The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (14)

“One time I asked her why she didn’t have a trace of an accent. I barely even heard her speak Spanish. And you do remember what she said?”

“She said she mixed dirt from the backyard, red rock clay, and peppermint leaves in a bowl and then scrapped her tongue with it.” Marimar was laughing so hard she could barely breathe. “Then you did that to try and pass your German class.”

Rey could practically feel the grit of the dirt in his mouth and the earthworm that he hadn’t noticed.

“It’s okay to be gullible kids, Rey,” she told him, nudging her arm against his. “That’s the whole point of being a kid. You believe things before the world proves you wrong.”

Why did his grandmother make him so mad? Thinking of her sometimes filled him with a sense of naivete that made him uncomfortable. Like he’d spent a lifetime watching a magician and then learned how simple her tricks were. He’d thought of his grandmother as a witch, a bruja with a house that buzzed with magic. Pantries filled with never-ending supplies of coffee and rice and sugar. With land that was always green and fertile. It wasn’t her fault that he’d become logical—that she must have had a steady shipment that came when he had been too busy chasing farm boys, or that her land was in a valley called Four Fucking Rivers and of course it was fertile.

Orquídea’s legacy was flash and secrets and half lies. Sweet memories that curdled with truth and bitterness over time. She wasn’t a bruja and she wasn’t powerful. He didn’t want to be anything like that. He was mad at himself for realizing too late that her stories were just stories. That she wasn’t a witch with magic tucked away like a silver coin between clever fingers, snatched behind a fool’s ear. She was just a lonely old woman who had survived a great deal of loss. And yet, despite everything she was and couldn’t be, she was a fixture in his mind. Orquídea Divina Montoya could not die. Not now, not ever. It worried him suddenly.

“I don’t feel lied to,” Marimar finally said.

“Good for you,” he said softly, and turned up the volume. The road ahead was open, and he hit the gas, like if he went fast enough, he’d fly.





5

THE FLOWER OF THE RIVER SHORE




The day her mother married for the first time, Orquídea helped her get ready. She’d glued river pearls to a diadem and spent all night sewing the veil. Her future stepfather promised to give Isabela Montoya the world, but Orquídea still wanted her contribution to be perfect. On the big day, mother and daughter sat in the small room with a vanity. It was the last time they’d be alone together for a while.

“You look like a queen,” Orquídea said, admiring her work in the mirror.

“Come here.” Isabela reached for her daughter. She was a young woman now dressed in a blush pink dress and gleaming white shoes with buckles on them. Her arms and legs were strong from swimming and walking and fishing. Her long, perfect curls wild with humidity and river water; beautiful brown skin that looked soft as velvet. Her elegant features caught all the wrong attention. Some of the locals called her La Flor de la Orilla, the flower of the shore. A name Isabela detested because it sounded cheap.

Orquídea didn’t like it because she knew she wasn’t a flower, delicate and pretty and waiting to be plucked. For what? To be smelled? To sit in a glass of water until she withered? She was more than that. She wanted to be rooted so deep into the earth that nothing, no human, no force of nature, save an act of the heavens themselves, could rip her out.

“Things are going to be different for us now,” Isabela promised. “Better.”

Before Orquídea could speak, the door opened and Roberta Montoya waltzed in, clutching a hat box and a smaller ring box. She greeted her granddaughter with a curt nod, then turned to Isabela.

“I wore this on my wedding day, and my mother on hers,” Roberta explained, lifting the hat box lid. “God has given you a second chance, and so will I.”

Isabela was stunned. Not because of the intricate lace veil spilling out of the box. But because it had been so many years since she’d heard her mother’s voice that she had forgotten the cadence of it. Roberta removed the pearl diadem and Orquídea caught it before it hit the floor.

“Why are you standing there, girl?” Roberta snapped at Orquídea and shoved the smaller box against her chest. “Make yourself useful. Deliver these cufflinks to Mr. Buenasuerte.”

Orquídea looked to her mother, waiting for Isabela to interject. But she only stared at her own reflection, hidden behind gauzy white lace, as if the moment her husband peeled it back she’d be a new woman.

The wedding was small, but elegant. Orquídea was forced to give up her seat for her grandmother. From the balcony of the church, she watched Isabela get her second chance at happiness. None of them—not the Buenasuerte clan, not the priest, and certainly not the Montoyas—noticed her up there, anxiously plucking out the pearls from the bed of glue on the diadem. And none of them knew that if not for Orquídea, the flower of the shore, there wouldn’t be a wedding, a second chance, to begin with.

She had spent the afternoon fishing when she first caught the attention of the man who would become her stepfather. He was a land developer and civil engineer. One of those men who waltzed into small, muddy neighborhoods and provincial towns. They laid down concrete, foundations for the city, roads and boardwalks. They left their mark. They always left children behind, too. In Ecuador, a place still transforming, still changing into what it wanted to be, a civil engineer was as common as the tomcats that prowled the neighborhoods. It was a respectable and secure job, with projects being commissioned by the government.