As if, I was about to retort until I remembered the campfire last night. All of us were stretched out before the heat of the flames when Hank had suggested that we trade cameras to check out what everyone else had shot.
“These are all blurry,” Hank had said, holding up the camera I recognized as my splurge purchase. I tried to stop him from asking whose it was by reaching for it.
Dad said flatly, “It’s mine.”
“I bet a little Photoshop will fix them,” Helen said kindly after a damning silence.
Until that moment, I hadn’t understood what Dad’s loss of vision was going to be like for him. He wasn’t just losing his vision; he was losing a part of himself. Wherever he went, he wouldn’t be Gregor or the twins’ father or even the pest control guy but the guy with the bad luck. The blind guy.
Now, as if Dad were remembering last night, too, he said abruptly, “No, never mind. Let’s get breakfast.”
Over quinoa sweetened with raisins, Ruben revealed the plan for the day. The morning’s trek up to Dead Woman’s Pass would be divided into three ninety-minute segments. Helen slumped and shut her eyes wearily, already exhausted.
“We’ll take ten breaks, each a couple of minutes long,” Stesha said cheerfully. How she had managed to look adorable in pink socks that peeked out from under her rain pants, I don’t know. I pretty much doubled as an overstuffed sausage squeezed into a casing of nylon.
“Everybody ready?” asked Ruben, reminding us that we had a strict schedule to keep if we wanted to make it to the next campsite at a reasonable hour. Naturally, Grace chose the exact moment of our departure to heed the call of biology.
“Oh, geez, she’s going to take a million years,” Dad complained, readjusting his backpack as he glowered at Grace’s receding back. He had a point; with all our layers, going to the bathroom was a long, multistep ordeal.
“You go on ahead,” I said quickly. “I’m walking with her anyway.”
“You’re not being paid to keep her company.”
“Actually, I am.”
“But you’re not a trained guide. If anything, Stesha should have hired you to be the trip photographer.” Shaking his head, Dad held the new camera out to me. “Here, take it, kiddo. I can’t see well enough to use it.”
I backed away, frowning. “Dad, it’s yours.”
“Look.” His tone may have been mild, but that word was scalding. He pushed the camera at me so I could see for myself that Hank was right. The image in the viewfinder was blurry, an impressionist’s rendering of the landscape. “It’s wasted on me.”
I was about to suggest that he just default to autofocus, but I knew better. Dad would rather leave the camera behind to be ruined in the rain. Mom nodded at me, silently ordering me to take the camera already and stop making a scene. Everyone at the campsite was watching us. So reluctantly, I accepted the camera, no longer a friendly weight in my hand but a cold, heavy anchor, weighing us down to our reality. If Dad couldn’t take photographs, neither would I.
The rest of the day was nothing but one lesson in humility after another. As soon as I congratulated myself for being in excellent shape and managing the trek so well, the stone-paved path that the Incas had laid down five hundred years earlier turned into a waterslide. Stones that were already large and uneven now became slippery from the rain. I kept expecting to twist my ankle. I glared at the swirling rain clouds overhead. What next?
“Sorry,” Grace said as she stopped again, this time to wrestle her water bottle from her backpack.
After I drew the bottle out for her, I said, “What are you apologizing for? If anything, I should be apologizing for my dad. He’s not normally like this.”
Instead of answering, Grace studied a branch so gnarled it looked like a witch’s deformed finger. I wondered where her mind had taken her. Finally, she identified it: “Polylepis.”
“That’s so cool looking.” I started to pull out my camera only to remember my vow: I wasn’t taking photographs, not with my old camera, and definitely not with the new one.
“Survival does that, doesn’t it?” she mused.
“Warps us?”
“Shapes us.” She paused, letting the branch go so it sprang back. “You know, if my husband were standing here, I’d tell him that I was beginning to wonder whether he loved me.”
“Why?”
