eight
The minute she stepped foot back inside the ballroom, out of breath with terror and something else, something that felt dangerously like want, she was pounced upon by her sisters.
“Where have you been?”
Margaret—oh, dash it, Meg—asked.
“It’s time.”
“Time?”
Jo repeated, dazed.
The crowd had thinned: everyone was leaving, finally. She had spent much more time with Laurie in the garden than she had realized. Outside the floor-length windows, the night had reached its darkest hour.
The realization crashed down on Jo like a mountain. It was time to say goodbye to her sisters.
…
They went back to Sir John’s residence.
It was a manor house in the fringes of town, surrounded by a garden large enough to give one the illusion of being in nature. Even so, Jo was acutely aware of how far from home she was.
She and her sisters sat in front of a blazing fireplace in the library, in their ballgowns, on the carpet, for one last time.
“Jo, you’ve ruined your lovely dress,”
Amy sighed, taking the torn muslin between her elegant fingers.
“You looked like a mermaid in it. So many men admired you, not that you realized. Laurie looked like he was in pain.”
“Amy!”
Meg said, affronted.
“He did not! What a thing to say.”
Jo, still numb, could not utter a word.
“You know he did, Margaret,”
Amy laughed.
“We whispered for hours about it, you and I. We kept saying how he could not take his attention off our Josephine the whole night, poor boy. He looked like he was ready to duel every single man who laid eyes on her even or a second. Not that Jo would notice any of them, of course.”
Jo couldn’t breathe.
This needs to stop, now.
“Enough about that foolishness,”
she said decisively.
Amy looked surprised at this: usually it was Jo herself who started all kinds of foolishness. But if Amy kept asking, or, even worse, if she discovered the further damage in Jo’s dress, she would find out what had happened with Laurie. And Jo was not ready to face that—not even by herself.
“We have been preparing ourselves for this moment for months,”
she went on.
“Now, ladies.”
They all looked at her somberly, expectantly. Jo might be the perpetrator of foolishness and theatrics, but she was always the one they all looked to for answers.
“Are we up for it?”
As they had agreed on the day of Meg’s engagement, the three sisters got to work.
They took turns, Everyone sharing their favorite memories. There was talk of singing by Beth’s pianoforte, playing the heroines for their parents and a few intimate friends at their parlor-turned-theatre at home, dancing on the grass underneath a full moon, reading in a cluster by the fire so as to keep each other warm in winter, gathering flowers from the garden in the spring and splashing each other in the stream in the summer.
Jo struggled a little when she shared her favorite memories of her sisters—they all included Laurie as well.
She had known remembering would bring pain, but she had not prepared herself for the pain of losing him. It had blindsided her completely.
She herself had proposed this trip to the past. She knew that the sacred memories of their happy childhood could be poisoned if they weren’t careful—poisoned by loss, absence and nostalgia. But if they shared them and repeated them to each other, maybe they could keep the memories safe. Safe from the pain.
What am I without memories?
I am entirely made of them.
And they are all intertwined with sadness already.
No memory was clean, free of pain. None at all.
The memory of Beth’s pianoforte brought with it the empty seat with her last music sheet on it. The memory of their theatrics brought to mind the closed trunk of clothes Mama had sewn for them, laughing, as Jo and Laurie argued violently over the last dueling scene between Roderigo and his rival for the heroine’s hand. The memory of falling through the ice… Well, that had nearly ended in death too, but that was life in general, wasn’t it? Always a breath away from disaster.
Always an hour, a month, a decade away from grief.
One could not escape it, no matter how far one ran.
Everyone I love is going to leave me.
“I am losing you both,”
Jo murmured, unable to keep her dark thoughts to herself any longer. Immediately she regretted uttering the words; she did not want her sisters to be burdened by them once they were happily away.
“Don’t be dramatic, Josephine, I’m only going to my honeymoon,”
Meg said in her gentle voice, threading their arms together.
“It’s perfectly natural for your life to change a little when you are married. You’ll see when your time comes.”
I won’t, Jo thought vehemently, but she held her tongue—a rarity indeed.
“We are going to be parted for the first time, and for a very long time. It hurts, Jo, I won’t deny it,”
Amy said, in a rare show of emotion.
They held each other tightly, hardly noticing that they had lapsed into calling each other ‘Jo’ and ‘Meg’, names they thought they had left behind them when they came to London to become grown-up ladies.
