13 Little Blue Envelopes

by Maureen Johnson

  That day I was going to a job in an office in the Empire State Building. I have to confess, Gin…I get a little romantic about the old Empire State. Just looking at it makes me want to play some Frank Sinatra tunes and sway a little. I have a crush on a building. I’d been in there several times but never to work. I always knew there were offices in there, but that fact never penetrated, really. You don’t work in the Empire State Building. You propose in the Empire State Building. You sneak a flask up there and raise a toast to the whole city of New York.

  And as I walked up to it and realized that I was about to enter that beautiful building to file or make copies—I stopped. Too quickly, actually. The guy behind me walked right into me.

  Something had seriously gone wrong if I was going into the Empire State for that.

  That was how it all started, Gin. It was right there on the 33rd Street sidewalk. I never went to work that day. I turned around, got back on the 6, and went home. As much as I loved my apartment, something in me was saying…it’s time! Time to go! Like that rabbit in Alice in Wonderland who runs past saying, “I’m late!”

  Late for what, I couldn’t really tell you. But this feeling was so intense, I couldn’t shake it. I called in sick. I wandered around my apartment in circles. Something wasn’t right about what I was doing. I’d been comfortable in my apartment for too long. I was doing boring jobs.

  I thought about all the artists I’d admired. What did they do? Where did they live? Well, for the most part, they lived in Europe.

  What if I just went to Europe? Right then? The people I admired had sometimes starved and scraped their way along, but it had helped them create. I wanted to create.

  By that night, I had purchased my ticket to London. I borrowed $500 from a friend to do it. I gave myself three days to get everything settled. I picked up the phone to call you a few times, but I didn’t know what to say. Where I was going…why…I had no answers. And I didn’t know how long I’d be gone.

  This is the position you are in right now. You are about to go to England with no idea of what’s in store for you. Your path, your instructions, are in these envelopes. Here’s the catch: You may only open them one at a time and only once you’ve completed the task in each letter. I am relying on your honesty—you could open them all now, and I’d certainly never know. But I’m serious, Gin. It won’t work unless you open them exactly as I’ve said.

  On landing, your first task is to get from the airport to where you’ll be staying. To do this, you’ll need to take the underground, otherwise known as the tube (in American, the subway). I’ve enclosed a £10 note for this. It’s the purple thing with the queen on it.

  You need to get to the stop called Angel, which is on the Northern Line. You’ll be in a part of London called Islington. When you get out, you’ll be on Essex Road. Go right. Walk for about a minute until you reach Pennington Street. Hang left and look for 54a.

  Knock. Wait for someone to open door. Rinse and repeat as necessary until door opens.

  Love,

  Your Runaway Aunt

  P.S.

  You will notice that an ATM card for Barclays Bank is also in this envelope. Of course, it wouldn’t be safe to write the PIN number down. When you get to 54a, ask the person who lives there, “What did you sell to the queen?” The answer to that question is the PIN. When you’ve solved that, you may open #3.

  * * *

  54a Pennington Street, London

  She was standing somewhere in Heathrow Airport. She’d been shuffled off the plane, had pulled the notorious backpack from the luggage carousel, waited in an hour-long line to get her passport stamped, and been ignored by some customs officers. Now she was staring at a London tube map.

  It looked like a nursery school poster designed to attract the eyes of toddlers. It was stark white, with bright primary-colored lines snaking around it. The stops had solid-sounding names, like Old Street and London Bridge. Royal sounding: Earl’s Court, Queensway, Knightsbridge. Entertaining: Elephant & Castle, Oxford Circus, Marylebone. And there were names she recognized: Victoria Station, Paddington (where the bear lived), Waterloo. And there was Angel. To get there, she’d have to change at a place called Kings Cross.

