Queens of All the Earth

by Hannah Sternberg

  She thought about the roof of the cathedral. She remembered the way she’d treated Mr. Brown. Then she thought of how Hugo already knew their travel plans, and how they also had to say goodbye to everyone else they knew at the hostel, and realized that Miranda had probably done all of the lying for her before she even knew they were lies.

  Olivia fell to her knees, hard, and dragged the suitcase out. She barely knew where to begin, so she unpacked everything slowly, and laid it out on her bed as she had the night before she’d left home. She made a pile for shirts and a pile for jeans, and a heap of socks and a mound of underwear. Then she swept all the dirty items into a plastic bag that she buried at the very bottom of her suitcase. With that hidden away, everything else looked neat, and the order calmed her and numbed her singing nerves.

  Each rigid movement, swiveling between the bed and the open suitcase, followed a steady tempo. The words you’re leaving in the morning marched with a Metronome beat. Her heart slowed to the rhythm of her packing, and when the bed was clear, she fell into it. When at last she blinked her sore eyes, she felt a tear oozing out of the corner of one of them.

  There was a light knock, and then the door creaked. With a surge of adrenaline, Olivia threw herself onto her other side, facing the wall. She didn’t want to speak to Miranda, but she couldn’t bring herself to feign sleep, so she stared dry-eyed at the bumpy whiteness of the wall in front of her nose and waited for her sister to leave again.

  But it wasn’t Miranda, she realized as the thinness of the shadow passed across the wall. It was Sophie, dropping off a stapled receipt. When the door shut again, Olivia was alone, and she set her hand against the wall, turned her face into the pillow, and lay still and tense.

  Their last night in Barcelona closed as drearily as a chill, drizzly November day in the dripping hills of Virginia. The sun, veiled by the haze of pollution and discontent, set, restless and unwatched.

  10

  A FRAGILE CERTAIN SONG

  There were suitcases in the hall. They did not belong to the Somersets, because Miranda insisted on keeping their bags in their room, with her, until they were ready to check out, to protect them against the negligible possibility of theft.

  The bags in the hall belonged to Ana and Chas, the Polish couple—they were also leaving that day, to continue the tour they’d planned, and Miranda was silently thankful, because it made it easier for her and her sister to slip out unnoticed.

  She felt a jolt of jealousy, however, noticing how much other people seemed to care that Ana and Chas were leaving—how they all took the opportunity to exchange e-mail addresses and plan to meet again somewhere else. But Miranda had long ago concluded she just wasn’t popular or easily likeable, so, if she were to leave unnoticed, it would be by her own choice, and she would be unmissed.

  Ana and Chas’s departure also drew the Browns out of the dorm room. Mr. Brown held Ana’s hand and spoke quietly to them both, a crinkly smile on his face, while his son hung back and blinked nervously. When at last the couple picked up their bags—the Browns were the last to wish them well—Greg clapped Chas on the shoulder and nodded. He hadn’t spoken a word the whole time.

  Olivia, who observed it all from the dining table, was thankful for that, because, in her own unconscious and breathless way, she feared hearing his voice. She studied her cereal closely, as it went soggy around the edges, bubbles of milk floating lazily up when she lifted and then dropped her spoon. She felt him there all the while, in the same way she had sensed him whenever he had been near—a warmth that began just below her breastbone and exploded down to the tips of her fingers.

  She had been sensitive to his comings and goings, even when doors were between them. She had lain in her bed all the night before, wondering when he would creep down their hall, and if he had ever come back from the Plaça Catalunya, though she understood that even Greg Brown wasn’t so abnormal that he would run away while on vacation. Would it all hurt less, she wondered, if she just stayed, with him?

  But there he was, and he wasn’t looking at her, either. Olivia was engulfed by last night’s dreams—by the vague hope that, despite all the confusion, he would appear; that something would happen, something large, and that would tell her whether to stand up and smile at him or just to go.

