The Last Little Blue Envelope

by Maureen Johnson

  “This appears to be in order,” he said. “Basic, but acceptable. I have four copies here. If you’ll just sign them all where indicated . . .”

  Ginny scrawled her name as quickly as possible and pushed the papers away. Oliver wrote slowly, in small, steady script.

  “Well,” Cecil said, taking the copies, “as I work for the seller, I’ll abide by your wishes. I’ll arrange for the sale on that day and do what I can to get the previous buyers back in the room. You will have the piece on the first, yes?”

  “That’s right,” Oliver said.

  “Then I’ll arrange for one of our teams to come for it. First of the year . . . normally we wouldn’t do that, but we work with the circumstances. Unless there’s something else I can help you with?”

  “No,” Oliver said, standing. “We should be on our way.”

  “Then James will show you out. Thank you so much for coming in.”

  Outside, the sky was the same color as the sidewalk and the stone walls in front of the houses. Oliver strode away from Jerrlyn and Wise with a long, easy step, stopping in front of one of the many small mansions that lined the street and sitting down on the low wall that surrounded its front garden. He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a silver lighter from his pocket with a sweeping gesture that Ginny suspected had been rehearsed in front of a mirror. She stood directly in front of him and folded her arms.

  “I want my letter,” she said.

  “I can’t give that to you just yet. The letter is the key to getting the art. If I give you the letter, you can just go and get the art. Don’t worry, though. The letter is of no other value to me, so the minute we’re done, you’ll get it back.”

  “The minute we’re done with what, exactly? How is this supposed to work?”

  “We go to Paris. That’s where the first piece is.”

  “Paris?”

  “Nothing’s properly open on Christmas or Boxing Day, so we’ll start nice and early on the twenty-seventh. I got us two train tickets. Don’t worry—they were cheap. Only fifty pounds. I figured I could contribute that to the cause.”

  “You think I’m going to travel with you?” she said. “To Paris. You and me. You’re insane.”

  “Look,” he said, sticking a cigarette in his mouth, “it’s probably hard for you to trust me when I say you’ll be perfectly safe with me. My interests are your interests. And I didn’t steal a thing. I found the letters, and I’m giving them back. You’re going to make money you couldn’t have made otherwise. You have no reason to complain.”

  A small orange cat slunk along one of the walls on the opposite side of the street. It sat and stared across at them haughtily, as if asking what they were doing in its neighborhood.

  “We’re both needed for this,” Oliver said. “There are things in the letter that only you will understand. I have the letter, and you have the knowledge. All I want is for us to go and get the pieces. That’s it.”

  Oliver calmly lit his cigarette and took a long draw, waiting for her reply.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  He nodded and pushed off the wall. “You know where to reach me.”

  The Pool

  Though it was only a little after four, the sky had gone dark and all the lights had been switched on: the illuminated ads on the double-decker buses, the light of cell phones pressed to hundreds of faces, the warm glow from the windows. Everyone was moving quickly, the final panicked moments before all the shops closed and Christmas began. London was sparkling and pulsing. Ginny allowed herself to be carried along with the crowd. She had gone beyond shock into a new and completely foreign state of almost aggressive acceptance. The summer had pushed her into some weird places. She had handled it then—she would handle it now.

  When she got off at Angel station, she saw a man selling trees in the shopping plaza. Decorate. That’s what she would do. She would decorate, and she wouldn’t think about anything but decorating. It was Christmas, and she wanted to make it nice for herself and Richard. It would keep her busy, and busy was good. She purchased one of the trees, a tiny one, maybe three feet high. It didn’t weigh much; she could carry it with one hand. She walked around with it, looking blankly in store windows until she found some decorations to go with it. There was nowhere to leave the little tree outside—she couldn’t exactly lock it up—so Ginny brought it in with her. She bought up pretty much everything she found on one of the display tables full of two-for-one Christmas balls and lights and shiny objects. She bought far more than she could reasonably carry, so she carried it unreasonably, the bags cutting harsh red lines into her skin, the tree banging into her ankles as she walked.

