Chapter Fifteen

The morning was half gone by the time Meg finished her errand and returned to the house. Pinching the pearl heads of her hatpins between two fingertips, she managed to extract the long pins and remove her hat. The hall mirror showed shadow crescents hanging beneath her eyes. Her lips looked pale, her hair dull. Not a flattering portrait, but a true one.

With Sylvie volunteering at the church today, Meg was determined to be useful too. Helene had recalled the name of the attorney who officiated Hiram’s will, so this morning Meg had gone to the Tribune to pick up a directory of relocated businesses, since the office of Thomas Grosvenor had been in the burned district. Nate was at the Tribune building when she stopped there, and after she told him about the missing will and her search for it, he had accompanied her to the attorney’s office. Just as Meg feared, most records had been lost in the fire, Hiram’s will among them. But the clerk thought Mr. Grosvenor might remember something helpful, so he arranged an appointment for Meg for next week. It was better than nothing, she told herself.

“Hello?” she called into the house. “Jasper? Kirstin? Helene?” Her voice bounced off the walls, bringing no response.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been alone.

Facing the task of unbuttoning her cloak unaided, she used her teeth to pull down the bandage on one side of her left hand, exposing her thumb. When the top was free, she wiggled her thumb to loosen the wrappings. Scar tissue stretched. The movement felt unnatural and stiff. Frowning, she watched her fingers fumble at the buttons. The pressure she applied did not match the pressure she felt. The nerves seemed farther away from her skin than they had been before the fire. She’d expected nerve damage in her right hand, not this one. Even so, with effort, she managed to unfasten her cloak and hang it on the hall tree.

Meg stared at her left hand, pinching her index finger and thumb together despite the binding around her palm.

Could she hold a pencil without all the feeling in her fingers? Whatever marks she could make were bound to be inelegant, but she could try. She had to try.

Upstairs in the bedchamber, she found a pencil and writing paper in the desk. If she could write with her nondominant hand, didn’t it stand to reason she could paint with it too? In time?

A sunbeam warmed the rug at her feet. Seated at the desk, she picked up the pencil, her grip awkward. It didn’t feel right. When she put the lead point to paper, the pencil tipped out of her hand. She picked it up again, struggling to get it into the proper position and keep it there.

Slowly, she spelled her name, dropping the pencil three times in the process. The letters staring back at her looked like a child’s attempt.

She tried again, noticing how her hand pulled the characters into a leftward slant. She tried compensating for this by adjusting where her wrist and elbow rested on the desk. Not only could she not sense the pressure in her grip, but the pressure between pencil and paper eluded her as well.

Apprehension gathered in her shoulders. When painting, the miniscule variations of pressure applied to a brush made a huge difference in the thickness of lines, the consistency of shading. It mattered more than she wanted to admit.

Head aching, she set that concern aside for another day, or tried to. As she studied her work, the letters began to wave and jostle in her vision. The harder she concentrated, the more fatigued she became, the more acutely her childhood affliction came back to her. Had she spelled her own name incorrectly? Now it appeared the words pushed together, letters out of order.

She closed her eyes, breathing deeply. She meant only to steady herself, but memories rushed at her, voices of teachers who’d called her lazy and stupid, of children laughing. Meg had not bowed to those taunts, though each one named her worst fear. What if they’re right about me? she had secretly wondered. But on the outside, she was fiercely defiant.

Her parents had told her she was created in the image of a God who loved her no matter what. But if she had learned anything from her childhood, it had been that worth, as the world measured it, was not innate. It was defined by what she knew and did. Her gift for painting had been the evidence that she was valuable after all.

Opening her eyes, Meg turned the paper over, shutting out the wiggling words, and attempted to sketch a picture instead. She fumbled the pencil, and it rolled to the floor. After picking it up, she attempted a simple outline of a head and hair, a shape she had drawn countless times.

Even when she managed to keep the pencil in her hand, the lines veered off course, distorting the shape to a mockery. The disconnect between her brain and her fingers was maddening. A small whisper of reason suggested that she give herself some grace, for she was using a hand she’d never sketched with in her life. Louder was the fear that her skill had burned up in the fire, never to be recovered.

She held her breath and focused on another try. This time the pressure she poured into the task broke the pencil lead, marking her failure with an asterisk.

