by Justina Chen
Without a word—big surprise there—Quattro handed my dinner to me.
So grateful for the food, I wove my hands tight around the hot metal cup as if it held all my scattershot thoughts from the day: the cataclysmic insights from Grace about true love and Quattro about his mom, to be precise. Softening, I held the cup out to him. “Want some?”
“You first.” Sitting down, Quattro waited for me to take the first bite. Why was he hanging out now?
Confused, I lifted the spoon to taste the familiar nutty grain that I knew I’d forever identify with this trail. But I wasn’t hungry after all, at least not for food.
“You didn’t take a single picture today,” Quattro said, turning his full attention on me.
Trust him to notice. I cleared my throat, trying to think of an excuse. Over our silence, I heard Dad snap at Mom, “Fine, you go live your big life.” He didn’t need to go blind: He had already stopped seeing anything good around him. I shifted just in time to watch Mom reach out a conciliatory hand, but Dad jerked away from her.
I could only hope that Quattro hadn’t overheard them. But of course, he had. Everybody had. And now everybody was resolutely admiring the sunset and focusing on the meal. Even the porters, who didn’t speak a word of English, had fallen silent. Quattro was looking at me with pity. I had to do something, anything, to stop him from staring at me like that.
“Don’t you need to go?” I asked him. We had passed the Andean Trekkers campsite a good quad-burning ten minutes earlier. He had done his duty, carried Grace’s backpack, and deposited us safely with our group. So bluntly that I verged on rude, I demanded, “Why are you here?” It was hard to be vulnerable, but I added, “With me? When you clearly didn’t want to talk to me?”
He scratched the side of his nose and dropped his head, his shoulders hunched. Then he angled his head to look me straight in the eye. “Sorry about that. It’s just that I never talk about my mom.”
Yet he talked about her with me. Interesting.
I couldn’t follow that intriguing line of thought because Quattro switched the topic: “All parents bicker.”
“Not mine. They’ve always been a united front. Always.” Needing to prove it to Quattro—or maybe to myself—I finally salvaged my camera, then quickly cycled through the snapshots I’d taken. Sea-Tac Airport, my parents holding hands. I lifted the camera up to him. “See?”
But then he forwarded to the Inca Trail, where Mom fell farther and farther behind my father until they stepped out of the same frame. Perfect twenty-twenty vision wasn’t necessary to observe the meltdown in my parents. It was as if their bonds, spoken and unspoken, had snapped, flinging them into separate stills. Frustrated, I frowned over in Dad’s direction. Couldn’t he see that his life wasn’t the only one that was going to change from his blindness? I took the camera back, shut it off, buried it deep in my backpack.
“You know…” Quattro paused as if weighing his words. Then, he plunged forward. “Your dad’s not just pissed. He’s scared.”
“But Dad isn’t ever—”
“I don’t blame him. I’d be scared if I were going blind, too. I mean, try walking for five minutes with your eyes closed.”
“But that doesn’t excuse what he’s doing. He’s taking it out on Mom. Reading all kinds of stuff into every little thing she says.” Dad, at least, was still pretty normal with me, but who was going to be the buffer for Mom when I went to college?
“It’s natural—not cool, but natural—to be pissed. At least that’s what my mom would say.” Quattro blew out his breath. “I wish my mom were here now. She was a counselor.”
“What do you think she’d tell me?”
“Your parents love each other. That’s a good start.”
Sine qua non, I thought, and held those rescuing words tight.
“What?” Quattro asked, leaning closer to me. “You were thinking something.”
So I told him about my mom’s love mantra, her belief that every single relationship had one must-have, deal-breaker quality. Without that, there was nothing.
“My parents had that,” said Quattro, leaning back so he could look up at the velvet-blue sky. “They could always make each other laugh, no matter what. You know, they could be having a fight, then all of a sudden, both of them would make monster faces at each other like they were three or something. They’d crack up and everything would be okay.”