  “Do you need help with that?” a man asked, as Ginny dragged the tree along the sidewalk.

  “No, I’m fine . . . thanks. Merry Christmas.”

  He nodded, but looked very uncertain.

  Though she had gotten a lot of things, some improvisation was still necessary. First, she had forgotten to get a tree stand. This meant finding a bucket in the closet, then getting the tree to stay upright by lashing it in place with some string, then covering the bucket in tinsel. Some of the ornaments came without hooks, so she was forced to make the hooks out of some paperclips she found. When she ran out of those, she just taped them to the tree, hiding the tape as best she could. She bought way too many lights, so she strung them everywhere—up the stairs, around the mirror above the sofa, around the television.

  She decorated until there was nothing left to hang, nothing left to cover. Then she sat on the sofa and waited.

  Paris. Oliver wanted her to go to Paris. She couldn’t deny a minor thrill at the thought. Their conversation played in her head on an endless loop. There was nothing she could have done differently. If she’d said something to Cecil, Oliver would have bolted. So she would go to Paris. She had done it before. And at least this Oliver, Oliver, Oliver loop was a distraction from the Keith, Keith, Keith loop. That was something.

  The debate continued until a black cab pulled up out front. There was a jingle of keys, and Richard was at the door with three large Harrods bags.

  “Hello!” he said. “I have . . . bloody hell.”

  “I decorated,” Ginny said, pointing out the obvious.

  “Yes, I see that.”

  It was hard to read his reaction. He wasn’t ambivalent—his eyes were wide and he rubbed his hairline.

  “It’s . . . wow. I don’t really ever . . . I suppose I don’t have time . . . it’s marvelous. I have half the food hall in here. The roast dinner! Come on. We need to put this in the kitchen.”

  She was pretty sure he was lying, but he was obviously happy to be home. As they headed for the kitchen, he casually slipped one of the bags behind a chair. Just as casually, she looked to see what it was. Wrapping paper peeked out at the top. He had gotten her some gifts.

  “It was absolutely mental,” he said, dropping the remaining bags on the counter. “I must have sent out two hundred Christmas hampers this morning. Some people don’t realize that if you want to send someone fifty pounds of chocolates inside of a decorative birdhouse for Christmas you should really ring me before eight in the morning on Christmas Eve.”

  “Any celebrities?”

  “A few. Nobody was too bad this year. I didn’t have to find any exotic animals or enriched plutonium or anything like that.”

  Richard wasn’t exaggerating about the roast dinner. There were easily thirty different containers in the bags. When the last one was put away, Richard took a beer out of the refrigerator. “I’m too tired to drink this,” he said, looking at it mournfully. He put it back in the fridge and shut the door. “I have to sleep.”

  He stopped halfway up the steps and had a look at the lights strung there. “Someone from your family has always decorated my house for Christmas,” he said. “Peg did last year. Her decorations were a bit weirder, as you might imagine. She suspended the tree upside down, for a start.”

  “She what?” Ginny asked.
r />   “By drilling a few holes in the ceiling and suspending it. Right there, in the corner.” He pointed to just above where she was sitting. Sure enough, there was a series of small holes there. Aunt Peg, once again, had been down this road before.

  “Was it a big tree?” she asked.

  “It was enormous.”

  “And she just . . . hung it?”

  “She did. I’m glad she didn’t bring the ceiling down. Even if she had, she probably would have turned the rubble into more decorations. I still don’t know how she did that. I suspect she had help. In any case . . . I’ll see you in the morning. Merry Christmas.”

  That night, as Ginny lay in bed staring up at the collage on the wall, her brain drifted back to a brutal summer’s day in New York City when Aunt Peg said, “Let’s go swimming. My friend has a pool.”

