A Blind Spot for Boys (8 page)

When everyone filed forward, I took the opportunity to frame the group against the ruins. As I did, Quattro slipped out of the shot to join me. Ignoring him, I zoomed in on a massive gray stone that had somehow been cut to fit around another large boulder like this was a jigsaw puzzle for giants. I was so awestruck, I wasn’t even aware that I marveled out loud after I lowered my camera: “How?”

Quattro answered, “How, what?”

“How on earth did they get these boulders here? I mean, really, how?”

“I read that the Spanish literally couldn’t believe that Indians could build anything like this. So they gave the credit to demons.”

“I read that some people actually think space aliens made this.”

Just like that, his answering grin could have placed us at the Gum Wall, at Oddfellows, halfway up the Andes—the location didn’t matter. That instant connection scared me more than the fluttering in my stomach. To regain my balance, I focused on the dirt path as though it were the most entrancing creation on the planet. Just when had Quattro’s smile become a special occasion that could warm me?

I needed to scare him off and fast. In my humble experience, I’ve found that a girl with serious brain wattage can intimidate a certain kind of guy. So watch me show off my superior knowledge.

“The Greeks thought stones this big could only be moved by Cyclops,” I said, then added for good measure, “Cyclopean architecture.” I gave silent thanks to Reb for sharing all things architectural ever since I’ve known her. Who knew that her ramblings would come in so handy one day?

“You’re the only person I know who’s ever used ‘Cyclopean’ in a conversation,” Quattro said. Unexpectedly, the expression on his face turned into something close to respect, the tone in his voice intrigued.

“You must not hang out with very interesting people.”

“That’s something I’m about to change.”

I flushed. What was I supposed to say to that? If anything, his easy response only confirmed what I thought: He was a player. And I wasn’t a girl who could be played with one day, discarded the next. Honestly, I should have walked away, but a part of me relished the company of a guy who could actually banter. Maybe—just maybe—we could be friends if enough boundaries were established. If I enforced the no-boy zone around my heart.

“Well, good luck with that.” I tested him with a practiced half smile, “I’m still on my Boy Moratorium.”

“That’s a relief.”

It was?

“I’m still on my Girl Moratorium.”

He was?

“Friends?” He held up his hand to fist-bump mine.

That’s it? Just friends?

A tiny smidge of disappointment poked its ugly head out of my asphalt-covered resolve to stay boy-free. And that betraying emotion was a pest that needed to be eradicated. Right now, this minute. Automatically, I returned the fist bump, then needing the safety of numbers, I strode toward the rest of my group. Their backs were turned to us as they listened to Stesha telling them, “Before we all know it, we’ll be finished with the Inca Trail, Machu Picchu, Cusco, Lima. So just how open are you to being changed in five days? Radically changed?”

In front of me, I overheard Hank mumble to Helen: “Remind me again why your mom gave this to us for an engagement present? And don’t tell me it was because of her trip with Stesha to Varanasi.”

“It was. India totally changed my parents,” Helen answered softly. “Radically changed?”

He barely muffled a snort.

She nudged him with her shoulder, brushed her hair behind her ear. The diamond on her ring gleamed. “You know, Mama just wanted us to have that same experience.”

Meanwhile, over their side conversation, Stesha finished her mini-lecture: “You can’t walk the Inca Trail without knowing yourself and each other inside out.”

All thoughts of anyone and everything else evaporated the moment I felt Quattro’s gaze land on me as if he wanted to
know me inside out, Girl Moratorium or not. What I wanted to know was this: Why had
he
sworn off dating? Clearly, my Boy Moratorium needed some reinforcement. Flirt now, clean up later, I reminded myself. A flirtation gone bad, and the next couple of days on the Inca Trail could melt down into one awkward disaster. Grace was right. I was bound to bump into him sooner or later on the trail. I stepped to the side of the Gamers, darting out of his sight line.

As Stesha guided everyone forward, Mom walked slightly ahead of Dad, scouting all possible obstacles. She warned him, “There’s a sharp drop here.”

