The Last Little Blue Envelope

by Maureen Johnson

  “It’s this one,” Ginny said.

  “The yellow one? You sure?”

  “Look,” she said, pointing at the rings and marks. “This is exactly the one she would want. She talked about people drinking wine, meeting over a table. And these marks—they’re like the sun, or the moon, or . . .”

  Well, that was it really. But she still knew it was the best choice. Keith got down on the ground and looked at the table from underneath. He produced a multipurpose tool in a case, with various-size heads for different jobs.

  “Where did you get that?” Ginny asked in amazement.

  “From my car. I had it in there from when I moved the set.”

  Since his head was under the table, Ginny could stare at the rest of Keith as he worked. This was a calming and pleasant sight, interrupted only by the unmistakable sound of a siren in the distance—one of those keening European ones that sounded like they were going nee-neer-nee-neer-nee-neer, and she could see the echo of a flashing light from somewhere down the street. Ginny drew back the curtain a little and found herself facing Oliver, who frantically waved for her to drop it.

  “Oh my god . . . ,” Ginny said. “Oh my god . . . stop. Stop!” Keith froze in place, taking in this sensory information.

  “Is that for us?” he inquired.

  “We have to go!”

  “Right. Perhaps I was wrong about the alarm system. Oh well. You never know until you try. I’ve almost got this thing off, anyway.”

  He said it calmly, as if this was just a very interesting piece of trivia, then got up on his feet. He gave the tabletop a shake.

  “Come on, you bastard,” he said, grunting a bit to get the last nut loose.

  “We need to go,” Ginny hissed.

  “No point in that now. Turn off the light and close the back window.”

  “What?”

  “They’ll probably just check the doors and windows and leave,” he said quietly. “We just have to keep our heads and voices down.”

  Several seconds of utter panic ensued as Ginny tried to find the light switch again, then fumbled through the dark, crashing into the toilet to get to the window. Then another fumble back into the main room. Keith was invisible in the darkness.

  “Get down,” he whispered, now with a trace of urgency in his voice.

  Ginny dropped to her knees, then scuffled her way along the floor until she found the bar. She got behind it, curling herself into a ball. Outside, Oliver was talking very loudly to someone.

  “I’m supposed to be meeting someone here, you see,” he was saying. “This is where she’s staying. I tried the doors. . . .”

  Rapid French from some other person, and more protestations from Oliver, who was playing the confused tourist about as well as Keith had that morning. A slightly drunk, arrogant English tourist.

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t know what’s happening, but I was just waiting here. Do you speak English? She said Twenty-five Rue de . . . wait. What street is this? What street is this? Can you just show me . . .”

  “He’s stealing my routine,” Keith whispered from across the room. “Bastard.”

  They stayed liked this for several minutes, until the voices retreated. She heard Keith moving, so she peeked over the ball. He was standing up, pulling at the table again.

  “We need to get out!” she said.

  “Almost have it . . . stand over by the door, would you?”

  “There are police outside.”

  “They’ve walked away, which means we have exactly right now to do this. Trust me, I’ve done this before. You trust me, don’t you? When I say now, you throw open that door. So get the locks undone.”

  There was no time to think about this. She controlled the shaking in her hands as she felt around for the locks. There were two dead bolts on the door, plus a strange lock which took a lot of jiggling to undo.

  “Ready?” he said.

  “Um . . .”

  “Now!”

  The double doors of Les Petits Chiens swung open. Keith hoisted up the table and hurried outside with it, setting it carefully down on the sidewalk.

  “Take it,” he said. “Get it to the car.”

  “What about you?”

  “Don’t worry about me. Be with you in a sec.”

  He stepped back inside and shut the doors, leaving Ginny in front of the restaurant with a tabletop made of a half a door. She had no option but to move, as quickly as possible. The tabletop was large, but not overly heavy. It was impossible to run with it, so she shuffled as quickly as she could. There was a little offshoot street about twenty feet away, just as narrow as this one. She turned down it, having no idea where it went. It was nearly impossible to make it down this alley with half a door, but she also couldn’t stay on the same street as the restaurant—so she wound her way down, turning to the left and right to squeeze past trash bins and bikes. It whacked into bike handles and brick walls and various unseen objects.

  This alley didn’t go in a straight line, but wove between buildings on a long curve. She emerged on a much brighter, busier street, one lined with lots of small shops: a late-night grocery store, a packing supply store, a crepe stand, a Senegalese restaurant. After a few wrong turns, she finally got back on a street that she remembered and saw the white car at the end. People were giving her a lot of looks, but she soldiered on, working her way through the crowd with the tabletop. Ellis jumped out of the car to help her.

  “Where’s Keith?” she asked.

  “Coming.

  “Where’s Oliver?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ellis opened the backseat and climbed into the other side and helped pull the tabletop into place. Then, without her even hearing him approach, Keith joined them.

  “As it turns out . . . ,” he said.

  Oliver was right behind him, running hard. His height gave him a strange, hopping gait, making the ends of his coat flap up and down. For a moment, Ginny was transfixed by the sight.

