luna, luna

Marisol watched the boy emerge from the sea and collapse onto the shore. For a moment, he lay still on his back against the sand and coughed and sputtered. She longed to help him stand up again but stood there, frozen. Though he looked like any other boy—the pale peach of his skin, the flush in his cheeks and the looseness of his clothes, as though pinned to a clothesline strung over his head—something about him seemed to glow even in the dark. 

And of course, he was a stranger. She remembered this, and longed to stare shyly at her feet at the sight of someone unfamiliar. Instead she managed to stammer, W-w-who are you?

You don’t know who I am? When she didn’t answer, he explained, I came from the moon.

She frowned. She hadn’t imagined the man in the moon to be a boy. But maybe, she supposed, he just hadn’t grown up yet?

The boy twisted back and pointed a single skinny finger at the moon, whose light haloed his head as round as a piece of fruit.

Marisol, don’t you see? Aren’t you the girl who wished for me? 

Her eyes widened. What he said was true—he knew her name without having to ask and when she looked up, she saw no face in the moon anymore. 

Marisol hadn’t always lived by the sea. Before the Bad Night, she and her parents had lived in a small house made of brick and encircled by trees. She treated birds as her pets, chased after her friends in the trees, and began the tales of her adventures everywhere but the beginning. 

Then the Bad Night came. Like a monster who had waited for years under the bed without her noticing. The three of them on the way home from somewhere she didn’t remember, her father driving on a steep mountain road, the kind that’s made for only one car at a time. A Beatles song was playing on the radio, the one about the sun, which was funny then because it started to pour and her father could barely see through the fog or the wetness on the window no matter how hard he rubbed with his palm. Her mother asking if they should pull over and Marisol no longer laughing and then from up ahead, a loud honk. Two large beams of light. Darkness for a long, long time. 

Days later, she followed her abuelo into his house, set her suitcase down and winced when the wooden floor groaned in protest. How could she ever belong here? she wondered. She’d never met this grandfather before, only heard her mother mention him once before. The walls were close together, squished, smelled of fish and nothing was like home. A curtain made of small beads at the back door. Wind chimes and smooth counters. Everything in shades of blue and white instead of the green with which she’d become familiar. 

Just then she spotted a large kitchen window above the sink. She walked over, stood on her tip-toes to stare out of it and almost gasped at the wildness, the fierceness of the sea. Abuelo, with a small smile, opened the window to let in the sound that hummed against Marisol’s ears like an unfamiliar song. CRASH, WOOSH, hiss, violence and passion and surrender all at once. Beautiful but so unlike her trees and bird melodies and the rich scent of the earth. Now the air was made up only of salt. 

For weeks after the Bad Night, Marisol developed a habit of staring out of windows. Cars, kitchen, the one in her bedroom, for hours at a time and Abuelo was still too shy to tell her to play outside. She was seven, still old enough to play pretend, but after everything, it all felt silly and wrong and didn’t come so easily to her anymore, but she wouldn’t have told him this anyway. She never spoke anymore, not even when summer vacation ended and she had to start second grade. A new school, a new kid, she never remembered it being like this.

Whenever Abuelo asked about school, she shook her head, picked at the broccoli on her plate. She couldn’t tell him the truth. Even when she turned eight, she couldn’t tell him about the hair-pulling, the name-calling, the losing of birthday party invitations addressed in her name, the smashing of her toes when the teacher wasn’t watching—she knew it had all become a game, kids always wondering, who would be the first to make her speak? 

But when Marisol turned nine, one thing did change, a small victory—a telescope Abuelo made out of spare glass and mirrors that he gave to her on her birthday. 

That’s the Man in the Moon up there, Abuelo said. He sank his knobbly knees into her bedroom carpet and adjusted the legs of the telescope to suit her height. 

She peered through the lens and smiled. His face reminded her of a baby’s: wide eyes and curvy nose and open mouth as though permanently caught in surprise. 

D-d-does he have a name?

Well, no. But what he’s made of, does. 

She tilted her head, confused. 

See those craters, the ones that look like his eyes and nose and mouth? They used to think those were seas. So they named them. 

They? 

People who were in love with the sky. People who gave their wishes to the moon, he said.

A-a-and they’ll come true? 

Abuelo grunted but Marisol knew, as she seemed to sense lately, that he hadn’t really heard. That his head was so full of his own thoughts that he didn’t have time for hers. 

At first, Marisol’s wishes had been small.

