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New York's sky is a slate cathedral resting on buildings nestled on top of each other, rows of metal and bricks shimmering after a rainy night – it has nothing to do with the Europe Amy paints in her sporadic letters, the Europe that is all old and elegant, all a cast of past lives and art frantically chasing after itself.
Jo plunges into the city's boiling chaos, she writes short stories for newspapers and teaches to some lovely children who warm her heart, and that really is all she has ever wanted: to be independent, far away, free - writing is her freedom (even if sometimes loneliness grabs her by the throat, even when her stories are worth a little more than scrap paper to Mr. Dashwood).
And yet sometimes Jo looks out of her tiny window with a strange pain in her chest, like a consuming nostalgia for something that hasn't been, and her thought runs wild to Massachusetts, but Massachusetts means sun-drenched fields and silver reflections on a river, it's the sweetness of Marmee and Meg, Amy's flirtatiousness and the quiet serenity of Beth and also Teddy’s totalising laughter (Teddy who ran away to Europe like Amy, and maybe it's better to forget).
*
It's Amy's letters that keep her tied to Europe, it's another letter that makes her come back to Concord as if fire is chasing her. Beth is sick, Meg writes her, and Jo leaves New York behind and rushes home without thinking twice (because Beth has always been her favorite, and the most delicate, and her weakness).
There's Marmee waiting for her on the doorstep, and dad with her: Jo barely hugs them and doesn't stop, she stumbles on all the steps with her long skirt, and with a broken breath she faces Beth's room. Her sister's forehead is shiny with sweat, and she trembles under the woollen coats, she breathes sick miasms - and seeing her so small in her bed makes Jo dizzy, it gives her the impression of a future going in the wrong direction.
Meg joins her as she leans over to leave a kiss on Beth's hot temple.
"I wrote a letter to Amy, too."
From the window in the back of the Marches’ house you can watch the sun until dusk, until the firmament is filled with stars. That corner of the sky is Jo's handhold when the world starts spinning too fast around her and it's too late to stop it and prevent everything from slipping through her fingers. Scarlet fever has weakened her body, the doctor says behind an ajar door, I don't know how much- I don't know how much more she can take.
Jo bites her lips, she touches Beth's tawny braids - she looks at the stars and she wants to scream and rip her clothes off, but instead she whispers fantastic stories in Beth’s ear to make more noise (now there's no one she can be weak in front of).
She spends many sleepless nights beside Beth's bed, on a dark wooden chair that has been there for as long as she can remember. She passes a cold cloth over her forehead and wets her lips with water, and she tucks her in when the darkness falls in the room and she collapses exhausted. One day she wakes up and Beth is looking at her with her blue eyes that are like sapphires.
"Jo" Beth croaks with hoarse voice, with a small and tired smile, and Jo doesn't scream, she leaps over Beth instead and holds her as if she almost lost her forever, while Marmee sobs somewhere behind her.
(For her there will be time to cry after).
*
Amy and Teddy arrive a couple of days later, a day when the wind seems to want to eradicate everything. Amy is an apparition of blonde curls and light blue silk and Jo dwells on her intentionally, and she discovers that two years have passed and Amy is no longer a little girl, but a woman with high cheekbones and eyes in which men surely get lost.
"Beth is getting better," Jo tells her, and when Amy embraces her, trembling and whispering thank goodness, oh, thank you, Lord, thank you, she realizes that she has forgiven her for everything - the burned book, a dream she has never lived (but this, perhaps, was never really hers to live).
The room narrows as Amy moves up the stairs and Meg and Marmee's voices are muffled; all that remains in the hall is her and Teddy; Jo slowly looks up at him and feels her heart scraping against her chest. He has changed, Amy wrote to her, and he certainly has, how could he not when time and pain erode everyone (and she has wounded him to death), yet Jo still sees Teddy in the manly features of Theodore Laurence, in the gray eyes looking at her as if not even a day has passed.
