13 Little Blue Envelopes

by Maureen Johnson

  They came to a large circle in the path. There was a fountain in the center and benches all around.

  “Here we are,” Keith said. “Our hotel. I’ll have the bellman take up our bags.”

  He dropped Ginny’s bag down on one of the benches and settled down with his head on one end of it.

  “Down pillows,” he said. “Sign of quality.”

  Ginny stretched out in the opposite direction. She stared up at the dark outline of the trees above them. They looked like shadowy hands reaching for the sky.

  “Keith?” she asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Just checking.”

  “Still here, mad one.”

  She grinned.

  “Think we’re going to get mugged and killed?”

  “Hope not.”

  She wanted to ask something else, but before she could think of what it was, she was asleep.

  Ginny heard a rustling by her head, but her body had no desire to move. She had to will her eyes to open. She glanced at her watch. It was ten. Ginny reached over to shake Keith by the shoulder. He had his arms folded and tucked in tight over his chest, and he looked so content that she didn’t really want to wake him.

  She pulled herself upright and looked around. People were milling around in the park now. No one seemed to pay them any notice. She quickly reached up and rubbed at her face, trying to get rid of any sleep or slobber. She checked her braids as well. They seemed more or less intact. Aside from the fact that she felt a little sticky (which she guessed was something you had to expect after sleeping on a bench all night, though she couldn’t really say why), she was in pretty good shape. Total cleanliness had become such a distant reality that her whole perspective on the matter had changed.

  Some of the other people in the park were walking dogs or just strolling. No one seemed to care that they’d been using the bench for a bed.

  Keith stirred and sat upright slowly.

  “Right,” he said. “Where’s breakfast?”

  They found a little café down the street that had a huge pile of pastries in the window. Soon, they were sitting in front of three cups of espresso (all Keith’s), a café au lait, and a basket of pain au chocolat.

  When he wasn’t shoving pastry into his mouth, Keith filled Ginny in on all the news on the show.

  “We’re just finishing up here,” he said, “then we’re off to Scotland as soon as we get back. Oh, blimey, that’s not the time.”

  He stood up.

  “Look,” he said, “sorry…but I have to get back. Have a show to do this afternoon. Drop me a line. Let me know how it’s going.”

  He reached over and grabbed her hand, then produced a pen from his pocket.

  “Might as well keep it up,” he said, writing a few words on the back of her hand. “My IM.”

  “Okay,” she said, unable to hide the dropping in her voice. He grabbed his bag and was out the door. Her body instantly felt heavy. She was alone again. Who even knew if she would ever go back to England and see Keith again?

  Automatically, she reached down into the front pouch of the backpack and pulled out the envelopes. The rubber band was growing slack now.

  The cartoon on #9 was drawn in dark ink. There was a small drawing of a girl with braids in a skirt in the lower-left corner. Her shadow was long, running on a diagonal across the entire width of the envelope.

  She pulled out her notebook.

  July 7

  10:14 a.m., café table, Paris

  Mir,

  Keith was HERE. In PARIS. And HE FOUND ME. I know it sounds impossible, but it’s true, and it’s really not that magical of an explanation. But what matters is that we made out in a graveyard and slept on a park bench.

  Just forget it. No way this can be explained on paper. Will require telling in person with lots of gestures. Suffice it to say that I totally love him, and he totally just walked out of the door of the café and I may never see him again…and I know that sounds like a great movie ending, but in life, it just sucks.

  I want to follow him. I want to go where his show is and just lie on the sidewalk outside so he can trip over me. Okay? That’s how pathetic I am now. You should be thrilled.

  I know I have no right to whine. I know that you are still in New Jersey. Please know that I think of you 75 percent of every single day.

  Love,

  Gin

  #9

  * * *

  #9

  Dear Ginny,

  Know why I like the Netherlands so much?

  Because some of it shouldn’t even be there.

  True story. They constantly keep the sea at bay, and they create new land through drainage and moving dirt around. Water cuts all through the country—and canals slice through Amsterdam. It’s a miracle that they keep the place afloat.

  You have to be pretty clever to pull that off. Plus, it shows a lot of determination.

  It’s not surprising that the Dutch also changed painting forever. Back in the 1600s, the Dutch could paint pictures that looked like photographs. They captured light and movement in ways that had never been known before.

  These are also people who like to sit around and smoke and drink coffee and dip fries in mayonnaise.

  When I finished painting the café, I felt like Paris was done for me. Which is a ridiculous thing to feel, when you think about it. You can’t wear out Paris. I guess I’d been in one place for so long (sleeping on the floor behind a bar can be a little confining).

  I had a good friend, Charlie, who I knew from New York. He’s an Amsterdam native, and he lives in a canal house in the Jordaan, which is one of the coziest, most beautiful quarters in all of Europe. I decided I needed to see a friendly face, so that’s where I headed. That’s where I want you to go. Charlie will show you the real Amsterdam. His address is 60 Westerstraat.

  There is one other task. You have to go to the Rijksmuseum, which is the major museum in Amsterdam. One of the world’s great paintings, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, is there. Find Piet and ask him about it.

