“My sisters and I searched for Luna Hernandez,” I began. Henry was turned halfway around in the seat, listening. He had not heard this part before. “I told myself it was because of the ring, but of course it was more than that.” I paused. “Where are you from, Luna?”
“Oh, around here,” she said, and circled a finger. “About twenty miles north, a small town. But originally, years ago, long before I was born, my great-grandparents lived in the Pacific Northwest. The islands, the ones that disappeared in the western tsunami—”
“Yes, I remember that storm. Horrible. No one had expected it. And then everything gone.”
Luna nodded. “Everything.”
I considered telling Henry simply to drive, to take us away. A desperation seized me. The crowds had thinned enough that he could get through with some care. The doors had driver-operated locks. But of course I couldn’t take her away from her family, I would never do that. I looked at this Luna and thought how much I would miss her when she opened the car door, exited to the street, disappeared. Lost and found and lost again.
A buzz came from Luna’s pocket, and she retrieved her device. “Excuse me,” she said, and answered, her face breaking into a smile. “Yes, I’m okay. I’m safe.” She listened for a few moments, nodding. “Good,” she said. “I’ll be home soon. I love you.”
Luna turned back to me. “It’s an elevated practice drill, that’s what they’re saying on the channels. Can you believe it? All this, for practice?”
Henry looked relieved. “Consider the alternative,” he said, and then regarded me with a short shake of the head: he was telling me to give her up. “Luna, would you like me to drop you somewhere?” Henry asked. “With the crowds gone, I should be able to pass through.”
And so we drove through the city streets, still busy with people, but their movement had changed. It was relaxed, relieved, almost giddy. Danger confronted and surmounted. The worst had been imagined and now had passed.
It’s so difficult to let some things go, to watch them walk out a door, get onto a plane, make their way in a dangerous unpredictable world. I didn’t ask more about Luna’s family, I did not reach out to examine the ring around her neck. Questions arise no matter how hard you strive for certainty. On the remainder of our drive, I told Luna and Henry the rest of the story. I told them about Luna, the first Luna, and about the secret I kept from my sisters. Henry listened without comment, though I could sense from the tenor of his coughs, the tension in his shoulders, that he yearned to discuss it. There would be time enough for that; we had a long drive home.
We arrived at Luna’s address, a narrow old brick building, not one of the newer builds, and sat for a few moments outside. The blue-black sky was just beginning to color with the dawn.
“Fiona, will I see you again?” Luna asked me.
“Perhaps,” I said. “Though this has been enough excitement for me for a while. Henry and I will stay put in the mountains. You’re always welcome to come visit of, course, but it is a journey.”
Luna demurred in the polite way of someone with the best of intentions. I would never see her again, this I knew.
“Good-bye, my dear,” I said as she opened the car door.
Luna hugged me awkwardly, a grasping sort of hug, the ring pushing painfully into the soft spot at the base of my throat, and then I released her into the morning.
Chapter 13
After we returned to Bexley from Miami, after we organized Joe’s memorial service and wrote thank-you notes and assured ourselves that Noni was okay—she was attending the grief support group, she was meeting regularly with her doctor, she was going to be okay—Caroline and I agreed to contact Luna. Our plan was to meet her—possibly in Miami, possibly bring her to Bexley—and give her the ring in person. We wanted to watch her open the blue velvet box and see for the first time the brilliant diamond that Joe had intended to place on her finger. It seemed important that Caroline and I be there to witness Luna’s reaction. To stand, in a way, in Joe’s place. I imagined the scene as well lit, cinematic, dramatic gasps and happy tears.
After that day in the restaurant, Renee wanted no part of it. She refused to discuss Luna Hernandez. Joe had died alone, Renee said. This was the truth, and it was all that mattered. This was what we, his sisters, had to live with.
Renee and Jonathan began to travel. Work, it appeared, was her antidote to grief. They went first to Chiapas, Mexico, where Renee volunteered at a rural medical clinic and Jonathan apprenticed with a seventy-four-year-old master carpenter who built intricately carved retablo altarpieces that stood taller than a man. Jonathan learned how to inlay mahogany, teak, and bone into oak, to bend the wood into fantastic and sacred shapes. At the clinic Renee conducted routine exams, set broken bones, and administered vaccines, but primarily she taught local doctors how to perform corneal-transplant surgery. Ocular surgery wasn’t her specialty—she worked with lungs and kidneys—but she’d received training in New York, and the procedure was fairly simple: cut, lift, slide, suture.
Renee’s patients arrived from distant, remote villages, on horseback, tractor, or foot. Causations varied: untreated infections, vitamin-A deficiency, trauma. But whether the patient was child or adult, female or male, the reaction to the bandage removal was always the same. The patient would blink, blink again, and reach out a hand to touch Renee’s face. The new eyes would fill with tears. Gracias. Gracias.
“I’m not sure when we’re coming back,” Renee said on a scratchy call from Mexico. “Some days the line at the clinic stretches so far I can’t see the end. The transplants—it’s like recycling. Tragic, intimate recycling.”
The idea of good arising from bad had always appealed to Renee. The senseless imbued with sense. After Joe it became for her an urgency. Luna she saw as a coward, possibly even a criminal. Nothing would be gained from meeting her, in Renee’s view, only regret.
Caroline and I believed otherwise. Why did Luna become our focus? Perhaps because we needed something to do. We could not return to the normalcy of our old lives, the stupid luxury of believing that Joe would always be there on the other end of a phone line. Luna gave us a focus, a distraction, but one that did not strike me as false. We were not hiding from anything; we were seeking.
Or perhaps it was the trace of what came later that prompted our search for Luna. A shiver of future knowledge that I did not understand, not yet. All I can say is that Caroline and I pursued Luna with a sense of unreasonable purpose. Luna was the answer to a question we did not yet know how to ask.
Day after day I called the Miami phone number given to me by Detective Henry, but it rang and rang. No answering machine, no voice mail, no Luna.
“No, we haven’t heard from her,” the detective said when I called him from New York. “She’s supposed to notify us before she leaves the state.” He paused. “But now that we’ve completed the investigation, I can’t devote any resources to finding her.”
I searched online with Google, visited Myspace and Bebo. The year was 2006, when an escape from the Internet was still entirely possible. The name Luna Hernandez gave me teenagers in Texas and Massachusetts, middle-aged women in Ohio and Arizona; none was the Luna from Joe’s Polaroid.