The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (34)

Rey carried a bucket of ice back down the hall, taking in the deep scent of dirt and lemon cleaner. First, he stopped in the parlor to key up another record—Buena Vista Social Club, Martin’s favorite. Rey danced by himself, determined to keep a hold on his bright mood. But this house was a memory capsule that refused to remain buried. He traced a finger along the rows of records that had been the only music allowed in the house. Pushed aside the rug to see if the stain was still there from the time he and Marimar had tried to make paint out of berries and crushed insects. He moved out into the hall and stopped at the bannister leading upstairs. Instead of marking his height with a marker like other mothers, Parcha had made little cuts into the grain of the wood panel. She said it was so the house could remember his height, but now that Orquídea was passing on, who would get the house? Who would remember the boy he’d been?

As he danced, he kept thinking of his mother. He’d wanted to be like his mom for a time, unworried and carefree in a way so few people get to be. When he was a little boy, Rey had wanted to be a brujo. Conjure spirits from the ether. He wanted to pull gold right out of the earth, meld it with his bare hands just as Orquídea had done in her stories explaining what she had once done to pay for her journey to come to America. He wanted to speak to the stars like his mother, before the stars stopped speaking back and she wasn’t strong enough to bear the silence after his dad died. That was when she moved them to the loudest place in the world. Turns out New York couldn’t drown out her emptiness, but she found a way to keep going. She raised Rey and Marimar and got a job as a teller at the Met, and everyone knew her as Parcha, the lady with the weird name and big laugh, who made cookies for everybody just because. Who was always in a good mood and brought her scrawny little son around to be bored while he waited after school for her shift to be over. He liked to wander around and pretend the Temple of Dendur was his backyard. He’d stare at boys his age huddle in whispers and dare each other to reach into the water and fish out the shiny pennies from the reflecting pool that was supposed to be the Nile River. He wanted to tell them what Orquídea once had—that you shouldn’t steal other people’s wishes because that’s when everything goes wrong. But so far away from his grandmother’s reach, Rey knew how that sounded. He was too old for that shit. Too old to believe he could do anything more than sit at a desk and count numbers.

The security guards all got to know him, too, and the tour guides let him hover at the fringe of their groups like a little lost planet trying to find its orbit. Like his mother, he’d lost a small part of himself when his father died in a motorcycle accident. Rey stopped wanting to be a brujo. But inside the hallowed halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he’d flirted with the idea of being an artist. Everyone mistook his silence for boredom when actually Rey was manifesting a wish. He knew from Orquídea that wishes didn’t grow on trees. They had to be nurtured, carefully constructed like houses so you got exactly what you wanted. Orquídea had an altar with candles and crystals and pictures of forgotten saints, bones and safety pins, dry roses and seashells. Rey didn’t have an altar. He had a penny that he kept in his pocket. He held it for years, rubbing it between his thumb and index finger while he stood in front of paintings and imagined his own hands at work. He’d rubbed it for so long, Abraham Lincoln’s face was smooth. And when he finally flicked it into the water to make his wish, his mother died from an aneurism, triggered a day after she hit her head in the subway.

Everything had happened so quickly. The funeral in the Bronx. He hadn’t even been mad at the other Montoyas for not dropping everything to show up. He hadn’t cared as long as Marimar was there. A year from turning eighteen, he’d forged every signature necessary and lied about his age to make sure he and Marimar didn’t lose the apartment or were made to stay in foster homes or had to go back to Four Rivers.

He turned his wish of becoming an artist into the desire to survive. Everyone said New York City was for creatives, for artists, but that was a washed-up remnant of the past. New York wasn’t for artists anymore. It was for steel and glass and suits. It was for fifteen-million-dollar Central Park apartments that remained empty all year round, ghost homes, tax shelter homes. Artists were as common as subway rats, except subway rats had free food options. New York gutted artists, used them as food, sucking out their marrow to make the glamour stronger.

So he’d become an accountant and he’d been all right with that, you know? It was no one’s fault but his. Not New York, not his mom, not his grandmother, not his cousins, not the magic. It always came back to the magic. How could something that had never been his leave a hunger nothing else could fill?

As he danced alone in the parlor, the sun was a bloody red thing sinking behind the clouds, streaks of furious pinks and oranges creating the illusion of fire behind the valley. The last song of the record was followed by the hollowness of the end. Sometimes he wondered if that’s what the afterlife sounded like. Those few seconds at the end of the vinyl where there’s sound but no music, just a crackle, a warped scratch. He pushed the records apart and found one of Orquídea’s records, the one full of pasillos she played on blue moons while she sat on the porch swing with a glass of bourbon and salt crusted on her face. His mom used to say that it was music people listened to when they wanted to be sad, and back then Rey had never really understood why anyone would choose to be sad.