What the Moon Saw (3 page)

Through the air vent I heard my parents’ voices—low whispers that grew louder and louder until they realized how loud they were getting, and began whispering until their voices grew loud again. Their voices were muffled, but I caught a few words, including my name.

I tiptoed to the landing of the stairs, and sat on a step, resting my gaze on a piece of light blue fuzz on the carpet. Now Dad’s voice sounded clearer.

“…I panicked…when we couldn’t find her last night…going from room to room, searching all over the house…do you know what kept going through my head?…that she’d left us, forever….”

Now I heard Mom’s voice, soft and soothing as hand cream, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. It was getting harder to hear them over the dishes clanking against each other in the dishwasher.

Then Dad’s voice: “…and I kept saying to myself, this is how my own parents felt when I left…this is what I made them suffer….”

The noise of the dishwasher filling with water drowned out their voices, but I didn’t want to listen anymore anyway. It was giving me a funny feeling in my stomach, the feeling that watching Dad cry gave me. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and looked in the mirror, wondering if one of my grandparents was to blame for my chubby cheeks.

As much as I complained to Mom, and stayed clear of Dad over the next two weeks (I really didn’t want to see him cry again), secretly, my curiosity about his village grew. It was impossible to have a blank bubble in my mind about the future. I had to picture
something.
What I came up with was a little adobe house with red flowers in the window boxes and a neat fenced-in garden. I think the image came from a New Mexico postcard that used to hang on our refrigerator. I figured my grandparents probably couldn’t afford a regular two-story house with a big yard, so everything would be smaller and older: a small, old car and a small, old TV and a small, old refrigerator. Their house would have Latino flair, like Mexican restaurants—the chairs painted bright blue with yellow sunflowers, the floor covered with earthy pink tiles. Clay moons and suns would smile from the walls. For dinner, we would eat nacho chips and spicy salsa and cheese-smothered enchiladas, with shredded iceberg lettuce and diced tomatoes and sour cream on the side, and then fried cinnamon ice cream for dessert.

I opened my new sketchbook and breathed in the fresh smell of paper and drew the house I saw in my head. All the while, a voice inside me was saying that really all I knew was this: The plastic me-doll in the stream was going somewhere, floating around the bend. And two weeks later on the plane, sipping my ginger ale nervously, watching clouds from above, I was between two worlds, drifting down the stream, letting the currents carry me, blindly trusting that I would end up in a good place.

Clara

T
rees
were what my grandparents made me think when I saw them at the airport. Brown tree trunks, worn by the wind and sun and rain, solid and tough, scarred and callused. Their skin looked rough as bark, and their feet, in sandals, as leathery as Dad’s old boots.

The look in their eyes, though, was gentle. My grandmother’s—Abuelita’s—eyes were black, like shiny beans. And my grandfather’s—Abuelo’s—were like bits of wet sea glass, one brown and one green, I noticed, amazed. The way his face lit up when he spotted me reminded me of Hector, bouncing up and down on his phone books, excited for dessert.

“Mucho gusto en conocerla, Clara,”
Abuelo said, beaming. Good to meet you. They must have known it was me, since I was the only fourteen-year-old girl looking lost and alone.

Abuelita took a step toward me and touched my hand softly—not a handshake, but something more gentle, like stroking a puppy. Her touch calmed the wild jumping in my stomach.

On the way to the airport in Baltimore, I’d made a deal with Mom and Dad that if my grandparents were weird or mean I could go home after two days instead of two months. But I could tell already they weren’t weird or mean. Abuelita’s smile was full of light, like the ocean early in the morning.

We waited for my bags to appear on the conveyor belt, and Abuelo whispered to Abuelita in Spanish, “How she looks like you,
m’hija
!” And a moment later, “Clara! How you look like your grandmother,
m’hija
!” I’m not sure why he called us both “my daughter,” but it seemed nice, like how Mom called me and Dad sweet pea or sugar pie. I pushed my bangs behind my ears.

Then he burst out, “Your eyes! It’s your eyes,
mi amor
!”

I hoped he wouldn’t bring up our cheeks, because my guess had been right; my squirrel cheeks came from her. On my grandmother, the rosy round cheeks looked cheerful, but mine made people think I was still in elementary school.

Abuelita looked at me with the hint of a smile, as though we shared some secret. Meanwhile, Abuelo talked and talked—about how good my Spanish was, how sorry he was he spoke no English, about how it was rainy season and he hoped I’d brought plenty of warm clothes (I hadn’t), about how sorry he was that the only phone in their village had been out of service for three months. “So you had better call your parents now, Clara,” he said.

