13 Little Blue Envelopes

by Maureen Johnson

  She rode all the way down and stepped off into some kind of food palace that stretched on for room after massive room devoted to every kind of food, organized as an ever–Mary Poppin-izing array of displays, great arches of peacock-patterned stained glass and sparkling brass. Decorative carts stacked with pyramids of perfect fruit. Marble counters loaded down with bricks of chocolate.

  Her eyes started to water. The voices around her thrummed in her head. The bolt of energy she’d gotten on the street had been rubbed away by all the people, burned out by all the colors. She found herself fantasizing about all the places she could rest. Under the fake wagon that held the parmesan cheese display. On the floor next to the shelves full of cocoa. Maybe here, right in the middle of everything. Maybe people would just step over her.

  She managed to pull out of the crowd and get to a chocolate counter. A young woman with a short and taut blond ponytail came over to her.

  “Excuse me,” Ginny said, “could you call Mr. Murphy?”

  “Who?” the woman asked.

  “Richard Murphy?”

  The woman looked highly skeptical, but she still politely took out what looked like a thousand pages of names and numbers and systematically flipped through them.

  “Charles Murphy in special orders?”

  “Richard Murphy.”

  Several hundred more pages. Ginny felt herself gripping the counter.

  “Ah…here he is. Richard Murphy. And what is it I need to tell him?”

  “Can you tell him it’s Ginny?” she said. “Can you tell him that I need to go?”

  Good Morning, England

  The small alarm clock read 8:06. She was in bed, still in her clothes. It was cool, and the sky outside was a pearly gray.

  She vaguely recalled Richard putting her in one of those black cabs in front of Harrods. Arriving at his house. Fumbling with keys and what seemed like six locks on the door. Getting up the stairs. Falling onto the quilt fully dressed, with her ankles hanging off the side so that her sneakers didn’t get on it.

  She kicked her feet. They were still hanging there off the edge of the bed.

  She looked around the room. It was strange to be waking up here—not only in a different country (different country…everyone an entire ocean away…she was not going to panic). No, it wasn’t just that. This room really felt like a moment from her past, like Aunt Peg had just walked through the room, covered in blotches of paint, humming under her breath. (Aunt Peg hummed a lot. It was kind of annoying.)

  When she emerged into the hallway and peered into the kitchen, she found that Richard had changed his clothes. Now he was wearing running pants and a T-shirt.

  “Morning,” he said.

  This made no sense.

  “Morning?” she repeated.

  “It’s morning,” he said. “You must have been exhausted. Jet lag. I shouldn’t have dragged you off to Harrods yesterday, not when you were so tired.”

  Yesterday. Now her brain was catching up. Eight a.m. She’d lost an entire day.

  “Sorry,” she said quickly. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for. Bath’s all yours.”

  She went back to the bedroom and gathered up her things. Though the letter had told her not to bring any guidebooks, it didn’t say she couldn’t look at them before she left. So she had, and she’d packed exactly the way they told her to pack. Her bag was full of “neutral basics” that didn’t require ironing, could be layered, and wouldn’t offend anyone, anywhere. Jeans. Cargo shorts. Practical shoes. One black skirt that she didn’t like. She picked out a pair of jeans and a shirt.

  Once she had filled her arms with all the necessary items, Ginny suddenly felt self-conscious about being seen going into the bathroom. She poked her head out of the bedroom and, seeing that Richard had his back turned, dashed across the hall and quickly shut the door.

  It was in the bathroom that Ginny fully realized that she was in a guy’s house. A man’s house. A kind of messy English man’s house. At home, the bathrooms were crammed full of country-crafty wicker wall ornaments, and seashells, and potpourri that smelled like the Hallmark store. This room was stark blue with blue carpet and dark blue towels. No decorations. Just a little shelf full of shaving cream (unknown brand in a vaguely futuristic-looking container), a razor, a few men’s Body Shop items (all tan or amber colored and serious looking—she could tell they all smelled like tree or something suitably manly).

