What the Moon Saw (13 page)

“You should have flown over it,” Pedro said when I told him about the dream.

“I forgot you could do that in dreams,” I said.

“You can do anything.”

A picture flashed in my head, me stepping forward and kissing Pedro on the mouth. It shocked me.
Where did that come from? Do I want to do that?
But Pedro was…Pedro. I imagined him standing next to Mark G., code name Kram, the third-coolest guy in my grade. I imagined Mark looking at a place beyond my head, too cool to actually look at me. He wore his attitude like another layer of name-brand clothes, his real self buried somewhere far beneath. And I saw Pedro, looking into my eyes, into the inside of me, making me feel like an oyster with a perfect pearl in its center. Then I pictured Samantha looking at Pedro’s outfit with her nose wrinkled up.
Clara, he is so not your type. Not anyone’s type.

I pushed the pictures out of my head. I wasn’t in Walnut Hill. I was here. Walnut Hill had its own set of rules. But those rules were flimsy and didn’t make sense and I didn’t have to follow them, did I?

I looked at Pedro’s face, rosy and damp with sweat. “You’re right,” I said. “I can do anything.”

We spent the morning looking for hummingbirds, just to watch them dart and swoop around from flower to flower, sticking their long tongues into the spirals of petals. We’d counted sixteen so far. Pedro started talking about Marcos, and I felt like he was talking about an old friend.

“Marcos collected stories from our village and put them together in a book.” Pedro said this with a proud smile. “And he taught us other stories, stories from before the Spaniards came. When there was a great civilization here.”

He talked for a while. The thing that caught my attention most was that hundreds of years ago, his ancestors worshiped a hummingbird god, and a feathered serpent god, and another called Smoking Mirror, and a goddess called Obsidian Butterfly.

“What’s obsidian?” I asked.

He scanned the ground for a few seconds, then picked up a tiny shard of glassy black rock and held it up. I imagined a butterfly made of this, something so airy and delicate and sharp and strong.

“Tomorrow let’s find pieces of obsidian,” I said. “We can lay them down in the shape of a butterfly and leave them on a rock as an offering.”

“An offering to who?”

“To the Obsidian Butterfly goddess!”

Pedro smiled. “Marcos always had ideas like that too. He said we should be proud of our ancestors.”

Our
ancestors. Was Pedro including me with him and Marcos?
His ancestors are Dad’s ancestors,
I thought,
which means they’re my ancestors too.
This gave me a shiver of pride and made me feel close to Pedro and close to Dad, even though he was thousands of miles away.

That afternoon, Pedro and I sat on a rock side by side, cooling off our bare feet in the stream. Pedro was playing his guitar and humming softly. Underneath our legs, a line of ants trailed along the bank, carrying pieces of leaves twenty times their size. Each one looked like a sailboat, struggling to stay steady in the breeze. “Look at them!” I said. “Isn’t that neat?” As I said this, I remembered how I’d been wishing for someone to point out neat things to. I smiled and tucked my chin into the crook of my elbow and breathed in the smell of the sunshine and sweat on my skin, and felt the ocean filling me.
You can do anything, Clara.
Again, the picture of me kissing Pedro crept into my head. Did he ever think about kissing me? The way he sang to me made me think he might.

Pedro looked like he was thinking about something else. He played some more, and sang the song about the galaxies and jewels, the first one he’d ever played me. I had drawn pictures of this song in my sketchbook—diamonds and emeralds and sapphires spiraling with stars. That was how I thought of our time together, something glittering, as big and important as the Milky Way.

Pedro kept playing, but stopped humming, and said, “Clara. Do you understand what the words to my songs mean?”

My brain started sifting through bits of his other songs. It was hard; I’d always listened more to
how
he sang the words, with so much feeling. I heard the words, but I’d never thought about the layers of meanings beneath them. At the core, they had to be about how he felt toward me. I felt like chocolate in the sun, a sweet, melting feeling.
This is it. This is the precise, magical moment he’s going to tell me he likes me.

I took a deep breath. “I guess—mostly they’re about…” I was going to say love, but my mouth wouldn’t form the word, and I felt my face flush. Luckily he was looking down at the ants. “Well, I don’t know.”

“Listen carefully, Clara.”

He kept playing the song, but now sang the words extra clearly.

“Jewels had no souls

They were only mirrors, brilliant colors…

“See, Clara, the words show how wealth isn’t important, how it distracts us from important things. The way the money in your country distracted my father. These are songs of protest. Songs to unite the poor people to stand up against the rich.”

My heart was starting to sink right down to my feet. “What are you talking about?” I whispered.

“Marcos says the rich treat us like those ants”—he pointed to the endless line of leaf pieces moving in the shadow of our knees—“doing backbreaking work for the people lucky enough to be born with money.”

This was what Abuelita had tried to prepare me for, I realized. But I hadn’t expected it to feel like this. I’d been flying with the stars, and suddenly,
bam,
I was knocked down.

“You mean they’re not about…love?” I asked in a small, humiliated voice.

“They’re about love…,” he said, and paused.

I held my breath and waited.

“Love for justice and dignity,” he said.

But they weren’t about love for me. I wanted to tear up the galaxy picture in my sketchbook and throw the pieces at him. “Pedro, those are just Marcos’s words coming out of your mouth. They’re not how you really feel.”

He looked confused. “Who cares whose words they are? They’re true.” He stood up, picked up his shoes, and slung his guitar over his back. He looked at me for a second as if I were a math problem he was trying to figure out. Then he said, “Forget it. Let’s go. It’s going to rain.”

