The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina Read online

  As he danced, he kept thinking of his mother. He’d wanted to be like his mom for a time, unworried and carefree in a way so few people get to be. When he was a little boy, Rey had wanted to be a brujo. Conjure spirits from the ether. He wanted to pull gold right out of the earth, meld it with his bare hands just as Orquídea had done in her stories explaining what she had once done to pay for her journey to come to America. He wanted to speak to the stars like his mother, before the stars stopped speaking back and she wasn’t strong enough to bear the silence after his dad died. That was when she moved them to the loudest place in the world. Turns out New York couldn’t drown out her emptiness, but she found a way to keep going. She raised Rey and Marimar and got a job as a teller at the Met, and everyone knew her as Parcha, the lady with the weird name and big laugh, who made cookies for everybody just because. Who was always in a good mood and brought her scrawny little son around to be bored while he waited after school for her shift to be over. He liked to wander around and pretend the Temple of Dendur was his backyard. He’d stare at boys his age huddle in whispers and dare each other to reach into the water and fish out the shiny pennies from the reflecting pool that was supposed to be the Nile River. He wanted to tell them what Orquídea once had—that you shouldn’t steal other people’s wishes because that’s when everything goes wrong. But so far away from his grandmother’s reach, Rey knew how that sounded. He was too old for that shit. Too old to believe he could do anything more than sit at a desk and count numbers.

  The security guards all got to know him, too, and the tour guides let him hover at the fringe of their groups like a little lost planet trying to find its orbit. Like his mother, he’d lost a small part of himself when his father died in a motorcycle accident. Rey stopped wanting to be a brujo. But inside the hallowed halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he’d flirted with the idea of being an artist. Everyone mistook his silence for boredom when actually Rey was manifesting a wish. He knew from Orquídea that wishes didn’t grow on trees. They had to be nurtured, carefully constructed like houses so you got exactly what you wanted. Orquídea had an altar with candles and crystals and pictures of forgotten saints, bones and safety pins, dry roses and seashells. Rey didn’t have an altar. He had a penny that he kept in his pocket. He held it for years, rubbing it between his thumb and index finger while he stood in front of paintings and imagined his own hands at work. He’d rubbed it for so long, Abraham Lincoln’s face was smooth. And when he finally flicked it into the water to make his wish, his mother died from an aneurism, triggered a day after she hit her head in the subway.

  Everything had happened so quickly. The funeral in the Bronx. He hadn’t even been mad at the other Montoyas for not dropping everything to show up. He hadn’t cared as long as Marimar was there. A year from turning eighteen, he’d forged every signature necessary and lied about his age to make sure he and Marimar didn’t lose the apartment or were made to stay in foster homes or had to go back to Four Rivers.

  He turned his wish of becoming an artist into the desire to survive. Everyone said New York City was for creatives, for artists, but that was a washed-up remnant of the past. New York wasn’t for artists anymore. It was for steel and glass and suits. It was for fifteen-million-dollar Central Park apartments that remained empty all year round, ghost homes, tax shelter homes. Artists were as common as subway rats, except subway rats had free food options. New York gutted artists, used them as food, sucking out their marrow to make the glamour stronger.

  So he’d become an accountant and he’d been all right with that, you know? It was no one’s fault but his. Not New York, not his mom, not his grandmother, not his cousins, not the magic. It always came back to the magic. How could something that had never been his leave a hunger nothing else could fill?

  As he danced alone in the parlor, the sun was a bloody red thing sinking behind the clouds, streaks of furious pinks and oranges creating the illusion of fire behind the valley. The last song of the record was followed by the hollowness of the end. Sometimes he wondered if that’s what the afterlife sounded like. Those few seconds at the end of the vinyl where there’s sound but no music, just a crackle, a warped scratch. He pushed the records apart and found one of Orquídea’s records, the one full of pasillos she played on blue moons while she sat on the porch swing with a glass of bourbon and salt crusted on her face. His mom used to say that it was music people listened to when they wanted to be sad, and back then Rey had never really understood why anyone would choose to be sad.

