The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina

by Zoraida Cordova

  “Orquídea, please.”

  “No. You chose your life and I chose mine. I don’t want to see you again.”

  “At least let me hold my grandson—”

  “You have six other children. One day you will have plenty of grandchildren to hold.” They were ugly words, but she had an ugly, cruel pain in her heart. “Tell me. Did you always know that someone would come into your life and make it better?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we had a life before Wilhelm Buenasuerte. A life where you could have loved me. What we had could have been enough if we had worked together.”

  Isabela Buenasuerte shook her head. “You don’t know what it was like being left alone. I was alone.”

  “You had me.” Orquídea tapped the naked skin over her heart, like if she punched through it she’d find it hollowed out. “We didn’t need Buenasuerte or my father. He came to the house one day and I never told you. I never told you anything because you made it clear, from the moment I could walk, that I had ruined your life. It’s like you were waiting for someone to give you the world you deserved before I came along.”

  When Isabela had nothing to say, no words to defend herself, Orquídea laughed. “I thought so.”

  Hurt, Isabela did as she was told. She left but, of course, didn’t go far.

  Orquídea returned to her schemes but she’d changed. Some people change over time, water wearing stones smooth. Others require the violent clap of lightning that turns sand into glass. Her heart felt like it had split into tiny little hearts, each pounding at the hollows of her body, her throat, her fingers, her toes. Pedrito could feel it, and he fussed and cried all the way back to their tent.

  She set Pedrito down in his basinet and ran over to the room she shared with her husband. Bolívar’s hat was in the same spot on the bed where he threw it every night before he went out. She didn’t think he’d be back, but she seized the boon. She turned it over. She’d never truly held it in her hands. It felt like an extension of him, in a way. She reached inside and ran her hand along the lining. The latch of a false bottom. She opened it.

  “Orquídea?” he asked. “Is that you?”

  Who else would it be? She wanted to ask but didn’t.

  Then she felt it. The cold metal of the key made of celestial light. She quickly pocketed it in her brassiere and sat at her vanity. Her dark eyes were glossy, but she hid her distress well. She opened one of her powder boxes and dipped the velvet cushion in, then dabbed it between her breasts. The delicate scent helped her relax.

  Bolívar stepped out from behind the bath screen. He was naked. Her hearts gave a flutter in reminder of how much she’d loved and wanted him once. He followed her eyes to his lower extremities as he dried his torso. She remembered the times when they bathed together, emptying the tub with their passion. Then she remembered Safi, the prostitutes in Amsterdam, the acrobat twins, the actress in Monaco, the duchess in London. Most of all she remembered standing in the parlor of that ship and watching a Russian girl swallow his erection whole. She wished the girl had bit it off.

  “Are you happy to be home?” Bolívar asked, drying his ear.

  He walked up behind her, kissed her while staring at them in the mirror. She accepted his kisses because she had a traitorous heart. They were together now. She, Pedrito, and Bolívar. He raked his hand over her leg, over her breasts. She remembered the key tucked there. Even if she wanted him one last time. Even if…

  “You’re in a good mood,” she said, and distracted him by slapping one of his muscular thighs. It was like he suspected something was wrong. Is that why, after months, he’d changed his predictable schedule? “And you’re wet.”

  He cocked a brow and let his stare rake over her. “I thought that’s how you preferred me.”

  She laughed and stood, using their son as a pretense. She rocked him so that the baby was the only one she had room for in her arms.

  “I was thinking,” he said, tugging on a simple button-down. A flush of heat spread across her skin as she remembered how much she’d loved watching him dress in front of her. “We should take a walk around the park tomorrow. See the city. The river. I know you’ve longed for it. Let’s see how the pearl of the Pacific has changed since you left it.”

  “You know me so well.” She tried to sound sweet but her nerves seized her vocal cords.

  He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her cheek, caressed the baby’s head. “That’s because you’re mine. You both are.”

