Chapter Six

If anyone had told me that my parents were capable of mobilizing for an international trip in two weeks, I would have bet an entire year of rat removal with me doing the rat-removing honors that they weren’t. How many of our travel plans had been canceled due to last-second emergencies and panic attacks over the impending cost? But there was Mom, hauling home three sets of rain gear she’d found on the extra-reduced clearance rack, placed there for good reason. Honestly, compared to the puce-colored rain jacket and matching pants, the Paradise Pest Control uniform was haute couture.

“Ta-da!” Mom cried, holding up the rain gear like hard-won trophies. “Try them on! Come on!”

“Mom,” I complained, frowning at myself in the mirror, “we’re going to look like our own paramilitary troop.”

“Shana’s got a point, hon. This gives new meaning to ‘dressed to kill,’” Dad agreed.

“Double O Seven would rather be shot than be seen in this,” I retorted.

But as Mom pointed out sharply over our snickers, “Who are we going to know on the Inca Trail anyway?”

My parents decided that it was only fair to take my brothers on trips, too. So the plan was for me to fly home on my own from Peru while they met Ash in Belize for some scuba diving. Then, Max would pick up the third leg of the trip, intercepting our parents in Guatemala to climb a couple of Mayan pyramids. My lucky brothers, their adventures didn’t involve military-grade outerwear.

So five thousand miles and seventeen hours after our travel day started in Seattle, Mom, Dad, and I set foot onto the Southern Hemisphere, backpacks stuffed with trekking pants, flip-flops for sketchy showers, and our questionable rain gear. After a five-hour overnighter in Lima, Peru, we’d catch a dawn flight to Cusco, the ancient capital of the Incas and gateway to the Inca Trail.

As exhausted as we were when we stumbled into the airport hotel in Lima, Dad still insisted that we check our room for bedbugs.

“Dad,” I groaned, “for real? Do we have to do this tonight?”

“Well,” said Dad, as he paused while inserting the key card into the hotel room door, “did I ever show you the pictures of that lady whose face ballooned with a hundred bites, not to mention her torso—”

“Fine.” With a resigned sigh, I took my assigned role in the drama that repeats itself in every single hotel, motel, and friends’ home where we rest our heads for a night. I flung our backpacks one after another into the bathtub. (For the record, bedbugs cannot climb porcelain.)

When I came out of the bathroom, Dad was approaching the side-by-side queen beds as though he were a medical examiner, sleeves rolled up and headlamp on his forehead. He wrested one of the headboards off the wall, leaned into the space between, then took a deep whiff.

“You know, some people might think we’re a little strange,” I said.

“Don’t smell blood here,” Dad said, and rehooked the headboard onto the wall.

“That’s reassuring, Mr. Cullen,” Mom said. “I’ll be sure to let the Volturi know.”

She yanked the sheets off the corner of one mattress and motioned me to do the same on the opposite end. I was about to protest—I’m the official lampshade inspector, since bedbugs adore snuggling into those seams—until I realized that Dad probably couldn’t make out the telltale sign of bedbug droppings: tiny speckles that could double as black pepper.

“I wish Auggie was here,” I said before I tucked the sheets back under the mattress.

“That makes two of us,” Dad said, sighing.

Bless Margie, my aunt who worked as Dad’s office manager. Dad is famously picky about dog care for Auggie, barely trusting anyone with her. So Aunt Margie had come prepared yesterday with freshly roasted chicken. One bite of that succulent bird and Auggie had practically leaped into Aunt Margie’s car.

Morning came much too soon for another bleary-eyed flight, and I was grateful that Reb’s grandma Stesha was awaiting us in Cusco.

“Hola!” Stesha cried and threw her arms first around me, then my parents. I had met Stesha once before but had forgotten how much she and Reb looked alike: the same pixie body build, the same joyful smile, the same mischievous glint in their eyes. It was a little odd to see what Reb might look like in fifty years.

With one dramatic wave that jangled the bright bracelets on her wrist, Stesha ushered us toward a waiting van. Her walk was a girlish bounce barely touched by the gravitational pull of adulthood. Who cared that we were in a boring airport parking lot? I trained my camera on Stesha.

Afterward, I tried to relieve Stesha of her massive tote bag, but she brushed me off with a “You need both hands free to photograph.” Clearly, “helping” Stesha was going to be a challenge; I didn’t need Reb to warn me of that. In my initial call with Stesha, she had told me, “Everyone signs up for a Dreamwalk for a reason and a purpose.” She went on to describe how some people came to get closure on unresolved relationships, others to understand their lives. Case in point: An older woman named Grace was on this trip to grieve and let go, emphasis on the “let go.” Stesha had assigned me to be her walking companion.