Dad sighed heavily, his frustration obvious. “I can see,” he said before backtracking to a different outcropping of stone. With his arms crossed and hunched shoulders, he couldn’t have been clearer that he wanted to be left alone. Mom wisely joined Stesha and Christopher at the front of our group.

Quattro’s empathetic expression reminded me of how I’d pitied Dom’s little sister when she was lambasted in a public parking lot almost a year ago.
This isn’t how my parents usually treat each other
, I wanted to tell him. Besides, it wasn’t like his family was all picture perfect either. Over by Stesha, Christopher was obsessively checking his phone. Had he even noticed that Quattro wasn’t walking with him?

I was about to join Mom as she told the others, “I read that this place became a quarry for the Spanish. They pillaged it to make some of the buildings in Cusco.”

“This poor temple,” crooned Grace, and without warning, I stopped midstride, already lifting my camera. My fingertips
could feel the impending moment. As I waited, Grace pressed her age-spotted hands on the wall and leaned her forehead against the stones as if this was her private wailing wall, a sacred place to pour out her grief. While Jerusalem was yet one more photo safari that Dad had planned and put off more times than I could count, I would have refused to budge even if aliens and demons rained on us now. Finally, I understood what Dad meant about making a photo, not just taking one. All the thought that went into telling a story. Every ounce of me thrummed with the need to make this photo.

I felt Quattro’s presence near me more than I heard him or saw him. More than anything, I liked how he didn’t distract me the way some boyfriends had, jealous that my photography required my full attention.

Then I tuned everybody out—Quattro, my parents, other tour groups milling around us. I allowed myself to lose all sense of time as I fell under the spell of color and texture and feeling and moment. I waited, waited, waited. At last, Grace tilted her face to the blue-lit sky, her expression beatific.

“Yes,” I breathed as I made my shot. Slowly, I lowered the camera.

“Beautiful,” Quattro said equally softly, his eyes on me.

E
arly the next morning, I woke, excited, before dawn even had a chance to bleach the sky. Today, our trek to Machu Picchu would officially begin, the lifelong dream my parents had spoken about in reverential tones. I turned to check the other double bed, where Mom was miraculously sleeping through Dad’s avalanche snores.

Apparently, the combined effect of altitude and one too many pisco sours last night had knocked Dad out. Even though he’d had so many sleepless nights after his diagnosis—his midnight pacing in his attic office above my bedroom was difficult to miss—I tried waking him, first with a low “Hey, Dad. Dad!” That was followed with an equally useless nudge. He snored loudly. I gave up.

Dad or no Dad, I was heading out for the photo safari we had planned over dinner last night. Quickly, I slipped into the
hiking outfit I had laid out the night before, grabbed my camera, and tiptoed out of the hotel room. According to our calculations, we’d have exactly an hour and a half before our group was supposed to meet in the lobby. The grand plan was for me and Dad to photograph the awakening town. But instead of staking out the main plaza, I found myself drawn back toward the cathedral.

I had a pretty good guess where a few women were speed-walking to this early in the morning: the statue of Saint Anthony. As for me, the saint and I were about to have a private chat:
Now, I know you meant well and all. And I don’t mean to be ungrateful. However. Could you please retract Quattro and help all these other women instead?

The heavy doors opened, and the last two people I expected to see staggered out into the gathering dawn: Stesha and Quattro. What were they doing here? Together? As soon as Quattro spotted me, he flushed. That momentary lowering of his self-confident guard made me yearn to photograph him again: Quattro, unplugged.

“Well, fancy meeting you here,” Stesha said, smiling as if she had anticipated this very encounter. “You’re up early.”

“I was just going to take some last pictures,” I said lamely, holding up my camera as proof that I wasn’t here to petition Saint Anthony. No, not me. No help needed in the boy department. I babbled on, “I thought I’d get a picture of this at dawn.”

Stesha waved at the entry of the cathedral. “We’ll wait.”

“No, you don’t have to. Really.”

“It’s not safe for you to be out alone. Do your parents know you’re here?”

“This is a small town,” I said, shrugging. “What could happen?”

“Anything!” Quattro retorted hotly, as if he were furious at me. I blinked at him. What was his problem?

