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She’d lived a hundred lives in different ways, but no one—not her five husbands or her descendants—really knew her.
It was loud because it was a symphony of people shouting their dreams and hoping to be heard. Marimar had longed to add her dreams to that song but when she tried, her voice was a whisper.
Maybe Marimar just needed to figure out how to accept that this is who she is—a girl with missing pieces.
As she grew, Orquídea quickly understood that if she wanted something, she would have to learn all the things that no one would teach her.
She learned that no one was ever going to want her, for reasons she couldn’t control, and that praying to chipped statues of la Virgen María and el niñito Jesús didn’t come with anything but silence. She learned to survive and survived by learning.
They recognized each other without needing to speak. Sometimes blood recognizes blood.
He returned to the docks, and that was when Orquídea learned that she was exactly like her father, untethered, belonging to nowhere and nothing and no one, like a ship lost to the seas.
Seeing them all like this was a unique experience. They weren’t the kind of family that celebrated holidays, except for the anniversary of Orquídea’s arrival to Four Rivers.
Enrique, though he was her son, didn’t understand her. Most of them didn’t. Not truly. If they had, they’d be inside the house.
Was the message a riddle?
There were those who felt too much, those who felt too little, and others who knew how to deal with those feelings.
Perhaps in some way, Isabela believed she was protecting her first daughter from the cruelty of the world she’d become a part of. But the first cruelties Orquídea learned were the ones Isabela doled out herself.
What broke your heart so completely that its splinters found their way through generations?
Damn the stars and damn luck. Damn everyone and anything who thought her insignificant. Orquídea Montoya was going to rewrite her fate.
Yes girl!
When he looked at her, she felt every brick she’d built around her heart come crumbling down.
You could be born into a family, but you still had to choose them. Marimar looked at Rey and Tatinelly and Rhi. She would choose them.
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.
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.
“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.”
None of them knew how many times her world had shattered and how she’d put it back bit by bit.
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.
When the house was full that way, Marimar wondered if it could have been like this always. But that was the way of missing people. You wished for them, you longed for them, you forgot them. Then you wished for them again.