A couple in their late twenties was already inside the van. The pale man could have been auditioning for an Indiana Jones flick, dressed as he was in a fedora, multipocketed safari shirt, and khaki pants. All that was missing from his outfit was a gun belt and bullwhip, but he wielded his iPhone like a munitions expert. Stesha had mentioned that a couple of grievers would be joining us, not just Grace. But neither the Indy wannabe nor the petite brunette with him looked particularly grief-stricken until she lost whatever game they were playing on their matching phones. Even when she threw back her head in defeat and he pumped a triumphant fist in the air, I doubted they were aware of us until Dad introduced himself.

“Oh, hey, I’m Hank,” the man said with a friendly grin. He nodded to the woman beside him, who looked up at us shyly through a massive halo of dark brown curls. Her long hair occupied nearly as much space as her entire body. “This is Helen. We’re from the Bay Area. What do you do?”

“Pest control,” Dad answered frankly as we maneuvered around the front row to reach the back two. Draped across Helen’s lap like a blanket was a Gore-Tex jacket, embroidered with the logo of Dom’s favorite game: Field of Fire. Had he been here, Dom would have gone into full fanboy mode. Dad must have noticed the logo, too. “So are you into gaming?”

“I’m just in finance.” As Helen tucked her hair behind her ear, her massive diamond ring caught the sunlight. She looked proudly up at Hank. “But he is gaming.” Hank shook his head modestly, though he smiled widely. “No, really,” she said, tapping the embroidered logo, “that’s his game.”

“Really?” I cringed at my squeal, the one that told me I wasn’t completely, one hundred percent over Dom. I remembered all too well Dom rattling off Hank’s bio—a Stanford dropout who banked his first million before he was legally able to buy beer. Dom intended to make sure that that start-up lightning struck him, too.

Turning to Dad, Hank asked, “So pest control?”

“It’s a family business,” Dad said.

“Well, good thing you’re here, because whenever I travel, it’s like bugs have a vendetta against me.” Then Hank told us about the scorpion infestation he had encountered in a remote village in India and the one cockroach that had nearly ruined his first trip to the Great Barrier Reef with Helen. “I never thought I’d see anyone walk on water until scaredy-pants here”—he gestured at Helen with his thumb before fluttering his hands in the air—“ran screaming bloody murder from our villa all the way into the sea.”

We all laughed, even Helen despite flushing a deep rose. She ducked her head so that her hair hid her face and mumbled sheepishly, “It was huge.”

Mom murmured sympathetically, “I’m sure it was.”

“Hey,” Hank said to Dad, his head bobbing up and down enthusiastically, “we should create the Mario Brothers of pest control. I bet that could be hot.”

My mouth opened to say that I knew someone who had already come up with that concept, but I clamped my lips shut and stared out the window at the parking lot, wondering yet again when everything would stop reminding me of Dom.

“You promised you wouldn’t work on this trip,” Helen complained lightly to Hank, now shaking his phone as if to drive the point home. Her ornate ring caught my eye. Two “H” initials, each outlined with diamond chips, flanked an enormous round diamond. Hank noticed me ogling, which wasn’t hard to miss—drool may have been a dead giveaway—and told me, “I designed it. H and H, see?” He lifted Helen’s delicate hand for our better viewing.

“It’s beautiful,” I said simply. Talk about understatement. The ring had TurnStyle blog written all over it, but I didn’t have the heart to gush over the stone or the setting.

Here was the It Couple that Dom and I were supposed to be. We were supposed to be the ones at the top of our careers who’d travel the world together in the midst of our crazy busy lives. We were supposed to be the ones with funny stories and inside jokes about our trip mishaps. And I’d really thought we had all that, starting the moment Dom told me he knew I’d love his grandmother’s favorite perfumery in Paris, which blended a unique fragrance for each and every client. “Yours would have to smell like nights in Bali,” he had said on our first date. “Have I ever told you about the week I spent there? No? You would love it.” Then four weeks later, he returned from a family reunion in Paris, bearing a tiny bottle of perfume crafted just for me.

Stesha walked back to the van with her phone in her hand and the paunchy driver at her side. She sighed with regret as she climbed into the passenger seat up front. “The last couple couldn’t make the trip after all. Family emergency.”

“Oh, no,” Mom said, frowning. “That’s terrible.”

“Well, things have a funny way of working out for the best,” Stesha said philosophically. “Grace has already been at the hotel for two days. So we’ll be a small party. Plus Ruben, Ernesto, a few other porters, and myself.”

