The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina Read online

  When she returned to Four Rivers, she’d have to try and find out.

  Marimar was nearing Rey’s office building but couldn’t quite let go of the pent-up breath in her chest. Part of it was the invitation to attend a funeral for a woman who was, by her understanding, still alive. Part of it was just an effect of walking these streets.

  At that moment, her Walkman fritzed and when she opened the battery cover, found they were oxidized. She walked the rest of the way in silence. Turned left on Sixty-Fifth Street, panting, a cold sweat matting her baby hairs against her temples. The city glittered before her in multicolored lights and shadows, and a strange sense of longing washed over her. As hard as it was, she had fallen in love with this city, and wanted New York to love her back. To be just a little bit easy. If she went back to Four Rivers, maybe she would never get the chance.

  She pressed the button to her cousin’s offices, assuring herself that yes, New York would be waiting for her when she got back.

  But didn’t she know? New York waits for no one.

  * * *

  Reymundo Montoya Restrepo was supposed to be alone in the office all night but was interrupted by the familiar, haunting squeak of the mail cart’s wheels. He blinked weary eyes at the red digital clock on his desk that read it was just past midnight, then looked up to see Paul the Intern making a beeline for him.

  “You’re still here?” Rey asked, his voice groggy from misuse.

  “Mr. Leonard said that I should always be around in case someone needs my help,” Paul said.

  His name wasn’t actually Paul—that was the name of an intern from five years prior. Paul had been an intern for about three years, the longest in the accounting firm’s history, mostly because he loved being an intern but also because he was so terrified of Mr. Leonard that he’d never remind him that his six months were up. One day Paul, with his mousey brown hair and milk-white skin, was hospitalized from stress and burnout and never returned. The next day there was a new intern, hired by Leonard’s secretary. That second intern had walked into Leonard’s office determined to make a name for himself, to be distinct, to impress the man whose eyes were always so glued to his computer and papers that they were shrinking every year.

  “Heya, Paul,” Leonard had said in a Brooklyn accent so thick you needed a pizza cutter to slice it. “Take these to Jasmine, and don’t forget I take six sugars and half-and-half in my coffee. I think you forgot yesterday because it tasted like I rinsed my mouth with an ashtray.”

  “Yes, Mr. Leonard,” the young boy said, and so was born an infinite number of Paul the Intern.

  Rey had once been Paul the Intern, but he’d changed that after he put in the required six months. He’d asked Jasmine the secretary to put him in as Mr. Leonard’s 1 p.m. interview. Maybe no one had thought of doing that before, but Leonard looked up.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Rey Montoya, I just finished my internship and I’m here to apply for a full-time position.”

  Leonard watched him with his beady eyes, moving around like a crab’s. His wide mouth became even wider, showing teeth yellowed by red wine and cigarettes. “Montoya, eh? Oh, you killed my father, prepare to die.”

  Rey had endured an entire lifetime of that joke. The only reason he used Montoya instead of Restrepo was because it was slightly easier on the English-speaking American tongue. It was remarkable how people treated him differently depending on which last name he used.

  Still, he laughed at the joke and swallowed his own pride as he picked up a pen from Leonard’s desk and waved it in the air like a Spanish rapier.

  “Exactly. Here is my résumé and I have the last six months to speak for my work.”

  “You been working with Paul? I haven’t seen you.”

  “We split the floor, sir.”

  “Graduated Adelphi in two years? Impressive.” He pressed a button on his phone. “Hey, Jasmine, get Mr. Montoya here set up. We’re about to get fucked by the IRS and need all hands on deck. And Paul’s late with my coffee.”

  The new Paul the Intern started later that day, and Rey was assigned a tiny desk at the far end of the office.

  Now, Rey leaned back in his chair and looked into Paul the Intern’s face. “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Krishan Patel,” he said.

  “Do you really want to do this?”

  “I just want a college credit.” He scratched the side of his face and broke a pimple along his jaw.

  “Then go home. If you come back tomorrow, figure out how to make people learn your name.”