Jo never found the opportunity or the courage to tell them about Laurie. She hadn’t even told herself yet. If she said it out loud, it would make it real.
My best friend is in love with me, she would say. Laurie proposed to me. They would look at her as if she’d gone crazy. But her next words would have them hating her:
I rejected him.
I lost him.
It was just as well that she didn’t say anything.
…
Meg and Sir John’s barouche departed shortly afterwards, and Amy was set to follow in a lavish carriage early in the morning. She went back to her own bedroom for a few hours of sleep and final packing.
Jo, left alone, her heart raw from their goodbyes, could not sleep. She had been given one of the best rooms, in the east tower. It overlooked the part of the grounds that contained a great, decorative lake, which was currently glittering with the reflection of starlight peeking behind dark gray clouds. Beyond the gates, a pale, angry dawn was painting the far horizon pink, but the room was still shrouded in thick darkness.
She lay down on the feathered mattress, but her eyes would not close. She watched the dancing yellow flame of the candle casting large shadows on the dark walls of the bedroom, until she thought she might go mad. She got up in her nightgown to write furiously by the window, but even that could not ease the dull ache between her collarbones.
She looked outside, to the lake. The clouds had parted and it was silver with moonlight.
Alone, in this strange, spacious, London room, with Papa softly snoring down the hallway, and Amy packing her brushes and colors in her trunks for Europe, Jo wrote by the candlelight, ruining her eyes. She wrote and scratched the words out, staining her fingers, scrunching and throwing away the paper. She did not care. She picked up another piece of paper. Then another.
She dipped her quill again and again until the words flowed.
…
She barely looked up from her writing for a second; when she did, there was a ghostly sort of movement beyond her window, down by the water. She sat up abruptly and flung the glass open.
The minute she realized what she was looking at, her heart stopped.
Dear Beth,
Our sister got married three days ago. You should have been here. You should have seen the way her chiffon dress flowed over the carpet as she walked. You should have seen her satin slippers, the flowers in her hair. You should have seen the kind face of her bridegroom, shining with the deepest love and adoration for her.
You should have been here.
You should have stood as close to the wallpaper as humanly possible with me at the balls that followed the next two days. You should be here in my room right now, after midnight, so we could whisper our plans for the rest of our lives, now that she’s gone.
Instead, you are gone more irrevocably than her and Amy.
I hate that you’re gone. I will never make my peace with it, no matter what the vicar says, but I will keep writing to you.
We played the ‘memories game’ before Meg and Amy left. You don’t know it, of course, we started it after you died. We needed to share our best, fondest memories of you, not so that we would not forget—that would never happen. But so that the good, bright memories wouldn’t get sullied by the pain of loss.
I won’t write to you the memories we shared as we sat close to the fire, our knees touching like little girls, for the last time. You haven’t lived most of these moments anyway, so they wouldn’t mean anything to you. Instead, I’ll share with you the best memory of my life. You were there for that one.
It was the first time Teddy laughed. When he’d moved in that huge manor house next to our Orchard Hall, a mere baby, it was strange, because he never even smiled. Mama used to tell me that when we were little.
He was the most serious child we had ever seen. And even as he got to know us girls and started playing with us, sharing our mealtimes and sometimes outings, he never once smiled. He only began talking with ease after he was years old, do you remember? You were already sick by then, but you were still alive, and that was all that mattered.
And then, one day when he was nine and I was , it happened. He smiled. His smile was the most glorious thing I’d ever seen, and I vowed to myself there and then that I would do anything in my power to keep it on his face for as long as I lived.
I don’t even remember why he smiled. It must have been because of something incredibly stupid I did or wrote, I’m sure of it. One of my ridiculous plays probably. Or even worse, my poems. Those were always worth a good laugh they were so terrible—especially at that age. But he smiled once, that dazzling thing of light, and then he laughed, and he never ever stopped.
Until tonight.
I wiped the smile off his face in one fell swoop, Beth, and I don’t know if I will ever see it back there again.
Maybe another woman will make him smile. Probably. Maybe she already has; I’m sure he’ll have no scarcity of ladies vying for his attention. But I will never see him smile like that to me, ever again. I’ve killed that.
I think I may have killed him too. At least that’s how it feels right now.
Oh, how I wish you were here to tell me what to do. You would probably tell me to stop being an absolute idiot. But I have no idea how to exist, what to ‘be’. I have no idea how to be myself in a world that keeps denying me entry.
Eternally,
Your sister