Queens of All the Earth (2 page)

On the bus to Barcelona, Miranda sighed. She wished the driver would slow down.

As her sister, next to her, reached for the bar in front of them, Miranda
clutched the edge of her seat. She had insisted they sit up front to see the city as they approached, but now, as she watched the road with the vigilance the driver should have had, she tapped her foot on an imaginary brake. Travel was difficult, she knew from experience, and the only way to shake total exhaustion was activity, activity, activity.

When they arrived, they would begin sightseeing immediately. They would take a few pictures on Miranda’s new digital camera to send to their mother to prove to her they had arrived. They would eat a meal at dinnertime and remain awake until 10 p.m. local time. This Sunday would be a prizefight between herself and sleep, and she would pound exhaustion to pieces, even if that meant ending up black and blue herself.

Miranda moved very fast in the bus to Barcelona. The numbing desire to lie down and do nothing crept up to her eyeballs. She suppressed it and prepared herself to take up the fight for her sister.

She watched the road.

Together they tumbled with the bus, through ridge-backed dragon-green mountains, past the pink houses that bobbed into and out of sight like shards of spectrums in a spinning prism.

“I don’t want to go.”

“Miranda’s already called in and explained the situation. They’re letting you defer your first semester.”

“No, Mom. I don’t want to go.”

“You can take the whole year if that’s what you need. The important thing is that you get better.”

Silence.

“Don’t you want to get better, honey? Don’t you want to be with people your age again?”

Huff. “You don’t get it.”

“I think I understand quite clearly what’s going on here.” Sharply.

“If I go,” slowly, deliberately, “the kids next-door will disappear.”

Pained sigh. “Honey, you know that’s not true. You can’t really believe that.”

“If I go, they’ll be stolen and replaced. There are things in the night that do that.” Matter-of-fact.

Getting up. “How about this. You can stay as long as you need to, but in return you have to go see Dr. Simons twice a week. Deal?”

“He doesn’t get it. He’ll just tell me I’m making it all up.”

“Okay, new deal. You go, or I take all your books away and give them to charity.”

“Mom, you can’t do that!”

“You’ve outgrown them all anyway. I can see now I shouldn’t have let you keep rereading them like that.”

“No you can’t take my books they’re special they’re the only thing that can save those kids Mom no you can’t do it please Mom no don’t do it it’ll kill them—”

“Shh, shh, I won’t, I won’t, I promise I won’t. You just have to go see Dr. Simons.”

Dr. Simons had said Olivia needed “closure.” The word “closure” had a great deal of power over them all.

Lack of closure, Dr. Simons said, was what prevented Olivia from letting go of her childhood. It was the reason she had made only a few scattered friends in high school. It was behind her silence and then, later, behind her delusions.

Dr. Simons talked to Olivia about her father, who had left them long
before she could remember him, and had died with equal invisibility earlier that summer. His disappearance had been so thorough that when Miranda declined to attend the funeral, Olivia wondered if they had both mentally buried him long before.

The doctor talked to her about her sexual history, which was utterly blank and calm. He talked to her about her mother. He talked to her about her sister. He talked to her about the children next-door. She had a bright, strong, healthy mind that gradually let go of its delusions like a flower letting go of its petals at the end of summer.

The blue period followed fantasy.

Dr. Simons encouraged her to garden. Her mother agreed. Contact with nature, she said, was traditionally believed to improve the mood and mental functions of depression sufferers. Their mother used the word “depression” clinically, as if she was ripping off a Band-Aid to show Olivia exactly where it hurt, and Olivia felt her eye twitch every time she heard it. She had recovered just enough feeling to be humiliated by the past month, which plunged her deeper into that dark place inside her that had opened up at the thought of leaving home.

But as the autumn grayed, so did the soothing effect of being home. Losing its leaves and scratching at the ease of mind Olivia so desperately strove to cultivate, autumn at home left her raw and terrified again. With tedious melancholy, home turned on her. Miranda saw it too, and saw the opportunity to promote her own route to closure: travel.

Their mother didn’t believe in Thanksgiving, so Miranda, who had the week off, suggested a vacation to Barcelona. Miranda had spent a semester in Spain when she was in college, and she hoped the experience would lift her sister out of her torpor and make her feel readier for Cornell. Their mother wasn’t coming—she had to be at Dartmouth to interview a published expert on the influence of Orientalism on existentialists in front of a panel of interdisciplinary literary critics and social scientists.

Olivia and Miranda blew out of their childhood home along with the last leaves of autumn, then tumbled from car to plane to bus, and finally to the streets of Barcelona.

Olivia, outside herself, watched the scenes of her first European city bob past like washed-out hand-held film footage as she and Miranda made their way on foot from the bus stop to the hostel. In the corner of an abandoned store window sat a sign faded by the sun, its letters obscured except for one surviving question mark.

The scent of sewage and things frying sent bullets into Olivia’s already pounding head, and on La Rambla, the artery of Barcelona with the broad, shady promenade down its center, each heavy impact of her puffy feet on the wide, sunny pavement echoed in the tender portions of her skull. It was bright, and she was tired; her hands and arms were cramped and her mouth was sticky, and she consistently patted each of her pockets to affirm their custody of important contents, followed occasionally by a nervous crane over her shoulder to glance at the zipper on her backpack.

