“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.
Looking farther down, Olivia saw Barcelona. She and Greg watched it together. But when Miranda, Lenny, and Marc crested the last steps with jolting strides, Olivia suddenly didn’t want to be seen with Greg. Without speaking, she turned away abruptly and tried to lose herself in the loose crowd around the guitar player.
After a pause, Greg, a little dizzy with confusion, ambled across the terrace to find his father sitting in one of the low metal chairs, looking out of place.
“Did you have a nice race?” Mr. Brown asked pleasantly. Greg just sat beside him and interrogated the ground with his eyes.
As soon as the others broke away to visit the coffee stand, Miranda’s gaze locked on her sister, and she made a beeline for her with the ruthless efficiency of an attack helicopter.
“Oh, there you are,” she said. “Where did you go off to?”
“Here,” Olivia said.
Lenny and Marc sailed over with drinks and snacks in hand.
“There’s got to be some way we can lose the Browns,” Lenny said.
“Can’t you just drop it?” Olivia said.
As if on cue, Mr. Brown, across the terrace, noticed the group and hoisted himself out of his chair. Olivia had been watching the Browns out of the corner of her eye, but when Mr. Brown stood, she felt a jolt of guilt as if she had been caught staring, and she looked the other way.
In a matter of moments, he was there, dragging his son behind him. “Does anybody want to go in the museum?” he asked.
Marc’s face brightened, and he was just about to respond when Lenny said, “I don’t think the rest of us are into it, but if you want to, you should go. When else are you going to get a chance? You can catch up with us later.”
Mr. Brown looked at Greg, and Greg, caught in a corner, was too startled to lie.
“I’d like to stay outside,” Greg blurted.
“I think that’s a great idea,” Mr. Brown said, smiling at his son.
Lenny looked from one Brown to the other and back again.
“Well then,” she practically growled, “let’s go.”
Lenny spun on her heels and struck out, leading the group away from the trembling glass doors, down the stately palace steps to the terrace at the top of the escalators, through the low metal chairs, out of the tremulous cloud of picked guitar strings, and toward the green on the other side of the Palau. They found a worn path that snaked around the right of the Palau, leading past a dusty little park to the Olympic complex and other attractions behind it. Marc clung to Miranda, and Miranda tried to cling to Olivia, but Olivia evaded her.
Looking straight ahead, Olivia didn’t realize—until their paces had aligned—that Greg was also slightly apart from the clot of companions. He too had been looking directly ahead.
“My dad might get tired soon,” he said, as if he felt he had to say something.
“Well, you should stop and buy him a cup of coffee,” Olivia said, without slowing down to let him separate from her. “You can sit together and we’ll come back down to you at the end.”
“I don’t want a cup of coffee,” said Greg, who pulled even with her just as unstoppably. “And he’s not allowed to drink it.”
They walked in silence for a short stretch. Greg glanced at Olivia often. Olivia looked ahead.
“He’s all right, as long as he has a place to sit when he needs a rest,” said Greg. “And—and I like—I think he likes being around people. A big group of people. Nice people. Like you.”
Olivia bit her lip. She didn’t want to grin at the shy way he rambled. She wanted to feel annoyed so she could brush him off without feeling bad, like Lenny—only not really like Lenny. Maybe in a better, less mean way, because Lenny wasn’t very nice and Greg said I was nice people.
The thing that made her afraid of Greg now was not Miranda’s disapproval; Miranda was far behind. Something made her afraid of meeting his eye or touching his shoulder with her shoulder as they walked so close together that she felt the heat of his body next to hers. Maybe she’d like it too much and it would show.
She took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know why I’m—we’re so special.” She stopped suddenly, realizing how egotistical that sounded. She started walking again, staring at the ground. “I mean, Miranda’s made it so hard to be around me, and there are so many nicer people around.”
When she didn’t hear a response, she looked up and saw Greg looking at her in a way that answered why. She looked away again.
“Your sister talked to me last night,” Greg said.
Olivia felt as though she had tripped over something large and hard. The others had long fallen behind, and Greg and Olivia were on a dusty yellow dirt path that led around the back of the Palau. The top of Montjuic was a wide, rippling plateau—even at the top, the path took them over rises and dips as they headed toward the other attractions on the crest.
Olivia tried to look more at the cacti and palm trees they walked between than at Greg as he spoke. Her lips trembled and her pulse hammered.
“She didn’t seem—happy,” he said. “And I thought maybe I could avoid you, if that’s what you wanted. But then today, this morning, my dad didn’t know. And by the time I found out we were all going together, it was too late, and then I saw you, and you looked different. Like you weren’t happy, either.”
“I had just woken up,” Olivia said.
“Why are you so afraid of her?” asked Greg.
Olivia stopped dead in her tracks.
“Who?” she said.
“You know,” he said.
“I’m not afraid of anyone,” Olivia said, her voice growing shriller. “She’s my sister. I trust her. And stop being nosy. This is our family. Go look after your dad.”
