A/N: yay! Elizabeth Harker updated for me, and now I owe her this story. This isn't my sandpit at all but I am incredibly grateful to her for letting me play in it. I adore the Seven Stories!verse and if you haven't read it, do yourself a favour and correct that mistake. Unbelievably gorgeous insights into Beth's character and heartbreaking situations for Laurie and Jo. Thank you Elizabeth! This is for you, naturally.
He visits her grave often. His first great love. Laurie touches the simple letters etched into the stone with a caress like a kiss. He shuts his eyes and twists to sit on the ground, leaning the back of his head on the stone and sighs.
At one point he'd promised himself he'd stop this. Coming back was a mistake, but it felt right, more right than anything else he might do with his time.
He should be giving piano lessons to his children, chopping the wood behind the house or reading to Beth as she mends his shirts. There are so many things he should be doing, but then he thinks, there are so many things that should happen but never do.
Laurie turns his head against the stone, laying his cheek on the cold, hard slab. He's tried singing to her. He's brought flowers. He doesn't know what he should do. She seems so very far from him these days and he doesn't know how to bring her back.
The wind picks up around the little graveyard and he shivers. It's cold, though it's sunny and he thinks about putting his jacket back on. It doesn't feel right though, dressing so formal for her so he leaves it by his legs, stretched out as though it could cover her body even if six feet of dirt and mud separate them.
There is a small part of him that lies awake at night wondering what she must look like when he visits her. The horrible images they had once conjured up in the garret, of gruesome faceless faces, skin with boils and holes come to mind and he pathetically struggles to remember what she looked like when he held her that last time. All sallow skin and bones, so thin she would break if he held her too tight. The thought doesn't help at all and so he focuses on recalling the sketch of her in his drawer.
He doesn't begrudge Beth when he catches her holding it in the afternoon sun by their window. If there was anyone who loved her better it would be Beth.
It isn't as hard as he thinks at night, to imagine her preserved in time the same way she is in Amy's charcoals. She would have wanted to be remembered for her strength and spirit anyway, not the sickness in her eyes or the frailty of her limbs. Sometimes his memory isn't perfect either but he tries. For her he tries, and for himself he continues to wish.
When he closes his eyes he can hear the wind. He folds his arms and just listens, the wind rustling through the branches behind over the other graves, the leaves skipping against each other like little whispered voices. He is sentimental enough to wish for her voice amongst the sounds, just the hint of that frank cadence, the silly way she would chose exclamations and boyish phrases.
He can never hear her voice again.
His eyes open and Laurie blinks roughly. The time for tears has long since passed, well before his first child was born. So much has changed from the simple times of her sickness and his longing to the family life and comforts of his home with Beth. He has to be stronger than he knows how to be, for the pity in Beth's eyes makes him sick with honesty.
It's easier sometimes, to just come here and cry quietly, without tears and without sound, to just hear the wind and feel her stone. But she was never one for complacency or the easy way out and so he always goes home in time for supper, or to help take the clothes off the line or pen-in the pencilled lines of his ledger.
Laurie tries to tell himself he does it for Beth, for her peace of mine. For his, for his sanity and his duty but deep down, with the breeze whisking through the leaves he know he does it for her.
His fingers stretch out across the material of his trousers and he looks out towards the street. A middle-aged woman is coming down the road, just past the bend into town with her purse and large brown dog. He wonders if she's been to the church for it's not far from here, hidden behind the tall house on the corner at the bend. He watches her pass from the other side of the cemetery, the way she clings to her purse strings and marches in time with her dopey-looking dog. She spares no glance to the low-lying gate and fence, or the willows and oaks stretching over the graves and out towards the bank of the river. She marches onwards, her clacking heels across the hard dirt of the road presumably towards home.
Laurie goes unnoticed, as he does most days.
He wonders if he should say something. Describe the big dog perhaps, and wonder if she should have liked an animal as big as that at her heels, sad eyes and fiercely loyal? But he has already drawn the comparison to his own behaviour and it would be bad form to simply sigh and ache for those days to be back.
