Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Five days—five days before she died—Libby had been in the hospital. A little while before the end, it had even seemed as if she might wake: mumbling in her sleep, turning the phantom pages of a book, before her words became too incoherent to understand and she slipped down into a white fog of drugs and paralysis. Her signs are failing , said the nurse who’d come in to check her that final morning, while Edie was sleeping on a cot beside her bed. There was just enough time to call Adelaide and Tat to the hospital—and then, at a little before eight, with all three of her sisters gathered around the bed, her breaths got slower and slower and “then,” said Tat, with a wry little smile, “they just stopped.” They’d had to cut her rings off, her hands were so swollen … Libby’s little hands, so papery and delicate! beloved little speckled hands, hands that folded paper boats and set them to float on the dish-basin! swollen like grapefruits , that was the phrase, the awful phrase, that Edie had repeated more than once in the past days. Swollen like grapefruits. Had to call the jewelry store to cut the rings off her fingers ….

Why didn’t you call me? said Harriet—staggered, dumb-founded—when at last she was able to speak. Her voice—in the air-conditioned chill of Edie’s new car—had squeaked up high and inappropriate beneath the black avalanche which had crushed her nearly senseless at the words Libby’s Dead .

Well , said Edie philosophically, I figured, why ruin your good time before I had to .

“Poor little girls,” said a familiar voice—Tat’s—up above them.

Allison—her face in her hands—began to sob. Harriet clenched her teeth. She’s the only one sadder than me , she thought, the only other really sad person in this room .

“Don’t cry.” Tat’s school-teacherly hand rested for a moment on Allison’s shoulder. “Libby wouldn’t want you to.”

She sounded upset—a little, noted Harriet coldly, in the small hard part of her which stood back, and watched, untouched by grief. But not upset enough. Why , thought Harriet, blind and sore and dazed from weeping, why did they leave me at that stinking camp while Libby was in the bed dying?

Edie, in the car, had apologized—sort of. We thought she was going to be all right, she’d said, at first; and then I thought you’d rather remember her the way she was and finally I wasn’t thinking .

“Girls?” Tat said. “Do you remember our cousins Delle and Lucinda from Memphis?”

Two slumpy, old-lady figures stepped forward: one tall and tan, the other round and black, with a jewelled black-velvet purse.

“I declare!” said the tall, tan one. She stood like a man, in her large, flat shoes and her hands in the pockets of her khaki shirt-waist dress.

“Bless their hearts,” murmured the little dark fat one, dabbing at her eyes (which were rimmed in black, like a silent movie star’s) with a pink tissue.

Harriet stared at them and thought about the pool at the country club: the blue light, how absolutely soundless was the world when she slipped underwater on a deep breath. You can be there now , she told herself, you can be there if you think hard enough .

“Harriet, may I borrow you for a minute?” Adelaide—who was looking very smart in her funeral black with the white collar—grasped her hand and pulled her up.

“Only if you promise to bring her right back!” said the little round lady, wagging a heavily be-ringed finger.

You can leave here. In your mind. Just go away . What was it Peter Pan said to Wendy? “Just close your eyes and think lovely thoughts.”

“Oh!” In the center of the room, Adelaide stopped dead, closed her eyes. People swept by them. Music from an invisible organ (“Nearer My God to Thee”—nothing very thrilling, but Harriet could never tell what the old ladies might find exciting) played ponderously, not far off.

“Tuberoses!” Adelaide exhaled; and the line of her nose, in profile, was so like Libby’s that Harriet’s heart squeezed disagreeably tight. “Smell that!” She caught Harriet’s hand and tugged her over to a large flower arrangement in a china urn.

The organ music was fake. In an alcove behind the pier table, Harriet spied a reel-to-reel tape recorder ticking away behind a velvet drapery.

“My favorite flower!” Adelaide urged her forward. “See, the tiny ones. Smell them, honey!”

Harriet’s stomach fluttered. The fragrance, in the over-heated room, was extravagant and deathly sweet.

“Aren’t they heavenly?” Adelaide was saying. “I had these in my wedding bouquet….”

Something flickered in front of Harriet’s eyes and everything got black around the edges. The next thing she knew, the lights were whirling and big fingers—a man’s—had grasped her elbow.

“I don’t know about faint ing, but they sure do give me a headache in a closed room,” someone was saying.

“Let her have some air,” said the stranger, who was holding her up: an old man, unusually tall, with white hair and bushy black eyebrows. Despite the heat, he was wearing a V-necked sweater vest over his shirt and tie.

Out of nowhere, Edie swooped down—all in black, like the Wicked Witch—and into Harriet’s face. Chill green eyes sized her up coldly for an instant or two. Then she stood up ( up and up and up ) and said: “Take her out to the car.”

“ I’ll take her,” said Adelaide. She stepped around and took Harriet’s left arm, as the old man (who was very old, in his eighties or maybe even his nineties) took her right, and, together, they led Harriet out of doors, into the blinding sunlight: very slowly, more at the old man’s pace than Harriet’s, woozy though she felt.

“Harriet,” said Adelaide, stagily, and squeezed her hand, “I bet you don’t know who this is! This is Mr. J. Rhodes Sumner that had a place just down the road from where I grew up!”

“ Chippokes ,” said Mr. Sumner, inflating himself grandly.

“Certainly, Chippokes . Right down the road from Tribulation. I know you’ve heard us all talk about Mr. Sumner, Harriet, that went to Egypt with the Foreign Service?”

“I knew your aunt Addie when she was just a little baby girl.”

Adelaide laughed, flirtatiously. “Not that little. Harriet, I thought you’d like to talk to Mr. Sumner because you’re so interested in King Tut and all.”

“I wasn’t in Cairo long,” said Mr. Sumner. “Only during the war. Everybody and his brother was in Cairo then.” He shuffled up to the open passenger window of a long black Cadillac limousine—the funeral-home limo—and stooped a little to speak to the driver. “Will you look after this young lady here? She’s going to lie down in the back seat for a few minutes.”

The driver—whose face was as white as Harriet’s, though he had a gigantic rust-red Afro—started, and switched off the radio. “Wha?” he said, glancing from side to side and not knowing where to look first—at the tottery old white man leaning in his window or at Harriet, climbing into the back. “She ain’t feeling well?”

“Tell you what!” said Mr. Sumner, stooping down to peer into the dark interior after Harriet. “It looks like this thing might have a bar in it!”

The driver seemed to shake himself and perk up. “No sir, boss, that’s my other car!” he said, in a jokey, indulgent, artificially friendly tone.

Mr. Sumner, appreciatively, slapped the car’s roof as he laughed along with the driver. “All right!” he said. His hands were trembling; though he seemed sharp enough he was one of the oldest and frailest people Harriet had ever seen up and walking around. “All right! You’re doing all right for yourself, ain’t you?”