13 Little Blue Envelopes

by Maureen Johnson

  “My boyfriend,” Ginny said. “I was writing to my boyfriend, Keith.”

  Okay. So she was lying, kind of. She didn’t even know why she was lying. Maybe just to hear it out loud. Keith…my boyfriend.

  “I thought so,” Olivia said. “I was doing that too. I can’t call like Phil.”

  “Why can’t you call your boyfriend?”

  “No.” Olivia shook her head. “It’s not like that.”

  “Not like what?”

  “It’s just…I have a girlfriend.”

  From across the street, Mr. and Mrs. Knapp were gesturing wildly, pointing down to their feet. They were each wearing brightly colored wooden shoes.

  “My parents would off themselves if they knew,” Olivia said meditatively. “They’d totally hang themselves from the rafters. They notice everything but what’s right in front of them.”

  “Oh…”

  “Does that freak you out?” Olivia said.

  “No,” Ginny said quickly. “I think it’s great. You know. That you’re gay. It’s great.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “No,” Ginny corrected herself. “Right.”

  Mr. Knapp broke into a little dance. Olivia sighed. They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the embarrassing spectacle. Then the Knapps disappeared into another store.

  “I think Phil’s guessed,” Olivia said glumly. “He keeps asking me about Michelle. Phil’s kind of an asshole…I guess. I mean, he’s my brother. But still. Don’t say anything.”

  “I won’t.”

  After her sudden confession, Olivia lapsed right back into being Olivia, with her middle-distance stare and the constant rubbing of her legs.

  “I think they’re buying cheese,” she said after a moment, and got up and went across the bridge.

  Ginny sat perfectly still for a moment and watched the boats rocking in the canal. The amazing part wasn’t exactly that Olivia was gay—it was that Olivia had feelings and things to say and that she’d said them. There was something under that emotionless gaze of hers.

  Olivia had just hit on something as well…not the thing about the cheese, but about not noticing what’s right in front of you. Like Piet—he saw The Night Watch every day and never really looked at it. What was in front of her? Boats. Some water. Some old canal buildings. Her oversized bicycle that she was going to have to ride all the way back to Amsterdam, probably getting herself killed in the process.

  What was she doing? There was no hidden message here. Aunt Peg had screwed this one up. There was no Charlie. Piet was clueless. And now she was reduced to trying to string together some kind of theory about what this was all about—a theory based on nothing but snippets of conversation.

  Amsterdam, she had to admit to herself, was just a washout.

  For their final night in town, the Knapps had decided to go to a restaurant that was in a medieval bank that looked like a tiny castle. There were torches on the stone walls and suits of armor in the corners. Olivia seemed tapped out from her confession earlier in the day and stared at one of these for the entire meal, never once speaking.

  “So,” Mrs. Knapp said, producing a sheet of paper, which she set on the table. “I’ve written up a little list for you, Ginny. We’ll say twenty euros for tonight’s dinner, just to make things easy.”

  She wrote something on the bottom and then passed the paper to Ginny. All along, the Knapps had been dropping their credit card for everything. Ginny had been aware that she was going to have to contribute at some point. That point had obviously come in the form of this very carefully itemized list of every ticket and every meal, plus the cost of her part of the hotel.

  Ginny certainly didn’t mind paying for herself, but there was something odd about having the bill passed to her in the middle of dinner, with all four Knapps looking on. She felt too self-conscious to even look at it. She put in on her lap and pulled the edge of the tablecloth over it.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll need to go to the ATM, though.”

  “Take your time!” Mr. Knapp said. “In the morning.”

  So why, Ginny wondered, did you give it to me now?

  Back at the Huis, Ginny read over the list and realized that she hadn’t been paying any attention at all to how much this was costing. They didn’t ask for the full amount for the room (it turned out that they had the nicest rooms in the place, which cost a lot more), but it still came to two hundred euros for the five days. Along with the frightening pace of their sightseeing (all of those admissions added up), the restaurants, the Internet café—she had burned through almost five hundred euros. She was fairly sure that she had five hundred euros left, but the sliver of doubt gave her a sleepless night. She was up before anyone, and she slipped out to make sure.

  The ATM gave her the money, which was a relief, but it wouldn’t tell her what her balance was. It just spat a handful of purple notes at her, then winked off with a message in Dutch. It could have said, “Screw you, tourist!” for all she knew.

  She sat down on the sidewalk and pulled out the next envelope. Inside, there was a postcard, painted in swirling watercolors. It seemed to be a view of the sky, but there were two suns—one containing a 1 and the other a 0.

  Letter ten.

  “All right,” she said, “what now?”

  #10

  * * *

  #10

  Dear Ginny,

  Let’s not be precious about it, Gin. We haven’t talked about it so far, and it’s about time we did. I got sick. I am sick. I will continue to get sicker. I don’t like it, but that’s the truth—and it’s always better to face things head-on. Rich words coming from me, but accurate ones.

  When I stopped before going into the Empire State that November morning—there was a reason. It wasn’t just because I felt moral indignation at the thought of working in the building. I had forgotten the suite number of the office where I was going. I’d left it at home.