  All of her toiletries were carefully sealed up in a plastic bag, which she set on the carpet. (Wall-to-wall—plush but worn flat. Who carpeted a bathroom?) Her stuff was all pink—had she meant to buy so much pink? Pink soap, pink miniature shampoo bottle, little pink razor. Why? Why was she so pink?

  She took a second to close the blind on the large bathroom window. Then she turned to the tub. She looked at the wall, then up at the ceiling.

  There was no showerhead. That must be what Richard meant by “the bath” was all hers, which she had thought was just some Britishism. But it was all too real. There was a Y-shaped rubber tube. There were open suction cups on each tip of the Y part, and there was a handle on the end of the stem that looked a lot like a phone. After examining the tub and this device, Ginny determined that the Y tips were supposed to go over the two spigots, and water would come out of the phone, and some shower-like action would result.

  She gave this a try.

  Water shot up toward the ceiling. She quickly pointed the shower phone into the tub and jumped in. But it proved impossible to try to wash herself and juggle the shower phone, and she gave up and filled the tub. She hadn’t taken a bath since she was little and felt a little stupid sitting in the water. Also, the bath was amazingly loud—every movement produced a sloshing noise that echoed embarrassingly. She tried to make her movements as conservative as possible as she washed up, but the effort was lost as soon as she had to submerge herself to wash her hair. She was pretty sure that ocean liners could be lowered into the sea and make less noise than she did.

  When the drama of the bath was over, she realized that she had another, totally unexpected problem. Her hair was soaked, and she had no way of drying it. She hadn’t brought a blow dryer since it wouldn’t work here anyway. There was no alternative, it seemed, but to quickly bind it up in braids.

  When she emerged, she found Richard all suited up in what appeared to be the same suit and tie he had on the day before.

  “Hope you were all right in there,” he said apologetically. “I don’t have a shower.”

  He’d probably heard her sloshing around all the way in the kitchen.

  Richard started opening cabinet doors and pointing out things that might be considered breakfast-worthy. He was clearly unprepared for her visit, as the best he could offer was a bit of leftover bread, a little jar of brown stuff called Marmite, an apple, and “whatever is in the refrigerator.”

  “I’ve got some Ribena here, if you want that,” he added, taking a bottle of some kind of grape juice and setting it in front of Ginny as well. He excused himself for a moment. Ginny got a glass and poured herself some of the juice. It was warm and incredibly thick. She took a sip and gagged slightly as the intense, overly sweet syrup coated her throat.

  “You’re…” Richard was in the kitchen doorway now, watching this with an embarrassed expression. “You’re supposed to mix that with water. I should have told you.”

  “Oh,” Ginny said, swallowing hard.

  “I’ve got to be off now,” he said. “I’m sorry…there’s been no time to talk at all. Why don’t you meet me at Harrods for lunch? Let’s meet at Mo’s Diner at noon. If you ever get locked out, I leave a spare key wedged in the crack in the step.”

  He carefully walked her through the tube journey from the house to Harrods and made her repeat it back to him, then walked her through all the bus options, which was just a big jumble of numbers. Then he was gone, and Ginny was at the table alone, with her glass of syrup. She gazed at it sourly, still stung by the e
xpression on Richard’s face when he’d seen her drinking it. She picked up the bottle and examined it to see if there was any warning, any indication that it was anything but normal juice, anything that would make her behavior less freakish.

  To her relief, there was nothing on the bottle that could have helped her. It said that it was something called “blackcurrant squash.” It was “only 89p!” It was made in the United Kingdom. Which is where she was. She was in a kingdom far, far from home.

  And who was this Richard, anyway, aside from a guy in a suit who worked in a big store? Looking around his kitchen, she decided he was definitely single. There were relatively few groceries—just things like this warm instant juice stuff. There were some clothes on the chairs nearest to the wall and a few scattered crumbs and coffee granules on the table.

