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“I suppose it's like the ticking crocodile, isn't it? Time is chasing after all of us.”
J.M BARRIE
In Josephine March’s memory, Theodore Laurence looks like this:
Teddy, eighteen years old, warmed by the fireside at Orchard House, the long line of his neck smeared with dirt below his left ear from when earlier they had been grappling out by the pond, his hair as tousled and wild as her own, the sleeve of her costume shirt gaping open at his neck, completely lacking in decorum, and his grin as he turned to look back at her, long and slow and too large to be anything but the same tumultuous joy she felt in her own chest.
Or maybe what she means to say is when she thinks of him, she can’t seem to separate him from herself.
In New York, Jo runs through the crowded streets, all a rush with activity, everyone in it with a hidden story in their chest, so many stories that she, Jo Marsh, can become nobody, just a strange girl rushing past. It is both strangely gratifying and horrendously awful. She is not known here. And she thinks that maybe if she tries hard enough, writes hard enough, there might be a hint of recognition as she hurries by.
But instead there is nothing. Just the pound of her feet on the pavement. And a too quiet room down the way.
“Let’s run away,” she says. Her head is hanging off the side of the back porch so that her hair can dangle into the weeds.
Laurie peers over to look at her, his face warped by the angle. “Run away where?” he asks.
Jo sits up, the blood rushing back to her head so that she feels giddy. “Where would take us, do you think?” she says. “We could go to California and pan for gold. Or do you think there are still pirate ships? We could hunt for treasure.”
Laurie exhales, his limbs relaxing, and Jo slumps into him, letting herself collapse full-bodied into his side.
“I’d go wherever you wanted,” he says, finally.
Jo can feel his breath stirring her hair, but she doesn’t look up.
Laurie lets her paint his eyes with back kohl, winging the outside up to his eyebrows so he looks mysterious and strange. “Hold still,” she tells him, batting at him. His hands are butterfly fast against his sides, and it’s distracting her. “There,” she says, leaning back to study the effect.
But all at once, it is Laurie who is studying her, and she feels, suddenly, as if she is the one in costume. “What is it?” she asks, patting at her hair.
They are close enough that their knees are touching. But then, they are often this close. It has never seemed a thing to be noticed before.
“You have something here,” he says, softly, and his thumb slides across her cheekbone.
Jo jolts back as if she had been shocked. “Where?” she says, sure she is flushing horribly.
“Jo,” he says. “Look at me,” and she fears that suddenly they are talking about something else entirely different than theater.
But then Meg and Beth and Amy come barreling into the attic, Amy holding a heaping ton of jeweled costumes, and Meg rehearsing her speech at double speed, and Beth, bouncing on her toes to be included too, and Jo is pushing up to greet them, leaving Laurie, sitting, behind.
“Oh Laurie!” Amy cries out. “Don’t you look magnificent.”
“It’s all Jo’s doing,” he says.
Jo is a wild child, taken to tantrums and extreme fits of pouting. She goes for long walks by herself and comes back red-nosed and still angry, despite her best efforts. Still, she likes to look at the wide landscape, familiar as far as the eye can see, and twirl around and around and around, everything blurring through the tears. “The only thing we have control of is ourselves,” Marmee likes to say, but Jo has never found it to be true. She sometimes feels as if herself is the last thing she has control of. It is the rest of the world she will conquer first.
The ballroom is a blur of colors as they spin and spin, and Jo is laughing, too loud Meg would say, but Meg isn’t here, and Jo is falling into Laurie, her hand wrapped tight around his shoulder so that she can feel the muscles flex, and what does the music matter really? They form their own beat.
In close up, Laurie’s face is different than it normally is. His eyes hold secrets, and for once, Jo has no desire to find out what is behind them.
“Let’s dance a slow one next,” he says.
Jo removes her hand from his grip.
“Whyever would we do that?” she asks. “It’s only the fast ones that are fun.”
On the balcony, the cool air hits her overwarm face. It is a while before her heart slows and she can go back in.
Jo never wants to grow up. Never never never never.
But,
“I can’t stop it,” he tells her on a cold, windy day. “I’ve tried, and tried, and I can’t stop.”
Try harder! she wants to yell.
My will is impassible, and I can stop it. I can stop anything.
“I know you have, Teddy,” she says, softer than she’d imagined she could. “But I won’t be changed.”
“I wish I had been born a boy,” she says, throwing herself onto the divan beside him. They are up in the attic again, just the two of them for the first time in a long time. Laurie is pretending to study, and Jo is meant to be writing, but the words won’t come today. It’s been weeks since there was a letter from Father, and she keeps getting distracted by thoughts of battle. It makes writing murder and gore less fun than it normally is.
Laurie looks up from his book as if he is glad of the distraction. His knees are pulled up to his chest, taking up too much of the divan with his long limbs. Of course, he is, Jo thinks, contentedly, shoving some of the clothes piled up on the couch aside, so she can lean more fully against him.
“You keep saying that,” Laurie says. “I still don’t know what you mean.”
Against her back, Jo can feel the press of his spindly knees digging in, and almost against her will, she imagines tumbling back further into him, so that they go falling off the divan and onto the ground below. It is a childish wish. Unwomanly. And yet—
Jo pulls herself up and off of him, turns back to look at him with a wide spread grin, “Oh, Teddy,” she says, reaching out and ruffling his hair, and trying to pretend she doesn’t notice his eyes tracking her hand. “Of course you don’t.”
“Should we try dancing again?” Laurie asks her.
“Out here? Where people can see?” Jo says, laughing. “Fat chance. Really I’m saving you. It’d be capitally embarrassing. An offense really.”
