Chapter Twenty-One

Not 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.