  Whoever he was, he’d let Aunt Peg stay long enough to decorate an entire room. It must have taken time to make the collage and sew the bedspread. She had to have been here for months.

  She got up and retrieved the package. After brushing a spot clean, she laid the envelopes out on the table. She looked over each of the eleven unopened ones. Most had been decorated with some kind of picture as well as a number. The front of the next one had been painted in watercolors in the style of a Monopoly Community Chest card. Aunt Peg had created her own version of the little man in the top hat with the monocle, with a very fat and round plane going by the background. She’d even managed to sketch out letters that looked like the Monopoly typescript. They read: TO BE OPENED THE MORNING AFTER THE SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF ENVELOPE #2.

  That required her to find out what Richard had sold the queen and getting to an ATM. She needed money anyway. All she had left was a handful of strangely shaped coins, which she hoped would be enough to get her back to Harrods.

  Ginny snatched up the directions that Richard had written for her minutes before, dumped the offending juice down the sink, and headed for the door.

  Richard and the Queen

  A red bus was coming down the street in Ginny’s direction. The sign on the front listed several famous-sounding destinations, including Knightsbridge, and the number matched one of the bus numbers Richard had given her. There was a small bus shelter a few feet away, and it looked like the bus planned on stopping there.

  Two black poles with illuminated yellow globes on top of them marked the opening of the pedestrian crossing. Ginny ran to these, glanced to make sure the coast was clear, and started to run across the road.

  Sudden honking. A big black cab whizzed past her. As Ginny jumped back, she saw something written on the road. LOOK LEFT.

  “It’s like they know me,” she mumbled to herself.

  She managed to get across the road and tried to ignore the fact that everyone on one side of the bus had just witnessed her near-death experience. She had no idea what to pay the driver. Ginny helplessly held out her little bit of remaining money and he took one of the fat coins. She went up the narrow spiral staircase in the middle of the bus. There were many seats available, and Ginny took one at the very front. The bus started to move.

  It felt like she was floating. From her perspective, it looked like the bus was running over countless pedestrians and bicyclists, squashing them into oblivion. She pushed herself farther back into the seat and tried not to pay any attention to this. (Except they had to have just killed that guy on the cell phone. Ginny waited to feel the bump as the bus rolled over his body, but it never came.)

  She looked around at the imposing facades of the stately buildings around her. The sky went from cloudy to gray in the space of a moment, and rain started hammering the wide windows in front of her. Now it looked like they were mowing down huge crowds of umbrella carriers.

  She looked down at her smattering of remaining coins.

  Aside from the 4th Noodle Penthouse, there was one other thing about Aunt Peg’s life that had been completely consistent—she was broke. Always. Ginny had known this even when she was very small and wasn’t supposed to know things about her relatives’ finances. Her parents somehow made this fact apparent without ever coming out and saying it.

  Still, it never seemed like Aunt Peg was wanting for anything. She always seemed to have enough money to take Ginny for frozen hot chocolates at Serendipity, or to buy her piles of art supplies, or to make her elaborate Halloween costumes, or to get that jar of really good caviar she bought once just because she thought Ginny should taste it. (“If you’re going to do fish eggs once, do it right,” she had said. It was still gross.)

  Ginny wasn’t sure if she believed that there was any more money waiting for her in an ATM. Maybe it would be there since it wasn’t going to be real money—it was going to be pounds. Pounds seemed possible. Pounds sounded like they should come in the form of tiny burlap bags tied in rough string, filled with little bits of metal or shiny objects. Aunt Peg could have that kind of money.

  It took a few tries on the escalators and a few consultations of the Harrods map to find Mo’s Diner. Richard had gotten there first and was waiting in a booth. He ordered a steak, and she got the “big American-style burger!”

  “I’m supposed to ask you what you sold to the queen,” she said.

