Jo & Laurie

by Margaret Stohl

  Nineteen-year-old Meg was distressingly traditional, which accounted for her taste in the most tediously earnest boys—the one thing both Jo and Amy could agree upon. Otherwise, the three March girls did not agree on much, though they loved each other dearly.

  A small shout echoed up the cellar steps. “Don’t yell. You know it upsets Marmee.” Jo heard the sarcasm in the tone; she could imagine the smirk on her little sister’s face.

  “Don’t . . .” Jo picked up an envelope and tore off the corner with her teeth. “Do not start!” There was a pause—and a crash—and Jo imagined the baskets of last year’s potatoes that had most likely been upset on the stone cellar floor. It was a bright sunny day in May, and Jo wished she felt more sanguine about her success and less rattled by its expectations.

  Then she heard Amy’s voice. “You were the one who gave her that treacly nickname, Jo! She’s Marmee forever now, in thousands and thousands of copies of a book everyone in the world mistakes for our real life!”

  Jo tossed the letter over the grating and into the dining-room fireplace, picking up another. “Oh, you ridiculous tartlet. Blame Mr. Niles! He insisted.”

  The stomping that accompanied the declaration brought Amy up the stairs and into the small, warm dining-room where Jo sat.

  Amy flung herself into the creaking wooden chair across from her sister. “What are you doing, anyways?” But she instantly forgot her question upon spying a ceramic bowl in the center of the table. “I didn’t know there were oranges! Oh, Jo! Such fancies we have now!” Oranges were a rare delicacy, shipped all the way from Florida or raised in a greenhouse, and only the wealthiest households were able to afford them.

  It was true. Though it was still a bit soon for Jo’s royalties to make the March family much in the way of actual dollars, Jo’s career now brought certain niceties into the house on a regular basis. And Jo had to admit, the more-than-modest success of the book had been satisfying, if bewildering, to acknowledge. It had completely taken her by surprise, and if a few obnoxious reviewers had dismissed her work as slight feminine rubbish, her pride was somewhat assuaged by the very real physical comforts said scribblings had brought them.

  Jo pulled the fruit bowl away from her sister, thumping it back to the table, where it had been holding a pile of letters down. “Mama’s saving those for preserves,” she scolded.

  “Hannah hasn’t let Mama Abba make preserves in years,” the youngest and blondest and prettiest of the March sisters answered back.

  Youngest and prettiest and by far the most irritating, Jo thought. At least I got that part right.

  “So what’s gotten you all up in arms?” asked Amy.

  Jo turned back to the table in front of her and motioned to the pile of mail with a touch of incredulity. “These are letters from my readers.”

  Amy was making a little pile of orange peels on the table. “All those? For you? You’re no fun at all! Why would anyone write you?”

  “Precisely the question.” Jo quirked an eyebrow. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Perhaps because they feel that I write to them . . . well, for them.”

  “You mean in the book?” Amy had gone wide-eyed, as if the idea of Jo’s newfound regard—or more specifically, her little tome’s—had only now struck her. “At least they aren’t thronging to our actual house, I suppose. Your readers.”

  “Could you imagine their disappointment? Upon learning the home of the Great American Authoress was this damp and earwiggy place?”

  “I suspect they’d be more shocked by your earwiggy curls,” Amy sniffed, with a self-satisfied toss of her own neat braids. “And what do these letters say?”

  Jo stared at the pile. “Some begin by asking for an auto or a photo—neither of which I can afford to send. But really, they want the very same thing. All of them.”

  “Well, what is it?” Amy asked, impatient now.

  Jo sighed. “They want to know how it all ends, which apparently means who marries who.”

  “Well, they have a point. How does it end?” Amy cocked her head, sucking juice from her delicate fingers.

  Jo snorted. “It ends the way it ends! Isn’t it enough the way I left it? That I become a writer? That Laurie goes off to college, and our father returns from war? That a very serious boy proposes to our very pretty sister—and that you, scamp, learn the error of your ridiculous ways?”

  Amy smirked. A curl of orange peel fell to the tabletop.

