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My heart has left its dwelling-place
And can return no more.
— John Clare, “First Love”
On the night that Teddy falls asleep with his head in her lap, Jo does not yet love him. There is no tangled yearning in bearing such a weight, no flushed cheeks, no agonies: only the sleepy warmth of the parlor and the smell of the Christmas tree and the sounds of Orchard House settling and creaking. In her mind are the beginnings of a story—she does not know what it will be about, yet, but she knows that it has simply got to have pirates—and her right hand is combing absently through Teddy’s hair.
It is long past midnight. An hour or so ago, snow had started falling. The last golden light at the Laurence house across the way has gone out. Not a soul but Jo is awake—of this she is sure. The first to doze off had been Beth, curled up in the green armchair; then Meg, who had done the grown-up thing and gone up to her room; then Teddy, cider-drunk and content, listening to Jo talk aimlessly of how to write proper hauntings, and about how all ghost stories are love stories, really, if one thinks about it.
Amy had held on for as long as she could muster, determined not to waste Teddy’s company and yet more determined not to yield even one moment of it to Jo, but somewhere past the stroke of eleven she had drifted off at Beth’s feet, sprawled beneath a blanket and holding tight to one of Aunt March’s hideous needlepoint pillows. Jo can hear her faintly snoring.
It’s been a warm and merry Christmas—Jo’s sixteenth on this earth. It was Marmee’s idea to invite Teddy and old Mr. Laurence to share the day with them, and just after breakfast they had come traipsing gladly across the snow. Mr. Laurence had even worn a rather jolly gold silk ascot tie and red waistcoat, much to Beth’s hushed delight.
A tithe for the king, Teddy had boomed at the door, beaming and pink-faced, and with a bow and a flourish he had handed Jo a small green box. Jo can feel its crushed corners in the pocket of her pinafore, still. She has yet to open it. Long may she reign.
Jo’s eyes drift down to his face—to the firm bridge of his nose, to the edges softened by sleep and firelight—and brushes a dark curl back from his temple. Dear Teddy, with all his cleverness and mischief, unruly as the wind—now so gentle and so open, laid out like an offering. At the small weight of her touch he breathes in, given life, drawn up from some unknowable place, and shifts closer, half-pressed to her stomach.
“Merry Christmas, old boy,” she whispers, speaking only because she knows he cannot hear it. “Let’s make a promise, you and I.”
In the precious stillness of the parlor, Jo listens to the sounds her little life makes: the faint crackling of the embers in the hearth, the hooting of an owl in the distant woods, and the tide of her sisters’ breathing. It could last her to her dying day, this moment. She would fight with all her might to keep it, just as it is.
“We shall never be parted,” she murmurs to Teddy, tracing his eyebrow with her little finger. “We shall never marry. Vagabonds to the last, us two. Come hell or high water, and hang all the rest. Swear it?”
“Mm,” Teddy says, and does not wake.
“Engaged,” says Jo.
Were the word to turn to ashes in her mouth it would not surprise her. It has a scorched, ruinous quality when she utters it, nothing like the lightness with which it had been given to her.
Amy has come back from Europe, and she has gotten older. It’s the first time since her arrival the night before that she and Jo have been alone. In the blue midmorning light that veils the house, dressed in mourning black, she could be the subject of a painting with four meanings.
“Laurie and I,” she answers, as if to say it again will stitch it into the world more firmly. “Yes. After we left Paris—on the ship. It was late. And I…” She bows her head, knotting her fingers at her diaphragm. “Coming home… and being with him… and thinking of Beth—”
“What about—” Jo pauses, groping for the words. “What about your Fred? Marmee said there was a—there was a Fred…”
She had never come to know much about Amy’s Fred. She had never cared to ask, really. Just another glinting jewel from Amy’s time in Europe—a bauble with a name.
“There was,” Amy concedes. Her eyes shift to the floorboards; her prim mouth thins. “Was.”
“And what about your art?” How cruel she is, for not asking after that first!
Amy smiles, tight-jawed. “I’ve not got the grit and fire you have, Jo. I know my limits.”
“Limits!” Jo blurts out. “You haven’t any. You never have. You—” There is nothing to follow it, no final truth to tell, except for this: “You and… and Teddy.”