It isn't like he's unhappy all the time, or that his life is in miserable shambles. He hasn't shut himself from society entirely and he works as steadily as any man of his grandfather's company. He lives, he breathes, he loves. Life has gone on and carried him with it.
But she's never far from his thoughts. Just at the edge. Around the bend. She can still consume him, even after all these years. He'll find his feet taking him halfway down the road and into the grove before he knows where he's heading. Beth in her infinite understanding never questions, simply knows and he doesn't have to say sorry when he kisses her as he comes in.
He is so grateful for Beth. No one else understands him quite like that girl – no, woman now. She is as quiet as she ever was, but having children has made her find her own command in their little house beside a fir tree. She does everything and he knows it. He doesn't know how he's ever going to repay her for everything she has done for him, for them in this lifetime.
He loves her more than he thought possible.
Laurie has told her this, whispered it across the surface of her stone, listening for an answer. He closes his eyes and thinks about Beth and imagines her laugh and clap with delight that he finally, finally did something right. She would love him for it, though that's not why he loves Beth. Maybe, a few years ago, that certainly played a part. But now he knows peace, he knows how to be content and happy and how to love and be loved without fear.
It's a little easier with Beth, he admits quietly to himself. His hands fold and unfold in his lap. There is no struggle to please her or tease her into loving him as he did with her sister. He doesn't spend half his days worrying whether she loves him or hates him and there is no effort. There just is – Beth just loves him, just listens, just holds him. And he would do, does, the same.
It doesn't stop him from missing her though. Beth understands, sometimes when he works he sees her leave for this very spot, out through the front gate with her hair tied up and a bonnet on her head. Every last Sunday of the month she leaves a posy of flowers on the bench by the kitchen door for him to take to her grave. He doesn't know when she realised he'd set a day aside, because he came here often enough before their child was born but without words and with a neat ribbon she'd left them there and he'd picked them up.
He doesn't know how Beth just knows these things. He's grateful all the same.
Laurie lifts his hand from his lap and touches the flowers that lie beside him, their petals pressed into the ground on one side. She'd picked daisies this time, pretty little ones with yellow centres and tiny white petals all stretching for the light. There's some lavender scattered throughout the bunch and he smiles lazily. She used to smell like lavender from the oil she kept on top of her dresser.
Once he would have buried his face in the flowers and drunk in that scent, almost able to conjure her back with that simple smell, but those days are gone. Instead he withdraws his fingers and folds them in his lap and stares up at the sky. The clouds are a wispy white overhead and it makes him think of lying with her in the grass, wanting to hold her hand when all she would hold is lavender.
He'd almost asked her that day and that had been so long before any of this had happened. Long before she was too weak to leave her bed but not long after she'd first gotten over the fever.
The memory makes him ache a little more and so he closes his eyes and listens for the wind again. It will be four years next week and he supposes her whole family will come. He prefers it like this, just the two of them and a silence that seems to stretch on forever. It's oddly comforting though it makes him yearn for so much more, he's come to accept and expect this and there is a calmness in familiarity. A calmness he has come to find in every aspect of his life, though he knows that is mostly Beth's doing.
He can't help but think of lying in the grass again in his backyard, looking up at the clouds.
Laurie sits with his legs crossed, his hands clasped tightly around them as he looks over his shoulder, down at Jo. She is wincing up at the sky, an arm cast over her forehead and he thinks of wives and war. It is a surprising thought but he chooses not to tell her. He's never sure anymore what should be said and what should be kept to himself, not since the fever. Jo's eyes are still keen but they hold a tense dread that he never knew before her sickness.
"I don't suppose you have much time for gallivanting about now, not with all those essays to write and articles to read?"
He studies Jo's face as she refuses to look at him. She speaks as though she has the strength for such 'gallivanting' and the pain of it is that they both know she doesn't. And really that is the reason he will lie and tell her he has homework.
