What the Moon Saw Read Online Free PDF Page A

see through the sheets of water.
    “What’s out there?” I whispered to Abuelita.
    “Jungles, mountains,” she replied. Her voice was soft.
    “Banana trees, a tree called
huele de noche.
It smells lovely, you see, but only in darkness.”
    Huele de noche.
Smells at night. Or, smells
like the
night. I remembered how the night smelled in the Maryland woods at three a.m. “And what else is there?”
    “Oh, streams and rocks.” She looked out into the darkness and cocked her head, as though she were listening very carefully to something. “A jaguar.”
    “A jaguar?” I didn’t know whether to be scared or impressed. “Really?”
    She nodded. “I feel it there,” she said after a pause. “I feel it.”
    I strained to look out the window through the rain. No streetlights. Only the winding road, and next to it, a steep drop-off. Past that, darkness.
    “What’s below the cliff?” I asked.
    “A big river, wild and high. It is the time of the rains, you see. Every afternoon, the storms come out from the caves. Like feathered snakes, they move across the sky. They move over the trees, over the fields, and bring us water.”
    Her voice sounded cozy. The way her words came in waves reminded me of how Dad used to tell me bedtime stories. As I began drifting off, she wrapped her shawl around me. It smelled like wool sweaters and fireplaces. In and out of sleep I swam, while the bus jerked this way and that, and the brakes slammed at the sharp curves. I dreamed that I dove deep underneath the ocean’s surface, into the currents that move in the dark.

    Sometime later my eyes flew open. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was. My eyes rested on my grandmother next to me. She was sitting straight up, her eyes wide open, staring at the driver. Her hand was squeezing mine tightly.
    “What’s wrong?” I whispered.
    “Hold my hand,
mi amor.
You have nothing to fear.”
    What was she talking about? I looked past her, through the window, and saw rain streaming down the plastic pane. I couldn’t see much through the watery darkness, only the edge of the road that dropped off at a cliff. Everyone else on the bus seemed to be asleep, wrapped up in shawls and blankets with their chins nodded off to the side. No one but Abuelita seemed worried. The bus twisted around the curves, jerking us from side to side while Abuelita kept her firm grip on my hand.
    Suddenly, the bus skidded sideways with a screech. The bus lurched and my body slammed into the seat in front of us. Now the bus was tilting on its side, and I braced myself for it to fall all the way over. But it seemed to settle there in the mud. The floor of the bus was slanted down like a ramp toward the windows on our side, which were facing downward. The chickens were crying out and flying up in a confusion of feathers. People were starting to wake up, murmuring and dazed.
    I rubbed my shoulder and peered out the window. Instead of seeing the ground, I saw something reflecting light. It was the river way down below, at the bottom of the cliff. It was churning and spitting up foam. It took me a moment to understand what was happening, and that was when my confusion turned into real, cold fear.
    Our bus is clinging to the edge of the cliff.
    My grandparents and I were sitting on the right-hand side—the low side—the side that would crash down into the river first. All kinds of thoughts flooded my head.
Will I ever see Mom and Dad and Hector again? Why did I even come here? I can’t die now. I still haven’t ever kissed a boy or painted a masterpiece.
    Abuelo was awake now. This was the first time I’d seen him without any trace of a smile on his face. He pulled down the window and stuck his head out into the rain, holding his hat. He craned his head to look ahead to the patch of light from the headlights; then he tilted his head up and down and moved it back inside. Water dripped off the rim of his hat, and underneath, his eyebrows furrowed together. “We must