A Blind Spot for Boys

by Justina Chen

  “Why not? We can homeschool. She’s only got three more months of junior year. Colleges would love that she went traveling, and just think of her portfolio. Right, Shana?” Mom’s gaze slipped over to me as she nodded her head vigorously, willing me to agree. “Right?”

  But I was stuck on Mute.

  It was one thing to declare to Reb and Ginny and anyone who would listen that I was done with high school. College couldn’t come any faster. And another to pull out halfway through junior year.

  Mom urged, “Let’s choose one trip, then.”

  “We’re already climbing Rainier,” Dad said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “That’s three months from now.…” Mom’s voice trailed off as each of us filled in the blank. It might be too late in three months. Her face brightened. “Machu Picchu.” Mom held up their frayed napkin of dreams, stained with age, and pointed at its primo spot at the top of the list. “We’ve always wanted to see Machu Picchu.”

  “Reb said the trail passes have already been sold out for the season,” I murmured.

  Dad latched on to the excuse. “See? This is so slapdash. It’d be a total waste of money.”

  “So okay, maybe not Machu Picchu. What about Patagonia? Or Kili? Something’s got to be in season now.” Mom held the thick guidebook out to Dad, but when he didn’t take it, she opened it randomly. “Or a month from now. We have enough saved for three big trips. We could take each of the kids on one. Spend some quality time with each one alone.”

  “I won’t do this,” Dad said firmly. “Not to you, not to the kids. I won’t be selfish.”

  Selfish.

  “The boys haven’t needed our money for years, and I’ll work full-time.…” Mom’s voice faded. We all knew Mom’s refusal to travel for work because she wanted to stay close to home had limited the projects she was offered since so many executives required on-site support for their keynote speeches. How could she travel when Dad would need her soon? She glanced at me like I might betray her again by sharing that thought. “Shana, why don’t you give your dad and me some privacy, okay?”

  Unable to think or breathe, I was only too happy to leave my parents, as they began to talk about how Dad had had to take over the family business. And set aside his own college education. And then the twins arrived. And then unexpected me.

  Selfish.

  My heart tilted as I rounded the main stairs and stopped at the second set of narrower steps, which led to Dad’s attic office. As always, the treads were stacked with travel books that Mom collected from around the house for him to reshelve. Where other girls got bedtime stories, I got death-defying stories from memoirs filled with the epic adventures Dad had intended to have… before the diagnosis ground his dreams to dust.

  Once in my bedroom, I banished the package to the corner, still unopened. I couldn’t bring myself to unpack the camera. How on earth could I possibly be a photographer when Dad had sacrificed that same dream career to take care of us?

  The eggplant dark of early evening shrouded the room. I was glad for it. The presence of my new camera felt reproachful, but I didn’t know where to store it—my microscopic closet was already crammed with shoes, books, old art projects. Then I glanced at the hope chest and knew I’d found the perfect coffin. When I opened the lid, I caught the familiar whiff of cedar along with the expensive perfume Dom had given to me on our third-to-last date. I had tucked that bottle away along with every gift Dom had given me because they were too painful to see out in the open. As I nudged aside the boxes filled with other childhood mementos that Mom had saved, I touched the plastic container that held my first camera, bright red, inherited from Dad. My hand recoiled.

  Selfish.

  The night after the ophthalmologist confirmed that Dad was going blind, Mom had come into my bedroom to check on me. Sitting beside her on the bed, I asked, “Is Dad going to be okay?” Mom’s answer had been an emphatic “yes,” but she had worried her bottom lip.

  Dad would never be okay if he didn’t take this chance to travel and photograph. I knew that. I lay down on my bed now, my eyes tearing. I was selfish to stand in his way. What was the worst thing that could happen to me? Repeat junior year because I bombed Chem?

  Selfish.

  My entire life of the best still lay in front of me; Dad had spent a life settling for second best because of us. Me.

  Selfish.

  I finally opened the package, labeled with my name, and withdrew the brand-new camera from its plastic bag. Once it was freed, I blew a speck of dust from its sleek black exterior. The weight of the camera felt right in my hands, but I knew which hands would appreciate it more. Which hands should have been documenting life. Which hands were empty now.

