Queens of All the Earth

by Hannah Sternberg

  “Do you have any other siblings?”

  “No.” She paused uncomfortably when she realized she was on the verge of saying they barely had a mother.

  Olivia’s silence terminated the conversation. They turned together to look again at the incomplete church.

  “How long has it been?” Olivia asked when it seemed to be long enough.

  “We can go in and see where they are,” Marc said.

  Lenny and Miranda weren’t far from where they had been before, but several noisy families had accumulated behind them in line, so at least they felt they’d made some progress. As Marc and Olivia slid up the winding maze of the rope barriers, the noisy families escalated their volume, and a few of the more alert children wailed. Apparently, it was unfair to cut in such a slow line, even if someone had been legitimately holding a place for them.

  Marc and Olivia decided to retreat, agreeing to meet Lenny and Miranda outside, near the entrance where they’d all come in.

  Together, Olivia and Marc drifted down the undulating steps of the church and out into the street. There were souvenir shops to be examined and the park to explore—but not, it turned out, to linger in. For in addition to palm trees and green pigeons, it was home to the rich scent of sewage, which began with the public water closets dominating the far corner.

  After walking until they were hollow with hunger and footsore enough to mar anything new they might see, Olivia and Marc agreed to break Lenny’s rule and get food. They searched until they found the perfect café—that is, the one exactly like every other café they had passed, and within easy sight of the agreed-upon meeting point, that being the booth where they had first entered the Sagrada Familia. The café was a cross between a coffee shop and a diner, with vinyl-padded seats, shiny black and white tiles, and an exotic menu. While they waited for their food, they watched, mildly bemused, as the waiters gently deflected wandering beggars from the outdoor seating.

  A man with a clarinet and another on tenor sax set up by the bench on the other side of the pavement, and Olivia and Marc sat back to watch the scene for another hour. Their growing concern for the others was offset by their growing irritation and boredom. What had started as light chattiness ran dry and lapsed into companionable silence, but even that began to sour as the wait grew longer.

  At last, Lenny and Miranda emerged from the church courtyard and swayed toward their waiting friends. After getting to the top, Lenny had suggested they take the spiral stairs down the spire so they wouldn’t have to pay the elevator fee again. (To prevent congestion on the narrow stairs, the church’s managers forbade tourists from climbing up them.) Besides, they’d get to look through all the little windows on the way. Miranda, whose vertigo had practically overwhelmed her at the top, stopped on every landing to close her eyes.

  They were ready for lunch, overpriced or not, and they didn’t mind that Olivia and Marc would have to wait a while longer. Miranda sat next to her sister and, sensing her restlessness, squeezed her hand under the table. It grounded her. Soon, Olivia discovered a fresh wave of hunger in time to join in on their greasy, messy, chattering meal.

  After another hour, they set off, having crossed out the museum at the top of the Casa Milá due to the loss of time at the Sagrada Familia, which Marc had anticipated all along. They stayed just long enough at Milá to snap a dozen digital pictures, but from the street level, the complex looked a bit bland and malformed—“like a gray plastic house left in front of a radiator,” according to Marc, and they all agreed. They moved on to the Casa Batlló.

  The Casa Battló was just around the corner from their hostel. Olivia’s guidebooks told her that the embellishments of the building, with its vertebrae balconies and scaled roof, depicted St. George defeating the dragon. Olivia looked forward to finding the story in its molten folds.

  Olivia remembered playing with Miranda in the backyard when she was very, very small, sitting on the lowest branches of the tree they called a tower and pretending the neighbor’s dog was a dragon. While Miranda, who always insisted on being the queen, shouted orders to an imaginary army of knights below, never waiting to be saved, Olivia, the princess, had thought how nice it would be to languish, as long as she had a steady supply of books and food. Miranda would tease her for it, then dare her to run into the neighbor’s yard.

  (When Olivia had told their mother about the games, their mother had said something cryptic about eating up the patriarchal myths of the Romantic era and told her to instead pretend to be an archeologist leading her own expedition.)