Why hadn’t Dad warned me about the phone situation? Or about the rainy season? Maybe he thought I would have used them as excuses not to come. I would have.

Outside in the sunshine, we stopped at a bright blue phone booth. I dialed a whole string of calling card numbers, and then cradled the receiver and counted the rings. My grandparents watched me, Abuelita’s face calm and curious, and Abuelo’s straining with anticipation, like a little kid in line for a roller coaster ride. After six rings the voice mail came on and I heard my voice, sounding young and far away. I mumbled a quick message in English. “Well, I’m here. I’m fine. They seem nice.” A lump began to form in my throat. “It might be a while before I can find a phone again,” I added, forcing my voice to stay steady. Then, even though I was a little mad they hadn’t been waiting by the phone for my call, I added, “Love you.”

When I hung up, my grandparents looked crushed. “He didn’t ask to talk to us?” Abuelo asked solemnly. So I explained voice mail, which they’d never heard of. Even after I cleared that up, they seemed disappointed. They’d wanted to hear Dad’s voice as much as I had, I realized. It had been over twenty years since they’d heard his voice.

We carried my bags across the parking lot, toward the bus stop by a palm tree. As we waited in the shade, the sparkle came back into Abuelo’s eyes. “And your hands,
m’hija
! How they look like your grandmother’s!” I couldn’t see anything our hands had in common. Hers were thick and huge, like a landscaper’s, like Dad’s. Mine were piano player’s hands, Mom always said, even though I gave up the piano after four months of lessons. Long, slim fingers with the nails filed into proud ovals and painted blueberry.

I caught a whiff of a nice smell—soil, campfires, leather. It came from Abuelo. Then I noticed the smell that clung to Abuelita. She didn’t smell like perfume counters in department stores the way other grandmothers did. She smelled like chiles roasting, chocolate melting, almonds toasting. And like herbs—the teas that Dad gave me when I was sick.

I must have been smiling just thinking about it, because Abuelo said, “And the same smiles!” He dropped my bags, and stood dramatically still, watching a grin spread over my face. Even though I tried to keep my mouth closed to hide my squirrel cheeks, I couldn’t help laughing at how hyper my little grandfather was.

I snuck a closer look at Abuelita’s dazzling smile. Did mine really look like that?

The first bus ride was a short one, from the airport on the outskirts of Oaxaca City to the bus station downtown. On the way, we passed shacks and fields and trees with big orange flowers that I’d never seen in Maryland, or anywhere else for that matter. The streets of the city were lined with pastel cement buildings, with store signs painted right on the walls. Tiny Volkswagens filled the streets, speeding and beeping and weaving crazily around each other, skidding between buses, through puffs of black exhaust.

At the bus station we boarded a bus headed outside the city, toward a smaller town. The view out the window made me thirsty—dry brownish hills spotted with tall cacti and shrubs with sharp leaves bursting out in all directions like fireworks. Villages speckled the landscape, each with its own giant cathedral and cluster of small houses. They weren’t the cute houses I’d imagined. Most looked haphazardly thrown together from unpainted concrete blocks and sheets of scrap metal. Heaps of sandbags and construction materials littered the dirt yards, and laundry flapped on barbed wire fences. The nervous ball in my stomach was growing bigger. I told myself not to worry, that my grandparents’ house would match my picture.

After two hours on the second bus, we switched to a third bus.
Another bus?
I nearly groaned. I felt like stomping my foot and whining,
Why aren’t we there yet?
When Abuelo saw the look on my face, he said, “Don’t worry,
m’hija,
only one more bus after this! And what a beautiful ride! You will see!”

Even though it was early evening, the heat felt heavy. This third bus wasn’t air-conditioned. I unstuck my thighs from the ripped vinyl seats and crossed my legs the other way. My body felt stiff as old spaghetti from so much sitting. My grandparents were dozing now. In front of us sat a woman with three chickens in her lap, their legs tied together with frayed twine. Every time the bus hit a bump, the chickens bounced up, flapping their wings and squawking. The bus held a strange mix of smells—animals, sweat, ripe fruit, raw meat. I pushed open the window and a fresh breeze blew in, rattling the panes and rippling through the torn curtains.

