The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (80)
Seeing their desperation, Jefita approached Marimar. She was in the garden with a notebook in her lap, drawing eight-pointed stars. There were pages and pages filled with them, compass roses without a map to give direction to.
“What’s wrong?” Marimar asked, upon seeing Jefita’s face.
The old woman glanced over her shoulder, twisting the bottom of her apron into a rope. “I know someone you can ask about Orquídea.”
Marimar sat up. “Who? Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
“Because the person we need to ask has been dead for ten years.”
“Tell me.”
And Jefita did. All things considered, it was not the strangest thing Marimar had ever heard. She should have considered it herself, but part of her still resisted the possibility of the impossible. Besides, she was desperate.
* * *
The following day dozens of people showed up to their house for the funeral. They muttered the words miracles and saints and alone. They knew that the beautiful descendants of Orquídea Divina didn’t have anyone else. Even Professor Kennedy Aguilar was there, offering to be a pallbearer.
Rey and Marimar did not have to bear the weight of the caskets alone, and together, they flooded the streets like a black river making its way to the sixth gate of the Cementerio Patrimonial de Guayaquil, at the foothill of the cerro del Carmen. People who lived up the hill liked to say it was the best place to live. There were no tourists, they had the best views of the city, and when the time came to return to God, their bodies only had to travel just few paces for a final rest.
During the two-mile walk to the cemetery, the sky turned gray and lightning announced the coming rain. Rhiannon held on to Jefita’s hand and wiped at her tears, which had begun to calcify as they were shed from her tear ducts. Those walking behind her rushed to pick up the shimmering pearls. They tucked them in pockets. Others ate them just to see what miracles tasted like. Rey, on the other hand, shed more than a tear. Three petals fell from his wrist. With one of the caskets firmly rested on his shoulder, he turned his face up to his hand and inhaled. The faintest trace of decay filled his nose. It was the scent of roses forgotten in a vase of water that turned to muck. There was nothing he could do, not until after they broke several legal and ethical laws in the cemetery.
Tatinelly and Mike were laid to rest in the Montoya mausoleum crowned by a statue of an angel. Rhiannon said, “the angel looks like it’s ready to fly away.”
After everyone had left, Ana Cruz, Jefita, and the Montoya cousins remained.
“For the record,” Ana Cruz said. “I do not like this. Rhiri is too young to see something like this.”
Rey, who had bummed a pack of cigarettes from one of the onlookers, raised one to his lips. “I’m pretty sure I’m too young for this, too.”
“I’m not a little kid,” Rhiannon asserted. “And we’re a team. You can’t leave me out.”
“We won’t,” Marimar assured her.
Ana Cruz raised her hands in defeat and went outside to keep watch and bribe any guards if she needed to. As she left, so entered a short, stocky man with deep-bronze skin and a canvas hat covered in the same white paint as on the stacked tombs. He had a pickax and a sledgehammer in his backpack and averted his eyes when greeting the Montoyas. Abel Tierra de Montes had been painting the outer faces of the vaults of the cemetery since he was fifteen. He’d apprenticed for an artist as a boy, but after she died, the family had ousted him. He had a practiced hand, and his portraits were favored by the families who paid for the upkeep of their entombed dead. Abel had owed Jefita a favor on account of her introducing him to his future wife, and though he didn’t think what this family was about to do was natural, he couldn’t turn away from the money. Not when more and more people were forgetting their dead.
It took twenty minutes, but he managed to open the sealed top of Isabela’s tomb. Then he made the sign of the cross, bowed his head to Jefita, and said he’d be back at the time they’d agreed to seal it all up.
They stared at the bones. There were still clumps of hair on the skull and thick cobwebs on the simple pale blue dress.
“How does this work?” Marimar asked. The black dress she’d borrowed from Ana Cruz was itchy. Sweat pooled between her breasts, down her spine. When the scent of cement and decay hit her nose, she breathed through her mouth.
“My mother did this once,” Jefita said, lighting a stick of wood with Rey’s lighter. “On her death bed my grandmother confessed that my mother’s father wasn’t her birth father. But she died before she could say his name.”
“Is that to summon the dead?” Rey asked.
Jefita wrinkled her nose, she set the stick on the lip of the tomb. “Palo santo. It purifies. And it smells good.”
“The ritual worked for your mother, though, right?” Rey asked, undoing the knot of his tie and the button choking his Adam’s apple.
Jefita peered down at the bones. Her mother had needed answers only the dead could give. Jefa, whose real name was María Luz Rumi, chased rumors of necromancy and resurrection until she found the real deal. “Yes. She discovered her real father was her uncle. My mother knew she might not like the truth. The difference is my mother had to dig.”
Rey grinned. “Lucky us.”
“Where do we start?” Marimar asked.