At last Amy looks at her head-on, and this is all that it takes for her steeled expression to come undone. In its place there is only some raw, hopeful thing, a yearning years-deep. She bites her lip.
“Jo…” And her voice cracks. “Jo, are you angry with me?”
The light seems to throb against Jo’s eyes. The emptiness of Orchard House could swallow her whole, un-name her entirely. Must she take everything from me, a hateful little part of her heart cries out; and from a different corner: Oh, she was always the fullest of love, our Amy, and I am proud of her.
“No.” She drags up a smile with all her might. It’s wet, and it trembles. But she holds to it tight. “No, of course not.” She thinks, For Beth, for Beth, and this, she means: “Life is too short to be angry at one’s sisters.”
Amy comes apart with relief and throws her arms around Jo’s neck. She smells of rosewater and, at its edges, the dusty leather of a carriage. Her slim body quakes with emotion.
“I really miss her,” she chokes into Jo’s shoulder.
“I do, too.”
“Marmee said—” Amy sniffles noisily. “She wrote that we’re to bury her b-by the junipers. Next to Grandfather and Grandmother. I thought—I couldn’t help but… worry she’d be cold.” She holds Jo tighter, as tight as she did with only six years to her name. “She ought to have lived forever. Just as she was.”
Jo nods, her cheek mussing Amy’s hair. She wants so very much to be good to her sister right then, and she wants so very much to hate her, and she has the distinct feeling that a musket is pressed to her gut, always, always about to land the one blow that will sunder her.
“I know,” she whispers.
She does not know how long they stand there, each breathing out of time but neither compelled to part—she does not know how long she clings to the stiff perfumed fabric of Amy’s dress, her mind awash with memories. Beth’s gentle finger coaxing a high note from the piano. Amy’s haphazard paintbrushes, gathered to dry on the windowsill. An unfinished braid in Meg’s hair. The piano bench, the apples in the bowl. And Teddy at the door, calling out land ho!, and both her and Amy looking up, in tandem.
What she knows is that, eventually, she must pull away—and she does, cursorily smoothing down Amy’s sleeves with both hands.
“Well,” she says, going for a tone that’s brisk and cheery. “Where is Theodore March-to-be, then?”
Amy wipes her eyes with the heel of her palm. Not a gesture fitting of a debutante, but Jo won’t tell.
“At Mr. Laurence’s,” she answers. “He wanted… he wanted me to tell you myself. He thought it best.”
What a strike to Jo’s heart that is. Teddy’s final thrust, she supposes. Glissade.
“I’ll go and fetch the old boy, then. What ne’er-do-well leaves his fiancée when there’s such joyous news to share? I’ll give him what-for, wait and see.”
She doubts that Amy is fooled by her pretending. No one worth their salt would be. Nevertheless, she hears no protest as she makes for the door. She’s already rushed out into the hard autumn wind before she manages to wrestle on her coat.
Her strides are wide, her breath a labor. She of course has no intention of going to find Teddy. She might be glad if she were never to see Teddy again. Instead she makes the walk to the club’s old post office box, where only the afternoon before she had locked away a certain letter: My dear Teddy, I miss you more than I can express—and so on.
She flexes her stiff fingers at her sides, already poised to rip it to pieces and give it to the weeds, let the river take it, carrying its remnants out to sea. When at last she reaches the tree on the outskirts of the Laurence house her hands are shaking.
She pulls the key from her coat pocket and jams it into the keyhole. The hinges don’t stick on the frost as they always do—a small mercy. She gropes around inside, waiting for the crisp texture of paper to meet her ungloved fingertips—but all she feels is cold, damp wood.
Her stomach plunges to her knees. She hunches down, peering inside the box.
There’s no letter to be seen.
Kitty and Minny are bright girls. Mrs. Kirke had taken care to remind Jo of this in her correspondences, but Jo had carried no preconceived notions with her to New York: their youthful intellects had spoken for themselves. Jo teaches them each day from nine o’clock to half past one, although Mrs. Kirke pushes her for more—an afternoon should be a girl’s to do with as she pleases, Jo staunchly insists, and in time Mrs. Kirke always yields—alternating the sciences and the humanities each day, to keep their minds malleable.
“I know the torment of arithmetic,” she says to them one April morning, when the first rays of spring sunlight have begun to creep up the sidewalks. “Believe me, I do. But in modern society one is expected to know it. Finish your problems, Kitty.”
