A Blind Spot for Boys (9 page)

U
sing holes dug into the ground and enclosed by concrete stalls, I’ll admit, was a bit of a shock to this suburban girl. (Apparently, years of backcountry camping in the Cascades did nothing to break my dependence on indoor plumbing.) But watching my sure-footed father stumble over a rock he didn’t see at the start of the trek? That was heartbreak, plain and simple.

“Gregor!” Mom cried from where she and I stood with the rest of the women for a female-power photograph at the humble wood signpost:
WELCOME TO INKA TRAIL
. We sprinted to where Dad had tumbled just ahead of us on the path.

“I’m fine,” he said shortly, ignoring Mom’s outstretched hand. He dusted himself off as he sprang to his feet. “Go on. Really. Go on.”

Mom reared back from his harsh tone, one step, then two.
Her lips tightened as she tried but failed to stem her hurt and humiliation. Automatically, she glanced at the other women who were busy cooing over a small herd of llamas. Her cheeks flamed red when the Gamers shot meaningful looks at each other as they passed us. I could almost hear them revising their wedding vows:
We’ll never be like them.
But my parents had never been one of Those Couples either—that’s what I wanted to scream at Hank, Helen, Grace, and most especially, Stesha, who was watching not my parents but me.

Without a word, Dad hoisted his backpack higher on his shoulders, then strode forward purposefully. I’d never been afraid to talk to my father about anything, but this wounded-lion routine made me wary around him. Fortunately, Grace provided me with a ready-made excuse to stay far from Dad today; she lagged way behind everyone else. Mom hung back with us, muttering regrets and second guesses: “This was a mistake. Maybe we should turn around now and just go home.”

Grace smiled gently. “Then you don’t know men. He’s got to do this.”

“But he couldn’t even see that rock. The entire trail is rocks and cliffs,” Mom fretted.

“He’ll manage,” said Grace.

“But—”

“He’s losing his sight, Mom, not his legs,” I told her.

Both Mom’s and Grace’s mouths curved into shocked Os at my flat statement, but I wouldn’t want Mom to be hovering over me any more than I knew Dad did. All further conversation was
cut off when Stesha introduced us to the team assembled near the warden’s hut.

“Okay, everyone, I want you to meet Ruben,” Stesha said with an arm around our barrel-chested guide, whose black vest was embroidered with his name and well-worn pants were frayed at the bottom of each leg. Then she gestured at the six men lined in a row. “And these are our porters.”

Wiry and muscular, the men had been hired to haul our food and tents along the Inca Trail while we carried our own backpacks filled with clothes and supplies. Their legs were so corded with muscles, they looked more than capable of sprinting up and down the trail, regardless of the number of bags they were already lugging on their backs. One was wearing flip-flops, most of them in shorts, which made me feel like a wimpy, overdressed tourist in my sturdy hiking boots and new trekking pants. I could only imagine how Hank felt in his Indiana Jones getup, the fedora topping his head.

Once each of us had signed in with the guard in the hut, Ruben led us to a rickety bridge that spanned the fast-moving river, much more dangerous and alive than what we’d seen from above in the safety of our van. He stopped in the middle of the bridge, raising his voice to be heard over the wild rush of water: “It’s been raining nonstop for the last week. Today’s the first day we’ve seen the sun.” He joked, “I almost thought we’d need an ark.”

“Let’s hope this flood doesn’t destroy the universe,” Mom whispered to me before she moved to stand next to Dad. He didn’t even look at her, as indifferent as a stranger.

“Okay, this might be a good time to tell you that we think of the Inca Trail as a pilgrimage,” Ruben said, turning serious. “There are definitely easier ways to get to Machu Picchu. Most tourists go by train, then take the bus up to the ruins. If we really wanted, we could just follow the river.” With a finger, he traced the bend of the cascading river in front of us. “And be at Machu Picchu in six hours.”

“But where’s the fun in that?” Grace asked. Dressed in her green raincoat, she looked like a leprechaun.