  They had an hour before they had to leave for the airport. Olivia had woken early because she couldn’t sleep, but having packed the night before, she had nothing to do to kill time while waiting out here for Miranda.

  There was nothing to distract her from the gnawing fear that Greg would drift toward her and start talking, or maybe ask her why she was going. When Greg followed his dad back to the dorm room, Olivia set down her breakfast and darted for her own room.

  “Do you want to take a walk?” she asked Miranda, stepping into the room.

  “I still have a few things to do,” Miranda said into her coffee mug.

  Olivia felt the same stifling rage as yesterday.

  “What can you possibly have to do?” she said. “I want to look around one last time.”

  “I have to finish packing and settle up with Hugo.”

  “Well, you can do that while I go take a walk.”

  “Olivia, I’d really rather you wait here. You don’t want us to be late and miss our flight,” Miranda said.

  Olivia pouted, and as she began to return to the common room to clean her dishes, she turned around and grabbed Miranda’s coffee mug from out of her hands.

  “I’ll clean this for you,” Olivia said over her shoulder. She was in the kitchen rinsing it out before Miranda could even open her mouth, and soon, Olivia was furiously washing everything in the sink.

  She had started with her own dishes, but as she set them in the drying rack, she was seized by a familiar fear. It was the fear of a girl in her bed the morning she was supposed to leave her childhood home and learn to be a grown-up.

  As long as there was something else to clean here, something else to set right, as long as she stayed here at this sink with the water running over her hands, she wouldn’t have to take another step toward an ending.

  Her lungs caught the feeling and wanted nothing to do with air. Her breath slowed until the air merely pulsed up and down like ripples in a bathtub.

  The kitchen went softly out of focus, her eyes fixing on the sign above the sink, until it seemed to float off the wall, or perhaps the wall drifted away from behind it.

  The sign said, “Have you Cleaned what you Used??”

  The sink was empty. Olivia’s foot rested heavily on the pedal that made the water run.

  Punctuation—a sign without a sound.

  A small voice inside her said, “Not now,” but she didn’t listen. She was already on the slide.

  The sound of water had covered over the sound of Miranda closing their door. It had covered over the shuffle of Hugo’s disappearing into the private end of the hostel. Now it covered over the creak of floorboards as Greg Brown entered the common room, but it couldn’t cover over the shiver that darted down Olivia’s arms as he appeared behind her, like the first jolt of consciousness when waking in the morning.

  She lifted her foot and the water stopped, but her hands were still dripping.

  As if an invisible hand held her chin, she looked up. Her eyes met his eyes. They stood, looking and seeing each other, dripping, frozen in the crisp morning light.

  Then she breathed deeply. He stepped toward her.

  Miranda, in her room, was not packing. She was looking at the piles of her things stacked neatly on the bed: the old clothes she’d brought with her and the new gifts she had bought yesterday night—a fan for her mother and candies for her coworkers. She looked at the carefully alphabetized and flattened pile of pamphlets, tourist information, and ticket stubs, and at the Spanish-language Casablanca guidebook sitting next to it. She looked at her shoes, upright and straight on the floor at the foot of her bed. She looked at her jacket, neatly aligned next to her open suitcase. With all these things toge
ther and in order, the room seemed barren, wounded. She’d thought the room would seem bigger, but it actually felt smaller.

  The window emitted only a square foot of petrified light. The orange curtains were faded and dusty. The floorboards between their beds were worn and splintered near the door, and standing in the middle, she could touch each bed with her hands, bending over pertly like a ballerina at the barre.

  She began to place her possessions quickly but neatly into her bag. They fit perfectly.

  The door hung open a crack, and it creaked open another inch when someone outside tapped on it gently. Miranda assumed it was Olivia and wondered why she would bother knocking. She called out for her to come in.

  Mr. Brown poked his head around the door, and the rest of him followed sheepishly. It seemed foolish in a man his age, but Miranda had little room left to be petty.