Grace swept off her wide-brimmed rain hat to wipe the sweat off her brow. “We loved to travel, Morris and I. But this”—she jabbed her hat accusingly down at the rain-slick stones—“this isn’t about travel anymore. This is beginning to feel like a suicide mission. I mean, I am going to become the Dead Woman’s Pass.”
The truth was, the Inca Trail wasn’t as romantic or fun and definitely not as bonding as I had imagined it would be. What had I been thinking? That we’d be the von Trapp family, trilling melodious harmonies as we skipped single file through majestic mountains? It wasn’t just Grace I worried about but Dad and his he-man pace to prove to Hank and everybody else that a twenty-year age gap and impending blindness meant nada when it came to his physical fitness. And then there was Quattro, who was disrupting my much-needed, much-wanted Boy Moratorium. I hadn’t seen him at all today, and I didn’t like missing him. Really missing him.
“Do you want to turn back?” I asked Grace, studying her intently. Less than halfway to Machu Picchu, now was the time to retreat if we were going to backtrack.
“Absolutely not,” she said, her mouth tightening. “I made a promise, and by God, I’m going to finish.”
But we still had the entire descent, never mind all the elevation gain ahead of us. I needed to get my mind off the trek. So I asked, “How long were you married?”
“Fifty-two years.” She stretched backward and groaned.
“Fifty-two! The longest I’ve ever been with anyone is four months, and that was back in freshman year.”
“Up until today, that didn’t feel nearly long enough.” Grace raised her eyebrows. “You know, he refused to die in the hospital. So our sons transferred him back home. And our last kiss… oh, I’ll never forget that one! I leaned down to peck him on the lips. But he French-kissed me instead.”
“No, he didn’t!”
“French. Kissed!” She yelled the words as she spun around toward me. “He was sexy to the end!”
We both laughed so hard, we couldn’t have taken another step if we tried.
“And then he sighed, the two most beautiful sighs in the world, like he was reliving our life together. You know, he always made me feel so beloved.” Grace’s eyes shimmered with tears.
Always beloved. That was so far from how Dom made me feel during the last weeks we were together, even before the breakup. Try nuisance. Try pest. Try anything but beloved.
“You must miss him,” I said softly.
“More than you know. Or maybe you do.”
“I thought I missed Dom—that was his name. But now I sort of wonder if I missed the idea of him more.”
“Why do you say that?”
I flushed. It was hard to admit the truth to myself, let alone to another person. But I had kept my heartbreak a secret for too long. “He had a big presentation, and it must not have gone well. He didn’t get the funding he was expecting.”
“And he blamed you,” Grace guessed.
“Yeah! It was so unfair, because we hadn’t even seen each other for a week. And then before that, he was on vacation with his family.” I peered up at Grace on the step above mine. “How did you know?”
She shrugged. “At first was he charming? Complimenting everything about you?”
“Yeah,” I said, so astonished that the slight breeze could have knocked me off my feet. For our third date, I had asked Dom to join me for a long run, ending with a three-mile loop around Green Lake to his rental house. His roommates had been tossing around a football on the lawn. Thanks to my two older brothers, who had trained me well in all things sports, I’d intercepted the football and thrown it back in a beautifu
l spiral.
“Whoa, you found the perfect woman,” one of his roommates had said, tossing the football to me.
“Hands off,” Dom had said, knocking the football out of my reach. “This goddess is all mine.”
With her hands on her hips, Grace asked, “Did he tell you that no one had ever understood him the way you did? That he’d never been able to talk to anyone the way he could with you?”
“Yeah! How did you know?”
Grace’s lips pressed together. “And what happened after the first time you disagreed with him?”
“It was our fourth date,” I said, remembering the day clearly because I had kicked myself for a full five days afterward when Dom didn’t answer a single one of my texts or calls. I knew I had blown it, but I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong. “He asked me what I thought about the website for his game. So I told him I didn’t think it was unique enough.”
“Let me guess. He took it as a personal insult that you criticized it, right?”
“How did you know?”
“And then after that,” said Grace, “I bet nothing you could do was right or good enough.”
