They stared at the bones. There were still clumps of hair on the skull and thick cobwebs on the simple pale blue dress.
“How does this work?” Marimar asked. The black dress she’d borrowed from Ana Cruz was itchy. Sweat pooled between her breasts, down her spine. When the scent of cement and decay hit her nose, she breathed through her mouth.
“My mother did this once,” Jefita said, lighting a stick of wood with Rey’s lighter. “On her death bed my grandmother confessed that my mother’s father wasn’t her birth father. But she died before she could say his name.”
“Is that to summon the dead?” Rey asked.
Jefita wrinkled her nose, she set the stick on the lip of the tomb. “Palo santo. It purifies. And it smells good.”
“The ritual worked for your mother, though, right?” Rey asked, undoing the knot of his tie and the button choking his Adam’s apple.
Jefita peered down at the bones. Her mother had needed answers only the dead could give. Jefa, whose real name was María Luz Rumi, chased rumors of necromancy and resurrection until she found the real deal. “Yes. She discovered her real father was her uncle. My mother knew she might not like the truth. The difference is my mother had to dig.”
Rey grinned. “Lucky us.”
“Where do we start?” Marimar asked.
“You have to focus all of your energy on that connection every family has. It’s in our bones, our blood. More than that, it’s in the questions we need answered. The secrets, traumas, and legacies that we don’t know we’ve inherited, even if we don’t want them.”
Jefita’s dark eyes fell to Rey’s hand. Another petal fell. In seven years, it had never shed a single one. After the other night’s attack, he’d shed four.
“A seance would be less smelly,” Rey muttered.
Jefita lightly smacked the back of his head. “This is real. Usually, the ingredients to call on the dead involve a blood sacrifice. Your family is still brushed by so much recent death and that is enough. Now, focus. You’ve never met your great-grandmother, but blood is like a tether, even when the tether is frayed. The connection is there, deep down, hasta la raíz.”
Down to the root.
Rey thought of the boy he’d been once, reserved and quiet. He’d wanted to hide in stacks of papers and numbers that added up to neat solutions. He’d never expected to be this person who dug up his ancestor’s bones. Though, to be fair, he hadn’t had to actually dig, in the literal sense. He tried to clear his mind again. Concentrated on what he wanted. Every other time he’d focused this power, gift, curse—whatever it actually was—his desire had been simple. To make art. So, he had. He envisioned Orquídea’s tree. The three of them had been trying to talk to their grandmother before the Living Star attacked. They’d heard Orquídea’s warning, too late. He explored the spark of his power, his gift. Rhiannon had said that Marimar and Rey hadn’t really been listening before, but where were they supposed to learn how to communicate having been raised in a house of secrets?
Rhiannon closed her eyes and felt the skin around her rose burn as it changed back to the blush pink that reminded her of her mother. Her beautiful, patient mother who had protected her. She didn’t want to cry anymore. She wanted to help her cousins listen and see. Somewhere in the shadows of the mausoleum came a breeze, a deep groan.
Marimar thought of the pictures she’d seen of Isabela Belén Montoya Buenasuerte. She’d already had opinions of her great-grandmother and they weren’t kind, even if she wore the woman’s face. She felt her frantic pulse at the center of her throat and focused on that. How far within her did the bud grow? When they’d taken Tatinelly away, Marimar had noticed the golden laurel leaf on her belly button. Is that what was inside of Marimar, too? Was she made up of roots and vines? Were there flowers in her lungs? Thorns around her heart? Jefita had said to focus deep down, hasta la raíz, down to the root. Tía Parcha was buried in New York. Her mother, Tía Florecida, Penny, and her grandfather Luis were in Four Rivers with Orquídea’s tree. Tío Félix was here in the river that surrounded them, and now Tatinelly was in this room with their great-grandmother. Where would she be buried when the time came? And who would care?
A single tear ran down her cheek.
Then, the bones rattled. They aligned, gathering into the semblance of a person.
Isabela Belén Montoya Buenasuerte’s skeleton sat up.
