The Orchid Sister

by LeClaire, Anne D.

  “State Department. Wow, you are really worried.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”

  Maddie took the photo back. “Me too.” She heard the despair in her voice.

  “Was she alone?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Then I definitely would have remembered her. I don’t often see women traveling solo,” the waitress said.

  “Really?” Maddie looked at her more closely, wondering what she was doing in Playa. “How long have you been here?”

  “Seven years.”

  “Seven years? You live here, then?”

  “I do now. Originally from Canada. Winnipeg. I came down one year when I couldn’t take one more winter of snow and ice.”

  “And you stayed.”

  “I did. I fell in love with the place. The people. The music and art. The culture, you know? The pace of life. I kept extending my stay until it became obvious to me that this was where I wanted to live full time. So I bought this place.” She extended a hand. “My name’s Eve. Short for Evelyn.”

  “Madison. Though everyone calls me Maddie.”

  “Welcome to Playa, Maddie. Where are you staying?”

  “The Hotel Molcas.”

  “That’s a good place. I know Ramón, the owner. Tell him I said he’s to treat you right or he’ll have to answer to me.” She winked. “We girls have to stick together.”

  “Thanks, but I’m leaving soon.” The taste of failure filled her mouth and she took a sip of beer, as if it could so easily be washed away. “What about your family? Are they here, too?”

  “No family.” Eve laughed. “I’ve been happily divorced for twelve years.” Two couples entered. She excused herself and went to seat them. Maddie watched her walk away, her stride relaxed. A woman who moved easily.

  Even if Kat had decided to make a radical change, as Eve had, there would be no need for secrecy. Maddie’s head ached from thinking about it. And from hunger.

  The menu was simple. A selection of local dishes. Sopa de pescado. Tacos and ceviche. Fish fajitas. Cochinita pibil and pollo pibil. Arroz and jaibas. Beside each item was a translation in English. The dips and tortilla had dampened the little appetite she had. She passed on the chicken, pork, and crab dishes and settled on the fish soup.

  “Another beer?” Eve asked.

  “Better not. I’ll have a coffee, though.” The jolt of caffeine would give her energy to continue searching the back streets of the village. Around her, the tables were filling with early diners. She smoothed the edges of Kat’s photo and slipped it back into her tote. Her fingers encircled the quartz heart. She held the talisman tightly and closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, she saw through the window a white van coming into view. She was struck by the anomaly of such a clean white vehicle among the old dusty cars of the village. There were blue letters on the side of the van, and she read them idly. And then with a shock of recognition.

  Retirada de la Playa. The words embroidered on the robe in Kat’s bathroom in DC.

  VÍCTOR

  The cantina was crowded and smelled of men and beer and cigarettes and the oily undertone of tequila. Víctor sat in the corner. He knew he should have something to eat and then go home and sleep, but he raised his glass and took a deep swallow. Already, in the short time since he had left the couple at the pier, he had managed to get drunk. Perhaps he should have stuck to beer, but he had needed something stronger, something he wouldn’t piss away before it could help him forget. Tomorrow he would have a headache and be unable to dive, but this did not concern him now.

  He recalled the image of the woman in the photo Madison had shown him. Katherine. He recalled how at the first sight of her, he had the inexplicable sense that they had met. Later, she had confessed she had felt the same way. It had been a long time since he had lost himself to a woman. He remembered a woman in Texas, a woman with calloused hands from handling horses and eyes that held laughter. Her name had been Suzanna. She had been his last real love, and that had been years ago. She had been married. He raised his hand and signaled that he would have another drink. An arm slid across his back in an easy embrace, and a thick hand gripped his shoulder. It was not his friend Antonio who sat at the bar and knew to leave Víctor alone when he was like this. This was Pedro Gonsalves. He was sweating and his face was red.

  “Take it easy, my friend,” Pedro said.