  “You’re hideous.” Jo flicked the peel gingerly off an envelope. “You should live in a barn.”

  “I’m hideous? While you’re the one telling the whole world about the time Mr. Davis struck me and made me throw away my pickled limes?” Amy leaned forward and pinched the soft white bit of Jo’s wrist.

  It was true; some of the more popular chapters of Jo’s little book had involved Amy’s misbegotten transgressions at their old school—in particular, a scene of the littlest March smuggling a sack of concealed treats into her desk and being punished as a result.

  Amy had sworn to never forgive Jo, though she’d enjoyed her newfound fame all the same. “Of course that character is inspired by me,” she’d say to anyone who asked. “Really, I created her myself.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be such a ravening little pickled piglet every second of every day. Besides, those limes did, in point of fact, fund the purchase of those very oranges,” Jo teased, “so I assumed you approved of those sorts of things.”

  “And so I do, those things. Most things. Though Meg was right that it was a curious choice to invent a neighboring dowager aunt who absolutely despises us all . . .”

  Not this again.

  “You know why.” Jo frowned. “It was just, everything was a bit too—”

  “Treacly, I know, I know. The great and temperamental Jo March can only handle so much sugar in her spice.” Amy looked at Jo sideways. “If only we did have a rich aunt.”

  “Anyway, it’s not about me,” Jo tried to explain, as she had a thousand times before. “It’s about the story. They all come with their own shape and spirit, you know. I can’t control how they turn out.”

  “Why not?” Amy demanded, shoving a section of lime-funded orange into her mouth. Even the scent was intoxicating, especially within the rather more pedestrian walls of Orchard House. The smell of adventure and faraway lands.

  Well worth the price of the limes, Jo thought.

  Amy kept going, dribbling juice as she spoke. “You’re the writer, aren’t you?”

  “I am, and use a napkin, you monster.” Jo pulled a folded square of cloth from beneath the pile of envelopes, brandishing it at her sister.

  “What? This?” Amy grinned with an orange-peel smile instead of teeth. Still, she took the napkin, spitting her peel into it. “I still don’t understand.”

  “I only write the characters for what feels like a moment, until the characters sort of . . . take up the quill on their own . . . and begin to write each other. Tell each other their stories. They breathe on each other, and make each other live. And from then on, I’m just an eavesdropper, Amy.”

  “But you crawl upstairs with your quill and your ink-pot, and that’s when the story begins. I’ve seen you do it a thousand times.”

  “That’s where it all starts. But the early bits are just, I don’t know. Pantomimes made with paper dolls . . . paper dolls and promises, I suppose.”

  A final wedge of orange halted in mid-flight as Amy shot her big sister a look. “What about Beth?”

  Two pink spots appeared in Jo’s cheeks. “What about her?”

  Amy put down the orange. “You changed what happened to her. You let her live. You wrote her, Jo.”

  Jo looked at the orange peels in the palm of her hand. She couldn’t bear hearing Beth’s name mentioned, not even by Amy, who had loved her as much as Jo had. “That was Niles’s idea. He said the book was too
sad otherwise.”

  Is that it? You did it for Niles?

  Or did you do it for yourself?

  Unlike what had happened in real life, in Jo’s book, Beth, the third March sister—younger and sweeter than Jo, older and wiser than Amy—had recovered from scarlet fever and lived. It was the least Jo could do for poor Bethie, whose absence in the house was still a shadow they lived under, an ache they all felt.

  The angel of Orchard House.

  Because the truth was, since she’d passed, Beth was still somehow there but not there in the house—same as her abandoned, porcelain-faced dollies, still in their old room, sealed in the close air of the cedar chest at the foot of the empty daybed.

  The chest Jo walked past no less than ten times a day.

  In some ways, I’ve begun to imagine myself a well-worn Roman step . . . , she had written into her tear-smeared journal. (Never mind that her “Rome” was only the capital city of her heart’s imagination, and that Jo had yet to venture farther than Boston.)

