What the Moon Saw
Para mis amigos en Oaxaca que han compartido
sus casas y sus corazones conmigo
For my friends in Oaxaca who have shared
their homes and their hearts with me
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I couldn’t have written this book without the friendship and warmth of several Oaxacan women who have treated me like a granddaughter, especially the healers Epifania García Diaz and the late María “Chiquita” López Martinez.
Muchísimas gracias
to friends who have shared their stories with me and commented on the manuscript: the Gallardo Martinez family, the López López family, the López Salazar family, Javier Guerrero García, Sergio Gutierrez, Eustaquio Morales Gonzáles, Mercedes Ortíz Gonzáles, Alex Rea, Verónica Vásquez Hernández, Gaby Velarde, and August Wagner.
Deep gratitude to the writers in my life—Peter Fendrick, Kim Lipker, Suellen May, and Leslie Patterson—for their enthusiastic feedback on draft after draft after draft; Debby Vetter for valuable revision help; and Sarah Ryan, Joan Schmid, Tracy Ekstrand, Teresa Funke, Jean Hanson, Kathy Hayes, Luana Heikes, Paul Miller, Karla Oceanak, Laura Pritchett, Greta Skau, Lauren Myracle, and Hazel Krantz for their encouragement. Thanks to my talented editor, Stephanie Lane, for believing in this book. And thanks to anyone who’s ever asked me, “So, how’s your book going?”…because that kept it going.
I am forever grateful to my husband, Ian, and my father, Jim, for their unwavering love and faith in me. This book would not exist without my mother, Chris, who has not only helped me every step of the way, but also has always made me feel that anything is possible, whether eating ice cream for breakfast, impulsively moving to Mexico, or writing a book.
Finally, in the words of the folk singer Violeta Parra,
Gracias a la Vida que me ha dado tanto.
Thanks to Life that has given me so much.
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Prologue
T
he moonlight touches them both tonight, despite the thousands of miles between them.
In a village deep in southern Mexico, wind slips in and out of a house pieced together from wood, reed, and tin. Just outside the door stands a woman who has seen nearly a thousand full moons in her lifetime, yet still feels a thrill at each new one. Most nights, she simply stands there, soaking up the calm expanse of stars, listening to mountains whisper secrets, watching leaves gesture silent messages. But tonight she is restless, uneasily rubbing the ribbon in her braids. She’s had another dream of the young girl whose eyes are nearly the same as her own.
A faint rustle comes from the corn plants. A large white bird she’s never seen before emerges from the shadows of the stalks. The bird stands on tall legs, close enough that she can see it watching her, telling her something. Yes. It’s time, she decides.
With bare feet she walks past the bird, through the cornfield, over three hills, to a shack even smaller than her own. The sleepy-eyed boy who answers the door listens closely to her whispers.
The moonlight is bright enough for him to sit on the doorstep, pencil in hand, and lean over his notebook as the woman dictates a brief letter to him. She looks over the five lines of circles and curves and folds up the paper carefully. Tomorrow she will walk half a day to the nearest post office and drop it off. The letter will take six weeks making the journey to the Baltimore suburbs, to the neighborhood of Walnut Hill.
The moonlight pierces the girl’s open window and shines on her eyelids, keeping her awake. Other people in Walnut Hill close their blinds, shut their windows tight, and seal themselves in their air-conditioned worlds. But this girl wants the night to come into her room. She wants the expanse of sky to fill her.
She tiptoes downstairs, slips out the sliding glass door, and walks to the edge of the yard, surveying the stretch of identical houses as far as she can see. They look like flat cardboard cutouts, scenery for a play—the fake shutters that won’t close, the carefully landscaped yards with perfectly rectangular bushes.
What is real?
she wonders. There is something more real than this, something deeper. When she holds very still she feels it in the wind—a whisper, a song, a low drumbeat. Sometimes she wants to scream, to dance wildly, to run and run until she gets to the edge and takes a leap into what is real.
Clara
M
oonlight is what started everything, what led me to the edge one May night. Yes, I know I sound like a lunatic, but it’s fitting since Luna is my last name. Clara Luna. Clara Luna
tic
is what some boys at school call me. I turn red and roll my eyes when they say it, but Mom says this is the way eighth-grade boys flirt. I wish they knew what my name means in Spanish: Clear Moon. I didn’t feel like a clear moon on the day my adventure began, though. More like a fuzzy moon, just a faint light through clouds.