  Víctor shrugged off the arm. He did not need advice. Someone began to sing. He recognized the voice of José Ventura, and he spat on the floor in disgust. José was a dog who could not sing on key if the angels themselves crept into his mouth. The noise of his off-pitch singing was an insult to the ears.

  “Someone should shut him up,” he said to Pedro. Even drunk, he could sing better than José.

  “You sing,” Pedro said.

  Juliana Morales left the bar she was tending and sashayed over to José. She took the guitar from him. “Víctor’s turn,” she said. José gave her a fierce look and slunk into the shadows. She brought the guitar to Víctor. He cradled it in his arms, his hands stroking the worn wood. He took a moment to tune the strings. Even drunk, his ear was truer than the ear of that dog José.

  His voice swelled and ebbed, as liquid as the tide, pulling the listeners in. When Víctor lived for a while in Mexico City, he’d worked in a bar, earning more in one night than he did in a week of diving with tourists in Playa. The women told him he looked like the singer Pedro Iglesias. He could have had his choice of any of them. But as he sang, he did not think of them or of the untrue woman in Texas. He thought of the two sisters. The scarred and scared one who was braver than she knew and the other sister, the one of mystery who looked out of the photo and straight into his heart, just as she had the first time they met. The song grew sadder. Many times that day, he had come close to confiding in Madison, but extreme caution had silenced him. Once entangled in a situation, it was not easy to remove oneself. He imagined interviews with the police, pictured the suspicion their faces would wear. It was serious business when an American woman went missing. He knew nothing. There was nothing he could do. He knew no more about where Katherine had gone than her sister did. But would people believe that?

  When he finished the song, he put the guitar on the bar and reached for the glass that Juliana pushed toward him.

  “Another,” a voice called. “Sing us another.”

  He shook his head. “Please, Víctor,” Juliana said. “For me.” Already his music had softened her eyes. Another night he might have reached for her, but now he brushed her aside. He stood, wavered, drunker than he had thought.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  He did not answer. As he left the cantina, he heard the sound of laughter. “A woman,” Juan Torres was saying in a knowing voice.

  “Sí,” said Juan Santos. “A woman has taken Víctor to the street of bitterness.”

  Fuck them, he thought. He staggered toward the sea. The salt air and breeze would clear his head. Forget the sisters, he told himself. But then he remembered standing afar and even from that distance being able to see the brave look on the woman’s face as she stood revealing her body marked by scars. And the image of her sister, the one who had stirred his frozen heart, swam before his eyes.

  There was one person who could help him, one person who knew things no one else could see, but he did not like the idea of going to Tia Clara. He knew the old woman would not welcome him. The grudge between them was long-standing and so entrenched it ran in his blood. He did not know the cause of this ill will, but it had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember. Even when he was a boy, Tia Clara had been cold to him. She had never crushed him to her or stroked his hair or smiled at him as he had seen her do with others. When another boy had cried of a headache, she would touch his brow and wrap halves of split beans to his temples, causing the ache to disappear, but Víctor believed he could be blind with pain from an earache and she would not mix
a tea of manzanilla or drip the juice of the pita cactus into his ear. But still, he always felt her eyes on him. And if he glanced at her, he could catch her with a look of hate in her black eyes. No. It was unthinkable to go to her now. She would only laugh and turn him away.

  Still his feet continued along the sand, taking him toward her, glad now for the many glasses of tequila. Only drunk could he bring himself to beg before Tia Clara.

  To ask her what she knew of the woman who had haunted his heart and disappeared.

  TIA CLARA

  Deep in the center of her bones, Tia Clara was tired. She knew sleep would not bring relief, for it was not weariness of the body alone that drained her. It was her spirit that bore exhaustion with a relentlessness that aged and plagued her. It was the sickness of memory.

  She was thinking these things when she heard the pounding on her door. Her hand flew to her chest, felt the rapid beating of her heart beneath her skin. Who could be coming to her door? At this hour and rapping with such fury, such a messenger could only mean misfortune. She crossed the floor and prepared herself to face straight on whatever waited there. Even so, she was unable to control the groan that escaped her when she opened the door and looked into the face of Víctor Díaz.

