“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—”