Kitty looks up at her miserably, slouched over the library table.
“I can’t,” she declares. “It’s horrid.”
“I like arithmetic,” Minny boasts.
“You like anything so long as you’re good at it,” Kitty snaps. “And that’s not passion, it’s vanity.”
Minny falls quiet, cheeks coloring. She whips her head away as if it’s an act of vengeance.
Jo would never do something so willfully blind as tell them to be kinder to each other—she knows too well how anger festers when denied—but she does not miss the regret that passes over Kitty’s face, and it plucks at a sore string of her conscience, or her memory, or both. It’s the oldest she has ever felt, watching Kitty and Minny face away from each other in their chairs, their legs not yet grown enough for their feet to meet the rug.
“Now listen,” she says, leaning forward on a pile of textbooks. “And listen well. There are no noble reasons in this world to love the things we love. Without vanity, passion dies. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
They bury Beth on a Tuesday—underneath the junipers, just as Marmee had said. The letter is forgotten.
Jo feels as if she is watching the proceedings from inside a Wardian case, all sight and sound distorted by panes of glass. The sky is a sharp rink of blue, and the cemetery is alive with tender newborn grass, and there is a wide hole in the earth for her sweet sister to lay in, the sight of which makes Jo’s heart crack and split inside her ribs, like tree bark in winter.
She watches each stroke of the shovel, each spray of dirt—watches as a part of her soul is buried, too, where no voice or season can reach it again. She watches Meg walk with John and the twins back toward the distant gate; watches as Father ushers Marmee gently away, though the wind still carries her weeping back, back into the trees. She watches Mr. Laurence take three faltering steps forward, and remove his glove, and press a kiss to his trembling fingertips, and lay them gently on the headstone.
She watches Amy stay until dusk falls.
She does not watch Teddy.
Jo would not care if roots and ivy were to bind her to this place—she would not care if she were to turn to stone, and crumble with the years, and stand faceless watch over Beth’s grave forever, for always, in saecula saeculorum. Human history would go on moving, but she would not: an immortal monument to her grief, and no one else’s. Jo March’s. A sadness for the scholars to make sense of, one day, when sense can be made of such things. No one comes to get her. No one dares.
“My girl,” Marmee says, “you look as if you’ve just broken someone’s heart.”
Jo stands panting in the kitchen doorway, her cheeks still hot and raw from the windy, tear-streaked walk home. Orchard House is quiet, and has been for some months with Amy off in Europe and Meg settled in to a house of her own, and it is a quiet that presses in on her from all sides. Beth must be sleeping upstairs, for in the sitting-room there’s only Marmee, embroidering a yellow handkerchief.
“Do I bear it that proudly?” Jo asks, throat thick, and lets out a hollow laugh. She runs both hands over her face to work the feeling back into it, heart stuttering behind her ribs. “I’ve just done something unforgivable. Something horrid. And I can never take it back, but—but I wouldn’t take it back.”
Marmee sets down her needle and pats the ottoman beside her. Jo feels distinctly that if she were to sit down in this moment it would be her undoing, so she starts to pace instead, tracking mud across the floorboards.
“Teddy wanted to marry me,” she blurts out, all but physically recoiling from it. “And of course I turned him down, I told him what I’ve known to be true my whole life, that I—that I will never marry, not even for companionship, not even for tradition, and most assuredly not even for money—and he—and what—what must he think of our friendship, my greatest treasure in this world, for it to be of lesser worth than romance, less than some proprietary attitude that was not even our creation—did he only ever want to own me?! What—” She stops in her tracks, overcome by the memory of Teddy’s ruined face, beautiful in the way that a tragic ending is, pleading for something that she did not own. It makes her sick, how small her voice becomes: “What have I done?”
Marmee lets her words run their course, just as she always does. She lets the silence settle in their wake, all the while looking up at Jo with eyes that are wholly unblaming, and yet pained, as if Jo’s grief is hers to share.
“You’ve been true to yourself, my Jo,” she says softly. “You’ve honored the girl that you are in this moment, and her heart, and her dreams, and that is no small thing.”
“I know what Amy says,” Jo exclaims and hiccups back more tears. “But I’m not incapable of love, Marmee. I’m not. Only of—” She struggles for the right word to convey it. “Surrender.”
