Chapter Seven
Seven
At breakfast the next morning at a quaint, countryside inn, Alejandro remained tight-lipped about the day’s upcoming adventure.
“All I’m going to say,” their guide repeated when the crew peppered him for information, “is double-check for your water, bug spray, sunscreen, the usual. And pack an overnight bag.” When she piled into the van, Lulu dug through her pack to make sure that she had remembered her mouthguard.
She could rough it. But she would not grind her teeth.
She snapped her seatbelt and gazed out the window.
So this was it: the start of the adventure portion of the tour.
And although Lulu could feel the trepidation factor rising within her, the changing views were a welcome distraction.
As the van veered toward the western coast, the landscape grew tangled and wild.
And when they then turned toward the hills, thick with El Polanco trees and yellow elder, Alejandro noted that quetzal birds could sometimes be found in these humid highlands, their bright red chests and long green tails standing out from the foliage.
Lulu’s competitive spirit rose up at the mention, and she stared out the window, hoping to be the first to spot one.
Spying her eagerness, Alejandro added, “It’s unlikely we’ll see them, unless we get up at four in the morning. ”
Lulu straightened. “Ooh! Can we?”
“No!” came the unified response from the others.
Quetzal or no, the sightseeing was breathtaking.
The green hills, covered in trees like bumps on an armadillo’s back, reached out over the horizon.
They drove for long stretches without seeing any signs of civilization, and then, like a miracle, a fruit stand appeared, selling enormous papayas and coconuts the size of bowling balls.
Then, pockets of houses, quaint and freshly painted, surrounded by shady trees.
A school, jostling clumps of teens in uniforms making their way to class.
A small supermarket with a scrappy white dog wandering inside before being shooed back out.
Bill steered the van into the parking lot, where above them a craggy mountain loomed. They poured out and peered at the sign bearing the disconcerting moniker in Spanish and English: Catarata Diablo de Diamante; Diamond Devil Falls.
Lulu’s eyes traveled up the face of the imposing giant of a mountain. Aptly named, she thought. Turning her head to check Tyler’s reaction, she found his eyes on her. Briskly, she shifted her attention back to the mountain.
Okay. This was fine. If she could play pickleball, she could climb a Costa Rican mountain.
She could try new things, she convinced herself.
In fact, traipsing up a mountain wasn’t new to her.
Lulu hiked in Washington, of course, because in the Pacific Northwest it was unlikely to go ten feet without hitting a trailhead.
But on Bainbridge and in Seattle, the parks departments threw bark on neatly defined hiking trails in wooded areas set aside for recreation.
Here the trail delved into the jungle like a wild creature, and even from the first few paces, Lulu could see she was not in Washington anymore.
The path, uneven and root-pocked, twisted and shifted, winding where it chose, skirting around trees and boulders, interrupting low creeks without so much as an “excuse me.”
They arrived at a grassy patch, open to the warm sunshine. Alejandro tugged his pack off his back and pulled out a long, spiny rope and a handful of red bandannas, then unloaded the curious equipment into Tyler’s arms.
Alejandro passed out the bandannas while Tyler spoke.
“I had this idea, and Alejandro here offered to go along with it. Thanks, Al,” he said, all chummy now that they were in on their secret, evil plot.
“On the courts, we’re learning to balance each other when we partner.
But today, we’re going to cross-train. We’re going to trust each other on the trail. ”
This, Lulu thought, has the makings of a reality TV show gone awry. She did not like it one little bit.
“Please cover your eyes with your bandanna, and I’ll explain,” Tyler said.
Alejandro tied the cloth over his eyes. Bill and Gwendy helped each other, while Ariana scoffed, removed her sunhat and glasses, packed them into her backpack, and with a great show of effort, secured the cloth around her head.
Cover my eyes with a bandanna and hike up this railing-deficient mountain? Lulu thought. Um. No, thank you. As if reading her thoughts, Tyler stepped nearer to her.
“I know you don’t like surprises, Lu, but give this a shot, okay?”
We’ll see about that. And at the same time, a wisp of a long-ago memory of her seventeenth birthday came back to her.
One of Lulu’s friends had invited them over for dinner.
Before they rang the doorbell, Tyler whispered, “Stay cool. I told them you wouldn’t like it, but they really wanted to do something special for you.
