“I don’t know where he went.” Helen bit her lower lip. Tears streaked down her face.
And then I didn’t hear another word because Quattro was wrapping his arms around me, hugging me tight. My arms encircled his waist. When had this boy become my pillar of strength?
“I thought you were down there,” he said into my hair. “I thought that was you shouting.”
“I was worried about you!” Only then did my body begin trembling as the enormity of the mudslide hit me. We had been so close to dying. Dying!
Quattro held me even closer. “We’re okay.”
I was so glad that he didn’t ask if I was okay, just assured me that we were. What words could possibly express how I felt after my first near-death experience? Any of us could have been killed. Helen, for one. I pulled back far enough to study Quattro and his melty-warm eyes and the mud speckling his chin and the side of his nose. “You looked for me.”
“Well, yeah.”
I couldn’t formulate a response because Quattro was staring at me intently, staring as though he had spent hours thinking about me, spent the last few minutes worrying about me in spite of himself. The silence stretched out long, the moment growing hot. Neither of us moved. We may not have been clenched close to each other anymore, but my body tingled where he had pressed against me, and my lips throbbed. And still we stared. And still the moment lengthened. My lips parted. He exhaled.
From far off, I heard his father shouting for him. “Quattro! Bring your backpack!”
I heard his sigh, felt his arms releasing me, and then his hand squeezing mine. He was as reluctant to let go as I was. Quattro nodded over at his dad. To me, he said gruffly, “You should photograph this.”
My cameras! They were lost in the mudslide. I shook my head. “I don’t have a—”
He pulled a basic point-and-shoot out of the front pocket of his backpack and offered it to me. “Will this work?”
It felt like a homecoming, holding a camera again. To be honest, creating a photo essay of this destruction hadn’t even occurred to me until now. In all my photographs, I had tried to prettify the world. Crouch down and the angle would obscure a man’s beer belly. Wait for the right light, and the acne scar on a girl’s face would fade, a middle-aged woman would look more youthful, a boy’s beak of a nose would shorten. Tears threatened again.
“You need to document this,” he said before he ran toward his dad.
I lifted the camera. I would start telling the truth now.
“Quattro,” I called.
He turned to look directly at me, and even when he saw the camera aimed his way, he didn’t avert his face but allowed himself to be shot in his full glory—sweaty, mud-stained, smelling like coffee and old gym bag. His eyes shone at me. I had no more doubts that I wanted him. Not a single one.
“I’ve got to go,” he said, then paused. “I’ll find you.”
And let me tell you, that single promise couldn’t have been more thrilling.
A terrible burial site lay below us: trees ripped from the path of the mud; their upturned trunks and branches had become a jagged landscape. I lifted the camera, and even as I made my shot, I knew I couldn’t just photograph the destruction.
“We’ve got to help,” I told Mom, who nodded. Together, we picked our way down, weathering Dad’s “What the hell are you doing?” before he gave up. We probed around the edges of the mudslide. Helped another group search for their missing guide. Consoled a curly-haired woman who was beside herself, bleating, “My sister! My sister!”
“Hank!” Helen yelled, not more than ten feet from us. Her voice may have been hoarse, but her relief was absolutely clear.
I spun around to find Hank near a pile of mud-flattened tents, carefully picking his way toward Helen even as she stumbled over the debris to reach him. Hank hiked the backpack he was holding in one hand over his shoulder so he could widen his arms for her.
“Helen! You’re okay,” he said.
“I thought you were dead!” she cried before collapsing against him. “I was looking and looking for you.”
No matter how softly Mom spoke the words to me, I heard the condemnation in them: “Looks like he saved himself.”
I was about to ask what she meant when I noticed that Hank was wearing his trekking pants, an undershirt, hiking boots, no jacket. His fedora was in place. It looked as if he had bolted out of his tent the moment the mud poured off the mountain, grabbing his hat and backpack, everything but his fiancée. But he couldn’t possibly have left Helen behind to fend for herself, could he?