The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (48)

She waited for the miraculous things that Orquídea had once made happen—calling down the rain. A house appearing where there hadn’t been one before. Summoning spirits. But Marimar was not Orquídea Divina. She was just alone.

One day, Marimar found a pocketknife on the floor made of steel and some sort of animal bone. Chris’s knife, the one he’d used that night. She used it to try and cut off the flower at her throat, but she passed out from the pain. When she woke up, her sheets were covered in blood and the stem that protruded from her flesh grew a lone green thorn instead.

She would not try this again for a while.

When the first heavy snow fell in Four Rivers, the leaves of the ceiba tree never turned. They remained a strange sharp green as snow fell all around them. Eventually, Marimar gave up talking to Orquídea, and there was nothing she could do on the property until spring. She felt like she had slowly transformed into a bear, ready for hibernation. All the grief she hadn’t let herself feel when her mother and aunt died washed over her threefold. Even though she hadn’t lost Rey, she missed him. She even missed Tatinelly, though they had never been as close. The hollow shape within her heart seemed to grow. That wasn’t the point of having come back here. That wasn’t the point of having stayed. Marimar was like the earth covered by layers of ice and snow. She needed rest. She needed to heal.

She slept for six months.

During her time under, she dreamed. Most of the time she was floating in outer space with the stars. She could see her mother but at a distance, so far away. Then she would just fade. Once, only once, she heard an echo, faint, but there. “Find me.”

When she woke up, it was spring. The earth around her was green. Wild. Orquídea’s tree had grown white cotton-like flowers. She was ready. The valley was ready.

Marimar hired a local contractor, but she insisted on carrying wooden planks and hammering nails along with them. It would take seven years to build her new house, because something always stopped construction. Once, it rained for so long the valley flooded. Marimar slept in her tent at the top of the hill until the water receded. Then there were electrical failures. Several townsfolk had petitioned to see evidence that Marimar owned the deed to the land. It was five more months before she was cleared to put in a work order, and when she did, the dragonflies and grasshoppers of the valley descended on the construction workers. They left of their own accord, and the workers that followed discovered several code violations and they had to redo it all anyway. One day, that entire team quit on account of ghosts and the zombie rooster that wouldn’t stop crowing. When the foundation was finally solidly built, Marimar decided to finish the rest herself. It would be hers, through and through. Her house was positioned right beside Orquídea’s tree. The ceiba that did not belong but had made a home there regardless.

Marimar kept moving. She enrolled in community college, but couldn’t quite find something to love, something that made her feel settled. Still, she went to classes and graduated. She’d see Chris at the farmer’s market or the hardware store, and he’d give a short wave before putting distance between them. He had met a nice girl, a baker, and they’d go on to have three kids, each named after famous baseball players. But before that, she noticed a new tattoo on the inside of his wrist. A twist of ivy.

Then, Marimar discovered she was good at something. Making things grow. She fixed the greenhouse. Even if she couldn’t figure out how to get her own flower bud to bloom, she had a green thumb. Those seeds that had survived the fire were still in their bottles. Roses. Orchids. Tulips. Geraniums. Carnations. Hyacinths. Foxglove. Baby’s breath. Daisies. Sunflowers. She made a garden of her own. She sold her flowers at the farmer’s market and more people knew her as Montoya than Marimar. She was the only one in Four Rivers, after all.

She called her family once a week, then once a month, then every other couple of months. She found that, after months of silence, she liked being alone too much. For a while she was okay with that. Silvia and the twins visited once. They’d never planted the seeds Orquídea had given them and chose to do it on the third anniversary of her transformation. Everyone visited once or twice, but never together. Never staying more than a couple of days or so. Enrique never came.

Seven years after the fire, Marimar sat down to have her eggs and black coffee for breakfast. Her rosebud still hadn’t bloomed, but her house was complete.

On what should have been another morning, the phone rang. The voice on the other line came rushed, urgent, weary.

“Tati, I can’t—slow down.”

“I’m sorry,” Tatinelly said. “It’s going to sound crazy.”

Marimar bit the side of her thumb. She looked out the window at her grandmother’s branches moving in the breeze. She absently pressed the pad of her thumb against the thorn on her flower bud.

“Try me.”

“I think someone is following us.” Tati made a strangled sound. “I shouldn’t even be saying this on the phone. Do you think I should?”

“Start over. What makes you think that someone is following you?”

“Mike thinks I’m being crazy but there are times I see this man standing at the end of our block. When I go point him out, he’s gone. But Rhiannon sees him too. She says that he said hi to her once. I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking lately about how everything happened all those years ago. And we just left you, Marimar. We just left and we should have stayed and every time I wanted to call you I’d get scared that you were mad. Are you mad at me?”