Her heart hammered immediately, but she didn’t take the words back. She wanted to feel powerful, like Miranda. She wanted to control the situation, like Miranda. She wanted for once to hold her ground, and holding it against Greg was less frightening than confronting Miranda—no, not frightening, she thought. He can’t be right.
Greg looked away, kicked the dirt shallowly, and then looked up, stretching his neck. He folded his hands into his pockets and looked back down.
Then they both began to walk again. They couldn’t help walking next to each other. Their paces broke and then aligned. A flight of pigeons rose up, flew across their way, and then swooped over and upwards to settle somewhere else.
She wondered if she resented him a little for going through worse times than her and coming out better.
“Do you feel different because you came here?” Greg asked. “You know, it just seems like things seem different once you’ve been somewhere out of your, uh, comfort zone.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Olivia said, immediately regretting it.
Greg looked into her face, though she refused to tear her glance away from the path ahead of them.
“You
sound like Lenny now,” he said.
That landed like a slap in the face. At first, the only retort she could think of was a growl. Finally, she said, “I came here for a vacation, not a Lifetime movie.”
They walked a little further—long enough for her to think of something else.
“I’m a boring person, okay?” Olivia said. “But I’m boring because I want to be. I like boring.”
“You’re not,” Greg said simply. “You’re not boring at all. You’re not sleepy like they are—indifferent. Yesterday, when I saw you on the beach—when you were running to me—”
“I didn’t run to you,” Olivia said. “I was running to the water. I didn’t see you.”
“Okay. I didn’t—I thought—I’m sorry,” he said.
She felt a stab of guilt. He kept talking, for once unaware she was staring directly at him.
“I want to know who you are,” Greg said, “because I think that person would be... someone kind of like me. Maybe not because you and me belong together forever or anything like that. But just because you have to try to experience something. I don’t know. The point is that you did it, not that it was perfect, or right.”
“I need to go,” said Olivia. “Back to my sister. Leave me alone.” She did not sound as confident as she’d hoped. Her heart was still pounding.
They rounded a corner and discovered the path had led them to the Olympic complex, a vast, desolate, and clean expanse of empty arenas, mammoth and cold.
Greg stopped abruptly, and so did she, as if she were tied to him with a string. The dirt ended at the edge of harsh gray cement, and Greg did not step over the line.
Behind him, the Palau hulked on its hill. Greg reached for her hand, but his fingers only brushed hers when the rush of her pulse told her to pull away and run toward the safety of the group.
Miranda and the rest had gained considerably, even with Mr. Brown in tow, and Olivia was out of breath when she stumbled to Miranda’s side, back on the yellow dirt road. When she looked back, Greg was no longer where they had stood.
“Olivia! I was getting worried,” Miranda said, though Olivia couldn’t help suspecting that Miranda had only missed her as soon as she saw her. “Where were you?”
“So what is all this?” Olivia asked, flapping her hands at the monster arena dominating the swell behind the Palau. Her verve to change the subject made even Lenny look at her askance. Olivia hunched her shoulders as if to shrink from the attention she had just gained.
Taking a deep breath, she sat down on the edge of the curved ramp railing that snaked downward toward the rest of the complex. Tiny tourists just like her crawled over the concrete plains surrounding the buildings. The sun was so bright, she squinted until her eyes were nearly shut and her whole face pulled taut, her mouth puckering downward in an unconscious pout.
She took her pocket guide out of her shoulder bag, started flipping through it, turned it right-side up, and stared fiercely at the page on the Montjuic Olympic complex, snapping her head up and down to compare pictures with their subjects.
As Mr. Brown said something to the others, Olivia channeled all her attention into her book. Greg materialized from around a concrete curve, spoke with his father, and then struck off in the direction from which they had come. Mr. Brown lingered only a little longer, then set off after him, but not at a pace to suggest he meant to catch up. Miranda finally came toward Olivia’s perch and filled her in.
“Lenny’s relieved,” Miranda said. “Looks like the Browns won’t be coming with us after all.”
“What? What did he say?” Olivia asked in one breath.
“Mr. Brown was getting tired already, and Greg seemed to think it was better for them if they made their way back and stayed close to the hostel.”
“Oh.”
Olivia looked out but was blinded by the light cast down by the sun and reflected up by expanses of glinting, simmering gray pavement. She imagined she saw two small figures on the dirt path, one taller, but it was probably just a residual image.
“So that’s it,” she said with a sigh.
“I hope you weren’t too uncomfortable,” Miranda said.
Olivia straightened with a pang. “You weren’t,” she snapped. “And that’s all that matters.”
“Olivia, I’m sorry if I—”
“You’re always sorry,” Olivia said, getting up. “I don’t know why you keep saying that.”
With a feeling like ice running down her back, Olivia wondered if she’d made the wrong decision in bowing to the group’s judgment of the Browns. With the warmth of Greg’s smile gone, the company of the others seemed bitter.