Jo looks at him in silence and Laurie does the same, motionless on his feet, between them a whole castle of unspoken things which were left to macerate (why didn't you write to me, why did you run away, can I still call you Teddy?), but Jo decides she doesn't care. She takes a step towards him and then collapses into his arms: she doesn't expect anything, not after what she told him, not after making him run away from her without even trying to stop him, but after a moment of she feels Teddy returning her grip, his hair brushing against her temples - and this feeling alone is enough to make her want to cry.
There are words trapped between her teeth, frozen in the act of speaking, and Jo can't pronounce them because she's always been too proud, too ready to cover every trace of weakness, so she bites her tongue and says nothing (I missed you, she thinks).
She's sure to be a drawing on paper, for him, when he says "I missed you too, Jo", and he is smiling.
*
Amy's return and Beth's unexpected recovery gift them unpredicted sunny days, when Jo believes she can erase every cloud.
Meg is the first to notice the thin gold band around Amy's ring finger; Fred and I got married before I got back, Amy gloats, and then there are words of jubilation and laughter: Beth screams with joy, Laurie tells about Paris, Meg hugs her, and Marmee and dad’s eyes are wet, and Jo laughs and messes Amy’s up her hair, surprised that she has managed to keep such news to herself.
It's like looking in a mirror reflecting the past, in those days, seeing the races in the snow, the afternoons spent on an improvised stage in their attic and receiving a piano as a present on Christmas Day (when Meg was supposed to be an actress, Beth a pianist, Amy an artist and Jo a writer).
Jo might almost believe in this crystal dream (and God knows how much she wants to), but the crystal is transparent and gets dirty without anyone noticing. No matter how hard Jo tries not to see, Beth is a porcelain doll that is slowly cracking - her fingers are getting colder and thinner and she has a bulimic chasm in her chest that nothing can weld (it's only a matter of time, Jo realises).
"I'll take you to the sea," Jo decides, and there's a tender resignation in Beth's smile.
The waves arrive in a slow caress on the shore, first the dark water and then the soft foam that lingers on the sand, a white flame that does not want to fade. Beth asks her for a story as she plays with the patched-up blanket on which they are lying, while the sun makes her hair look like a burnished golden halo.
"I don't write anymore, Beth," Jo says, sweeter than she ever thought possible.
"Why?"
"Maybe it was a waste of time" she lies, but that's a lie she doesn't believe either.
Beth wrinkles her forehead, and suddenly she looks much older than her years, much older than she could ever be (maybe it's just Jo's perspective that doesn't resign herself, which wants to see her grow up, become a woman, grow old). "I don't think it was a waste of time" she considers, and she is again a child (a snow painting) when after a second of silence she adds "Write again for me, Jo".
If Beth wants stories, then Jo writes them without protest, splattering her fingers with black ink, bent over the desk, while Beth rests and dreams and seems to wash away in the feather pillow. Jo takes her to the ocean with the pirates, to California with the gold rush and the cowboys raising red dust under the hooves of their steeds, in a cottage lost in the English moors. A few pages also tell about a family that lives in Concord and Beth listens to those pages with a tender smile on her lips - you should really write a book, Jo.
Jo feels she's slipping away, but she keeps reading even when the words get mixed up before her eyes (as long as she reads for her, Beth can't die).
(One night, when they're in the same bed, lying so close that their breaths melt and Jo can trace constellations between Beth's tiny freckles, her sister breaks the tacit agreement that lied between them, but she does it so gently that Jo can't even blame her.
"What about Laurie?" she asks, and Beth never asks questions without reason, without having brooded in her head and given voice to every possibility - Beth is too far beyond her own destiny not to see what Jo can't even grasp.
"Laurie what?"
The freshly laundered sheets barely rustle as Beth intertwines her skinny legs with Jo’s ones. "He's back," she says, with a simplicity that can not be discussed – it must simply be accepted. It's just two words, two stones rolling on the side of a mountain and causing a landslide, an avalanche of ignored awareness that now sting like thorns and Jo doesn't know what to say. Beth falls asleep before she can even find an answer, and her breath is weaker and weaker - for a moment it reminds her of the beauty of a dandelion just before it scatters in the wind).