  So I picked up the phone and dialed a number I knew by heart: Reb.

  “Hey, are there still two spots left on your trip?” I asked.

  “Oh, my gosh! Your parents actually want to go?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Then I’m pretty sure there’s room for them.” Reb continued in a breathless rush, “You have to go with them.”

  “How? You said there were only two spots left.”

  “There are. But if you’re okay helping Grandma Stesha out during the trek, I’ll ask her if you can take my place.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “This is probably going to be the only time you’ll ever photograph Machu Picchu with your dad.”

  My eyes overflowed with tears at her offer. I bit my lip. “I know.”

  “So just say yes.”

  Down in the living room, my parents were sitting on the couch, the flames in the potbellied stove banked low. I lifted the dream camera and took their photo. The flash startled them.

  “Shana!” Mom said, hand to her heart. “You scared me half to death.”

  Into my father’s hands, I placed the new camera, the next best thing to lifelong sight.

  “Dad,” I said. “We’re taking you on a photo safari to Machu Picchu.”

  Part Two

  But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart.

  —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  Chapter Six

  If anyone had told me that my parents were capable of mobilizing for an international trip in two weeks, I would have bet an entire year of rat removal with me doing the rat-removing honors that they weren’t. How many of our travel plans had been canceled due to last-second emergencies and panic attacks over the impending cost? But there was Mom, hauling home three sets of rain gear she’d found on the extra-reduced clearance rack, placed there for good reason. Honestly, compared to the puce-colored rain jacket and matching pants, the Paradise Pest Control uniform was haute couture.

  “Ta-da!” Mom cried, holding up the rain gear like hard-won trophies. “Try them on! Come on!”

  “Mom,” I complained, frowning at myself in the mirror, “we’re going to look like our own paramilitary troop.”

  “Shana’s got a point, hon. This gives new meaning to ‘dressed to kill,’” Dad agreed.

  “Double O Seven would rather be shot than be seen in this,” I retorted.

  But as Mom pointed out sharply over our snickers, “Who are we going to know on the Inca Trail anyway?”

  My parents decided that it was only fair to take my brothers on trips, too. So the plan was for me to fly home on my own from Peru while they met Ash in Belize for some scuba diving. Then, Max would pick up the third leg of the trip, intercepting our parents in Guatemala to climb a couple of Mayan pyramids. My lucky brothers, their adventures didn’t involve military-grade outerwear.

  So five thousand miles and seventeen hours after our travel day started in Seattle, Mom, Dad, and I set foot onto the Southern Hemisphere, backpacks stuffed with trekking pants, flip-flops for sketchy showers, and our questionable rain gear. After a five-hour overnighter in Lima, Peru, we’d catch a dawn flight to Cusco, the ancient capital of the Incas and gateway to the Inca Trail.

  As exhausted as we were when we stumbled
into the airport hotel in Lima, Dad still insisted that we check our room for bedbugs.

  “Dad,” I groaned, “for real? Do we have to do this tonight?”

  “Well,” said Dad, as he paused while inserting the key card into the hotel room door, “did I ever show you the pictures of that lady whose face ballooned with a hundred bites, not to mention her torso—”

  “Fine.” With a resigned sigh, I took my assigned role in the drama that repeats itself in every single hotel, motel, and friends’ home where we rest our heads for a night. I flung our backpacks one after another into the bathtub. (For the record, bedbugs cannot climb porcelain.)

  When I came out of the bathroom, Dad was approaching the side-by-side queen beds as though he were a medical examiner, sleeves rolled up and headlamp on his forehead. He wrested one of the headboards off the wall, leaned into the space between, then took a deep whiff.

  “You know, some people might think we’re a little strange,” I said.

  “Don’t smell blood here,” Dad said, and rehooked the headboard onto the wall.

  “That’s reassuring, Mr. Cullen,” Mom said. “I’ll be sure to let the Volturi know.”