“What he means is that tourists have been known to be robbed or kidnapped even here,” said Stesha smoothly. She nodded in the direction of the plaza. “We were just going to hunt for some coffee, but we can wait for you, right, Quattro?”

Feeling self-conscious and embarrassed, I could already hear my mom’s lecture once she found out that I had snuck out alone.

“Nah, I need caffeine, too,” I told them quickly, and swung my backpack around so I could stash away my camera. “I’ll grab the shot with Dad on our way home.”

Stesha studied me intently, just like Reb does when she feels compelled to tell me the hard truth in the most loving way possible. Whatever it was that Stesha wanted to say about safety, I didn’t want to hear any more, not with Quattro beside me. A girl can only look like so much of an idiot before any guy.

“It’s better this way. Dad would hate to miss out on this,” I said. Then, desperate to fill the growing silence, I found myself babbling about how my parents are so careful with money, we rarely go to coffee shops, much less restaurants, except on Sundays. “That’s when my brothers and I were treated to hot chocolate, and my parents got themselves their lattes,” I said, laughing. “We went to a different coffee shop every week.”

“An expedition at home,” Stesha translated.

I blinked at this reinterpretation of what I’d always seen as nothing more than a weekly treat.

“We used to do something like that, too,” said Quattro.
“Only it was hiking. Our Saturday morning hike. My mom says her church was in the mountains.” A fraction of a second later, Quattro corrected himself, “Used to say.”

“I sometimes think people forget that they can have adventures without even leaving their homes,” Stesha said, leading us across the street.

As I followed, I cast a curious glance at Quattro, wondering what had happened to his mom, but his inadvertent slip wasn’t an opening for a deeper conversation. Instead, his mouth clamped tight, as firmly locked as the shuttered cafés lining the streets.

Defeated, Stesha sighed. “Well, there’s always the hotel, I suppose.” But when we reached the hotel, Ernesto, our driver, flagged her down from outside the van, where he’d been waiting for her. Whatever he needed to discuss, it looked urgent.

“Oh, dear,” Stesha sighed. “You two go on in.”

A good five feet separated Quattro and me before I even stepped foot in the lobby. If he’d hustled any faster toward the elevator, he would have set a world record for racewalking. Just before the door closed in front of him, Quattro mumbled something about needing to wake his dad for coffee—at least that’s what I guessed since I could only make out the words “wake” and “coffee” and “dad” before he left me standing there, alone.

My head rattled back and forth between disbelief and confusion. Waking his dad to join us for coffee was only a slight variant of my rarely invoked but highly effective “Oh, my parents have always wanted to try that restaurant! You mind if they come?” Plus, yesterday, I had seen with my own two eyes his
father’s megalithic watch, which had more instruments than an airplane’s cockpit. Waking his dad up, my foot. I bet his father’s watch could have blared an alarm that could scare the entire hotel awake.

From behind me, I heard Stesha—my best friend’s grandmother, the woman who had committed to taking care of our needs this next week, the tour guide who vowed to transport us safely—chuckle. At me.

“I bet that doesn’t happen to you every day,” she said, not even bothering to hide her smirk. “That boy
ran
from you.”

“Whoa, for a second there, I thought it was Reb speaking.”

“Oh, thanks for reminding me. She said to remember that she met Jackson on a trip. Good karma, these trip romances.”

I blushed and informed Stesha that Quattro and I were both on relationship moratoriums. “So nothing’s going on.”

“But, honey, romance or not, there’s a reason why you’re both here. Together. Whenever things like that happen to me—sitting next to someone at a movie theater who knows exactly the person I need to talk to—well, there’s a reason. And a purpose.”

Synchronicity
,
reason
,
purpose
—those words reminded me of my first phone call with Stesha: “Sometimes, you got to get out of your daily rut to get clarity about your life. That’s why a lot of people go on Dreamwalks.”

Safer territory, that’s what I needed. I gestured in the direction of the slumbering street. “Is everything okay with Ernesto?”

“Well,” Stesha began heavily, “the government mandates that you have a specially licensed tour guide to take you on
the Inca Trail. Ruben can come, thankfully, but we like to have extra help for our guests. His second in command broke his foot in a soccer game yesterday.” Stesha frowned at the empty tea cart with so much desperation that the receptionist saw her and pantomimed that caffeine was coming. After a joyous “
gracias!
” Stesha plunked herself down on the sofa and patted the space next to her.

