Jo & Laurie

by Margaret Stohl

  In a heartbroken fog, she sent Laurie to Europe, where he met Amy and Aunt March on their travels. She wrote that Amy became a fine lady, admired by society and with her choice of half a dozen suitors, including Fred Vaughn.

  Jo laughed to herself when she wrote it. Amy would like this part of the sequel very much. All those art lessons had to be put to use somewhere.

  But there had to be sadness, too. No life was ever untouched by tragedy. And so, like she had in real life, the Beth who had survived scarlet fever weakened, and eventually died.

  Then Jo felt it utterly.

  She wept when she wrote it. They had lost Beth. There would be no future for her in fiction, as there had been none in life. There was no pretending any more that a fictional future could make up for the real one. And the loss was as hard on the page as it had been in Jo’s own life. A devastation. In its wake they had all been raw, and would be ever after.

  When it came to Bethie, Jo could not write her way to someplace better, only more truthful. Not a castle in the air, but a castle on the earth, a gravestone to mark where she once had been.

  It was the hardest thing she had ever done, and when she finished the scene, she was exhausted.

  But she had to finish.

  There must still be an end for Jo and Laurie.

  She thought of all the readers who had written to ask her what happened to them. They must marry, these readers had said to her. And her own response—“I won’t marry Jo to Laurie for anything!”

  They must marry, but not to each other.

  So Laurie married Amy, the fine lady. In grief over the news of Beth’s death, they comforted each other. They came home to surprise Jo and Meg, Father and Marmee, already husband and wife. This contented everyone, for Amy was the kind of lady Jo could never be. Laurie belonged to the Marches, as he had wanted. And Jo—Jo belonged to no one but herself. On the page, as in life, she was alone, but free.

  Jo wrote in a frenzy. It was a rough draft, and whole swaths were only just sketched out, but it was all there—the family in joy and sadness, broken but remade. Everyone’s fate met her sense of satisfaction.

  Outside, the sun was coming up, but Jo was still writing furiously. Her heroine ended the story as she began: temperamental and alone. Jo had promised her readers an end to the story, even if it was not the end they demanded. But no one could force her into a marriage. No one. Not even she herself.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE HOUSE WAS still asleep when Jo put on her coat to cross the lane to the Laurences’ house. It was snowing softly, the air thick with flakes and silence. Her feet made soft swishing noises as she broke a path through the whiteness.

  She would not wake the servants, or Mr. Laurence or Harriet. No one else needed to see her at that hour. She threw a pebble instead at Laurie’s window, then another, to entice him to come.

  A third pebble finally brought Laurie to the window. He threw up the sash and stuck his head out. His hair stuck up in every direction, his eyes still heavy with sleep. “Jo?”

  “Come down, Laurie. I need to speak with you.”

  She could see the hesitation in his face. Was this some kind of trickery, he was wondering, some game she was playing?

  “Teddy, please. I need you.”

  Then he knew she was in earnest. His face changed. “I’ll be right down,” he said.

  In a minute he was coming out the door and meeting her on the porch. He, too, had thrown a coat over his night-clothes. In the morning light, with stubble on his chin, he looked like he had when he was young and would use ink to give himself a beard for the plays they put on in the attic. She wanted alternately to laugh and weep to see it.

  “I hope I didn’t wake the house,” she said by way of apology.

  “Not at all. I heard Grandfather snoring when I passed his door.”

  “And Harriet? Is she still asleep?”

  Laurie looked at her with an expression of utter weariness. “What did you want to tell me, Jo? It’s very early in the morning.”

  “I finished the sequel. I . . . wanted to give it to you to read. To see what you think.”

  He took the sheaf of paper from her. “Now?”

  She was hopeful and stubborn and demanding, as always. “Of course now. It’s not completely polished and, well, it’s missing a lot of the middle . . . but it is done. Are you doing something else?”

