13 Little Blue Envelopes

by Maureen Johnson

  Everything was gone. All her swampy clothes. And all of the envelopes. Including the last, unopened one. Her explanation had just zipped up the side of a Greek hill on a red scooter.

  Ginny dug her toes into the sand.

  “I’m going to go swim again,” she said. She reached into her pocket and produced her only two remaining possessions, her passport and her Barclaycard. She had moved these there for safekeeping on one of the trains. She passed them to Emmett and walked to the water.

  This time, she just left everything on as she walked back into the warm waves. She felt her shirt and shorts balloon up with water as she got deeper, and as the water pulled away, they suctioned to her body. All the early morning gray and lavender was burning off fast, and a bright blue sky blossomed above her. It was matched by the color of the sea. In fact, she could just about tell where the horizon was. She was in the water, and the water was in the sky—it was kind of like she was at the beginning and end of everything.

  Nigel waded out to her after a few minutes.

  “You all right?” he asked, looking concerned.

  Ginny started to laugh.

  The Only ATM on Corfu

  It took about an hour to stop Carrie from raving and frantically pacing up and down the beach. Then they scrabbled (with a considerably lighter load) back up the steps cut into the sandy-colored rock to the road. They began walking back in what they guessed was the direction of the town. There was really nothing to indicate this, except that there seemed to be more hibiscus plants in that direction, and Emmett thought he saw something that might be a phone booth up ahead. It turned out to be a rock, but Ginny could understand how he made the mistake. It was kind of square.

  The sun had pulled itself up high in the sky with surprising speed. The heat, combined with their exhaustion and Carrie’s sporadic crying, made the going slow and somewhat painful. After a while, they could see massive modern hotels in the far, far distance and white churches and houses on points high above, jutting out over the water. About a mile up the road, they came to a clump of buildings. It turned out not to be Corfu Town, but a small village with a few small hotels and restaurants.

  Everything was white. Blinding, hot white. All the buildings. All the walls. The stones that paved the ground had even been painted white. Only the doorways and shuttered windows stood out with sudden bursts of red or yellow or blue. They walked down a tiny path shaded on both sides by little trees that looked like someone had grabbed them by the top branches and twisted them like corkscrews. They were full of little green fruits, some of which had dropped and splattered open on the stones. Nigel cheerfully pointed out that they were olive trees, and Carrie, much less cheerfully, told him to shut up.

  Ginny picked up a split olive from the ground. She had never seen an olive that looked like this—it was like a little lime, hard, with a skin. Nothing like those little green things with the red speck that you were supposed to drop in martini glasses.

  Nothing was quite like it was supposed to be.

  There was a sleepy little taverna with a few outside tables. They sank gratefully into the seats, and soon their tiny, round table was overflowing with plates of spinach pie, dishes of yogurt and honey, and cups of coffee. There was fresh juice as well, full of pulp and warm. Ginny put her passport and her bank card next to her plate. Strange. They took up almost no space at all, yet with them, she could travel all the way across Europe. They were all she really needed.

  Carrie started weeping all over again when Ginny did this and reminded everyone that she no longer had these things. She had nothing at all. Without a passport, she wasn’t going to be able to get anywhere. Not on a plane. Not on a ferry. And, she went on, her arms weren’t quite strong enough to allow her to swim to the Greek mainland or back to Australia, for that matter.

  Ginny quickly put her things back into her wet pocket and concentrated on dripping honey into the thick yogurt and swirling it in. She felt very bad for Carrie, but the situation didn’t seem real. She felt slightly lobotomized (if you could be slightly lobotomized). It was a pleasant sensation, in any case. She listened as they speculated on how they could get Carrie out of Greece and back across the globe. The general consensus was that they’d have to get to the Australian embassy somehow, not that they knew where this was. The best guess was Athens.

  Ginny stared off in the distance and saw a clothesline with small octopi hanging from it, drying in the sun. They made her think of Richard’s washing machine and its strange alphabetical dial. What setting did you use to wash your octopus?

  O, she guessed.

  “What about you, Gin?” Bennett said, interrupting this mediation on the proper washing of sea creatures. “What do you want to do?”

  Ginny looked up.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’d better get some cash.”

  It took a while to find an ATM among the souvenir shops and churches. The one she finally did locate was in a shop no bigger than a hallway that sold everything from canned chickpeas to rubbery-smelling bathing suits. The ATM was just a little stand-alone thing in the back, under some dusty disposable cameras. It looked kind of shady, but there was nowhere else to get any money.

  She asked it for five hundred euros. The Greek message that appeared on the screen meant nothing to her, but the honking noise that accompanied it told her that it wasn’t going to happen. She tried four hundred. It honked again. More honking for three hundred and two hundred. One-ninety? Nope: 180, 175, 160, 150, 145, 130, 110, 90, 75, 50…

  The machine eventually coughed up forty euros, then spat her card back at her in disgust.

  There was only one thing she could think of to do.

  The five-euro phone card didn’t buy a lot of time, and the operators at Harrods didn’t seem to understand her rush. The electronic voice kept interrupting her hold music to speak to her in Greek to tell her (she guessed) that the minutes were ticking away.

