracle.

  Rey had spent the day after consuming the entire bottle of bourbon Mike had intended to drink in celebration of Félix Montoya’s life. Rhiannon hid in the garden, crying and whispering to the grasshoppers who surrounded her like a rapt audience. Meanwhile Marimar went over every finding, every photo. She obsessed over the Living Star, but there was nothing about him. No real name. No museum obscurities. He was like Orquídea, a mystery they couldn’t solve.

  No one slept, and they only ate because Jefita forced them to. Mostly, they waited for the bodies to be ready. Marimar called the family at Four Rivers, told them to stay put, stay together, and then she sat there listening to Reina, Tatinelly’s mother, wail. It haunted Marimar as she retraced the steps of that night. How had the Living Star found them? Why hadn’t he come back? She stood in the courtyard with her face to the night sky. She listened for a whisper, a threat. That strange bell-chime voice that threated at the fringes of her mind. But nothing and no one came.

  There were no more miracles.

  Miracle or not, there was work to be done. A funeral to prepare. Tatinelly had used her final words to say she wanted to stay here. Despite Reina’s plea to come home, they couldn’t go against Tatinelly’s wishes. Not when she’d saved them. As for the Sullivans, they left a message, but no one had returned their call.

  Seeing their desperation, Jefita approached Marimar. She was in the garden with a notebook in her lap, drawing eight-pointed stars. There were pages and pages filled with them, compass roses without a map to give direction to.

  “What’s wrong?” Marimar asked, upon seeing Jefita’s face.

  The old woman glanced over her shoulder, twisting the bottom of her apron into a rope. “I know someone you can ask about Orquídea.”

  Marimar sat up. “Who? Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

  “Because the person we need to ask has been dead for ten years.”

  “Tell me.”

  And Jefita did. All things considered, it was not the strangest thing Marimar had ever heard. She should have considered it herself, but part of her still resisted the possibility of the impossible. Besides, she was desperate.

  * * *

  The following day dozens of people showed up to their house for the funeral. They muttered the words miracles and saints and alone. They knew that the beautiful descendants of Orquídea Divina didn’t have anyone else. Even Professor Kennedy Aguilar was there, offering to be a pallbearer.

  Rey and Marimar did not have to bear the weight of the caskets alone, and together, they flooded the streets like a black river making its way to the sixth gate of the Cementerio Patrimonial de Guayaquil, at the foothill of the cerro del Carmen. People who lived up the hill liked to say it was the best place to live. There were no tourists, they had the best views of the city, and when the time came to return to God, their bodies only had to travel just few paces for a final rest.

  During the two-mile walk to the cemetery, the sky turned gray and lightning announced the coming rain. Rhiannon held on to Jefita’s hand and wiped at her tears, which had begun to calcify as they were shed from her tear ducts. Those walking behind her rushed to pick up the shimmering pearls. They tucked them in pockets. Others ate them just to see what miracles tasted like. Rey, on the other hand, shed more than a tear. Three petals fell from his wrist. With one of the caskets firmly rested on
his shoulder, he turned his face up to his hand and inhaled. The faintest trace of decay filled his nose. It was the scent of roses forgotten in a vase of water that turned to muck. There was nothing he could do, not until after they broke several legal and ethical laws in the cemetery.

  Tatinelly and Mike were laid to rest in the Montoya mausoleum crowned by a statue of an angel. Rhiannon said, “the angel looks like it’s ready to fly away.”

  After everyone had left, Ana Cruz, Jefita, and the Montoya cousins remained.

  “For the record,” Ana Cruz said. “I do not like this. Rhiri is too young to see something like this.”

  Rey, who had bummed a pack of cigarettes from one of the onlookers, raised one to his lips. “I’m pretty sure I’m too young for this, too.”

  “I’m not a little kid,” Rhiannon asserted. “And we’re a team. You can’t leave me out.”

  “We won’t,” Marimar assured her.

  Ana Cruz raised her hands in defeat and went outside to keep watch and bribe any guards if she needed to. As she left, so entered a short, stocky man with deep-bronze skin and a canvas hat covered in the same white paint as on the stacked tombs. He had a pickax and a sledgehammer in his backpack and averted his eyes when greeting the Montoyas. Abel Tierra de Montes had been painting the outer faces of the vaults of the cemetery since he was fifteen. He’d apprenticed for an artist as a boy, but after she died, the family had ousted him. He had a practiced hand, and his portraits were favored by the families who paid for the upkeep of their entombed dead. Abel had owed Jefita a favor on account of her introducing him to his future wife, and though he didn’t think what this family was about to do was natural, he couldn’t turn away from the money. Not when more and more people were forgetting their dead.

  It took twenty minutes, but he managed to open the sealed top of Isabela’s tomb. Then he made the sign of the cross, bowed his head to Jefita, and said he’d be back at the time they’d agreed to seal it all up.