Queens of All the Earth (11 page)

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.

O
livia, 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.

“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.

Olivia was surprised by how exhausted she was when she finally laid herself down on her bed. She dropped off quickly into a flat, blank sleep so heavy that when she awoke again, she wasn’t sure she’d slept at all. At first, she was overwhelmed with the sensation that she was in her bed at home, that it was spring, and that the dogwoods were tapping her window with brightness, and everything was turned around. But the feeling just came from the smell of the old sweatshirt she had rested her head upon.

As she read one of her guidebooks, Miranda sat tensely in the common room, telling herself she wasn’t waiting for Greg to return. Miranda wondered again what the private room had really cost. She kept expecting the Browns to exact some kind of tribute for their supposed good deed. But underneath that, she was afraid they really were as nice as they seemed.

Olivia dozed serenely in that private room, behind the closed door, the translucent curtains pulled, and Miranda waited, thinking she was waiting for her sister to wake up. She waited so intently that Marc gave up on trying to gain her attention and wandered off to speak Spanglish with Hugo in the kitchen, the tall, lean adult and the short, compact young man mumbling awkwardly out of Miranda’s earshot, but just close enough to irritate her as she pretended to focus on the open page.

At last, in the November crispness that follows a warm day, Greg gusted in, coat pulled lazily over his damp shirt, his hair matted with sun and water. His stride was loose and relaxed, and though he didn’t quite smile, he tunelessly hummed some song he must have heard in his head. These things made Miranda furious, especially because they were new on Greg, and she knew immediately they were because he had kissed her sister.

As Greg left the room, she instead glared at Hugo and Marc in the kitchen, but they were talking and didn’t notice her, so she got up and followed Greg into the dormitory room. It was empty except for the two of them, and there he was, toweling his hair vigorously at the end of the room near the window where Miranda and her sister were supposed to be, a new shirt hanging off his shoulders. He turned, and his grin faded in the face of Miranda’s taut frown.