Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

With Ida had vanished many comforts. Among them was sleep. Night after night, in dank Chickadee Wigwam, Harriet had lain awake in gritty sheets with tears in her eyes—for no one but Ida knew how to make the bed the way she liked it, and Harriet (in motels, sometimes even at Edie’s house) lay open-eyed and miserable with homesickness late into the night, painfully aware of strange textures, unfamiliar smells (perfume, mothballs, detergents that Ida didn’t use), but more than anything else of Ida’s touch, indefinable, always reassuring when she woke up lonely or afraid, and never more lovely than when it wasn’t there.

But Harriet had returned to echoes and silence: a spellbound house, encircled with thorns. On Harriet’s side of the room (Allison’s was a mess) everything was perfect, just as Ida had left it: tidy bed, white ruffles, dust settling like frost.

And so it remained. Underneath the coverlet, the sheets were still crisp. They had been washed and smoothed by Ida’s hand; they were the last trace of Ida in the house, and—as much as Harriet longed to crawl into her bed, to bury her face in the lovely soft pillow and pull the clothes up over her head—she could not bring herself to disturb this last small Heaven left to her. At night, the reflection of the bed floated radiant and transparent in the black windowpanes, a flouncy white confection, as soft as a wedding cake. But it was a feast that Harriet could only look at, and long for: for once the bed was slept in, even the hope of sleep was lost.

So she slept on top of the covers. The nights passed fitfully. Mosquitos bit her legs and whined about her ears. The early mornings were cool, and sometimes Harriet sat up foggily to reach for phantom bedclothes; when her hands closed on air, she fell back on the coverlet, with a plump , and—twitching like a terrier in her sleep—she dreamed. She dreamed of black swamp water with ice in it, and country paths she had to run down again and again with a splinter in her foot from being barefoot; of swimming upward through dark lakes, knocking her head against a sheet of metal that sealed her underwater, away from the surface air; of hiding under the bed at Edie’s house from some creepy presence—unseen—who called out to her in a low voice: “Did you leave something, missy? Did you leave me something?” In the morning she woke late and exhausted, red patterns from the bedspread stamped deep into her cheek. And even before she opened her eyes, she was afraid to move, and lay still in the breathless consciousness that she was waking to something wrong.

And so she was. The house was frighteningly dim and still. When she got out of bed and tiptoed to the window and pushed aside the curtain, it was with a sense of being the sole survivor of a terrible disaster. Monday: clothesline empty. How could it be Monday with no sheets and shirts snapping on the line? The shadow of the empty clothesline jangled across the dry grass. Downstairs she crept, down into the murky hall—for now that Ida was gone, there was no one to open the blinds in the morning (or to make coffee, or call “Good Morning, Baby!” or do any of the comforting little things that Ida did) and the house remained sunk for most of the day in a filtered, underwater gloom.

Underlying the vapid silence—a terrible silence, as if the world had ended and most of the people in it had died—was the painful awareness of Libby’s house shut up and vacant only a few streets away. Lawn unmowed, flower beds browned and sizzling with weeds; inside, the mirrors empty pools without reflection and the sunlight and the moonlight gliding indifferently through the rooms. How well Harriet knew Libby’s house in all its hours and moods and weathers—its winter dullness, when the hall was dim and the gas fire burned low; its stormy nights and days (rain streaming down purple windowpanes, shadows streaming down the opposite wall) and its blazing autumn afternoons, when Harriet sat in Libby’s kitchen tired and disconsolate after school, taking heart in Libby’s small talk, and basking in the glow of her kindly inquiries. All the books Libby had read aloud, a chapter each day after school: Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Ivanhoe .Sometimes the October light that flared up suddenly in the west windows on those afternoons was clinical, terrifying in its radiance, and its brilliance and chill seemed like a promise of something unbearable, like the inhuman glow of old memories recalled on a deathbed, all dreams and lurid farewells. But always, even in the most still, desolate lights (leaden tick of mantel clock, library book face down on the sofa) Libby herself shone pale and bright as she moved through the gloomy rooms, with her white head ruffled like a peony. Sometimes she sang to herself, and her reedy voice quavered sweetly in the high shadows of the tiled kitchen, over the fat hum of the Frigidaire:

The owl and the pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat

They took some honey and plenty of money

Wrapped up in a five-pound note ….

There she was, embroidering, with her tiny silver scissors hung on a pink ribbon around her neck, working the crossword or reading a biography of Madame de Pompadour, talking to her little white cat … tip tip tip , Harriet could hear her footsteps now, the particular sound of them in her size-three shoe, tip tip tip down the long hallway to answer the telephone. Libby! How glad Libby always seemed when Harriet called—even late at night—as if there were no one in the world whose voice she so wanted to hear! “Oh! It’s my darling !” she cried; “how sweet of you to call your poor old auntie …”; and the gaiety and warmth of her voice thrilled Harriet so much that (even alone, standing by the wall phone in the dark kitchen) she shut her eyes and hung her head, warmed and glowing all over, like a chimed bell. Did anyone else seem so happy to hear from Harriet? No: no one did. Now she might dial that number, dial it all she pleased, dial it every moment until the end of time and she would never hear Libby crying at the other end: My darling! my dear ! No: the house was empty now, and still. Smells of cedar and vetivert in closed rooms. Soon the furniture would be gone, but for now everything was exactly as it was when Libby set out on her trip: beds made, washed teacups stacked in the dish drainer. Days sweeping through the rooms in unremarked procession. As the sun rose, the bubbled glass paperweight on Libby’s mantelpiece would glow again into life, its little gleaming life of three hours, only to sink into darkness and slumber again when the triangle of sunlight passed over it, at noon. The flower-twined carpet—vast tangled game board of Harriet’s childhood—glowed here, glowed there, with the yellow bars of light that slashed through the wooden blinds in the late afternoons. Around the walls they slid, long fingers, passing in long distorted strands across the framed photographs: Libby as a girl, thin and frightened-looking, holding Edie’s hand; stormy old Tribulation, in sepia tone, with its thundery air of vine-choked tragedy. That evening light too would fade and vanish, until there was no light at all except the cool blue half-light of the street lamps—just enough to see by—glimmering steadily until the dawn. Hatboxes; gloves neatly folded, slumbering in drawers. Clothes that would never know Libby’s touch again, hanging in dark closets. Soon they would be packed away in boxes and sent to Baptist missions in Africa and China—and soon, perhaps, some tiny Chinese lady in a painted house, under golden trees and faraway skies, would be drinking tea with the missionaries in one of Libby’s pink Sunday-school dresses. How did the world go on the way it did: people planting gardens, playing cards, going to Sunday school and sending boxes of old clothes to the China missions and speeding all the while toward a collapsed bridge gaping in the dark?