  Why had he chosen that day, of all days, to remind her of the moments when things were beautiful? She knew that Bolívar Londoño was not going to change. She should have listened to Agustina long ago and protected her heart better. But she’d been naïve. She’d been desperate to cling to something good. The biggest trick, the greatest illusion in the whole circus was Bolívar’s love.

  “Why? Is Safi busy or did you already fuck her enough today?”

  Bolívar looked like she’d slapped him. He bit his bottom lip and pulled on his trousers. “You spurn my advances and then you push me to another woman. Is that how little you love me now?”

  “You stopped loving me long ago,” she said softly, and she wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince. She tucked Pedrito back in his bassinette and sat in front of her mirror. Tried to summon all the strength she had, steel her heart.

  “I have never stopped loving you,” he said, turning Orquídea in her seat to face him. He caged her with his arms. “You know who I am, and you chose me, too.”

  That was the last time Orquídea Divina would see Bolívar Londoño. Sometimes, during the time periods between husbands in Four Rivers, Orquídea wondered how things would be now if she had only relented, slipped the key back into his hat when he fell asleep. Pedrito might still be alive. She’d still be the foolish ringmaster’s wife who allowed his trysts and infidelities. How was she supposed to know which life had been the right one? She allowed herself that moment of weakness every few years and then she put Bolívar where she put her other memories, locked away where no one could find them.

  Instead, she kissed her husband. She let him trace the familiar lines along her thighs and hated herself for still wanting him just a little. He was on his knees, ripping the seams of her sheer stockings. Orquídea’s heartbeat pounded in her ears. She turned her head and watched him through the mirror, the bright lights that showed every detail, even the lines across his back made by someone else.

  She reached on her vanity for one of her powders. There were so many reasons she had asked Lázaro to wait until she was back in Ecuador to enact their plan. The most important one was because it was her home. She wanted Pedrito to grow up with eyes on the river. She wanted him to learn to love the land. Guayaquil was an old city, full of old people, rooted to the earth. The world changed around them. Hills covered in grass became paved streets. Houses made of cane and brick and tin became slabs of concrete. There would be new bridges and monuments and art. It would change, but the resilient heart of the people would always remain strong. She needed that strength.

  The second reason was because Ecuador was home to thousands of species of flowers. Four thousand types of orchids, four hundred types of roses, and one strange, hallucinogenic lily. An angel’s-trumpet, shaped like a bell and used by shamans to divine the stars and expel inner demons. It had medicinal properties, but in the hands of men, it was used for cruelties. She’d acquired the powder and emptied the vial in one of her powdered perfumes.

  It wasn’t how she’d timed it, but it could work. Would work.

  Bolívar wrapped his hand around his cock and looked at her, dazed by her beauty as he’d been that first day. Orquídea grabbed a fist full of powder and blew it in his face.

  He choked and sputtered. He cursed and grabbed for the bed, falling on his back. She’d only ever heard stories of the plant, and she didn’t know how long it would last. Her plan was three-fold. She had the key. She retrieved the bag from under the bed. Now, she ya
nked the signet ring from his finger and pocketed it.

  With Pedrito safely against her chest in his sling, she ran. While the fireworks went off, she approached the tent. Lucho frowned when he saw her, but she blew a handful of the angel’s-trumpet powder in his face. All eight feet and four hundred and sixty pounds of him fell like a great bear in the woods.

  Lázaro paced in his iron cage. Orquídea dropped her bag and rested a protective hand over Pedrito’s soft curls.

  “You are early,” Lázaro said, taking in her agitated state. “What happened?”

  “We have to do this now. Bolívar came back early, and I don’t know how long the angel’s-trumpet will last.”

  Orquídea thought of her father shoving money in her hands and then asking her not to look for him. How arrogant had he been in thinking she’d wanted to know him in the first place?

  “The key,” Lázaro said, and held up his manacles.

  Orquídea thought of her mother marrying Wilhelm Buenasuerte and telling her to wait upstairs on the balcony, out of sight.

  “And the ring?”