27
LOS HUESOS DE ISABELA BELÉN MONTOYA BUENASUERTE
“What have you done to me?” Isabela asked in a clear, haughty voice. There was the faintest imprint of the woman she’d been layered over the bones, like transparent skin. A ghost. A true and honest ghost. “Who are you?”
“It’s me, señora Isabela! Jefita Rumi—”
“I know you, Jefita, of course. But who are they?” The bony finger pointed at Rey, Marimar, and Rhiannon.
“I’m Marimar, and this is Rhiannon and Rey.”
“Rey?” Isabela’s bones asked. “¿Rey de qué?”
Marimar snorted. His mother had changed the usual Ray to Rey. “Rey,” the Spanish word for “king.” She would always call out to him and say, “my little king of the earth.” Sure, that was cute when he was five. But clearly, his great-grandmother didn’t think so.
“It’s short for Reymundo,” he said and took a long drag of his cigarette.
“I’d say I’m pleased to meet you but, who are you to me that you would wake me? How long have I been dead, Jefita?”
“Almost a decade, señora,” she said, and crossed herself.
“We’re your great-grandchildren from your Montoya side,” Rhiannon explained.
“Montoya? Whose Montoyas? My brother or sisters’?”
“Neither.” Marimar said the word like a bite. “We are the progeny of Orquídea Divina. And we have questions.”
“Orquídea lived,” she said with joyful sorrow. She repeated the name, until the sad spell was gone, and Isabela’s bones rattled with the Montoya temper. “She lived, and she didn’t tell me. I don’t want your questions. I don’t have answers. Let me rest in peace.”
Marimar and Rey exchanged a knowing look. She said, “Well, at least we know where Orquídea got her stubbornness from.”
Isabela’s bones made a choking sound, if bones could choke. “How dare you talk to me that way? The nerve. It served Orquídea right that she should have such insolent grandchildren. And what is that on your skin?”
“It’s Mamá Orquídea’s gift,” Rhiannon said, clutching the side of the tomb. She leaned in, not away like her older cousins, like Jefita who hovered against the wall out of fear of the dead. “And I’m actually your great-great-grandchild. We need your help, otherwise the star is going to get us, too.”
“If he does, I might just haunt you for all eternity,” Rey muttered.
Isabela crossed her arms over her chest. “And my daughter? Why don’t you ask her?”
“She’s not among the living and she’s not among the dead,” Marimar explained. “We’d leave you alone, but we know that you were there when the Londoño circus went up in flames.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“You’re lying,” Marimar stated plainly.
“We saw it on film,” Rey said.
The skeleton turned to Jefita, dust particles buzzing around her. “Mira cómo me hablan. None of my other grandchildren take that tone with me. Was I so terrible to deserve this unholy disruption?”
“We’ll leave you alone,” Rey said. “But we have to know. Did you speak to Orquídea the night of the fire?”
“That place.” She tipped her nose to the ceiling and sniffed as if she wasn’t a bag of bones marinating in her own decay for a decade. “That wretched place. My daughter dressed like a whore for all the world to see. They told me she was born unlucky and they were right.”
“You don’t get to talk about my grandmother like that,” Marimar said, a second thorn growing from her throat, twin to the first. “Maybe if you had loved her, if you’d done right
by her, she wouldn’t have run away, and we wouldn’t be talking to you right now.”
The bones stiffened. A dense cold bit at their skin as Isabela said, “You don’t know what I went through. You don’t know what it was like. Two years after she left, the Londoño Spectacular returned to Guayaquil. I saw Orquídea on a poster. I took it down, of course, lest anyone in the neighborhood recognized her. I tried to fix things; I did. I tried to tell her to come home. She had a child. She shouldn’t have raised him in that place.”
“Pedrito,” Rey said. “He—he died. We think that night, but we can’t be sure. We need to know everything that you saw. Anything Orquídea might have said.”
“Why?”
“Are all the Montoyas this way?” Marimar asked, half laughing, half hysterical. “Just—tell us please.”