  “Ginny? Where are you?”

  “Corfu. In Greece.”

  “Greece?”

  “Right. The thing is, my account’s empty and I’m stuck,” she said. “And this phone card is about to run out. I can’t get back.”

  “Hold on a minute.”

  Classical music filled up the line. A voice came on and said something very chirpily in Greek. Again, she had to guess at the meaning. She was pretty sure the voice wasn’t just welcoming her to Greece and hoping she had a pleasant stay. A series of short little beeps confirmed this. She was relieved when Richard came back on the line.

  “Can you get to the airport in Corfu?”

  “I guess so,” she said. Then she realized it wasn’t a guessing kind of thing. She was either going to get to the airport or stay on Corfu forever.

  “Right. I’ll call down to our travel agency and get you a ticket back to London. You’ll be fine, all right? I’ll take care of it.”

  “I’ll pay you back or my parents…”

  “Just get to the airport. We’ll figure it all out later. Let’s just get you home.”

  As Ginny set down the phone, she saw Carrie being tended to by all of her friends at a bench across the street. She looked somewhat calmer now. Ginny crossed the street and sat down with them.

  “I have to get to the airport,” she said. “Richard—my aunt’s friend—is getting me a ticket out.”

  “You’re going, Pretz?” Carrie asked. “Back to London?”

  There were several rounds of hugs and an exchange of e-mail addresses. Then Emmett waved down a small beat-up Fiat that he correctly identified as a taxi. Just before it pulled away, Carrie came over to the window. She had started crying all over again.

  “Hey, Pretz,” she said, leaning in to Ginny. “Don’t worry. You’ll find out what it was.”

  Ginny smiled.

  “You’ll be okay, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” Carrie nodded. “Who knows. We may stay around here for a while. It’s not like I can really go anywhere right now. There are w
orse places to be.”

  And after one final hand squeeze, the taxi pulled off, and Ginny found herself on the way to the Corfu airport.

  The polite British Airways stewardess at the door to the plane didn’t change her expression at all when Ginny came aboard her nice, clean aircraft. It was as if disheveled, stinky, empty-handed urchins always flew with her. She remained composed later on when Ginny accepted everything that she offered. Yes, she’d have a water. She’d take a soda, and a sandwich, and a cup of tea. Cookies, towelettes, nutcrackers, basketballs…Whatever she had in her little silver cart, Ginny was taking. Two, if she could get them.

  It was dusk in London when her plane touched down at Heathrow. This time, after she walked the ten thousand miles of hallway, there was someone waiting for her at the end. Richard didn’t seem to mind hugging her, even if she was filthy.

  “My God,” he said, pulling back and taking a good look at her. “What happened to you? Where are your things?”

  “Everything got stolen.”

  “Everything?”

  She reached into her pocket and produced her only two remaining possessions, the passport and the useless ATM card.

  “Well,” he said, “not to worry. As long as you’re all right. We can get you some new clothes. What about the letters?”

  “They got the letters too.”

  “Oh…right. Sorry to hear that.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and nodded heavily. “Well, let’s get you back.”

  The train was fairly crowded, despite the late hour. Richard and Ginny were squashed together. Ginny explained where she’d been after Rome. Now that she strung it all together, she realized how much had been packed into such a short time—just under a month. Seeing Keith in Paris. Getting stuck with the Knapps in Amsterdam. Riding in Knud’s house to the north of Denmark.

  “Can I ask you something?” Richard cut in as Ginny reached the end of her story.

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything, you know, private, but…did Peg tell you anything?”

  This wasn’t nearly specific enough to be answered, and Richard seemed to realize that.

  “I know we didn’t get to talk much when you were here a few weeks ago,” he went on. “But there’s something you should know. In case you don’t know. Do you know?”

  “Know?”

  “It seems like you don’t. I was trying to think of a good time to sit down and tell you this, but I couldn’t figure one out. So do you mind if I do it now?”

  Ginny looked around the train car.

  “No,” she lied.

  “I suppose she probably explained this in the end,” he said, “in the one you didn’t read. Your aunt and I were married. She needed medical care. Not that that was the only reason, of course. It just happened faster than it would have, perhaps. She told me not to say anything until you’d read everything that she’d written to you.”

  “Married?” Ginny said. “That means you’re my uncle.”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what it means.”

  He glanced over nervously. Ginny fixed her eyes in front of her.

  She hated Aunt Peg at that moment. Hated her completely and totally. It wasn’t her fault that the envelope had been stolen, but it was her fault that she was here, that Richard was forced to rescue her and explain these things that he obviously felt awkward about. It was better when it was all a mystery—when Aunt Peg had just been out there in the wild somewhere. She wasn’t married. She didn’t have a brain tumor. She was always on her way home.

  In that second, as they pulled into Angel, Aunt Peg was gone. Really and truly gone.

  “I have to go,” she said, bolting out the door ahead of him. “Thanks for everything.”

  The Runaway Niece

  The one advantage to having everything you own stolen is that travel becomes very easy.