  But now, he danced with the melancholy out the hall. The front door was still open. Now, he could hear the night, an incandescent whisper that only ever happened once after his dad died. He heard the stars.

  Or were those crickets?

  Rey made his way into the living room where Gastón, Penny, and Juan Luis were setting the table while Orquídea grinned at the music. He picked up a red ceramic plate dotted in gold. None of the pieces matched, like they were missing parts of several sets.

  “Watch it!” Penny said, arranging the center pieces of dried flowers in colored glass vases. “I’m not finished yet.”

  Orquídea turned her head in Rey’s direction, the movement slow, like it pained her. “Pour me a drink, niño mío.”

  Rey wasn’t a little boy, but he thought it was okay if he was her little boy for the rest of the night. For always. He went to the bar cart and fixed both of them drinks.

  “What’s your poison tonight, Mamá Orquídea?”

  “Bourbon, neat.”

  He poured generously into two glasses and his grandmother accepted his offering. In the time he’d been cleaning the parlor, Orquídea’s roots had spread, growing thicker. She was like a mermaid whose legs were being bound together, only with bark instead of scales.

  “Is it painful?” he asked.

  “Not any worse than it was giving birth,” she said.

  He almost pointed out that this would be like giving birth to herself, and how gross that image was, so for once, he kept that comment to himself.

  “How’s your art?” Orquídea asked.

  “I haven’t done anything since I sent you that painting,” he said, gaze traveling to the one hanging over the fireplace. Part of him had imagined that she’d put it in the shed or something. How funny that Orquídea would ask about his art, something he hadn’t let himself want in years.

  “It’s my favorite. Make another.”

  It was a portrait of Orquídea as she’d been as a young girl. Her hair was long and curly, and she wore a white dress. In her hand a fish and in the other a net. He’d found the picture between the pages of her favorite novel. Now he wondered if, like the photo of Marimar’s father, she’d let Rey find it.

  “Work is crazy,” he said by way of explanation. “This one was a fluke.”

  She let loose a gravely laugh. “Was it a fluke or was it that you couldn’t stop yourself?”

  Rey shrugged. He remembered painting that over a week, locked in his room the summer after his first year at college. He’d been sick with adrenaline, red-eyed from not sleeping for days. Marimar was ready to break down the door, but he said he was fine. He ate the food she left at his door. And when he emerged, the painting was finished, he slept for another week and said never again.

  “Why am I not surprised that you already know?”

  “I only mean that you made a beautiful thing.” She looked into her glass, then at him. He tried not to jump when her eyes went milky-gray and then coffee-black. “Why did you choose that picture?”

  He’d blacked out the event, but he did recall one thing. He’d walked all the way home from his last day of classes and stopped at the Met. He’d paid a one dollar suggested entry because he had to pee, and it was a cleaner bathroom than the ones in the park. He meant to go in and out, but he couldn’t help himself. He went to the reflecting pool in front of the Temple of Dendur and stared at the pennies in the water and even though it was impossible, he spotted his, bright and hopeful and uns
pent. On his way home, he stopped at an art supply store, bought a canvas, brushes, and paint at random, sweating like he was going home to assemble a bomb.

  But as for why Rey had chosen that picture—He took a big drink and licked his lips. He scratched at the inside of his wrist and flashed a smile at his grandmother.

  “You told us a story once about catching a river monster. It always stuck with me, I guess.”

  She smiled and her wrinkles deepened. “He’s not a monster. The monsters look like us. He outlived me, so what does that say?”

  “It says I need another drink.”

  She reached out and grabbed his wrist. Her hand felt like rough, ridged bark. One of the stems protruding from her wrist was showing pink petals beneath the green, like it was going to start blooming.

  “Paint me another.”

  He shook his head and a sensation like a vice clutched his heart.