Now the hills were growing green and shady, thick with pines and flowering trees. Along the roadside, two boys my age strutted along without shirts. They looked tough, with faded red bandannas wrapped around their heads. They were laughing and casually swinging machetes as long as their arms. I wondered what they used the machetes for—hacking through jungles, maybe? An old barefoot woman passed by, leading a sheep tied to a piece of rope. The boys stopped swinging their machetes and stepped politely out of her way. A little farther on, three girls in too-small dresses and plastic flip-flops giggled and tried to keep their goats out of the path of our bus.

When we reached a town of low buildings painted sherbet colors, the bus lurched to a stop, clanking and rattling. It sounded like a bowling ball was rolling around in the engine. We were in front of what looked like a big garage full of blue plastic seats.
TERMINAL DE AUTOBUS
was stenciled on the wall with orange paint. The bus station. We gathered our bags, shuffled off the bus, and waited on the plastic seats, which turned out to be as uncomfortable as they looked.

At the curb, a three-legged dog was sniffing for scraps near a food stand with a torn cardboard sign. Tacos with head and tongue, I translated silently. My stomach was already beginning to turn. Tongue of what?

“Are you hungry,
mi amor
?” Abuelita asked.

“Not really,” I said, imagining the whole head and tongue of some animal wrapped up in a tortilla. Were the eyes in there, too?

A boy walked by waving ice pops in the air and carrying a cooler streaked with mud.

“Would you like an ice pop?” Abuelita asked.

I nodded. The ice pops looked safe enough in sealed packages. Anyway, I was almost too hungry to care. At the airport, when it was too late to change my mind, Mom had given me a long list of things not to do: Don’t drink unboiled water; don’t eat street food; don’t eat raw fruits or vegetables; don’t eat without washing your hands for thirty seconds first. The last thing I’d eaten was the lasagna I’d nibbled at nervously on the plane.

Abuelita called to the ice pop boy.

I liked watching my grandmother. Her braids were woven with an orange ribbon and tied together at the ends. Her hair reached down to the small of her back, and it looked like she’d never cut it in her life. And another thing about her—even though she was shorter than me, she
seemed
tall. The way she held her neck long and her head high reminded me of a cat I had years ago. There was something catlike and graceful in the way she moved, even though she was so sturdy.

She gave three coins to the boy, and he handed her an orange ice pop.

His hands were filthy. The plastic wrapper dripped muddy water as Abuelita passed it to me.

“Here, Clara,” she said, and settled back down in the seat.

I wiped the wrapper off on my shirt while she wasn’t looking. The ice pop turned out to be mango-flavored and good. I licked it and tried not to worry about germs. I hadn’t even been able to wash my hands after I’d peed behind a cactus at our last stop. I didn’t see any sign of a bathroom at this stop, either. I wondered if I’d get Montezuma’s revenge. That’s what Samantha’s cousin got when she went to Cancún and had ice cubes in her Coke. She spent the whole vacation in the bathroom.

Abuelo bought the tickets for our last bus, which would head toward the coast. The coast! Just when I started imagining a beach complete with snorkeling and palm trees, he said we would get off hours before the ocean, probably at around dawn.

What? A whole night of traveling?
This was unbelievable.

Abuelo showed me the route on a map hanging on the wall by the ticket counter.

“It can’t be that far,” I said, looking at the key, wondering if I’d entered a land where time and space worked inside a different set of rules.

“Oh, but it is all narrow mountain roads,” he said. “The bus must crawl slowly around the curves. Like a snake.” He moved his hand like a snake and laughed.

I laughed back to be polite, but I didn’t like the idea of any winding mountain roads. It sounded dangerous.

A half hour later, at sunset, when the sky was streaked with pink and orange, we boarded the bus. It started up after a few tries and made its way up the twisted road, snorting and wheezing as though it had a terrible cold. The houses along the side of the road were patched together from scraps of metal and plastic. We swerved suddenly around a little girl riding a rusted bike with a toddler in a diaper on the handlebars. I hung on to the seat in front of me. Chickens flew up, squawking wildly. I noticed they belonged to the same old lady who had been on our last bus. I wished I were back in Maryland in Mom’s new Toyota with AC and airbags, riding along a wide, straight highway lined with clean rest stops and fast-food places. I wouldn’t even complain about the talk radio she always made us listen to.

Abuelita rested her hand over mine. My fingers were still sticky from the ice pop, but she didn’t seem to mind. The weight of her hand calmed me. It felt comfortable, like a winter blanket.