The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (76)

“Too Oedipal, Marimar.”

“Penny is dead. Uncle Félix is dead. Aunt Florecida is dead. Tati—” She glanced at Rhiannon, then composed herself. “Whoever this is, they can’t get away with it.”

“Do you remember how Orquídea conjured those ghosts?” Rey asked.

“I’ve tried talking to my mom. But if she’s a ghost, she’s not coming to see me.”

“You’re both wrong,” Rhiannon said.

“Oh yeah, smarty-pants? Why?”

Rhiannon dug her finger in the dirt. She loved all the same things other seven-year-olds loved. Video games and dolls. Glittery dresses and mountains of candy that she would regret in the middle of the night. She loved staying up late, fighting sleep so she wouldn’t miss a minute of her cousins’ adult conversations. She loved eavesdropping. But she also loved listening to the way creatures whispered at her, the way butterflies said hello and kissed her forehead. The strength she felt when she got dirt under her fingernails. One time, when no one was looking, she ate a mouthful of it, worms and all. Later that day, she could understand what Ana Cruz and Jefita were whispering when they spoke in Spanish. She’d never been able to understand them before that day. In a dream, Mamá Orquídea had done the same: eaten dirt and learned a language. Rhiannon was connected with her in ways she was only beginning to understand.

“You think you want to know but you’re scared. He is scary.”

“Who?” Rey asked.

“The man in my dreams. Usually, Mamá Orquídea is there to protect me. But sometimes, I see him.”

“What does he look like?” Marimar asked.

“I can’t see his face or anything. But after we went to that place, I think he might be the same. The moon. Or maybe a star.”

Rey felt his mouth go dry. He’d painted that light, that prism that appeared in reflective surfaces in New York. “Baby girl, circuses are tricks. It’s like magicians. Illusions.”

“Is the flower on my forehead a trick?” she asked with a slight grin. “Were Mamá Orquídea’s miracles tricks? She shows me in my dreams. She says you both think you want to hear her, but you’re not actually listening.” Then she raised her eyebrows in a gesture that was uncannily Orquídea. “Especially you, Marimar.”

Marimar felt a pressure in her stomach, behind her belly button. She was starting to understand that feeling meant something was on its way. Something was going to happen.

“Can you show us, Rhiri?” she asked.

Rhiannon held out her dirty little hands. Ladybugs crawled up her arms, but she didn’t seem to mind them. “Okay, think about Mamá Orquídea.”

Rey’s lips quirked slightly. They each had a different version of the woman in Four Rivers. For Marimar, she would always be the same. Half real, half legend. She imagined Orquídea Divina Montoya pulling salmon from a lake that was made for trout. She imagined her making salves and ointments for every scrape and burn that Marimar accumulated like battle scars. For Rey, she was all glamour. She was the same grandmother he’d loved and hated in equal measure at different stages of his life. The one who would never be confined and normal. He saw her as the girl she’d been in that photo, hopeful and young, like the world hadn’t quite broken her yet. Rhiannon only knew one version of Orquídea—the woman who was a tree. The voice in her dreams that sang pretty songs she was only beginning to understand.

Together, they heard a single voice. A man Rhiannon and Rey had already heard before.

Find me, he said.

And then, Orquídea’s clear voice. Run.



* * *



When Rey opened his eyes, sweat was running down his face and neck. He crab-walked into the wall behind him but something brushed his skin. Again and again, leaves and vines shot out of the ground, growing faster than he could blink.

“Run,” Marimar said. She hauled Rhiannon up by her hand, and they stumbled into the house. Rey was trying to close the screen door but there were too many vines. They flooded the house with green, creeping up on the ceiling and twisting around the ceiling fan, the light fixtures.

Marimar slapped her hand on the light switch, but the electricity was dead.

That pressure and ache behind her belly button intensified until she was on her knees. Rhiannon pulled Marimar by her shirt. Rey pulled them both back.

“Marimar, Marimar, get up, please,” Rhiannon cried. “He’s here!”

She could see a shape emerge in the center of the living room. The dark warbled around him, forcing their eyes to work twice as hard to focus on the outline of his silhouette. The negative of a photo filled in with moving space and time, radiating at the core with the rainbow fractures of a prism. Marimar knew. She knew Rhiannon was right.

The Living Star.

“Why are you doing this?” Marimar asked. She hated the sound of her voice. The fear that squeezed her vocal cords into high notes.

He looked around, and she could make out a snarl outlined in the bright kaleidoscope of his features. “I have to take back what was stolen.”

“We didn’t take anything!” Rey shouted.

“But Orquídea did.” He moved fast, his hands closing around the gifts at Marimar’s throat and Rhiannon’s brow.