*
If the world were a fairer place, it would have stopped with Beth's death; if the world were a fairer place, a fragile and good and gentle soul like Beth's would not have slipped away so soon but-
(but they don't live in that world and maybe that parallel universe doesn't even exist).
But there's the sunlight kissing Amy's blonde hair, there’s green grass under Mr Laurence's fancy shoes, and there are titmouses chirping far away, on branches with so many buds - the world will go round even without us, Jo realises.
Jo remains while everyone else goes away; she looks at the damp, dark earth and she thinks that Beth isn't really there, that those flowers are useless, and her tears would be just another mockery. Behind her, Laurie's footsteps don't even make a sound (she never heard them) and she has that lump in her throat that she can’t make go away. The fingers resting on her shoulder, close to the collarbone, are delicate and warm and light with life.
She starts crying while clutching at Teddy's hand (the one he still wears her ring on).
That evening she pulls out of the drawers all the sheets she can find (yellow from years gone by, crumbly as dust) and she throws them one by one in the tongues of fire in the fireplace. Jo watches the paper burn until only the last embers remain, blood red craters on the black of the space between the stars.
It all becomes ashes, but not the stories she has written for Beth (never that sacrilege, never, never).
*
She spends whole days locked up in the attic, thinking, and thinking – thinking of the infinite possibilities of what she could write, but she only touches them with her fingertips (and she can't hold any of them back). The wooden steps often creak: Marmee brings her delicacies arranged neatly on a tray, Meg covers her shoulders with a shawl, Amy comments that she should go out - but none of them can stop and understand the wild soul that lives in a girl's body (not Marmee with her quiet spirit, not Meg with John and her life and their accounts that never add up, not Amy who will soon leave for Europe).
That afternoon the creaking of the wood is stronger and Jo instantly recognizes Teddy's footsteps: he appears at the top of the stairs a few seconds later, first his dark hair and his mouth bent into a smile, and then his long legs, wrapped in high leather boots.
"Let's go to the river, Jo."
Outside the calm is taking the place of a morning downpour. Laurie's words are not a suggestion, not even an order, rather something halfway, and Jo takes her coat on impulse and follows him under the mottled sky.
Once (a lifetime before, when they were little more than children), when she was angry Jo used to take long, tiring walks along the river, the only way to calm her impetuous nature, prone to light up like a fuse and burst out like a thunderstorm (and Teddy knew this and was the only person allowed to watch those thunderstorms).
Now they walk side by side, their feet sinking in the mud and their hands barely touching.
"What are you doing locked in there all day?" Laurie asks her, tilting his head, when the soft sound of water is the only sound left between them.
"I think."
"Of what?" he insists.
"Of what my book will tell," Jo answers, looking at him with a flash of pride in her eyes, challenging him to reply, but he just scrutinizes her thoughtfully, and then he shakes his head.
"That’s not you" he finally replies, and Jo already feels a tingling in her fingers, the air leaving her lungs as she is about to scream, outraged. "You think and do, Jo. You don't just think" he whispers, glancing at ther with a look that takes her breath away (because of the tenderness she reads in his eyes, because he knows her so deeply).
Blood immediately rushes to her cheeks (a feeling that she has always hated and that now moves something in her stomach) and Jo acts on instinct.
"Is this something more like me, Theodore Laurence?" she provokes him, placing her hands on his chest and pushing him hard to the side of the path, but Teddy is ready and quick to grab her forearms, pulling her down with him in the fall. Jo finds herself in a tangle of arms, legs and fabric as they tumble through the tall grass, as they roll to avoid the slush and the world becomes just a green and blue stain.
Laurie lets her go only when he's sure she's on top of him and unharmed.
"Definitely" he laughs back with a little laugh that erases everything else - and Jo laughs, too, despite herself, looking at the sky until salty drops tickle the corners of her eyes.
They return home as the blurred rays of sunset are reflected in the pools of water along the riverbank, a kaleidoscope of grey, warm orange and periwinkle blue; her skirt is damp and dirty, his shirt is soil-stained and he has a leaf in his hair, and both of them look at each other's shoes, covered in mud - they are anything but decent, and Jo can't remember being so happy in a long time, with just a drop of darkness in her heart.
