The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (30)
The Buenasuerte-Montoyas were a large brood. Isabela got pregnant on her wedding night and didn’t stop being pregnant until her sixth child, Ana Cruz, was born prematurely, and her uterus slithered out of her body with the baby.
By the sixth child, Isabela had settled well into the role of a celebrated engineer’s wife. She was still a beauty, turned plump and delicate like the macarons Wilhelm surprised her with on his returns from Paris. She never corrected her guests when they assumed Orquídea was another housemaid. She never let Orquídea sit at large banquets or put her in too-pretty dresses so that men wouldn’t leer at her. Perhaps in some way, Isabela believed she was protecting her first daughter from the cruelty of the world she’d become a part of. But the first cruelties Orquídea learned were the ones Isabela doled out herself.
When Orquídea was fourteen, she wouldn’t stop going to the river, so her mother marched to the shore, ripped the net out of her hands, and heaved it into the water, where it sank and snagged on a tangle of reeds. Orquídea still went to the river’s edge and stood by the pier, but she didn’t fish. She talked to no one. She simply watched the canoes, the ships in the distance, and the clouds swallowing the skyline of Guayaquil and Durán across the way.
The summer when her mother had Ana Cruz, and lost her uterus, Wilhelm’s family came to stay, and Orquídea lost any chance she had to visit the river. Instead, her days were occupied with tending to the colicky Ana Cruz. She’d had to give up her room to the guests and sleep on a cot in the nursery. When she wasn’t caring for the baby, she was helping Jefita do everything from peel potatoes to slaughter two dozen turkeys. She cleaned every part of the house, but as soon as she was finished mopping, the Buenasuerte cousins—Mila and Marie—would stomp around with muddy shoes. They threw bloody underwear to be laundered when they caught her in the courtyard. They taught little Wilhelm Jr. and Maricela that Orquídea’s skin was made out of polished wood, like a marionette, and couldn’t bleed, and so they tested that theory by pinching her so hard they drew blood with their jagged, bitten nails. Mila and Marie stayed for two years.
Some people were born evil, some people were taught. Her siblings were both. Orquídea had been born cursed and adrift, but at least she hadn’t been born evil. She still had that. Her siblings—though they were only between the ages of six and one—were her own personal demons. They ran wild, red-faced from the heat, trailing after German-speaking cousins and repeating every insult they could toward their half-sister.
Once, when Wilhelm Jr. refused to get dressed for school, he shoved Orquídea down the stairs. The doctor who came to the house told her she had a concussion and a sprained ankle and needed to stay off it. Isabela told her to be less clumsy. They had a feast in a month’s time to prepare for. During the two weeks she spent off her feet, Wilhelm was tasked with taking food up to his sister.
“She’s not my sister.” He’d repeat the words he’d heard his father use: “She’s a bastard.”
But the little boy went anyway. He’d leave her food outside the nursery door, and in his pure childish boredom decided to make things more interesting. He found the raw carcass of a fish in the garbage and added it to her soup as a garnish.
After that, Orquídea got her own meals, limping her way to the kitchen three times a day. She didn’t mind because that way she could sit in the courtyard gardens. There, in Orquídea’s arms, while swinging back and forth in the hammock with a radio crackling the latest boleros, it was the only time Ana Cruz didn’t cry.
On October 9, Guayaquil’s Independence Day, the streets were flooded with parades of cars and revelers. Fireworks burst from alleyways and street corners. The pale blue and white of Guayaquil’s flag waved proudly from the front of the Buenavista home. Anyone who was anyone in the city attended the feast.
Up in the nursery, after cooking, cleaning, and bathing Ana Cruz, Orquídea put the finishing touches to a dress she’d spent weeks crafting. She’d used her mother’s old sewing machine and dress pattern. Orquídea had used most of her savings to purchase the fabric from a seamstress over in Las Pe?as. The satin was a deep peacock blue that gleamed in the candlelight. She sewed crystal beads in the shape of stars around the waist to look like a sash. She swept her curls back into an elegant bun like a prima ballerina, buffed her nails, and lotioned her toned arms and calves. When she spun around in her room, Orquídea felt like the night sky. She could hear the music and imagined batting her lashes at a young officer, dancing with the mayor himself. If everyone, even Jefita’s family, was allowed to have fun, then so would she.
One day. All she wanted was one day to feel happy.
Jefita knocked on the door and gasped at Orquídea. “You look like a movie star! Beautiful like Sara Montiel in Ella, Lucifer y yo.” Then she made the symbol of the holy cross over her body. A woman of superstition and faith, Jefita was from Ambato, in the Tungurahua province. She’d come down to the coast for work after she lost everything at thirteen in the earthquake of 1949 and found it in the Buenasuerte household. She loved bitter chocolate, feeding the iguanas in the park, boleros, and scandalous soap operas, even if she couldn’t get through most seasons without hyperventilating.
“Are there a lot of people already?” Orquídea asked.
She snapped her fingers in the air and giggled. “The mayor’s just arrived. His wife is wearing a tiara. If you ask me—”