  She yanked the sheets off the corner of one mattress and motioned me to do the same on the opposite end. I was about to protest—I’m the official lampshade inspector, since bedbugs adore snuggling into those seams—until I realized that Dad probably couldn’t make out the telltale sign of bedbug droppings: tiny speckles that could double as black pepper.

  “I wish Auggie was here,” I said before I tucked the sheets back under the mattress.

  “That makes two of us,” Dad said, sighing.

  Bless Margie, my aunt who worked as Dad’s office manager. Dad is famously picky about dog care for Auggie, barely trusting anyone with her. So Aunt Margie had come prepared yesterday with freshly roasted chicken. One bite of that succulent bird and Auggie had practically leaped into Aunt Margie’s car.

  Morning came much too soon for another bleary-eyed flight, and I was grateful that Reb’s grandma Stesha was awaiting us in Cusco.

  “Hola!” Stesha cried and threw her arms first around me, then my parents. I had met Stesha once before but had forgotten how much she and Reb looked alike: the same pixie body build, the same joyful smile, the same mischievous glint in their eyes. It was a little odd to see what Reb might look like in fifty years.

  With one dramatic wave that jangled the bright bracelets on her wrist, Stesha ushered us toward a waiting van. Her walk was a girlish bounce barely touched by the gravitational pull of adulthood. Who cared that we were in a boring airport parking lot? I trained my camera on Stesha.

  Afterward, I tried to relieve Stesha of her massive tote bag, but she brushed me off with a “You need both hands free to photograph.” Clearly, “helping” Stesha was going to be a challenge; I didn’t need Reb to warn me of that. In my initial call with Stesha, she had told me, “Everyone signs up for a Dreamwalk for a reason and a purpose.” She went on to describe how some people came to get closure on unresolved relationships, others to understand their lives. Case in point: An older woman named Grace was on this trip to grieve and let go, emphasis on the “let go.” Stesha had assigned me to be her walking companion.

  A couple in their late twenties was already inside the van. The pale man could have been auditioning for an Indiana Jones flick, dressed as he was in a fedora, multipocketed safari shirt, and khaki pants. All that was missing from his outfit was a gun belt and bullwhip, but he wielded his iPhone like a munitions expert. Stesha had mentioned that a couple of grievers would be joining us, not just Grace. But neither the Indy wannabe nor the petite brunette with him looked particularly grief-stricken until she lost whatever game they were playing on their matching phones. Even when she threw back her head in defeat and he pumped a triumphant fist in the air, I doubted they were aware of us until Dad introduced himself.

  “Oh, hey, I’m Hank,” the man said with a friendly grin. He nodded to the woman beside him, who looked up at us shyly through a massive halo of dark brown curls. Her long hair occupied nearly as much space as her entire body. “This is Helen. We’re from the Bay Area. What do you do?”

  “Pest control,” Dad answered frankly as we maneuvered around the front row to reach the back two. Draped across Helen’s lap like a blanket was a Gore-Tex jacket, embroidered with the logo of Dom’s favorite game: Field of Fire. Had he been here, Dom would have gone into full fanboy mode. Dad must have noticed the logo, too. “So are you into gaming?”

  “I’m just in finance.” As Helen tucked her hair behind her ear, her massive diamond ring caught the sunlight. She looked proudly up at Hank. “But he is gaming.” Hank shook his head modestly, though he smiled widely. “No, really,” she said, tapping the embroidered logo, “that’s his game.”

  “Really?” I cringed at my squeal, the one that told me I wasn’t completely, one hundred percent over Dom. I remembered all too well Dom rattling off Hank’s bio—a Stanford dropout who banked his first million before he was legally able to buy beer. Dom intended to make sure that that start-up lightning struck him, too.

  Turning to Dad, Hank asked, “So pest control?”

  “It’s a family business,” Dad said.

  “Well, good thing you’re here, because whenever I travel, it’s like bugs have a vendetta against me.” Then Hank told us about the scorpion infestation he had encountered in a remote village in India and the one cockroach that had nearly ruined his first trip to the Great Barrier Reef with Helen. “I never thought I’d see anyone walk on water until scaredy-pants here”—he gestured at Helen with his thumb before fluttering his hands in the air—“ran screaming bloody murder from our villa all the way into the sea.”

