Little Women and Me (24 page)

When I walked in the door, it was as though they were already holding a funeral.

It was so weird for me being there then, the weirdest moment since I’d arrived there back around Christmas. Once again I was an alien. The others were all crying into handkerchiefs, holding on to one another, absolutely devastated. Although I could feel upset for them, I didn’t know this man they called Papa, had never met him.

I wished I could do something to help them all, to make it better for them.

“Oh, Emily!” Beth cried, throwing her arms around my neck.

I hugged her back, patted her when Meg came to me with a piece of paper in her hand.

“Here is the awful telegram,” she said.

It was just a greeting, plus two short sentences, signed by an S. Hale. But then I noticed the address at the bottom:

Blank Hospital, Washington.

Blank
Hospital? What the heck sort of name was that?

“I feel so guilty,” Meg said. “There I was complaining how hard times are, how men have to work and women have to marry for money, and then Hannah came in with that telegram.” She began to sob again.

I pulled her into the embrace so now there were three of us in that hug.

“It is my fault,” Amy said miserably. “When Meg said that,
I said that Jo and I would make our own fortunes—her through her writing and me through my work with clay.” She glanced over at the little clay figures of birds and fruit and faces she’d made, the objects Hannah referred to as mud pies. “It was vain of me to think of personal fortune as if it mattered.” She began to sob again too.

“There, there,” I said.

And now we were four in this group hug.

It would have been comical if it weren’t so tragical.

“I wish I could be as strong about this as you are, Emily,” Meg said, wiping at her eyes. “I never pegged you for the stoical type before.”

Easy to be strong and stoical
, I thought,
when you don’t have a personal stake in anything.

Then Marmee bustled in and looked at us for a long moment as though counting heads.

“Where is Jo?” she asked.

None of us knew.

“No matter,” she said. “I am all packed and ready.”

Then Mr. Laurence came and told Marmee that Mr. Brooke would be going with her to Washington as her personal escort, which made Meg straighten up, suddenly looking very grateful and surprisingly pretty.

And then Laurie came in with a letter from Aunt March, saying she was enclosing the requested funds but first needed to deliver a lecture on how she’d always said March shouldn’t have gone into the army, which made Marmee mad enough to crumple up the letter and toss it on the fire, after pocketing the money, of course.

And then—the last then!—Jo came in.

She had a bonnet on her head, one that I didn’t remember seeing on her when I’d seen her back at Laurie’s. It looked ridiculous.

With one swift move, she tore the bonnet from her head.

We all gasped.

Her hair, all that beautiful long chestnut hair, gorgeous as a healthy horse’s mane, had been cut off, leaving her with a short, choppy crop.

“What have you done?” Marmee asked.

I didn’t even have to listen as Jo explained to the others.

She’d sold her own hair, the one thing she could think of for which she could get any cash, so she could give it to Marmee to help out Papa.

I watched as she pressed crumpled bills, totaling twenty-five dollars, into Marmee’s hand.

Jo wasn’t a pretty girl, but her hair had been, and now it was gone. Now she looked like a naked bird.

But she looked like something else too as she stood there, defiant.

She looked glorious, magnificent.

Where others would wring their hands over something but then be content to leave it at that, Jo had taken action.

Tomorrow, I’d no doubt go back to resenting her, thoroughly, but for today she had all the admiration I’d ever felt for anybody.

Sixteen

That night, I lay in bed listening to Jo finally cry over her lost hair and then Meg speaking softly in the most glowing terms yet about Mr. John Brooke. Once the room fell completely silent and the house was fast asleep except for me and one other person, I heard Marmee making her nightly rounds, going from bed to bed to lay a kiss on each of our foreheads. She began in the other room with Beth and Amy before coming to our room, where she kissed Meg and Jo before coming to me last.

I don’t know why she saved me for last, since by rights I should have been third, or middle, but as I heard her approach I made sure to shut my eyes tightly. I didn’t know what words of comfort I could possibly offer this strong woman who was so worried for her husband, the man who was supposed to be my father. So I just lay there feigning sleep when she kissed me, but in my heart I wished her well.

The next morning the household rose at an insanely early hour so that Marmee could catch the first train to Washington. After waving her and Mr. Brooke off with promises on our parts to be good and strong and instructions on her part that we were to rely on Hannah’s faithfulness, Mr. Laurence’s protection, and Laurie’s devotion, saying further that she wanted us to work and hope and remember that we could never be fatherless—oh, right, she was talking about God again; well, I supposed we couldn’t possibly escape a Marmee lecture on such an occasion—we were left on our own.

After Hannah made us a rare pot of coffee and Meg remarked that with Marmee gone the house felt a full half empty—“a full half empty”? Was it full or was it empty? I wished she’d make up her mind!—it was time for Meg to go to the Kings’, Jo to Aunt March’s, Beth and Amy to do housework and schoolwork, and me to go wherever the day of the week told me to go.

