The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (82)

“It’s Mamá Orquídea’s gift,” Rhiannon said, clutching the side of the tomb. She leaned in, not away like her older cousins, like Jefita who hovered against the wall out of fear of the dead. “And I’m actually your great-great-grandchild. We need your help, otherwise the star is going to get us, too.”

“If he does, I might just haunt you for all eternity,” Rey muttered.

Isabela crossed her arms over her chest. “And my daughter? Why don’t you ask her?”

“She’s not among the living and she’s not among the dead,” Marimar explained. “We’d leave you alone, but we know that you were there when the Londo?o circus went up in flames.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“You’re lying,” Marimar stated plainly.

“We saw it on film,” Rey said.

The skeleton turned to Jefita, dust particles buzzing around her. “Mira cómo me hablan. None of my other grandchildren take that tone with me. Was I so terrible to deserve this unholy disruption?”

“We’ll leave you alone,” Rey said. “But we have to know. Did you speak to Orquídea the night of the fire?”

“That place.” She tipped her nose to the ceiling and sniffed as if she wasn’t a bag of bones marinating in her own decay for a decade. “That wretched place. My daughter dressed like a whore for all the world to see. They told me she was born unlucky and they were right.”

“You don’t get to talk about my grandmother like that,” Marimar said, a second thorn growing from her throat, twin to the first. “Maybe if you had loved her, if you’d done right by her, she wouldn’t have run away, and we wouldn’t be talking to you right now.”

The bones stiffened. A dense cold bit at their skin as Isabela said, “You don’t know what I went through. You don’t know what it was like. Two years after she left, the Londo?o Spectacular returned to Guayaquil. I saw Orquídea on a poster. I took it down, of course, lest anyone in the neighborhood recognized her. I tried to fix things; I did. I tried to tell her to come home. She had a child. She shouldn’t have raised him in that place.”

“Pedrito,” Rey said. “He—he died. We think that night, but we can’t be sure. We need to know everything that you saw. Anything Orquídea might have said.”

“Why?”

“Are all the Montoyas this way?” Marimar asked, half laughing, half hysterical. “Just—tell us please.”

“Yes,” Isabela turned her cheek on them. “If you’re going to wake me from my rest, then I at the very least want to know why. And did you bring me any offerings?”

Jefita had instructed them to bring something the dead might have missed from their life. Since the Four Rivers Montoyas didn’t know their great-grandmother, they made their best guess. Marimar brought a silver flask of whiskey. Rey contributed a cigarette, and Rhiannon, her plastic Little Mermaid doll. Jefita offered her former employer’s comfort food, a sweet humita. Isabela made a noise of reluctant satisfaction, and gathered everything into her tomb and placed the cigarette in her mouth, leaning in for Rey to give her a light.

Jefita and Marimar also took cigarettes Rey offered because the occasion felt like it called for such a thing.

“Very well. Tell me your plight,” Isabela said.

“We are being hunted.” Marimar couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder. “Something Orquídea stole from her time at the circus was important enough to murder for. A gift, of sorts. Before she died, Orquídea gave three of us that gift. We need to figure out how to kill the man she took it from before he kills more of us. Did she tell you anything that could help?”

Isabela’s bones blew out smoke. She observed the people before her. None of her Buenasuerte children had tried to wake her. But then again, none of them would have believed in such a thing. She wouldn’t have either, once. There had been a weightlessness to being dead. Now that she was, not alive, but awake, Isabela felt every regret she’d once had. They were needles piercing right through her bones, reminding her of her sins.

“When I went to see my daughter,” she said slowly, “I wanted to ask her to come home, as I already said. When I got there, part of me hoped that I was wrong, that I imagined her likeness. But there she was. Glowing. Beautiful. She even sang for the crowd. I don’t remember her voice ever being that strong. I thought she was indecent at first, because the dresses they wore were so short, but when I saw her up close, she was—radiant. Wilhelm had forbidden me from going to see her. He found out, of course. How could I keep something like that from my husband? He forbade me from telling my other children. But she was my daughter. I missed her more than I can ever say. There were so many things that I should have done differently but I couldn’t change it.”

Isabela unfolded the yellow corn leaf of the humita. Her movements were dainty, but she ate with her fingers, drank ravenous sips of whiskey. Every morsel that passed through her phantom mouth turned to ash.

“I went to confront Orquídea. She was like a new woman. So sure of herself. Married, too, by the ring on her finger. I met her little boy, Pedrito. He was so sweet, barely a year old. I wanted to hold him, but she didn’t let me. She asked me to leave.

“Hadn’t I done the same thing to her? Pushed her away because of my own shame? I shouldn’t have left, but I did. It’s my own fault. We don’t talk. None of us. Why don’t we ever talk? Silence is a language of its own in this family. A curse of our own making. That’s the inheritance my daughter got from me, and I am so very sorry.”