Mostly, she looked at her feet, trying not to step on the trash that was foreign only in being printed in another language, while bearing the logos she knew well. When she looked up, she could only squint, and so her first glimpses of Barcelona were painful, brief slices of pedestrian signals and street signs.

They arrived at the address Miranda had written down. An exiting couple let them in without question through the creaking iron and glass street door of Sixty-Four La Rambla. Olivia rushed in with evident relief, but Miranda lingered a moment in the doorway to scowl at this breach of security.

Then Miranda, with a confidence that Olivia had not yet learned to question, led them across the tiled and barely lit foyer and into the twilight of the narrow marble staircase that slithered up the center of the building, encircling a cage elevator. The Casa Joven was on the third floor
of a relatively plain and forgotten Art-Nouveau building that bisected the edges of the city’s medieval and nineteenth-century districts.

Below the hostel, a notary and an architect lurked behind elaborately carved wooden doors set with stained glass, defying the shabby decay of the narrow stair they opened onto. Olivia paused for a nanosecond when she thought she saw a question mark faintly chalked in the dim grime of the stairwell wall, but Miranda pulled her past it before she could get a good look.

The Casa Joven, like the businesses below it, was hidden behind a square, hulking green door with a brass knob protruding from the exact center, a door that hung ajar, and Olivia, rising toward it, had a sense that if only it had opened an inch wider, she would have had a glimpse of fantastically intimate scenes of life unfolding just around its edge.

But instead, when Miranda pushed it open, she saw only a narrow passage, cubby-holing a computer, and a sour-faced, blond receptionist. Olivia crowded in awkwardly behind Miranda, jostling both her and the little reception desk as she tried to find a way to get her backpack out of the path of the closing door. After an agonizing moment, she emerged on the right side of the entry hall, leaving her sister to confirm their booking as if she were twelve and Miranda was her mother. Her bags had grown heavier the closer they’d approached their goal, and Olivia now dropped them on the floor of the common room with a wracking groan.

“We have reservations,” she heard Miranda say as she looked around.

Feeling the weight of weary muscles finally relieved, Olivia drank in the safety of stillness, letting the room enclose her and protect her from the painful and strange outside. She looked around the common room, letting her eyes wander from the couches slouching against the left wall, hugging the parquet floor, to the island of the faded braid rug, to the opposite wall harboring two dining tables and a fleet of spindly chairs. Turning to look behind her, she took in the kitchen in a nook open to the rest of the room,
beside the mouth of the hall with the reception computer.

At the back of the common room, a wooden arch supported by lotus-shaped columns embellished a single step up, beyond which a sunken recliner hid in the corner and three computers clustered in front of a large bare window. Olivia took a step toward the window when the recliner moved. It had grown a hand; there was a person inside it.

He leaned forward and materialized as an adolescent about her age, his gangly height folded around a book. His eyes, which seemed to speak when he didn’t, met hers, and then he looked up at the ceiling above her head. Her glance followed his. Above her, strands of a sunburst shot from the center of the hanging lamp.

It was then the room became whole, crystallizing from assorted elements into a hard and definite shape: the painting on the ceiling, geometric and bright with visible brushstrokes; the angular details of the wooden arch, notched by collisions; the footpaths worn into the braided rug.

Then her sister touched her elbow and it all evaporated into invisible ordinariness again, and the silent reader in the chair made himself invisible, too, having turned the beacon of his eyes back to his book.

They followed the blond girl through the right of the common room into a short corridor with doors on both sides and a bathroom at the end.

“On the left, at the back,” the blond girl said, and with a flash of keys into Miranda’s hand, she abandoned the sisters in the corridor.

Miranda and Olivia opened the left door into a long room, where paired bunk beds multiplied in neat rows toward the small window at the back, providing enough sleeping space for about ten people. At the very end was a bunk wedged against the window, which Olivia assumed was “the back.” She shuffled toward it with their things while Miranda followed with hesitation, looking critically around the room.

“Wait, is this
our
room?” Miranda called out the door. “This isn’t
our
room, is it?” But the blond girl was nowhere to be seen.

With numb absence of mind, Olivia scrutinized the flower-specked cotton duvet rolled at the end of a neighboring bunk.

“This can’t possibly be our room,” Miranda said, her confusion growing into anger.

Olivia looked up.

“Where is she? This
can’t
be our room,” Miranda said again, more sharply.

“What’s wrong with it?” Olivia asked.

“I could have sworn I booked a room for two.”

“Yeah, well, we get the whole bunk, both the beds—”

“No, like a private room for two. I
know
I booked a private room for two. I’ve got it on our reservation.”

“Maybe the other beds aren’t filled,” Olivia said, sitting on the empty one she had been examining as if to make her point.

“No, there’s a suitcase under that bunk. And,” Miranda said, advancing toward the door and between two bunks, “there are boxer shorts over here.”

“Miranda, those were under someone’s pillow!”

“Oh my God, they put us in a mixed dorm!”

“I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding.”

“Don’t they have computers to keep things straight? I can’t believe I trusted the reviewers from Australia.”