It was the afternoon of my neighborhood’s spring fair, and I was supposed to meet my best friend, Samantha, at one o’clock at the snowball stand, but she was late as usual. I was sweating and waiting in line for a raspberry snow cone when I noticed a miniature Walnut Hill set up on the table next to me. It was an exact replica of my neighborhood—every single house was there! There were little plastic people everywhere—smiling kids with helmets riding bikes on my street, women gardening, couples jogging, a teenager mowing the lawn, people barbecuing on their decks. It was kind of cool, but kind of creepy.
I found my family’s house, and sure enough, the shutters were dark green, and the aluminum siding was tan, just like ours. For some reason I shivered, even though the sun was blazing and sweat was dripping down my neck. In the backyard of our house, under a tree, stood a girl who looked about my age, fourteen. Her skin was lighter than mine and her hair was only down to her shoulders, but still, looking at her gave me goose bumps. Of course, her hair was painted on, so I couldn’t tell if she had the same streak of pumpkin orange underneath where I’d tested blond highlights the month before. She did have the same chubby cheeks, and the same way of standing awkwardly, as though she didn’t know what to do with her hands.
I paid for the snow cone and stayed staring at the tiny neighborhood, licking the syrupy ice.
“Pretty neato, huh?” said one of the mothers at the table behind a sign that read
WALNUT HILL NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION.
“You see your own house there, hon?”
I pretended not to hear her, and she turned away to talk with another mother about a shoe sale at the mall. Then I did something crazy. I didn’t know why, but I reached over and tried to pick up the plastic girl. She was glued down, and didn’t budge. I reached my other hand over and held down the turf grass as I yanked her up. She came up, but only after half my snow cone had fallen into my miniature yard.
The mother glanced back at me as slush dripped off the tree, making a red puddle where the girl used to be.
Her mouth dropped open, and before she could say anything, I turned and ran.
Samantha walked up to me at the bike racks just as I was fumbling with my bike lock. I could tell she’d spent hours in the bathroom perfecting her makeup, which was probably what made her so late. She begged me to stay and hang out with her for a while. I did, but I made sure we stayed far away from the miniature neighborhood. The rest of the afternoon I didn’t talk much. I felt like a hazy moon, all fogged up with questions that Samantha wouldn’t understand.
I’m more than just a plastic doll, aren’t I? Who am I, really? Who did I come from?
On Dad’s side, I had no idea. All I knew was that before I was born, Dad crossed the Mexican border into Arizona, illegally—probably the only time in his life he’d broken a law. He hiked through the desert for three days and two nights, thirsty all the time, careful to stay hidden from the border police. In the cool darkness of night he walked, and during the blazing days he rested in the shade of cacti. Over the next years he picked tomatoes in the Southwest, and apples in the Northwest, and then made his way to the East Coast, where he mowed lawns and fell in love with his English tutor—my mother. He married her and started his own landscaping business. Then I was born and then my little brother, Hector, and we all moved to Walnut Hill, suburban Maryland.
For all my fourteen years I’d never thought much about Mexico—at least not until those questions began taking over my mind like tangled weeds.
The night after I freed the plastic girl, I couldn’t sleep. The moonlight through my window made me restless. I picked up the girl from my nightstand and felt her hard and smooth in my hand. I couldn’t stop fiddling with her, the way I could never help wiggling a loose tooth with my tongue.
After a long time, I slipped the doll into the pocket of my nightgown and crept downstairs, opened the sliding glass doors, and balanced there on the metal edge in my bare feet. The air felt damp and warm for a May night. The grass smelled especially strong, and the trees seemed to be watching me.
I took the first step onto the cold concrete of the patio. There was the hum of the air-conditioning fan, and beyond that, songs of crickets and maybe frogs.
Another few steps. My feet touched the wet blades of grass. This shocked me, woke me up. I walked across a wide stretch of lawn, and the ground squished beneath me like a sponge. I didn’t know where I was headed or why I was headed there.