On the drive to the hotel, Stesha warned us, “Be careful not to overexert yourselves as you acclimatize to the high altitude.” With a pointed look at my big, strapping father, whose knee was bouncing up and down impatiently, she continued in a stern voice, “I mean it. We’re at eleven thousand feet—almost as high as your Mount Rainier. So drink a ton of water in the next two days, take a nap as soon as we get to the inn, and make sure to eat lightly. As appetizing as roasted guinea pig may sound, hold off on it until your body adjusts.”

“Guinea pig?” I repeated weakly, as Mom twisted the cap off a water bottle and handed it to me.

“A local delicacy.”

The thought of eating one of my elementary school pets pretty much obliterated all my appetite and jet lag. I didn’t protest when Dad suggested a short run while we scoured the hotel room for any and all telltale signs of bedbugs. Despite Mom’s meticulous packing, it took her another good fifteen minutes to get herself ready. So I cracked open the manual for the new camera I’d given to Dad. Since there was only so much a travel-worn person could process about f-stops and shutter speeds, I abandoned that effort and retrieved my old camera. I thought I had wiped the SD card clean of photos, but of course, there he was: Quattro, glowering at me in front of the Gum Wall, with all the staying power of a cockroach after a nuclear blast.

“Oh, who’s that?” Mom asked, spotting Quattro’s photo when she leaned over me to snag her deodorant from the backpack. “He’s rugged looking.”

Dad ambled over. “Hey, that’s the kid from the Gum Wall. He’s got quite the schnoz.”

“Dad!”

“Oh, he’ll grow into that,” Mom said with the same easy confidence that she had when she assured me that I’d grow into my large feet. Unbelievably, she was right, as I’d discovered in ninth grade, the year when boys started pursuing me with off-putting enthusiasm. “And besides, never underestimate the beautifying power of a good personality. So who is he? When did you meet him?”

“We better go if we want to be back on time,” I said loudly. Dad must have agreed, since he hustled to the elevator bank before our hotel room door could even shut behind us.

“You sure about this?” Mom asked as we landed in the lobby, looking guilty for disobeying Stesha’s orders.

“This’ll be the perfect training run for Rainier since we’re already at altitude,” Dad said, ignoring the employees at the front desk, who stared at us while my parents stretched. Of course, people stared. I’m sure they were wondering how we’d pay the hotel bill if we had to be medevaced back to the U.S. “We’ll just take it a little slower.”

But slow for Dad was race pace for most humans. His guiding principle for exercise was to train hard and train often. My lungs protested every step for the first quarter of a mile. There was a reason why all the other tourists lollygagged at a slow, dazed pace. Can you say “oxygen deprivation”?

“Sorry, I can’t keep up,” Mom huffed.

Did that slow Dad? No, he and his lungs of titanium kept on going. After ten minutes, Mom grabbed Dad’s arm and tugged him to a stop. “Honey, please.”

Dad may have nodded in reluctant agreement as he checked his watch, but it was like he heard a different clock ticking. The next few weeks with me and the twins weren’t just family vacations but his last epic adventures with sight. No wonder he wanted to squeeze in as much as he could. Mom must have guessed that, too, because she said, “Gregor, we’ve got seven days here to see everything.”

At that, Dad sidled away from Mom. She flinched at the slight. I felt so bad for her, I actually asked her to tell us what she had read about Cusco. We wove through the labyrinthine streets back to the hotel with Mom (still) talking about the first order of Catholics who built a monastery on top of the foundation of an Incan building, supposedly to show the superiority of Christianity. But then an earthquake in 1950 toppled the monastery. The only thing left standing was the Incan stonework underneath. As I walked in between my parents, I only wished that our family would be so lucky in the aftermath of Dad’s diagnosis.

Despite our being showered and wearing fresh clothes, Stesha divined that my parents and I had disregarded her suggestion to power-nap: “Well, you three better drown yourselves in water to rehydrate, then some coca de mate.” She gestured to the tea service in the middle of the lobby. “Coca tea. Really. Have some.”

Guilty as charged, I obediently hightailed it to the beverage table. There, Hank was filling his teacup from a large dispenser. He lifted his cup to me in a toast. “Say hello to liquid cocaine.”

“Cocaine?” Mom practically lunged for my cup until Stesha said, “Mollie, sheesh, the tea’s brewed from such an insignificant amount of leaves—”

“Which is why it’s been banned back in the States,” interrupted Hank with a large grin. “Down the hatch, right?”

Stesha continued despite Mom’s shocked expression. “And it’s absolutely harmless. Plus it helps with altitude sickness.”

