The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (29)
She unlocked the door and, like so many parts of the house, it wheezed as it opened. She pulled on the chain hanging from the ceiling, while Rey peered over her shoulder and gasped.
Marimar felt heat behind her eyelids, the sting of tears that she wished she could keep back.
There were boxes and boxes, each one labeled with handwritten names—Pena. Parcha. Félix. Florecida. Silvia. Enrique. Ernesta. Caleb Jr.
Orquídea had always said that she gave her mother’s things away. Marimar had seen the local church ladies drive over to collect boxes of donations. Orquídea wasn’t sentimental about things like booties and baby clothes. But as Marimar rummaged through the eighties prom dresses and little league jerseys and cleats too small to fit even Juan Luis and Gastón, she considered that perhaps her grandmother was an ocean of sentiment. She just didn’t want anyone to see it.
“Well, she never fails to surprise.” Rey yanked a photo album from his mom’s box and sat in Orquídea’s favorite chair. “Yes! Embarrassing photos.”
When he flipped to the first page, there was only a tan residue where photos had been stuck once and the crinkle of a sheer plastic protector. He flipped and flipped. There was nothing for a few pages until he landed on a grainy photograph.
“Is that—” Marimar sat on the arm of the chair and stared at the picture. Pena and Parcha Montoya were so young, possibly nineteen or eighteen. Cheesy smiles, cropped halter tops, high-waisted jeans, and big hoop earrings.
“Your mom never changed,” Marimar said to Rey.
He traced his finger across the bright spot beside them. A light that cast them in an incandescent glow. There were more pictures on the following pages, each one with an overexposed flash taking up space. They were at a local carnival, the one the church and high school always put on to raise money over the summer.
“Is that a double date?” Rey laughed. “This is definitely my dad. Holy fuck, why haven’t I ever seen this one before?”
“Wait.” Marimar plucked the picture off the sticky sheet and peered closer. Beneath the flash was a fourth person. Obstructed. But he was there, an arm wrapped around her mother’s shoulder. The blurry outline of a hand, a silver ring with an eight-pointed star engraved at the center.
“Is that—?” Rey started to ask.
The pressure behind Marimar’s belly button returned, then extended across her skin, wound around her muscles. She was being pulled apart. After nineteen years, this photo, developed at the Four Rivers drug store and stored in a box, was all she had of the man she’d never met.
“I think that’s my father.”
9
THE GIRL AND THE MOONLIT PATH
After Isabela’s wedding to Wilhelm Buenasuerte, Orquídea’s life changed, just as her mother had promised. The entire city was changing, too. Every time Orquídea walked to school there was new construction. New bridges and ramps. Ships in the Guayaquil harbor loading thousands and thousands of bananas for export.
Wilhelm Buenasuerte led the charge to developing La Atarazana, starting with the single-road town where he’d first met Orquídea and fallen in love at first sight with Isabela. A contract with the city had allowed him to modernize and pave the streets. Isabela had turned over the modest plot of land she’d bought when she had no one but her daughter, and Wilhelm used that land to build a great big house with a courtyard, and two levels that overlooked the river. He pushed out smaller, poorer families, but there were some who stayed put. Who’d empty out their bedpans full of shit and urine every time the “German Engineer” swung by. But Wilhelm would not give up his new claim on the neighborhood and he was a patient man.
Despite all the changes, La Atarazana still felt like it belonged to Orquídea. She’d carved her name on a small boulder on the river shore and it was her name that the locals acknowledged when she went on strolls with her pregnant mother and stepfather, a fact that gave Wilhelm Buenasuerte a permanent scowl between his brows.
Orquídea had been forbidden from fishing or swimming in the river, especially by herself. But the fishermen knew her. They protected her more than the Buenasuertes did. And besides, she was still the only one in her little pier who could catch the most fish. Sometimes she snuck the fish home and handed them to Jefita, the housekeeper. But mostly, she took her pail down the row of shanty houses and offered her catch to la viuda Villareal, to Jacinto, who’d lost his leg at the border war with Peru, to Gabriela, whose husband left her too bruised and beaten to leave the house. They didn’t care that she smelled like fish and mud. They blessed her, but not even those blessings could counteract Orquídea’s cosmic bad luck, or the treatment she endured in the Buenasuerte house.
Once a week, without fail, Wilhelm and Isabela Buenasuerte hosted the elite of the city. Lawyers and doctors. Actors and soccer players. Ambassadors and artists. They opened their home to host brilliant minds. There was Alberto Wong, a philosopher who’d spend an entire month with the Buenasuertes theorizing on the happiness quotient in coastal populations versus those of the colder regions. There was a socialist poet from Bolivia who spent every dinner shouting with Wilhelm, and then laughing between puffs of cigars late into the night. It was the summer of Orquídea’s fifteenth birthday when he’d shared his cigars with her and written several poems about her skin, her hair, her lips. Her mother had locked her in every night, and even though Orquídea had no interest in men yet, she did as her mother said and occupied her time caring for her four siblings.