13 Little Blue Envelopes (21 page)

“Did a woman ever ask you about it?”

“Lots of people ask me about it,” he said. “What do you want?”

Ginny didn’t know what she wanted.

“Just anything,” she said. “What you think about it.”

“It’s just part of my life,” he said with a shrug. “I see it every day. I don’t think about it.”

That couldn’t be it. This was Piet. This was
The Night Watch
.

But Piet just scratched at his lower lip and scanned the room, already detached from the conversation.

“Right,” she said. “Thanks.”

Back at Het Kleine Huis, Ginny dug through her bag and tried to figure out which of her clothes were the cleanest—which was a tough call.

“I’ve got some great news!” Mrs. Knapp said, bursting through the door without knocking, startling Ginny. “Something big for our last day together! A bike ride! To Delft! Our treat!”

“Delft?” Ginny asked.

“It’s one of the other big towns. So, lots of rest tonight!

We’ll be getting up early! Tell Olivia the good news!”

Bang. Door shut. She was gone.

221

The Secret Life of Olivia Knapp

Early the next morning, they were on a tram out to the far edge of Amsterdam. Ginny liked the tram. It was like an overgrown toy train that had gotten loose on the streets. She looked out the window and saw the Netherlands wobbling by—its ancient houses and constant canals and people in practical shoes.

One thing that the Knapps hadn’t said but Ginny could abundantly feel (really feel—like it was physically coming in through the back of her head) was that though they liked her enough, they were glad that she wasn’t their child. Or rather, if she had been, things would have been different. She would have been roboting herself out of bed at six in the morning
automatically
. She wouldn’t have dragged her feet on the mad rush from place to place. She would have sung show tunes. She would have liked running or at least
thinking
about running.

And she definitely would have been more excited about riding a bike for fifteen miles. She knew this last one for certain because 223

they kept asking her, “Aren’t you excited, Ginny? A bike ride?

Isn’t that great? Aren’t you excited?”

Ginny said that she was excited, but she also kept yawning, and the expression on her face probably told the whole story: she didn’t like bikes. In fact, she hated bikes. She hadn’t always hated bikes. She and Miriam had gone everywhere on their bikes when they were kids, but that had all stopped one day when they were twelve, and Ginny’s bike decided not to stop as she took a big hill and she was forced to turn hard and wipe out on the asphalt to keep from running into traffic.

She tried not to think about this as she was being saddled onto a bike that was much too big for her. The tour director said it was because she was such a “big—I mean tall big—

girl.” So that meant all the shorter people got bikes that were right for their height, and she got the big girl bike that was left.

And she wasn’t even that tall, anyway. Olivia was taller.

This was obviously “single Ginny out” day.

The ride to Delft was fairly easy, even for her, since the Netherlands was flat as a board. She only felt herself teetering off her towering bicycle once or twice, and that was only when she sped up a little to put some distance between herself and the Knapps, who were singing every song they could think of that referenced bikes, or riding, or going somewhere.

Delft turned out to be a beautiful town, a miniature version of Amsterdam. It was one of those places so absurdly cool that Ginny knew that either through legalities or luck, she would never, ever be able to live there. The citizenry simply would not permit it.

224

Also, they had wooden shoes in one of the first shops they got to. Mrs. Knapp was thrilled. Ginny just wanted to sit down, so she crossed the street (the canal, really) and sat down on a bench. To her surprise, Olivia joined her.

“Who were you writing to yesterday?” Olivia asked.

Maybe it was the shock of Olivia showing a sudden burst of actual personality that caused what happened next.

“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.”

225

“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 emo-tionless 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 226

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 227

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?”

228

#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.