All I wanted, right that second, was to throw myself into Quattro’s arms. It was as if I knew with bone-deep knowledge what being together with him would feel like: absolutely right. But if my parents were in an official state of disaster, what chance did anyone have? I didn’t care if I was being Chicken Little, running around seeing thunderstorms where there were only blue skies.
“What’s up?” Quattro asked after a few minutes of silence, elbows on his knees, leaning toward me.
That’s what I want to know.
At the same time, I didn’t. He was the first boy I had seriously liked since Dom, and being rejected by him—look how I felt with the silent treatment—was going to hurt more than I thought I could stand. Listening to the urgency sweeping inside me to push him away, I retrieved my old camera, found the photo I wanted, and thrust it at Quattro. “Look.”
For a long, silent moment, he studied his image at the Gum Wall, then zoomed in. Finally, he lifted his eyes to mine. What I saw in them—surprise, disbelief, and admiration—tugged at the seams of my stitched-up heart.
“How did you do it?” Quattro asked, his eyebrows furrowed, genuinely perplexed. “I’ve never liked any picture of me before.”
“The light loves you,” I said before I tightened my lips. No more encouraging a guy. I needed him to go. Now. “Your dad’s got his computer, right?”
Quattro nodded.
I ejected the SD card from my camera and held it out to him. “Take it.” It wasn’t like I was going to be shooting any more pictures, and this way, I wouldn’t even be tempted, not with photography, not with him.
Quattro placed the postage-stamp-size card carefully into a plastic Ziploc bag that held a couple of granola bars before sliding it back in his pocket. At last, he said, “I better get going before it’s pitch-black.” But before he hiked back to his campsite, Quattro told me one last thing: “I doubt your dad would want you to give up photography just to be in some kind of solidarity with him.”
Chapter Twelve
You know what a good daughter would do right now, don’t you?” Mom whispered as she laced up her hiking boots the next morning. The air was so cold that her words left breathy traces inside the tent.
In response, I managed a one-note grunt that spanned sigh, question, and groan. Freezing, I wished I were burrowed deep in my sleeping bag, but I pulled on another layer of fleece before shaking out my rain gear.
She yawned widely before narrating what must have been a really great dream: “A good daughter would go and forage for coffee for her feeble mother.”
“As if you’re feeble—”
Out of nowhere came an immense roar. The thunderstorm of the century. The snapping of bones. Hundreds of bones.
“Get out!” Dad flung open the tent flap from where he had stood outside to step into his rain pants. In a blur of movement he yanked Mom and me up, but Mom’s feet got tangled in her bag. He all but hoisted her into his arms and lugged us out of the tent.
She protested, “Wait! Our stuff!”
“Leave it,” Dad ordered, dragging us.
“Mudslide!” I heard someone yell, the alarm echoed in other languages.
Outside was dawning chaos as trekkers from other groups ran through the shared campsite. Another angry roar erupted from the earth. Dad’s grip around my wrist was bruising tight. He glanced left, right. I looked up. And then I saw the dark mass of mud flowing down the cliff, plowing a forest of trees, devouring everything in its path. Quattro had been up there, somewhere. He hadn’t been caught in that mudslide, had he?
“Over here!” Dad
barked and tugged us toward safer ground. We stumbled toward an outcropping of boulders. Once there, he stared at Mom, who was wild eyed and shivering. He shrugged out of his raincoat and handed it to her. “You’ll be okay here.”
Mom clutched me to her side as though she would protect me bodily while Dad ran down to the mud pit that had been our campground.
“He should have stayed here with us,” Mom said, blame and worry thickening her voice.
I frowned even as I stared uphill. Come on, Quattro, where are you? “He’s helping everyone else,” I told her.
“But he should be here. With us now.” She repeated the words stubbornly like they were a talk track on an infinite loop. One that had played in her head since the diagnosis. Since their wedding. Since they met. He should be here with her, protecting her always.
I peered down into the drizzling gloom. Made out Dad sprinting heedlessly toward the tent Grace and Stesha shared, racing into the avalanche of mud, rocks, tree limbs sliding down the mountain, cascading toward our campsite.