“So we’re going to see Machu Picchu the way the Incas did,” said Stesha.

Ruben scrutinized each of us as if calculating the odds that we’d make it to our destination. “The next four days of walking through pretty difficult terrain will make you appreciate the site even more.”

“And by the time we get to the Sun Gate,” said Stesha, “I think you’ll have discovered things you’ve never known about yourself.”

Almost immediately, our group divided into four sections—Grace and I bringing up the rear. The porters, who’d disappeared about two minutes after we began walking. Ruben at the front with Dad, Hank, and Helen. Stesha in the middle with Mom, the better to answer all of my mother’s thousand questions. The last I heard before Grace and I trailed behind everyone, Mom was peppering Stesha with questions about all the plant species we encountered even though she had no interest in vegetation. Mom couldn’t even keep a cactus alive if she tried, which was why we didn’t have any plants, but she was obviously determined to wring every last bit of learning from this trip.

After four hours of what Grace dubbed “trudgery”—trudging that was pure drudgery on soggy ground—I confirmed what I already knew about myself: Can you say impatient? The trail ascended so slowly, you could barely call it an incline. So why did everyone describe the Inca Trail as challenging? But then the trail taught me a fast lesson about faulty first impressions. Too soon, I had to stop every ten feet or so to catch my breath.

If I thought I was dragging myself up the mountainside, Grace’s pace was even more sluggish, inching forward while bent over at the waist. How was she going to trek for four days if an hour of hill climbing taxed her? No one was in sight, just the two of us poking along.

“You doing okay?” I called up to Grace after deciding that it was safer to walk behind her in case she lost her footing. From back here, I could at least break her fall.

“I’m fine,” she said, her tone sharp.

One cantankerous father was more than enough to deal with, but now I was latched to an old lady who should have known better than to join a long trek? For this, I had given up my brand-new camera and come to Peru?

“You can go up ahead,” Grace told me in a gentler voice, casting an apologetic glance at me over her shoulder. She looked as winded as she sounded, which pushed aside my irritation to make room for serious concern. “I’ll go at my own pace.”

“You know what they say about slow and steady,” I shot back.

Grace may not have fallen into silence now, her labored breathing preventing that, but she plowed on, only stopping at our first view of Patallacta, gray-stone ruins atop banks of
terraces. At our last break, Ruben had told us that these ruins were rediscovered in 1911 by Hiram Bingham, the real-life explorer who was the inspiration behind Hank’s favorite fedora-wearing movie hero. Hearing about the site was a completely different experience from seeing it, just like writing about Ginny’s chocolate soufflé was way less satisfying than eating it, especially straight out of the oven.

All misty and gray, the ruins could have been a watercolor painting. They begged to be memorialized in a photo.

Just as I crouched down for a better angle, Grace howled to the skies: “Girls!”

Worried, I hurried up the hill to her side. Was she having a mental breakdown? Maybe she’d succumbed to some kind of altitude sickness that induced delusions.

“Girls! You seeing this?” Grace spun around in a slow circle. In an even louder voice, she called, “Check it out! I’m here. I’m really here.”

“Ummm… Grace. Who are you talking to?”

Grace grinned before she wheezed, “The Wednesday Walkers.”

“Who’re they?”

“My walking group. There were five of us. We started hiking together almost exactly forty years ago.”

“Really? Where?”

“Vermont. If you weren’t burying a husband or dead yourself, you were walking.” She laughed lightly. “Rain, snow, or shine.”

“Every Wednesday?”

“Every single one. I’m the last of the bunch. The last of the Wednesday Walkers.” She sighed deeply, then brushed her bangs out of her eyes. “Bertie died back in October, right after our walk. Bless those girls, they talked a good talk about wanting to trek abroad. We had such grand plans, too. Following in Alfred Wainwright’s footsteps in the Lake District. Doing the Appalachian Trail. The Cinque Terre. But we never made it out of Vermont together. Life called. If there weren’t children, there were husbands to take care of. And then there was always the issue of money. But you’re too young to understand all that.”