  “Your heart is trapped, and this is the way it will be free. Mine was, too. That is why—It’s too late for me but not for you.”

  “Mamá—”

  “Promise, mi niño.”

  “I will,” he promised then. “I will.”

  It was a momentary relief when Penny ran back into the living room. “Mom says you need to light the candles because you smoke that trash porquería.”

  “Charming,” he muttered, but dug his metal lighter from his back pocket. Did they need so many candles? He went through them one by one, running down the line of the dining table, lighting the ones on the windowsills.

  “Don’t forget the altar,” Orquídea said.

  So he lit those, too. The altar had changed slightly. There were more pictures of her family. Usually, people put up the photos of the people who were dead, but Orquídea had her whole family. Old Polaroids, new glossy photos developed at the pharmacy, and graduation portraits beside small sepia portraits of faces he didn’t recognize. A ticket drew his eye. Rey had stood before this altar a million times. He’d memorized the placement of every trinket. Tatinelly’s wedding announcement and Caleb Jr.’s ad in Vogue were new additions, but so was this ticket. Rectangular, like from an old-timey theater. The ink was faded but he made out the word Spectacular! And an eight-pointed star.

  Where was Marimar? he wondered.

  But then came the war cry from Tía Silvia. “¡A comer! Don’t make me go look for you.”

  Tío Félix and his wife Reina brought in the roasted pig while the others carried bowls of crisp salsa topped with cilantro. An ají that made Rey’s eyes water even from across the table. Heaping towers of patacones and maduros. A mountain of arroz con gandules. Yuca frita stacked like a Jenga tower. Camarones apanados. Whole avocados ready to be cut.

  One by one, the Montoyas took their seats. They congratulated Penny on the table setting and scolded the twins for hiding Gabo. But they were forgiven, with their easy smiles of sweet preteen boys. Those smiles would get them in trouble with women and men in the years to come.

  Rey wanted to change the record but was pulled into a conversation with Tía Silvia’s husband Frederico to give tax advice, which was as delightful as the time Frederico had gone off on a homophobic Christmas rant. Ernesta was trying to convince Caleb Jr. that he’d be rich if he found a way to synthesize the smell of the ocean. Tatinelly held Mike’s hand and rubbed her belly as she gave her medical history to Tía Silvia, who was measuring the size of the belly with some concern, as Tati was well over the six-ish months she claimed. Penny whispered to her mom that she heard Rey say that he’d done the painting of their grandmother hanging over the mantel. All of a sudden, they were taking pictures of it. Even Tío Félix took out the photo from his wedding day. “Paint me this way,” he said. “I want to be just like I was in this moment.”

  Rey agreed, mostly because he wasn’t sure when he’d see his uncle next, and therefore probably wouldn’t have to keep his promise. He’d say anything to get through the night. When this was over, he had to go home. Make sure his boss hadn’t given his tiny desk to Paul the Intern. He had to continue on the path he’d carved out for himself.

  Rey wanted Marimar to hurry back. If he was getting through this, then so could she. He needed to tell her about the ticket he found on the altar, conveniently now in his pocket. He wondered where Enrique was, but he didn’t really care to know the answer.

  Gabo let out a long, screeching cry from somewhere outside.

  “How is that bird still alive?” Félix asked, holding a fork and knife in each fist, ready to dive into the crackling pig skin and juicy meat.

  “He’s come back to life twice,” Orquídea said.

  To which the twins responded with, “ZOMBIE CHICKEN.”

  “Zombie rooster,” Penny muttered, but only Rey paid attention to her.

  “Right you are.” He raised his drink in acknowledgement.

  “It’s a shame the Buenasuertes didn’t stay for dinner,” Florecida said, twisting a wine opener into the cork of a red bottle. “It might have been nice to know about Mom’s other side of the family.”

  “Nice like getting a root canal, maybe,” Rey said.

