What the Moon Saw Read online

  “Abuelita,” I said. I blew on my chamomile tea. “Do you have a map of Yucuyoo?”

  She smiled, then laughed. “A map?” She shook her head and her earrings clinked like tiny wind chimes. “Oh, mi amor, there has never been a need to make a map of Yucuyoo!”

  “Why not?”

  “We know this land well. As well as our children’s faces.”

  I took a careful sip of tea. “I just thought maybe for tourists…”

  “Clara, mi vida! No tourist has come here before. You are the first.”

  I stirred a little more honey into my tea. I’d liked the idea of keeping my explorations secret—it made them more exciting—but it looked like I’d have to say it outright. “I heard a waterfall today.”

  “Ahhh,” she said, nodding. “The spirit waterfall.”

  At that moment, Abuelo came into the kitchen in a dripping rain poncho, carrying an armful of firewood. “The spirit waterfall,” he echoed. “The waterfall that is heard but not seen.” He began piling the wood neatly in the corner.

  “People of our village are accustomed to the sound,” Abuelita said. “For us, it is part of the mountain sounds, the insect songs. Part of the breezes and the birdcalls.”

  “And no one’s ever found it?” I asked. Now, here was a real, genuine secret mission.

  Abuelo shook his head. “No one of this earth.”

  “The young people ask about it from time to time,” Abuelita said. “But to my knowledge, no human eye has seen it.”

  My heart was nearly jumping out of my chest. Now all the pieces seemed to be coming together into a picture. My spirit was starting to feel more like a clear moon again. I remembered the way the waterfall sound seemed to call to me. Maybe even back in Walnut Hill it had been calling to me. I opened my tin of pastels, pulled out a brilliant green, and began shading the trees. “I’ll find it,” I said. My voice sounded a little more confident than I felt. “And,” I added, “I’ll mark it on my map. Yucuyoo’s first map.”

  What I love about making maps is that they tell you what to notice. My map showed landmarks like the high rock face, with its scars and wrinkles, crisscrossed with cracks and vines. It showed a fallen tree covered in moss, like a woman sleeping under a fleecy green blanket. It showed two trees bent over the path with their leaves dangling in an emerald arch. You know, when I draw these kinds of things, I notice them more the next time I pass by. I almost feel like waving at them, as though we’re friends.

  Abuelita began collecting our empty cups in a metal bucket. She looked at my map a moment, and I felt suddenly shy.

  “Perhaps it will be you, Clara,” she said. “The first one who sees the spirit waterfall.”

  A while later, I looked up from my sketchbook and out the doorway and saw that the rain had stopped and darkness had come. Here it got dark earlier than in Maryland in the summer. I remembered the astronomy chapter of my science book, the diagrams of a blue-swirled earth and a bright yellow sun. It made sense that the days didn’t grow as long here, since we were closer to the equator.

  The only light came from the fire, warm and orange. A bare lightbulb dangled by a wire from the ceiling, but it was turned off. Even though my grandparents had electricity, they didn’t seem to use it much. There were no appliances except for an abandoned-looking blender stuffed in a crate in the corner. Abuelo stood underneath Loro in the kitchen, offering him bits of stale tortilla. I shut my sketchbook, took a tortilla from the basket, and helped Abuelo feed him. Abuelita was taking eggs from another basket and cracking them, one by one, into a blackened pan of hot oil.

  As Loro snatched bits of tortilla from my palm, I realized I felt comfortable here. Then I realized how unexpected that was. Most kids in my school would have freaked out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do.

  “What made you ask me to come here?” I asked Abuelita.

  She smiled. “Your spirit was restless.”

  “It was,” I said. “How did you know? Did Dad tell you in a letter?”

  Abuelo shook his head and winked. “Remember, m’hija, your grandmother knows things. Now, me, I was worried you wouldn’t like it here. I stayed awake at nights telling your grandmother, ‘Oh, but Clara is used to TV and computers and city life! What if our food tastes bad to her? What if our life is too humble for her? What if she turns her nose up at our dirt floors?’ But your grandmother said, ‘This is what Clara’s spirit wants. No distractions.’ And it’s true! You feel good here, no?”