  “Tia Clara,” he began.

  “What do you want here?”

  “Your help,” he said.

  He was drunk. She saw that at once and knew that without drink he would not have come to stand at her door like a beggar. Years had passed since she had been this close to him, so close she could touch him without extending her arm, but she did not reach out. When she looked into his eyes, eyes so familiar even now after all these years, she felt a sharpness like sticks in her chest.

  “You are drunk.” Her voice was harsh in an effort to calm the panic that tightened her throat. “You stink of it.”

  “Por favor,” he said, whining on her doorstep like a beaten dog.

  Once, perhaps, the sight of his pain might have moved her, but now, looking into his eyes—eyes that reminded her of all that she had once had and all that she had lost so long ago—the old bitterness filled her heart.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  “There is nothing I can do for you.” His voice plagued her, as haunting to her ears as his eyes had been. What devil had sent him here to torment her?

  “You know things,” he said.

  “I have nothing for you.”

  “Not for me. For another. A norteamericana. She is looking for her hermana.”

  “What do you care?” she spat out. “What business is it of yours?”

  “I want to help her.” She saw this was a half truth, and he still held back why he had come to her.

  “You are a fool.” She saw in his face the pain of one lost, so like his padre it nearly stopped her heart. It was this pain that forced the next words out. “Forget about her. This gringa is nothing to you. And the hermana she looks for is nothing. She is a foolish woman.” Too late, she saw that she had revealed too much and that, even in his drunkenness, Víctor saw this.

  “You know about her sister?”

  Tia Clara took a step back, suddenly afraid.

  “Where is she?”

  “I do not know,” she said, hoping he was too drunk to detect the lie. “Now go.” She closed the door, shutting out the sight of him. She waited, listening for his footsteps to leave, ignoring the sound of his voice calling to her. Eventually he fell silent. She heard him stumble over the pot by the door that held a planting of sage. She crossed back to the wood chair. The fly remained on the rim of the cup. The past, she knew, was not dead. It was not like a door that could be shut and sealed. It remained forever alive with her.

  On her wedding day, the village had been surrounded with a rosy light, the edges of which shone with gold. Too happy to sleep, Clara had woken early. Her wedding dress was folded over the back of a chair and glowed in the light of dawn. It was white, with tiny flowers stitched across the bodice. Even her madre’s disapproval of the groom had not kept her from making the wedding dress. When it was finished, Clara had slipped it on and known that it had made her beautiful. For one day, she would be the most beautiful girl in Playa del Pedro. More beautiful, even, than Consuelo. Today, she’d thought as she stared at the garment, today is the best day of my life.

  The sleeping sounds of her family filled their small casa. She tried to foresee what awaited her. Tonight, for the first time in her life, she would not sleep in this house. Tonight she would sleep beside Felipe Manuel Vazquez, the handsome reformed bandito who today would become her husband.

  It was impossible for Clara to lie still any longer. Before the others awoke, she would go to the forest and ask the talking tree about her future. She slipped from the hammock and ran on bare feet from the house. The grass around the base of the talking tree was flat, trampled by the feet of the villagers who came to seek answers to the questions of their lives. Fearlessly, Clara stood where so many had before her. Birds cawed and sang in the jungle. She heard the words in her head, ready to be spoken. Tell me about Felipe Manuel Vazquez? she would ask. Will we be happy? Will our firstborn be a son? Strong and tall like his father? She believed that asking the talking tree was only a tradition, and she would receive the answer she already knew in her heart. Who could doubt his love?

  At that moment a cloud had passed before the rising sun, casting the jungle into darkness. For that instant the birds had ceased their song. Because of this she ran back to her home before she could give voice to her questions and did not hear the answer she now knew the talking tree would have given her. One year, it would have told her. You and your bandito will have one year of happiness.