Mr. Brooke wrote every day and the news was good: Papa’s pneumonia was getting a little bit better all the time.

Naturally, we were expected to write letters too, first to Marmee, but then as it appeared that Papa was finally strong enough to receive letters, to him too.

This presented me with a huge problem. I saw the others eagerly bend their heads to the task, some thoughtfully (Meg), some energetically (Jo), some gently (Beth), and some with excruciatingly poor spelling and grammar (Amy). They all seemed to have a lot to say, perhaps giving him news or reminding him of
shared remembrances to brighten his day. The thing was, I had no past with this man. What could I possibly write that wouldn’t sound totally asinine? What comfort could I possibly offer?

“Haven’t you started yet, Emily?” Jo asked crossly. “We want to get these off with the early post.”

“Simply composing my thoughts here,” I said brightly, while inwardly I groaned.

What do you say to someone you don’t know?

Get well soon
was usually a crowd pleaser, but not with this crowd, since Jo would yell at me for not putting enough time and thought into it.

Then I remembered something
he
had written to me in a packet of letters the household had received shortly after my arrival, and then I too bent my head to the task, trying my best to pick words a March would use.

Dearest Papa,

I know, as you told me once, that even when I feel there is no clear place for me, there is always one in your heart. And so I write to give you a full report on the state of the March household.

Meg is now the head of the table at meals. The role seems right for her and I think when the time comes for her to have a bunch of kids, she will do a good job. She hardly ever yells at any of us.

Jo is, well, Jo. She and Laurie got in a fight, but even though she still claims to be right, she was willing to apologize the moment he was.

Sweet Beth! You should see her. So kind, and even with these letters, it’s like she’s determined to take up as little space as
possible. Honestly, I wish she would take up more. Do you ever stop and think how much better the world would be if it were filled with Beth? Or how empty it would be without her?

Amy’s handwriting and grammar are terrible. But I suppose you can see that? It’s hard to believe she’ll one day m—

Whoops! If I predicted who Amy would end up marrying (so crazy!) and one day it came true (still crazy!), Papa might think I was a witch. No one, to look at Amy now, chewing her pen and then writing “contradick” and “punchtuation,” would ever believe who she was destined for.

Sorry, one of Beth’s kittens just jumped on the paper and I lost my train of thought.

Where was I …

Okay, so perhaps this was not a full report, but please know that everyone here—including me—wishes you a speedy recovery. So GET WELL SOON!

Anyway, Jo is now glaring at me, so I had better wrap this up. I hope it will give you comfort to know that while Marmee is down there in Washington with you, I am keeping an eye on things up here and seeing that the others remain the little women you love so well. I even read
Pilgrim’s Progress
every day for strength.

A lie. The others read it religiously but I’d barely cracked the spine on mine. Still, it wouldn’t be good for him to think one of his little women had gone heathen.

So continue mending and, as I say, GET WELL SOON!
There are many here who miss you.

A truth. Many did miss him, even if one of them technically wasn’t me.

Signed,

“Aren’t you going to sign this?” Jo asked when she was about to put all our letters in the packet.

“Oh,” I said vaguely. “I thought I did.”

“Well, you didn’t,” she said, thrusting the sheet back at me.

I stole glances at how the others had signed theirs.

Ever your own Meg.
Hugs and kisses from your Topsy-Turvy Jo.
Come home soon to your loving Little Beth.
Your affectionate daughter, Amy Curtis March.

Well, at least Amy was capable of spelling her own name right.

Even Hannah had signed hers:
Yours respectful, Hannah Mullet
. As though he might not know which Hannah she was if she didn’t write out her whole name. And what kind of last name was Mullet anyway?

What to write, what to write … how to sign, how to sign …

And then it hit me: the one thing that if I included it in a letter to him was sure to put a smile on his face.

I smiled myself as I took up my pen again and scrawled across the bottom of the page:

Your Middle March.

Seventeen

We spent the next week being so virtuous it would have made my teeth hurt if it weren’t for the fact that I felt just as caught up in the purpose as the others did: the purpose being to keep the household running as smoothly as possible in Marmee’s absence so that she should have nothing to worry about while she continued to nurse Papa.

But then Jo got sick and everything got crazy.

At least for me.

“You must go to Aunt March in Jo’s place,” Meg in her role as Marmee in absentia directed me.

“But I’ve never gone there on my own before,” I objected.

“What can be so hard about that?” Meg wanted to know. “Jo goes there every day of the week on her own save the one day you go with her.”

“The old lady terrifies me,” I admitted.

“Don’t be absurd,” Meg said, proving herself to be no real Marmee at heart. Marmee would never mock one of our fears. “What can one little old lady do to you?”