"You should really do it" he confides to her before saying goodbye, at the front door, and Jo looks at him almost trembling, fearing that she hasn't understood anything yet and that she is still deluding herself (he hadn't understood her back then, she and her desire for freedom, to write and escape, and he might not understand her now). "Write a book."
(She can’t remember being so happy in a very long time).
*
She gets a crazy idea, the kind that most people caress once in their lives, just once, and then they distractedly relegate to a corner - but not Jo.
She starts writing the day Amy gets back to Paris and the house empties a little more, after Meg and Beth, and there is that unperturbed silence that Jo always struggled to accept. She starts writing the day Amy returns to Paris and she reconstructs the story from the beginning; there's so much to tell, so many things filled and accumulated, starting with Marmee and Dad and four sisters, and then Hannah's sweet voice and the hats to look like pirates, the snow cloaking Concord and the days skating on the frozen river, and Beth's fingers, like a feather on the black and white piano keys.
"Could anyone ever be interested in a story like ours?" Jo reflects, letting herself fall next to Laurie on the old sofa, a sheet of paper covered with writing in her left hand and a pen in her right hand grip.
"If that’s the case, I would buy half the copies of your novel" Teddy says, and she snorts and punches him in the upper arm.
"Don't even joke about it!" she blows, and yet she feels a strange gasp in her heart when he raises his hand and gently rubs a thumb on her cheek, erasing a smudge of ink - Jo lowers her gaze and reminds herself that she is sick, so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for.
(Sometimes she wonders whether she hadn't been too categorical on that wind-blown hill, too eager to conquer the world with her own strength, in her all or nothing, and she can't answer herself).
*
Aunt March's house is big, even too big, and has the smell of old, lived-in houses - the smell of wooden furniture, the vague scent of rosewater and sweet talcum powder that still breathes. Jo walks through the half-empty rooms, chasing ancient thoughts (the long afternoons spent with her aunt and her books, the sun filtering through the windows onto the oak floor) and she can't believe that the place is hers, all hers.
"What are you going to do with it?" Meg asks her, holding Daisy and Demi - Plumfield offers so many possibilities that it is difficult to unroll them neatly next to each other, foresee them all.
Jo smiles watching the twins run, in her mind there is an image that is like a revelation. "We need a real school in Concord, don’t we?"
*
The old sofa is the only surface of the attic that remains free. She has been writing day and night, constantly dipping her nib in the inkwell, using her right hand and when necessary also her left one, dirtying her fingers and palm with black ink, sometimes in silence, sometimes with Laurie and his soft melodies in the background (but Teddy is always there).
Now pages full of words flutter everywhere: on the desk, on the window sill, they even clutter the floor, drawing a mosaic of letters and stories. Leaning on the wall, Jo rereads frantically every sentence, while outside the evening shadows are getting longer and longer and her eyes are getting heavier and she has to squeeze her eyelids to send the tiredness away.
When she looks up the darkness is red, behind the glass the cicadas sing and Laurie is asleep in the left corner of the sofa. Jo approaches him to wake him up, stretching her legs to avoid the paper on the floor, yet when she is in front of him she finds herself unable to do anything but look at him: at the last sighs of a dying candle, Teddy's head is slightly tilted, his breathing just a little heavier than usual, and her heart is full of a strange nostalgia.
Jo leans over him, looks at the dark curl that falls on his pale forehead, the shadow of his long eyelashes brushing against his cheekbones, and she finds him handsome and impossible, and suddenly the desire to touch him is so intolerable that it frightens her. (She traces the outline of his lips, but only with her fingertips, a trail of fire that lingers on her fingertips, and tomorrow she will pretend she never came this close.)
"I thought you wanted to change me back then," she whispers, and she doesn't know whether she's talking to herself or the young man in front of her.
(The first time she proposes the novel to Mr. Dashwood she keeps her hands in her lap to prevent herself from shaking. He gives her a bored look from under his reading glasses, it's not the kind of story the public is looking for, he tells her, and in the buzzing confusion of the room Jo is sure she heasrs the roar of her dreams shattering down.