  . . . just a sanded bit of stone in an empty stairwell, still carrying the deep grooves and depressive dents of every passing sole that ever touched it. A meaningless monument to absence made permanent. To eternal loss and stillness. To the impressions that remain, whether or not we ask them to, long after their makers have turned to dust.

  “Your editor said the truth was too sad for your book?” Amy gave Jo a pointed look. “He wasn’t wrong, you know. Though some girls like sad books. Poppet does.”

  Jo looked past her sister to the little grating that hid the fire, forcing herself to breathe, in and out, again and again, as far as the nipped-in waist of her new day-dress would allow. Beth had known her best—and worried about her—for Beth had seen how dark Jo could get and, more to the point, how lost she would feel without her Beth. And so Beth had made her promise—

  No, stop.

  It was still too painful. Jo could not let herself dwell on her memories. On the grief that had wrung out Orchard House in the days after the scarlet fever had taken the second-youngest March.

  It was only writing her book, her Little Women, that had allowed Jo to begin to feel even some relief.

  Jo took Amy’s discarded orange peels and tossed them into the fire with a brisk, no-nonsense motion, as if she were sweeping out all her sorrows with them. They curled up into little black husks, making the whole house smell like oranges.

  2

  THE SEQUEL PROBLEM

  No more sad truths. No more ghosts, however angelic. Not this afternoon.

  Jo inhaled sharply and changed the subject. “I thought we might go into town and get you a new ribbon tomorrow.”

  “You did?” Amy sounded shocked—and gleeful. “Can we?”

  “I believe so.” Jo smiled as she tossed another letter onto the pile. “Roberts Brothers wants a sequel, you know. Now that the first book is selling, Mr. Niles says if I were to do it, he could finally offer us the sort of money that could properly change our lives.”

  Amy sat up. “Really?”

  “They’ve had to reprint it, you know. They’re even in talks to make Little Women into a theater piece in London’s West End.” Jo couldn’t hide the pride in her voice at that fact.

  “Oh.” For once in fifteen years of her life, Amy had nothing to say.

  “A literary society wants to bring me on a steamship to Paris for a speaking engagement.”

  Amy’s mouth fell agape. “Paris?! You? Because of a book?”

  “Yes, me. They want me to speak next year.” Jo frowned. “Why else do you think the fruit baskets and the flower arrangements and the sweets and the dresses keep coming?”

  But Amy hadn’t heard a word after Paris. “Speaking engagements! The theater! The River Seine! Resplendid! Oh, truly! As famed as if you’d written The Orphan of the Rhine!” Amy clapped her sticky-sweet hands together. “Think of all those oranges! And grapes! And the cherries we’ll have this summer! Oh, cherries!” Cherries were Amy’s favorite and hard to come by for those of modest means.

  Jo shook her head. “I can’t think of it. It’s all become . . .”

  “Wonderful?!” Amy’s eyes widened.

  “Strange. And . . .”

  “Incredulous?!” Amy clasped her hands dramatically.

  “Confusing. Because it isn’t real, you noodle-head. My book’s based on us, but my characters aren’t us, not really. We’re not those little women.” The title still made her cringe a little. “So how can I keep writing them?”

  “So?! If we aren’t, then who is?” Amy was spluttering now. “The cherries, Jo!” Her face had gone pale. “Think of the cherries!”

  “I do! It’s all I think about! Why do you think I wrote the stupid thing in the first place? Father’s war debts . . . and all the costs of maintaining Orchard House . . . the animals and the gardens . . . coal and milk and butter and meat and sugar . . . setting aside something for Mama Abba’s future . . .” Jo tried not to feel resentful of her father for leaving them alone, but some days were harder than others. While she rarely said it aloud, she couldn’t help but wonder what she would have been free to write if she didn’t so keenly feel the pressure to earn. Then again, as a member of the gentle sex, would I have been encouraged to write at all?

  “Animals? Gardens?” Amy was still spinning. “You mean ball gowns! And petty-furs! And the Grand Tour! We can travel the world, Jo! We can go to Rome and Sardinia and Capri, where I will paint and you will write and Meg will . . . come with us!”