  So Olivia had looked forward to the Casa Battló, but by the time they arrived, their visit was limited to a neck-snapping stare at the exterior, thanks to impossibly long lines and an early closing hour.

  They tried to enjoy that for a while, crossed the street to see if they could catch a glimpse of the tiled roof from that angle (they couldn’t), and then ducked in front of people who had just finished taking a picture and walked blindly in front of those who were just about to.

  “And that’s how you do Gaudí in a day,” Lenny croaked triumphantly as they shuffled toward Casa Joven, each person uniquely disappointed.

  “Now we know,” Marc said.

  Olivia remembered seeing water from the top of the Cathedral of Barcelona yesterday. She remembered the streaming air up there, and the transformation that had occurred below while she’d waited, floating, above. Reaching for Miranda’s hand, she said, “Let’s go to the beach. I haven’t seen the beach yet.”

  “It’s been a long day,” Miranda said, extricating her hand. She was afraid of Olivia’s tone, which had the desperate excitement that had preceded her dives into fantastic waking dreams.

  “But you can’t say you’ve been to Barcelona without seeing the Mediterranean,” Lenny said. “I could use a good drink in a beach bar somewhere.”

  “It’s only a few stops away,” Marc said. “We can take the Metro.”

  “Well.” Miranda sighed. The enthusiasm of the others eased her concern. “I like listening to the waves. It could be relaxing. And it shouldn’t be too crowded in the off-season.”

  They walked past their hostel and down a few more blocks to the Plaça Catalunya Metro, where they were swallowed by its bareness and the hot scent of metal and oil. A guitarist in the tile-paved tunnel played songs by the Police.

  “I only give them change if they sing in Spanish,” Lenny said, the only comment made as they waited on the platform.

  The ride of five stops was agonizing, and so was the strenuous walk from the closest stop to the beach, toward the twin high-rises that towered over the sand. Perplexing curvaceous artwork and blocky hotels shot up around them, crested, and ebbed away, and Olivia broke into a jog, charged with a childlike impatience, until she was stopped by the pavement railing that overlooked the beach and the sea.

  She waited there until the others caught up, but as soon as they did, Olivia dashed off again, down along the rail and past an advertisement asking swimmers if they were thirsty, and tripped down the slide of sandy dirt and stringy grass to the beach, warm, glowing, and alive.

  A green bird flew from a tree.

  The water was blue and white.

  The air smelled like fish.

  Black and brown rocks neatly cut the coast into groomed partitions.

  A thickset woman in a forest-green bikini sunned herself on the sand, alone, while passing walkers laughed at her or pretended to ignore her.

  Olivia threw herself down the beach, gathering up with swaying arms every gift thrown to her—like the wind that blew off the water and made her clothing mold against her body, shift, and cling again, and made her cheeks bright and her eyes fill. She felt the sea throwing swells toward her that billowed and fell and grew again to crash as waves and cast out shy, quiet, shallow washes, eaten again by the following waves. She stumbled out of her shoes, leaving them somewhere upside-down behind her on the sand.

  She felt the water beating against her hips, under her feet, under t
he palms of her hands, encircling her waist, sliding down the taut muscles of her legs, smoothing over the curves of her waving arms. It created something: a solid body that arose from the waves, panting and smiling, alive. He rolled toward her, legs awash, dripping with the many rivulets that composed his body, blue and white, green and brown and black. The sun struck him and made him real.

  “Olivia! Olivia!” he yelled. The form that had emerged from the waves was Greg Brown.

  “Olivia! I will wade out!” Wade out? He was already out. He spoke too soon; the sea tossed another wave up at him and knocked at his knees, and he fell into the water, dissolving and resolving, standing, laughing, his mouth full of laughter, while she crept slowly into the water toward him.

  “Olivia! I will wade out, ’til my thighs are steeped in burning flowers!” he called to her. He emerged again from the water after another dunk. “I will take the sun in my mouth.”