“So when in Rome…” said an old woman who acted anything but elderly as she tipped back her head to catch the last drops in her teacup. She smacked her lips, then grinned impishly up at us from the well-worn couch. “Whatever it is, it’s kept me refreshed these last couple of days. I’m Grace. Grace Hiyashi.”

So this was Grace, the woman I was hired to accompany during the trek. I lowered my hand to shake hers, but Grace scooted to the edge of the sofa, placed her hands next to her hips, and hoisted herself up. My parents and I obviously weren’t the only ones to ignore Stesha’s advice. Grace didn’t exactly move like she’d exercised an hour a day the way Stesha had advised as preparation for the trek. Even with a few inches on Stesha, who barely scraped the five-foot mark, Grace was tiny as she stood before me.

“So I hope everyone took the packing list seriously. If you have any problems with your hiking boots, we’ll have just enough time to take care of them before we hit the trail tomorrow,” Stesha said, waving us to follow her out of the hotel, but not before she cast a worried glance at Helen’s and Hank’s boots, so new they couldn’t have seen much action beyond a store aisle. I recognized them as the top-of-the-line mountaineering boots that Dad had coveted but quickly reshelved when he saw that they cost more than a camera lens.

Once outside, Stesha added ominously, “The restored section of the Inca Trail may be just twenty-four miles long, but it’s quite uneven. Quite.”

Mom’s concerned gaze flicked to me before it planted on Dad. From her pre-trip reading of every published guidebook about Machu Picchu and her hours searching the Web for photos of the steep and rocky trail, we knew this trek would be rough. But it was entirely different to have it confirmed by someone who knew the trail well.

“Okay, so everyone ready for a tour of Cusco?” Stesha asked, but without waiting for our response, she began rattling off details about the Temple of the Sun, which had once been the most important building in the Incan empire, then repurposed by the Catholics. I was beginning to sense a theme with dominant cultures.

In front of me, Helen confessed to Hank, hand over what must have been her overworking heart: “Oh, gosh, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to make it on the trail if walking here is this tough.”

He said in a supportive undertone, “Don’t worry. If that old lady can do it, so can you.”

Grace’s expression didn’t betray whether she overheard him as she untied the shamrock-green raincoat from around her waist. She paused on the sidewalk, breathing hard, while she struggled into her coat.

“Here,” I said, holding it so she could slip her arms through the sleeves.

I had to agree with Hank, though: If Grace lagged behind now, panting from the altitude even with two days of acclimatizing, how was she going to keep up with us on the trail? The Gamers distracted me from my thoughts. Out of shape or not, Helen was acting pretty spry up ahead of me, nudging Hank playfully. I had to wrestle down my envy, and not just over their flirting; they were snapping pictures with their matching cameras, so state-of-the-art, our new model looked like a toy. I was only too happy to test Hank’s camera when he asked, “Hey, could you take a picture of us?”

I took so long framing the shot that I blocked the flow of traffic on the sidewalk. But honestly, it was a thrill to handle a camera I’d only ever read about.

“Sweetie, this isn’t for the cover of Time,” Helen teased me with an easy smile that turned doting when she blinked up at Hank. “Yet.”

Apologizing—“Sorry, I get kind of carried away”—I returned the camera reluctantly. As we followed Stesha on a whirlwind tour of Cusco, my eyes kept finding the Gamers. Maybe it was a little stalkerish, but I couldn’t help but study how easily Hank draped his arm across Helen’s shoulders. How they walked in unison, stride matching stride. How I was walking behind everyone with an old lady who was cute, but not Dom cute.

Right then, Stesha stopped dramatically in the middle of the plaza. With her arms spread wide, she announced, “You are standing in Huacaypata, the Square of War and Weeping.”

War and weeping. That, I understood. Just the idea of my final conversation with Dom was enough to make me want to war and weep against the memory of it.

“If you believe the Incas, this is the navel of the entire earth.” Stesha jabbed her finger at the ground. “Literally, you can draw a straight line to connect all the sacred spots in the Incan empire to this point right here.”

“All roads lead to you,” Hank crooned to Helen behind me.

Just like that, I realized that the next four days with the Gamers were going to be my own personal purgatory. Their perfect-couple company would only remind me of what I could have had if I were just a couple of years older or Dom a couple of years younger. Doomed by our birthdays; talk about unfair.

With no time to lose, Stesha ushered us toward the cathedral, an imposing and ornate building better suited for medieval Spain than the Incan empire. No photographs were allowed. Even if I had been able to shoot, I don’t think I could have lifted my arms. They felt weighed down and strapped to my sides in the oppressive space, which made it easy to imagine bloodthirsty priests and ruthless conquistadores.

“This entire cathedral is a subversive rebellion fought with art,” Stesha told us, pointing to a painting and telling us that the rumored model for Judas’s face was none other than Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador who pillaged the city.