” And she had steadied herself, prepared, thanks to Tyler, before the crowd yelled, “Surprise!”
He remembered that about her?
Tyler turned back to the group. “We’re headed up this mountain trail. It’s steep. There are a lot of roots, and many, many stairs.”
“How many?” Lulu asked, the blindfold still clutched in her fist.
“Many, many.”
He certainly wasn’t sugarcoating it. “Each of you will hold on to the rope while I lead the way. You won’t be able to see where you’re going, but I will. I’ll warn the first person in line of any obstacles, and then you’ll pass that information along the line as you go. Any questions?”
She had a lot more questions, but she did not voice any of them. Instead, she narrowed her lids to slits in a last-ditch effort to curse him into turning into a dart frog. When that didn’t work, she tied on the blindfold.
Tyler touched her shoulders, and she was hyperaware of his steady hands.
There was a familiarity to the pressure of his touch, and she tried to ignore the fine hairs that jumped to attention on the back of her neck.
Lulu allowed herself to be moved into line.
She knew Ariana was right behind her because she could smell her perfume.
Moments later, Tyler pressed the rough-textured rope into her hand, and she passed the length to Ariana, who passed it along down the line, judging by the murmured thanks from the others.
As Lulu exhaled her anxiety, she heard Tyler near her ear.
“You got this. Remember. We’re all in this together. ”
Exactly. If one of them fell off a cliff holding on to this damn rope, the rest of them would be yanked over like lemmings.
Tyler was in front of her again, leading the line, and he gave a small tug on the rope. “All clear.”
Lulu shuffled forward. This was okay. This part was fine.
She had seen this section of the trail before she was deprived of her free will by the very man who had deprived her of her stress-free vacation.
Perhaps her line of thinking was veering toward the dramatic, but at least she knew that for the next ten feet or so, the ground ahead was mostly flat and obstacle-free.
“And a small step.” She lifted her foot up onto the first stair and passed the information down the line. “Another step.” Rinse and repeat. She had this. “Now we have about forty or fifty more stairs here.”
Lulu skidded to a hard stop. Ariana’s arm bonked into her back. She would have burned a hole through Tyler with her defiant glare, but the stupid blindfold was in the way.
The whole group was relying on her to move, so she took a tentative step forward. Then another. Lulu sighed. She would give it a go. And she could hear the encouragement of the others, urging her forward.
They trudged up and up, passing unseen cautionary signage and sweating in the strengthening sunshine.
Her mind wandered as her feet followed instructions and her mouth robotically repeated Tyler’s warnings for Ariana, who kept slack on the rope behind her.
Step for step, Lulu’s brain could concentrate only on the attentive movements of her body.
As she paced, her mind relaxed. Maybe Tyler was right.
Relinquishing control could be relaxing.
Even fun! Maybe, like the worth-the-pain thrill of jumping into the hot tub after enduring the snowdrift, her initial anxiety would dissipate once she allowed herself the freedom to trust Tyler, if only for a little while.
Just then, Lulu’s toe slammed up against a rock.
“Ah!” she yelped and tumbled forward. Her palms banged hard against the packed earth and her knee hit the ground, scraping against a patch of gravel.
Stunned, she sprawled on the trail. With trembling fingers, Lulu lifted the bandanna off and brought her hand to her face where, to her embarrassment, her eyes were welling up. “I ran into a rock.”
Tyler, several feet ahead of her on the trail, rushed back to her. “I’m so sorry. There was a branch across the path that I was clearing—” He stopped himself. “I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you warn me? It’s supposed to be a trust walk!”
“I know. Are you okay?”
“I’m…” She assessed her scraped palms. “I’m fine,” Lulu said, her indignation rising. “But you weren’t even—” She stopped, acutely aware that the depth of her venom was not about a scraped knee or a stubbed toe. The real injury was years old, but Tyler’s anti-trust walk just ripped off the scab.
Suddenly, she felt eyes on her. Her fellow trudgers had removed their bandannas and were gawping, a group of silent witnesses to her meltdown. She sniffled. “You were supposed to be watching out for me,” she mumbled, her voice trailing off.
“I know. And I’m sorry. I’ll do better,” he promised. He held out a hand to help her, but still stinging, she waved it away.