“So what does that mean?” I asked, lowering myself to her side.

“Well, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Grace. You know, I had asked you to keep her company. But now, even though we’ll have a guide and a few porters, they’ll all be busy. And… she’s not moving around as well as she did on our last trip together.”

I nodded even as I replayed my observations about Grace yesterday. “I can stay by her all the way. Well, at least for as much as she’ll let me. She seems pretty independent.”

“That’s all you can do.”

“Can I do anything else?”

“That’s helping a lot.” Stesha breathed out, releasing her tension.

“It’s pretty amazing that someone her age is going on this trek,” I said carefully, thinking about my neighbor Mrs. Harris, who couldn’t have been much older than Grace or Stesha, but an outing for her was a ten-step stroll to her porch.

“We can usually do a lot more than we think. Isn’t that how it works?” Stesha said, visibly relieved when the tea service arrived. I followed her to the serving cart. Instead of handing
me a cup, she held my hand, her face softened with a bemused smile. “So forget about Quattro.” She shrugged, squeezing my hand tightly before letting go. “Figure out why you yourself are here.”

The van descended into a seascape of gritty brown clouds that looked like millions of sand grains magically suspended in air. The sight was so spectacular, it knocked me out of my regret that I didn’t even get to say good-bye to Quattro before we left the hotel and transported me right back to Stesha’s final advice this morning. I hadn’t even considered that there might be a reason outside of my father for me to be on this trek. I was already unpacking my camera. This shot alone could have been the reason.

“This,” Stesha said in a hushed voice from the front passenger seat, “is the Sacred Valley.”

“Can we pull over?” I asked eagerly, even though I heard the Gamers’ medley of impatient sighs. They were already irritated that we’d been late to load into the van this morning, and stopping now would only delay our reaching the trailhead, still an hour’s drive away. But when were any of us going to see this mirage of a floating beach ever again in our lives?

“I think so,” Stesha said, leaning over to Ernesto, who immediately pulled off to the side of the road. “Two minutes, okay? Ruben will be waiting for us.”

My parents followed me as I hopped out of the van. I
quickly found an interesting angle and framed the shot. A breeze dragged the clouds down into the valley. Trees pierced through the clouds so they looked like stubborn sentries determined to remain on high alert. I got my photo, then on a whim, spun around to capture my parents, standing on the cliff edge as if they were planning to take flight. Dad was staring hard at this sandy veil as if he were memorizing it, Mom breathing in so deeply, she could have drawn every molecule of air inside herself.

“Look, Dad,” I said, as I pointed out the misty line where the clouds converged with clear air. “Do you see that?”

Dad flinched.

I mirrored his pained grimace. No matter how careful Mom and I were, our word choices themselves were unintentional land mines. “Look” and “see” had become the ticking bombs of reality.

But Dad recovered with his usual easy grin for me and agreed, “Beautiful.”

As he left my side for the van, I swallowed the lump of guilt in my throat. Why was this happening to my father? Our family? Only now that my parents were about to board the van did Hank lumber out with his camera. He said to me, “This looks like something that could be straight out of a game, doesn’t it? You know how much money I could make off of this?”

“Yeah,” I said faintly, knowing that if Quattro were right here with me, he’d appreciate this view, not for what it could earn him but just for what it was. Where were he and his dad now?

Hang on a second. What was I doing, wrapped around thoughts about Quattro, wishing we’d said good-bye to each other when we hadn’t? I hurried inside the van, frustrated with myself. If there was one thing I wasn’t going to do, it was waste my vacation obsessing about a boy, particularly one who had all but fled from me this morning. Been there, done that for the better part of a year. No matter what I told myself, though, it was hard to ignore the empty space in the back row where Quattro had sat with me just yesterday.

At last, Hank finished his photo shoot, beaming when he clambered into his seat. He crowed to no one in particular, “
Halo
is going to look so old school.”

“See?” said Stesha once Ernesto had pulled back onto the road. “Nothing is wasted.”