  “I think Greg left something in here,” he said as he came in. “But he won’t come and get it, and I don’t understand why, if it was that important, he didn’t notice it missing before. Have you found anything since you’ve been here?”

  “I wouldn’t know what to look for,” Miranda replied in a daze.

  “I think it was a piece of paper. We always have plenty of paper—we bring notebooks everywhere—but this one seemed important.”

  “Notebooks,” Miranda said, and the word triggered the memory of yesterday’s discovery in the common room. Her blood ran hot. “It was your notebook! You—you—I can’t believe you’d write that about my sister—about your own son!”

  Mr. Brown sat down and looked at her with a contracted brow. The folds of his face molded around incomprehension and concern.

  “Wrote what?” he said. “Slow down and explain it to me.”

  “The notebook on the kitchen table. My sister saw it yesterday. I told her not to, but what she read in it was about her.” Miranda took a deep breath. “It was about Greg kissing her. The other day. On the beach.”

  Mr. Brown’s face lit up, which was not the reaction Miranda had been hoping for. “Greg and your sister?” For a moment, he was unable to express himself. Then, he began to laugh. “Well, that’s kind of sweet, isn’t it? Isn’t it nice they found each other?”

  “No!” Miranda exclaimed.

  “But don’t you think leaving early is breaking her heart? Hugo told me about it last night,” said Mr. Brown. “And I can see it’s breaking your heart.” He leaned forward.

  Miranda recoiled.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t think you understand at all,” she said, crossing her arms.

  “Why are you running away?” Mr. Brown pressed, implacable. “Is it someone you’ve met? Is it Marc?”

  Miranda was furious with a passion she hadn’t felt in years. Her eyes flamed, and fire bubbled up her throat.

  “It isn’t always about a boy!” she snapped, a tenseness in her shoulders and her jaw. She held herself rigidly. “Sometimes you don’t want it to be about a boy.”

  “What happened?” Mr. Brown asked with irritating gentleness.

  Miranda stomped. She bit her lips, looked at the ceiling, and shifted from foot to foot.

  “Why should I have to tell you anything?” she finally asked.

  “You don’t.”

  Miranda glanced out the window. She’d never really looked at the view before. The window was just above the adjacent roof, and she saw birds settling on the chimney of the building next-door, dirty and disheveled. The sunlight was not direct, but through the translucent curtains, she felt its diffused glow illuminate her face forgivingly.

  “Travel romances never work. I know. I met a boy in Madrid. He told me he wanted to come and stay with me back home. I went home and never heard from him again.” It gushed out unbidden. She’d never even told Olivia.

  “It isn’t about the boy,” Mr. Brown echoed, standing and offering his seat on Olivia’s clear bed to Miranda. She scowled at him but couldn’t refuse. She felt twelve years old, being ushered from place to place.

  “Let me guess—you never wrote to him, either.” Mr. Brown knelt in front of her, taking her hands.

  “He promised me,” she said. “I never promised anything.”

  It was there again, everything she had felt, the static prickle when he—the boy from Madrid—had entered a room, wanting him so much it had scared her. So she had left him, let it drop, and sunk back into the comfortable numbness of everyday life. She’d made the cut cleanly, and bled until she was dry and impervious, and everything turned normal again.

  But the blood bubbled up again, and boiled behind her eyes and made her burn. She snatched her hands away but instantly regretted it. She looked into Mr. Brown’s eyes.

  “Why did you come back to Spain?” Mr. Brown said gently.

  “I really liked Spain,” Miranda said. “I think I wanted to prove it wasn’t just because of him. But we’re going to Africa now...”

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “Your room is still yours. You have a place to stay.”

  “But Olivia wants to go to Africa,” Miranda said. “She was so desperate to get away, and I did it to her.”

  “You were only trying to be a good sister,” Mr. Brown said. “She’ll understand. You could have done worse.”

  “I don’t think she’ll understand,” Miranda said, sniffling. As an afterthought, she added, “I don’t think she ever really understands. Something always gets lost between us.”