Marmee tilts her head, still patient. “Is that not what love is?”
“It oughtn’t be,” Jo says fiercely—that, she does not have to struggle for. She clasps her hands at the nape of her neck, closing her eyes tight. “Teddy said that he—he altered all these habits and desires, just because he figured I would love him if he did. And it made me sick to hear it, sicker than I’ve ever been… I never asked for such power over someone. I would sooner die than let someone have such power over me.”
“Oh, Jo.”
To hear Marmee utter it with such fairness and understanding makes Jo feel she is going to cry again. At last she crosses the room to sit on the ottoman, dropping her head gracelessly into Marmee’s lap. The sun has gone down, casting a dim blue shadow over the room; in the kitchen, Hannah starts singing “Mo Ghile Mear.”
“Is this childhood’s end?” Jo asks hoarsely. “That Teddy should go where I cannot follow?”
Marmee’s hand comes to rest upon her shoulder, a slim familiar weight.
“I think,” she says, in her wise and terrible way, “that is for you to decide.”
Since her return to Concord from New York, Jo has fallen into the habit of rising before dawn. Rather than make noise about the house she will slip out into the half-wakened world and stroll she knows not where until the sun has breached the hills. It helps her to clear her head—and her heart, besides—though to what end, she doesn’t know. There are no stories to write anymore, after all, with no Beth to tell them to. She must work out something new to live for, and sooner or later she and Father will run out of roof to repair.
A handful of weeks into spring, on one of these strolls, she finds herself on an achingly familiar hillside. Down in the valley she can see the church, and here and there an apple tree, just budding. A pale whisper of daylight lingers at the rim of the world, and all along the earth is a fine layer of mist.
She has not seen Teddy since the funeral, though since Amy will remain at Orchard House until autumn he has set down roots at Mr. Laurence’s, both in and entirely out of reach. She’s nearly certain, now, that he had taken her letter from the box, but the panic that had crushed her insides on that first day of knowing, and wondering, hardly registers anymore. He and Amy are still engaged, and he still keeps Jo at a distance delicately maintained, proper but not cold, cordial but not definite. She is conditioning herself to prefer this, to be grateful for the rope that he is throwing to her valiantly: a way out.
Will you go back? Meg had asked her the afternoon before, in a hushed, clandestine tone, while Daisy and Demi chased the old goose around the yard. To New York.
Maybe, Jo had answered, and maybe I won’t. I’m not at the yoke of ambition anymore, after all. No cart to pull. Just waking up and facing another day.
Perhaps, she thinks, looking out over the valley, she’ll stay in Massachusetts. Father and Marmee could use the company, and Concord will be in need of a proper spinster once Aunt March has vacated her seat. She’d tried her hand at words, and they’d not even been enough to impress Friedrich Bhaer.
She clenches her skirt in her fists. I’ll stop it. I’ve stopped it before. They’d not even been enough to—
Through the restless silence of the countryside comes the sound of footsteps, and by their weight and some deeper instinct she doesn’t dare name she knows that they are Teddy’s.
She damns her mind for still calling him by that name. He isn’t Teddy anymore. Teddy had gone off to Europe and never returned. This boy—this man—is Laurie. Laurie, who is shy and generous. Laurie, who will marry Amy.
Slowly, she turns her head. A moment later he crests the hill, windswept and Byronic, in a brown wool coat and red scarf.
He waits for a moment before making his way down the slope to meet her.
And Jo has the same feeling that she did all those years ago, when she and Laurie had ambled down this hillside together and left it apart, when he had told her with a raw and bleeding certainty that he could not love anyone but her: the feeling that she is about to break a heart.
Laurie, to his credit, does not look like he dreads it. He comes to stand beside her.
“Was it an accident?” he asks without preamble. “Coming here.”
Again Jo is reminded that his voice is deeper, his features more defined. He isn’t quite looking at her—rather at the distant trees, the flocks of sheep waking. This is the first time Jo has been close enough to him in days to take in the details of his face, and at once she can tell that he hasn’t been sleeping.
“I don’t know,” she answers, and draws in a shuddering breath. “Whenever I set out for a walk, I always tell myself I could go anywhere. But I keep finding myself… back here. Aimless, and—”
“Wishing you could do something over?” Laurie asks very softly.
