A Blind Spot for Boys (18 page)

Without thinking, I knelt down to take a photo of some of the workers, focusing first on a thin young man dragging a massive tree limb that looked three times his weight. My lens found a familiar figure who should have been lounging in Cusco, sipping pisco sours, but was clearing the train tracks with volunteers a third her age. The same woman who’d lagged so far behind everyone on the Inca Trail that my father had accused her of jeopardizing the trip. The same woman who encouraged everyone—Mom, Helen, me—with her stories.

This was the photograph I knew I had to make: a woman who chose to build instead of tear down. I framed Grace just left of center and waited until the exact moment when she straightened, holding a bouquet of torn branches. I got my shot. Next, I zoomed in to a ponytailed woman in a Penn sweatshirt, who scowled at me. Complaining to her friend loudly, she said, “If
everyone would stop playing tourist and actually help, we might get something done around here.”

Chastened, I lowered the camera and tried to listen to what Ruben was saying to the group around him. He lifted his eyes off the to-do list and said, “We need a couple of people to play soccer with some kids.”

“That’s helping?” asked a balding man with a potbelly.

“Have you ever seen what kind of trouble bored kids can get into?” countered a stout woman whose wide-brimmed rain hat could have been an umbrella. She said, “I’d volunteer, but I blew out my knee gardening.”

“I’ll play,” Mom offered. The last time she joined the Thursday night soccer league filled with cutthroat mothers, she had been given a red card for bodychecking an opponent. Those poor kids on the soccer field here in town. Even though I didn’t inherit any of her killer instinct on the field, I was about to volunteer for soccer duty until Quattro placed a hand on my arm and drew me away from the crowd.

“No one in the press is covering what’s happening here,” he said in a low voice, gesturing to the disarray around us. “That’s why there’s no aid coming. No one knows, and no one cares. But
you
know. The right photograph can make all the difference.”

But Dom had told me that only videos could make a difference these days. And that’s what I said now: “A video would be better.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Quattro said. “My mom used to do a ton of development work for nonprofits.” The last time Quattro had talked about his mom, he had shut down on me.
I waited for a repeat performance. Instead, he continued, “She was all about the visuals helping with fund-raising. Video or photography, I’m not sure what’s more important so long as you’re telling a story. We’ve got to activate people into doing something about all this.”

That rang true. How many times had I heard Mom talking about “visual narratives” when she prepped for meetings with her clients—telling executives that one iconic image could create a lasting impression. Could communicate information more effectively than even their words.

“Where’d I post it?” I asked.

“CNN.”

“Please.” I shook my head, calculating the minuscule chances of that ever happening.

“They show photographs from citizen journalists. That could be you. But it’s your decision.” With one last shrug, Quattro said, “I heard entire villages have been washed away. People have died.”

The image of people trapped in their demolished homes dampened my objections until nothing but the truth was left: If a photograph might possibly help, I literally had to give it a shot.

“Oh, and that”—Quattro nodded at the camera—“shoots video, too, if you wanted to try something new?” Then Quattro lifted his chin at Ruben and raised his hand. “I’ll play.”

As Ruben gave the volunteer soccer team directions to the field, Quattro kicked the ball to my mom, who stopped it easily with one foot. The roar of the nearby river grew louder,
and a breeze blew my hair back out of my face. Maybe I had approached my photography all wrong. It wasn’t about beautifying people so they looked their best in senior portraits, erasing acne, thinning the girls, beefing up the guys. Maybe it wasn’t even about documenting destruction. Maybe it was about telling stories, the ones that people were living and I was viewing. The ones that knocked my heart open.

I let my self-doubt go and left the volunteers and makeshift soccer team to scout around town and find stories to share.

Two dark-haired men digging through the debris on the swollen riverbanks. Planks of wood mingled with mud, the remains of their home. One pulls out a shard of a ruined plate and bursts into tears.

Muddy tendrils surging and swirling, ready to grasp and drown the unaware.

An iceberg of cement bashing against rocks.

A middle-aged mother, hair braided into a single plait, slumped in despair outside her home, a hovel of wood and recycled aluminum. Upon seeing a photographer, she stands and vanishes inside. In a moment, she returns with a feast of a bruised banana for the two to share.

A tourist filling a plastic bag with beer bottles and empty wrappers, tidying one corner of the town square.

A tour guide who could have trekked back to his own home and family like half the other guides. But instead, he stayed. And while he waited to get his group to safety, here he was, working to make conditions better for everyone, not for any money, not for any applause, just because it was the good and right thing to do.

