13 Little Blue Envelopes (24 page)

Fourteen words. You’d think I could remember something like that. I tried. It lasted for about four minutes, and pretty soon it was, “No shoe should be judged by its footprint, for the foot has a print of its own.”

That’s how it stuck in my head. And that, I thought, has no meaning. At all.

Except in your case, Gin. It may actually work for you. Because what I’ve done to you (or what you’ve chosen to do—you are your own woman) is follow in my footsteps on this insane journey I took. You’re in my shoes, but the feet are yours. I don’t know where they’ll lead you.

Does that make any sense? It did when I thought of it. I thought you’d think I was really smart.

I ask because what I want you to do next is retrace a journey I took when I left Copenhagen. I left because the festival was over, and I had no idea what to do with myself.

Sometimes, Gin, life leaves you without

directions, without guideposts or signs. When this happens, you just have to pick a direction and run like hell. Since you can’t get much more north than Scandinavia, I decided to go south. And I just kept going.

I went by train to the coast in a misty fog, then got on a train in Germany and rode down. Down through the mountains, down into the Black Forest.

I got off in several cities, but each time I couldn’t get any farther than the station door, and I would just turn around and get on another southbound train. Then I hit Italy and turned toward the sea. I had a bright idea—I thought, I’ll go to Venice and drown my sorrows. But there was a garbagemen’s strike in Venice, so it smelled like stinky fish—and it was raining. So I went to the water’s edge and thought, What now? Do I turn left and go through Slovenia, maybe escape to Hungary and eat Hungarian pastries until I explode?

But then I saw the boat, and I just got on.

There’s nothing quite like a long, slow boat ride to clear your thoughts, Gin. A good, slow ferry that takes its time and leaves you baking in the sun off the coast of Italy. I was on that boat for

twenty-four hours, sitting by myself in a sticky deck chair, thinking about all that I’d done in the last few months. And around the twenty-third hour, as we were coming through the Greek isles, it all broke open for me, Gin. I saw it all clearly. I saw it as clearly as the island of Corfu, which was looming in front of us. I saw that I’d seen my destination a while back, and I’d forgotten to stop.

My future was behind me.

So try it yourself, Gin. Leave now. And I mean, now. As soon as you get this letter. Go right to the train. Go south relentlessly. Follow the yellow brick road all the way to Greece, to the warm waters, to the birthplace of art, philosophy, and yogurt.

When you get on the boat, give me a shout.

Love,

Your Runaway Aunt

P.S. Oh. Go to the grocery store first. Pack snacks.

This is a good rule to follow in all aspects of life.

The Blue Envelope Gang

It was noon the next day, and they were all recovering on Hippo’s beach. Ginny sat in the cold, shallow sand and felt the wooden boards that supported the beach just under her fingertips. The sky was mostly gray, and the buildings around them were Danish canal houses and seven-hundred-year-old countinghouses, but everyone was acting like it was spring break in Palm Beach.

People were sleeping on the sand in bathing suits and a large group was playing volleyball.

She scooped up some of the sand in the empty eleventh envelope, slid the letter back in, and absently folded the flap closed.

Ginny turned to her companions and said, “I’ve got to go to Greece. Someplace called Corfu. And I have to go right now.”

Emmett looked over.

“Why do you
have
to go to Greece?” he asked. “And why now?”

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It was a reasonable enough question, and the asking had attracted the attention of the others.

“I have these letters,” she said, holding up the sand-filled envelope. “They’re from my aunt. It’s kind of a game. She sent me here. The letters tell me where I have to go and what I have to do, and when I’m done, I can open the next one.”

“You’re kidding,” Carrie said. “Your aunt is ace! Where is she? At home or here?”

“She’s . . . gone. I mean, she died. But that’s okay. I mean . . .”

She shrugged to try to show them that she was all right with the question.

“So,” Bennett said, “are there a lot of these letters?”

“Thirteen. This is number eleven. Almost to the end.”

“And you don’t know where you’re going or what you have to do until you open them?”

“Nope.”

The effect was kind of remarkable and seemed to solidify in the Australians’ minds the idea that Ginny was a very special being. This was a very foreign feeling, and not a bad one.

“Well,” Carrie said, “can we go?”

“Go?”

“To Greece. With you?”

“You want to come with me?”

“Greece sounds good. We’re done here, anyway. We could use some sun. We have rail passes. Why not?”