Jo’s next breath turns to a blade in her throat. She whirls on him, stumbling two steps up the slope. Laurie doesn’t follow, doesn’t turn to face her. She addresses the pale nape of his neck.
“Teddy, tell me that you didn’t read it,” she says frantically, “or if you did, that you can banish it from your mind, because I—I can never—if I’d known—”
“If you’d known?” Laurie murmurs. “What of me, Jo? What if I had known?”
“It was foolish,” Jo chokes out, unable to stop. “It was so foolish, and I—”
“But was it true?” Teddy asks, half-desperate. Then, an open wound given voice: “Was it true, Jo?”
Jo opens her mouth and closes it, and opens it and closes it. Was it true? The ink and the nib, the turning of the key, the words without you? The loneliness and longing, the ache and the regret? Could she tell Laurie if it were? And if she were to tell him, what then? Wreckage in her wake, the same as always—good intentions for the paving of a certain road. What good would it do?
And yet—
“It was,” she croaks. “But I can put it down, I swear it, I swear on my life that I will never trouble you with it again, that you and Amy needn’t—”
“I do love her, you know,” Laurie interjects. Only now does he pivot his body to face her, his eyes red-rimmed but his carriage steady, steady. “That’s the damnedest thing of it, Jo, that I love her as she is and she loves me as I am and if I could share each coming day of my life with her I would die a happy man. I was a boy, back then, to think such a thing could never be.”
“If I had known,” Jo says helplessly, shifting closer despite herself, “I wouldn’t have written it. I would have taken it to my grave, or waited for it to fade.”
“But you did write it,” Laurie whispers. For an instant—just an instant, sharp and starved—his eyes flicker to her cold-stung lips. “And I read it. And now we…”
He swallows back the rest, whatever it might be. Jo can restrain her greed no longer. She reaches out to touch his sleeve.
“And now we must put it away,” she says, and gives him a little nod to coax out some agreement. “Amy is my sister, and I can see your love for her is true. And I will not be the force that ruins you both. I won’t do it.”
Laurie’s weight seems to gather against her palm, as if drawn to her by blood. He swallows, hard, and trembles—and he is so lovely, and so new, that Jo wonders for the very first time in her life what it would be like to kiss him.
“Walk back with me,” he begs her.
Jo takes away her hand, and waits for the burning to subside.
“Start back now,” she tells him. “In ten minutes, I will follow.”
The first time that Jo looks at one of Amy’s paintings, it is a torpid afternoon in late July. It is the summer that Aunt March suggests that Amy spend her mornings at Plumfield, refining her talents as a blossoming young lady: etiquette and embroidery and, on Fridays, watercolor. Every window in Orchard House is open wide, and Jo’s waking hours have been spent peacefully writing on the parlor floor, listening to Beth play Chopin. When Amy slips through the front door just after three o’clock, there is something bulky under her arm, wrapped in paper.
“What have you got?” Beth asks, her étude forgotten.
“Oh—nothing,” Jo hears Amy reply, uncharacteristically retiring. “Just something I made at Aunt March’s.”
“Can I see? Please?”
“N-No, or… maybe later…” Amy clears her throat.
Jo looks up just in time to catch Amy staring at her, but as soon as their eyes meet Amy tenses up and hurries on toward the stairs, cheeks pink.
“Lord in heaven.” Jo scowls, already annoyed. “It’s not some secret treasure map, is it? Let us see.”
Amy halts and bites her lip. Her fingers grip the object a little tighter, crinkling the paper.
“It’s only a painting,” she says with clear effort. “And I doubt you’d find much merit in it anyway, so—”
“What is that supposed to mean, that I’m some plebeian? Give it here.”
Amy considers her for a long moment. She seems torn.
“I’d like to see it, too,” Beth chimes in meekly.
Amy straightens up, never one to resist an entreaty from Beth. Giving Jo one last sour look she stomps toward the side table by the chaise and slams the object down on it, tearing off the paper.
Jo has seen Amy’s art, certainly, but she has never felt inclined to look at it. Art does not stir her soul in the slightest—give her a rousing symphony or a well-acted play any day—and its second cardinal sin after being art is being Amy’s. But she’s known, tangentially, about the schoolyard drawings, the loose leaf sketches stuffed between couch cushions. This is something altogether different: a daintily rendered landscape of the seaside, though it’s no sea Jo recognizes. The sky is dappled with clouds, and small white streaks seem to wink upon the waves. The water is a subtle, otherworldly green, almost Grecian.