  She pulled out her £10 note, found a ticket machine, and followed the instructions. She walked up to one of the entrance aisles and faced a pair of metal doors, almost like saloon doors. She looked around, unsure of what to do next. She tried to push the gate gently, but nothing happened. Then she saw a woman next to her put her ticket into a slot on the little metal box next to her, and the doors opened. Ginny did the same. The machine sucked in the ticket with a satisfying swoosh, and the doors clapped open and she passed through.

  Everyone was moving in the same direction, so she kept going, trying not to stumble against the backs of the bags other people were wheeling. When the train slid up to the stark white platform, she didn’t think to unhook herself from the pack, so when she got on, she could only fit on the very edge of a seat.

  It wasn’t like the subway she had taken in New York. These were much nicer. The doors made pleasant bonging noises as they opened, and a British voice warned her to “mind the gap.”

  The train moved aboveground. They were riding along behind houses. Then it was back underground, where the stations became more crowded. All kinds of people shuffled on and off, some with maps and backpacks, others with folded newspapers or books and blank expressions.

  The cooing British voice said, “Angel,” a few stops later. She couldn’t turn around, so she had to back off the train, feeling for the space with her foot. A sign suspended from the ceiling said WAY OUT. As she approached the exit, there was another set of metal gates. This time, Ginny was certain that they would yield when she approached, kind of like an automatic door. But they didn’t. Not even when she walked right into them.

  An annoyed British voice from behind her said, “You have to put in your ticket, love.”

  She turned to face a man in a navy blue uniform and a bright orange work vest.

  “I don’t have it,” she said. “I put the ticket in the machine. It took it.”

  “You’re supposed to take it back,” he said with a sigh. “It comes back out.”

  He went over to one of the metal boxes and touched some unseen button or lever. The gates clapped open for her. She hurried through, too embarrassed to even look back.

  The first thing that hit her was the smell of a recent rain. The sidewalk was still wet and was fairly thick with people who politely moved around her and her backpack. The street was jammed full of real London traffic, just like in the pictures. The cars were tightly packed together, all going in the wrong direction. An actual red double-decker bus lumbered along.

  As soon as she turned off the main road, everything became much quieter. She found herself on a narrow street with a zigzagging line that cut down the middle. The houses were all chalk white and were nearly identical except for the colors of their doors (mostly black, but occasionally there was a red or a blue) and they all had multiple chimney pots poking out of the top, along with antennas and satellite dishes. The effect was weird—it was like a space station had crashed into a Charles Dickens story.

  Number 54a had a jagged crack running down the six concrete steps that led to its front door. Several large pots lined these steps, each containing plants that didn’t exactly look like they had been condemned to death on purpose. They were weak and small but still making an effort. Someone had obviously tried, and failed, to keep them alive.

  Ginny paused at the base of the steps. This had a very good chance of being a major mistake. Aunt Peg had some very unusual friends. Like the performance artist roommate—the one who ate her own hair onstage. Or the guy who spent a month communicating only through interpretive dance as a form of protest (against what, no one really knew).

  No. She had come this far. She wasn’t going to give up on the very first step. She walked up the stairs and knocked at the door.

  �
��Hang on a moment,” a voice called from inside. “Just a moment.”

  The voice was British (which really shouldn’t have surprised her but still did). It was also male. Not an old voice. She heard a thumping—someone running downstairs. And then the door swung open.

  The man standing in front of her was in the process of getting dressed. The first thing that surprised Ginny was that he was wearing half a black suit (the pants). A silver gray tie hung loosely around his neck, and his shirt was only half tucked in. Aunt Peg’s friends did not usually wear suits (or even parts of suits) and ties. It was less of a surprise that he was handsome—tall, with very dark, slightly curly hair and highly arched eyebrows. Aunt Peg attracted people with lots of personality, lots of charm.

  The man gaped at her for a moment, then hurriedly tucked in his shirt.

  “Are you Virginia?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Ginny said. The yeah came out too broad, and she suddenly heard her own accent. “I mean, yes. That’s me. I’m Ginny. How did you know?”

  “Just a guess,” he said, his eyes lingering over her bag. “I’m Richard.”