  He took the pages and began to read. She stood awkwardly nearby—too anxious to sit—watching him as he bent over the page, his brow furrowing. Now and again, he’d break into a smile or even a chuckle, as Jo had done herself.

  He flipped page after page. Inside, she could hear the house begin to stir. The servants came down to light the fires. The cook made breakfast in the kitchen; Mr. Laurence thanked her for his tea.

  Across the lane, Mama and Hannah would be doing the same. Readying the cake, and bringing out the best of the jam, the scones, the tea for the guests.

  Jo should be there, helping, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Laurie, or wait for what he would say. He read fast, the pages smudging under his fingers.

  No matter—she knew what they said. It was written on her heart.

  His eyebrows rose and he coughed at a few pages—she peeked over his shoulder and saw it was the chapter called “Heartache,” which she had written about his proposal.

  He glanced up and she found she could not meet his eyes.

  Still, like the pages, she didn’t need to see them to know what they looked like.

  There are no eyes like those in the whole world, she thought. Eyes like glaciers, like cold northern afternoons. Lapis eyes, blue-sky blue.

  She hadn’t known how much she loved them.

  And that face.

  She loved the frown. She loved the furrowed brow. She loved the one irritated eyebrow. She loved the total indifference, the moment one idea or another pushed her temporarily out of his thoughts. She loved it because she loved the sweetness, in the other moments, when he came back to her. The softening, when she came near.

  Her heart was broken. She knew that, had known that.

  Expected it, even.

  What she hadn’t and couldn’t have imagined was the part that came after, the vast stretch of the thing, the way it settled in and took over every element of her life.

  The way she lived with it. The familiarity of how she knew it.

  The ease with which she could build a house in it, carve furniture from it, plant her own little dark garden with it.

  She hadn’t expected that.

  Who knew a heart could break open so expansively?

  Who knew whole kingdoms—with no master, no queen, no governance, obedient to no rule of law, accountable to no country custom, unruly to all logic whatsoever—could rise in a heartless wake?

  Sometimes, now, she felt as if she might have imagined him. Her Teddy, the way he had been. The intimacy of their bond. The very watering-hole of it.

  The way their relationship had defined and redefined every other in her life, including those with her sisters, her mother—even the way she had seen herself.

  The way I see myself now, she thought.

  He is my person. Everyone needs a person, and he is mine. Only he isn’t mine.

  He was, and now he’s not.

  That was a very grave problem indeed, and the more she felt it—how wrong she had been, how foolish, how ignorant, really, to not see it for what it was—well, that was of no consequence now.

  She was exactly and directly as intimate with the absence of him now as she had been with the presence of him then.

  She still stood at the sitting-room window of Orchard House every day, just as she always had. Only the view had changed. That face she had loved so well, the one she had been unable to see for all its brightness, that ball of light, th
e sun of her own small galaxy? Gone.

  The shadow in its place was a void, a darkness beyond reckoning.

  And so here she stood, dizzy from the weight of nothing at all.

  This is how lovers die, she thought. This is Romeo and Juliet. This is Roderigo and Rodanthe. It isn’t because they choose to leave their life behind.

  It’s because there is no life left in living.

  * * *

  • • •

  AT LAST, THEODORE Laurence set down the final page. Around them, Jo could smell wood-smoke. In the distance, a loon laughed. “Well?” she asked.

  “It’s very good. Nearly perfect, in fact.”

  “Nearly perfect?”

  “You haven’t finished with your heroine yet. She needs . . . something more. Her own sense of contentment, whatever that may be.”

  “She is content.” Jo got up and stomped across the porch, her footsteps as loud as gunshots. “I’ve told you; I won’t marry her off for anything.”

  “Yes, I am well aware.” Laurie seemed to sag, as if someone had placed on his back a tremendous weight. Like Atlas, holding up the world. “But she must have something. Something more than her writing, as she faces her future.”

  “Why shouldn’t her writing be enough?”