As soon as she caught the moon in the lens of her telescope, she said, Luna, Luna, more than anything I wish— 

For chocolate kisses that appeared the next morning under her pillow, new pencils sharpened and arranged in a bouquet on her desk, and once, a single button from Abuelo’s favorite oil-stained shirt, just because she could. 

Hmph, Abuelo had grunted to himself when he tried to close the first button and instead found nothing but the frayed white thread that the man in the moon had left behind. 

Marisol hid her smile behind another spoonful of cereal, Abuelo’s button pulsing like a heartbeat in her pocket. 

Then her wishes grew. And she told the moon the deepest wish of her heart—Luna, Luna, she whispered, I wish more than anything, for a friend.

¿La luna? Abuelo repeated, staring at the boy with an odd, fascinated expression. He leaned back in his chair at the kitchen table and rubbed his unshaven chin. 

Marisol and the boy exchanged glances. In the light, she could see now just how strange he looked. His head still carried that glow she’d seen down at the beach. His hair, which just a few minutes before had been soaking wet, was dry and sticking up in the air as if all by itself. Instead of his eyes and mouth and nose being made of craters and shadows and so-called seas were freckles and pockmarks and moles, all at once and all over his skin so pale it was almost translucent. Abuelo liked to call them lunares, for he was so old he had them, too. 

Marisol saw me fall out of the sky, didn’t you? the boy said, rubbing a spot near his elbow.

She nodded, her face warming with his eyes on her. She thought about asking if it had hurt when the boy hit the water, how long he would stay, why his head glowed like the moon was shining around him all the time. 

But before she could, Abuelo asked, Chiquito, what do we call you? 

Niño de la Luna, he said, and shook Abuelo’s hand. 

Welcome, Niño de la Luna. You have a place to stay, Niño? Parents? 

No, señor. I’m from the moon. The stars are my home and my mothers. 

Abuelo laughed with his whole mouth, so much so that Marisol almost did, too.

That night, Marisol’s eyes refused to close. She twisted and turned in her sheets, stared at her ceiling, watched shadows flicker on her walls. Still a part of her wondered if Niño de la Luna would be there when she woke up the next morning. If he would suddenly resent her silence, punish her for it like everyone before him had done.

¡Buenos días, Sol! Niño de la Luna called as he and Marisol climbed and scrambled over rocks on the far end of the beach. It was the next day, Sunday, and the sun felt warm against Marisol’s skin, and both of these things almost made her want to laugh out loud and cartwheel with one arm if only she could do either. 

I always say good morning to the sun, Niño de la Luna later explained as they sat side by side on a rock. I try to be polite, you see, and scratched at his neck until it turned red with irritation like a mosquito bite, like those bumps that meant summer had come and rose from her skin and itched her even when she slept. 

She turned away and looked up, waved to the sun with her free hand. 

The sun says hello to you, too, Marisol, Niño de la Luna said. His eyes widened. Esperate. Sol! Mari-sol! 

She nodded. 

And Mari is— 

She pointed a single finger out to the horizon. 

—the sea! he finished. He was so excited that he nearly fell off the rock into the water below them. You’re named after the sea and the sun, Marisol. 

And for the first time, she felt a flicker of pride for the name she’d been uncertain of all her life. She liked the way he said it. She wanted to ask him to say her name the way only her parents and Abuelo ever had, over and over again and with the roll of the r she’d never quite gotten right. She blushed at the thought, so much to ask for someone she couldn’t look yet in the eye when he looked into hers. 

Then Niño de la Luna spotted at her legs with a careful eye, and frowned. 

Marisol, what happened?

She cowered and hugged her legs to her chest. She knew what he was talking about, the old bruises greenish-yellow on her skin from the kids who longed to pull her voice out of her body. 

Who did this to you, Marisol? he asked.

At first, she couldn’t answer, the humiliation in her cheeks turning almost as red as the color her bruises used to be. 

J-j-just kids at school, Niño. Stupid ones. No one, she said, and he squeezed her hand as though he understood.

The next afternoon, Marisol hurried out of the chain-linked wire fence that protected the school from the street. Someone said her name but she was watching her feet, wasn’t sure if it had come from behind her or in front, how much time she had to outrun them, so afraid she almost forgot that no one at school called her by her name. 

Then she looked up and there he was, Niño de la Luna waiting for her under the shade of a nearby tree and eating an apple he must’ve taken from its branches. 

