Little Women and Me - By Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page 0,65

leave Beth’s bedroom, but leave the house completely? And to go stay at Aunt March’s?

“I’m sorry, Emily,” Meg insisted, “but there simply is no other way to keep you and Amy safe from catching scarlet fever.”

Amy kicked up even more of a fuss than I did.

“I won’t go! I won’t go!” she shouted when informed of Meg’s plans. “I can’t stand that old bat!”

It was no comfort to think that one other family member thought of Aunt March in the exact same terms I did.

But then Laurie came by to see how we were doing.

“Couldn’t we stay at Laurie’s house until the danger’s passed?” I suggested.

Meg looked shocked. “I can’t let you go stay unchaperoned at a boy’s house!”

Laurie looked shocked at my suggestion as well, a little fearful of it too.

Why was he so scared of being sort-of alone with me?

“Please, Meg,” Amy pleaded. “It is, after all, only Laurie, so it’s not as though it were a real boy.”

Before Meg could respond to this odd claim, Laurie stepped in.

“It won’t be so bad,” he reassured Amy. “Every day you’re at your aunt’s, I’ll come by to take you on walks and for drives. I’ll even take you out trotting in the wagon with Puck and to the theater.”

Amy was immediately satisfied. She may have claimed Laurie wasn’t a real boy—who did she think he was, Pinocchio?—and yet she certainly managed to simper and flirt with him now as though he was one.

As for me, why wasn’t I reassuringly offered walks and rides in the wagon with Puck? Whoever Puck was.

“It’s wonderful how strong you are about these things,” Laurie said to me in a low voice when Amy had skipped off to pack a trunk and Meg had followed to help her not pack anything foolish. “The others are lucky to have you. You’re such a brick.”

No one had ever called me a brick before. It was a bizarre compliment, but one that made me feel good.

Then everyone was back in the room.

“Should we write to Marmee and tell her about Beth?” Jo wondered aloud.

“No,” I said, determined to remain a brick now that someone had decided I was one. “It’ll only worry her when she can’t do anything about it anyway. What kind of choice would that be: Stay with her sick husband, who has no other family in Washington, or leave him to come tend to her sick daughter? No, I say leave her in ignorance unless a time comes when she absolutely needs to be told.”

I’d done my best to deliver a persuasively Marmee-ish speech and the others took it well enough. Even Jo nodded a grudging approval.

Then:

“Emily,” Jo said exasperated, “why aren’t you packed yet? Always holding everybody up!”

As I rushed around the bedroom, throwing items into a trunk like a crazy person—mustn’t forget my spare corset!—sadness and worry returned: worry because, having failed to prevent Beth from getting sick, now I might get stuck here forever; and, more importantly, sadness because I’d grown to love Beth and I really hated to leave her behind.

Not to mention that in my mind’s ear I could already hear that wretched parrot taunting me.

“E-mi-LY want a cracker?” it would croak.

Then I brightened.

Once installed at Aunt March’s, there was nothing to prevent me from sneaking back to the house in order to spy on Beth’s progress, was there? And maybe when I did sneak back, I could find something to do to save her.

It was a long walk, but I was strong—a brick, even!

I could do it.

Eighteen

It was a lot easier to make the long walk from Aunt March’s house to the March home than it was to find a good time to sneak in. As I stood freezing under Beth’s window in the gray of a dying day, occasionally going on tiptoe to risk peeks over the ledge, only to see Jo sitting at Beth’s bedside, I kicked myself: I should have waited until the middle of the night, when even Jo would have to fall asleep for a bit. As it was, my feet felt like blocks of ice, my legs too stiff, the road between that house and Aunt March’s too long to go back only to make the trek again later.

And so I waited, waited through the long hours of dying day turning to deeper dusk and finally full night.

For some reason, I’d never noticed how many stars there were. The sky was blanketed with them. Finally, when it must have been long after