  She started walking, following the bus route down Essex Road. People were dressed for their night out or they were coming back from work. In both cases, it meant that they looked, as Richard would say, “smart.” Or as she would say, “clean.” They probably didn’t smell of train funk and old wet clothes and they’d most likely bathed sometime in the last forty-eight hours.

  But she didn’t really care. She just kept walking, feeling her face set into a determined grimace. It was about half an hour before she realized that she had passed from the busy area with the brightly lit stores and pubs and restaurants to the smaller, tighter streets filled with liquor shops and off-track betting.

  The route had imprinted itself in her mind. She turned down to the street where all the houses were the same—all flat-fronted, dull-gray brick with white-rimmed windows. Halfway down the block she saw it, the red door with the diamond-shaped yellow window. The black blinds in the upstairs windows were crookedly pulled up halfway, and lights were on. As she got closer, she could hear music.

  Someone was home, anyway. It couldn’t be Keith. He was in Scotland. She’d only come here because this was the only other place in London she knew how to get to on foot. The only other place she knew besides Harrods, and she couldn’t go there, obviously.

  Maybe David would let her in.

  She knocked. There were heavy footsteps running down the stairs inside, stomping along the hall.

  It was Fiona who threw open the door. She was even tinier and blonder than the last time, like she’d been bleached and then left in the dryer too long.

  “Is Keith here?” Ginny asked, already dreading the “no” that was sure to come.

  “Keith!” she shrieked, before letting the door drop closed softly and stomping her way back upstairs in her heels.

  He came to the door foamy lipped, a toothbrush handle sticking straight out of the side of his mouth. He pulled it out, swallowed hard, and wiped away the minty freshness with the back of his hand. It was only there for a second, but Ginny was sure there was a hint of a smile just as he drew back his hand. It flickered away as he took in the sight of her—rumpled, dirty, empty-handed.

  “You’re not in Scotland,” she replied.

  “The school mucked it up. We got up there only to find that we had nowhere to stay and half our performances were canceled. You look like you might need to sit down.”

  He stepped back and let her inside.

  Keith’s room looked like it had been hit by a freak tornado. The crates and boards that made up his old furnishings had given way to exploded boxes full of papers, bits of scripts, piles of books with titles like The Theatre of Suffering. Keith tucked the toothbrush behind his ear and started gathering up some of the papers on the sofa, clearing a spot.

  “Did you just get back from Amsterdam? Or did you end up somewhere else?”

  “I went to Denmark,” she said. It seemed like it was so long ago, but it had been two, maybe three days? It was hard to tell anymore.

  “How was that?” he asked. “Rotten? And how did you get tan there?”

  “Oh.” She looked down her arms. They were tan, actually. “Then I went to Greece.”

  “Well, why not? They’re right next to each other, aren’t they?”

  She dropped onto the seat he had cleared. Nothing held this sofa up but some cheap foam, and that was so worn out that she sank almost all the way to the floor.

  “What happened to you?” he said, kicking some books out of the way to make a seat for himself on the floor. “You look like you’ve just been airlifted out of some international tragedy.”

  “Someone stole my bag off the beach. This is all I have left.”

  All the energy that had propelled her for days across land and sea and air had been spent, with no result. And now she was empty, tired, with no direction left to go in. Nothing telling her where to go, and nothing keeping her from going.

  “Can I just stay here for a while?” she asked. “Can I just sleep here?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his face clouding over. “Sure. You all right?”

  “I’ll just sleep on the floor or something,
” she said.

  “No. Stay there.”

  Ginny lay back and pulled the pile of Keith’s Star Wars comforter from its resting place on the back of the sofa. She closed her eyes and listened to him moving his papers around. She could tell he was watching her.

  “The letters are gone,” she said.

  “Gone?”

  “They were in the bag. They took the last one.”

  His brow wrinkled in appreciation of this fact. Ginny pulled the comforter over her nose. It smelled surprisingly clean and fresh. Maybe everything smelled that way when compared to her.

  “When did you get back?” he asked. “And how?”

  “Pretty much just now. Richard got me a plane ticket.”

  “Richard? Is that your aunt’s friend that you’ve been staying with?”

  “Kind of more than that,” she said.

  “Meaning?”

  She shifted a bit deeper into the sofa.

  “He’s my uncle.

  “You didn’t say that before.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  Keith sat down on the floor next to the sofa and stared at her.

  “You didn’t know?” he asked.

  “I just found out. They were married, but just for health insurance or something, because she was sick. But they also liked each other. It’s complicated….”

  “You just found out? Now?”

  “Richard just told me. And then I kind of ran away.”

  She tried to bury those last few words in the fabric, but he seemed to catch them.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked.

  It was a good question.

  “Don’t,” he said, pulling the blanket down. “You have to go back there.”

  “Why?”

  “Look,” he said, “this guy Richard cared enough to get you a plane ticket. He married your mad aunt because she was sick. And that is not fake. This whole thing is weird, granted, but that at least is real.”

  “You don’t get it,” she said, sitting up. “She wasn’t dead before. She was just gone. I knew she was dead. They told me she was dead. But I never saw her get sick. I never saw her die. Now she’s dead.”