She stares at it over Amy’s shoulder, stricken by the power of looking at something so beautiful it could drown her. It is beautiful, and it stings to know it.
“Well?” Amy fidgets with her skirt, glancing warily at Jo. “Do you hate it?”
Jo hardly knows what to do with such a question.
“It’s—” She unsticks the words from the roof of her mouth. “It’s stunning.”
That’s it. No disguises, no underhanded blows. When Amy turns to her, there is a smile on her face so pure and joyous that Jo thinks it must be meant for someone else.
It is the first time in her memory that Amy has shown the slightest investment in her opinion—and, in good time, she forgets it, like an unremarkable morning, like an ordinary supper or a senseless argument.
(But this is the power that the telling of a story gives: Amy does not forget.)
On a fragrant June night there is a knock at Jo’s door. She knows the hour is late because Hannah has put all the lights out, but she is still wide awake, watching the shadows of the maple branches on the ceiling. She lights her lamp and walks barefoot across the floor.
“Don’t say a word,” Amy says sternly, and shoulders her way in.
Her golden hair is undone, spilling past her shoulders. She’s in an elegant lavender dressing gown that Jo has never seen before. A gift from—? Stop that.
“Do come in,” Jo says dryly, and shuts the door.
When she turns back into the room she finds Amy sitting inelegantly on the floor at the foot of the bed. Her knees are raised, and her arms braced on them. She’s fixed an intent gaze on the bureau.
“I need your advice,” she blurts out, “and if you choose this moment to laugh at me, so help me, I will ruin you. Come sit next to me like a proper sister and give me comfort.”
Jo stares at her, agape. Not once in all her years has Amy ever come to her for counsel; her foremost confidant, through and through, had been Beth. Nevertheless, and with little recourse, she approaches Amy and does as she’s told, lowering herself onto the floor beside her.
“Put out the lamp,” Amy orders her. “I won’t be able to say this if you can see my face.”
Jo sighs—such theatrics! it is Amy, after all—and blows out the light.
For a good while, Amy makes no indication that she plans to speak. Jo wonders if maybe this is the result of somnambulism. Then—
“I received a letter,” Amy announces. “Today. From Philomène.”
Jo waits for this to mean something to her.
“Am I expected to know Philomène?”
“Don’t be cheeky. She was my friend at the Salon. An impressionist.” She pauses. “Did you never find it in your heart to take an interest in my letters?”
Jo elbows her. Amy elbows back, harder.
“I wrote to her last month, you see,” Amy continues, settling back against the bed frame. “About Beth, and—my decision not to pursue painting any longer.” She breathes in as if to steel herself. “She’s to open an atelier in Pont-Aven. She said that—there’s a place for me there, if I’ll have it.”
The flash of jealousy is a dull, familiar thing to Jo, now, enough that she can keep it from her voice. “That’s wonderful.”
“But I couldn’t. I can’t.” Amy balls her dainty hands into fists. “After all that agony—all that fighting with myself to be practical and well-behaved… I finally put it behind me. No more childish fancies. No more playing at being a painter. No more vanity. I would come home and make a lady of myself, and live a comfortable life with a comfortable man, and that would be that. And it would be mine .”
Jo nods. In her youth she might have scoffed at such desires, but now she sees Amy’s aspirations for what they are: a woman in search of the balance between dignity and survival, digging up a proper ending with her own two hands.
“And when Laurie asked me to marry him,” Amy says shakily, “I said yes.”
It takes all Jo’s strength not to flinch.
“But it…” Amy swallows and unbends her legs, tangling her fingers at her stomach. “It felt like killing something. And I didn’t know why.”
In a small, stricken voice, plain as the moonlight: “I don’t think I want to marry him, Jo. And I didn’t want to marry Fred, either. And I don’t know what to do.”
No words have been invented, not even in the dead languages, to describe what Jo feels, right then—sitting on the floor of her childhood bedroom in the dark, her shoulder flush against Amy’s shoulder. Hope, terror, sorrow, pride; shame and love and comprehension. It frightens her to understand someone she had once taught herself to resent so well.
We are alike, a voice echoes inexhaustibly in her chest. Amy, and I.