“No. You know what?” Lulu straightened. “I’ll do better.
” She brushed off the dirt from her shorts and stood.
Whipping the bandanna in his direction, she pressed it into his hand.
“You put on the blindfold. I’m taking over and you can follow me.
” A fire burned in Lulu’s eyes, the glare of a woman scorned.
Safe to say that it did cross her mind to walk him right off the cliff.
No. No. That would be unsportsmanlike.
Still, if there was one thing Lulu had learned from single parenting, it was that she should rely on her own good judgment first. And never give your toddler the car keys. They will end up in the toilet. She did not have to learn that lesson twice.
She kept her tone cool and glowered at Tyler. “Trust me,” she said.
Wordlessly, he took the blindfold. He gulped, glanced worriedly at the crumbling mountain ledge, and with a last apologetic glance at Lulu, he secured it around his head.
The others, realizing she was serious, took their cue and retied the cloths over their eyes.
Lulu handed the rope to Tyler, who handed it back to Ariana, and down the line it went to Gwendy and Alejandro and Bill.
Lulu assessed the path in front of her. She began walking.
Leading was so much better than being blindfolded, she decided. And if she had to be honest with herself, which she often tried to be, she never really liked relinquishing control to someone else. Especially when that someone was an unreliable prickleballer with a history of leading her astray.
“You’re doing great,” she said, her tone so much more helpful and encouraging than Tyler’s had been.
“Keep going. There’s a little root here.
Be careful,” she said, and with plenty of lead time before they passed under a low branch, she warned, “Duck!” Lulu took her job seriously, and there were passages where she let them stroll at their own pace and places where she needed to address her position with vigilance. She was born for this.
Pace after pace, she monitored the path. Up ahead, a series of stairs stretched toward the heavens. She took great pleasure in saying, “Step up. Okay, now. There are about…I don’t know, maybe a couple hundred more of these?”
They trudged after her, plodding up those mountain stairs.
It turned out, the two hundred stairs were only the beginning.
Gwendy stopped counting aloud somewhere in the three hundreds after Ariana implored, “Mom! That’s annoying everybody,” which was rude but true.
After that, the only noises were the passing of instructions and slapping at mosquitoes.
“How much farther?” Tyler grunted when they had been marching for another thirty minutes.
“How should I know?” Lulu retorted. Nobody had given her any instructions. She’d never seen a map. “I’m just walking.”
“Did you turn at the sign for El Diablo de Diamante?”
“We were supposed to turn there?” She had noticed it perhaps a half mile back. Like, a hundred or so stairs?
Tyler tugged his bandanna to his chin in frustration. He blinked, clearing his vision, and groaned. Twisting toward the group he said, “Okay. Everybody. Trust walk over.” Blindfolds were removed and the dazed hikers blinked in the brightness.
Gwendy said, “Gawd. The last time I had a blindfold on for that long I was tied up in a limo with nothing but a feather duster and three guys I hired from Chippendales. Does anybody else feel this in their knees? Anybody? No? Just me then,” she said to the speechless crew.
Getting his bearings, Alejandro spun full circle. “No problem. We’ve gone a little past the turn. We’re going to have to backtrack.”
“Down?!” Gwendy asked, her voice rising with the kind of incredulity one might reserve for saying, “You put fifty live chickens in my back seat?!” Grunting, she executed a labored three-point turn and squinted down the stairs.
“My knees are not gonna thank me,” she muttered. “ ‘Down’ is a miserable preposition!”
“Proposition?” Lulu suggested.
“Both.” Gwendy grimaced.
“You should try yoga,” Tyler suggested. “It’s great for the whole body. Really good for strengthening the knees.”
“Yoga puts me in a murderous rage,” Gwendy said.
After that, there was a long moment when Lulu was certain she was not the only one picturing Gwendy in yoga pants wielding a recently sharpened ax.
Everyone turned around, and Tyler offered to carry Gwendy’s pack on his front.
Down they tromped, with the pro looking like a double-sided turtle and Gwendy singing songs from Wicked.
Having dispensed with the bandannas, and with full use of their senses, the mood of the group lifted.
When at last the crew arrived back at the turnoff, Tyler whistled low.
The rest of the group came to a halt as one by one, they absorbed this new wonder, awed by the beauty of the view before them.