I didn’t move. I didn’t think my legs would work. All this time, I’d thought every song he’d sung had been a gift especially for me. How stupid I was, to listen to every song as though I were hypnotized. I’d trusted him with my most secret things, things I would never tell Samantha. And all along he’d really been lecturing me about politics. What I wanted now was for him to hurt the way I was hurting. I raised my chin and said in a voice that didn’t sound like my own, “You wish Marcos were your dad because you don’t have one anymore.”

He looked like I’d slapped him. His mouth fell half-open in disbelief. Then he shook his head and said slowly, “Your father’s no better, Clara. He ran away too.”

“He didn’t
run away
.”

“Yes, he did. And found an American wife and had a kid and forgot about Yucuyoo.”

“He didn’t
forget
.”

“Then, Clara, why didn’t he ever come back to visit? Not once in how many years? Twenty years?”

“You don’t know anything about my father!”

“It’s a small village. Everyone knows everything.”

I picked up my sandals and slipped them on even though my feet were dripping wet. I fastened them, fumbling. Pedro had a point, although I wasn’t going to admit it. Why hadn’t Dad ever returned? I searched for a way to defend him. “Maybe he felt guilty,” I said finally, “because for all those years while he was illegal he couldn’t go back. He had to work and save money and learn English. And it would have been dangerous to cross the border again. People die crossing. And then when he married my mom, and he finally became legal—maybe he was afraid people here would be mad if he showed up.”

“None of the men care once they leave,” Pedro said.

“But he did try to remember Yucuyoo,” I said, hearing my voice grow louder. “In his own way.” Every nature walk Dad and I had taken was an echo from his past that he’d shared with me. And I’d stopped going. There was the tea he made for me when I was sick—chamomile and oregano and lime and honey and garlic. When I got older I refused to drink it and demanded normal cold medicine, bright red syrup in a bottle. All the bits of his past that he offered, I rejected. “I’m the one who didn’t care.”

My body tingled with some kind of furious electricity. I stood up and faced Pedro.

He stood there, hands awkward at his sides.

I picked up my backpack and turned away. I ran down the trail, half tripping over rocks as I went. My backpack bounced clumsily against me, and I hoped he wasn’t watching me stumble along with my arms out, trying to balance. I was a wounded bird, crashing through tree branches and vines. The rain began, and I slipped and slid downhill as the ground spit up mud at me. My skin felt raw and cold, but I didn’t bother stopping to put on the plastic poncho. I let the rain pelt me like hard little bullets.

By the time I made my way across the stretch of cornfield, I was hungry, thirsty, tired, and angry. Angry at myself for being so stupid.
I want to go home,
I thought.
I want to go back to where I understand things.

It was still drizzling a little when I reached Abuelita, out in the yard. She was holding a bloody machete and standing over a freshly killed chicken on a tree stump. It was headless and some of its feathers were stained red. She dipped it into a pot of steaming water for a minute, then pulled it out and tore out feathers by the handful. Then she slit open its skin, pulled the guts out, and plopped them into a bucket. Chicken blood and goop dripped from her hands. My appetite disappeared.

She looked up and noticed me gaping. “Chicken soup for dinner tonight,
mi amor.
And chicken in chocolate-chile sauce for lunch tomorrow,” she announced.

I felt my lip curl up. “At home we buy chicken already plucked and cleaned and wrapped in plastic. You can buy a package of all legs or all thighs or whatever you like best.” My voice sounded like the popular girls’ voices, talking about whose clothes were cooler or whose parents’ car was more expensive or whose DVD collection was bigger.

“What about the feet and guts?” she asked, curious.

“I don’t know—maybe they just throw them out—make dog food with them or something.”

“Or diet dog food!”

I didn’t laugh.

“Well, Clara, here we use most of it. Except for the beak, of course, and the feathers, and some of the innards. And always, we boil the goodness out of the bones in a soup.”

That night, when Abuelita handed me a big bowl with a chicken foot sticking right out and bits of fat floating around, my stomach turned. At first I thought the foot was a decoration like parsley, but then I saw Abuelo sucking and chewing on his. I ate a lot of tortillas and some of the broth, but I stuck the foot in my pocket to throw down the hole in the outhouse later. Abuelita probably knew, but I didn’t care.

They talked about the coffee harvest, switching to Mixteco at times. I stayed silent. My hand touched the slimy, bumpy chicken foot in my pocket. I ran my fingers over the soft claws with their rubbery ridges and felt very, very far from home.

That night in bed I let Pedro’s words come back to me, hard and powerful, like punches. I let his eyes come back too, frustrated and honest. His face, its shadows and light, its curves and dips. I wanted to sketch his face again and again. How had this feeling snuck up on me?

I wondered if I would ever smell his shoe polish again, its sharp, sad scent. That smell brought back another memory of Dad. We were living in an apartment in Baltimore at the time. Even though Dad was doing plumbing and pool cleaning for the apartment complex, he still polished his work boots in the mornings, out on our little balcony. In nursery school one day, bratty Allison S. had been bragging about how many birthday presents her grandparents had given her—all four grandparents. I remember lying and saying I had five grandparents, just to beat Allison. That afternoon I sat on my usual place on the balcony, cross-legged on the Astroturf, watching the rain, wondering how I’d gotten ripped off with only two grandparents. Mom was inside unloading the dishwasher.