  Love,

  Your Runaway Aunt

  * * *

  Charlie and the Apple

  Amsterdam was damp.

  For a start, the central train station was smack in the middle of some kind of inlet and surrounded by water, which seemed to Ginny like somewhere a train station shouldn’t be. A canal even separated it from the busy main road that curved past. Ginny made her way over this. From there, countless tiny bridges spanned the canals that spidered out and cut through every street.

  Plus, it was raining—a slow, steady drizzle that she could barely see but that soaked her through in minutes.

  Paris had been wide, with big, white, wedding-cake-perfect buildings and palaces and things that looked just like palaces even thought they probably weren’t. Amsterdam looked like a little village in comparison. Everything was red brick or stone and low to the ground. And the place was swarming—it was a hive. Backpackers, bicyclists, people, streetcars, boats…all making their way through the mist.

  Westerstraat wasn’t far from the train station. (This was according to the free map she had just picked up in the train station. The rules said she couldn’t bring one but nothing about getting one when she was there. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t realized this before.) To her amazement, she found the address with little difficulty. (This was what having a map could do.)

  The house was one of a row of houses on a canal, with huge front windows and no shades or curtains to hide what was going on inside. Three little pug dogs chased each other around the floor, and she could see massive abstract oil paintings hanging on the walls, a room full of overstuffed furniture and thick rugs, and cups of coffee on a low table. Hopefully this meant Charlie was home, because if Charlie was home, she would soon be warm and dry.

  As she knocked on the door, she could almost feel the change of clothes. Socks first, then maybe pants. Her shirt was still somewhat dry under her fleece.

  A young Japanese man an
swered the door when she knocked and said something in Dutch.

  “Sorry,” she said slowly. “English?”

  “I’m American,” he answered, smiling. “What can I do for you?”

  “Are you Charlie?”

  “No. I’m Thomas.”

  “I’m looking for Charlie,” she said. “Is he home?”

  “Home?”

  Ginny checked the address on the letter again, then looked at the number above the door. They matched. But just to be certain, she held the paper over to Thomas.

  “Is this here?” she asked.

  “That’s the right address, but nobody named Charlie lives here.”

  Ginny wasn’t quite sure how to process this information. She stood dumbly in the doorway.

  “We just moved in last month,” he said. “Maybe Charlie was here before?”

  “Right.” Ginny nodded. “Well, thanks.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Oh, no.” She did a quick check of her face to make sure she didn’t look like she was going to burst into tears. “It’s not a problem.” Few things Ginny had ever experienced seemed gloomier than slogging back alone from Westerstraat with no particular destination in mind, in what was rapidly becoming actual rainfall. The gray sky seemed to hang about two feet over the tops of the low buildings, and every time she swerved to avoid one bike, another seemed to take aim for her. Her pack grew heavier from the soaking, and little rivulets were running down her face and over her eyes. Soon she was so wet that it ceased to matter. She would never be dry again. This was permanent.

  The point of being here in Amsterdam appeared to have just slipped away, aside from a short trip to a museum. Whatever wisdom that Charlie was supposed to impart was gone.

  There was no shortage of hostels in the area around the station. They were all a little sketchy looking, with signs that looked more like they were for skateboard shops than places to stay. She tried a few, but they were all full. Finally, she went into one called The Apple.

  The front of The Apple was a small café. There were several old sofas, along with lawn decorations—plaster cupids, birdbaths filled with hard candy, pink flamingos. There was a reggae album playing, and the sweet tang of cheap incense hung in the air. A bright stripe of green, yellow, and orange—the colors of the Jamaican flag—ran along the wall, along with several posters of Bob Marley hung at odd angles.

  It was like living in a stoner’s locker.

  This café also served as a front desk. They did have room, as long as Ginny was willing to pay for two nights up front.

  “Room fourteen,” the guy said, scrawling something on an index card. “Third floor.”

  Ginny had never seen a set of stairs this steep in her life—and there were about a million of them. She was completely out of breath by the time she reached her floor, which was only three stories up. The room numbers were each inside pictures of pot leaves painted on the doors. It was only when she was standing in front of room fourteen that she realized that she hadn’t been given a key. She soon knew why—the door had no lock.

  What hit Ginny first was the powerful smell of mildew and the uneasy knowledge that if she touched the carpet, it would probably feel damp. There were way too many beds in the room, each covered with a plastic overlay. A girl was standing at one of these, hastily shoving stuff into her bag. She pulled it onto her back and made her way quickly to the door.

  “Make sure they give you your deposit back,” she said on her way out. “They’ll try to keep it.”

  A quick look explained a lot. Previous tenants had left their comments for all to read. There were scrawls all around the walls, little messages of doom like, MY PASSPORT WAS STOLEN FROM RIGHT HERE (with a little arrow), Welcome to Motel Hell, Thanks for the lepprosey! and the philosophical, Stay stoned and you may be okay.

  Everything was broken—either slightly or completely. The window didn’t open very far, nor would it close. There was no lightbulb in the one overhead light. The beds were like wobbly restaurant tables, balanced out with bits of cardboard. Some had strange objects in place of an entire leg, and one of the bunks was just completely collapsed. Above this bed someone had written in huge letters: HONEYMOON SUITE.