Buenas tardes, he greeted her. She wanted to ask what he was doing here, why a rash the size of a large coin and the color of pomegranates had bloomed on his arm. Before she could, he took her small hand in his and turned her questions to dust that fell and settled in the grass beneath her feet. He’d been waiting, she realized, for her. 

Is that your boyfriend, Marisol? a boy from her class taunted as they walked close by. 

She stiffened, readied herself to run but instead of the silence of the air before a kick or a pinch or a pull, she heard them trip and gasp in pain. 

She twisted around, put her hands over her mouth at the sight of a boy laying on the ground with both his shoes mysteriously untied. He was in one of her classes, she remembered, but nothing else. He glanced around, more confused than hurt. 

Marisol leaned into Niño. But how did you—

Just a little trick, he whispered and winked. 

Marisol’s face flushed with embarrassment, and all the way home she found herself shaking her head at Niño de la Luna’s antics. Still it was nice, she had to admit, having someone around to stick up for her. 

Over the next few days, however, Marisol soon realized Niño de la Luna was much more than what he seemed. During their morning swims, he whispered to the ocean, which seemed to whisper back, and yet it didn’t stop his skin from itching with pain from the sun. He could catch fireflies without burning in his hands and throw rocks that skipped on the water at least a dozen times, but he couldn’t walk too fast without finding it hard to breathe and could only sleep in temperatures that made Abuelo and Marisol’s teeth chatter with cold like a cricket’s song. And even worse, it was all the newspapers could write about, what every radio station couldn’t stop talking about. They claimed the oceans would dry up without the face of the moon to guide it, that the stars would blink and die out one by one and though Niño de la Luna said it wasn’t true, it didn’t stop Marisol from realizing what was. 

H-h-he doesn’t belong here, Abuelo, Marisol said later that evening as he crouched down and rummaged around his toolbox.

Who? His face was frowned in concentration and it was clear, as it always was, that he wasn’t really listening. But he smelled of sweat and oil and work done with hands and both of these things made Marisol certain he could do what she needed him to.

Marisol stood there, as still and as frightened as the day she’d seen Niño de la Luna emerge from the sea. She was tired of not standing up for herself, of how much she’d come to rely on everyone but herself for everything. 

Abuelo! she said with a stomp of her foot. 

He froze. She’d never spoken in front of him without a stutter before.

I wish— 

She stopped herself. She wished for a lot of things: that Abuelo would help her so that the moon would have a face again, that words weren’t so hard to say, that Niño de la Luna could stay her friend forever. But even more than that, she realized, she wished for her parents and their red brick house in the forest and her life before she spent all her time watching and waiting at the windows in her grandfather’s house by the sea and it was silly, she realized, to be so young and yet to wish for so much. 

But then Abuelo found the old wrench he’d been looking for. He muttered something about a broken pipe in the back and left, and Marisol was alone in the garage as the sun disappeared beneath the horizon, and she wondered, briefly, if she’d ever grow up or if, as she felt she’d done all her life, only keep growing down. As though in reply, the sky began to turn so black it was almost blue, and she got an idea. 

Marisol hurried to her room and to the window, where the faceless moon now hung in the sky like a lantern on a boat. Peering through her telescope, she caught the moon in the lens as she’d done hundreds of times before.

Luna, Luna, she began but found she couldn’t finish. The moon’s shadows, once so familiar and certain, were gone. Without Niño de la Luna, without Abuelo, without her parents, there was no one left for her to wish to anymore. 

The door creaked open behind her, and Niño de la Luna shuffled into the room. The sight of his hair, as untamed and wild as ever, and his lunares and his arms and legs as skinny as a bird’s, made Marisol smile despite how badly she wanted to cry. Looking at him, she now knew, was like looking at home. 

B-b-buenas noches, Marisol, Niño de la Luna croaked, standing beside her. But no one ever said good night as a way to say hello; they only said it to say good-bye.

Can I look? 

She moved aside and he bent down to peer through the telescope. Though she knew one could only look at the world in silence, and though they didn’t have enough time for anything at all, she still had a dozen questions on her mind. Did Niño de la Luna have a real name? What would she do when the kids at school taunted her again and kicked her and called her names and how, she wondered could she say good morning to the sun without him? 

But only one of her questions for the boy in the moon really mattered now. 

Do you think you’ll ever grow up? Abuelo thinks I will. But I don’t know, she said. 

Instead of answering, Niño de la Luna took her hand in his, reminding her of the smallness of herself and the fact that he couldn’t stay, and both of these things made Marisol decide that tomorrow, perhaps with a little help from her friend, she’d give him back to the moon again.