  She thought of Bolívar’s serpent tongue. She thought of the broken pieces within her.

  “Here.” She cupped it in her palm like a pearl.

  She thought of how Lázaro trusted her. But he knew the darkness in the heart of humans, and he should’ve known better.

  As he shut his eyes and became the Living Star, Orquídea did as he’d instructed. She placed her hand against his chest. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. She felt like she’d fallen into the Guayas River. She’d stepped into the hollow space of the galaxy he said he’d come from. The world was all color and light. Then all darkness and stars. Was this what he felt like every time he used his power, like the world couldn’t touch him?

  Orquídea thought again of her mother and Bolívar. The two people she loved the most once again had split open her wounds. She never wanted to feel that way again. What would she do when Lázaro’s power faded? What would she do when she was alone again? Why should she not have the power of the stars forever? The universe had conspired against her, Niña Mala Suerte, Bastard Daughter of the Waves, and she was evening the score.

  Overcome with grief and anger, when the moment came to let go, she held on. She took and took as others had taken from her. She heard Lázaro’s heartbeat, his pulse within her, slower, racing against her own and losing. She heard him scream her name.

  Only then did she snap awake. Pedrito was crying and Lázaro had passed out.

  Orquídea kept her end of the bargain, however. She left the key and the ring in his hand.

  She felt his starlight coursing through her. It was deep in her marrow, in the composition of her blood, her sinew. Orquídea Divina made her first wish.

  I wish Lázaro never finds me, she said. Never sees me, never hears my voice, never comes near me.

  Then she picked up her bag and left. She made it across the fairgrounds before she smelled the smoke. The others did, too.

  “No,” she gasped.

  Orquídea tried to run back but there were several explosions. Animals and people trying to escape all at once. She dropped her bag and tripped over a net. Later on, she remembered thinking how ironic it was. The very thing that had sustained her as a child would be her undoing.

  She heard Bolívar’s voice somewhere in the distance calling her name. He was awake. She had done this, played a part in the destruction of everything he had built, and she knew, she knew he’d want to hurt her.

  Freeing herself from the tangled net, Orquídea held her baby close. She thought she must have hit herself when she fell, because, as she stood, there was a piercing pain cutting from her heart to her core, deep within her uterus. She began to glow, her insides radiating with light, hot and blinding.

  She didn’t remember fainting from the pain, but she came around to the wail of ambulance sirens. Heard the screams. Then, a terrible realization claimed her. Pedrito was pressed against her, but he wasn’t moving. Wasn’t flesh or bone. He was calcified, unbreakable moonstone.

  31

  THE LIVING STAR & THE GIRL WITH A HOLE IN HER HEART

  The city of Guayaquil was born on a hill. Nearly five hundred years later, three cousins raced up 444 steps of the same hill to reach the summit of the cerro Santa Ana. They passed vendors whistling for their attention, girls selling candy and cigarettes out of boxes that hung from their necks like parlor girls from the 1920s. Buskers and pickpockets. Young and old couples out for a stroll, families dining in at local favorites. Families so much like the Montoyas and families worlds apart.

  As they reached the very top, Marimar felt that familiar pain behind her belly button. She wondered if she’d been wrong when she’d equated that feeling with Four Rivers, with Orquídea. The plaza at the top of the hill was lined with visitors who wanted to watch the sun set over the city. Not one of them was aware that she’d buried her cousin that morning, that she’d spoken to the bones of her great-grandmother moments later. None of them knew how many times her world had shattered and how she’d put it back bit by bit. All because some circus oddity had a vendetta against her grandmother. They’d take the fight to the Living Star. This ended with her, with them.

  “Fuck, I need to quit smoking,” Rey muttered as they reached the top of the hill, winded, but alert.

  The Montoyas formed their own cluster, turning and turning in the direction of the winds in hopes of hearing that voice.

  “What about that place?” Rhiannon asked, pointing at the lighthouse.