  He smiled and dabbed some ketchup onto his steak. Ginny tried not to wince.

  “My job is to take care of special orders and customers,” he said, not noticing her distress over his condiment choice. “Say a star is out on a movie set and can’t get their favorite chocolate, or soap, or sheets, or whatever…. I make arrangements to get it to them. Last year, I made sure all of Sting’s Christmas hampers were properly packed. And occasionally, occasionally, I get to set up royal visits. We open at special times for those, and I make sure that there’s someone in the necessary departments. One day, we got a call from the palace that the queen wanted to come over that evening, in just a few hours. She never does that. She’s always very carefully scheduled weeks in advance. But this night she wanted to come in, and there was no one else available. So I had to take care of her.”

  “What did she want?” Ginny asked.

  “Pants,” he said, dabbing on even more ketchup. “Underwear pants. Big ones. Very nice ones as well, but big ones. I believe she also got some stockings, but all I could think as I wrapped them up in the tissue was, ‘I’m packing up the queen’s pants.’ Peg always did like that story.”

  At Peg’s name, Ginny looked up.

  “It’s a funny thing,” he went on. “I don’t know what you’re meant to be doing here or how long you’re supposed to stay, but you’re welcome, as long as you like.”

  He said it very sincerely but kept his eyes trained on his steak.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I guess Aunt Peg asked if I could come.”

  “She mentioned that she wanted you to. I mailed the package. I suppose you know that?”

  She didn’t, but it made as much sense as anything else. Someone had to send it.

  “So,” Ginny said, “she was your roommate, huh?”

  “Yeah. We were good mates.” He pushed his steak around for a moment. “She told me a lot about you. About your family. I felt like I knew you before you ever got here.”

  He poured a bit more ketchup, then set the bottle down very deliberately and looked at her.

  “You know, if you want to talk about it at all…”

  “It’s fine,” she said. His sudden directness…the closeness of the topic, the it…it made her nervous.

  “Right,” he replied quickly. “Of course.”

  The waitress dropped a handful of forks next to their table. They both stopped to watch her pick them up.

  “Is there an ATM in here anywhere?” Ginny finally asked.

  “Several,” he said, looking eager to take up this new topic of conversation. “I’ll show you when we’re done.”

  They were done just a few minutes later, as they both developed a sudden interest in eating very quickly. Richard showed Ginny to the ATM and returned to work, with the promise of seeing her
in the evening.

  To her relief, Ginny found that English ATMs looked exactly like American ones. She approached one and stuck in the card. The machine politely asked for a code.

  “All right,” Ginny said. “Here we go.”

  She entered the word pants into the keypad. The machine purred and showed her a few advertisements about how she could save for a home, and then it asked her what she wanted.

  She had no idea what she wanted, but she had to pick something. Some number. There were lots of numbers to choose from.

  Twenty pounds, please. That seemed like a good, basic kind of number.

  No. She was on her own. She would need to buy things and get around, so…

  One hundred pounds, please.

  The machine asked for a moment. Ginny felt her stomach drop. Then a stack of crisp purple and blue notes (different sizes: the purple ones were large, the blue ones little) emblazoned with pictures of the queen popped out of the slot. (Now she got it. Aunt Peg’s little joke also ensured that Ginny would never forget the code.) The large notes didn’t fit in her wallet, so she had to crush them in.

  Her balance, the machine said, was £1856. Aunt Peg had come through.

  #3

  * * *

  #3

  Dear Ginny,

  Let’s get right down to business.

  Today is MYSTERIOUS BENEFACTOR DAY. Why Mysterious Benefactor Day? Well, Gin, let me give you a because: because talent alone doesn’t make an artist. You need a little serendipity, a little luck, a little boost. I stumbled right into someone who helped me out, and it’s time to return the favor. But it’s also good to be mysterious. Make someone think that wonderful things are happening to them for no reason they can see. I’ve always wanted to be a fairy godmother, Gin, so help me out here.