  The other version made for a better story…that I stopped dead, turned around, left. That’s romantic. It’s not quite the same if I said I just had a brain fart, left my Post-it, and had to turn around.

  Looking back, Gin, I think that was the beginning. It was little things like that. I’ve always been a little flaky, I admit, but there was a definite pattern going on. Little facts were just getting winked away now and then. My doctors tell me that this problem I have is fairly recent, that there’s no way I would have seen symptoms two years ago, but doctors aren’t always right. I think I knew that time was soon going to become an issue.

  When I was in Amsterdam with Charlie, I definitely knew something was wrong with me. I wasn’t sure what. I thought it was something with my eyes. It was the quality of the light. Sometimes things seemed very dark. There were little black spots in my vision, spots that would sometimes eat up my view. But I was too chicken to go to the doctor. I said it was nothing and decided instead to keep moving. My next stop was an artists’ colony in Denmark.

  So, your next instruction is to take a plane to Copenhagen, immediately. It’s a short trip. Send an e-mail to knud@aagor.net with flight information. Someone will meet you at the airport.

  Love,

  YRA

  * * *

  The Viking Ship

  She was standing in the airport in Copenhagen, staring at a doorway, trying to figure out if it was (a) a bathroom and (b) what kind of bathroom it was. The door merely said H.

  Was she an H?

  Was H “hers”? It could just as easily be “his.” Or “Helicopter Room: Not a Bathroom at All.”

  She turned around in despair, her pack almost causing her to lose her balance and tumble over.

  The Copenhagen airport was sleek and well organized, with shiny metal plates on the walls, metal strips along the floors, and big metal columns. All airports were kind of sterile places, but the Copenhagen airport was like an operating table. Looking through the massive glass panels that lined the building, Ginny could see that the sky outside w
as also a steely gray.

  She was waiting for someone she didn’t know and who didn’t know her. She only knew that he or she wrote English in all caps and told her to WAIT BY THE MERMAIDS. After a lot of walking around in semicircles (the whole place was one big curve) and asking a lot of people, she found statues of two mermaids looking over from one of the second-floor rails. She had been standing next to them for over forty-five minutes, she badly needed to pee, and she was seriously wondering whether this was some kind of test.

  Just as she was about to make a run for the H room, she noticed a tall man with long brown hair approaching her. She could see that he wasn’t very old, but his big brown beard gave him a mature, imposing air. His outfit—a pair of jeans, a Nirvana T-shirt, and a leather jacket—was normal, except for the belt of chain-link metal that hung from his waist, with various objects hanging off it like charms, like a large animal tooth and something that looked like a massive whistle. And he was making a beeline for her. She looked around, but she had a pretty strong feeling that he wasn’t charging toward the group of Japanese tourists who were converging next to her under a small blue flag.

  “You!” he called out. “Virginia! Right!”

  “Right,” Ginny said.

  “I knew it! I am Knud! Welcome to Denmark!”

  “You speak English?”

  “Of course I speak English! All Danes speak English! Of course we do! And pretty good English!”

  “Pretty good,” Ginny agreed. There was an exclamation point after everything Knud said. He spoke English loudly.

  “Yes! I know! Come on!”

  Knud had a very modern, very expensive-looking blue BMW motorcycle with a sidecar waiting for them in the parking lot. The sidecar, he explained, was what he used to transport all of his tools and materials (what they were, he didn’t say). He was absolutely certain her massive backpack would fit in there as well, and he was right. A moment later, she was in the sidecar, low to the ground, tearing down the street of yet another European city that looked (she was ashamed to admit it—it seemed like such a cop-out) very much like the one she had just left.

  He parked his bike on a street full of colorful houses, all linked together, that sat along a wide canal. Ginny had to wait until she was unpacked and then stepped uncertainly out of the sidecar. She took a step in the direction of the buildings, but Knud called her back.

  “This way, Virginia! Down here!”

  He was carrying her pack down a set of concrete steps that led down to the water. He continued down the sidewalk that was along the very edge of the canal, past several carefully marked out “parking spots” where large houseboats were docked. He stopped at one of these. His was a complete little house that looked like a small wooden cabin. There were flower boxes full of red flowers at the windows and a massive wooden dragon head coming from the front. Knud opened the door and beckoned Ginny inside.

  Knud’s house was all one large room, made entirely of red, fresh-smelling wood, every inch of which was intricately carved with small dragon heads, spirals, gargoyles. At one end of the room, there was a large futon bed with a frame made of thick, unfinished branches. The majority of the space was taken up by a wooden worktable with carving tools and bits of ironwork. A small space was devoted to a kitchen. This was where Knud headed, removing several plastic containers from the tiny refrigerator.

  “You are hungry!” he said. “I’ll make you some good Danish food. You’ll see. Sit down.”

  Ginny took a seat at the table. He began opening the containers, which were filled with a dozen or more kinds of fish. Pink fish. White fish. Fish with little green herbal specs on it. He took out some dark bread and piled these things onto a slice.

  “Good stuff!” he said. “All organic, of course! All fresh! We take care of the earth here! You like smoked herring? You will. Of course you will!”

  He set the heavy, fishy sandwich down in front of Ginny.