Meg threw the pencil across the room. She felt wrung-out and raw, every disappointment of the last couple of weeks collecting beneath the surface of her skin. Her soul craved beauty and hope, and what she found instead was disordered scratchings and a dread that time might not heal all wounds after all.

For herself or for her father. It galled her that she could control neither her own hand nor Stephen’s fate. She must trust God for both. As Charlotte Brontë wrote, she must “avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”

Resolved to do better in that regard, Meg retrieved the pencil from where it had landed on the bureau. Her mother’s Little Women lay next to it. It had lost its front cover, but that was all. The sight of her mother’s name on the title page brought a hitch to Meg’s breath. She could use a mother’s comfort now.

After bringing the volume back to the desk, Meg carefully turned the pages, noting her mother’s graceful handwriting. Ruth always wrote in her favorite books. She underlined passages and even talked back to the characters in the margins on occasion. Meg’s exhaustion made reading challenging, since the letters refused to be still, but she managed to sort through a few lines. On the blank page opposite the start of the first chapter, Ruth had penned a quote from the character Amy March: “I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.”

Meg had always felt an affinity for Amy’s character because of their shared interest in art, even though the eldest March sister shared Meg’s Christian name. But she had forgotten this quote. Written in Ruth’s hand, it took on new layers of meaning. Beneath it in smaller letters, Ruth had added, Yes, dear Amy, but I’m not afraid of storms, for the One who made the sea is in my boat with me.

Turning to the window, Meg gave her eyes a rest from the text. A strengthening wind shook the trees outside. Bark stripped away and blew off the sycamore trunk.

Mothers weren’t supposed to have favorites, but if Ruth had been forced, she would have picked Sylvie. It was Sylvie, after all, who knew to preserve this book. It was Sylvie who had excelled in school and who’d never distressed Ruth with tantrums or cluttered the home with drawings and paintings. Longing for a connection with her mother that had eluded her in life, Meg returned her attention to the book.

Near the middle of the novel, a folded sheet of paper covered with Ruth’s script obscured the beginning of chapter thirty. Meg labored to unfold it. Dated 1865, it seemed to have been ripped from her diary.

Ruth had wanted to hide this.

The impulse to honor her mother’s wishes guttered as soon as Meg spied the shape of her own name among the jumble of letters. Her mother had written about her. Such a small and simple thing, and yet it was enough for Meg to forsake the privacy of the dead for the chance to feel closer to her. She rubbed her eyes, then slowly untangled the letters.

Meg’s hopes may prove false regarding Stephen. She insists he’ll recover in time, but he’ll never again be who he was. Forgive me, Lord, but at times I want to shake her for not accepting this.

Meg sat back in her chair and exhaled. This was not a diary but a prayer journal, a window into Ruth’s soul. And Ruth had wanted “to shake her.” Had Meg really grated on her mother so much? Tension coiled tighter inside her.

She paints only from imagination and not from life, but there is beauty in the imperfect too. You are a God who uses broken vessels. You are not afraid of human limitations or scars. I fear that if she doesn’t accept this, she will one day weary of her father and cease to love him if he doesn’t recover to her impossible standards. Hope can only carry her so far, so long.

The words wrapped around Meg like a vine, the phrase “impossible standards” a thorn that pierced her conscience. She railed against the idea that she would ever give up on her father. Yet did she persevere only for the chance that he would get better? Or would she still love him—truly and freely love him—if his current state never improved?

As for the scars her mother mentioned, Meg would live with her own for the rest of her life.

Clanging wind chimes competed with the clamor of Meg’s thoughts. She leaned forward to examine the rest of the page. There was a change in the color of the ink in the next passage and a slightly looser script.

Lord, please comfort our dear friend Hiram.

Meg startled at the sight of his name. She squinted at the paper and kept reading.

He won’t say why he changed his will to make Stephen, then me, then the girls his beneficiaries, only that he did it. He told us that it was something he’d done some time ago.

Meg’s heart kicked in her chest. Her fingers and feet were as cold as the empty hearth. She reread the lines, not trusting her first translation of the jostling words. She willed the letters to rearrange themselves into a different statement, but in vain.

Jasper had nothing to gain from Hiram’s death.

Stephen did.