  “Get in, get in, get in,” he said briskly, pushing her into the back with the tabletop. He squeezed in right behind her and just about got the door closed. They were still in a tangle when Ellis hit the gas and they took off.

  To Belgium!

  The scene inside the car had become much more complex in the last few moments. For a start, the tabletop made a wall between the front and backseats, with just four or five inches at the top left open for communication. Ginny and Oliver now had their own little room—a room that definitely couldn’t hold both of them. There was double as much Oliver as there was Ginny. His knees were tucked up into their torso space, his arm span was much wider than the backseat. He was wedged in place. Meanwhile, the car itself was careening down a Parisian street as Ellis got used to the opposite-side driving. Ginny was bounced around in the tiny bit of remaining space, hitting Oliver, then the door, over and over. Most of the contact was of the shoulder-to-face and elbow-to-abdomen kind . . . with the occasional full-body slam.

  On the good-news front, it didn’t appear that anyone was after them.

  “If I could just move this,” Oliver said, trying to lift the tabletop enough to get his legs down and his feet under it. Keith peered over the tabletop and into the strange little world of backseat land.

  “That looks really uncomfortable,” he observed, leaning his chin and hands on the tabletop, crushing it down a bit on Oliver’s toes.

  “Do you mind?”

  “You stole my patter from this morning. You’re a bastard.”

  “And I saved your arse.”

  “I could have gotten us out of there. All we had to do was wait it out.”

  “Where am I going?” Ellis called. “Is anyone going to give me directions?”

  “Do you think you could manage one of your little readings so we have some idea of what the hell is happening?” Keith asked. “Where does the letter send us next, oh knobular one?”

  “Just get out of the city.”

  “We need a bit more th
an that,” Keith said.

  “I can’t exactly reach my phone right now to look up directions.”

  “So tell us what our next stop is,” Keith said. “We don’t need you playing Flight of the Navigator back there.”

  “I’ll tell you where we need to go for the night,” Oliver said. “You can hear the rest tomorrow. And stop leaning on the table.”

  Keith released the table and retreated. Oliver continued his efforts to lift the table and get into a normal seated position. Through a lot of jerking and bumping around, he managed this. Further jerking and bumping allowed him to get his phone free. He was looking up directions.

  “Why won’t you just say?” Ginny asked, as her head knocked against his shoulder.

  “Because I don’t want to end up shoved out on the side of the road. The longer I know things, the longer I can put that off.”

  She had to admit, there was some sense in that. Actually, everything suddenly made a kind of sense. A minor euphoria came over Ginny, along with a fit of hiccupping. They had done it. They had made it to Paris and gotten this table. And though the circumstances were not ideal, Paris was still Paris, and success was still success.

  They were on the Champs-Élysées, one of the grand boulevards of Paris. Ginny recognized it from her French textbook, specifically, from a dialogue called, “On the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.” It was one of many dialogues in the book between Véronique and Sylvie, two girls who primarily spent their time reading menus out loud and reciting long strings of phone numbers. In “On the Avenue des Champs-Élysées,” however, they stepped out of their comfort zone and took a walk and said how formidable everything on the Champs-Élysées was. They had a point. And now Ginny really understood why they called Paris the “City of Light.” The Champs-Élysées during the holidays was nothing but light. Lights dripped off the trees. At the speed they were going (which was keeping up with traffic, which meant probably way too fast), all the lights blurred together into one wondrous streak. Aunt Peg was right. Paris wasn’t a place you could get after one visit. A place this wonderful would take a lifetime.

  “Oh no,” Ellis said.

  “Ah,” Keith added as a follow-up.

  “‘Ah?’ ” Ginny said, shaking out of her trance. “‘Oh no?’ What does ‘ah’ mean? ‘Oh no’ what?”

  They had stopped briefly. Directly ahead of them, bathed in light in a great ocean of light, was one of Paris’s great landmarks, the Arc de Triomphe—the massive white arch, so large that a small plane could be flown under it. And around that arch-circled traffic—lots and lots of traffic . . . hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of cars, just going around and around and around. There had to be eight or ten lanes worth, but there were no lanes. Nothing bound the cars into any particular position.

  “What am I doing?” Ellis yelled. “Where am I going?”

  “Hang on a moment,” Oliver said, still working his phone.

  “I can’t hang on a moment!”

  “Know what I heard once?” Keith said grimly, as the light changed. “Insurance is invalid in the circle around the Arc de Triomphe.”

  The little white car screeched into the melee and began going around the monument, cars merging in from all directions, peeling off, coming in front, slipping up behind. Cars were coming at them sideways.

  “All right,” Oliver said. “All right. You want the third junction. The one for the Place de la Porte Maillot . . .”

  “What third junction? There are no junctions!”

  A motorcycle buzzed by, just inches from Ginny’s door. Ellis must have hit the gas, because the whole car lurched and shuddered.

  “You want to play?” Ellis yelled. “All right, then! I played a lot of video games as a kid, bitches!”

  “There!” Oliver yelled. “That way! Toward Boulevard Périphérique. There! There!”

  The car swerved abruptly to the right. Ginny heard Keith swear for a solid ten seconds.