  “I work in iron,” Knud said. “Though I have also done some of these wood carvings. All of my work is based on traditional Danish art. I am a Viking! Eat!”

  She tried to pick up the overloaded piece of bread.

  “Now,” he said, “you are probably wondering how I know your aunt. Yes, Peg was here, three years ago now, I think. At the arts festival. I liked her very much. She had a great spirit. One day she said to me…What time is it? Five o’clock?”

  Somehow, Ginny didn’t think that was Aunt Peg’s big proclamation in Denmark.

  Knud gestured for her to continue eating and then stepped out of a small doorway by his two-burner stove. Ginny ate her sandwich and looked across the canal at the row of stores on the other side. Then she turned her attention to a metal plate that sat on the table. Knud was etching it with a complicated pattern. It was amazing that such a big guy could do such delicate work.

  When she looked up again, the stores she had been looking at a moment before were gone and had been replaced by a church, and even that was drifting away. The floor rocked gently underneath her, and her brain managed to put together the fact that the entire house was moving. She went to the window and saw that they had left their place at the boat sidewalk and were quickly moving through the canal.

  Knud swung open the little door at the front. She could see that he was standing in a tiny booth where the boat’s controls were.

  “How do you like the fish?” he yelled in.

  “It’s…good! Where are we going?”

  “North! You should relax! We will be some time!”

  He shut the door.

  Ginny opened the door that had just led from a sidewalk and found only a foot of deck and a calf-high rail separating her from the churning water. Water splashed her legs. Knud was driving his house quickly now, as they’d made it to a wider body of water. They passed under a massive bridge. At the front of the boat, Ginny looked out at the silvery channel of water that separated Denmark from Sweden.

  So, she was going north. In a house.

  “I live alone,” Knud said, “and I work alone, but I am never truly alone. I do my ancestors’ work. I live the entire history of my country and people.”

  They’d been sailing for at least two hours, maybe more. Knud had finally docked his house at a utilitarian pier along a road, next to a field of skinny high-tech windmills. He was a folk artist, Ginny had learned. He studied and revived crafts that were over a thousand years old, using only authentic materials and processes and sometimes getting authentically ancient injuries in the process.

  What he had not explained was why he had just driven her so far north in his houseboat so that they could park along a highway. In lieu of an explanation, he made some more sandwiches, once again impressing on her the quality and freshness of all the ingredients. They sat next to the houseboat, eating these.

  “Peg,” he said, “I heard she died.”

  Ginny nodded and watched the windmills furiously spinning. They looked like mad, overgrown metal daisies. A bright orange sun gleamed behind them, shooting sharp and silvery beams off the blades.

  “I am sorry to hear this,” he said, landing a heavy hand on her shoulder. “She was very special. And this is why you are here, am I right?”

  “She asked me to come and visit you.”

  “I am glad. And I think I know why. Yes. I think I do.”

  He pointed at the windmills.

  “You see this? This is art! Beautiful. Also useful. Art can be useful. This harnesses the air and makes beautiful clean power.”

  They both watched the windmills spin for a few moments.

  “You’ve come at a special time, Virginia. This is no accident. It is almost midsummer eve. Look. Look at my watch.”

  He held his wrist in front of her, revealing what most people would have considered to be a wall clock on a strap.

  “Do you see? It is almost eleven o’clock at night. And look. Look at the sun. Peg came here for the sun. She told me this.”

  “How did you know her?” Ginny asked.
<
br />   “She was staying with a friend of mine in a place called Christiana. Christiana is an art colony in Copenhagen.”

  “Was she here long?”

  “No so long, I don’t think,” he said. “She had come to see the midnight sun. She had come to see what an extreme place this is. You see, we spend much of the year in darkness, Virginia. And then we are bathed in light, constant light. The sun bounces in the sky but never goes down. She wanted very, very much to see this. So I took her here.”

  “Why here?” Ginny asked.

  “To see where we grow our windmills, of course!” He laughed. “She of course loved them. She saw in all of this a fantastic landscape. You come here, you understand that the world is not such a bad place. In this, we try for a better future where we do not pollute. We bathe in light. We make the fields beautiful.”

  They sat there for quite a while, looking at the sun that refused to go down. Finally, Knud suggested that Ginny go back into the boat and rest. She thought the light and the strangeness of the place would keep her awake, but soon the boat’s gentle rocking had gotten to her. The next thing she knew, a huge hand was shaking her shoulder.

  “Virginia,” Knud was saying. “I am sorry. But I must go soon.”

  Ginny sat bolt upright. It was morning, and they were docked back in Copenhagen, right where they had started. A few minutes after that, she was watching Knud get onto his motorcycle.

  “You’ll get there, Virginia,” he said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “And now, I must go. Good luck.”

  With that, she was on the streets of Copenhagen, once again on her own.

  Hippo’s

  At least she was prepared this time.

  In case she was faced with another Amsterdam, Ginny had looked up some places online. The number-one recommended hostel on all the websites was a place called Hippo’s Beach. It got five backpacks, five bathtubs, five party hats, and two thumbs up from the most thorough of the sites, which pretty much qualified it as the Ritz of youth accommodations.