Back on the trail, I was aware of my every footstep, where I planted my feet, where I shifted my weight. Every minute, I half-expected a second avalanche of mud and trees, boulders and debris to sweep us away. So I didn’t protest when my parents insisted on taking the rear position, no doubt to guard me with the same eagle-eyed attentiveness I paid to Grace, who was sandwiched safely between Helen and me.
Our first rest break only ratcheted up my anxiety. By the time we reached the porters, Ruben and Hank had gone ahead, scouting the next section of the trail. Before I sat, I made an effort to talk to our porters, stitching together my broken Spanish and hoping my smile would fill in the grammatical gaps: “Gracias para tu ayuda.” Why had I been too embarrassed about sounding stupid to talk to them? Their answering grins and pats on my back communicated their relief that all of us were okay.
Afterward, I peered up the mountain. No sign of Quattro, which was unsurprising. All along, his group had trekked faster than we did, taking side trips and still managing to establish their campsite before us. Every time I thought about Quattro, my heart felt like it was tripping. I hadn’t known how scared I would be to trust my heart to another boy. Or how much it would hurt to be rejected again.
At our next break, Stesha kept casting worried glances at Grace, as though wondering whether she would make it through the next day and a half. From our meager supplies, we divided three PowerBars among all of us for lunch, one sticky bite a person. Improbably, Grace smiled as she considered her puny segment. “Sort of makes you miss the round-the-clock quinoa diet we’ve been on, doesn’t it?”
“Here,” Mom said, holding out her piece to me.
“Mom.” I shook my head and almost didn’t hear her soft request: “Do you mind walking with your dad? He’s all twitchy, like I might slip any second.”
“Don’t say that!” I protested, shivering. “But I suppose now you know how he feels with both of us hovering.”
“Well, it’s making me nervous! I’ll walk with Grace, okay?”
Whatever Grace had said to Helen in the morning must have been encouraging. She lost the forlorn look of the recently widowed, and she didn’t gaze at Hank with naïve puppy dog adoration anymore. Instead, she scrutinized him when he spoke, as though she were weighing his every word and action against some mental checklist. I got the feeling I needed to do a bit more of that in my own love life.
“Hey, Mom,” I said before I joined Dad as she had begged, “ask Helen to walk with you guys, will you?”
After two days of trudging at Grace’s pace and being weighed down by my heavy backpack, I felt like Dad and I were sprinting when we set off on the trail together. But I knew he wasn’t going at his full race pace. Neither was I. Both of us wanted to play it safe.
“You seem unhappy,” Dad called up to me. Even without looking at him, I could hear the concern in his voice. “Does it have anything to do with a certain boy?”
“Maybe,” I admitted to my surprise.
“I liked how he came to find you.”
“Me, too.”
And that was the problem. The pause in our conversation had less to do with the altitude or the arduous climb and more with processing what both Dad and I had noticed: Quattro’s first instinct was to ensure that I was safe. Just look at Hank and how he’d done in the same crisis: a big, fat selfish F.
I glanced back over my shoulder at Dad, who had his eyes trained on my feet, ready for the slightest hint that I was losing my footing. That’s where I’d learned how to be vigilant for Grace. Dad had always been there for us, always putting us ahead of himself. He hadn’t run to save his own life, but he’d reached back to save ours.
“Dad, you were amazing this morning,” I told my father, wanting so badly for him to see himself clearly.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Are you kidding?” I stopped on a wide stone step to face him. “If you weren’t with us this morning, Mom and I wouldn’t be here.”
“If I weren’t going blind, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
“Dad.”
“If I had made more money, we would have visited here earlier.”
What I now knew for a fact was that money, ambition, and big plans mean nothing at all when you’re staring down death. So I said, “You saved us this morning, Dad. You did.”
As my words sank in, we tackled the next steep section of the mountain in silence. I couldn’t get enough breath to continue a conversation with Dad anyway. All I could manage was a steady rhythm of five plodding steps, then a brief panting rest. If my breathing was labored, how was Grace doing behind us? Ruben, Hank, and the porters waited for us at the crest of this section. We reached them just in time to hear Hank’s sarcastic assessment: “This is exactly the way I imagined the Inca Trail.”
I actually understood that complaint. My parents had taken a healthy chunk out of their retirement savings to fund this expedition with me, and the two following trips, with my brothers. This was hardly the Inca Trail I had imagined or would ever wish upon anyone.
“Then my apologies,” said Ruben smoothly. He gestured for the porters to push ahead. Somehow, drawing from a deep well of patience and good humor that I didn’t have, Ruben continued, “Just because we’re trying to make good time doesn’t mean that we can’t appreciate what we’re seeing.” He looked downhill to the other half of our group, still with one long set of stairs to climb before they caught up to us. “You know, this is one of the most beautiful cloud forests in the world.”
Strange as it might sound, I had been so distracted by worry and hunger and burning hamstrings, I hadn’t even noticed that we were surrounded by low clouds and wind-battered trees. While Ruben tried to satisfy Hank with a lecture on the function of moss in a cloud forest, Dad paused before a small orchid, an improbable, show-stopping pink flower that thrived without the benefit of direct sunlight.
“Your mom really wanted to see this… and a hundred other things. I just never made the time to take her,” he said finally with a defeated sigh.
“Dad.”
“You should check on your mom,” he said gruffly. “Why don’t you wait here until they catch up?”
I started to protest. After all, what the heck was the point of a family excursion if all we were doing was excusing ourselves from each other’s presence? Without wasting another moment, though, Dad began plodding uphill like a travel-worn pilgrim who’d been walking for such a long time, he’d given up hope of seeing whatever he’d come to find. His resignation was way worse than his anger.
Laughter—rich, joyous, and just shy of hysterical—signaled that the women were nearing. It was almost unfathomable that just hours ago, a chunk of mountain had sheared off, and we’d been screaming in fear.
“Sexy to the end, girls!” Grace cackled. Spying me, she added, “Right, Shana?”
The rain fell harder. Even with the thick foliage that arched overhead, drops of rain penetrated the canopy. But not a drop seeped through my military-grade barrier of rain gear. That was no less a miracle than Mom’s cheeks flushed as pink as the stubborn orchids blooming around us. No less a miracle than the women’s laughter.
What could I do but laugh helplessly, too? Laugh at my ludicrous mud-spattered rain gear and agree, “Oh, yeah, we are sexy to the end.”