Queens of All the Earth (14 page)

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 fountain. 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.

“Dad has trouble with steps sometimes,” Greg said after a pause.

“You mean you got tired,” said Olivia.

“I did not get tired. I’m not tired.”

“You think you’re a better climber than me.”

“I never said you were a bad one,” said Greg.

“I’ll race you to the top of the palace steps.”

His grin was the starting flag, and they sprinted off, dodging low-set metal chairs, svelte taut-faced women with paper cups of coffee, hordes of ecstatic children escaping the indoors, and a few disapproving attendants smoking cigarettes, until Greg touched the glass door of the art museum.

“I won!” he hollered.

“I got stuck behind a toddler with untied shoes,” Olivia muttered.

“You should have moved him,” Greg said, laughing.

They turned at the same time to look down at the terrace and steps. The man with the guitar continued to tune, but his tuning slid gradually into a canting, simple song that rose and fell rhythmically, vibrating gently across the terrace and up to the glass doors.