The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (69)

Marimar? She’d built a house. She’d resuscitated the valley. Was that enough? It would have been so if she didn’t feel so unfinished. That had to be it. That had to be why she’d never gotten the flower bud at her throat to open, only grow thorns.

“Just another one of Orquídea’s secrets,” she said, and gave a smile she didn’t quite feel.

“I hope being here will help you find answers,” Jefita told her. “It is not natural to be too far from your roots.”

Once, she would have agreed. Orquídea had planted herself in Four Rivers. It didn’t get more literal than that.

“In my family,” Jefita continued, mincing red onions without a tear in sight, meanwhile Marimar blinked against the burn, “those kinds of markings are signs that someone was blessed by God.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Jefita,” Marimar said. “But we’re nonbelievers.”

Jefita shook her head but chuckled as she sprinkled salt. Marimar closed her eyes and imagined her house. The salt in the grain of the wood. Orquídea holding rough salt crystals in her hands like dull diamonds. There was an ache pressing under her belly button. She’d had that feeling before en route back to Four Rivers the day of the fire. Why was it happening so far away?

“I’ll believe twice as hard for you. Besides, it doesn’t have to be my God. It can be a powerful being. A saint. Something. Otherwise, we would all have such blessings.”

“Don’t you have plenty of blessings, Jefita?” Marimar was curious.

“Of course, I do. I was blessed by Diosito Santo. A good life is enough. I mean a physical representation of that blessing. Like a sixth finger.”

“Or a tail?”

Jefita widened her eyes and made the symbol of the cross. “No. No tails.”

Rey and Rhiannon came back inside to escape the rising heat. Rey grabbed an orange from the fruit bowl and started peeling it. “What did I miss?”

“Jefita thinks our flowers were blessings from saints.”

“I am very saint-like,” he said.

“Ay, ni?o,” Jefita admonished.

But she wasn’t wrong. Since their arrival and visit to the river, word had spread that there were three American-born Ecuadorians with real honest-to-God flowers growing out of their skin and bones. The people wanted to see miracles. For the next few hours, there was a flood of visitors at their door. They wanted to see the girl with the rose on her forehead and the artist with the one on his hand. Marimar was less of an attraction. Most whispered, wondering what was so special about her. They were in luck, because Marimar had spent years wondering the very same thing. There was even a group of teenage girls who brought an offering of chips and chocolate covered cookies with sticky marshmallow centers. They had T-shirts with Juan Luis and Gastón’s faces screen-printed on them and had written the initials JLG in glitter on the apples of their cheeks, which made Tatinelly ask for her own.

Jefita put a stop to it in time for dinner, refusing to answer the door for anyone and warning them that the family was tired and not there to be watched like penguins at the zoo. She brewed a special tea made of anise, lemongrass, and herbs she didn’t have names for to help comfort “Sick Mister Sullivan” as she called Mike.

Before they sat down to eat, Ana Cruz finally emerged from a storage closet, her hair in disarray, and announced, “I found it!”

Rey helped her carry the box of photographs, letters, clothes, and what looked like a poster.

“My mother kept everything my sister left behind.” Ana Cruz picked up a photo album yellow with age. Clear plastic sheets covered grainy photos. Before she opened it, she looked at Marimar and said, “Your coloring is different but you look a lot like our mother.”

The first photo was of a woman, her hair pinned up in an elegant bun with a side part. Marimar didn’t look like her own mother or Orquídea. For a long time she had wondered if the face in the mirror belonged to the father that had left. But there she was, seeing her likeness in the great-grandmother she’d never met.

“Same eyes and face. It’s so weird,” Tatinelly said, delighted.

Marimar flipped the page and saw the Montoya-Buenasuerte wedding. She recognized Orquídea in a simple dress, off to the side.

“What was your mother’s name?” Rey asked, pointing at the bride.

“Isabela Belén Montoya Buenasuerte,” Ana Cruz said. “She was disinherited because she had Orquídea out of wedlock. Took the money her mother gave her and built a house. That’s where she met my father.”

There was another photo. All of the Buenasuertes stood at the grand steps of a house. Isabela was older, more elegant in her finery. And Orquídea, again, off to the side as if she’d walked into the photo while it was being taken as opposed to being a part of it.

“Our parents were too hard on my sister,” Ana Cruz lamented.

But Marimar understood the real issue as she looked at the family portraits. More and more photos, and each one was the same. The Buenasuertes at the park, at the beach, in their Sunday best, and Orquídea always apart. Marimar’s words grew thorns. “Surely Wilhelm Buenasuerte had no problem with his wife’s little brown daughter, as long as she stayed in her place.”

Ana Cruz’s cheeks turned pink, but she did not make excuses for her father. Instead, she changed the subject, as if Marimar had said nothing at all. “I see Orquídea never took her husband’s last name. She remained Montoya until the end.”