  I nodded. Nearly every minute in Yucuyoo I noticed another difference between it and Walnut Hill. Most of the differences either made me laugh or made me a little nervous. Things that made me laugh were the newspapers and old schoolbooks piled up in the corner of the outhouse to tear up and use for toilet paper, the glittery plastic purple jelly slippers that Abuelita gave me to wear in the bathing hut (which was a tiny shack hidden among the banana trees), the Barbie doll dressed in a poofy knit dress in my grandparents’ bedroom—a souvenir from a neighbor’s birthday party ten years earlier. Things that made me nervous were having no refrigerator (germs!), the fact that no one in the village seemed to own a car or a phone (emergencies?), and all the bugs and rodents living in my bedroom (just creepy).

  Some things seemed plain strange, like the way pets were fed only leftovers. “Pets in the U.S. get their own special food,” I said. “Bird food, fish food, cat food, dog food…”

  Abuelo grinned. “You’re joking!”

  “Then what do you do with stale tortillas and burned rice?” Abuelita asked.

  “Throw them out.” I didn’t want to get into explaining garbage disposals.

  Abuelo’s eyes got big. “So, there the dogs are very fat and happy!”

  “Well, not too fat because fat dogs get fed diet dog food,” I said.

  Abuelo’s mouth dropped open. Abuelita held a cracked eggshell in midair and stared at me. “Diet dog food?” they said at the same time.

  I nodded.

  They started laughing, first in little titters, and then in deep belly laughs. Abuelo clutched his belly, doubled over, nearly falling to the floor. And Abuelita buried her face in her hands. Her whole body shook. Every time it looked like they were calming down, Abuelo gasped, “Diet dog food!” and they shrieked with laughter all over again. For three minutes straight they laughed. They laughed until smoke began rising from the pan.

  “The eggs!” Abuelo cried.

  Abuelita grabbed the pan with a towel and spooned the eggs quickly onto our plates. “Ayy, Clara!” she sighed. She wiped her tears with her wrist.

  I was trying hard to put myself in their shoes and see what was so hilarious. Maybe diet dog food was as funny to them as using a math workbook for toilet paper was to me.

  I took a bite of the eggs, which were only a little brown in places. I ate the way my grandparents did, tearing off a piece of tortilla and using it to scoop up some eggs. They didn’t use forks and knives at all at the table, and only sometimes spoons. Tortillas were their utensils. They used tortillas as napkins, too, to wipe off the sauce around the corners of their mouths.

  “How come the eggs don’t go bad, sitting out?” I asked.

  “Sitting out?” Abuelita asked. She tilted her head, puzzled.

  “At home we always keep them in the fridge.”

  Abuelita squinted at me. “The hen laid them only a few days ago, mi amor.”

  “For what do we need a refrigerator?” Abuelo said with a proud shrug. “Even if we could afford one, we would never use it.”

  “Here our food is fresh.” Abuelita smiled. Her gold tooth caught the firelight and made her look like a queen. “Good for you.”

  Abuelo added, “Nearly everything you eat here came from our land and our animals. Only a few things, like honey, we buy at the market. We pay with the money our coffee beans bring us. Which isn’t much.” He glanced at Abuelita and laughed.

  I had to admit, the eggs were delicious. Much better than old eggs from a cardboard carton from th
e store. Like fresh-squeezed orange juice compared to the frozen stuff in a can. They were the tastiest eggs I’d ever eaten.

  The next morning when I came into the kitchen, Abuelo exploded in another fit of laughter. “I couldn’t sleep last night, m’hija! The diet food for dogs! Every time I drifted off, I thought of it!”

  “It’s true,” Abuelita said. “Oh, how he laughed! For hours, Clara! I almost sent him out to sleep with the chickens.”

  As we ate, I noticed quiet sounds—the wood fire crackling, Loro rustling in the rafters, a pot of beans simmering. Sounds you might not be able to hear over the hum of a refrigerator. Maybe when you took the extra noises away, you could notice hidden messages. You could hear what your spirit was telling you.