She marched up to Marc, cutting a clearly visible wake of frustration toward her sister. Marc only raised an eyebrow.
“Are we ready to go now?” Olivia asked.
“I think Lenny’s flirting with those gentlemen, but I’d hate to interrupt her to find out,” he said.
Lenny was chatting with two men in reflective gear leaning against a scaffold constructed around the entrance of the main arena. Olivia and Miranda watched her from a distance for a few minutes, waiting for her to return, before sending Marc out on reconnaissance. They watched from afar as Marc was promptly dismissed, and he returned almost immediately, looking slightly amused—as usual.
“No need to wait,” he said. “Obviously, she’s researching.”
Miranda smiled tightly, and Olivia wasn’t listening.
They set off again, along the sweltering concrete path away from the arena, gaining speed toward the nearest shade. The tabletop of the mountain rose now, revealing a little peak hidden by the Palau when viewed from the bottom. “How far is it up this mountain?” Marc asked with a laugh.
There weren’t any signs that said “This far up the mountain,” so the three travelers trekked slowly out of the Olympic complex, encountering a few double-backs and dead ends before they emerged fully and pointed themselves in the right direction.
The winding, deserted, quiet road ahead narrowed as it rose toward the botanical garden Miranda had read about in her guidebooks. At the garden gates, in the shade of a kiosk that looked vaguely like the visitor-information huts in national parks back in the United States, they bought their tickets in dense silence. The Jardí Botànic de Barcelona was a wide, rambling park of cacti, trellises, and Jurassic-looking spiny ferns draped over half a hillside, with a grade just steep enough to make walking up feel like work, even though it didn’t look like it should be work. Once inside, Olivia made her way up a winding path and out of sight.
“We’d better look for her,” Miranda said, and Marc, nodding, agreeably meandered away.
With his hands in his pockets, Marc looked down on telephone wires and chain-link fences and the roofs of the city, shy behind the hill at the edge of the garden enclosure.
Miranda, determined to see it all, walked through the Californie, Chili, and Mediterranée occidentale gardens, which is where she found a couple, horizontal on a bench tucked under the garden wall. Miranda was far more embarrassed than they seemed to be, if they noticed her at all.
Olivia was pacing in Afrique du Sud. Pink star-shaped flowers bobbed beside her, and she tried to concentrate on finding the right distance to stand from them so she could enjoy their scent without being overwhelmed by pollen and exacerbating her headache. She sat under the arbor of vines, got up and walked a few paces away, then came back and sat just outside the arch of flowers but found it was uncomfortable in the sun.
Getting up, she saw on the bricks of a pathway a trail of question marks, jauntily tilted, in all different sizes, leading down around a curve. She froze, but then the hammering of her heart sent her tiptoeing down the path, holding her breath.
Around the corner, behind a bush, a hunched figure worked with a piece of chalk, embellishing his question marks as they grew in size. The light shone in Olivia’s eyes and for a moment she was stunned. What did it mean? She thought of the question mark she had found in her room at the hostel
and felt a sudden irrational fear that the figure was Greg. Was it possible he hadn’t gone back to the hostel? Why would he do this?
Suddenly, the boy stood and turned toward her. It was not Greg—it was some local boy, or a lone tourist, suddenly looking guilty. Behind him, Olivia saw that the question marks emanated from a phrase he had written, in Spanish, at the top of the walk. Olivia didn’t know the words.
“What are you doing?” Olivia snapped at him, surprised at her own anger. “Why are you doing that?”
The kid bolted, dropping his chalk. Olivia stared after him, and then at the chalk. She touched it with her shoe, but didn’t pick it up, and eventually she backed away. The rush of adrenaline fading, she wobbled back down the path from where she had come.
She thought of Mr. Brown’s voice, full of enthusiasm in the morning, and how much he had looked forward to a nice day with people he’d thought had wanted him. She remembered the Cathedral, which felt like a month ago, and how eager Mr. Brown had been to keep her company and make her feel comfortable.
It was more than gratitude that generated her regret, though. Mr. Brown deserved to be treated kindly and gently because he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do otherwise, but it was only Greg who cared for him that thoroughly, consistently, and honestly.
Miranda thought the garden plants looked so desert-loving that they barely required enough care to be called “gardened.” The dryness of their roots scrabbling into the dusty ground, the thick toughness of their husks, the spines and prickles, and the small, sterile-looking flowers made her homesick for the gardens she was familiar with—postage-stamp patches of irises, backyards lined with dogwoods and crape myrtles, azaleas and tulips, and the shady wooded bike trails by rivers lined with ferns. Miranda had hoped this would be a pretty garden, but it was just a nature garden.
As she prepared her complaints for Marc, she heard a sharp cry from the other side of the plot where she paced. Looking toward it, she saw Marc himself on his hands and knees, struggling up from the dirt—but he used only one hand, the other awkwardly crooked toward his chest. She hurried toward him.
“What happened?” she called when she was within a few yards.
Queens of All the Earth Page 11