  Now, his feet encrusted with sand and water streaming down his slicked masses of hair, his eyes were filled with the sea and the sun and with her. He leaned toward her. His smiling mouth spoke.

  “I waded out, ’til my thighs were steeped in burning flowers. I took the sun in my mouth, and I leaped into the ripe air.”

  Alive, the sea answered. With closed eyes.

  To dash against darkness, the green bird said.

  In the sleeping curves of my body, Olivia’s skin sang.

  Her mouth was smiling without her permission. Her throat was laughing without her awareness. Her eyes were streaming with the salt blown into them.

  He stepped quickly forward and his mouth covered hers, and there was salt and the taste of his skin and the waves that danced around their ankles and an overwhelming warmth.

  They had no names.

  Olivia?

  “Olivia!”

  “Olivia!” Miranda repeated. Miranda, coming down the beach, first saw two figures against the blinding water, and then—then, she saw her sister clasped by someone who—attacked? No, kissing—Greg Brown. She wished she could somehow take the Browns’ private room and throw it back in their faces.

  She wanted to make it hurt.

  “Olivia, get back here!” Olivia heard her sister’s voice over the deafening cry of the sea. With the awkwardness of being seen kissing by her sister, she pulled away and ran back.

  “Where are your shoes?” Miranda snapped. Olivia found them, picked them up, dusted her feet, and put them on. She trembled. A pillar stood on the edge of the water—Greg, standing in the waves, smiling. She stood looking at him, and the warmth flowed back, until Miranda pulled on her elbow and they walked back up the beach and onto the concrete.

  The back of her shirt was still damp, like the print of his dripping hand.

  Miranda hoped Lenny and Marc hadn’t seen. As it turned out, they had been busy hiding their dislike for each other (his mild, hers intense) by chattering nonstop, and most of their remarks had been directed at the soaring bronze sculpture down the boardwalk, which he thought looked like a whale, and she thought looked like a helmet. When Miranda trudged up, they were both looking in the direction opposite of where Olivia and Greg had been.

  “Are you guys coming to the beach bar with us?” Lenny asked.

  “No. Olivia’s tired and we’re going back,” Miranda said.

  “In that case, I’ll join you,” Marc said.

  “I’ll just make some new friends at the bar,” Lenny said, chuckling artificially as she meandered away in the opposite direction.

  Olivia looked back down onto the beach, where the orange and red were fading into deep juniper blue, an ink stain across the sky. She saw someone dive into the water, submerge, and float back up. He was swimming. He had swallowed the sun, and he would wait in the water and glide through it until he could set his teeth in the silver of the moon.

  6

  SHE RISES SHE

  Olivia, Miranda, and Marc roared through Barcelona’s underground. Emerging again to the street, they found the darkness had followed them up. After a gentle uphill walk of ten minutes past street stalls and lost-looking tourists, they came upon the hidden little entry of Casa Joven, climbed the stairs, and tumbled through the big green door, Marc breaking off to go to the dorm room.

  “We’re going to have a long talk after you get out of there,” Miranda said as Olivia stepped into the bathroom. “I’ll be waiting.”

  Olivia chose between two showers. She opened the one that had been hers this morning and, turning the free handle on her feet only, washed away the last grains of sand. With wet feet, she padded to the mirror and looked at herself. Her hair had escaped in tendrils from her bun, rising in a wild halo around her head. Her eyes were large and nervous. She sighed and looked at her parted lips. They were freshly red. They were—

  “That’s it!” Miranda said, walking in and shutting the door behind her. “What the hell just happened out there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t try that with me.”

  “Let me out. Miranda, I want to go back to our room,” said Olivia. “This is weird. What if someone wants to come in here?”

  “I’m not letting you out until you talk to me,” Miranda said, placing herself in front of the door. “I saw you and Greg.”

  “I know,” Olivia said with a groan. Unconsciously, she raised a hand and touched her mouth.