A young man with strong features tucking two squealing kids under his arms and dashing down a soccer field. A young man who takes off his long-sleeved T-shirt and literally gives away the clothes on his back to a boy who’s lost everything.

Afterward, the kids gathered around me as if I were a candy vendor when I bent down to show them the photos and videos. It didn’t matter if some of the videos were shaky or if most of the photos would never make it anywhere near my portfolio, much less CNN. For me, nothing compared to this very moment, when the children laughed with pure delight as they saw themselves through my eyes.

N
ot soon enough that evening, our group turned in, one by one, leaving my parents, Quattro, and me in the spacious lounge adjacent to the closed restaurant at our hotel. The stress of daily uncertainty was wearing on everyone. Mom yawned widely for the tenth time in the last fifteen minutes.

“I’m calling it a night,” she said. “Boy, those kids could play soccer.” At last, she stood up from the well-worn leather couch across from the potbellied stove and held her hand down to Dad to pull him to his feet. “You two going to stay up a little longer?”

Quattro and I glanced at each other. When he nodded slightly, my own tiredness vanished.

“Yeah,” I said, and then flashed Mom the key card just as she asked me if I had mine. “Got it.”

Dad warned us, “Don’t go into town tonight.”

“Dad,” I said, barely refraining from clobbering him with the throw pillow. “It’s not like anything’s open.”

“Just saying. People can turn into animals when they’re scared. Be back in the casita in an hour.”

I shot a silent plea at Mom. Understanding, she slipped her hand through the crook of Dad’s arm and told him, “Okay, honey, I’m wiped out.” With one final don’t-mess-with-me look at Quattro, Dad paused at the door before telling us, “An hour.”

I sighed. Loudly.

“Sorry about that,” I said to Quattro with a wry smile as the door swung shut behind my parents. “They used to be so normal.”

“Nah, now I’ve got a model for how I’ll talk to all my sister’s boyfriends.” As if he only now heard the implication of those words, he flushed.

My heart actually thumped with excitement. More times than I could count, I had caught myself wanting Quattro to be my boyfriend, but did he subconsciously do the same? But no, what was I thinking? Since our moonlight conversation outside the hostel on the Inca Trail, we had barely even talked to each other until today. And even then, it was Quattro urging me to photograph, all friend, no hint of boyfriend.

Silence stretched between us. I hugged a throw pillow to my stomach.

“Hey, can I see the pictures you took today?” he asked.

“Sure.” As I removed the camera from my pocket, he walked around the coffee table to sit beside me. I was aware of
his closeness, aware of him reaching for the camera, aware of the brush of our fingers as I placed the camera on his palm. We were sitting so close, it’d be easy for me to lean into him, angle my head nearer to his, as I supposedly looked at my photos.…

A scuffle broke out in the walkway outside: shouted words, a few choice obscenities, pounding footsteps running back toward us. Then, my dad’s voice, loud and authoritative: “Hey! Stop!”

Without hesitating, I leaped up and rushed out into the cobblestoned courtyard, Quattro at my side. Clearly, Dad had no problem with being a hypocrite, ignoring his own warning to stay safe inside.

“Hey!” Dad shouted again at two brawling men with stubbled faces and dirty clothes that reeked of days-old sweat. Dad stepped between them. There had been reports of fighting in town, especially with food running out and no further word on the helicopters returning. Fear clogged my throat, but as I tried to join Dad, Quattro placed a hand on my arm. On the opposite side of me stood Mom, her eyes watchful, but she looked calm, almost expectant.

“Let go,” I hissed, trying to shrug Quattro off. What if they had knives and Dad couldn’t see the weapons? What if—

Then a familiar confidence emanated from Dad, the calm that soothed countless people who were scared of their rat-infested attics and cockroach-filled kitchens. The authority he had to stop my twin brothers from bashing each other. With quiet assurance, Dad said, “It’s time for you to leave.”

The moment was taut, the same knot of tension I’d felt at the helipad and the train station. Dad stood firm. He wasn’t
giving off menacing vibes, just ones that said he meant business. Whatever the guys mumbled, they left docilely.

“Wow, your dad’s good,” said Quattro, nodding his head.

“He is.”

After a long moment, shivering out in the cold by ourselves, Quattro nudged me. “Head inside?”