Once I stepped past the edge of our yard, the grass didn’t feel any different, but
I
did. On and on I went. Across the Morgans’ lawn, along the Taylors’ fence into the Sweeneys’ yard, around their plastic-lined pond and down their driveway. I cut across the cul-de-sac, through more yards and streets. No cars moving. No people. Purple-blue shadows draped everything. I realized I was making a beeline for the patch of forest that marked the end of Walnut Hill.
I crossed the border between the last trimmed lawn and the tangle of wild grasses. I walked farther and farther into the shadows, weaving in and out of tree trunks, letting my hands run along their rough bark.
I missed this feeling. Until the year before, Samantha and I used to play in these woods together after school. Sometimes we were priestesses who could talk with animals in the Otherworld. Sometimes gypsy dancers living in treetops in the Black Forest. Sometimes scientists collecting insects in the Amazon. I’d always thought it was a magical place during the daytime, but in the moonlight it was more than magical; it was a different world.
I climbed over logs slick with moss, and ducked under low-hanging leaves that stroked my hair. Now I was really leaving Walnut Hill. I was dropping off the edge.
I reached the stream where Samantha and I used to try to catch minnows with paper cups, before she became more interested in looking at fashion magazines than fish. What would she say now if she saw me? What would anyone say? Just when I was thinking that I
was
a lunatic, that I should go home and be normal, something made me stop. There, at the water’s edge, stood a white bird balanced on its long legs, its neck a graceful S. I moved closer. Slowly, it unfolded its wings, and with three great flaps, flew up to a high branch. I couldn’t see it anymore, but I felt it there watching me.
Down on the muddy bank, I placed my feet over the bird’s forked footprints. Slime oozed between my toes. Suddenly, I wanted to know how it felt to be under the water’s surface, inside a world of hidden things. I wanted to be wrapped in cool, underwater mysteries. I pulled the nightgown over my head and tossed it over a fallen tree. Maybe I was a lunatic, but something was calling to me, and I was going to follow it. Farther and farther into the stream I walked, to the middle, where the water nearly reached my waist. I lowered myself. I gasped at its coldness, but kept going until I was lying entirely underwater, every last strand of hair soaking wet. All the cells in my body quivered, awake, alive.
Remember this feeling, Clara.
Almost as soon as I was under, I leaped out, shivering, thrilled, and threw my nightgown back on before I’d even dried off. I started to leave, but then stopped. I pulled the plastic girl out of my pocket and tossed her into the water. The current caught her and carried her downstream, around a curve—to who-knows-where.
As I ran back, my limbs flailed around like the wings of a crazy bird just released from a cage. Back to the neighborhood, the yard, the patio, inside the sliding glass doors. I closed them carefully behind me and tiptoed upstairs to bed. The next morning I wondered if I should tell anyone. Maybe last year Samantha would have understood, but I could imagine what she’d do if I told her now. She would slouch against the lockers outside homeroom and lean her head back and raise her plucked eyebrows. Then she’d wrinkle her lip-glossed mouth into a smirk and look around to see if anyone had heard me, and whisper, “Clara, you are soooooo weird.”
Just thinking about telling her nearly gave me a stomach-ache, so I decided to keep it my secret. After all, the only witnesses were the trees, the white bird, and the moon.
Mom and Dad didn’t catch me sneaking out that first night, or the second time, but the third time, after the last day of school, I got careless. I thudded boldly down the stairs and noisily unlatched the sliding glass door.
When I came back to the edge of our yard with muddy feet and wet hair, I noticed that something was wrong. The lights were all on—the kitchen light, the living room lights, all the bedroom lights except Hector’s.
My insides tightened. This was it. I wasn’t worried so much that Mom and Dad would punish me, more that they’d feel betrayed and never trust me again. How could I explain what I’d done? I wasn’t even sure of the reason myself. I wiped off my feet and slunk inside like a guilty dog.
Mom stood there in the kitchen, holding the phone between her chin and shoulder, popping her knuckles one by one. That was what she did when she was very, very nervous. Her eyes looked huge through her thick glasses. “She just came back,” she said into the phone, letting out a long breath. “Yes, thank you.”
She hung up and hugged me so tightly I couldn’t breathe. My ribs nearly cracked, she squeezed so hard. Finally, she took a step back and ran her fingers through her hair, which shot out in all directions in a frizzy blond halo. She’d been twisting and tugging it, which was another thing she did when she was very, very nervous. Then came the questions like bullets, like a police interrogation.