But tonight, Laurie is determined. “Let’s do it anyway,” he says, and offers her his hand.
She stares at him for a moment in astonishment, surprised that he would ever go against her desires. But there is his hand, overlarge and pale and ridiculous. She knows that hand as well as she knows her own.
And George Washington, big deal, it was just Teddy.
She takes his hand.
“Why did you think I was trying to change you?” he asks her much later, past the point it is meant to matter at all.
“What?” Jo asks. She is editing in the firelight at Plumfield, and Laurie is keeping her company. The house still feels empty, though she’s set about trying to make it feel more like a home.
“Back then,” he says. He doesn’t bother clarifying, and though Jo doesn’t need him to, she’d like him to pretend that she does. Just this once.
“Why does it matter now?” she asks him, her voice stiff and strange. There is ink on her face she is sure, and the conversation is unwanted.
“It doesn’t,” he says, turning back to her book.
It’s a lie.
And maybe that is what’s worst of all.
“Soon, you’ll be away to Harvard and everything will be different,” she says. She’s in a true sulk now, she knows, and everyone, Marmee, Amy, Meg, and even Beth, had known that it was best to just stay away from her for the day. But then Laurie isn’t everyone.
“Is that what all this is about?” he says. He lifts the layers of gauzy fabric of Jo’s fort up, so that he can duck inside it with her.
“You’ll forget all about me,” she says. Her nose is red from crying, and her eyes are bright and manic, and Laurie is still looking at her like she is as beautiful and graceful as Meg, and if that isn’t as horrifying as if he’d been mad.
“I’ll never forget you,” he says. He lifts a pinky in promise, and this close up, she can see the scattering of summer freckles across his cheekbones, and the slow spiral of a dark curl across his forehead.
“Oh Teddy,” she says, burying her face in his shoulder, and clutching him to her. “A college boy’s promise means nothing, don’t you know?”
She can feel his laughter against her shoulder, and she wishes she didn’t feel so—
It is their first Christmas without Beth, and all of them feel the pressure to make sure everything is perfect, though of course, how could it be without Beth there amongst them, playing the piano and roasting chestnuts in the kitchen and cajoling everyone softly back into good humor?
“What does Laurie want, do you think?” Jo says.
Amy pauses folding laundry. “You never call him Laurie,” she says, confused.
“Of course I do,” Jo says, snapping the sheet straight. “It’s his name, isn’t it?”
“I love the woods in winter, don’t you?” Jo says, spinning once and then twice and then laughing as her feet catch on themselves. She will never have Meg’s grace, but that’s alright with her.
Laurie looks amused. He’s redcheeked from the cold and pretty, like a boy in a painting. She almost opens her mouth to tell him so, but then stops herself.
“What?” he asks. “You’re staring at me.”
“No, I’m not,” she says, snottily. “I’m just admiring the general splendour.”
He hums. And when she stumbles again, he reaches out to catch her, gloved hands around her waist, and she jolts out of his touch, and goes scampering away from him through the snow.
“Jo!” he calls after her, but already she is farther and farther away, her heart rushing in her ears.
“Come catch me, Teddy!” she calls after her, but she knows he won’t. She’s fast enough to outrun him.
She is baking in the kitchen of Orchard House. It’s been months now since Beth had—
Since Teddy had—
Well, none of it bears thinking about. She isn’t very good at baking, but then it is the thought that counts, right?
“What are you making?”
Jo looks up and sees Laurie standing in the doorway. He’s looked different since he came back from Europe as Amy’s husband, like something essential in him has stilled, and Jo doesn’t know why the sight of him now makes her feel like weeping. We both had to grow up, didn’t we, Teddy? she thinks.
“They’re supposed to be scones.”
“Supposed to be?” he says, laughing, but when he comes closer to her, she’s moving across the kitchen to the window, and he is left standing in the middle of the room alone.
“Jo,” he says to her back, a whole conversation buried in her name.
“Let’s not talk about it,” she says, firmly. She refuses to be a girl in some torrid melodrama.
“Well, you’ve never wanted to talk about it, have you?” His voice is bitter now.
“No,” she says. And she has no intention to start now.
In New York, Jo sits by the window and writes letters to Laurie. She writes pages and pages to him. Describes the vapors of the city, steam and smog and awful stench, and the bustle of people frantically rushing to and fro, and her horrible editor’s ridiculous mustache which he would love, and her students, who she loves, and the foreign feeling in her chest, a sort of loneliness she has no name to.
He never replies.
But perhaps that’s for the best.
“Oh, Teddy,” she sighs. “Don’t you love summer?”
They are lying out in the fields, watching the sun crawl across the sky. Jo has shucked her shoes and socks to better feel the grass against her calves, and Laurie is more undone than he normally is, just in shirtsleeves and an old pair of trousers, and when she reaches for him, their hands intertwine over their heads, easy as breathing.
“I wish it would never end,” he says, more serious than she’d imagined. And when she rolls over to look at him, she sees his eyes are hooded and serious. Jo searches for some way to push him back into good humor.
“Maybe it never will,” she says, reaching over and poking him in the stomach where she knows he is ticklish. “We’ll join with the faerie folk and dance the nights away in perpetual summer.”
“Alright,” he says, rolling too so that they are face to face. There is grass in his dark curls, but he looks as if he could be one of the faerie folk like this, pale and delicate and beautiful. Teddy, beautiful? she wants to scoff at the thought. But there it is.
He holds up his pinky for her. “Promise?” he asks her.
She takes it.
“Promise,” she says.