More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Orquídea was born during a time when the planets converged to create the singularly worst luck a person could ask for, a cosmic debt that was not her fault, and yet fate was coming to collect like a bookie.
The house was hers. Born from her power, her sacrifice.
Orquídea was so many things: evasive, silent, mean, secretive, loving, and a liar. But she wasn’t dramatic enough for this.
When Marimar was six and decided she didn’t want to eat chickens in solidarity with Gabo and his wives, her grandmother had told her that the dead chicken’s soul would go to chicken hell if it wasn’t completely consumed. Orquídea told her if she swam to the bottom of the lake, there would be a passageway waiting there to take her to the other side of the world where sea monsters lived. That baking during her menstruation curdled milk, and cooking while angry embittered the food. Tiny, little untruths that Marimar now chalked up to things grandmothers said.
It hadn’t been much different than walking up the hills around her grandmother’s house in Four Rivers, except she’d traded rocks and grass for glittering concrete. Both had cut the strong muscles of her calves and thighs.
One of the men wearing a bright blue Mets jersey looked up and caught her eye, telling her, “Dios te bendiga, mamita.”
The city’s tough love provided a series of lessons that a soft place like Four Rivers could never teach her.
It was loud because it was a symphony of people shouting their dreams and hoping to be heard.
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.
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.
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.
“You know, Orquídea Divina was a fierce little girl, too.”
When her mother finally enrolled her in school, she learned to read and write. She also learned how to fight the girls from good families who made fun of her name, her skin, her whole existence.
She learned to survive and survived by learning.
Everyone mistook her silence for being dim-witted, but Orquídea was as sharp as the knives in her pocket.
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.
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.
“Latino families just think they’re cursed because they won’t blame God or the Virgin Mary or colonization.”
“That’s the whole point of being a kid. You believe things before the world proves you wrong.”
elegant features caught all the wrong attention. Some of the locals called her La Flor de la Orilla, the flower of the shore. A name Isabela detested because it sounded cheap. Orquídea didn’t like it because she knew she wasn’t a flower, delicate and pretty and waiting to be plucked. For what? To be smelled? To sit in a glass of water until she withered? She was more than that. She wanted to be rooted so deep into the earth that nothing, no human, no force of nature, save an act of the heavens themselves, could rip her out.
That is to say, his father was half Spaniard and half Indigenous, part of the mestizaje of the country. But he considered himself Ecuadorian to the bone.
to wake the fairies that lived among the twisted gardens. Orquídea liked to tell stories of the winged creatures that protected the ranch with their otherworldly magics born right from the stars.
Marimar counted her cousins, aunts, and uncles, but kept losing track. She leaned over to Rey and mumbled, “I guess this is what twelve years of four husbands looks like.” “Goals, question mark?” Rey said with caution.
There were those who felt too much, those who felt too little, and others who knew how to deal with those feelings.
but I always knew that I was on a different path than my mother’s. Even before I was born, we diverged.
“What is it like to live without rage in your heart?”
The Montoyas spread out, racing out of the living room, arming themselves with brooms and kitchen knives, like witches going to war.
Her family was different, off to others, but they were hers.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m sure,” she said softly. “It’s what I saw.”
“I love my family,” she said. “They’re part of who I am. So, in that sense, this place is me.”
Everyone had home remedies, didn’t they? Everyone had brought secrets from the old worlds with them.
But being back at the ranch made her feel like she had been missing something. If not for her, then for her child. She wanted her daughter to know there was magic in the world.
Pena Montoya had drowned. Marimar accepted that now, but she hadn’t wanted to believe it then. She’d needed someone to blame, and that was Orquídea. She’d loved her grandmother. Wanted to possess her magic, too. She’d wasted seven years simmering in her anger and all it took was a few hours breathing in the dusty air, seeing her grandmother in this state, and she was homesick enough to forgive.
She wondered, did everyone have such a fraught relationship with the places they came from? Did anyone else have a grandmother who might as well have been a legend, a myth, a series of miracles that took the shape of an old woman?
“Like what?” she asked, but she knew. “Broken, Marimar. Missing pieces.”
“One time she caught me trying to pick the lock,” Rey said. “Orquídea told me that was where her monster lived and if I kept bothering it, the thing would use its nails to poke my brain through the keyhole.” “Charming.”
she considered that perhaps her grandmother was an ocean of sentiment. She just didn’t want anyone to see it.
Some people were born evil, some people were taught. Her siblings were both. Orquídea had been born cursed and adrift, but at least she hadn’t been born evil. She still had that. Her siblings—though they were only between the ages of six and one—were her own personal demons.
What broke your heart so completely that its splinters found their way through generations?
“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.”
“Paint me this way,” he said. “I want to be just like I was in this moment.”
In her arms was a baby carved entirely of moonstone, and gathered behind her were the ephemeral outlines of six ghosts.
She did not belong in her mother’s new life with her new husband and new kids. She had no father to turn to.
Orquídea felt that tug beneath her ribs. This was her present, her future. Hadn’t that been her destiny all along? The girl who’d been born unlucky, a soul lost to the seas.
“Bitch, you owe me two cases of wine.”
“Baby, you’re anything but plain,”
Protect your magic.
Even when they thought her heartless and cold, she had given them these gifts. Marimar touched the closed flower bud at her throat. The thorn it grew to fight back against her. There was only one place they could go to learn their grandmother’s secrets.
Not the devilish grin. Not the misfortune or loss. There were some kind of men who could turn a gift into ruin if they weren’t careful, and that was Bolívar.
It was a funny thing that people warned of the dangers of pretty women, that there was power in beauty. But Orquídea thought beautiful men were even more dangerous. Men were already born with power. Why did they need more?