  “She is accomplished and successful. But that isn’t all she is. She is loving and bright and everything. But she is very much alone in the world.”

  Jo was furious, fuming. Why did a woman need a husband? Was she never enough on her own, without a man? Who was Theodore Laurence, to order her about so?

  “If you will not marry in life, at least marry in fiction. Niles will demand it; you know he will.”

  Jo groaned. That was probably true. “But whom?”

  “Not me, of course. But someone. Someone who will be a friend to her, and make her laugh at herself.”

  “Who?”

  “She meets someone in New York. Another writer, perhaps. A Dickens type.” A very faint smile flickered across his face as he remembered the older gentleman sitting next to Jo at the reading. “You and old Charley, together at last.”

  Jo smiled. He wasn’t trying to change her life, she saw. Only her book. To draw the story to a close. “A scholar,” she said. “A German professor. Mr. Bhaer.”

  Laurie laughed as she invoked the name from Vegetable Valley. “Very ursine. Yes, Mr. Bhaer, your old bore. But she returns home to see Beth before she dies, and leaves him in Manhattan. All seems ended, until Amy and Laurie return home . . . man and . . . wife.”

  Jo looked at him. “It was about art and music. And Paris. And Rome.”

  “I get it.” He shook his head, aghast. “But, Jo.”

  “Keep going,” she said.

  “Fine, then.” Laurie thought about it. “Let’s say the professor arrives to bring Jo something she had written. A poem he found of hers, about her sisters. He says he would offer her his hand, except he has nothing to give her . . .”

  “Poor as rats. Just like we used to be,” Jo said. “Yes.”

  Laurie nodded. “So he says . . . his hands are empty.”

  Jo smiled. How funny Laurie was, concocting this end for her. “But she puts her hands in his and says, ‘Not empty now.’”

  Laurie smiled at her sadly. “A fitting end for your heroine. Engaged to a poor scholar, with none of those mercenary tendencies that would have made her accept her boy, when he asked. Happiness without greed.”

  “Yes,” said Jo.

  Laurie was giving her away. He was letting her go, as he must, and offering to marry her to another. It might be fiction, but it had the ring of truth.

  She could already see it all—the professor with his German accent, his fond and foolish speech. Just what Laurie had declared for her all those months ago, when they had quarreled, and he went away. That she would meet someone else and love him, and that Laurie, heartbroken, would be hanged if he would stand by and let it happen.

  Instead, he was the one who had met someone else, and she was the one who was heartbroken. For that’s what it was, wasn’t it? To watch someone you loved marry another.

  She’d learned, all right. She’d learned it all too late.

  There was a wedding to attend, but there was also a book to write, and so she went back to it. Because that was what writers with deadlines did, even on the days they were helping to throw weddings.

  They wrote.

  33

  WEDDING BELLS, SILVER BELLS

  The morning had dawned beautiful and clear. A brilliant winter day, the earth turned white. The grandest cathedral in Europe would not have been more perfect for the wedding of Margaret March and John Brooke.

  Meg wore the silver Worth gown that Laurie had ordered for Jo. Her mother had done Meg’s hair up in braids, tied around her ears and behind. Her friend Sallie Moffat had given a silver comb for Meg’s dark hair, as her “something borrowed,” and Jo had tucked behind it a bluebird feather she’d found, just so.

  Meg had never looked so beautiful when she came downstairs to the drawing-room to find Brooke waiting for her. Dressed in his new brown wool suit, he seemed on the verge of disappearing into the wood.

  Mama and Father sat together on a bench to watch, along with Amy and dear Hannah. Most of Concord had come to see the ceremony. The Moffats were there, and the Gardiners. The Emersons came, and the Kings, and the Nileses. Even the Hummels were there, and Jo was astonished to see Mrs. Hummel with tears in her eyes.