Our tent was gone. Swept away. So was Grace and Stesha’s tent, which had been next to ours.
Grace. Stesha.
Where was the woman I was supposed to watch over? Reb’s grandmother? The Gamers? Ruben and our porters? And Quattro? I yelled for them now, screamed their names, prayed they were safe. Where was everybody? I spotted Dad darting around the perimeter of our campsite. Another round of yelling.
“Here, here,” Stesha panted, surrounded by the crew of porters, who set her and Grace on this safe ground. All of them fully dressed, ready for an early start. Grace even had her backpack, which one of the porters had been carrying and now dropped at her feet.
Grace said dazedly, “We were just having our morning tea.…” Then she threw her arms around the men. “Gracias, gracias. Damn, how do you say ‘hero’ in Spanish?” There was no time for more; the men were already returning to the destruction.
“Has anyone seen Ruben?” Mom asked, looking frantically down at the campsite. “Or Helen and Hank?”
Even as she said those names, a woman screamed, high pitched and frantic: “Help!”
At the edge of the mudslide, I spotted a half-swamped tent, sited for maximum viewing. Helen was pinned inside, waving desperately. I started down the slope despite Mom’s screams for me to stop. “Shana! No!”
A witch’s grip, nails digging into my arm. Mom must have flown after me. My answering yell—“Let go!”—was swallowed by the noise of another part of the cliff shearing off. I scanned the mountain. Quattro! Where was he?
And then there he was, dashing downhill with his dad, both of them racing straight at the screaming woman below. With headlamps on their foreheads and wearing their backpacks, they looked like a search-and-rescue team, prepared for this disaster. Quattro’s dad—this skinny ghost of a man—waded through the mud and yanked Helen out of the tent. Quattro and one of our porters now threw their powerful arms around her. Two of our porters pointed in our direction. I could almost see the sagging relief in Quattro’s body when he spotted me. They carried Helen to us.
“There’s Ruben!” Mom called, spying him as he circumnavigated the far edge of the mudslide, helping other trekkers out of the danger zone. “Nine o’clock.”
Stesha scanned the campsite, a captain unwilling to leave her ship until everyone was accounted for. “Where’s Hank?” She caught my eye. “Do you see Hank?”
“You’re bleeding,” I told her, and patted my pants for the handkerchief Mom insisted I carry with me at all times, only to remember that I was in my fleece leggings, clutching my rain gear like a security blanket.
Not that it mattered, since Stesha shrugged off all concern. Helen wrenched her arms free from Quattro and the porter and staggered toward us, demanding hysterically, “Where’s Hank? He was with me in the tent. But then”—she waved—“he was gone.…”
“Gone?” Mom asked her, frowning.
“I don’t know where he went.” Helen bit her lower lip. Tears streaked down her face.
And then I didn’t hear another word because Quattro was wrapping his arms around me, hugging me tight. My arms encircled his waist. When had this boy become my pillar of strength?
“I thought you were down there,” he said into my hair. “I thought that was you shouting.”
“I was worried about you!” Only then did my body begin trembling as the enormity of the mudslide hit me. We had been so close to dying. Dying!
Quattro held me even closer. “We’re okay.”
I was so glad that he didn’t ask if I was okay, just assured me that we were. What words could possibly express how I felt after my first near-death experience? Any of us could have been killed. Helen, for one. I pulled back far enough to study Quattro and his melty-warm eyes and the mud speckling his chin and the side of his nose. “You looked for me.”
“Well, yeah.”
I couldn’t formulate a response because Quattro was staring at me intently, staring as though he had spent hours thinking about me, spent the last few minutes worrying about me in spite of himself. The silence stretched out long, the moment growing hot. Neither of us moved. We may not have been clenched close to each other anymore, but my body tingled where he had pressed against me, and my lips throbbed. And still we stared. And still the moment lengthened. My lips parted. He exhaled.
From far off, I heard his father shouting for him. “Quattro! Bring your backpack!”
I heard his sigh, felt his arms releasing me, and then his hand squeezing mine. He was as reluctant to let go as I was. Quattro nodded over at his dad. To me, he said gruffly, “You should photograph this.”
