Teresa’s favorite birthday had been her thirty-second. That year was windy and arid. Irazú still regurgitated fiery clouds of ash high into the atmosphere. Gray flakes had been snowing down on San José’s valley for four years and showed no signs of stopping. They’d all had a gray Christmas—as close as they could possibly get to a white one this near to the equator. While Teresa baked a banana bread pudding and put her hair into rollers, José María climbed onto the roof to sweep the ash off the grooves, afraid years of accumulation might collapse it.
The Three Marías, already there, danced a perfectly choreographed tango with Amarga, Lyra, and Carmen. Cristina hadn’t yet arrived with her record player, so Conchita provided the improvised rhythm, singing, Dun, dun, dun, DUN, over and over. The Three Marías led, and Amarga, Lyra, and Carmen clenched thornless roses between their teeth. Amarga refused to let Visita dip her. Lyra and Carmen did so with exaggerated motions, kicking one foot into the air, grazing the ground with their hair. All six of them left ash-black footprints on the tiles, drawing a discombobulated dance manual on the floor. When José María reentered the living room, he erased the footwork patterns with his broom and swept them out into the garden. Picking three thorny roses from a bush to put between his own teeth, he asked the triplets to dance. They curtsied and joined him, timing their steps and twirls just right, dipping like professionals, adding flamenco claps for a bit of flair. Walking in, curlers still in her hair, Teresa brushed them all aside, and she and José María danced a silent, burning tango.
Cristina and her family arrived. Everyone went to the kitchen and held up a glass of champagne, even the girls. Cristina was the first in line to propose a toast to their best friend. Teresa the Indomitable, she called her. The Restless, the Kind, the Beauty, and the Saint. To almost a decade of friendship, she said. And to many more to come. The Three Marías added their own anecdotes afterward, pouring themselves more champagne to punctuate each retelling. Then José María with his familiar tale of the beach, to which Amarga rolled her eyes. Asunta’s lazy eye noticed, and thought Amarga might’ve seen the back of her own skull.
“I fell in love with her the first second I saw her,” he said. He looked down at Lyra and Carmen. “I didn’t have a chance. No one does when it comes to your mother. Everyone she’s ever met falls head over heels. With her smile, with the way she dances and her kindness. She and you two are the reason why I wake up in the morning. Why I trek all the way to the plantation and cut those bananas from their trees. I told her you two would be born, and that we would love you both more than anything we would ever get to love. I am not too good with words, but Teresa María Cepeda Valverde has made me the luckiest man in this whole wide world. I would give her the moon if she asked me for it.”
Teresa rested her head on José María’s shoulder. Their daughters held them both by the hips, and Teresa was unsure what she had done to deserve this. In this moment, her life was perfect. José María didn’t need to lasso any moon.
Afterward, in the girls’ room, Lyra and Carmen drew crayon portraits of each other, sucked on the gelatinous seeds of rambutans, and tossed the spiny rinds at the ceiling fan. And every so often, Juan Julián and Carmen sneaked innocent pecks. Beneath an umbrella to protect the meat from the raining ash, José María grilled fat steaks, and Desiderio joined him.
After dinner, the women remained in the kitchen, clearing tables and countertops, pouring more champagne, washing dishes, smoking, sneaking extra bites of meat, gossiping, cackling. Conchita held Teresa close to her, refilling her bottomless flute. The other two Marías, surprisingly indifferent, told Amarga about mutual friends in Liberia who had become a lesbian couple. Asunta called them tortilleras, and when asked why, she clapped her hands together as if forming the dough.
They wiped their eyes from laughter. At her corner of the table, Amarga was abnormally cheery, downing glass after glass of champagne she had ordered herself from an Italian down the street. Today, Teresa’s happiness kept her own bitterness at bay. Once or twice she caressed Teresa gently on her back. It felt almost natural: loving her daughter. Letting her happiness become her own happiness. Participating in it, instead of watching it rancorously from the shadows of herself. Amarga presented Teresa with a velour box, and inside was a pair of rounded diamond earrings. Miniature moons, full, and glittering, and sweet. No one in that room had ever seen Amarga be so generous. They all reached in to hug her, but she shooed them away as if scurrying a rat out of a room. “¡Get, get! ¡Go on, get! Before I change my mind,” she said, and poured herself another glass.
Unbeknownst to everyone in the buzzing house, an untranslated CBS special report whispered a tragedy on the radio. A live broadcast from New York relayed onto every station in Costa Rica: 2,075 kilometers north, in Cape Kennedy, three astronauts had burned up in a cockpit. Young men with their eyes set on the moon. During a flight simulation, something sparked, igniting the oxygen-laden cockpit air, trapping the three excited boys inside. Melting their spacesuits and life-support hoses. Covering their airways with a warm hand.
A mother quieting her child.
A lover with a secret in her bed.
A guest holding her breath before yelling Surprise!
THAT NIGHT, AFTER everyone was passed out on the couches, the beds, and the floor, Teresa and José María stood on their balcony, watching a gibbous moon attempt a reveal behind a curtain of ash. It was impressive how strong her light was, José María said. Teresa nodded.
“¿Do you think we’ll ever make it?” she asked.
“¿To the moon? Maybe the Americans, or maybe even the Russians first. I don’t know if anyone like us will ever step foot on it.”
“¿But don’t you think that if one person makes it, we all make it?”
“Maybe. I guess so. That’s a nice way of looking at it.”
“It’s spooky, ¿right?” Teresa said after a pause.
“¿You remember the moon the night we met?” he answered.
“Of course I do.”
“If the Americans go to the moon, they have to tell us what it’s like. How it smells, how it tastes. How the rocks feel. If they’re as smooth as butter or as hard as the ones in a river. I always wondered how it would be. I wish I could take you.”
“¿Wouldn’t that be beautiful?”
“Not as beautiful as you.”
José María picked Teresa up and took her into the bedroom. Even with the sheer curtains drawn, slender moonbeams spilled in, bringing their bodies to life. They made love gently, covering each other’s mouths, suppressing their moans in their chests. That night they became indivisible, a single entity taking in all the air in the room. Leaving a passionate, hushed thing in its place. An unlasting thing, but the most beautiful thing the jealous moon had ever seen.
TWO YEARS LATER, in 1969, when Teresa looked up at the moon, she saw men. Inside the embassy’s red-carpeted lobby, Doña Vicenza and Faqueza sat with their faces almost touching the television screen as the first images of the moon landing came in. In a rare display of kindness, Doña Vicenza shared her bowl of hard-boiled eggs with Faqueza and Ricky, who lay on his stomach, drawing Martians. The gelatinous whites trembled on their lips as they watched the astronauts plant the American flag on the lunar surface. A glimmer of hope unfolded before the entire world after such a tumultuous decade.
Teresa stood outside, underneath two ancient oaks, watching rivulets of moonlight drip from in between the leaves. Microscopic moon men frolicked in the moon craters, jumped high enough to see over the moon mountains. All around them, blackness sat in a still, endless sea. A blue-green orb whirled beyond them in slow motion. The two moon men looked longingly to it as billions of eyes looked back. Everyone’s hearts full of promise and precipitated peace. Not since the beginning of time had the moon received so much attention. She, too, whirled about, spinning on her heels.
Wearing the moon men like diamonds.
But Teresa was looking for another man in its face. A faint resemblance of José María in the moon’s mirror, with the meager, reluctant hope that he might have been watching this all unfold, too; that he might have been running toward its light, searching for her until the end of the world.