Queens of All the Earth (21 page)

That afternoon, Olivia and Greg climbed the mountain. They left at noon and rose between the scattered trees along the road that zigzagged up, taking each turn with a gust of breath, through slanting shadows that smelled like pines, until they could look down on Barcelona through the clear air.

The castle was like a fort in a book, but Olivia didn’t think of that. She
saw the red vines that crawled up its massive side, blushing and blood-colored against the mud-brown stones, and the piercing sunlight on the top, where an endless Barcelona stretched around her, falling sharply to the cliffs and then the docks below, where trucks crept through threadlike driveways and containers were stacked like dingy toys. The warm wind threaded her hair as it hung loose around her shoulders, and she felt Greg’s arms slip around her waist. She leaned back into him.

“Why did you leave a question mark in my room?” she asked.

He tensed, embarrassed, and tried to withdraw, but Olivia turned around to show him she was smiling.

“I just,” he began, then stopped. “I read—I was reading about, um, I was reading some things about language and I thought, if you can express so much in one unspoken thing, why not put it everywhere? But I didn’t have the guts to actually write it on the streets. So I just put it on a piece of paper. I thought maybe I could do that instead, write it on lots of pieces of paper and leave them everywhere, but then I was too nervous to do that, too.”

Olivia laughed, but stopped when she saw his long face.

“No, no, I’m not laughing at you,” she said, scooting closer to him. “It just makes so much sense.”

All the little fragments of Greg she had seen throughout the week began to coalesce into a person, but there was still so much to learn. She wondered what he had been like before his mother had died. She wondered how he had taken the news.

Her face became solemn again.

“Are you still sad about your dad?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, only realizing the answer when it popped out of her mouth.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. I thought—”

“But it’s going to be okay,” she said, cutting him off. “I think.”

In time, they got up and moved to explore the rest of the castle.

Back at the Casa Joven, Mr. Brown listened while Hugo attempted to explain to him the music on the dance radio station. He sat and watched as a new group arrived to take Ana and Chas’s beds—another pair of sisters from the States, looking very jet-lagged, unhappy, and wilted. He smiled at them, and then got up to fetch his notebook from the dormitory room. In it were the poems he thought his wife would have enjoyed.

When they had married, he was more than twenty years older than her, and had always assumed he would be the first to go. But then she got sick, and the doctors said it had been lurking in her body since before they had ever met. He never stopped copying out passages for her, though, or marking the pages he would have shown to her in their bed later in the evening.

That night, Mr. Brown and Hugo made a Thanksgiving dinner of sorts for the whole hostel: turkey sandwiches and mashed potatoes from a box. Marc invented Thanksgiving traditions like “hinkle spoons” to teach to the non-American guests. Miranda played along as if she’d known about them her whole life. Olivia was grateful to see her sister playful again.

On Friday, all the travelers went to the Cathedral. Miranda recognized Saint Sebastian, and Marc pretended to know more about him than he could really remember. Olivia and Greg stood on the roof and Mr. Brown fed the geese in the cloister. The bells tolled and the organ whistled, and Olivia never found the accordion man.

Leaving was harder. Greg’s hand fell out of hers. Mr. Brown kissed her on her hair. Olivia understood that a life was unfurling in front of her, long and ribbon-like and unknown.

Miranda, watching them, found a resilience long hidden under the
rotten anxiety clouding her heart.

In the end, they all went home.

Hugo and Sophie planted lilies in a box outside the window the next spring. Greg applied to college, and Mr. Brown hired an assistant pastor, a kid fresh from upstate. Marc never wrote a book about Spain. He went back to New York, where he completed his first literary novel, the story of a middle-aged writer living in New York. Miranda read it and finally gathered the courage to write him.

On an unseasonably chilly, bright September day, Olivia arrived at Cornell, and her mother drove away after leaving her with her bags stacked in a dusty, empty room. Her roommate would soon arrive and they would begin to arrange furniture and devise arbitrary and complex rules for sharing food, watching TV, and having guests.

She put her hand in the pocket of her jacket. There, her fingers ran over the well-worn edges of a letter. Greg had been the one to suggest they write to each other on paper. Now she appreciated the idea. She felt as if she was holding his hand. She told herself this was the way she could, until next time.

Outside, the trees shivered in the breezes of autumn, and loaded vans passed alongside the anxiety of a thousand freshmen hoping to feel ready for what lay ahead.

I owe too many people too large a debt of gratitude to squeeze onto one little page. Here’s the abridged version.

To my mom, novelist Libby Malin Sternberg, for being my best writing teacher, for editing early versions of this story, and for supporting me, as a tireless counselor, through subsequent revisions.

To Dad, for being my biggest fan, and my brothers for telling me I’m nuts for everything I do except writing novels.

To Bruce Bortz, my publisher, for giving me a chance and for holding my hand through the phone. To Harrison Demchick, my editor, for helping me take a sock-drawer manuscript and turn it into something I can confidently wear in public.

To Vanessa, my one-time roommate, who filled me in on what to do when your character refuses to talk or eat.

And to all the friends I traveled with, wrote with, and experienced with.

Hannah Sternberg lives and works in Washington, D.C. In 2009, she graduated from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland with a major in Film and Media Studies and a minor in Writing Seminars, feeling like the most unemployable girl in the world. She now works for the Washington D.C.-based Heritage Foundation.

In addition to writing, she spends her spare time making short independent films and freaking out about hypothetical travel accidents.

To learn more about Hannah, her creative work, and her pet bamboo, visit her at
www.hannahsternberg.com.