  Olivia’s breakdown that summer had dredged it all up. She could have tried harder to find a job in Williamsburg. She could have tried to move Olivia to live with her in Arlington. She could have come home for the funeral. She could have been a better sister. But all along she had wanted only to make herself feel better.

  Mr. Brown heaved himself up to his feet, and Miranda jumped to help him. He dusted his knees.

  “You don’t always have to know everything about each other’s hearts and minds,” he said as her hand remained on his shoulder. “But at least you can accept it.”

  “Accept what?”

  He just smiled.

  As they stood together, Miranda gradually recovered her stability and began to feel her age. She could shrug off Mr. Brown’s last piece of rambling wisdom as she used to shake off his kindness, but this time it was with patience rather than flinty disrespect. She didn’t think Mr. Brown would mind.

  In the settling silence, she remembered why Mr. Brown had come in.

  “Weren’t you looking for something?” she asked him.

  Mr. Brown paused, looking slightly puzzled.

  “Oh, well,” he said, with a twinkle that made Miranda wonder if it was all a ploy. “It doesn’t matter now that you’re staying.”

  Then he shuffled out of the room as quietly as he had come.

  With a sigh, Miranda settled back into the bright and happy morning.

  A sigh rippled like a breeze through the corridors and corners of the hostel and filtered through the empty common room, settling on the place where Greg had stepped forward and caught Olivia’s dripping hand. She looked up at him, so close now.

  “You caught me,” she said quietly. “You win.”

  “Were we playing something?”

  “You weren’t,” Olivia said, a smile dawning on her face.

  He smiled at her smile and leaned his cheek on her hair.

  “Can I talk to you now?” he asked, gently tugging her toward the empty dormitory. “Can I get to know you?”

  “Yes,” Olivia said.

  In the place where they had been, their warmth lingered.

  When Miranda strolled into the common room, the place was empty, drops of water still fresh on the kitchen floor. The window at the back rattled, and Miranda opened it herself, because it looked like it was going to be a warm day. The curtains flapped against her face. Just for one second, the world was orange.

  She realized she didn’t know where her sister was.

  Miranda ran into the dormitory to ask Marc or Mr. Brown, but she stopped in th
e door.

  Against the light of the back window, silhouetted against the orange curtains, she saw Olivia’s ear against his heart. She saw his cheek on her hair. She heard the soft murmur of their voices. She gathered all she needed to know about Olivia wanting to go to Africa.

  She stepped quietly out again.

  Mr. Brown was not to be found in the common room or the kitchen. He had probably gone in search of someone else’s life to change. Alone, she lay down on the couch and spotted Olivia’s novel on the end table, forgotten. She picked it up and flipped to the bookmarked page.

  She remembered reading this book in eighth grade, and having it read to her by her father years before. She remembered how tense she’d felt during the scary parts, though she no longer could remember what happened. She remembered believing that real life was like that, and asking whether she would find the same concepts in the encyclopedia. Later, when she was a bit more grown-up, she would wince with embarrassment at the desperation of her imagination, and her gullibility—but after that, she would laugh and tell the story to her friends, a decibel too loudly, when they talked about how stupid they had been when they were little. Now, she could look back on these things as if that girl were a different person—blameless, sheltered, and honest—who believed in novels and sought adventure tales, if not adventure itself.

  The sun defined itself high in the sky, and as it flew, it gained in color and intensity.

  Finally, the wide, squat door of the hostel was nudged open, and the world breezed in, in the form of Marc, who bore a paper coffee cup and a brown bag stained with oil and sugar.

  He stopped with a faltered step, and it was quiet enough for Miranda to hear his coffee slosh forward as if eager to be other places.

  “I thought you were your sister for a second,” he said, and then, after another tense pause, “Aren’t you supposed to be in Africa?”

  Miranda let the book drop onto her chest and looked up at him out of the corner of her eye.

  “Plans changed,” she said. “You might not want to go in there.” She pointed her chin in the direction of the dorm room door.