“I should do that with our competitors in the next game,” Hank murmured to Helen.

To put more distance between me and the Gamers, I trailed behind everyone, even Grace, down an aisle. Elaborate art was crammed into every square inch, making me feel claustrophobic. Before Stesha stopped in front of a statue in an alcove, my heart began pounding in double time. But why? Why would this supplicating saint make me feel anxious, as if I were late for a final? My family wasn’t Catholic, just part-time Presbyterians who made it to services only on Christmas Eve and Easter morning.

“Meet Saint Anthony,” Stesha said, her eyes on Grace, not me, thankfully. “Women of all ages come here first thing in the morning.”

“Why?” Grace asked.

I knew why.

Once Ginny, whose mom is a devout Catholic, found out that I was going to Cusco, she told me about Saint Anthony, the patron saint of missing people and possessions. In this particular cathedral, the faithful believed that he paid special attention to the lovelorn. So Ginny had begged me to leave a note for her. I knew she meant business when she sent me that note, signed, sealed, and delivered in a FedEx envelope. Obviously, Chef Boy needed a massive prod of the divine intervention kind.

Stesha explained, “To leave prayers for a novio.”

Novio. Boyfriend, soul mate. I knew that word from years of Spanish classes. Still, I wasn’t prepared for Stesha to gaze at me—me!—with so much empathy, I could have been one of the lovelorn making a special pilgrimage to petition Saint Anthony. I took a hasty step back to distance myself from that mistaken identity. Nope, just an innocent messenger. I was of the no-boys-allowed order of girlhood, thank you.

“It’s been ten years, Grace,” Stesha said quietly.

“Some men are irreplaceable,” Grace murmured. Her fingers flew to the man’s wedding ring that rested on a chain above her chest, rubbing it as if it were a rosary.

Stesha may have placed her hand between Grace’s shoulder blades, calming her, but a stern directness replaced the warm glow in her eyes. She told Grace flatly, “You have a second chance at love. You told me that you really cared for Henry. You can’t be afraid to love again.”

That statement tore into me, threatened to reopen the scar tissue from my breakup with Dom. As much as I wanted to join my parents, who were examining another alcove, I was frozen in place.

“I miss Morris so much.” Grace’s husky confession welled up from a grief so deep, plumb lines couldn’t scrape the bottom.

The sound of this heartbreak scared me. It was bad enough missing Dom, bad enough having every little conversation and every little black-jacket sighting remind me of him—and this was after dating him for only six weeks. So how do you even move on after an entire lifetime together? Grace’s face crumpled. Who’d ever want to risk being buried alive under that kind of grief? Not me.

“He was my life,” Grace continued softly. “I’m almost seventy. And Henry’s even older than Morris was. So why bother? If I want companionship, I could get a dog.”

“Grace Hiyashi!” cried Stesha, placing her hands on Grace’s shoulders. “I refound the love of my life and I’m almost exactly your age. There’s no age limit to loving. And have you even considered that maybe there was a reason why you met Henry where you did? You’ve always wanted to go to Bhutan.”

Unable to breathe, I needed out of this gloomy cathedral with its burden of gold. I was only too glad when Stesha glanced at her watch and said enthusiastically, “Oh, good! We’ve got just enough time to look at some ruins today.”

And here I thought we had already looked at ruins.

All I wanted to do was follow Stesha along with everyone else out into the plaza. But a promise was a promise, and I had promised Ginny I’d deliver her note. How could I place her prayer on the altar with Grace still standing there, practically guarding Saint Anthony? Finally, Grace lifted her head. Finally, she walked away with heavy footsteps. As soon as she did, I tossed Ginny’s prayer onto the pile ringing the saint’s feet. Just as I turned to escape, a name flew into my head before I could grab hold of it and bury it so far down that even my subconscious couldn’t tap it: Quattro.

What the heck?

A single candle in the alcove flickered, a sudden bend in the flame, as though Saint Anthony himself had chuckled.

Wait a second. I whirled around to face the statue. That was so not a prayer.

After Reb came home from a trip to Hawaii, she talked about certain places being able to rearrange you. I hadn’t understood until now. My survival instincts shifted into such high gear, I felt the power burst of cortisol pulsing to my nerve endings. I rushed out: out of my memories, out of the cathedral, out into the afternoon sun, where everyone was waiting. Unused to the bright equatorial light, I squinted and saw a blur of orange. Orange, the all-too-familiar color used to flag emergencies. Orange, the signature color of a certain boy with a beak for a nose and a taste for bacon maple bars and who had told me he’d be at Machu Picchu, too.