I remembered how Dom’s criticism had begun to creep into our conversation, so subtly, I could never point it out to him: You really don’t know about f-stops? Whenever I bristled, he said I was being overly sensitive. I demanded, “Really, Grace, how do you know all this?”
“My daughter was married to a narcissist, and he just picked and picked and picked at her. She thought she was living in crazy town, but it was just him, diminishing her to make himself feel more important. Thank goodness they got divorced before they had kids. How long were you together with Dom?”
“Six weeks.”
“You should be grateful that you got out as soon as you did,” said Grace, drawing her hood over her head as the rain restarted.
After months of blaming myself for the breakup, the world might have spun off its axis, Grace’s answer was that startling. It was shocking to consider that even though Dom went to the right school, knew the right people, drove the right car, aspired to the right career, he may never have been my Mr. Right.
We walked in silence for such a long time that Grace misread my quiet. Without warning, she spun around to apologize. “I’m sorry, honey! Did I offend you?”
“No!” I told her emphatically. “I think this might be the first time that I’ve thought straight about the whole thing. I mean, I was so wrong about Dom, what if I find out that my next guy is a narcissist, too?” I grimaced. “Maybe I should just go solo forever.”
“You can’t shy away from love just because you’re scared and—” Grace stopped suddenly with a sharp intake of breath.
“Grace! You okay?”
“Okay, I get it!” She called up to the sky. “Girls, I get it.”
“What?” I looked heavenward, too, as if the answer were written up in the clouds.
“I’m such a hypocrite!” Grace tapped her heart, then nodded firmly as if making a pact with herself and her Wednesday Walkers. “I’m telling you to get out there and love when I’ve been Chicken Little myself: He’s older than I am, and I don’t want to be widowed twice!”
“Well, that’s scary!”
“But no more being afraid. Especially when you finally meet the right guy who’s worth the risk,” she said, and nodded in the direction of the trail.
“What—” I started to ask even as I followed her gaze up the trail to Quattro, who was loping nimbly down the long flight of hand-carved stairs toward us.
Call it a miracle, call it a cosmic shift in the universe, but Quattro wrangled Grace’s backpack from her with two measly sentences: “I’ll just carry this up to the next rest stop. Your group’s ready for lunch, but they wanted to wait for you guys.”
Honestly, I didn’t think Grace was capable of releasing a single burden, dead set as she was on carrying her own weight. So when she shrugged off her backpack, my eyebrows shot up so fast, they could have launched off my forehead.
Grace explained rather lamely—“I need a little alone time”—then flew up the steps. Flew as if she had sprouted wings. I didn’t know who to glower at: her for playing Cupid, or Quattro for tucking her forty-pound backpack easily under his arm while I strained under the burden of mine.
Show-off.
But to tell you the truth, I rather liked this male display of strength.
“From up above, it sounded like you guys were having a party,” Quattro said as he unzipped his rain jacket, opening it to a T-shirt that hugged his chest.
No matter how often I declared my Boy Moratorium and how hard I fought my attraction to Quattro, my mouth went dry in a way that had little to do with dehydration. I zeroed in on his pecs. Sexy to the end! I cleared my throat now. “Just some girl talk.”
“Dare I ask?”
“Do you speak girl?”
“Obviously not. Kylie’s a mystery.”
“Why didn’t she come here with you guys?” I asked.
“Nationals for her dance team fell this week. But Dad and I had to come.”
Now was the moment to change the subject, redirect our conversation to a safer, surface-layer zone. Instead, I deep-dived and asked, “Why?”
“Mom’s birthday. Her heart was set on Machu Picchu.” He shot me a wary look, then waved me ahead of him on the trail. “A couple years back, she said it was time to tap into her Scottish ancestry, but Dad was too busy working to go with her. So she and some of her friends went to Scotland. The Isle of Skye. They wanted to see their roots and the fairies.”