"Such is the life of a student, Jo." He says, more serious than he intended. Laurie turns back to look at the trees between their yards and sees the wind whip about the oak leaves. He can feel her eyes on his back now and part of him wishes he would turn around and meet that stare.
"I wouldn't begrudge some company though," he says after hesitating, risking a glance back at her.
Jo frowns seriously and turns her gaze back to the sky.
"Alright." She says finally. He doesn't stop the smile spread across his face as he flops down beside her, pulling his hands to his chest lest he take hers and ruin the afternoon.
"Would you like to hear about my new heroes?"
Laurie twisted his neck to look at her, the grass scratchy against his skin. "Why do you do that?"
Jo sighs, as though it was a question he asked every day. "Do what?"
"Distance yourself like that. I'm not even allowed to take your hand anymore. I don't understand any of this."
"Of course you don't."
"You told me it was okay, three years ago Jo. So much has happened that-"
"Exactly! You don't let a moment pass without pushing this further – pushing us! So much has happened yes, but so much has changed too. Teddy, you go to college now…"
"I don't see what that has to do anything! You always say it as though there! – that is the end of it! but it's nothing. College is nothing to me Jo without you at the end of it."
Laurie crosses and uncrosses his arms, recalling the expression of her face when he'd let that slip. Nothing was ever easy between them. College had almost torn them apart and he couldn't tell half the time whether she was regretting every action and every word or saving them up in case he left her behind for the world. She hadn't understood just how much she meant to him.
He sighs but the sound is swallowed up by the wind now and he seriously thinks of putting his jacket back on. Beth will worry if he catches cold and he doesn't want to distress her, especially in her condition now. Laurie smiles at the thought of his little dark-haired wife, swollen with child as she balances quietly through the kitchen with their son in tow, begging for more soft dough to chew on. Their daughter is probably painting in her room, pansies pressed neatly between her books she can only half-read.
She would have loved their children.
The wind is definitely cooler now and Laurie pulls his coat up over his knees to lay it across his chest. He'll pull it on when it's time to go but he wants just a little longer. He thinks back to the argument they'd had that day with a sky such as this and wonders if it had been a little colder, as it is now, if she'd let him put his arms around her. Probably not, he decides though a wry smile makes its way across his face.
In the end he was happy to wait so long as she knew, deep down what it was between them. And in the end she had.
Laurie looks beside him at the stone he leans against and smiles again, openly and easily. He doesn't hate her for any moment they spent arguing or riling each other up. He loves her for all of it. She'd been his life and he'd taken every moment, happy or sad, every fight, every kiss, every blessed time she'd open her mouth and tell him off or admit her deepest fears or laugh about her latest novel and tease him about the way he'd hang off her every word. He'd taken all of it.
Now there was nothing to take and everything to remember.
He presses his cheek against the grey-coloured rock, his skin feeling the texture of the lettering. Those two letters. His finger slips into the little pocket stitched inside the lining of his jacket still draped over his arms and he slips the little ring out.
It's old now, worn from use. He couldn't count the number of hours he spent holding it between his fingers, thumb rubbing against the carvings that used to be etched so much clearer. It shines dully in the sunlight, greyish silver before he tucks it into the palm of his hand and presses it against the headstone. She wears a much different one, down there beneath the soil. It's gold and dark and hasn't seen the light of day for so many years and probably never will but he knows it's there, on her finger in the dark.
There is something comforting about her having something of his. He has so much of hers that he feels spoiled, guilty for everything she's left behind. His family was hers first, his ring, his books, the quilt at the end of their bed. There are so many pieces of her left everywhere in his world that he's glad she had something to take with her into that place he cannot follow.
Not yet, not for years to come. But, he likes to think, especially times like this, with that sky overhead as he pulls himself to his feet and pulls his jacket on, arms slipping through the sleeves before he dusts his trousers and puts the ring back in his pocket, he likes to think she will be waiting for him as he waits for her.