“I’ve loved Laurie for so long,” Amy murmurs, “but I was a fool to say yes. I’ll never be sure if I wanted him because he was Laurie or—or if it was only because he was yours. And he could provide for me, and make me a fine house, and he would be my lord and I his lady and we could build our happiness, the two of us, brick by brick—but I’ll never be sure. Not entirely.”
She turns her head to give Jo a smile, tightly bound. “And there are other things I’ll never be sure of.”
Jo stiffens, but there is no hatred on Amy’s face, no ire. Shamefully, she looks down at her lap and says nothing—for what could she say?
“I thought I could be the sort of noble woman who could make her peace with such things,” Amy says. “But I was wrong.”
“Amy,” Jo says quietly, and then, because she’s got to, at least once, and then she can be done with it: “I’m sorry.”
“Apologies don’t suit you, Jo.”
“That’s no reason not to try,” Jo retorts, leaning her weight pointedly against Amy’s side. She retreats again, settling, and lets silence make its little home between them before asking, quietly, “What was it that stopped you from painting?”
Amy ponders her answer for a good while. Jo can tell that she is thinking hard because of the way her forehead crinkles.
“Have you ever wanted something so badly,” she says at last, “that you would sooner burn it down than settle for only a fraction of it?”
Jo can’t help but laugh. “My writing.”
“Yes—yes, exactly!” Amy exclaims, and then quiets, as if second-guessing her agreement. “In Paris, I told Laurie… that I would be great, or I would be nothing.” She breathes in deeply through her nose, and then exhales. “Maybe it’s the same with him. Everything, or nothing.” Her head lolls to one side. “It took me two years in Europe to come to my senses, but I have. I will never be great.”
“I felt the same way in New York,” Jo exclaims disbelievingly.
Amy frowns. “But you are great.”
“Am not.” I don’t like them. I think that they are not good. “But maybe that’s—that’s not the point. Maybe the trick is… accepting that you aren’t great, and doing it anyway. Defiantly, and full of rage and love. Maybe that’s meant to be enough.”
She bows her head, drawing her knees up to her chin. She’s too big for this room now, too uncomfortably folded; even her old nightgown barely breaches her knees.
“I don’t know that I’m great. I just know that I cannot stop. No matter how much I long to. Even when it hurts, and even when it’s worthless—even when I know it’s worthless. And I try and I try to ignore it—I try to tell myself that I’m creating masterpieces, for no one has ever told me otherwise, have they—but in the end all that it comes down to is pride and want.”
Amy’s eyes meet hers in the dark, searching for an answer. “A woman can’t subsist on pride and want.”
“No.” Jo sets her jaw, looking back. “But can’t a soul?”
Amy breaks off her engagement with Laurie before the summer’s end. She cries and wallows at home for three days precisely and then writes again to Philomène, and by September she has gone away to Paris. Jo hears from Meg (who’d heard from Marmee) that Laurie had sent her off with a small share of his fortune. A dowry, he’d said dryly—and neither Jo nor any other March has seen him since.
Jo begins to wonder if he had drifted back to Europe, or gone west somewhere, carrying his twice-broken heart in his pocket. The war in her chest between guilt and joy is far too much to bother holding, so as the last warm days are stripped away by autumn’s wind turn she rolls up her sleeves and helps about the house—hammering nails and painting sills, and waiting for the rain to come.
“I will never fall in love,” says Amy.
She is six, perhaps, or seven, which means that Jo is ten. It is stormy November night, and the wind is blowing recklessly against the windowpanes, and all four of the March girls are tucked inside the same quilt, huddled around the fireplace.
“That’s not true,” Beth mumbles, her hair in one long braid. “That can’t be true.”
“Silly girl,” Meg adds, shaking her head at Amy. “Everybody falls in love sometime. It is a rite of passage.”
“Not me,” Jo declares, and grins at Amy across the hearth, “and not my Amy.”
Without Aunt March to inhabit it, Plumfield could be any house. It feels almost sacrilegious to walk through it after she is gone, wandering through great empty rooms, all the chifforobes and fauteuils draped with white sheets like bodies at the morgue. The bookshelves are barren, the wardrobes unfilled, the grand bedrooms vacant. Any soul could haunt it as they pleased.