“Yes,” Isabela turned her cheek on them. “If you’re going to wake me from my rest, then I at the very least want to know why. And did you bring me any offerings?”
Jefita had instructed them to bring something the dead might have missed from their life. Since the Four Rivers Montoyas didn’t know their great-grandmother, they made their best guess. Marimar brought a silver flask of whiskey. Rey contributed a cigarette, and Rhiannon, her plastic Little Mermaid doll. Jefita offered her former employer’s comfort food, a sweet humita. Isabela made a noise of reluctant satisfaction, and gathered everything into her tomb and placed the cigarette in her mouth, leaning in for Rey to give her a light.
Jefita and Marimar also took cigarettes Rey offered because the occasion felt like it called for such a thing.
“Very well. Tell me your plight,” Isabela said.
“We are being hunted.” Marimar couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder. “Something Orquídea stole from her time at the circus was important enough to murder for. A gift, of sorts. Before she died, Orquídea gave three of us that gift. We need to figure out how to kill the man she took it from before he kills more of us. Did she tell you anything that could help?”
Isabela’s bones blew out smoke. She observed the people before her. None of her Buenasuerte children had tried to wake her. But then again, none of them would have believed in such a thing. She wouldn’t have either, once. There had been a weightlessness to being dead. Now that she was, not alive, but awake, Isabela felt every regret she’d once had. They were needles piercing right through her bones, reminding her of her sins.
“When I went to see my daughter,” she said slowly, “I wanted to ask her to come home, as I already said. When I got there, part of me hoped that I was wrong, that I imagined her likeness. But there she was. Glowing. Beautiful. She even sang for the crowd. I don’t remember her voice ever being that strong. I thought she was indecent at first, because the dresses they wore were so short, but when I saw her up close, she was—radiant. Wilhelm had forbidden me from going to see her. He found out, of course. How could I keep something like that from my husband? He forbade me from telling my other children. But she was my daughter. I missed her more than I can ever say. There were so many things that I should have done differently but I couldn’t change it.”
Isabela unfolded the yellow corn leaf of the humita. Her movements were dainty, but she ate with her fingers, drank ravenous sips of whiskey. Every morsel that passed through her phantom mouth turned to ash.
“I went to confront Orquídea. She was like a new woman. So sure of herself. Married, too, by the ring on her finger. I met her little boy, Pedrito. He was so sweet, barely a year old. I wanted to hold him, but she didn’t let me. She asked me to leave.
“Hadn’t I done the same thing to her? Pushed her away because of my own shame? I shouldn’t have left, but I did. It’s my own fault. We don’t talk. None of us. Why don’t we ever talk? Silence is a language of its own in this family. A curse of our own making. That’s the inheritance my daughter got from me, and I am so very sorry.”
Isabela Buenasuerte was an old woman with so much regret that she’d carried it to her grave. It poured out of her in shimmering tears.
“I know my daughter well enough that I knew there was something wrong,” Isabela said, sniffing and taking a calming drag of her cigarette. “It was in her eyes. She was scared.”
“Did you see the Living Star?” Marimar asked.
Isabela paused, like she was trying hard to recall the night. “Yes, yes I did. I was going to leave after seeing Orquídea perform, but I stayed until the end. They rolled him out in an iron cage. A Living Star, they called him. I thought it was a bunch of horseshit, you know. Trying to fool honest people. But he glowed from the inside out. You couldn’t even see a person, only the outline of one. Orquídea watched him, too, from the opening of one of the curtains. That’s when I took my chance and went after her. You say this Living Star survived, too?”
Rey nodded and lit another cigarette. “He said he’d never stop hunting us.”
Isabela’s bones rattled as she shook her head. “I tried to find her, when the circus caught fire. When I couldn’t find her, I thought she was dead. She and Pedrito. My poor girl. It’s my fault, not the stars’. The only bad luck she ever had was me.”
Marimar gripped the lip of the tomb. “We shouldn’t have come here.”
