What the Moon Saw (27 page)

Of course I knew, but I’d been trying hard to forget. I’d been changing the subject whenever he and Abuelita brought it up. I picked up a flattened circle of tortilla dough and placed it on the
comal.
My tortillas were perfect now. It had taken me all summer, but finally, they were just the right thickness.

Pedro sat massaging his leg in silence. The smoke was drifting into his eyes, making them shine.

“Clara, perhaps Pedro can help you pack after lunch,” Abuelita said gently. “Tomorrow at sunrise we must leave to catch the bus.”

I flipped the tortilla with my fingertips and watched it puff up in the center. My palms still had strips of white cloth around them where the top layer of skin had been scraped off. Somehow my fingertips had come through fine, probably because they’d gotten so tough after a summer of making tortillas. I picked the tortilla off the
comal
and quickly dropped it on top of the pile of tortillas in the basket. By the time I came back next summer, my fingers would be soft again. I wondered if I’d have to start all over to create the calluses.

“Is this enough tortillas, Abuelita?”

She gave me a long, thoughtful look. Then she nodded and sat down in her little chair. We ate lunch in silence—chocolate-chile chicken with tortillas and rice. Even though it was my second favorite, I barely touched it. My throat wasn’t working right—the food seemed to take forever going down, and once it got into my stomach, it sat there like a stone.

Pedro wasn’t eating either, I noticed. He watched the fire and didn’t even blink when smoke drifted into his eyes again, making them watery and red. Finally Abuelita took our plates and said, “Why don’t you start packing up now,
mi amor
? I’ll wash the dishes.”

Pedro walked outside with only a slight limp now, but instead of coming toward my room, he headed straight down the path toward his house.

“Pedro! Aren’t you going to help me pack?”

He didn’t turn around, just shook his head and limped down the path. “Pedro!” I shouted again, and started running after him. But he kept walking fast and wouldn’t turn to look at me even when I’d caught up to him.

So I stopped and watched him go. I tried to memorize him, to take a picture of him with my mind as he disappeared through the tall cornstalks.

I didn’t sleep that night. I lay in bed, trying to imagine Yucuyoo existing without me here—this musty room, the hidden waterfall, Pedro’s music on the mountain. Back in Walnut Hill, Dad and Mom and Hector were probably asleep, and my room was sitting there empty. There was the mall just a mile away, with its giant parking lot lit up by fluorescent lights, and a mile farther, my school with the empty desks and clean blackboards and thin gray carpet. In two days I would be there, filling those spaces, and Yucuyoo would be far away—a jumble of sounds and smells and images—slowly fading.

At dawn Abuelita came into my room and placed her hand on my forehead. “Clara,
mi amor,
it’s time,” she said, stroking my face. I pretended to be asleep so that she would stay with her hand on my head and keep talking to me softly.

After a few minutes, she shook me gently. I dragged myself out of bed, put on jeans and my art sweatshirt, and tied my hair in a ponytail. Outside I splashed water onto my face and brushed my teeth in the blue half-light.

While we drank cinnamon coffee in the kitchen, Abuelo handed me my father’s carved gourd. He’d filled it with roasted coffee beans and tucked it into a woven palm basket, along with a wooden stirrer and five chunks of cinnamon chocolate. “Now you can show your mother and brother how to make hot chocolate,
m’hija.
And the gourd and coffee beans are for Enrique. Tell him we hope the wind blows him our way again.” His eyes were shining. One brown and one green.

Abuelita handed me a bag of seeds. “Who knows if these herbs will grow in your home?” she said.

“Oh, they’ll grow,” I said. “Dad will help me plant them. He can make anything grow.” It was true. Mom always said he could make even a rock sprout roots and buds. And Dad would treat these seeds with more care than ever, I was sure. Some of the herbs he might not have smelled for twenty years. I could remind him of their names, even their names in Mixteco. After all the flowers and stones and seedpods he’d given me over the years, now I could give him something important back.

“Good,
mi vida.
You and your father plant these at your home, and every time you water them, think of us. Watch them grow and think of us. Know that they are alive, and that so are we, far away.” She unbraided her hair and pulled out the faded orange ribbon, the one that Nana had given her. She stood behind me and carefully wove it into my ponytail, forming a single braid. She tied the ends firmly.

The ocean was welling up inside me again, only this time the tears were more sad than happy. “Thank you.” I started walking out of the kitchen to get my bags before the tears could spill over.

Just then, when I was halfway through the door, Loro cried out,
“¡Hasta luego!”
See you later!

I’d almost forgotten to say goodbye to him. I stroked his green feathers and wiped my eyes and whispered,
“Hasta luego.”
One of his feathers had fallen to the floor, and I picked it up and stuck it in my braid.

“Ahh, he said
see you later,
” Abuelo said. “He knows you will return next summer with the rains.”

As I left the kitchen Loro called after me:
“¡Ánimo, Clara!”

Everything looked blurry through my film of tears while we gathered the bags from my room and carried them down the dirt path. Every few minutes I looked back, thinking that Pedro might come limping through the wildflowers. Every time I heard a sound—
Is it Pedro?
The sky had begun growing lighter in the east. A few minutes after we crossed the stream, just at the edge of the patch of trees, we heard the faint rumbling of the bus. It was coming around the bend in the mountains above us.