And so, the matter was decided. Ten minutes later, they were shaking the sand off themselves and back onto Hippo’s little beach and heading inside to get their things. In twenty minutes, they were online in Hippo’s lounge, booking seats on a train.

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Because Bennett, Emmett, Nigel, and Carrie all had Eurail passes, their route to Greece was restricted to certain trains at certain times. And because there were four of them and one of Ginny, their needs came first. Their route would take them through Germany, through Austria for a short while, then they would cut into Italy, finally stopping at Venice. It would take twenty-five hours.

Within a half hour, they were in a Copenhagen super-market, filling a basket with fruit, bottled water, tiny cheeses sealed in wax, cookies . . . anything they could think of that might sustain them for twenty-five hours on board a train. And one and a half hours later, they were leaving Copenhagen for another Danish city called Rødbyhavn, which Ginny wasn’t even going to try to pronounce. It seemed to consist only of the ferry terminal, a big, windy building. There they caught a small ferry to Puttgarden, Germany, which took about three minutes.

In Puttgarden, they stood on a lonely train platform, where a sleek-looking train stopped and accepted them. They squished into a set of seats meant for four people.

As Ginny saw it, Germany was a Pizza Hut in Hamburg where she burned the roof of her mouth from eating too fast.

She and Carrie got lost trying to find the women’s bathroom in Frankfurt. Nigel accidentally knocked over an elderly woman as he ran for the train in Munich.

The rest was just train. In her dazed state, she remembered looking out of a window at a bright blue sky against gray mountains with white peaks soaring in the distance. Then there were miles and miles of green and fields of long, slender grasses and purple flowers. Three sudden rainstorms. Gas stations.

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Colorful cottages that looked like something out of
The Sound
of Music
. Rows of plain brown houses.

After the twelfth hour, Ginny began to suspect that if she sat like this much longer, hunched over with Carrie’s jacket behind her head, she would be shrimp-shaped the rest of her life.

Somewhere in what Ginny guessed was the north of Italy, the air conditioner died. A valiant attempt was made to open their windows, but to no avail. It didn’t take long before the heat began to collect in the car, and a light but definitely funky smell hung in the still air. The train got slower. Some announcements were made about a strike somewhere. Patience was requested.

The funk got funkier.

They stopped entirely for half an hour, and when they started again, the conductor asked that nobody use the bathroom.

They arrived at Venice with only fifteen minutes to spare and no idea where they were. They took their cues from the signs, trying to find the exit. Once out on the street, they piled into a small, unmarked cab, and then they were speeding down the empty streets at what felt like a hundred fifty miles an hour. A strong ocean breeze came in through the open windows as they flew, buffeting Ginny’s face and causing her eyes to tear up.

And in another moment, they were all getting on a big red boat.

They were deck passengers. That meant they could sit in a chair in the lounge (already full), a chair on the deck (all taken), or the deck itself. And most of that space had been claimed. They had to walk around the boat twice before they found a narrow 262

slice of deck between a lifeboat and a wall. Ginny stretched out as far as she could, grateful to be in the open air.

She woke up feeling a midday sun hanging right above her eyes. The heat penetrated her eyelids. She could feel an uneven sunburn on her face. She got up and stretched, then walked to the side of the boat.

The boat they were on was part of the “super-speed” line, but it didn’t live up to its name. They slugged through the water at a slow enough pace to allow seabirds to land on the deck, rest, and then take off again. The water under them was a crayon-bright turquoise—the kind of color she’d never believed water could be. Ginny pulled the remaining envelopes from her bag and held them tightly (not that anything moved much—

there was almost no breeze). Now the rubber band was irrele-vant. It hung slack over the last two. Ginny slipped out the twelfth envelope and wound the band around her wrist.

The picture on twelve had always puzzled her. It sort of looked like the back of a purple dragon rising from the bottom edge of the envelope. Now that she was on the water, she understood exactly what it was supposed to be—it was an island.

Granted, a strange picture of an island, somewhat blurry and completely the wrong color. But it was an island nonetheless.

She broke the seal and opened it.

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#12

#12

Ginny,

Harrods is the kind of thing I think you only find in England. It’s in a beautiful old building.

It’s traditional. It’s bizarrely organized and more or less impossible to find anything—but if you look hard enough, everything in the world is in there.

Including Richard Murphy.

See, Gin, when I first arrived in London, I was still on my adrenaline rush. But after a few days, I realized that I was homeless, jobless, and broke—which is a really bad combination.