Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Nursie Vance had appeared from nowhere. She swooped down on Harriet with a smothering, bosomy hug.

“The Lord loves you!” she said, in her twinkly voice. “Just you remember that!”

She patted Harriet on the bottom and turned, beaming, to Edie, as if expecting to start up a regular old conversation. “Well, hay! ” But Edie wasn’t in such a tolerant or sociable mood as she’d been when dropping Harriet off at camp. She gave Nursie a curt nod, and that was that.

They got in the car; Edie—after peering over her glasses for a moment at the unfamiliar instrument panel—put the car in gear and drove away. The Vances came and stood out in the middle of the graveled clearing and—with their arms around each other’s waists—they waved until Edie turned the corner.

The new car had air-conditioning, which made it much, much quieter. Harriet took it all in—the new radio; the power windows—and settled uneasily in her seat. In hermetically sealed chill they purred along, through the liquid leaf-shade of the gravel road, glossing springily over potholes that had jolted the Oldsmobile to its frame. Not until they reached the very end of the dark road, and turned onto the sunny highway, did Harriet dare steal a look at her grandmother.

But Edie’s attention seemed elsewhere. On they rolled. The road was wide and empty: no cars, cloudless sky, margins of rusty red dust that converged to a pinpoint at the horizon. Suddenly, Edie cleared her throat—a loud awkward AHEM.

Harriet—startled—glanced away from the window and at Edie, who said: “I’m sorry, little girl.”

For a moment, Harriet didn’t breathe. Everything was frozen: the shadows, her heart, the red hands of the dashboard clock. “What’s the matter?” she said.

But Edie didn’t look away from the road. Her face was like stone.

The air conditioner was up too high. Harriet hugged her bare arms. Mother’s dead , she thought. Or Allison. Or Dad . And in the same breath, she knew in her heart that she could handle any of those things. Aloud, she said: “What happened?”

“It’s Libby.”

In the hubbub following the accident, no one had stopped to consider that anything might be seriously wrong with any of the old ladies. Apart from a few cuts and bruises—and Edie’s bloody nose, which looked worse than it was—everyone was more shaken up than hurt. And the paramedics had checked them out with irritating thoroughness before permitting them to leave. “Not a scratch on this one,” said the smart-aleck ambulance attendant who had assisted Libby—all white hair, and pearls, and powder-pink dress—from the crumpled car.

Libby had seemed stunned. The worst of the collision had been on her side; but though she kept pressing the base of her neck with her fingertips—gingerly, as if to locate a pulse—she fluttered her hand and said, “Oh, don’t worry about me! “ when, against the protest of the paramedics, Edie climbed out of the back of the ambulance to see about her sisters.

Everybody had a stiff neck. Edie’s neck felt as though it had been cracked like a bullwhip. Adelaide, pacing in a circle by the Oldsmobile, kept pinching her ears to see if she still had both earrings and exclaiming: “It’s a wonder we’re not dead! Edith, it’s a wonder you didn’t kill us all!”

But after everyone was checked for concussions, and broken bones (why, thought Edie, why hadn’t she insisted that those idiots take Libby’s blood pressure? She was a trained nurse; she knew about such things), in the end, the only one the paramedics wanted to carry to the hospital was Edie: which was infuriating, because Edie wasn’t hurt—nothing broken, no internal injuries and she knew it. She had permitted herself to be caught up in argument. Nothing was the matter with her but her ribs, which she had cracked on the steering wheel, and from her days as an army nurse Edie knew there was nothing in the world to do for cracked ribs except to tape them up and send the soldier on his way.

“But you’ve got a cracked rib, ma'am,” said the other paramedic—not the smart-aleck, but the one who had a great big head like a pumpkin.

“Yes, I’m aware of that!” Edie had practically screamed at him.

“But ma'am …” Intrusive hands stretching towards her. “You’d better let us take you to the hospital, ma'am….”

“Why? All they’ll do is tape me up and charge me a hundred dollars! For a hundred dollars I can tape up my own ribs!”

“An emergency room visit is going to run you a whole lot more than a hundred dollars,” said the smart-aleck, leaning on the hood of Edie’s poor smashed car (the car! the car! her heart sank every time she looked at it). “The X-rays alone will run you seventy-five.”

By this time, a slight crowd had gathered: busybodies from the branch bank, mostly, giggling little gum-chewing girls with teased hair and brown lipstick. Tat—who signalled to the police car to stop by shaking her yellow pocketbook at it—climbed into the back seat of the wrecked Oldsmobile (even though the horn was blaring) and sat there with Libby for most of the business with the policemen and the other driver, which had taken forever. He was a spry and irritating little old know-it-all man named Lyle Pettit Rixey: very thin, with long, pointy shoes, and a hooked nose like a Jack-in-the-box, and a delicate way of lifting his knees high in the air when he walked. He seemed very proud of the fact that he was from Attala County; also of his name, which he took pleasure at repeating in full. He kept pointing at Edie with a querulous bony finger and saying: “that woman there.” He made it sound as if Edie was drunk or an alcoholic. “That woman run right out in front of me. That woman got no business driving an automobile.” Edie turned, loftily, and stood with her back to him as she answered the officer’s questions.

The accident was her fault; she had refused to yield; and the best that she could do was accept the blame with dignity. Her glasses were broken, and from where she stood, in the shimmering heat (“that woman sure picked herself a hot day to dart out in front of me,” complained Mr. Rixey to the ambulance attendants), Libby and Tat were little more than pink and yellow blurs in the backseat of the wrecked Oldsmobile. Edie blotted her forehead with a damp tissue. At Tribulation every Christmas, there had been dresses in four different colors laid out under the tree—pink for Libby, blue for Edie, yellow for Tat and lavender for baby Adelaide. Colored penwipers, colored ribbons and letter paper … blond china dolls identical but for their dresses, each a different pastel….

“Did you,” said the policeman, “or did you not execute a U-turn?”

“I did not . I turned around right here in the parking lot.” From the highway, a car mirror flashed distractingly in the corner of Edie’s vision, and at the same time an inexplicable memory from childhood leapt up in her mind: Tatty’s old tin doll—dressed in draggled yellow—lying windmill-legged in the dust of Tribulation’s kitchen yard, beneath the fig trees where the chickens sometimes escaped to scratch. Edie herself had never played with dolls—never been the slightest bit interested in them—but she could see the tin doll now with a curious clarity: her body brown cloth, her nose glinting a macabre metallic silver where the paint had rubbed away. How many years had Tatty dragged that battered thing with its metal death’s head around the yard; how many years since Edie had thought of that eerie little face with the nose missing?

The policeman interrogated Edie for half an hour. With his droning voice, and his mirror sunglasses, it was slightly like being interrogated by The Fly in the Vincent Price horror movie of the same name. Edie, shading her eyes with her hand, tried to keep her mind on his questions but her eyes kept straying to the cars flashing past on the bright highway and all she could think of was Tatty’s ghastly old doll with the silver nose. What on earth had the thing been called? For the life of her, Edie couldn’t remember. Tatty hadn’t talked plain until she went to school; all Tat’s dolls had had ridiculous-sounding names, names she made up out of her head, names like Gryce and Lillium and Artemo….