Then again, they didn’t seem like the kind of girls who would bicker in public. Relatively pleasant people, they were almost mature, and interesting enough to make up the difference.
“Hugo said you were going up a mountain,” said Mr. Brown, walking into the room behind Greg. He plugged in the kettle.
“Yes, with Miranda and Olivia,” he said. “We’re going to have a picnic at the castle.”
“I’m coming, too,” Lenny wheezed, to Marc’s surprise. Her face was on the table, pillowed by her arms. Marc had assumed she was unconscious.
“Greg and I want to see the castle,” Mr. Brown said. “I think he wants to sit up there and imagine Don Quixote.” In the kitchen, Greg groaned. Marc laughed. “Mind if we tag along?”
“I don’t have a problem,” Marc said. He was already wondering what the combination would produce.
Olivia had heard the Browns come in, but she’d kept her eyes on her book, succeeding only in pretending to read. But when she heard Marc invite them along, her eyes shot up to the main room, and a wave of heat rippled up to her cheeks. Greg was quiet as usual and slightly pale. As they always did, their eyes met briefly, but this time Greg was the first to break off. Two patches of red stung his cheeks, and he looked quickly at his father, then to the floor.
Mr. Brown appeared completely unaware of his son’s embarrassment. Olivia knew instantly Greg hadn’t told him.
Closing her book, Olivia padded out of the room, keeping her shoulder turned to the group and her head down. Greg hadn’t told his father. She couldn’t imagine not telling someone. It probably meant he didn’t care as much as she’d thought.
She thought of the sensitivity she had instantly ascribed to him on hearing his mother was dead. Maybe she was wrong about him. Maybe things just happened to people, but didn’t shape them. Or maybe he was just an insensitive jerk.
Or maybe she was the one who made everything a big deal, and he did this sort of thing all the time. She didn’t want someone who did this sort of thing all the time. She didn’t do this sort of thing all the time. As much as she hated the idea, which tore at her, she wondered if Miranda had somehow, and for all the wrong reasons, been right.
She wondered if she, herself, had been right back in August, when her natural response to change, to hurt, was to seal herself inside her shell and create a new impervious world inside. Looking back, that time seemed like a half-forgotten dream and, like vertigo, it gave her a brief rush of fear.
She slipped into their bedroom and shut the door.
Miranda, looking up at Olivia, was troubled by the look on her face—her eyes glowed fiercely.
“What’s going on?” Miranda asked, getting more nervous the longer Olivia stood in silence.
“Greg and his dad are coming along,” Olivia fumed.
Miranda blinked. It took a few seconds to sink in.
“Today?” she asked. “With us?”
“Yes. And yes,” Olivia said.
“How did that happen?” Miranda asked, her heart pounding. She felt as if she was three feet tall, holding a broken vase, and the Browns were the grown-ups who had just walked in. Miranda felt a sudden urge to throw her hands up and cry, “I didn’t do it!”
“I don’t know,” Olivia said. “Marc let them. Or they just invited themselves. I don’t know how they do these things.” Having blown off the worst of her frustration, Olivia collapsed onto her bed.
“It’ll be okay,” Miranda said.
“No, it won’t,” Olivia groaned. “I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to talk to him. I want to spend time with you. Like we said we would. You made me promise.”
Miranda felt another stab of guilt at the tone with which her sister repeated the word “want,” as if it were a chore, like cleaning the dishes.
“We’ll still be there together,” Miranda said. “You don’t have to talk to him if you don’t want to.”
Olivia sat up and flashed a glare at Miranda, as if she were missing an important point.
“We can’t do anything about it now anyway,” Miranda said weakly.
“Yes we can. You can,” Olivia said. Barely audible, she murmured, “You’re supposed to.”
“I can’t get rid of them if they’re already coming along,” Miranda said.
“What about your friend Lenny?” Olivia said. “She doesn’t like them.”
“I’m not sure Lenny will make it today,” Miranda said.