  She ran in and out of the bathroom before her brain could take a good snapshot of the horrors she found within.

  The best bed on offer seemed to be the one that the stolen passport arrow was pointing at. It had all four of its own legs, and the mattress seemed relatively clean. At least she couldn’t see any marks through the plastic (which wasn’t the case with some of the others). She quickly threw the sheet over it so she wouldn’t be able to look at it too closely.

  The locker at the end of her bed had no lock, and one of the hinges was busted. She opened it up.

  There was a thing in it.

  The thing might have been a sandwich at some point, or an animal, or a human hand…but what it was now was fuzzy and putrid.

  A minute later, Ginny was down the stairs, out the door, and gone.

  Homeless, Homesick, and Diseased

  There was nothing left to do but eat.

  She squelched into a little grocery store and looked over the rows and rows of chips and gummy bears. She grabbed a huge bag of some kind of waffle cookie called a Stroopwaffle that was on sale. They looked like tiny waffles stuck together with syrup. It was kind of like comfort food. She took her cookies outside and sat on a bench and watched the low flat boats and the bicyclists go by. There were disgusting smells that she couldn’t get out of her nose. An uneasy sensation crept all over her skin—a feeling of permanent contamination.

  Nothing seemed clean. The world would never be clean again. She shoved the bag into her pack unopened and went searching for another place to stay.

  Amsterdam was full. Ginny walked into every place she could find that seemed at least a little safer than The Apple. The only places that had any room at all were way out of her price range. By seven o’clock, she was getting desperate. She had walked pretty far from the city center.

  There was a small canal house made of sandy-colored stone with white curtains and flowers in the windows. It looked like the kind of house a cute little old lady might live in. She would have passed it by, if not for the blue electric sign that said: HET KLEINE HUIS HOSTEL AND HOTEL AMSTERDAM.

  This was her last try. If this failed, she could go back to the train station knowing she had done all she could. Not that she knew where she would go from there.

  Because of her backpack, she had to squeeze sideways into the narrow hall, which led to a lobby that wasn’t much more than a hallway itself. There was a cutaway window, behind which was a desk, and behind that was a neat family kitchen. A man came out to help her and apologized, but he had nothing left. He had just rented the very last room.

  “Don’t you have anywhere to stay?” It was an American voice. She turned to see a man on the stairs, a guidebook in his hand.

  “Everything’s pretty full,” she said.

  “Are you on your own?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, we can’t let you back out in the rain with no place to go. Hold on.”

  He went back up the stairs. Ginny wasn’t sure what she was holding on for, but she waited anyway. He came back again a moment later, a wide grin on his face.

  “Okay,” he said, “it’s settled. Phil can stay in our room with us, and you can share the other room with Olivia. We’re the Knapps, by the way. We’re from Indiana. What’s your name?”

  “Ginny Blackstone,” she said.

  “Well, hi, Ginny.” He extended his hand, and Ginny shook it. “Come meet the family! You’re with us now!”

  Olivia Knapp, Ginny’s new roommate (“Her initials are OK!” Mr. Knapp had said. “So just call her OK, okay?”), was a tall girl with short golden blond hair. She had wide, doe-like blue eyes and a creepily even, toast brown tan. The whole family was kind of like that—short hair, whippet thin, dressed exactly as the guidebooks recommended, in easy-to-main
tain, modest, all-weather clothes.

  The room she was to share with Olivia was a far cry from the one she had hastily vacated that morning. It was an extremely narrow room, but it was clean and decorated in a soft, girlish style, with rose-and-cream-striped wallpaper and a pitcher filled with pink and red tulips sitting on the windowsill. Best of all, it had two beds made up in fluffy white comforters that still held the lingering scent of detergent.

  Olivia wasn’t much of a talker. She had tossed her things down on the bed and rapidly unpacked. (It was a textbook packing job, Ginny noticed. Every inch of the bag perfectly utilized. No overpacking.) She filled two of the four dresser drawers and then nodded to Ginny, indicating that the other two were hers. If she thought it was weird that her parents had just taken on a complete stranger for five days, she didn’t show it. In fact, Ginny quickly got the impression that this kind of thing happened to them a lot, and they simply didn’t notice it anymore. Olivia flopped on the bed, put her earphones in, and stretched her legs up to the ceiling. She didn’t stir until Mrs. Knapp came and got them for dinner.

  Even though she hadn’t eaten all day, food still didn’t seem like a good idea to Ginny. The Knapps tried to persuade her for a few minutes but eventually bought the “I’ve been traveling for a while and haven’t had any sleep” excuse.

  When they were gone, she wasn’t even quite sure why she hadn’t gone with them. Something in her just wanted to stay in this little room. She opened her pack and pulled out her wet clothes (waterproofing only did so much). She arranged these over the nightstand.

  She went into the bathroom and took a long, scalding hot shower. (Soap! Towels!) She made a careful effort not to scrub at her ink tattoo, which was starting to fade just a little.