  Krishan nodded, but Rey could tell he wasn’t listening, not really. Instead, he picked up a stack of packages from the cart and dropped them off on the desk beside Rey’s. As the kid started to leave, he jolted to a stop and turned around.

  “Oh, almost forgot one.”

  He handed Rey an envelope that looked like it had traveled from the late nineteenth century, wax seal and all. Then, Krishan was gone.

  Rey didn’t have time for mail that didn’t come in manila envelopes from the firm’s clients, so he put it aside and got down to work, punching the numbers on his calculator like the world’s least satisfying game of whack-a-mole.

  Rey hated numbers, but he was good at them. He could make sense of them, at least. Always could. He wasn’t sure where he got that talent from, and sometimes he wished he’d gotten Marimar’s photographic memory, or the twins’ musical talent, or even Tatinelly’s ability to charm unsuspecting suckers into pyramid schemes. His mother had dropped out of high school to chase after a soldier whose motorcycle had gotten a flat on their road. His father, the soldier, had been an army grunt who’d been killed in combat when Rey was eight. He’d been a good man, as far as Rey remembered. When he started to forget, all he had to do was rummage through his father’s old things he could never get rid of. There was a folded flag that hung at an awkward angle on their living room wall. The three crates of vinyl covering an entire history of rock, from Ray Charles to Metallica. His mother had also kept his collection of terrible Hawaiian print shirts that he liked to barbecue in when he was home. And even worse, sterling silver jewelry of flames and skulls from his teenage days as a metalhead in Queens. It was, all together, an altar to toxic masculinity, despite the fact that his father had been the first person to realize Rey was gay. He’d also been the first person to tell Rey there was nothing wrong with him, and he’d hold onto that through his adolescence and current attempt at adulthood.

  Rey had thought that he could get through anything as long as he remembered that he’d been loved by two parents who had burned hard and bright, and quickly, like matchsticks.

  Jordan Restrepo took every moment to be with his Parcha and his Reymundo when he wasn’t deployed. One time, Rey and his dad were playing baseball in the park, even though Rey hated baseball. It was his dad’s excuse to talk to his son. At some point, Reymundo regaled him in painful detail about what the second grade was like. All the boys were bigger. All the boys were grosser. Rey didn’t know how to be like them, soft and quiet like a drop of dulce de leche as he was. The kind his mom scooped up out of half coconut shells from the bodega. There was this class play and Reymundo wanted to be in the role that sang and danced with a boy named Timothy who had hazel eyes, and Reymundo wanted to marry him. Rey didn’t know what “marry” meant, but his mother liked to yell at her sister over the phone that way. “If you love that summabitch so much, marry him.” “If you love misery so much, marry it.” And so on. All he knew was that marriage was for love and he loved Timothy.

  “Easy buddy,” Jordan had said. He held little Reymundo’s round face for so long, and Rey was never sure what his old man had been thinking. But the memory was sharper than the rest from his earliest years. He could always recall the tears in his dad’s eyes. Not because he was upset, but because he was worried. “You have to wait until you’re my age to get married, okay?”

  “Fine,” Reymundo had said, in that way bored little boys had.<
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  Sometimes, when he was unsure of himself, Reymundo thought back to that moment. To the certainty that he’d never been more himself than with his dad, hating baseball, talking about a boy he wouldn’t kiss for another ten years. Sometimes, on Rey’s worst days, he pictured his Army hero father—with his chunky boots, gap between his teeth, scars crisscrossing his white skin—and told himself, If my dad could cry, then so can I.

  Rey would never marry Timothy, but they kissed in the halls of their high school at sixteen, and then one last time in Timothy’s room. Before Tim’s dad came home and had a fit. He asked, “What would your father say if he were alive?”

  And Reymundo only smiled, because he knew in his heart what the answer would be. “He’d say that you’re a homophobic fucking asshole, Mr. Green.”

  He never saw Timothy again after that, and no one fucked with him either. Rey knew who he was in his bones. He’d lose himself often, but he had memories, lodestones to guide him home.

