Little Women and Me - By Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page 0,35

to get a rail from the fence over there.

And then they were handing me the rail, pulling me up and out to safety.

“It took you both long enough,” I said accusingly to Jo and Laurie.

“What happened?” Laurie asked, his concern so strong I would have felt hopeful for our future as a couple if I weren’t nearly dead.

“That’s never happened before,” Amy said oddly. Then she added with awe in her voice, “Emily saved my life.”

“Huh,” Jo said. “Well, I highly doubt that. Emily can’t even skate.”

Back home, Amy and I were wrapped in blankets and put before the fire, our teeth still chattering.

Jo couldn’t do enough for Amy. Apparently death was a great reminder of love.

“Well, no harm done,” Marmee said soothingly. “A little cold water never hurt anybody.”

I nearly choked on my tea.

No harm done? my mind screamed. A little cold water? I wanted to strangle Marmee. Amy had almost died out there. I’d almost died out there! Hadn’t any of these people ever heard of hypothermia before?

Oh, wait a second … 1862… perhaps no one had invented hypothermia yet … or maybe they just didn’t know about it …

And then they were hurrying Amy and me off to our beds, and I could hear Jo and Marmee talking over Amy’s snoring in the next room.

Jo was feeling guilty over her temper, worrying that one day she’d do something so awful it would destroy her life and make everyone hate her.

Serves you right, I thought. If we were in my world and you pulled a stunt like that—letting someone go out on thin ice when you knew the risks, and then if that person died, we’d call it negligent homicide and lock you away.

Wait a second. Maybe Amy wasn’t the resident sociopath. Or perhaps she and Jo were both pathological?

But there was Marmee’s voice, soothing Jo with stories about her own temper, how it had taken Marmee most of her life to conquer it.

“How did you?” Jo asked with rare timidity. “Conquer your temper, I mean.”

“I didn’t conquer it permanently,” Marmee said. “It came back to me again when I had four young daughters and we were poor.”

“Four? Don’t you mean five?” Jo said.

“Oh, that’s right,” Marmee said sounding puzzled. “I don’t know why, but for some reason, I forget at times that there are five of you and think there are just four.”

Gee, I wonder why that is? I almost snorted out loud. It was some comfort to realize that I wasn’t the only one here who was confused at times by all of this. Maybe the story mostly seemed preadapted to me, but there were these occasional wrinkles, as though the story still had to stretch to accommodate me.

Then Marmee droned on about Papa, how his goodness and perpetual patience had been the beacon that had led to her current temper-less state. He’d encouraged her to be the kind of woman her girls would want to grow up to emulate, a woman who would be proud and happy to have her girls confide in her.

It would have been so easy to snort then. So much of what she was saying was snort-worthy, like the idea of Papa being perpetually patient. Well, of course he was—because he never actually had to be there!

I thought about what Marmee and Jo had discussed about Jo’s temper being something she needed to work on and I remembered those books Marmee had given us for Christmas: the four—no, five copies of Pilgrim’s Progress. It occurred to me that Marmee knew that Jo’s temper was her weak spot; and further, that Marmee had intended for each of us to work on our character. Meg, I figured, needed to become less superior; we all knew about Jo’s temper and Amy’s vanity, not to mention Beth’s shyness—shyness might not be a huge flaw like a pathological temper, but it did keep Beth from fully enjoying her life. But what then was my character flaw, the big thing I had to work on? Surely, it had to be something more than conquering my tendency to be the family skank.

“I still don’t believe that story Amy told about Emily saving her,” Jo said. “Emily? Perhaps Amy was imagining things?”

“It does seem unlikely,” Marmee admitted.

Hey! I was outraged. I would have objected, loudly, but I was the eavesdropper here. And what did they mean by that? What did these people know about me that I didn’t? Was there something about me that made it seem unlikely I