  “What was that all about?” Miranda asked, sounding, to Olivia’s surprise, a little diminished. “I thought this week was supposed to be about us. A sister week.”

  “I know,” Olivia whispered. She wanted to add, “It was just a kiss,” but it wasn’t.

  “And I feel like you’ve been ignoring me,” Miranda said. “Yesterday you left me all alone, and then you came back with that kid. And today you left me behind to be with him again. And you didn’t even tell me you two had a... thing.”

  “I’m sorry,” Olivia said, her voice becoming very small. She wanted to say, “We don’t have a thing,” but that didn’t seem right, either.

  “I didn’t think you were like that. Not that you’ve done anything wrong,” Miranda said, gaining some strength in her voice again as Olivia blushed. “But we’ve only been here two days, and I didn’t think you were the kind who went for vacation flings.”

  “I don’t know,” Olivia said. She felt as if a rock was sitting in her throat. Her lips trembled. She remembered the times when her sister used to talk about encountering boys as if it were the most interesting thing a person could do. That Miranda had disappeared some time ago. “I thought you said I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Miranda relaxed against the bathroom door. “No, you’re okay,” she said. “I just thought we’d get more time together than this.” She hitched up a sorry smile that was half condescending and half conspiratorial. “And you don’t want Greg. Take him out of Barcelona and he’s a total hick.”

  The words were unexpectedly harsh, especially in the forced nonchalance with which they were delivered. Olivia had never had a boyfriend, and she knew Miranda knew that.

  Olivia wondered if it was possible to explain the roof of the Cathedral. The way Mr. Brown’s smile had smoothed away her anxiety. The way the church had looked different when she came down again. How she had felt alive. And the story of the accordion player and her lost mask and eating pretzels with Greg in the crowded plaza. The feeling of Greg’s hand around her own.

  “I thought he liked me,” Olivia said softly.

  “And what isn’t there to like?” Miranda said, pulling her into a hug. “That’s why I want to make sure no one walks over you. You deserve better.”

  They rocked in straining silence for a few moments.

  “Hey, Miranda,” Olivia murmured, “please don’t tell Mom.” Olivia didn’t know what made her more nervous—her mother’s political outrage that she would waste her time wrapping herself up with some stupid male, or just the simple embarrassment of being caught.

  Miranda pulled back slightly.

&nbs
p; “Why would I?” Miranda said. “It’ll be our sister secret.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Hey, I’m here for you, kiddo. And I’m not going anywhere,” Miranda said. “Quick nap and then dinner?”

  “Okay,” Olivia said.

  “You’re tired. We’ll just take it easy tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  Miranda slipped out the door and shut it again behind her, leaving Olivia alone.

  Olivia stepped to the sink, wet her face, and dried it carefully with a white towel. She let down her hair, combed it half-heartedly, and tied it up again. She looked in the mirror. She was clean, orderly. But even the smallest of motions sent shivers over her body. For a long time, she had hid a very deep well of affection, desperate to pulley it up in buckets and pour it over someone.

  She’d once looked to her sister and her mother, but been afraid the water would have beaded and rolled right off their backs, so she’d saved it for her books and private thoughts. She often imagined that, if she’d had a chance to meet and get to know her father, she could have given a large portion of her affection to him, and when she’d heard he was dead, it was like the passing of an opportunity more than the passing of a person.

  But this was different. She sensed she had connected with someone who would receive her downpour with joy, dance in it, and invite her to dance with him.

  She hoped that sleep would wash her confusion away—sleep and clean socks. And, she hoped, a healthy, filling dinner in a warm, quiet restaurant far away from tourists and Scottish football fans would ease Miranda’s fears. She hoped she could sneak through the rest of her vacation without running into or even seeing Greg Brown again, or she might die, or combust with embarrassment, or hurt her sister—or she might kiss him again, softly, his lips between her lips, and hear the sea that followed him into even the quietest room.