  Now, as he dug through stacks of taxes and poorly kept receipts, he was overcome with a worry that hadn’t been there before. His skin didn’t fit, his clothes were too tight. There was something so wrong, so bone-deep he couldn’t scratch it hard enough to get rid of the feeling. He looked around the office, dark except for the green glass lamp on his desk. It felt like someone had pumped oxygen into the room. He thought about calling for the intern, but his eyes fell on the letter he’d tossed aside. It had begun to smoke.

  Rey cursed loudly and, in an attempt to pick it up, knocked over a stack of folders. He played hot potato with the envelope as the wax seal melted off in a quick burst of flame.

  He stomped on the letter, the envelope having burned off while somehow leaving the cardstock inside perfectly intact, save for the black smudges from his fingertips.

  He read the words and muttered, “Fucking hell.”

  It was after midnight, and when the buzzer rang, he knew who it was. He gathered all his things and texted his boyfriend to say he had a family emergency and would be gone for a couple of days. He’d have to call Jasmine first thing in the morning. At least Krishan was still there, waiting to clean up his mess.

  When Rey got downstairs, Marimar was leaning against the side of the building, holding a brown paper bag.

  “She almost set my office on fire,” he said.

  Marimar shrugged and bit into her bagel. “A pigeon broke into our apartment.”

  “Did it also catch on fire?”

  “Nope.”

  “Most grandmothers send five-dollar bills in Hallmark cards or tin cans full of toffee.” They walked to the corner and he hailed a cab and gave the address.

  “Who do you know with grandmothers like that?” she asked incredulously.

  “I don’t know, but they have to exist.”

  “Stranger things exist, I guess.”

  They got back to their apartment and packed. Before 2 a.m., Rey and Marimar were in his old truck, the one he’d kept from his dad and was usually parked in a little lot near the East River. A gaudy skull hung from the rearview mirror beside a wooden rosary that had belonged to his paternal grandmother.

  “I say there’s no way the old witch is dying,” Rey said.

  Marimar bit the skin around her thumbnail raw. Orquídea would slap her hand when she saw her. The engine came to life and they peeled into crosstown traffic.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  * * *

  Tatinelly tried to keep cool, balancing a bowl of ice cream on her belly. The flavors had been scooped out from four different pints—pistachio, cherry chocolate swirl, vanilla rhubarb, and passion fruit sorbet. It was the only thing she could stomach on her eighth month of pregnancy. Olympia, Oregon, was not known for its warm weather, but on that spring day, a heat wave descended out of nowhere, trapping the soon-to-be mother with the struggling air conditioner unit.

  She rested her head back against the arm of the sofa and sighed. The baby hadn’t kicked in a couple of days and she’d tried everything to stir her because that silence made her nervous. Her doctor, a young man who’d never carried a baby himself, told Tatinelly that everything she was feeling and not feeling was perfectly normal. But this was her and Mike’s first child (first of many, she hoped) and every pinch, ache, or fever dream made her worry.

  Tatinelly Sullivan, née Montoya, grew up an only child, and though she’d had many cousins, at a certain point, everyone in her family just left the house they’d grown up in and never went back. It was difficult to explain to Mike the house where she’d come from. The things her father and grandmother had believed in. Stories of real, true wishes, and women who divined the stars, of slippery mermaids, and enchanted rivers. Stories about ghosts that could enter the house if they didn’t lay down enough salt. Fairies living in the hills of their family estate in Four Rivers, disguised as insects. Magic things. Impossible things.

  Mike had been born and raised in Portland. He was tall, wiry in a way that gave the impression of having been stretched. He’d played baseball and basketball in high school, and every morning he rode his bike on the trails that led into the woods for thirty miles. The best part about Mike was that he didn’t change. She could go through his routine blindly, like muscle memory.

  It was silly, but the night of her graduation from Four Rivers High, Tatinelly had made a wish. She didn’t want much. She wasn’t like Marimar, who wanted the world to explain itself, or like Rey who, burned with fire and color inside, or her younger cousins who wanted fame and money. She wasn’t even like her dad who had wanted to be the mayor of a town that didn’t exist anymore.