  “I’m Ginny,” she said again. She gave her head a quick snap to try to get the blood flowing up there again.

  Richard clearly had a moment of confusion over what kind of greeting to give her. He finally stuck out his hand for her bag.

  “It’s a good thing you caught me. I wasn’t sure when you were coming. I wasn’t even sure if you were coming.”

  “Well, I’m here,” she said.

  They nodded at each other for a moment in acknowledgment of this fact until Richard seemed to be physically struck by a thought.

  “You should come in,” he said.

  He opened the door wider and grimaced only slightly as he relieved Ginny of the groaning purple-and-green backpack.

  Richard gave her a quick tour that revealed that 54a Pennington Street was just a house—not an artists’ colony, or a commune, or any kind of sociological experiment. It was a fairly plainly decorated one at that. It looked like it might have been shipped straight out of an office supply catalog. Low-pile carpet. Simple furniture in flat navy blues and blacks. Nothing on the walls. Nothing, that is, until they came to a small, sunny bedroom.

  “This was Peg’s room,” Richard said, opening the door. But Ginny didn’t need to be told that. It was a miniature version of the 4th Noodle apartment. In fact, the room resembled the apartment so closely it was almost spooky. It wasn’t that she had furnished it or painted it exactly the same—it was the method. The walls had been washed down in pink and then covered in an elaborate collage of…well, trash, really. (When Ginny’s mom got annoyed with her little sister, she tended to make comments about Aunt Peg’s trash-picking habit. “She’s got other people’s garbage all over her walls!”)

  But it wasn’t bad, smelly trash—it was labels, bits of old magazines, candy bar wrappers. If anyone else had attempted this, the result would have been dizzying, nauseating. But Aunt Peg managed to arrange it all by color, by type style, by image, so that it all looked like it belonged together. Like it all made sense. One wall had been left collage-free, and on it hung a poster Ginny recognized. It was a French painting of a young woman standing behind a bar. It was an old picture, from the late 1800s. The woman wore an elegant blue dress, and the bar she was tending was opulent—marble, loaded down with bottles. The mirror behind her head reflected a crowd and a show. But she looked terribly, terribly bored.

  “It’s Manet,” she said. “It’s called The Bar at the Folies-Bergère.”

  “Is it?”

  Richard blinked, as if he’d never noticed the poster there before. “I don’t really know anything about art,” he said apologetically. “It’s nice, I suppose. Nice…colors.”

  Good one, Ginny thought. Now he probably thought she was some kind of art nerd who was only here because she had outgrown art-nerd camp. She only knew the name and artist of this one because Aunt Peg had had the exact same picture in her apartment, and the title and artist had been written at the bottom of the print.

  Richard was still staring blankly at the poster.

  “I don’t really know much about it either,” Ginny said. “It’s okay.”

  “Oh. Right.” He seemed a bit reassured by that. “You look exhausted. Maybe you’d like to have a rest? Again, I’m sorry, I wish I had known when…but you’re here, so…”

  Ginny looked at the bed, with its crazy-quilt cover. This was Aunt Peg’s handiwork as well. She’d had similar items all over her apartment, all made of random, mismatched pieces of cloth. She wanted to stretch out on this bed so badly she could almost taste it.

  “Well, I…I have to go,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to come with me? I work at Harrods. The big department store. It’s as good a place as any to start seeing London. Peg loved Harrods. We can sort everything out later. What do you say?”

  “Sure,” Ginny said, with one final, sad look at the bed. “Let’s go.”

  Harrods

  Ginny was passing in and out of thoughtful consciousness on the tube. They were stuck in the morning rush, forced to stand. The rhythm of the train lulled her. It look a lot of effort not to give in to her wobbling knees and slump into Richard.

  Richard was obviously trying to make conversation, pointing out things that could be seen at each of the various stops—anything from the major (Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park) to the minor (his dentist, “a really good Thai takeaway”). His words were dribbling into the ebbing sensory mess that surrounded her. British voices swirled around her head. Her eyes flicked over the advertisements that ran along the top of the car. Though the language was the same, the meaning of many of the posters was lost on her. It seemed like every one of them was some kind of inside joke.

