13 Little Blue Envelopes(61)

Nothing was quite like it was supposed to be.

There was a sleepy little taverna with a few outside tables.

They sank gratefully into the seats, and soon their tiny, round table was overflowing with plates of spinach pie, dishes of yogurt and honey, and cups of coffee. There was fresh juice as well, full of pulp and warm. Ginny put her passport and her bank card next to her plate. Strange. They took up almost no space at all, yet with them, she could travel all the way across Europe. They were all she really needed.

Carrie started weeping all over again when Ginny did this and reminded everyone that she no longer had these things. She 278

had nothing at all. Without a passport, she wasn’t going to be able to get anywhere. Not on a plane. Not on a ferry. And, she went on, her arms weren’t quite strong enough to allow her to swim to the Greek mainland or back to Australia, for that matter.

Ginny quickly put her things back into her wet pocket and concentrated on dripping honey into the thick yogurt and

swirling it in. She felt very bad for Carrie, but the situation didn’t seem real. She felt slightly lobotomized (if you could be slightly lobotomized). It was a pleasant sensation, in any case.

She listened as they speculated on how they could get Carrie out of Greece and back across the globe. The general consensus was that they’d have to get to the Australian embassy somehow, not that they knew where this was. The best guess was Athens.

Ginny stared off in the distance and saw a clothesline with small octopi hanging from it, drying in the sun. They made her think of Richard’s washing machine and its strange alphabetical dial. What setting did you use to wash your octopus?

O, she guessed.

“What about you, Gin?” Bennett said, interrupting this

mediation on the proper washing of sea creatures. “What do you want to do?”

Ginny looked up.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’d better get some cash.”

It took a while to find an ATM among the souvenir shops and churches. The one she finally did locate was in a shop no bigger than a hallway that sold everything from canned chickpeas to rubbery-smelling bathing suits. The ATM was just a little stand-alone thing in the back, under some dusty disposable 279

cameras. It looked kind of shady, but there was nowhere else to get any money.

She asked it for five hundred euros. The Greek message that appeared on the screen meant nothing to her, but the honking noise that accompanied it told her that it wasn’t going to happen. She tried four hundred. It honked again. More honking for three hundred and two hundred. One-ninety? Nope: 180, 175, 160, 150, 145, 130, 110, 90, 75, 50 . . .

The machine eventually coughed up forty euros, then spat

her card back at her in disgust.

There was only one thing she could think of to do.

The five-euro phone card didn’t buy a lot of time, and the opera-tors at Harrods didn’t seem to understand her rush. The electronic voice kept interrupting her hold music to speak to her in Greek to tell her (she guessed) that the minutes were ticking away.

“Ginny? Where are you?”

“Corfu. In Greece.”

“Greece?”

“Right. The thing is, my account’s empty and I’m stuck,”

she said. “And this phone card is about to run out. I can’t get back.”

“Hold on a minute.”

Classical music filled up the line. A voice came on and said something very chirpily in Greek. Again, she had to guess at the meaning. She was pretty sure the voice wasn’t just welcoming her to Greece and hoping she had a pleasant stay. A series of short little beeps confirmed this. She was relieved when Richard came back on the line.

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“Can you get to the airport in Corfu?”

“I guess so,” she said. Then she realized it wasn’t a guessing kind of thing. She was either going to get to the airport or stay on Corfu forever.

“Right. I’ll call down to our travel agency and get you a ticket back to London. You’ll be fine, all right? I’ll take care of it.”

“I’ll pay you back or my parents . . .”

“Just get to the airport. We’ll figure it all out later. Let’s just get you home.”

As Ginny set down the phone, she saw Carrie being tended

to by all of her friends at a bench across the street. She looked somewhat calmer now. Ginny crossed the street and sat down with them.

“I have to get to the airport,” she said. “Richard—my aunt’s friend—is getting me a ticket out.”

“You’re going, Pretz?” Carrie asked. “Back to London?”

There were several rounds of hugs and an exchange of

e-mail addresses. Then Emmett waved down a small beat-up

Fiat that he correctly identified as a taxi. Just before it pulled away, Carrie came over to the window. She had started crying all over again.

“Hey, Pretz,” she said, leaning in to Ginny. “Don’t worry.

You’ll find out what it was.”

Ginny smiled.

“You’ll be okay, right?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Carrie nodded. “Who knows. We may stay around

here for a while. It’s not like I can really go anywhere right now.

There are worse places to be.”

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And after one final hand squeeze, the taxi pulled off, and Ginny found herself on the way to the Corfu airport.