  After breakfast, Abuelita packed me squash flower quesadillas for lunch. She wrapped them in banana leaves, which she used like plastic bags. I stuck them into my backpack, along with a water bottle, two red bananas, a pencil, my sketchbook, a flashlight, a pocketknife, and a yellow rain poncho. The poncho looked silly on me—something I would never in a million years wear in Walnut Hill. But Abuelita made me put it in my backpack. “For later, Clara, when the waters come with such force you won’t think of how you look. The trees will not care. The animals will not care.”

  That was another thing we had in common: We both liked to be prepared. Mom always called me a pack rat and complained about how I dragged my backpack around everywhere. For even a ten-minute car ride, I had to have books and snacks and CDs and my CD player and sketchbook. But it pays to be prepared. If I’d been allowed to bring a third suitcase, I would have had a pair of hiking boots with me. Abuelita’s sandals were starting to grow on me, though, so maybe it was a blessing in disguise, as Mom would say.

  All morning I wandered along a maze of trails on the mountain. I even explored places without the waterfall sound. I figured there might be echoes that tricked you. By the time the sun shone from directly overhead, I’d circled back to where the sound was the strongest. I sat down on a rock by the stream and watched the wispy-thin water bugs, and right then it occurred to me I might be lonely. Not completely lonely, since I had Abuelita and Abuelo and Loro, but lonely for someone to explore with me. Sometimes I just had the urge to point out neat things to someone else. I used to do this with Dad, and Samantha, too, until she changed.

  “Hey, look at the shadow of that water bug!” I would say if a friend were with me. “Look at the perfect little ribbons the water makes in the sand!”

  I leaned back on the rock, with my face to the sky, and then I squirmed around a little because a sharp point was jabbing me in the back. I sat up and thought. Maybe I could turn the rock over to lie on its smooth side. I wedged my fingers underneath the rock and pushed it over. I was so absorbed in my work, I didn’t notice him coming up behind me.

  “Don’t move!” a voice yelled.

  I froze.

  “Let go of the rock and move back slowly!” the voice said. The voice was sharp. It was a guy’s voice, I realized.

  I felt the rock under my palms. I thought of murderers and gang members and genuine lunatics. The rock was too heavy to pick up and hurl at him, so I took a deep breath and turned to face him.

  The boy was my height, and staring me straight in the eyes with a crazy look. Sweat was beaded up on his forehead and dripping down the sides of his face. We stood facing each other—him breathing hard and me just trying to breathe at all. Our bodies were tensed, like two deer with their ears perked up, ready and waiting.

  He took a step toward me. Then I noticed that his eyes weren’t focused on me, but on the rock I had turned over. I looked at the rock. The bottom of it seemed to be moving with swarms of creatures that looked like small brown lobsters. They waved their claws above them and grasped angrily at the air. I stepped closer and bent down to inspect them.

  The boy grabbed my arm. He pulled me back so hard I fell against him.

  “Do you…” He paused to catch his breath. “Do you know what these are?”

  I shook my head.

  “Scorpions.”

  The word made my stomach freeze.

  “Do you know what would happen if one stung you?”

  Again, I shook my head.

  “One sting on your toe would make your whole leg ache all day. Then it would feel prickly—like ants were crawling around under your skin. Three or four stings in the right places could kill you. The worst is if you’re allergic to scorpions. Then, with one sting, your lungs would close up and you’d be dead in fifteen minutes.”

  At least a dozen scorpions covered the rock. I took a few more steps back and glanced nervously down at my legs to make sure none was crawling up.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said.

  I shrugged. My mouth was dry. I couldn’t form words.

  “Just—don’t move the rocks,” he said. Now his voice sounded gentle, like I was a scared dog he was trying to calm down. “Be careful.”

  He walked to the edge of a rock outcropping and yelled, “Chchchchchchivo!” Ggggggggoat! I walked toward him and peered over the edge. There were nine or ten white and brown and black goats scattered across the hillside, chewing leaves. Slowly, they wandered toward us.

  Now that I was standing close to him, I noticed a strange smell—wet wool and sweat mixed with something sweet. He wore a T-shirt that looked like it had been handed down twenty times. It was so thin that light came through. He had on faded red pants, too big for him, held up by a frayed rope around the waist. And the weirdest thing: Sticking out below the cuffs were pointy black shoes—old-man loafers. They were strangely shiny, with decorative fringe on top.

