Queens of All the Earth (20 page)

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 the 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.

Marc’s eyebrows gained altitude significantly. He drew out a kitchen chair and sat in it.

“Pastry?” he offered lamely.

Miranda shook her head but sat up slowly. She watched as he flipped open the notebook still on the kitchen table and scanned its contents casually, with an experienced eye.

With the clarity of looking in a mirror, she now understood who
Marc was.

She watched him through hooded eyes for the signs she had felt herself all week—the careful constraint and the firm tension. With a shot of green adrenaline, a wicked smile broke on her face. “You’ve been lying,” she said.

Marc turned to her with the first honest look she’d seen in his face, except maybe yesterday when he passed with her through mottled sunshine, when the relief of fresh air was written in his eyes.

Marc closed the notebook.

“What do you mean?” he asked, struggling to pull the screens back across his eyes.

“You’re not a priest. You were never going to be one.”

“Well, not exactly,” he said, a moment of panic rippling across his face. “Maybe a long time ago.” Found out, he relaxed into his real self. Its smoothness irritated Miranda, even while it inspired her to meet him with equal coolness and nonchalance.

“Is your name even Marc Castillo?”

“Yes, though I’m disappointed none of you recognized it,” he said. “I thought you might have seen one of my books—they’re usually in airports. Near the other, really more successful thrillers. Kind of near the bottom.”

“Well, you can’t have your cake and eat it too,” she said. “Either you wanted us to recognize you or you didn’t.” Marc shrugged good-naturedly. “You were going to write about them,” she said.

“I’m trying to break into literary fiction,” he said. “I’ve got to start somewhere. But I don’t think they’re quite as interesting anymore, so I think I’ll look elsewhere.”

“Why?” Miranda asked, leaning forward. Though she’d been angry with him for stealing it in the first place, it irked her that he would so easily throw away their story.

“It’s not as interesting when they actually get together in the end,” he
said. “I’ll probably have to change that, and a few other things. Add some more action. Your character needs to do something drastic, like try to kill someone. Anyway, it’s over now, and I missed the most important parts, so I’ll probably just make it all up.”

“Join the club,” Miranda said, leaning back again. “That’s the story of my life with Olivia.” She paused, sensing an alarming camaraderie nosing its way between them. “So where are you really from?”

“New York,” he said, shedding the last of his soft accent. “You’re never going to trust me again, are you?” He stroked his wrist-bandage lightly with the tips of his fingers.

“Not a bit.”

Miranda wondered if it would really matter to anyone if she exposed him. She wondered if it even mattered to her. She realized he was the first new friend she had made in three years. She realized he hadn’t run, as Lenny had.

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t have lunch again today,” she said at last. “I don’t think my sister will make it.”

“You know,” Marc said, dusting his hands off over the sink and running the water briefly, “I think one of the best parts of Spain is the food.”

“Really? Not the churches?” Miranda said dryly.

“Okay, you got me,” he said, grinning weakly. “You going to tell me why you’re okay with this?” he said, gesturing toward the dorm room.

“Sure, but you have to promise me I won’t see it in print,” she said. “Oh, and one more question.”

“What?”

“Why pretend you’re a
priest
?”

“Everyone’s nice to the hip young priest. And you never have to risk vacation fling disasters,” Marc said. “It was hard with the real deal around, though.”

“Oh yeah? Afraid of competition?”

“No, it just cramped my style.”

Marc held out his arm, with conscious affectation. Miranda rose to take it. Together, they walked out of the hostel.

M
iranda and Marc set out for Gothic Quarter adventure, armed with new and interesting facts about each other. She heard the bells and he smelled the lilies, and she never once stopped to worry about getting lost, except briefly when she saw someone in a shop she thought looked like Lenny’s friend from yesterday, the one she was supposed to be traveling with.

When Olivia and Greg emerged timidly from their dim retreat, having finally talked about all that had happened between them, the hostel was empty and shivering, and they sat by the window to feel the warmth of the sun swarm around their bare arms. Miranda hadn’t left a note. Olivia understood.