My cameras! They were lost in the mudslide. I shook my head. “I don’t have a—”
He pulled a basic point-and-shoot out of the front pocket of his backpack and offered it to me. “Will this work?”
It felt like a homecoming, holding a camera again. To be honest, creating a photo essay of this destruction hadn’t even occurred to me until now. In all my photographs, I had tried to prettify the world. Crouch down and the angle would obscure a man’s beer belly. Wait for the right light, and the acne scar on a girl’s face would fade, a middle-aged woman would look more youthful, a boy’s beak of a nose would shorten. Tears threatened again.
“You need to document this,” he said before he ran toward his dad.
I lifted the camera. I would start telling the truth now.
“Quattro,” I called.
He turned to look directly at me, and even when he saw the camera aimed his way, he didn’t avert his face but allowed himself to be shot in his full glory—sweaty, mud-stained, smelling like coffee and old gym bag. His eyes shone at me. I had no more doubts that I wanted him. Not a single one.
“I’ve got to go,” he said, then paused. “I’ll find you.”
And let me tell you, that single promise couldn’t have been more thrilling.
A terrible burial site lay below us: trees ripped from the path of the mud; their upturned trunks and branches had become a jagged landscape. I lifted the camera, and even as I made my shot, I knew I couldn’t just photograph the destruction.
“We’ve got to help,” I told Mom, who nodded. Together, we picked our way down, weathering Dad’s “What the hell are you doing?” before he gave up. We probed around the edges of the mudslide. Helped another group search for their missing guide. Consoled a curly-haired woman who was beside herself, bleating, “My sister! My sister!”
“Hank!” Helen yelled, not more than ten feet from us. Her voice may have been hoarse, but her relief was absolutely clear.
I spun around to find Hank near a pile of mud-flattened tents, carefully picking his way toward Helen even as she stumbled over the debris to reach him. Hank hiked the backpack he was holding in one hand over his shoulder so he could widen his arms for her.
“Helen! You’re okay,” he said.
“I thought you were dead!” she cried before collapsing against him. “I was looking and look
ing for you.”
No matter how softly Mom spoke the words to me, I heard the condemnation in them: “Looks like he saved himself.”
I was about to ask what she meant when I noticed that Hank was wearing his trekking pants, an undershirt, hiking boots, no jacket. His fedora was in place. It looked as if he had bolted out of his tent the moment the mud poured off the mountain, grabbing his hat and backpack, everything but his fiancée. But he couldn’t possibly have left Helen behind to fend for herself, could he?
“Mom, you don’t know that.” Even as I said it, I wondered where Hank had been, why no one had seen him, and why he was half-dressed.
“No, but I do know this: It takes a crisis for you to know a person’s true character,” said Mom firmly. “And trust me, you want to be with a man who’ll wear himself out looking for you.” Her eyes sought out my father, who was wading knee-deep in muck with Quattro, his dad, our porters, all of them splattered with mud, all of them still helping where help was needed.
Chapter Thirteen
Two hours later, all the trekking groups at the campsite had accounted for their parties. Luckily, not one person had been buried under the mud or been badly injured. We were just bruised and scared. At the sight of Quattro’s group, now inching down the mountain with all their gear, the tenor of our morning grew even more somber as we tallied our loss: every tent, every sleeping bag, most of the backpacks except for three: Ruben’s, Hank’s, and Grace’s. That meant almost all our supplies were gone.
“Where are we going to sleep?” I overheard Mom ask Dad. My instincts pricked, and I maneuvered for a better angle. If ever I hoped for a decisive moment to shoot, this was it. I could feel it. I waited.
“We’ll figure it out,” Dad assured her. For the first time in days, he pulled Mom close and tucked her head under his chin. Through the lens, I could see the tension releasing from Mom’s body as she sank into Dad in homecoming. Their eyes closed. And there it was, the moment I so wanted, even more than as a photographer: the first glimmer of hope that my parents would actually survive Dad’s blindness.