  He had on a woven-palm hat that was worn and comfortable-looking and fit his head perfectly, like it had been molded on there. And under the shadow of the brim were pink cheeks, brown skin, and sharp eyes watching the goats. It was the kind of face you wanted to keep looking at, soaking in every detail.

  “See you later,” he said with a sideways glance, and disappeared down the hillside.

  During the afternoon storm I sat cross-legged under a rock ledge and watched drops slide off the points of leaves. The smell of rain and the sound of drumming water wrapped around me. Nature was becoming a wild force, bending the trees and turning the ground into a mud slide. A thrill swept through me. There was nowhere I’d rather be than this place on this mountain at this moment.

  What was the boy doing now? Watching the rain? What was he thinking about? Was he used to these rainstorms, or did they make his heart race too? Was he someone I could tell about the water bug shadows and the ribbons of sand? Through the sheets of water, things lost their outlines and became blurred shapes and watery colors. I could be anyone, anywhere in the rain, and it would be the same. I could be Abuelita, my father, the boy, at any point in time, just sitting in the rain.

  I asked myself a question. Why were you restless in Walnut Hill? A feeling washed over me: being underwater at night in the woods. Remember this feeling, Clara. Abuelita had said that the world before her spirit journey had seemed like reflections on water, and that afterward, she saw what was underneath. Maybe that was what I wanted, deep inside—to see the world that Abuelita saw, the world of spirits and webs of light.

  When I bounced into the kitchen that afternoon, the green bird greeted me, “Clara, Clara, Clara!”

  “Loro, Loro, Loro,” I sang back.

  “How fast he’s learned your name, mi amor!” Abuelita said. She was dropping squares of chocolate into the green pitcher of milk on the fire. Abuelo sat at the table, bent over a sandal he was sewing. He glanced up at me and smiled.

  “Another pair of sandals for your grandmother.” Then he bent his head down again and threaded the thick needle through the goat hide.

  I grabbed an old tortilla out of the basket and tore off a few pieces. Loro carefully plucked them out of my hand. His beak looked ancient, covered with cracks and scars. “Clara!” he called again and again, between his tiny mouthfuls. I felt
proud that he had learned my name; I was part of this odd little family already.

  Now Abuelita was rolling a wooden stirrer between her palms to make the hot chocolate foamy. It seemed to whip things up just like an electric blender. I liked her strange kitchen utensils—a stone bowl to grind chiles and tomatoes, a clay comal to cook the tortillas, and wooden spoons, some as small as my pinkie and others as long as my arm.

  “You seem happy about something, mi amor,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. I was surprised at the flush I felt coming over my face. “Well, nothing special.” I tried to make my voice sound casual. “I met a boy.” It ended up sounding too melodramatic. So I shrugged and mumbled, “He saved me from scorpions.”

  Abuelo looked up from his sewing. “What?”

  I blushed. Now I’d made him sound like a heroic prince who’d rescued me.

  “Scorpions,” Abuelita said, raising an eyebrow. Not much surprised her besides diet dog food. “Who was the boy?”

  “I don’t know. He was about my age. He had a lot of goats with him. He was wearing red pants that were too big for him.” I didn’t say anything about his smell.

  “It must be Pedro.” Abuelo glanced at Abuelita. “You think so, mi vida?”

  She nodded. “Yes, it was Pedro.” She poured hot chocolate into our brown clay cups.

  I took a sip, breathed in the cinnamon-chocolate steam. “So, who is he?”

  “Past the cornfield, a few hills over is where he lives. With his mother. Only the two of them.” Abuelo knotted the thread and bit off the end with his teeth. “All alone, she raised him.”

  “His great-grandmother was a dear friend of mine,” Abuelita said. “Since he was born I have known him. Since he was this tall”—she held her finger at knee level—“he has had the gift of music.”

  Music? I wanted to know more but was too embarrassed to ask: How old was he? Why did he wear those shiny old-man loafers? Did he go out every day with the goats? Would I run into him again on the mountain?

  As though she’d heard my thoughts, Abuelita said, “Oh, you will see him again, Clara. Of this I am certain.”