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.”