The second time she proposes the novel to Mr. Dashwood, he's the one who called her, the one who wanted to print her book. They discuss copyrights and fees and publications, and how the story should end, love or death, one of the things a woman is always forced to succumb to, and that is what hurts the most. To give in to compromise feels always like dying, to give up a part of oneself without really wanting it, and it is so unfair that Jo would like to shout to the world that women have other ambitions - but publishing her manuscript, she reflects, is already a crack in a society that does not conceive what they can achieve).
*
Amy returns with Fred Vaughn at her side as summer gives way to autumn - there is a shade of light gold enveloping everything, and elms and chestnut trees casting neat shadows along the driveway leading to the entrance to their home.
The room where they decided to have the party (for their wedding, for Jo's book) is a whirlwind of fabrics and colors, the indigo satin of Amy's flounced dress and the green velvet of Meg's, and then the irregular gleam of dozens of candles, their warm reflection on mirrors and the bronze of chandeliers, and so many people that Jo feels herself suffocating.
When the dances begin she instinctively seeks shelter behind the heavy curtains that hide a more intimate living room, where the light is dimmer and the air colder, and for an absurd poetic revenge she meets Teddy's surprised eyes.
"I didn't know anyone was here," he says, with an conspiratorial smile, while one of his legs is swinging rhythmically from the armchair he's sitting on so untidily, and Jo wrinkles her eyebrows, and then her eyes become big with awareness (it's like their first meeting, that's how it all started).
"Stay, if you'd like" she concedes, crossing her arms behind her back, almost theatrically, but keeping the serious facade for more than a few seconds is impossible, and then she laughs crystal clear, sitting on the armrest left free.
Laurie makes room for her, he gently moves away the simple burgundy skirt that hinders her movements. "You should be out there celebrating with everyone."
"That’s not me" she mocks him, imitating him once more, but then she rests her head on his shoulder and sighs, serene. "Besides, they're all boring."
His laughter takes her by surprise, and so does the thrill that vibrates along her spine when his breath creeps into her hair.
"I shall consider myself lucky as I have been excluded from the group of people who do not arouse Miss March's interest" he pompously proclaims, and she has to snort.
"You're the dullest of them all, Teddy," she says, and she refrains from giggling when he fakes a heart attack.
They're both silent, while a more frantic music comes from the main hall.
"Jo, will you dance with me?" Laurie asks, and Jo almost falls out of the chair in the hurry to turn her head to look at him.
"What?"
But Teddy has already stood up and he is watching her with a playful flick in his irises and has his hand open, facing her. "Did you ruin this dress too?"
She gets up on her feet, too, not before glaring at him. "In front of all the others, Christopher Columbus? I'd embarrass both of us!" she notes, yet Teddy doesn't back off.
Jo studies the hand he offers her, large and pale and with the tapered fingers of a pianist (a hand she knows almost as well as her own, which she can trust), and she grabs it, leading him out of the room.
"Follow me."
This time there's no snow outside and she's not wearing a red dress with a burnt hem.
The music can be heard lightly from the inside, like a pale echo, and Laurie is in front of her and he bows slightly without ever leaving her hand (and he has a smile that would light up the whole garden).
Jo clings to his fingers and finds herself dancing in the crisp evening air; she and Teddy run past the illuminated windows and slow down in the most hidden corners, where he leaves her hand just to guide her in a spin - a couple of times she ends up clumsily on his feet, she apologizes and he laughs with a laugh that fills her as he drags her along to an imaginary melody.
Jo laughs almost breathlessly, spins and jumps ungracefully on the patio, and out there, away from everyone, there with Teddy, she feels absurdly in the right place (even when she doesn't fit into anything and she exceeds everywhere). As soon as the thought touches her mind her leg gives up, slipping on the floor: she is ready to the impact on the ground, but Laurie grabs her quickly, he holds her at his chest.
"Careful, Jo" he whispers on her lips, panting a little, so close that Jo can smell his mint breath, she can guess the gray dashes in his eyes.
His hand squeezes her waist, his face is at the distance of a breath, and his eyes don't leave her mouth, and Jo is back on that hill (I've loved you ever since I’ve known you, Jo), torn between fleeing and staying and that fear she can't explain. She walks away from him like she's burned, and something similar to pain blooms on Teddy's face.