I nodded even though I should have slipped back to the casita, safe and sound without any possibility of making a fool of myself with a boy who so obviously didn’t know what he wanted. If this were Ginny, I’d have lectured that she deserved a Chef Boy who knew with a thousand percent certainty that he never wanted to cook in anyone else’s kitchen.

But did I leave? No, I walked back to the deserted lounge with its dim lights and fire banked low. A room couldn’t have sparked with more romance. We sat at opposite ends of the couch, where he’d left his backpack.

“So,” Quattro said from his side of Siberia, “your photos?”

I’m not sure what I loved more: how he had tracked our conversation, remembering exactly where we had left off, or how he actually wanted to see my work. I fished out the camera and cued it to the photos I’d shot today. Our hands brushed each other, and I could have sworn that Quattro swallowed hard at the touch. I know I did.

“These are awesome,” he said after a while, his voice deep and gruff. If I closed my eyes, I could easily imagine him sounding
exactly that way after hours of kissing. What was I thinking? Luckily, he just cycled through the photos without noticing my discomfort. Finally, he reached the series I’d taken of the soccer game. “You really captured… I don’t know, real moments.”

Pleased, I smiled at him. “That’s what I was hoping to do.”

He handed the camera back to me. “Like this one. Those kids had moves.”

“The best thing is,” I said, then cleared my throat to shake out its huskiness. I tried again. “The best thing is, none of them are letting the flood bring them down.”

“You aren’t either.”

“You must be going deaf.” I thought guiltily of my grumbling earlier that night about having to down yet another PowerBar for dinner.

“You’re still having an adventure.”

Was I? I’d preached at the pulpit of girl power with the best of them, bragging to my friends that I was going to travel the world, enjoy an amazing career or two of my own, and never settle down until I was thirty. I’d reminded Dad that he’d always wanted a shake-your-soul kind of adventure. But I had let one bad breakup scare me off relationships and allowed a bad attitude to drag me down here in Peru, when, really, Quattro was right: I was in the middle of an adventure.

“We are,” I said slowly, then grinned at him.

“So did you fulfill your purpose on this trip?” Quattro asked, smiling sheepishly at his question. “You know, Stesha’s tours and all that?” He shrugged and ducked his head. “She told me that people always come on them with a purpose.”

Back on the morning I’d encountered Quattro slipping out of the cathedral in Cusco, Stesha had told me as much:
Figure out why you yourself are here.

“Did you?” I countered, because it was easier to hear his answer than to be aware of the silence in my own. “Fulfill your purpose?”

“Not yet, but I will,” he said, nodding his head firmly as though making a pact with himself. He angled a cautious look at me. “I’m going back to Machu Picchu.”

“But it’s closed.”

“I know.”

“Isn’t it dangerous? I mean, the trail looked like it was going to be washed out.”

“But it hasn’t been.”

“You’ll be arrested for trespassing!”

“Unlikely.”

“Your dad’s cool with this?” I asked. The wood in the fireplace crackled.

“He doesn’t know. Besides, he’s the one backing out when he promised…” Quattro’s expression shut off then. Just when I thought the conversation was over because I had trespassed into no-woman’s territory, he confessed in a low voice, “My mom told Dad that she wanted her ashes scattered somewhere beautiful and remote.”

“So what better place than here?”

“And this”—he gestured to the mountain somewhere behind us, lost in darkness—“this was supposed to be our way of saying good-bye to Mom.”

Quattro now removed a metal canister from the backpack at his feet, cradling it tenderly in his big hands.

“That’s her?” I asked, raising my eyes to his as he entrusted me with the real reason for his pilgrimage to Machu Picchu with his father.

“I carried her almost every step of the way.”

The tiny container looked too insubstantial to contain a woman’s life. My eyes watered, and I wiped away the tears. Quattro shot me a rueful look and said, “My parents never had a Fifty by Fifty. They had a One. My mom—all she ever wanted to see was Machu Picchu. Since I was a kid, she had a postcard of Machu Picchu on our fridge and would tell us, ‘We’re going there one day.’ But she wanted me and Kylie to be old enough to walk the entire trail and to remember it all. So we waited until Kylie was twelve.”

And then it was too late.

Or was it?

“You’re going?” I asked. “Tomorrow?”

He shrugged.

“By yourself?” Why did I ask when I already knew his answer as much as I knew what mine should have been:
Let’s go. Together.

But I hesitated too long as every objection formed in my mind—it was dangerous, my parents would ground me forever. So instead, it was Quattro who said those words: “We should go.” And he placed the canister carefully in his backpack, rising from the sofa as if he had revealed way too much.