  The lighthouse would be the highest point of the hill. But it was decorative. Visitors spilled in and out to get a sight of its views.

  Marimar knew in her gut that the Living Star was not up there. This was the hill that the indigenous peoples had called Loninchao, and the Spanish invaders had called Cerrito Verde, the Little Green Hill. Where a treasure hunter, near his death, invoked the name of a saint to save him from death. Santa Ana.

  Isn’t that what the locals had called her, and her cousins? Saints. Marimar knew that she wasn’t any of those things. But Orquídea might have been. The girl who spoke to the river, the girl who made something out of nothing. The woman who transformed herself time and time again when the world refused her.

  “The chapel,” Marimar said, and this time she was certain.

  They ran across the stone plaza bathed in sunset golds. The stained-glass depicting Santa Ana pulsed with light. The chapel itself was small, with five or six rows on each side. A couple of old women were kneeling in the front pews. Despite the noise of the intrusion, they did not open their eyes, only kept rubbing rosary beads between wrinkled fingers.

  Marimar palmed her stomach. Sharp pain tugged at her belly button. She stepped closer to the stained glass windows depicting the stations of the cross.

  “There’s nothing here,” Rey said, his whisper amplified by the acoustics.

  “Wait—” Marimar couldn’t quite explain the sensation that pulled at her. She heard a faint chime, like the prolonged note of a church organ. It was distant, but there. The Living Star was hiding within these walls and she would rip out the wallpaper, the boards. She’d break everything apart the way Orquídea had destroyed her own house. Then the pulling sensation grew stronger. She counted each window and found the oddity.

  At the other end of the chapel was a fifteenth window that did not belong—a figure standing at the top of a green hill overlooking a river. Above him, stars fell in a torrent, but one was the brightest. An eight-pointed star right over his heart like a compass rose.

  “It’s him,” Marimar said. Her throat ached, and this time it spread, like thorns were growing inside of her chest. She wove between the pews until she stood in front of the glass window. Her abdomen cramped where her power tugged, and for a breath of a moment, she wasn’t certain if it wanted her to go forward or turn back. She heard Rey and Rhiannon hurrying to her side.

  When she touched the glass, vertigo spun her up and down, left and r
ight, here and there. Marimar closed her eyes and breathed through the nausea that slammed into her. The temperature dropped and, when she opened her eyes, she was no longer in the chapel.

  Rey and Rhiannon leaped into the stain glass window a breath after her. Rey had never felt as cold, not even when he did the polar bear plunge on New Year’s Day in Coney Island. Rhiannon thought of the ice that had frozen her hair into icicles when her parents took her sledding, and she didn’t mind as much.

  The room was empty, dark, with a circular skylight that let in a single shaft of moonglow. She took a step forward. The thick plumes of incense and the sweet, humid air of the city was replaced by a stench that assaulted her—waste and decay. The same rot she’d smelled in Four Rivers, but older still. Something was dead and it was in this room with her.

  “What is that?” Rhiannon asked beside her, pinching her little nose. “I don’t see anything.”

  “It’s another trick,” Rey said. He walked into the moonglow spotlight. Up above, he could see the moon, like it had been lassoed closer to the earth. His steps echoed in the cold stillness, as he made his way to the far wall and stopped at his reflection. He spun in every direction but there were no doors, not even to mark their entry point.

  Rhiannon touched her reflection. “Why are the walls all liquid mirrors?”

  “I don’t know,” Marimar said. Every instinct within screamed for her to run. But to where? There was no place that was safe for them. Not until she confronted the Living Star. She pressed her hand against the wall, but this time it was solid. She saw herself multiplied over and over again, an infinite version of herself and her cousins, and then, right behind her, a man appeared where there hadn’t been one before.

  The Living Star’s halo of light flickered, then darkened, until he was the layer beneath, a man with long black hair, milky skin dotted with pearlescent scars. His black eyes flared wide and a deep moan echoed in the room. Thick stitches formed crude exes over his lips, the skin red and raw at the puncture wounds.