Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Allison—with a sharp cry—wrenched away and ran across the yard: past the glider swing, past Hely and Harriet, into Edie’s toolshed. There was a tinny crash, as of a rake toppling off the wall at the slammed door.

Hely said, flatly, as he swivelled his head to stare: “Man, your sister’s nuts.”

From the porch Edie’s voice—clear, carrying—resonated with an air of public address: formal though it was, emotion trembled behind it and also something of emergency. “Odean! Thank you for coming! Won’t you step inside for a minute?”

“Nome, I don’t want to bother nobody.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! We’re mighty glad to see you!”

Hely kicked Harriet in the foot. “Say,” he said, and nodded at the toolshed. “What’s the matter with her?”

“Bless your heart!” Edie scolded Odean—who still stood motionless. “Enough of this! You come inside right this minute!”

Harriet could not speak. From the decrepit toolshed: a single weird, dry sob, as if of a choked creature. Harriet’s face constricted: not with disgust, or even embarrassment, but with some foreign, frightening emotion which made Hely step away from her as if she had an infectious disease.

“Uh,” he said, cruelly, looking over her head—clouds, an airplane trailing across the sky—“I think I have to go now.”

He waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t, he sauntered away—not his usual scurrying gait, but self-consciously, swinging his arms.

The gate snapped shut. Harriet stared furiously at the ground. The voices on the porch had risen sharply, and, with a dull pain, Harriet became aware of what they were talking about: Libby’s will. “Where it is?” Odean was saying.

“Don’t worry, that’ll all be taken care of soon enough,” said Edie, taking Odean’s arm as if to guide her inside. “The will’s in her safe-deposit box. On Monday morning I’ll go with the lawyer—”

“I ain’t trust n’an lawyer,” Odean said fiercely. “Miss Lib made me a promise. She told me, she say, Odean, if anything happen, look there in my cedar chest. There’s an envelope in there for you. You just go on and do it and don’t ast nobody.”

“Odean, we haven’t touched any of her things. On Monday—”

“The Lord knows what went on,” said Odean haughtily. “He knows it, and I know it. Yes, ma'am, I surely do know what Miss Libby told me.”

“You know Mr. Billy Wentworth, don’t you?” Edie’s voice jocular, as if speaking to a child, but with a hoarseness that edged on something terrifying. “Don’t tell me that you don’t trust Mr. Billy, Odean! That’s in practice with his son-in-law down there on the square?”

“All's I want is what’s coming to me.”

The garden glider was rusted. Moss swelled velvety between the cracked bricks. Harriet, with a kind of desperate, clenching effort, fixed the whole of her attention upon a battered conch shell lying at the base of a garden urn.

Edie said: “Odean, I’m not disputing that. You’ll get what’s legally yours. As soon as—”

“I don’t know about any legal. All's I know is what’s right.”

The conch was chalky with age, weathered to a texture like crumbly plaster; its apex had broken off; at the inner lip, it sank into a pearly flush, the delicate silvery-pink of Edie’s old Maiden’s Blush roses. Before Harriet was born, the whole family had vacationed on the Gulf every year; after Robin died, they never went back. Jars of tiny gray bivalves collected on those old trips sat on high shelves in the aunts’ closets, dusty and sad. “They lose their magic when they’ve been out of the water a while,” Libby said: and she’d run the bathroom sink full of water, poured the shells in and pulled over a step-stool for Harriet to stand on (she’d been tiny, around three, and how gigantic and white the sink had seemed!). And how surprised she had been to see that uniform gray washed bright and slick and magical, broken into a thousand tinkling colors: empurpled here, soaked there to mussel-black, fanned into ribs and spiraling into delicate polychrome whorls: silver, marble-blue, coral and pearly green and rose! How cold and clear was the water: her own hands, cut off at the wrist, icy-pink and tender! “Smell!” said Libby, breathing deep. “That’s what the ocean smells like!” And Harriet put her face close to the water and smelled the stiff tang of an ocean she had never seen; the salt smell that Jim Hawkins spoke of in Treasure Island . Crash of the surf; scream of strange birds and the white sails of the Hispaniola —like the white pages of a book—billowing against cloudless hot skies.

Death—they all said—was a happy shore. In the old seaside photographs, her family was young again, and Robin stood among them: boats and white handkerchiefs, sea-birds lifting into light. It was a dream where everybody was saved.

But it was a dream of life past, not life to come. Life present: rusty magnolia leaves, lichen-crusted flowerpots, the hum of bees steady in the hot afternoon and the faceless murmurs of the funeral guests. Mud and slimy grass, under the cracked garden brick she’d kicked aside. Harriet studied the ugly spot on the ground with great attention, as if it were the one true thing in the world—which, in a way, it was.

CHAPTER 7.

The Tower.

Time was broken. Harriet’s way of measuring it was gone. Before, Ida was the planet whose round marked the hours, and her bright old reliable course (washing on Mondays and mending on Tuesdays, sandwiches in summer and soup in winter) ruled every aspect of Harriet’s life. The weeks revolved in procession, each day a series of sequential vistas. On Thursday mornings, Ida set up the board and ironed by the sink, steam gasping from the monolithic iron; on Thursday afternoons, winter and summer, she shook the rugs and beat them and hung them out to air, so the red Turkey carpet slung on the porch rail was a flag that always said Thursday . Endless summer Thursdays, chill Thursdays in October and distant dark Thursdays of the first-grade past, when Harriet dozed beneath hot blankets, fitful with tonsillitis: the whap of the rug beater and the hiss and burble of the steam iron were vivid sounds of the present but also links in a chain winding back through Harriet’s life until vanishing in the abstract darks of babyhood. Days ended at five, with Ida’s change of aprons on the back porch; days began with the squeak of the front door and Ida’s tread in the hall. Peacefully, the hum of the vacuum cleaner floated from distant rooms; upstairs and down, the slumbrous creak of Ida’s rubber-soled shoes, and sometimes the high dry cackle of her witchy laughter. So the days slid by. Doors opened, doors shut, shadows that sank and rose. Ida’s quick glance, as Harriet ran barefoot by an open doorway, was a sharp, delicious blessing: love in spite of itself. Ida! Her favored snacks (stick candy; molasses on cold cornbread); her “programs.” Jokes and scolding, heaped spoons of sugar sinking like snow to the bottom of the iced-tea glass. Strange old sad songs floating up from the kitchen ( don’t you miss your mother sometimes, sometimes ?) and birdcalls from the back yard, while the white shirts flapped on the line, whistles and trills, kit kit, kit kit , sweet jingle of polished silver, tumbling in the dish-pan, the variety and noise of life itself.

But all this was gone. Without Ida, time dilated and sank into a vast, shimmering emptiness. Hours and days, and light and darkness, slid into each other unremarked; there was no difference any more between lunch and breakfast, weekend and weekday, dawn or dusk; and it was like living deep in a cave lit by artificial lights.