“She has to come—and then she’ll get the Browns to leave!” Olivia said.
“No she won’t. They like everyone,” Miranda said.
Olivia stood up with a huff.
“Is this some sort of punishment?” she asked, more to the ceiling than her sister. In silence, she pulled her socks on and finished neatening up and packing her bag. From the hall came sounds of people walking back and forth, to and from the bathroom and the dorm room, as the rest of the hostel awoke and got ready for the day.
After zipping up her bag, Olivia cast her eye around the room, then slapped her leg sharply.
“I left my book in the common room,” she said. “Just let me know when we’re ready to go.”
When Olivia had her hand on the door handle, Miranda stopped her and said, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Olivia replied coldly. “You didn’t do anything.”
“Have you had anything to eat yet?” Miranda asked, forcing a smile.
“I’m not hungry,” Olivia said, leaving Miranda alone in the room.
Before they left, Miranda crept out and stuffed a few muffins in her backpack for her sister. She wasn’t sure when she’d be brave enough to suggest she eat them, but Miranda felt a little better knowing they were there.
Lenny, it turned out, bounced back quickly as soon as she realized the rest of the group was getting ready to leave without her. She was a little less conversational than usual, but a hangover was no fun without an audience.
Marc and the Browns sat on the couches, chatting about the weather while the girls assembled. They were like two teams preparing for a relay marathon, only the girls looked like theirs would be in a desert, for all the stuff Miranda and Olivia planned to lug along. Marc had already gone out to collect food, and the full picnic bag sat at his feet, its contents gradually squishing together and mingling scents.
Just late enough to be certain everyone else was ready, Olivia emerged from her corner to stand slightly behind Miranda. Without much conversation, they shuffled down the hall, and Hugo, who was leaning on the front desk talking to Sophie, waved cheerily as they marched out.
Miranda was struck by the idea that Hugo not only knew all along how things would turn out—that the Browns would find a way into the trip and Greg and Olivia would be thrown together again—but had engineered it that way. Her old resentment of him surged, and she was so intent on shutting the front door on his face that she didn’t realize Sophie was on the other side, trying to pull the door open to get out. With a grunt of frustration, Miranda let go of the knob, and the blonde girl darted out and down the stairs ahead of them. As the door swung shut again, Miranda could have sworn she heard Hugo chuckling.
Lenny led the way down the stairs while Marc waited beside the landing for Miranda to join him. But Miranda, noticing that no one stood between her sister and Greg Brown, ignored Marc and grabbed Olivia’s arm, creating a wall with their bodies so no one else could walk alongside them.
8
INTO THE WATERS I RODE
Greg Brown wasn’t happy. He hadn’t been for at least three years, give or take a few weeks—not since the silent hospital bed where he had sat beside her before the end. Gradually, the unhappiness became a habit. He put it on with his shirt in the morning, and like his shirt, it was so ordinary he didn’t stop to think about it much once it was there.
Today was different. It didn’t fit right. It was more uncomfortable, prickly.
When he thought of Miranda’s face yesterday, her tone, the words she had used, his ordinary
unhappiness collapsed into a seething new kind. What an idiot he’d been. He must have embarrassed Olivia and her sister and himself, and probably his father, too. He had just wanted to act like the poems, but maybe he had been selfish. Miranda certainly made it sound that way. And Olivia hadn’t said anything at all.
On the walk to the Metro, he hung behind his father, afraid to approach anyone, the Somersets especially. But through the chaotic shuffle onto the Metro train, packed in with a crowd of tourists who didn’t pay attention to where they or their elbows were going, Greg was forced in next to Miranda. He clung grimly and silently to a ceiling strap the entire ride, and when they changed trains to a different line, he held firm, like a rock against the tide of onrushing travelers, until he was certain he would board well after Miranda, with a buffer of several strangers between them.
As he emerged from the clinging darkness of the Metro and looked up at the double pillars of the Plaça d’Espanya, Greg Brown stood apart from the rest of the group. The Metro had brought them to the very bottom of the little mountain.