  “Sorry!” Ellis called, merging farther and farther right with insane determination. She jerked the car off the roundabout in one final, bold turn.

  “Turn right!” Oliver yelled. “Take the A-One toward Lille!”

  “Where?”

  “LILLE.”

  “A-1?”

  “YES!”

  With one last screeching turn, they began the run out of Paris.

  The A1 was just a highway, and the night was a wintry blank. It was colder than ever now. Ginny and Oliver had worked together to create some kind of peace with the tabletop, but the end result was that it sat on both of their feet and completely blocked any heat coming from the front. So they had two things making them go numb. They both went into a hibernation mode, silent, burrowing inside their coats. The one advantage to their closeness was that they got a little warmth from each other. Suddenly, there was a little burst of excitement from the front seat, and Ginny saw that they were pulling into a gas station.

  “Petrol stop!” Ellis called.

  Oliver and Ginny couldn’t just get out of the car—they needed to be extracted from under the tabletop. Keith and Ellis worked from either side, one pushing and one pulling, to get it out of the car. Ginny and Oliver stumbled out, Oliver making an uneven path away from the car to smoke. Ginny’s feet were completely pins and needles. It would be several minutes before she could walk at all. She leaned against the car, while Ellis went inside to find a restroom, and Keith filled the tank. She watched the little counter on the pump spinning what seemed like an incredible number of Euros. Gas was expensive here.

  “I need to give you money,” she said.

  “I’ll use his for now. How do you feel, by the way? Being a proper thief?”

  “Queasy.”

  “That’s a sign you’re doing it right. You did good back there.”

  “I still can’t believe we did it,” she said.

  “Oh, you know how these things go,” Keith replied. “You go to Paris, steal part of a table, and then spend all night driving to Belgium. God, when will they stop making this movie?”

  “Belgium?” Ginny asked.

  “That’s where we’ll be if we keep going on this road. Bet you’ve always wanted to go to Belgium.”

  Ginny looked around for any mental files she had on Belgium, but came up with nothing, except a tiny memo about chocolate. Also, she hadn’t called Richard. She had to do that now, before it got any later and they actually left France.

  “I have to make a call,” she said, holding up her phone. Keith nodded and continued filling the tank. Ginny endured the pain of walking on her dead feet and tried to keep her gait even and smooth as she walked over to the side of the station. Richard picked up on the very first ring.

  “Hi,” she said, trying to sound casual. “It’s me. We’re here in France. . . .”

  “How’s Paris?” he asked.

  “Really . . . busy.”

  There was a lot of noise in the background wherever Richard was.

  “Are you still at work?” she asked.

  “Sadly, yes. Did you get into the same hostel?”

  “Oh . . . we were just out. We’re going to get a room now.” Not a lie. Certainly the intention.

  “You don’t have a place yet? Isn’t it after nine?”

  “Yeah . . . but it’s fine. We’re going now. Really.”

  “I’m sure it is, just . . .text me to let me know you’re safely in the hostel, all right?”

  “Okay,” she said. “I will.”

  When she got off the phone, Ginny looked up at the stars. The view here was incredible for that—black and clear. The only things around besides this gas station were a dark clump of houses up the road and a wind turbine in the distance. From here she could see about twice as many stars as she could at home, maybe three times as many. The sky was littered with them.

  Ellis was over with Keith at the car. They were talking in low voice, laughing quietly. Even though they were probably talking about what they had just pulled off, Ginny felt a rush of je
alousy. She hurried back to join them.

  “Hey, tosser!” Keith yelled to Oliver. “Get in the car or we leave you here!”

  Oliver threw his cigarette into the road and came over to them.

  “Look how his coat snaps in the wind as he walks,” Keith said. “Very dashing. He’s like Batman.”

  The thing was, it actually was kind of dashing. The coat was extremely long and would have dwarfed a lot of guys, but it looked right on Oliver, and it did snap around his calves as he walked over.

  “Are you taking us to Belgium?” Keith asked tiredly. “I need to know. It’s late. We need to stop soon—we’ve been going all day now.”

  “We can stop in Ghent for the night,” Oliver replied. “It’s not too far. Maybe an hour. Keep going on this road.”

  “Fine. Time to pack the two of you back in the car. In you get.”

  Ginny took one last look at the sky, shivered under the size of it, and got back in the car where the world was smaller, though no easier to comprehend.

  A Feeling of Shed

  As they drove north toward Ghent, the clear skies gradually became more milky and pink, and a light snow started to fall. It was right around ten when they came into the city proper, and it was quite a contrast from the bleakness of the highway or the magnificent sprawl of Paris. Ghent looked like a congregation of cathedrals. Every building in the center was ornate, with a thousand little details and hooks and spires and miraculous accents carved into stone or made out of brick. A warm yellow light bathed the streets, which were now covered in a light dusting of snow. The city was situated around a river, which glowed under the lights.

  “Well, it looks like we found Hogwarts,” Keith said. “Now where do we go?”

  “We try to find a place that’s open,” Oliver said. “It’s late, and it’s a holiday, so there’s no guarantee that we’ll find anything. I did have a place for us in Paris. . . .”