“Don’t say that,” Isabela said, like she’d been slapped. “I didn’t know my daughter in life, not truly. But through you, perhaps I know her a little more. You know, there is something.… When Orquídea was a little girl, she talked to the river more than she talked to me. She told me she made a pact with the river monster. I wouldn’t be surprised if she went back there when she escaped the fire.”
Marimar brushed the corners of her eyes.
“We’ll let you rest,” Reymundo said. “Thank you.”
“What will you do?”
“Go to the river,” Marimar said.
“Take this.” Isabela yanked off the tips of three phalanges and handed them to her descendants. “Keep them with you. Put them somewhere safe. I failed to protect my daughter, but perhaps I can protect you.”
Marimar chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“You just reminded me of her for a moment,” Marimar said.
Isabela laid back and rested her hands on her abdomen. She shut her eyes. The impression of her ghost faded. “She is still my daughter, after all.”
28
THE FLOWER WHO STOLE FROM THE STARS
A few weeks into her search for the key to free Lázaro, Bolívar had become so attentive, so utterly loving, that Orquídea almost wanted to change her mind. Doubt seeped into her thoughts. Why should she take another man’s word over her own husband’s? A man who was not a man but a celestial being. A fallen god trapped for the amusement of others by a clever ringmaster.
Bolívar proved his love and desire for her again and again, for the duration of their voyage. When they changed ships in Panama, en route to Santiago, Chile, Orquídea spent most of her time walking on deck, taking in the cold breeze. She talked to her child, even though he was still growing. She wanted to make sure he recognized her voice when he was born.
On one of those walks, another passenger approached her. He leaned against the railing beside her. “What a beautiful sight.”
She nodded and offered a polite smile but nothing more.
The man leaned in. He was handsome, tailored. The kind of man who liked to adorn a bowl with exotic fruit but never eat it. A Nordic accent perhaps. “I meant you.”
He reached for her cheek, but before his hand made contact, Bolívar grabbed the man by his coat and pinned him against the edge. The threat was clear. Orquídea tried to pull Bolívar back, but she was not strong enough.
“Stop it, Bolívar, please!”
“He was going to touch you,” Bolívar shouted, feral.
Thankfully, Lucho was there to stop her husband from being jailed for manslaughter.
Back in their cabin, Bolívar kissed her, pressed his face against her pregnant belly and apologized for scaring her. Everything was
fine for a moment. That’s what Bolívar was like, moments of love, adoration, heat, betrayal, jealousy. All of them fleeting.
When the moon was full, the tide within him changed. He wandered into the crowded parlors and salons, searching for a pretty girl to fuck in the dark corners of the ship. He was a lycanthrope, waiting for that one night of havoc and rage, of wild reverie that made him forget about his wife and his son growing in her womb.
It was that day, once a month, when he stayed out all night, that she made herself remember her rage. It drove her. It turned her little by little into a new kind of marvel, the woman made of iron. But no matter how many times she emptied his closets, his suitcases, turned out the pockets of his dozens of tailcoats and doublets, his socks and his undergarments, she couldn’t find the key. The only thing Orquídea discovered was that Lucho left his post once, every night, just after midnight to carry out his clandestine affair with Wolf Girl. Those were the moments she spent with the Living Star.
Lazáro was getting impatient. They were already making their way across Chile and into parts of Argentina, after which they’d continue north to Guayaquil and end back in Cartagena where everything had begun for the Londoños.
“Perhaps,” Lazáro mused, “I will find another girl with a heart of ice who wants her dream just as badly as you, perhaps more so.”
She sat where she always did, at the door of his cage on a wool blanket. How many times had he said that to her? Always the same threat. “Too bad, my dear fallen star, you already showed me your hand. I am the one you were looking for.”
He allowed himself to laugh with her and accepted her offerings. He’d never cared for human food because he hadn’t known that Bolívar had only ever fed him the same scraps they fed the dogs. Orquídea brought him cakes filled with cream, tartes topped with candied berries. She’d made him try wine and tell her the story of sailing across the stars. What it felt like to be pure energy and light and consciousness. She never grew tired of that one, of the promise of infinite wonder.
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