Mr. Brown soon joined his son and smiled up at the sun.
“Look at the way the light makes them look even bigger,” he said of the pillars. “But I wonder why they put them there. They don’t seem to be doing anything, or decorating anything.”
Lenny had not taken off her sunglasses since leaving the hostel, but she was unprepared for the brightness outside.
“It’s fucking bright out today,” she growled to Marc on the escalator out of the Metro.
“Technically, I think we are marginally closer to the sun,” Marc said smoothly.
Miranda and Olivia arrived next. They didn’t speak at all. Though their arms were no longer locked, they stood close enough to discourage outside conversation.
Olivia squinted and could barely see.
Her guidebooks had told her that the Plaça d’Espanya, where they stood now, was one of the largest squares in Barcelona; that, like the Plaça Catalunya, it was the meeting of several major arteries of the city; and that the two Venetian towers they looked up at now, hulking square pillars with pyramid tops, pointed the way up the mountain. Past the towers, two flights of steps flanked a sloping park. Above, the steps emptied onto a wide, sunny terrace, and from there a final flight of steps, like the ones in the front of important civic buildings back home, led up to a gleaming palace, rounded and sprawling. They were looking up at Montjuic, the lonely mountain that peered over Barcelona and its port.
As Miranda shaded her eyes, her first thought was of the vertigo the tower builders must have felt at the base of the climb. Disoriented, she looked down again.
They marched up the slanting ground.
“It looks like the Magic Fountain is under repair,” Marc said, referring to the famous centerpiece fountains on the terraces between the stairs. “Too bad.” Instead of tiers of dancing water, there were only empty concrete pools in the center of each wide landing that led to a hulking, ornate building presiding over what appeared, from that angle, to be the top of the mountain. The only working segment of the Magic Fountain was up there, a faint mist in the distance right in front of the Palau. Surreally, a pragmatic-looking escalator like the one they had just taken out of the Metro ran alongside the stone steps up the mountain. Although most of the tourists were ascending that way, the group eyed the stairs.
“Hell if I’m walking those,” Lenny grumbled. But when she noticed she was the only one of their group who steered toward the escalator, she found the strength to veer back to the stairs.
“Look,” Mr. Brown said to Greg. “It’s the palace you’ve seen on the hill! Every night, my son’s seen this lighted palace on the hill, and we’ve wondered what it was. And here it is! As if we’ve flown up through the night and into the day to find it.”
“It’s the Palau Nacional,” Lenny said, without looking. “It houses a major art gallery.” She brushed past them, grumbling to herself. “Read a fucking book...”
Olivia looked to her right as they strode up the promenade, an outsized landing between the first two flights of stairs. Looking up, she felt as if each flight was only a tiny inch forward. On the other side of a row of groomed trees, smaller fountains separate from the Magic Fountain spat at the sky, and the scent of fresh mist and mildew drifted coolly toward them. In the sun, the heat was just shy of wilting, and in the shade, the coolness was piercing, and in all places Miranda’s presence seemed to squeeze her.
On the other side of the row of trees, children played behind a haze of flying water. Mothers called to them, but Olivia couldn’t see the break in the barrier where they’d all gotten through.
“It’s like in a museum,” Marc said, nodding toward the row of trees. He slowed to join the Somersets, partly to keep them company and partly for a better view of the Browns catching up to Lenny. “The trees aren’t a real barrier,” he said, “but like the line on the floor in front of pictures in a museum, people think they can’t pass through.”
“It’s such a nice pattern,” Miranda said. “I like watching it go by.”
Something in that set off Olivia, and she broke free from her sister’s side. Miranda watched with mild panic as Olivia stepped quickly toward the others, then past them and ahead of them.
“Teenagers,” Marc said, smiling.