We started running through the woods, the bags bouncing against our backs, slamming against our thighs. Maybe we would miss it! And there wouldn’t be another bus until the next morning, and then I would miss my flight, and I could stay longer, and say goodbye to Pedro. But Abuelo sprinted ahead, waving his hat and whistling at the bus. The driver slammed on the brakes in a cloud of gray exhaust and waited for Abuelita and me to catch up.

I looked back again, to see if Pedro had come. I was squinting into rays of light through the branches. The sun had risen all the way.

Through the trees I caught a glimpse of red—his pants! He was running fast, only limping a little. By the time he reached us, all my bags were loaded. Abuelita and Abuelo had already settled in their seats, and the driver sat up front, wiping his forehead with a red bandanna.

Pedro was completely out of breath, and his cheeks were as pink as I’d ever seen them. He handed me a little package wrapped in a banana leaf. “It’s for you. A tape of my music,” he said. “Felipe let me use his tape deck. We stayed up all night recording it.” Then he gave me an envelope. “This is for my father. If you find his address, could you send it to him?”

I nodded. I couldn’t find words. Everything was rushed. I wanted to tell him so many things. Last night I’d imagined a long hug and a passionate kiss. But now, all the passengers were watching us and waiting, looking restless. The driver revved the engine.

“Don’t disappear, Clara,” Pedro said.

“I’ll come back.”

We touched hands.

Inside the bus I held the tape in my lap and watched Pedro grow smaller. Finally he turned and limped back into the woods, alone. Abuelo put his arm around me and Abuelita smoothed the orange ribbon in my braid and said, “You will see him again,
mi vida.
Next summer, in the full moon in June. When you come with your father.”

I would play Pedro’s tape hundreds of times over the fall and winter and spring. I would sit in the dark and watch the rabbit in the moon and let Pedro’s music enter me. I would feel the mountains in my bones, the stream in my blood, the sound of the waterfall in my pulse. I would feel the fresh herbs dripping rainwater down my arms, the warmth of hot chocolate, the sweet copal smoke, the taste of mango juice, the color of his voice, the smell of goats.

Clara

D
ad and I walked through a carpet of crisp fall leaves, up a mountainside in Maryland. Treetops rustled in the breeze, all reds and yellows against the blue sky. “
Espérate,
Dad,” I said. “Let’s sit for a minute. I want to sketch something.” We sat on a rock by a small stream and sipped from our water bottles. Dad flipped through our
Medicinal and Edible Plants
book and examined wands of blue flowers growing at the stream’s edge. I opened my sketchbook to a fresh page. I’d torn out the pictures from Yucuyoo and given them to Dad. The rest of the book was nearly filled with pictures for Pedro. The pages still smelled of woodsmoke from Abuelita’s kitchen, and some were wavy from getting wet in afternoon rainstorms.

I looked around for something to draw and spotted, in the sunlight, a spider’s web, stretching across the stream from a tree branch on one bank to a branch on the other. With the tip of my pencil, I drew the thin threads. I’d learned in biology class that spider’s silk is stronger than steel of the same weight. I sketched the web, its circles widening, connected with spokes like those of a wheel.

I glanced at Dad. He had that excited, triumphant look in his eyes that meant he was close to figuring out the name of the wildflower. I studied his face, all lit up, and saw a piece of Abuelo shining through. And then I noticed Dad’s comfortable silence, his steady breath, and I heard a piece of Abuelita.

Samantha had asked me to go over to her house that day, and when I told her I was going hiking with my dad, she said, “I wish my dad hung out with me.” Over the summer, her parents had decided to divorce, and her father had moved out.

When I’d first gotten home from Mexico, Samantha had thrown her arms around me and cried, “I missed you!” and then she’d burst out sobbing. She talked and talked about how miserable and lonely she was. I held her hand and felt her fear, sharp as a scorpion sting, and her sadness, a deep ache. Then I felt the heron lifting her up, little by little, out of her pain. After a while, Samantha’s gasps calmed into a long sigh. “I don’t feel so bad now,” she said. She wiped her tears and hugged me and whispered, “Thanks, Clara.”

What she was really thanking me for was letting my soul touch hers. And it wasn’t just mine. I thought of the bits of Abuelita’s and Abuelo’s and Pedro’s spirits leaping around inside me like flames and sparking Samantha’s soul.

I drew the final thread of the spider’s web, closing the outer circle. “
Ya, vámonos,
Dad,” I said. “Ready?”

“Sí, m’hija.”
We headed down the trail, and he talked about the wildflower he’d identified, great blue lobelia, how its leaves cured headaches and coughs. Afternoon faded into evening, and the air smelled of earth and wood and fallen leaves. I felt the strength of the spiderweb’s threads connecting me to people miles and years away, as real as the moon’s force on the oceans. Then I felt my father’s hand, warm and callused around mine. Then I noticed the breeze, light on my arms, through the holes in my favorite green sweater. Then I thought,
This is how it feels to be alive.