They come back inside as the music fades.
(Just before she gets home Amy sits next to her on a cream-colored brocade sofa, she points to Laurie with a nod and almost carelessly whispers, "It's you. It has always been you").
*
From the window in the back of the house you can watch the sun until dusk, until the firmament is filled with stars. Jo leans against the windowsill and gets lost watching the river of stars flooding the absolute blackness of the sky - it's just by chance that her eyes run to the only candle left burning in house Laurence, just by chance.
It's the middle of the night, Jo isn't asleep and Laurie is playing the piano: she perceives its poignant and distorted notes beyond the walls, the glass, the space. It's late at night and she should be asleep, yet her feet refuse to move and her eyes seek the glow of a candle, brighter than any star.
Jo thinks about Teddy and Amy's words and that missed kiss, and Jo thinks about the regrets, the unspoken things, and the things that can still be shouted, and there's that pain in her chest that won't go away.
Jo didn't want ties, because she has ambition and talent, as well as a heart; she has a mind and soul, and her vocation as a writer and the school she's building, but there's that staggering void that widens with every step she takes away from him and that she can't fill alone, not when Teddy is the only one who knows how to extinguish it. And maybe that's what love is all about, laughing together and two souls dancing alone, and not being able to breathe when they are away - maybe that's what he meant by you will care for somebody, and you'll love him tremendously, and live and die for him, and right away Jo is crushed by the enormity of that thought.
She takes one last look at the candle (it's still there, it's lit) and quietly rushes down the stairs.
The heavy, polished wood of the front door is cold under her fist; it's the middle of the night, but someone will hear her, someone will open the door. Jo was never able to wait (all or nothing, everything and immediately) and this time she couldn't wait until morning, so as not to lose all the courage, so as not to let the candle fade.
A maid opens the door, recognizes her and lets her in without saying a word; Jo does not wait for her, she heads for the piano room with her heart in her throat, following the music as if she were in a dream. He's still wearing the party suit and he is bent on the piano, and she takes a moment to breathe while the melody fills her flesh.
"Teddy" she calls him, and Laurie immediately turns his head, looking at her like a mirage, a hallucination - his lips parted, his iridescent eyes in the faint light of the candle.
"Jo?"
Jo gasps, caught off guard by the silence and his eyes, nailing her where she is; she hasn't prepared a speech, she hasn't prepared for anything, and in the end she just says "I love you".
The sentence hovers in the room, bounces off the walls; the amazement makes Laurie's eyes bigger, and he doesn't speak and there's that silence she has always hated.
"I know it's late to say this, but- oh, Teddy, if I'd said yes back then we would have been unhappy, and we would have ruined everything, and we would have hated each other, and I couldn't stand it," she throws out, and she already feels shameful tears pressing down on her eyelashes, and she feels so stupid and weak (but he's Teddy and he can understand her). "And I'm still odd and inappropriate, and I can't keep my temper, and we'll probably fight every day," she adds, taking a step forward, and she doesn't even know why she's laughing and crying at the same time. "But I think the someone you were talking about has always been you."
Just that handful of words is enough to see Laurie suddenly get up and reach her in two long stride; he stops a breath away from her, he looks at her behind the long eyelashes and he touches her face, her chin, a wet cheek.
"Do you mean it, Jo?" he asks, the shadow of a smile on his lips and his eyes that are like liquid diamonds.
Jo almost rolls her eyes, but she is certain that she would not be credible, not with the burning embarrassment and the salt inflaming her face, with her heart almost bursting.
"I'll write all the time and I'll never be a good wife," she says, and Teddy laughs quietly, he takes her face in his hands and rests his forehead on hers.
"I don't want a good wife. I want my Jo, I want you," he breathes into her mouth, and Jo smiles at him and no longer feels that pain in her chest, and Laurie's lips are so close that reaching out and kissing him is natural, with his arms holding her, with her ink-stained hands looking for him and finding him.
(In Teddy's arms, Jo finally finds her place.)