  We all laughed, even Helen despite flushing a deep rose. She ducked her head so that her hair hid her face and mumbled sheepishly, “It was huge.”

  Mom murmured sympathetically, “I’m sure it was.”

  “Hey,” Hank said to Dad, his head bobbing up and down enthusiastically, “we should create the Mario Brothers of pest control. I bet that could be hot.”

  My mouth opened to say that I knew someone who had already come up with that concept, but I clamped my lips shut and stared out the window at the parking lot, wondering yet again when everything would stop reminding me of Dom.

  “You promised you wouldn’t work on this trip,” Helen complained lightly to Hank, now shaking his phone as if to drive the point home. Her ornate ring caught my eye. Two “H” initials, each outlined with diamond chips, flanked an enormous round diamond. Hank noticed me ogling, which wasn’t hard to miss—drool may have been a dead giveaway—and told me, “I designed it. H and H, see?” He lifted Helen’s delicate hand for our better viewing.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said simply. Talk about understatement. The ring had TurnStyle blog written all over it, but I didn’t have the heart to gush over the stone or the setting.

  Here was the It Couple that Dom and I were supposed to be. We were supposed to be the ones at the top of our careers who’d travel the world together in the midst of our crazy busy lives. We were supposed to be the ones with funny stories and inside jokes about our trip mishaps. And I’d really thought we had all that, starting the moment Dom told me he knew I’d love his grandmother’s favorite perfumery in Paris, which blended a unique fragrance for each and every client. “Yours would have to smell like nights in Bali,” he had said on our first date. “Have I ever told you about the week I spent there? No? You would love it.” Then four weeks later, he returned from a family reunion in Paris, bearing a tiny bottle of perfume crafted just for me.

  Stesha walked back to the van with her phone in her hand and the paunchy driver at her side. She sighed with regret as she climbed into the passenger seat up front. “The last couple couldn’t make the trip after all. Family emergency.”

  “Oh, no,” Mom said, frowning. “That’s terrible.”

  “Well, things have a funny way of working out for the be
st,” Stesha said philosophically. “Grace has already been at the hotel for two days. So we’ll be a small party. Plus Ruben, Ernesto, a few other porters, and myself.”

  On the drive to the hotel, Stesha warned us, “Be careful not to overexert yourselves as you acclimatize to the high altitude.” With a pointed look at my big, strapping father, whose knee was bouncing up and down impatiently, she continued in a stern voice, “I mean it. We’re at eleven thousand feet—almost as high as your Mount Rainier. So drink a ton of water in the next two days, take a nap as soon as we get to the inn, and make sure to eat lightly. As appetizing as roasted guinea pig may sound, hold off on it until your body adjusts.”

  “Guinea pig?” I repeated weakly, as Mom twisted the cap off a water bottle and handed it to me.

  “A local delicacy.”

  The thought of eating one of my elementary school pets pretty much obliterated all my appetite and jet lag. I didn’t protest when Dad suggested a short run while we scoured the hotel room for any and all telltale signs of bedbugs. Despite Mom’s meticulous packing, it took her another good fifteen minutes to get herself ready. So I cracked open the manual for the new camera I’d given to Dad. Since there was only so much a travel-worn person could process about f-stops and shutter speeds, I abandoned that effort and retrieved my old camera. I thought I had wiped the SD card clean of photos, but of course, there he was: Quattro, glowering at me in front of the Gum Wall, with all the staying power of a cockroach after a nuclear blast.

  “Oh, who’s that?” Mom asked, spotting Quattro’s photo when she leaned over me to snag her deodorant from the backpack. “He’s rugged looking.”

  Dad ambled over. “Hey, that’s the kid from the Gum Wall. He’s got quite the schnoz.”

  “Dad!”

  “Oh, he’ll grow into that,” Mom said with the same easy confidence that she had when she assured me that I’d grow into my large feet. Unbelievably, she was right, as I’d discovered in ninth grade, the year when boys started pursuing me with off-putting enthusiasm. “And besides, never underestimate the beautifying power of a good personality. So who is he? When did you meet him?”