The Palau Nacional sat atop the steep hill, large, domed, and dully orange. It grew out of the mist of the lone working fountain and rose in intricate layers with each flight of wide, shallow steps, which they climbed so achingly slowly they felt they were barely moving at all. The palace seemed to move like a king rising in a stately, grave manner to greet the peasants. But if they stopped to crane, pain would flood back into their thighs.
Olivia jogged forward with defiant freedom. A high, singing headache in her forehead gave an edge to the small scenes sliding past her. Up here, she could almost pretend she was alone and not followed by a damp, heavy load of companions and her sister. Each impact of her feet with the ground sent a bolt of pain into her head, but each soaring step gave her a brief sense of weightlessness that carried her through it.
She breathed the cool air deeply and shook back her hair. Mentally, she had already placed herself inside the Palau, safe and sheltered as a princess.
“Look, there’s Olivia,” Mr. Brown said to Greg. “She’s gotten far ahead of us.”
Greg merely shrugged and looked in another direction, not even noticing he was staring at a kid picking his nose.
“You could run up to her and talk. I don’t mind,” Mr. Brown said.
Greg turned back to his father with a faded smile.
“I’d rather stay here with you,” he said.
“Hey Greg, is your dad okay with all these stairs?” Lenny asked. “You guys should go over to the escalator.”
“I’m actually enjoying—”
“Come on, Dad,” Greg said, slightly more perceptive than his father. “I’ll go with you.”
When they stepped onto the escalator together, Greg realized two things: how sore his own feet were, and what a relief it was to get away from Lenny, who didn’t work very hard to hide her dislike. It almost made him want to laugh, even though it probably wasn’t very nice. He chewed it over as he rose serenely through dust-shot light shafting toward the Palau. In the mottled sunshine, he put his hand on his father’s shoulder and smiled faintly.
They were rising high above the bickering tourists. They were flying up through cloud and tree with an eerie cinema-crane quality, toward the dull gold Palau.
Olivia, in a final sprint, reached the terrace at the top before anyone else. As soon as she stopped climbing, her thighs boomed out in an ache that made her legs feel like lead, and her head spun with her empty stomach and the new sensation of standing still. She almost reached out for the balustrade, but only brushed her fingers on the cold stone. She straightened up as her heart sang to a staccato beat.
Below her, armies of steps crawled down and around the out-of-commission fount
ain. Above her, the Palau spread itself like a lion seated. And between them, the terrace rippled out, gray and cool. There was a coffee stand surrounded by low metal seats and lower tables, and there was a man playing guitar.
Chest heaving, eyes laughing, and free from the ground, Olivia turned and saw Greg and his father rising smoothly to her level. At first, they appeared like ghosts, vaporous and floating, and Olivia at that moment wouldn’t question anything strange that happened, especially because she suspected that the man eerily tuning his guitar behind her was related to the accordion player near the Cathedral her first day. The guitar player’s six tinny strings plunked and picked through the terrace like the whistling of an out-of-tune wind through tone-deaf trees—or possibly the voices of a chorus of ethereal birds with long, green wings. As her body coursed with energy, looking at the steps she had just climbed, Greg Brown came toward her, smiling because she was alone. Soon, he was standing near her, and now that she was free of Miranda, all of her guilt and anxiety melted with his smile.
She’d had no idea that her sister had that dampening effect on her. The realization was only a short flicker in the spreading warmth through her limbs. As long as she was unwatched, she was free to feel what she wanted to feel. She briefly forgot that the others would eventually appear. She thought maybe, in the sound of the fountain, she could hear the sea again.
“I beat you up the stairs,” she said, gasping.
“I took the escalator with my dad,” he said.
“Oh, that’s an escalator?” she said, peering around him. “It looked like you were stepping off the back of a bird.”
“It is a bird. Can’t you see it hovering? We just call it an escalator to avert a public panic,” Greg said. “As soon as people know it’s a bird, they’ll all have an allergy.”
Olivia laughed, and they looked down the hill together.
Queens of All the Earth Page 10