  This was about three years before, when Ginny was a freshman in high school. It was right before Aunt Peg vanished from their lives. Ginny didn’t know it then, but this would be the last time she stayed in Aunt Peg’s apartment in the East Village. New York City summers are punishing affairs—intense heat magnified off steel and glass, more heat coming from the subways underground, heavy, blanketing humidity that makes you feel like you weigh ten extra pounds. New York is a watery town. It sits between rivers, has a huge harbor, and swamp. For environmental and aesthetic reasons, Aunt Peg did not believe in air-conditioning. Plus, her apartment was directly above a Chinese restaurant. The apartment that was so cozy and warm in the winter from all the rising heat below was torturous in July. It was like taking a sauna in fat fumes.

  So Ginny had been pretty miserable until this pool was mentioned. She was also confused, because having a pool in New York City meant you had to be insanely rich. Aunt Peg’s friends were not insanely rich—more just insane. Ginny also didn’t have a bathing suit with her. Aunt Peg dug out an old pair of shorts and a thin, ripped T-shirt, declared that to be exactly bathing suit–like, and took Ginny down, deeper into the Village, to a funky, run-down building on Avenue A. There was an alley that led around to the back, where some artist had created a metal “garden” out of car and bicycle parts. There was a Dumpster in the middle of this garden with a ladder up against it.

  “Ready?” Aunt Peg asked, shedding her shirt, revealing the bikini underneath. She started to make her way up the ladder, into the Dumpster.

  That was not a pool.

  “It’s clean,” she assured Ginny. “It’s safe.”

  She jumped inside with a loud splash.

  Those things seemed highly unlikely. But, as she always did, Ginny followed her aunt. She slowly climbed the ladder and peered in. Pools usually look bright. They’re painted a cheerful blue on the bottom to give the water a pleasant color. Climbing into a dark pool violated some evolutionary instinct. It just wasn’t right, even if it did have an inflatable alligator bobbing around. Rust, disease, dirt . . .

  “It’s fine!” Aunt Peg said again. “I swim in this all the time! Trust me, they cleaned it really well.”

  Ginny got to the top edge, sat there for a moment, sticking her feet into the water. It was warm, and it reeked of chlorine. That was a positive sign.

  Aunt Peg was looking at her, waiting for her to take the plunge—literally. Aunt Peg was the one person Ginny hated to disappoint, so she took a deep breath, inched herself forward, and dropped.

  The water was about five feet deep, but the walls of the Dumpster were about eight feet high. It also wasn’t very big. It was exactly what it looked like—a big metal box filled with water in the backyard of a building in the Village. But there was something great about it—it was a pool. It was an incredibly stupid pool in the middle of New York. And she had done it. Aunt Peg made the call, and Ginny had answered.

  “You know what?” Aunt Peg said. “People would say that it’s impossible to have a private pool in the city, unless you were some kind of mogul and had it on the roof of your penthouse or something. But it’s not illegal to have a really clean Dumpster, and if you want to fill it with water, and if you want to get in it . . . well, that’s your prerogative. People always say they can’t do things, that they’re impossible. They just haven’t been creative enough. This pool is a triumph of imagination. That’s how you win at life, Gin. You have to imagine your way through. Never say something can’t be done. There’s always a solution, even if it’s weird.”

  Ginny nodded away at the time, and by the next day dismissed the sentiment as stupid artsy crap, even though she liked the pool. The day after that she found that she had an infected scratch on her arm and told her mom she got it on the garage door.

  But the idea never left her mind. The adventures of the summer had been a triumph of imagination. You could make something amazing out of something awful. So, Keith had a girlfriend. So, she was essentially being blackmailed. She was here. She had made it to London for Christmas. She was with her uncle. She had jumped into the garbage pool before.

  Before Ginny could think the matter over anymore, she rolled over and reached around in the dark, finding her computer on the floor. It blinded her for a second when she opened it. She blinked off the shock and turned on chat to see if he was there. It didn’t surprise her to see that he was.

  When and where? she wrote.

  He instantly began typing a reply.

  Meet me at St. Pancras Station at 10 a.m. on the 27th, at the meeting place. I have two tickets for the train to Paris at 11:37.

  What meeting place? she asked.

