Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Ida had Things to Do. She cleaned out the refrigerator; she took everything out of the cabinets, and wiped them down; she made banana bread, and a casserole or two, and wrapped them in tinfoil and put them in the freezer. She talked, and even hummed; and she seemed cheerful enough except that in all her rushing around, she refused to meet Allison’s eye. Once Allison thought she caught her crying. Gingerly, she stood in the doorway. “Are you crying?” she asked.

Ida Rhew jumped—then pressed a hand to her chest, and laughed. “Bless your heart!” she cried.

“Ida, are you sad?”

But Ida just shook her head, and went back to work; and Allison went to her room and cried. Later on, she would regret that she’d wasted one of her few remaining hours with Ida by going up to her bedroom to cry alone. But at the moment, standing there in the kitchen watching Ida clean out the cabinets with her back turned had been too sad to bear, so sad that it gave Allison a panicky, breathless, choking feeling to remember it. Somehow Ida was already gone; as warm and solid as she was, she had already turned into a memory, a ghost, even as she stood in her white nurse’s shoes in the sunny kitchen.

Allison walked to the grocery and got a cardboard box for Ida to carry her cuttings in, so they wouldn’t get broken during the trip. With what money she had—thirty-two dollars, old Christmas money—she bought Ida everything she could think of that Ida might want or need: cans of salmon, which Ida loved to eat for lunch, with crackers; maple syrup; knee-high stockings and a fancy bar of English lavender soap; Fig Newtons; a box of Russell Stover chocolates; a booklet of stamps; a pretty red toothbrush and a tube of striped toothpaste and even a large jar of One-A-Day vitamins.

Allison carried it all home, and then spent a long time that evening out on the back porch, wrapping up Ida’s collection of rooted cuttings, each snuff tin and plastic cup in its own carefully fashioned sleeve of wet newspaper. In the attic was a pretty red box, full of Christmas lights. Allison had dumped them all out on the floor and carried the box down to her bedroom to re-pack the presents, when her mother pattered down the hallway (her pace light, unconcerned) and put her head in at the door.

“It’s lonesome here without Harriet, isn’t it?” she asked brightly. Her face was shiny with cold cream. “Do you want to come in my room and watch television?”

Allison shook her head. She was disturbed: this was very unlike her mother, to go around after ten at night taking an interest, issuing invitations.

“What are you doing? I think you ought to come in with me and watch TV,” said her mother, when Allison did not answer.

“Okay,” said Allison. She stood up.

Her mother was looking at her strangely. Allison, in an agony of embarrassment, glanced away. Sometimes, especially when the two of them were alone together, she sensed keenly her mother’s disappointment that she was herself and not Robin. Her mother couldn’t help this—in fact, she tried touchingly hard to conceal it—but Allison knew that her very existence was a reminder of what was missing, and in deference to her mother’s feelings she did her best to stay out of the way and make herself small and inconspicious around the house. The next few weeks would be difficult, with Ida gone and Harriet away.

“You don’t have to come watch TV,” her mother finally said. “I just thought you might want to.”

Allison felt her face growing red. She avoided her mother’s eye. All the colors in the bedroom—including the box—seemed far too acid and bright.

After her mother left again, Allison finished packing the box and then put the money left over into an envelope, in with the book of stamps, a school picture of herself and her address, carefully printed on a sheet of good stationery. Then she tied the box up with a string of green tinsel.

Much later, in the middle of the night, Allison woke with a start from a bad dream—a dream she’d had before, of standing before a white wall only inches from her face. In the dream she was unable to move, and it was as if she would have to go on looking at the blank wall for the rest of her life.

She lay quietly in the dark, staring at the box on the floor by her bed, until the street lamps went off and the room was blue with the dawn. At last, she got out of bed in her bare feet; with a straight pin from the bureau, she sat down cross-legged by the box, and spent a laborious hour or so pricking out tiny secret messages in the cardboard, until the sun was up and the room was light again: Ida’s last day. IDAJ WE LOVE YOU, the messages on the box said. IDA R. BROWNLEE. COME BACK IDA. DON’T FORGET ME, IDA. LOVE.

Though he felt guilty for it, Danny was enjoying his grand-mother’s stay in the hospital. Things were easier without her at home, stirring up Farish all the time. And though Farish was doing a lot of drugs (with Gum away, there was nothing to stop him from sitting in front of the television with the razor and the mirror all night long) he wasn’t so likely to blow up at his brothers without the additional strain of gathering three times a day for Gum’s large fried meals in the kitchen.

Danny was doing a lot of drugs himself, but that was all right; he was going to stop soon but he just hadn’t got to that point. And the drugs gave him enough energy to clean the whole trailer. Barefoot, sweating, stripped to his jeans, he washed windows and walls and floors; he threw out all the rancid grease and bacon fat that Gum secreted around the kitchen in smelly old coffee cans; he scrubbed down the bathroom, and polished the linoleum until it shone, and bleached all their old underwear and T-shirts until they were white again. (Their grandmother had never got used to the washing machine Farish had bought her; she was bad about washing the white clothes with colors, so they got gray-looking.)

Cleaning made Danny feel good: in control. The trailer was trim and ship-shape, like the galley of a boat. Even Farish commented on how neat things were looking. Though Danny knew better than to touch any of Farish’s “projects” (the partially assembled machinery, the broken lawn mowers and carburetors and table lamps) it was possible to clean up around them, and getting rid of all the needless mess helped a lot. Twice a day he drove the trash to the garbage dump. After heating alphabet soup or frying bacon and eggs for Curtis, he washed the dishes and dried them immediately, instead of letting them sit. He’d even figured out how to stack everything in the cabinet so it didn’t take up as much room.

At night, he sat up with Farish. This was another good thing about speed: it doubled your day. There was time to work, time to talk, time to think.

And there was a lot to think about. The recent attacks—on the Mission, on Gum—had marshaled Farish’s attention to a single point. In the old days—before his head injury—Farish had a knack for reasoning out certain kinds of practical and logistical problems, and some of this quiet old calculating shrewdness was in the cock of his head as he and Danny stood together on the abandoned overpass, checking out the crime scene: the cobra’sdecorated dynamite box, empty; a child’s red wagon; and a bunch of little footprints running back and forth in the cement dust.

“If it was her that done this,” said Farish, “I’m on kill the little bitch.” He was silent, hands on hips, staring down at the cement dust.

“What are you thinking?” Danny said.

“I’m thinking how did a kid move this heavy box.”

“With the wagon.”

“Not down the stairs at the Mission, she didn’t.” Farish chewed on his lower lip. “Also, if she stole the snake, why knock on the door and show her face?”