“I get it. We’re here for my dad. He’s going blind.” I followed Grace as she started up on the trail again, thinking about all the life and living my parents had forfeited.

“I heard.”

“You did?”

Grace stopped. Turning to face me, her eyes scanned mine. I didn’t know what she was searching for, but she said, “You mentioned it earlier.”

“I did?” I said, dismayed. I hated sharing our private business, having seen too much pity in people’s eyes over the years when they learned how cash-strapped my family sometimes was.

“You know, our Wednesday walks gave us midweek exercise, but it was so much more than that. It was being there when breast cancer took Olivia. And Kat lost her baby, and then her husband turned to the bottle. And…” Grace waved her hand in the air as though conceding to an entire lifetime’s heartache, then blew her breath out. “When terrible things happen to us, it’s so easy to think that our lives are nothing but rubble.”

“I know.”

She gestured to the ruins in the far-off distance. “But here we are, looking at broken rocks! We’re
admiring
these ruins like they’re artwork.”

“It’s a little weird when you put it that way.”

“And you know what the biggest shame is? All the people who are alive but aren’t really living because they’re still trapped in their own ancient rubble! Me included! Right before Kat died, back in ’ninety-six, Bertie and I promised that at least one of us would make it here. But then there was this excuse, and that reason…” Unconsciously, Grace pressed her hand to her husband’s wedding ring. “So after Bertie’s funeral, I said to myself, ‘Enough, Grace. This is the year.’ And then Stesha called.”

“She did?”

“On our last trek together, Camino de Santiago, she told me the exact same thing.” She straightened her backpack on her shoulders. “‘This is the year, Grace Hiyashi. You aren’t getting any younger.’”

“It’s Wednesday,” I told her.

“It is.”

As we continued walking, I couldn’t help but think about Reb and Ginny. I said, “I have my own Wednesday Walkers, but we’re called the Bookster Babes, for our mother-daughter book club.”

“That’s great, honey! And I bet you girls know each other’s secrets.”

“Pretty much.” But that wasn’t the whole truth. Instead of pretending that I had it all together, I should have told my
friends the truth: I had a secret boyfriend who had dumped me, the girl everyone thought did all the dumping. The girl who adopted a Boy Moratorium to stop all the boyfriend drama when really, she was just afraid to be hurt again. The next best thing was to tell Grace now. So I confessed, “Well, they knew everything except a guy I was dating. He asked me not to tell anyone about us.”

“Why on earth would he do that?” Then Grace guessed before I had a chance to answer. “How much older was he?”

I gaped at her. “How’d you know?”

“Why else would he need to keep you a secret?”

“He didn’t know that I was only fifteen until the very end. Well, I was almost sixteen, not that it really matters. He was twenty-two.”

“Trust me, Shana,” said Grace, her eyes unwavering as she stood her ground. “He knew. You don’t get to be twenty-two and not be able to tell when someone doesn’t have much life experience. I mean, really!”

This time when we started walking, I was the one dragging behind. It was as if the stone-enforced fortress that I’d erected around myself since Dom was crumbling with my every step. Dom knew? There it was, the nagging memory of him sidestepping the waiter who asked to see my ID on our second date, a dinner at a romantic seafood restaurant at the edge of the lake. “No wine for her tonight,” Dom had said smoothly. “She’s training for a marathon.” I had felt so special because Dom had tracked our conversation from the first date in a way that virtually none of my high school boyfriends ever had, never mind
that I had said I was
thinking
about running the Seattle Marathon. He had actually listened and remembered—and was proactive!

Our conversation must have energized Grace, because she picked up the pace. For the first time since the last rest break, we were within view of Stesha and Mom, though they were still pinpricks in the distance.

“How about if I take your pack for a little bit?” I asked Grace.

She turned to me then, placed one wrinkled hand firmly on my arm. “Shana, you are a dear. If I need your help, I’ll ask. But I’d rather have your company than your concern. Deal?”

“Deal,” I said, nodding. I could respect her independence. “Tell me more about the Wednesday Walkers.”