  And so it was. Exactly one year passed, and the pink and gold shell that had shimmered around the village began to fade, replaced by a somber shade of red. At first, Clara had misread the significance of this and believed the coming of the red fire meant only that the passion she felt for Manny (as she alone called him), and he for her, had grown and deepened, and soon the flower of his seed would take root in her and grow.

  When Manny had come to her and revealed his secret, the secret that had caused the delicate color of her universe to darken, she had wept. How could it be so? How could her Manny have fallen in love with Consuelo?

  The news had made her sick with fever, but once she regained her strength, because even then she knew she was stronger than he, stronger than Consuelo, she began to plan. It had been a mistake, and she could forgive his weakness. Even if he had left his past behind, he still remained a bandito and could not resist the theft of her sister’s heart. He was not at fault. Consuelo had bewitched him. Clara began to gather the herbs that would return him to her. One night she slipped her potion into his drink. And she waited. And he came to her and asked forgiveness.

  All might have been well had his seed taken root in her belly and not in Consuelo’s. And as her sister’s belly grew, a corresponding bitterness grew inside Clara’s heart. She could not look at Manny without picturing them, their arms and legs entangled, Consuelo’s black hair spread across his unfaithful chest. Consuelo’s scent—so like the yellow flower of the vanilla plant and the bark of the cinnamon tree—staining his skin. As Consuelo’s belly grew, so did the gossip of the villagers. They wondered who had fathered the child. Consuelo, more beautiful than ever, even swollen with child, would not speak of him. And Clara kept the secret. And planned.

  After the birth of the child, a beautiful boy—even she had to admit the infant was beautiful—she melted wax and formed it into a candle. She drew figures in the air with its flame and wove her magic, a spell that would make the child grow weak and ill and cause her sister to grow ugly with grief, magic that would free Manny from Consuelo’s witchcraft and return him to her bed. And the child did fall sick, and Consuelo did grow thin and worn with worry. It was then that the magic failed Tia Clara and all went wrong. Manny, her Manny, went into the jungle to find the root of the tree that would cure his child. W
hen he didn’t return, Clara went looking for him. She found him at the base of the tree, dead from the poison of a snake. When Consuelo learned of Manny’s death, she did not weep. The next day she walked into the sea. The villagers, ignorant of the truth, believed that because her infant son was dying, Consuelo had become mad with grief. How else to explain such an act? Only Clara knew the truth. She knew it was not the venom of the snake that had caused the death of her husband, but Clara’s own magic, created from the poison of a jealous heart. And such poison had killed her sister as well. Only the infant had escaped to remind her of what she had done.

  Tia Clara stared at the canary, unmoving in its cage, its green feathers dull. Soon it, too, would die. Fear moved in her chest, curling like a serpent. Why had Víctor, a man born of the betrayal of the two she had loved most, come to her now? What help did he want of her? For a moment her vision cleared, and she saw the depth of the pain in his heart, but it was nothing compared to the pain she felt when she confronted her own future. Then she glimpsed his future and saw that more pain was waiting for him, but there was more she saw and this caused as much distress as his unhappiness had. She saw a future circled with the rose-gold of love.

  If once power was used for evil, could it still be used for good?

  Was it too late now for her soul to be saved?

  She was an old woman, afraid of dying, but there was one thing she could do. She would go to the hotel and tell the gringa mask maker what she knew about her missing sister. She doubted helping the two sisters in this way would balance her own sins that had led to Consuelo’s death, but if she could lead Consuelo’s son one step closer to his rose-tinged future, perhaps the ghosts that shadowed her days would forgive her.

  GRACIELA

  There was a commotion in the hall outside her door.

  The voices of the doctor and Señorita Mercer. A door opening, closing, opening again. She lay still, ready to feign sleep if they should look in on her. She concentrated on the noises in the hall, trying to learn from them what was happening. Had the weeping woman left her room again and collapsed in the hall?