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The Adventures of Aunt Peg

When Aunt Peg was Ginny’s age (seventeen), she ran away from her home in New Jersey, just two weeks before she was supposed to go off to Mount Holyoke on a full scholarship. She reappeared a week later and seemed surprised by the fact that people were upset with her. She needed to think about what she wanted to accomplish in school, she explained, so she’d gone off to Maine and met some people who built hand-crafted fishing boats. Also, she wasn’t going to school now, she informed everyone. She was going to take a year off and work. And she did. She gave up her scholarship and spent the next year waitressing at a big seafood restaurant in downtown Philadelphia and living with three other people in a small South Street apartment.

The next year, Aunt Peg went to a tiny college in Vermont where nobody got any grades and where she majored in painting. Ginny’s mom, Aunt Peg’s older sister, had a pretty clear vision of what “real” college majors included, and this was not one of them. To her, majoring in painting was an act of insanity akin to majoring in photocopying or reheating leftovers. Ginny’s mom was born practical. She lived in a nice house and she had a little baby (Ginny). She encouraged her younger sister to become an accountant, like herself. Aunt Peg replied in a note that said she had picked up a minor in performance art.

As soon as she graduated, Aunt Peg went off to New York and moved into the 4th Noodle Penthouse, and there she remained. That was about the only constant in her life. Her job changed constantly. She was a manager at a major art supply store until she accidentally hit the zero one too many times on an online order form. Instead of the twenty non-returnable, custom-made Italian easels she was supposed to get, she was surprised to take delivery of two hundred. She answered phones as a temp at Trump headquarters until she happened to take a call from Donald himself. She thought it was one of her actor friends pretending to be Donald Trump—so she immediately launched into a tirade on “scumbag capitalists with bad toupees.” She enjoyed recounting the experience of being escorted out of the building by two security guards. To Aunt Peg, these jobs were just the things she did until her art career took off.

Again, this caused Ginny’s mother to despair over her little sister—and she always tried to remind Ginny that though she should love her aunt, she shouldn’t try to be like her. There was never really any danger of this. Ginny was just too well behaved, too normal for that ever to be an issue. Still, she loved her visits to Aunt Peg’s. Though they were erratic and all too infrequent, they were also magical experiences during which all normal rules of living were cast aside. Dinner didn’t have to be balanced and on the table at six—it could be Afghan kebabs and black sesame ice cream at midnight. Evenings weren’t spent in front of the TV. Sometimes they wandered through costume shops and boutiques, trying on the most expensive and outrageous things they could find—things Ginny would have been mortally embarrassed to put on around anyone else, and frequently things so pricey that she felt like she needed permission touch them. (“It’s a store,” Aunt Peg would say as she put on the five-hundred-dollar, saucer-sized sunglasses or the huge feathered hat. “The stuff is here to try on.”)

The best part about Aunt Peg was that when Ginny was around her, she felt more interesting. She wasn’t quiet and dutiful. She was louder. Aunt Peg made her different. And the promise had always been that Aunt Peg would be there—throughout high school, throughout college—to guide Ginny. “That’s when you’ll need me,” Aunt Peg always said.

One day, in November of Ginny’s sophomore year, Aunt Peg’s phone stopped working. Ginny’s mom sighed and figured the bill hadn’t been paid. So she and Ginny got in the car to drive up to New York to see what was going on. The apartment above 4th Noodle was vacant. The super told them that Aunt Peg had moved out several days before, leaving no forwarding address. There was a little note, though, stuck under the welcome mat. It read: Something I just have to do. Be in touch soon.

At first, no one was too concerned. It was assumed that this was just another Aunt Peg escapade. A month went by. Then two. Then the spring semester was over. Then it was summer. Aunt Peg was simply gone. Then came a few postcards, basic assurances that she was doing well. They were postmarked from a variety of places—England, France, Italy—but they contained no explanations.

So Aunt Peg was exactly the kind of person who would send her to England alone, with a package from a Chinese restaurant. That wasn’t so odd.

The odd part was that Aunt Peg had been dead for three months.

That last fact was a little hard to swallow. Aunt Peg was the most lively person Ginny had ever known. She was also only thirty-five years old. That number was stuck in Ginny’s head because her mother kept repeating it over and over. Only thirty-five. Lively thirty-five-year-olds weren’t supposed to die. But Aunt Peg had. The phone call had come from a doctor in England explaining that Aunt Peg had developed cancer—that it had come quickly, that everything had been tried but nothing could be done.

The news…the illness…it was all very distant to Ginny. Somehow, she’d never really believed it. Aunt Peg was still out there somewhere in her mind. And Ginny was somehow speeding toward her in this plane. Only Aunt Peg could make something like this happen. Not that Ginny hadn’t had to do her part. First, she’d had to convince herself that she could follow what seemed like an obvious flight of insanity from an aunt who wasn’t known for her reliability. Once she’d done that, she had to convince her parents of the same thing. Major international treaties had been negotiated in less time.

But now she was here. No going back now.

The plane was cold. Very cold. The lights were down, and it was completely black outside the small windows. Everyone but Ginny seemed to be asleep, including the people to either side of her. She couldn’t move without waking them up. Ginny wrapped herself in the tiny and ineffectual airline blanket and clutched the package to her chest. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to open it yet. Instead, she’d spent most of the night looking out of her darkened airplane window at a long shadow and several blinking lights, at first thinking she was looking at the coast of New Jersey and then maybe Iceland or Ireland. It wasn’t until the dawn, when they were just about to land, that she saw that the whole time she’d been looking at the wing.

Below them, through a cottony veil of clouds, was a patchwork of green squares. Land. This plane was actually going to land, and they were going to make her get out. In a foreign country. Ginny had never been anywhere more exotic than Florida, and nowhere by herself.

She pried the package from her own grip and set it on her lap. The time had clearly come to open it. Time to find out what Aunt Peg had planned for her.

She pulled open the seal and reached inside.

The package contained a collection of envelopes much like the first. They were all blue. They were made of heavy paper. Good quality. The kind from one of those boutique paper stores. The front of each envelope was either illustrated in pen and ink or watercolor, and they were bundled together with an overstretched rubber band that had been doubled around them.

More importantly, they were each marked with a number, starting with two and running to thirteen. Envelope 2 had an illustration of a bottle, with a label that read OPEN ME ON THE PLANE.

So she did.