Paper Moons

The summer our father left, my brother Tommaso decided we needed more moons.

He was nine and I was twelve, and I was old enough to know that one moon was quite enough for anybody. But Tommaso had never been interested in what was enough. He cut the first one out of a cereal box, a thin silver crescent, and hung it from the ceiling of our bedroom with a piece of our mother’s sewing thread.

By July there were eleven. Crescents and half moons and full moons made from the lids of biscuit tins, a blood moon cut from a red envelope, a blue one painted with the last of my watercolours. They turned slowly in the draught from the window, and at night, when the streetlamp came on outside, they threw small wandering shadows across the walls.

“Why so many?” our mother asked, standing in the doorway with a basket of laundry on her hip.

“So there’s always one somewhere,” Tommaso said, as if it were obvious. “Wherever you are.”

She did not say anything. She put the basket down, sat on the end of his bed, and looked up at the moons for a long time, and I saw that she was crying in the particular silent way adults have, as though they are embarrassed to be caught at it.

The next day she came home with a packet of gold paper from the stationer’s on Via Roma. She did not explain. She simply sat down at the kitchen table with the scissors, and the three of us made moons until it was dark.

We hung the last one in the window, where anyone passing in the street could see it. Tommaso said it was for our father, in case he looked up. I did not tell him that people who leave rarely do. I was twelve, and I had already learned that some things are kinder unsaid.

I still have that moon. It is faded now, more brown than gold, and it lives in a drawer with my passport and my children’s birth certificates and a single sock that belonged to nobody. Every summer I take it out and hold it up to the window, just for a moment, just in case.