  He felt someone pinch him but couldn’t tell which of his aunts it was. He rubbed the side of his arm and was determined to stay quiet. To enjoy these last hours with his family. Listen to Félix detail travel destinations he’d never get to see because he was a dreamer, not a doer. Wait for Silvia to force the twins to sing while Penny played the guitar.

  Unfortunately, Enrique finally stalked into the dining room. His dress shirt was unbuttoned to the middle, like wherever he’d been he’d worked up a sweat and had stripped to his white tank. There was what looked like a snake bite on the veiny top of his hand. His fingers were smudged and there was a cobweb in his hair, which his twin Ernesta plucked and threw away as he sat.

  His uncle had been searching for something. Rey was sure of it. By his foul mood, he hadn’t found it.

  Enrique poured himself a glass of wine and leaned back. “I thought this was your funeral, but you’re still looking well, Mother.”

  “About as well as you,” she said, eyeing the bite on his hand, then held out her glass in the air. “Marimar is on her way, but I want to start off with a toast.”

  “Come on, Mom,” Enrique said, drumming his fingers on the table. “Do we have to sit through this? You wanted us to come back to give us our inheritance, so do it. We all know this land is mine by right.”

  “We do?” Rey laughed.

  “Excuse me, you little shit, but there are plenty of your brothers and sisters who are older than you and less entitled,” Florecida said.

  “The food’s going to get cold,” Tatinelly said softly.

  “Wait a minute,” Félix said, his bushy eyebrows knitted like two kissing caterpillars. “I don’t want the land. I wanted to see my mother. My brothers and sisters. We’ll figure out what to do with the valley later.”

  “You would say that.” Enrique scoffed. His green eyes were taking on the pale shade of water poured into absinthe. “The oldest brother trying to keep the peace.”

  “Actually, Pedrito is the oldest,” Orquídea said. It was so low, and it didn’t carry. But Rey followed her line of sight to the empty chair where Marimar should be. A cold sensation snaked around his throat. It prickled the hairs on the back of his neck. Who was Pedrito?

  “No more ghosts, no more stories,” Enrique said, raising the baritone of his voice. “Just—where is the paperwork?”

  Orquídea Divina looked at him. She bit down and froze, like the words she really wanted to speak were caged by her teeth. Instead she said, “I tried to do the best I could. I failed. I knew the price.”

  Enrique barked a laugh, his eyes incandescent with anger and jealousy. “The price of what? Why can’t you ever just say what you mean? Where is the paperwork?”

  “Upstairs. Second drawer on my nightstand.”

  He got up. The chair smacked to the floor. He took only his drink with him. But before Enrique could leave, Marimar a
ppeared at the threshold. Her hair was windswept, tears carved away a pattern on her dirty cheeks. At first, he didn’t understand what she was carrying in her arms. A white pumpkin? He wouldn’t put it past her to have found an albino fox, but the thing didn’t move. In her arms was a baby carved entirely of moonstone, and gathered behind her were the ephemeral outlines of six ghosts.

  11

  THE FEEDING OF FIFTEEN LIVING HOUSEGUESTS AND SIX GHOSTS

  No one moved. No one spoke. Rey was positive no one even breathed for several moments.

  “Dad,” Enrique said breathlessly.

  That word was said over and over. Dad. Daddy. Papá. All four of Orquídea’s dead husbands moved into the room. They were not the way Rey had thought ghosts would look like. He’d always imagined see-through white figures, outlines of what they used to be. But these people—these phantasms—did have touches of color. His grandfather Luis’s brown skin gave him the impression of being alive. The only thing that marked him as dead was the way he flickered as he walked through the table and across the room to embrace Orquídea. For the first time in his entire life, he saw a tear run down her face. It shimmered, like tree sap.

  Rey looked for her and there she was. His heartbeat fluttered as his mother appeared in front of him. Parcha was faded except for her rose red lipstick, the one she always wore because she said that roses were the most beautiful flower and everyone else was out of their goddamn mind to think otherwise. He trembled all over as she kissed his whole face. It felt like the first snowflakes that signal a blizzard.