The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (5)
Embarrassed, he looked down at the dregs of his pale coffee, when a birdsong called his attention. There were blue jays at the windowsill. He hadn’t seen one of those around these parts—maybe ever. Wondrous. Who was he to judge that? To judge her. He’d sworn to protect the people of Four Rivers, and that included Orquídea.
“Then I’d say you make a bewitching cup o’ joe.”
They shared a laugh, and finished their coffee in a comfortable silence, listening to the creaking sounds of the house and the return of birds. It wouldn’t be the last time that the surrounding neighbors tried to question Orquídea’s right to take up space on that land, but that coffee and those papers would buy her a few years at least. She had traveled too far and done too many things to get where she was. The house was hers. Born from her power, her sacrifice.
Fifty-five years after Sheriff Palladino came to call, she’d sit at the same table, with the same porcelain cup, stirring the same silver spoon to cut the bitter out of her black coffee. But this time her stationery would be out, crisp egg-shell paper and ink she made herself. She’d send out letters to every single one of her living relatives that ended with: “I am dying. Come and collect your inheritance.” But that is yet to come.
As Orquídea walked the young man to the door, she asked, “Is everything in order, Sheriff Palladino?”
“Far as I can see,” the Sheriff said, returning his hat to his head.
She watched his car amble up the road and didn’t go back inside until he was gone. A strong breeze enveloped her, hard enough to make the laurel leaves on her doors and windows flutter. Someone out there was searching for her. She felt it only for a moment, but she doubled the protection charms on the house, the candles on her altar, the salt in the grain.
There would come a time when her past caught up to her and Orquídea’s debt to the universe would be collected. But first, she had a long life to live.
2
INTRODUCTIONS TO THE PROGENY OF ORQUíDEA DIVINA
The invitation arrived at the exact moment Marimar Montoya burned her tongue on her midnight cup of coffee. She felt a strange surge ripple through the apartment, as if a phantom had made the lights flicker, the TV turn on, and her computer screen freeze. She grimaced and set down the porcelain cup. It was part of an ancient set from her grandmother’s cabinets, one of twenty-four. She’d shoved it in her duffle bag on the morning she left Four Rivers, just after Gabo, the skeletal rooster, started to crow.
“Not now,” she muttered, slapping the translucent blue shell of her iMac G3. She’d bought it refurbished for fifty dollars from the fancy prep school on the Upper East Side after they upgraded their systems. All Marimar had needed was a way to get on the internet and a word processor where she could attempt to write a novel when she was actually supposed to be working on her college papers.
She licked the tender tip of her tongue against the roof of her mouth and fruitlessly clicked on the mouse. Then gave up and spun around in her swivel chair.
She hadn’t realized how late it was and still had five pages to go in her Gothic Literature essay about Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and his use of fucked-up families. Rey was working late at the office again. The apartment they shared was in the heart of New York City’s Spanish Harlem, and though she’d lived there for six years, she’d never gotten used to the building’s faults. The lightbulbs that blew out days after being installed, the serpentine radiator, the creaky floors, the rusted pipes that ran hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. Still, it was the place Marimar and her cousin Rey had nurtured into a home.
She was reaching for her phone to message him when she noticed the slim square envelope beside it. There was no stamp, only her name and address:
Marimar Montoya
160 East 107th Street, Apt. 3C
New York, NY 10029
She glanced around the living room for anything else out of place. The worn leather sofa with the woolen blanket depicting llamas on the Ecuadorian highlands. Rey’s paintings from high school and a print of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue she had bought in front of the Met on her first field trip. A solid mahogany coffee table her aunt had rescued from a sidewalk on Fifth Avenue and made Marimar and Rey carry for twenty blocks and three avenues. A stack of magazines, most of them stolen from the office of Hunter College’s literary journal, supermarket coupons, bubblegum-flavored gum, a moldy Nalgene emblazoned with Rey’s accounting firm logo, free NYC-branded condoms in the rotting fruit bowl, the open box housing a half-eaten pizza pie that she’d devoured after work.
Everything was as it had been when she started writing. Except the open window. Instantly, Marimar knew where the envelope had come from.
She got up and went to the window. Downstairs, a group of high school kids were talking shit and sharing chips and quarter waters out of thin black plastic bags. A strange bird lingered on the fire escape. It looked like a blue jay, but it was too big for the kind she occasionally spotted in Central Park. She leaned halfway out the window to grab it, but it flapped away from her grasp, the color leaching out of its feathers as its body rounded into the lazy mass of a common city pigeon. It made a gurgling sound and flew away.
“Tell her to use the phone like normal people,” Marimar shouted at the bird.