  You won’t be able to miss it. After Paris, there are two other places we have to go.

  Where?

  I can’t tell you that yet. I have to protect my interests. I’ve planned it all out. It will take us four days, total.

  Ginny stared at the chat window glowing in the dark. Four days? When Oliver said they were going to take the train to Paris, she assumed he meant they would go there and back. They didn’t even have to stay over—that was the magic of going to Paris from London. It could be a day trip. But four days? Multiple cities?

  We’ll have all the pieces by the 1st, Oliver added, and then you never have to see me again. Deal?

  She was on the edge again, looking into the murky depths of the garbage pool. This time, there was no voice reassuring her.

  Fine, she wrote. I’ll be there.

  Nothing for a moment, then he began typing again.

  Merry Christmas, he wrote.

  She closed the computer in reply.

  The Feast

  Ginny woke up on top of her computer, which had snuggled under the covers with her at some point in the night. She extracted it from her bed, looking at it a bit suspiciously. Downstairs, Richard was flopped on the sofa in a pair of running pants and a sweatshirt, watching a Doctor Who Christmas special and sipping a mug of tea.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I overslept.”

  “It doesn’t matter. This is casual Christmas. We do as we like. I’m drinking tea and watching television. Go make a cup and join me!”

  Ginny went into the kitchen. The kettle was still warm from its last use. She flicked the switch and it speedily reboiled the water as she got out one of the heavy striped mugs. This was one English ritual she loved. She never drank tea at home. Tea was for England. Tea was at Richard’s house. This one simple gesture made her feel like this was home.

  “I have something very important,” Richard said, when she joined him in the living room. He reached around to the side of the sofa, producing a long box, about the size of a board game. It was full of what looked like paper towel rolls wrapped in shiny paper.

  “Fancy crackers,” he said. “Harrods’ best.”

  “Crackers?”

  “Christmas crackers? Oh, you don’t have those. Here. I’ll show you.” He opened the box and removed one of the tubes, holding it out to her. “Count of three, you pull on that end, and I pull on this one. Ready? One, two, three . . .”

  Ginny gave her end a halfhearted tug and the tube snapped apart with
a loud cracking noise. Three small objects fell to the floor. One was a small lump of pink paper, a small folded piece of paper, and the last was a small metal elephant on a key chain. Richard handed Ginny the elephant.

  “The prizes are usually rubbish, but these are nice crackers, so there you go. Small metal elephant. Quality. Bet you’ve been wanting one of those.”

  “Ever since I was little,” Ginny said, as Richard unfurled the pink lump to reveal a small paper crown.

  “I suspected as much. You also get a crown and a joke. The jokes are always bad. Let’s see here. . . . ‘Who delivers Christmas presents to all the little fish?’”

  “I don’t know,” Ginny said, putting on her crown.

  “Santa Jaws. Ho ho! That’s a Christmas cracker joke. Now, presents!”

  Richard had gotten her a number of gifts—a pile of books (chosen by his friend in the Harrods bookstore), a bag of makeup (put together by one of his friends at the makeup counter), and a sweater (chosen by yet someone else). He was a professional present-picker, with a team of literally hundreds of specialists working under him. It was no surprise then that the gifts were all perfect.

  “I hope those are okay,” he said. “I gave them as much information as I could. I would have chosen them myself, but it seemed stupid when I could just use experts.”

  Ginny handed over the three packages she had brought for him. Now that she was here, face-to-face with Richard, she wondered about the wisdom of giving him reminders of Aunt Peg. Maybe what he needed was to forget. He was very quiet as he opened them, and she could see that he was getting teary eyed, which made her get teary eyed.

  “They’re wonderful,” he said. “Thank you.”

  He set them carefully on the coffee table and coughed into his fist.

  “I forgot one,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Let me just go and get it.”

  He was upstairs for just a little bit longer than was probably necessary to get something from his room. When he returned, he had one more box, which he handed to her. “I got this one for you when you first told me you were coming over. I forgot to put it with the others.”