  The minister spoke over the couple, who recited their simple vows. Meg looking shyly at her new husband. Brooke with a sheepish but unmistakably pleased grin.

  Then it was done. “I now declare you man and wife,” said the minister, and the assembled broke into applause.

  Everyone except Jo. She could not applaud the loss of her sister, even to a man she admired as much as John Brooke.

  When she had greeted all her guests, Meg turned to her sister and flung her arms around Jo’s neck. “Oh, Jo!” she said, her eyes dropping happy tears. “I can’t believe how happy I am! Truly, I could wish nothing better for myself.”

  “You will both be very happy, I daresay.”

  “How I would wish something similar for you. What will make you happy, Jo? Whatever it is, I hope you get it!”

  “I have, dearest,” she said. “Nothing makes me happier than seeing those I love content. As long as you are, I am.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A CAKE WITH a posy on it, baked with love by Mama Abba herself. That was how the March girls had celebrated every birthday for as long as Jo could remember, and Meg had especially requested the very same for her wedding.

  So Jo had dutifully helped her mother and Hannah bake and frost and decorate the glorious layers of sponge for days—and was still helping her mother cut them—when Mr. Niles found her, trapping her at the table. “So, Miss March, am I ever going to see your sequel, or have you given up?”

  She crossed her arms. “As a matter of fact, sir, I have most of it finished. I believe you will be well pleased.”

  He looked a tad skeptical as he asked, “And is there a happy ending?”

  “Perhaps not the one you or my readers would have intended. But there is a certain truth to it. I am . . . moderately . . . er, largely . . . satisfied . . . on behalf of my characters.”

  Truthfully, the jury was still out, even to Jo’s own mind.

  “And what of their . . . let’s see . . . whalebone-corseted hearts?”

  Jo raised an eyebrow. “One only writes what one knows, sir.”

  “One writes what pays one’s bills, Miss March. That’s what one knows—but now, whether one admits it? Quite another tale entirely.” Still, her editor looked merry. Or perhaps just hungry, Jo thought, watching Niles eye the cake in front of her. “And when can I expect it? This moderately or large
ly satisfying tale?”

  She nodded up toward the general direction of her garret, her automatic response whenever anyone asked about The Book. “In a few weeks. I only need to add one last element, and it will be perfect.” As she said the words, she desperately hoped they were true.

  Niles quirked a smile. “Perfect is maybe less important than done, Miss March, but I will look forward to reading it, all the same. Tell me, is everyone married off this time?”

  Jo smiled. “Very happily.”

  “Good,” said Niles. “I think we’ll sell loads of it, then.”

  “I hope so,” said Jo. “I need the money.”

  Niles nodded. “Don’t we all. Now. About that cake—may I?”

  “Of course.” Jo waved at the bountiful dessert table.

  The editor regarded his author over the tops of his spectacles, then took the largest slice with a wink. “But why stop at one when you could have two? The second being for my wife, I mean.” He helped himself to the second-largest piece as well.

  She sighed. “The true question, Mr. Niles, is if you ever mean to stop at all?”

  He laughed. “I suppose that depends entirely, Miss March, on the flavor of the cake. I’ll let you know.”

  “I’m sure you will, Mr. Niles.”

  And with that, he disappeared into the throng of well-wishers crowding around Brooke and Meg.

  Mama Abba followed him, hovering anxiously, for he had come the farthest, and thus somehow needed the most supervision, by Concord logic. As if he were a sheep that had strayed up the road from Boston, rather than a man with a coach.

  Jo felt someone at her elbow and hurried to cut another piece. “Just a moment,” she said, and reached for a plate.

  “No need. I’ll have one later, when everyone else has gone.”

  She looked up to find Laurie meeting her eyes, only somewhat awkwardly. Her heart turned over and over in its place, rolling about in circles beneath the carefully ironed tucks of her dress. Like one of Bethie’s kittens, she thought, when it couldn’t quite get comfortable in the laundry-basket.