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She rewrote the evening so that she saw only him, on his knee, presenting her with a ring. He tasted like licorice and mint, and when he made love to her, he repeated, “you are mine. You are mine.”
You could be born into a family, but you still had to choose them.
Jefita had large pots steaming on the stove. Mounds of cubed meat. Seasoning powders and oils turning the pink flesh into a copper brown. She listened to music while she cooked, like Orquídea, and sang along off-key. Every now and then, Jefita touched a small gold Jesus pendant that rested on her chest.
“They called her Niña Mala Suerte. But that never stopped her from being kind or from helping those who had less than she did.
Rey tried to picture Orquídea smiling with a spotlight on her face in the middle of a European city with people trying to decipher what she was, as if she had been made of something other than bone and sinew and blood. Then again, how much different would it have been than if she had walked through the main street of Four Rivers, also with people trying to decipher what she was, where she had come from? How much different was it from Rey, standing at his gallery shows with people trying to decipher what he was, where he had come from?
Orquídea had tried to be so careful with her heart. It had already been broken once, the day her father shoved a purse full of coins in her hands and told her not to look for him. How could she not look for him when every time she saw her own reflection, fractures of him stared back at her? The parts desperate to be loved but never feeling quite whole enough to be loved.
They faced each other. He was so solid, so strong. It was then, as her heart splintered, that she realized that he was built of a more fragile substance than she was.
Tatinelly would never be a painter, a writer, a celebrity, a scientist. She didn’t want to be any of those things, and that was okay. Some people were meant for great, lasting legacies. Others were meant for small moments of goodness, tiny but that rippled and grew in big, wide waves. Tatinelly might have been ordinary, but she was not weak.
“What are you?” His mouth tugged with a smile. “Flower. Mermaid. It seems you have to be anything, other than yourself.”
“There is nothing brighter than a wish. It comes from true hope. Humanity is so full of that. Desperate hope. Joyous hope. Even those in anguish, especially those in anguish, I should say, have hope. The anticipation that tomorrow will be better than the next day. I find it terribly amusing.”
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.
“You have to focus all of your energy on that connection every family has. It’s in our bones, our blood. More than that, it’s in the questions we need answered. The secrets, traumas, and legacies that we don’t know we’ve inherited, even if we don’t want them.”
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.”
Everything was fine for a moment. That’s what Bolívar was like, moments of love, adoration, heat, betrayal, jealousy. All of them fleeting.
Orquídea made a strangled noise. “We haven’t—we don’t—he doesn’t want me that way anymore.” “He does,” Lázaro affirmed. “He is simply content knowing that you are his.” “I am no one’s.”
Wish for riches, and you might get a million dollars in sucres, but the next day the country’s currency becomes the dollar and the exchange rate is not in your favor. Wish for true love, and you might get it, but he might drown in a year because you were not specific.”
The second reason was because Ecuador was home to thousands of species of flowers. Four thousand types of orchids, four hundred types of roses, and one strange, hallucinogenic lily. An angel’s-trumpet, shaped like a bell and used by shamans to divine the stars and expel inner demons. It had medicinal properties, but in the hands of men, it was used for cruelties.
Orquídea thought of her father shoving money in her hands and then asking her not to look for him. How arrogant had he been in thinking she’d wanted to know him in the first place?
None of them knew how many times her world had shattered and how she’d put it back bit by bit.
The girl who spoke to the river, the girl who made something out of nothing. The woman who transformed herself time and time again when the world refused her.
How do you fight a thing that believes it owns you? How do you fight the past? With gold leaves and salt? With silence? With new earth beneath your feet? With the bodies, the hearts of others? With hearts that are tender and bloodied but have thorns of their own. With the family that chooses you.
And she knew, nothing was infinite, not truly. Not even the stars.
She thought of the things she was made of—flesh and bone, thorns and salt, bruises and promises, the sigh of the universe.