Nonetheless, it cheers Jo to picture Plumfield as it may be, one day—to think of children charging down the long hallways, brandishing books and wooden swords, too young and raucous for any ghost or grief to linger.
She can hardly comprehend that it is hers—every sconce, every floorboard. She checks three times with the family’s solicitor to ensure there hasn’t been a mistake. But it’s all there in writing, made true by Aunt March’s ostentatious hand (she signs like a dowager! Meg exclaims), and, as with many things, Jo knows just what she will do with it.
After she has finished walking through it with Meg—earning a proper scolding when she stomps hollering through the library—she can’t quite bring herself to leave it, not yet. She lays spread-eagled on the parlor floor, watching twilight fall over the garden, and finds herself thinking of Belsham.
Political problems do not primarily concern truth or falsehood… they relate to good or evil—what was the rest…?
What a funny thing, to have let herself forget it.
She closes her eyes, letting time settle its weight all around her—above and below, and underneath, and onwards.
“Jo, is that you?”
Jo gasps, vaulting herself upward. Her legs are spread gawkishly, her skirt and petticoat bunched ridiculously over her bloomers. Laurie is watching her from the doorway, cast in twilight shades, holding a hat in his thin fingers and looking far too amused.
She gives him a half-hearted glare, for her honor.
“I thought it might be a specter, is all,” he continues. “Some vengeful spirit laid out where the body breathed its last.”
“I thought you’d left,” Jo says, getting to her feet. She spends just a few moments too long brushing off her bodice, neck bent so that she doesn’t have to witness Laurie’s face. “Or that you were dead.”
She looks up in time to see him slowly shake his head, gaze steady.
“No,” he says softly. “Neither of those.”
Jo flushes, to her shame.
“You’re not ruined, then?” she asks—so clumsy, so mean , but it’s out before she can wrangle it. “A beleaguered whipping boy for the March sisters?”
Laurie laughs—snickers, almost—and throws his hat onto one of the white-draped tables like a discus. It lands perfectly.
“Beleaguered, no,” he replies. “Amy made her case fairly. I daresay she could have convinced the Pope himself not to marry us, if it had come down to it.”
“That does sound like her,” Jo says.
She wishes very sorely for something with which to busy herself, a pitcher or a stack of books, so that she did not have to stand across from Laurie empty-handed and unoccupied. His hair has grown a bit longer, and curls freely past his ears. In the retreating light, his neck seems smooth as stone. These are the things she cannot help but notice, now, the same way one cannot help but notice a flock of wild geese crossing the sky, or a sudden spring downpour.
He is familiar and dear in so many places—and in others, alluring and new. The solitude of the house quickens her pulse. She jams her hands into the pockets of her pinafore.
“Jo,” Laurie murmurs, but his mouth lingers half-open after her name, and he trails off, smiling at himself. He bows his head, almost shy. “I’d hoped the sight of you might give me courage.”
There is a great surge of emotion in Jo’s chest. Courage! she wants to cry out ruefully. What does courage give us, when the day is done?
“Before we go any further, Theodore,” she whispers, all pretenses pressed and folded away into a drawer, just for now, just for the empty house and the damage they’ve done, “I must know, and do not lie: do you love me, or the memory of me?”
Laurie stays in place for a moment, and then crosses the room. The sheets of golden light through the windows slip across him and retreat, one by one. When he closes the last of the distance Jo’s breath bows in her chest. They could be children again, trading clothes and scorning convention, laughing until they couldn’t, simple until they weren’t. If souls are cut from the same cloth, Jo thinks, then theirs are still unhemmed.
“Whatever you have always been,” Laurie says, “and whatever you will be, that is what I love. I belong to it. I am yours.”
Jo lifts her hand, settling four fingertips on Laurie’s left cheek and watching how his lashes flutter, how his breath hitches. She traces each detail of his face like that: his eyebrows and the bridge of his nose, and his jawline, and the sweet seam of his lips.
“And I am no one’s but my own,” she whispers, framing Laurie’s face between her palms. “But I would walk home with you gladly, Teddy, and I would stay, if you’ll have me.”
Laurie gazes back at her, eyes half-lidded—holding very still, suspended in her hands—the ending she could never write.
“No force on heaven or earth could claim to have you, Jo March,” he says to her, reverent and plain.
And this is when Jo knows. She knows. She knows.