  Tatinelly wanted a good life, a good husband, and a baby. That was it. That was enough.

  The moment that wish left her lips, the magic her grandmother had talked about felt real for the first time in her life. She saw signs everywhere. For Texas, of all places. That night, she left a letter to her family, fit her worldly possessions in the suitcase her mother had intended for world travel, and trekked up the steep road that led to the highway. The first car she’d seen was an SUV, driven by a woman heading to Texas.

  From there, Annette, the driver, gave her a room for the night and a job opportunity. All she had to do, for a small fee, was sign up to sell internet services for a company called DigiNet. Tatinelly, who’d never shown interest in much of anything, was really very good at it, and after days, her downline of coworkers was becoming an extensive network of men aged eighteen to forty-five. She’d even recouped her start-up fee and enough to rent her own studio apartment. Then one day, Annette and DigiNet vanished. No weekly meeting in Annette’s kitchen, no car in her driveway, no internet connection. Tatinelly had to go all the way to the mall to get her service switched back, and there, she noticed a Help Wanted sign at a phone accessories counter. She was offered the job instantly.

  A few weeks later, she met Michael Sullivan, who was visiting from Portland on a business trip. He didn’t need three phone cases and a battery charger that lit up when he plugged it into his car, but he bought them anyway. He’d been taken in by her smile, sweeter than anything he’d ever tasted. Her eyes were large with a slight tilt to the edges. Her light brown hair fell in long tangled waves down her slim figure. She had the effect of a doe trying to get across the I-10 and he wanted nothing more than to protect her, guide her to the other side.

  It was the most impulsive thing Mike had ever done, but he asked her on a date. They went across the parking lot to an Italian restaurant that had never-ending bowls of pasta. By the fifth hour of slurping up fettuccini Alfredo, Mike excused himself, walked across the street to the pawnshop, emptied his savings account on an emerald ring, and returned to Mezzaluna.

  Tatinelly said yes, of course. Her family didn’t understand why they couldn’t wait a few years, but most of them had come to the small wedding in the Oregon woods where Tatinelly Montoya became the first of her cousins, aunts, and uncles to take up a new last name. Tatinelly Sullivan.

  The Sullivans didn�
��t believe in ghosts or family curses. They only used salt in food, sometimes. They never got speeding tickets and always read the Terms & Conditions. They never fought or yelled or wore colors brighter than pastels. They loved their son and they loved Tatinelly, too, even if they were young for marriage; it just meant they had more time to be together.

  Her grandmother couldn’t be at the wedding, but Tatinelly had known, even as a little girl, that Orquídea Divina did not leave Four Rivers. She wondered if perhaps she couldn’t.

  Now, pregnant and enduring unseasonable heat, Tatinelly wasn’t sure why she was thinking of her grandmother, whom she hadn’t seen in the two years since she’d left Four Rivers. It wasn’t that her family didn’t get along. But Tatinelly had always felt apart, distant. It was like loving something from far away and not needing to be part of it. She kept Four Rivers in her heart and the Montoyas with it.

  As Tatinelly Sullivan, she had a good house surrounded by trees and flowers. She’d been married for six months, though as far as her mother knew she was also that much pregnant. She had everything she had wished for. A selfish part of herself, one that Tatinelly didn’t know was there, wanted one more thing—her grandmother. Tatinelly wanted her child to have the wondrous, strange, magical Orquídea Divina in their life. Her life. Tatinelly was almost positive, though Mike wanted to be surprised.

  It was then that she felt a kick so strong, that the bowl, perfectly balanced on her belly, tipped over, and she wasn’t fast enough to catch it.

  The front door opened and in came the earthy, sweat-drenched scent of her husband in his black and neon bike gear and helmet.

  “Honey?” He kicked off his shoes at the door and walked to her with a stack of mail in hand. “You’ve got a letter from your grandma. That’s weird. It’s not stamped.”

  “How about that,” she said wistfully, even as pain seized her belly. Tatinelly grinned and breathed through the roundhouse kicks from within. “You’re going to be strong, aren’t you, my little one?”