Note: This story recounts the events of the year following Melanie's death, told through the eyes of Ashley, Scarlett, and Rhett respectively. Any and all feedback is solicited. All characters are the intellectual property of Margaret Mitchell.
1. Ashley
Life changes so very quickly.
An instant, a flash, a breath.
So little separates death from life.
And yet, the consequences are such that life as you know it ends. Not for the one who died, no, it is a matter of supreme inconsequence for them. But for those who are left behind, there is the cold realization that there is no way to recover the lost save for looking backward. Perpetually backward, reveling in the memory of the good times and cringing at the memory of the bad ones. But even so, there is no way to fill that void. There is no way to make up for lost time. What's done is done.
Life, so short, so fleeting, is irrecoverable once lost.
And then, after all that settles in, you sit down, a glass of brandy in front of you, and you look at yourself in the mirror. You see a face before you that you don't recognize, and you are left with that most repugnant of emotions, self-pity.
I had made no major life changes since the day that it happened. I put away the pen and paper which I had used to record the words on September 27, 1873, a day or two or three after it had happened. For a long, long while, I wrote nothing else. I thought of nothing else.
I recall her funeral, the words spoken at her graveside. In the midst of life, we are in death. I realize then that I must have parroted the same words to everyone who came over to the house in those first several weeks after she had passed. There were cousins from Macon who descended like flies and brought food and made drinks and gave Pitty smelling salts when she fainted during the eulogy. There was India who worked her fingers to the bone serving the food and then picking up the plates and washing them for the next morning's use. And then of course, there were our friends (always our never my) who filled our otherwise quiet house, even after I had withdrawn into my study.
Our bedroom had been cleaned out and used for company, although Aunt Caroline had thought it a bit morbid to sleep in the bed in which Melly had lay dying. It would never be my bedroom. It was hers, in every way. The linens and curtains so meticulously starched, the white porcelain pitcher by the bedside, the little miniatures of her father and mother and Charles, looking down on us with their benevolent brown eyes. In the closet still hung her two day dresses, her pale green Sunday best, and the lovely blue silk she had worn to my last birthday party. Her faded bathrobe lay on the divan, the novel she was reading still bookmarked to page two hundred and forty-two.
It was those sorts of details which kept me sane. There were other details that I could not think of without losing my bearings completely. The blood on the bedroom floor for instance. Melly's lifeblood. The blood that stayed on the floor until Scarlett cleaned it up herself.
Scarlett. The last link to my boyhood. She was resting at a spa in Marietta when Rhett sent for her, telling her that Melly had died. She was recovering from the deaths of two children, one unborn, the other the light of her life. She wanted to go to Tara the day after Melly's funeral, but never went. I remember hearing her cry as she scrubbed the floor, attacking it with the scrub brush until no trace of red remained. I heard her talking to Melly, saying something that I couldn't understand. Clearly I couldn't help her. Anything I said would fail to convey my understanding of her grief. I knew she loved Melly, perhaps even more than she loved me. I encountered the same failure earlier, the moment she walked in the house and offered to let Beau stay at Tara with Ella and Wade Hampton. I tried to recount my story, my false words of politeness, but Scarlett just squeezed my arm and walked past me and into the bedroom. Seeing the blood, she immediately understood, rolled up her sleeves and worked in silence.
In the moments after it happened, I cannot recall anything that was said to me, nor can I recall saying anything to anyone around me. Vaguely I recall Scarlett, constant and steadfast, holding my hand like a child. In the days that followed, I was overcome with the exhaustion of the three day vigil and the following days of mourning leading up to her burial. I must have asked for Scarlett, because she was sitting in my bedroom the day after the funeral. She was telling me that Rhett had left her, although I have no memory of the details. Perhaps there weren't any, just that he had left her and that was that. I must have said something though; she was sobbing on my shoulder, and thereafter assumed that I knew the entire story, so I played along as though I did.
It is almost a year later, and much has happened. We have all changed, for better and for worse. It would be tedious to draw up in narrative fashion what all has occurred, for it's hardly been a linear journey. How simple it would be if we could just collapse the sequence of time, to be able to revisit the frames of our memories, enabling us to select those to metaphorically hang on the wall. Alas, time is not measured in photographs, in forced smiles which we can look at and pass down for posterity. No, life has to be lived. Melly knew that, that which the rest of us had no concept.
Thus begins the account of my year after her death, my year of rediscovering the art of living.