  “You look a lot like Peg,” he said, catching her attention.

  This was somewhat true. They had similar hair, at least—long and deep chocolate brown. Aunt Peg was shorter. She had a slender build and a regal bearing that made strangers assume she was a dancer. Her features were very delicate. Ginny was taller, curvier. Bigger, generally. Less delicate.

  “I guess,” she said.

  “No. You really do. It’s extraordinary….” He was hanging onto an overhead strap and looking down at her with an intense stare. Something about his look managed to penetrate Ginny’s exhaustion, and she found herself staring back with equal intensity. This move startled them both, and they looked away at the same time. Richard didn’t speak again until they reached the next stop and informed Ginny that this was Knightsbridge. This was their stop.

  They emerged onto a pulsing London street. The road was completely jammed with red buses, black cabs, tiny cars, motorcycles…. The sidewalks were crammed to capacity. Though her brain was still cloudy, Ginny felt a shock of energy run through her body at the sight of it all.

  Richard directed her around a corner to a building that seemed to stretch on forever. It was a solid wall of golden red brick, with decorative cornices and a dome on the roof. Green awnings stretched above dozens of huge windows, each opulently displaying clothes, perfume, cosmetics, stuffed animals, even a car. Each one of these awnings was printed with the word Harrods in a mustard-gold script. Richard led Ginny past the windows, past the front doors and the doorman, and around to an unobtrusive nook by a large trash bin.

  “This is it,” Richard said, indicating the side of the building and a door marked STAFF ONLY. “We’re going in through a side entrance. It gets a bit mad in here. Harrods is a big tourist destination. We get thousands and thousands of people a day.”

  They entered a stark white hallway with a bank of elevators. A sign on the wall next to the door listed various departments and floors. Ginny wondered if she was misreading them: Air Harrods helicopter services, Air Harrods jet aircraft, tennis racquet restringing, piano tuning, saddlery, dog coat fitting….

  “I just have to take care of a few things,” he said. “Maybe you can walk around, have a look at the store, and
meet me here in an hour or so? That door leads to the ground floor. Plenty of things to look at in Harrods.”

  Ginny was still stuck on “dog coat fitting.”

  “If you get lost,” he said, “have someone call Special Services and ask for me, all right? My last name’s Murphy, by the way. Ask for Mr. Murphy.”

  “Okay.”

  He punched a code into a small number pad and the door clicked open.

  “It’s good to have you here,” he said, smiling widely. “See you in an hour.”

  Ginny poked her head through the doorway. A display case there featured a miniature speedboat, only big enough for a small child. It was colored olive green and had the name Harrods printed over the bow. The sign said: FULLY OPERATIONAL. £20,000.

  And then there were people. Massive, scary throngs of people pouring in through the doors, lining up at the display cases. She stepped tentatively into the crowd and was immediately absorbed into the flow of humanity, which sucked her along. She was pushed past the cigarette lighter repair desk, through a Princess Diana memorial, into a Starbucks, and then dropped on an escalator entirely decorated in Egyptian artifacts (or really good copies, anyway).

  She went up through the hieroglyphics and the statues until the river of people unloaded her into some kind of children’s theater room with a Punch and Judy show. She managed to get through that room pretty much on her own, but the crowd got her again as she passed through the door into a room filled with tuxedos for babies.

  Departments that made no sense were strung together in a series of large and small rooms. Every offshoot led to something weirder, and nothing appeared to be an exit. There was always just more. She went from a room displaying colorful kitchen appliances into a room entirely filled with pianos. From there, she was swept up by the crowd into a room of exotic pet supplies. Then a room devoted solely to women’s accessories, but only ones colored light blue—purses, silk scarves, wallets, shoes. Even the walls were light blue. The crowd snagged her again—now she was in a bookstore—now back on the Egyptian escalator.