I inched closer to him now, unsure I had heard him correctly. “Fairies? As in—”
“Yup.” He mimed fluttering wings with his hands and looked somewhere between adorable and dorky.
I burst out laughing. Just watching his face light up made me want to photograph him—to capture him in this misty light. But I pictured Dad’s withdrawn face just as Quattro’s closed.
“Anyway,” he said, “right after she came home, she told Dad to book this trip.”
“Why?”
“She wanted me and Kylie to get in touch with our roots. We’re a quarter Scottish, part Chinese, some black, and the rest Peruvian. We’ve got some real ground to cover.”
“So her last wish was to come here?”
“It was.” His words may have been soft, but they rang with finality. Just as I knew he would, because it’s exactly what I would have done to keep things light, Quattro deflected. “I hear the last leg of this trek is a killer. So how’s about we make it a little more challenging?”
“As in…”
“You know the Sun Gate in Machu Picchu? The two stone pillars on top of the mountain?”
“Yeah…”
“So how’s about if I touch it first, you drive me to Voodoo as soon as I move to Seattle?” Quattro said.
I placed one hand on my hip. “And what happens when I get there first?”
“I’ll drive you.”
“And that’s supposed to be my prize?”
“Maybe it’s more of a consolation prize,” he conceded.
“Fine,” I said, surprising him. He cocked his head suspiciously just as I continued, “It’s the least I could do for including your picture in my college portfolio.”
“Wait—”
Before I could fashion a smirk, I had to lick my dry lips. His eyes were arrested on that slight movement. The mood shifted. He stared at my mouth with a distinctly appreciative look.
Quick, now, deflect.
But I didn’t want to deflect anymore. My girlfriends would have been shocked. I know I was. I’d changed boys as frequently as some girls change nail polish, finding one excuse after another to erase any boy who might make the slightest inroad into my heart. But I wanted Quattro to see me. To like the real me. Me, the girl who worried about her parents. Me, the girl who planned to be a photographer. Me, the girl who found Zen in her lens. Me, the girl who wanted to be loved for herself.
&nb
sp; Instead, in a classic deflecting move I had perfected myself—see, we’re just friends—Quattro stuck out his hand and said, “So? Deal?”
“Deal,” I answered, shaking his hand.
Electric shock. I knew he felt it, too. I could almost feel his breath. I definitely heard my own gasp, a sharp intake, as I wished we were running straight to the Sun Gate this very day.
“We should go,” he said abruptly, as if he’d heard my thoughts and didn’t like them. Not at all. He charged around me, fleeing like this was the scene of a crime.
Chapter Eleven
Maybe it was because I was shivering—feeling imminent hypothermia or heartache, it was hard to tell the difference—but I couldn’t have been happier at the sight of the flickering campfire at the end of the day’s trek. The awkwardness of wordlessly following Quattro was over at last. That is, I was relieved until I noticed Dad sitting sullenly by himself on one side of the fire, opposite the Gamers and Mom. It would have been hard to miss him, considering the scalding blast of his scowl at Grace. These days, the slightest comment could change the weather pattern of his moods.
Preempting Grace’s apology, I announced loudly so everyone could hear, “Sorry we took so long. It was my fault.”
“No, it was mine. Shana kept having to help me balance all of this,” Quattro said as he placed Grace’s backpack carefully on the ground.
Once again, Quattro’s bigheartedness blindsided me. But if he had stayed with me—and with Grace, once we caught up with her—out of some weird misplaced sense of obligation, he could have just left us now. He was taking the bullet of blame for us. Now, as I started to shuck my backpack, he actually slid it off my arms. Layers of water-repellent polyester and microfiber may have separated us, but I still shivered at his touch. What was his deal?
Dude, you don’t know how to break up with a girl.
Dad stalked off to our tent like a sulky toddler. Since I was such a bundle of irritation, too, I staked out an outcropping away from everyone else so I wouldn’t have to make small talk or worse, do a Dad and lash out at an innocent bystander. But who came toward me, bearing a steaming cup of quinoa?