  “Amy!” Jo shook her head. “Stop swooning. I don’t think I can do it. I’ve even tried to plot it out in my head. But I’m not . . . a romantic. Not this sort.” She sounded strange as she said the words, mostly because she herself wasn’t entirely certain of what she meant by them. “Good Wives. That’s what the title is meant to be, of the second part. Roberts Brothers wants us all married off, Niles says. What madness! If I can’t imagine it, I can’t very well write it, and I can’t sell a book I can’t write.”

  Amy laughed. “Jo March! Of course you can! You’ve been writing romance since I was five! I’ve been more swooning damsels and lovelorn dashers in your plays than anything else!”

  “That’s not the same.”

  Amy ticked them off on her sticky fingers. “Roderigo of the North, Alphonse the Odious, the Countless Count . . .”

  “This time it would be us, Amy. Even if . . . it’s not. I can’t write romances for us.”

  “Poppycock!”

  “Amy March! That mouth!” Jo tried to be scandalized, but in truth, it was always a bit thrilling when one of the other Marches cursed.

  “You’re just scared.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Of course you are,” Amy scoffed. “You’ve had a bit of luck with your first book, and now you’re afraid you’ll do something wrong and spoil everything.” As usual, her sister had hit the nail on the head, or, as she was more likely to say, the head on the nail.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Jo could feel her temper rising with her voice. She reached to pull the nearest golden curl, but Amy squirmed away.

  “Don’t wrestle me like I’m Laurie!” Amy howled. “And don’t be prickly, I’m just telling the truth!”

  Could she be right? The little potato? Jo thought about it. She may just be right.

  “Don’t be such a fraidy-cat,” Amy said, earnestly. “Give the people what they want, Jo. Give them the sequel they deserve! You owe it to your readers . . . not to mention the London West Enders.”

  “Do I?”

  “Of course you do!” The youngest sister was no longer listening. “As for me, in the sequel, make sure I marry a count! No—a prince!”

  Jo couldn’t help but smile. Her little sister was nothing if not predictable. “Pierre, the Prince of Pickled Limes?”

  “No! Christophe . . . the King of Cher
ries!” Amy shouted as Jo chased her around the chair.

  The wooden door pushed open as Meg March followed their mother inside, trailed by Hannah, their loyal servant and, in many ways, a member of the family. Hannah had helped raise the March girls from infancy. Jo truly didn’t know how Mama Abba would have survived their father’s absence without her.

  “What king?” Meg asked, pulling off her plain, round-brimmed bonnet. The splintering straw was shaped like a coal scuttle, Jo thought. Way too homely for their sister. Even if they could have afforded a ribbon or two, it was near impossible to get Meg to really enjoy anything.

  Regardless, Meg was generally held to be the first great beauty of the March family, with her rich dark hair and doll-like porcelain complexion—perhaps even more fragile than a doll’s, like a teacup Jo might drop, or a silk stocking she might tear.

  When Meg blushed, Amy said it looked like watercolor paints splashed across her cheeks. But Meg only looked delicate. In truth, Meg was as tough as any March sister, inside and out. She could beat Jo up the attic stairs and shinny up the old oak before Amy had reached the lowest branch. The rest was all feminine artifice and girlish manner—as per the style, and the society, of the day.

  What a fat lot of rot, Jo thought.

  Poor as the March family was, she didn’t know why her older sister bothered with feminine artifice at all. She herself certainly didn’t. Yet Meg did always seem to care what other people thought of her. And now Jo could not stand that her horrid little book had become a source of some awkwardness between them. But it had, because Jo had written that their neighbor Laurie’s otherwise unremarkable tutor, John Brooke, had proposed to Meg, and Meg had accepted him, when in truth they had never even exchanged a word with each other.

  “What king? Why, the king I’m going to marry in Jo’s next book! The Cherry King!” Amy announced, even as she held up an orange.

  “Amy! Those oranges were the last of the fruit basket the book man sent! I was saving them for the preserves!” Hannah scolded. “Now we’ve nothing to send to the picnic on Sunday.” Hannah sighed, but she drew her arms around Amy. “Next time, stick to the raisins, dearest.”