Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

The certainty flooded her with a dreamy, settled feeling. As the nurse pushed Harriet down the shiny spaceship corridor she reached down to pat Harriet’s cheek and Harriet—being ill, and more malleable than usual—permitted this, without complaint. It was a soft, cool hand, with gold rings.

“All right?” the nurse inquired as she wheeled Harriet (Edie clicking rapidly behind, footsteps echoing on the tile) to a small, semi-private area and jerked the curtain.

Harriet suffered herself to be got into a gown, and then lay down on the crackly paper and let the nurse take her temperature

my goodness !

yes, she’s a sick girl

—and draw her blood. Then she sat up and obediently drank a tiny cup of chalky-tasting medicine that the nurse said would help her stomach. Edie sat on a stool opposite, near a glass case of medicine and an upright scale with a sliding balance. There they were, by themselves after the nurse had pulled the curtain and walked away, and Edie asked a question which Harriet only half-answered because she was partly in the room with the chalky medicine taste in her mouth but at the same time swimming in a cold river that had an evil silver sheen like light off petroleum, moonlight, and an undercurrent grabbed her legs and swept her away, some horrible old man in a wet fur hat running along the banks and shouting out words that she couldn’t hear….

“All right. Sit up, please.”

Harriet found herself looking up into the face of a white-coated stranger. He was not an American, but an Indian, from India, with blue-black hair and droopy, melancholy eyes. He asked her if she knew her name and where she was; shone a pointy light in her face; looked into her eyes and nose and ears; felt her stomach and under her armpits with icy-cold hands that made her squirm.

“—her first seizure?” Again that word.

“Yes.”

“Did you smell or taste anything funny?” the doctor asked Harriet.

His steady black eyes made her uneasy. Harriet shook her head no.

Delicately, the doctor turned her chin up with his forefinger. Harriet saw his nostrils flare.

“Does your throat hurt?” he asked, in his buttery voice.

From far away, she heard Edie exclaim: “Good heavens, what’s that on her neck?”

“Discoloration,” said the doctor, stroking it with his fingertips, and then pressing hard with a thumb. “Does this hurt?”

Harriet made an indistinct noise. It wasn’t her throat which hurt so much as her neck. And her nose—struck by the gun’s kick—was bitterly tender to the touch, but though it felt very swollen, no one else seemed to have noticed it.

The doctor listened to Harriet’s heart and made her stick her tongue out. With fixed intensity, he looked down her throat with a light. Uncomfortably, jaw aching, Harriet cut her eyes over to the swab dispenser and disinfectant jar on the adjacent table.

“Okay,” said the doctor, with a sigh, removing the depressor.

Harriet lay down. Sharply, her stomach twisted itself and cramped. The light pulsed orange through her closed eyelids.

Edie and the doctor were talking. “The neurologist comes every two weeks,” he was saying. “Maybe he can drive up from Jackson tomorrow or the next day….”

On he talked, in his monotonous voice. Another stab in Harriet’s stomach—a horrible one, that made her curl up on her side and clutch her abdomen. Then it stopped. Okay , thought Harriet, weak and grateful with relief, it’s over now, its over ….

“Harriet,” Edie said loudly—so loudly Harriet realized that she must have fallen asleep, or just nearly—“look at me.”

Obligingly, Harriet opened her eyes, to painful brightness.

“Look at her eyes. See how red they are? They look infected .”

“The symptoms are questionable. We’ll have to wait until the tests come back.”

Harriet’s stomach twisted again, violently; she rolled on her stomach, away from the light. She knew why her eyes were red; the water had burned them.

“What about the diarrhea? And the fever? And, good Lord, those black marks on her neck? It looks like somebody’s taken and choked her. If you ask me—”

“There may be an infection of some sort, but the seizures aren’t febrile. Febrile—”

“I know what it means, I was a nurse, sir,” said Edie curtly.

“Well, then, you should know that any dysfunction of the nervous system is the first priority,” replied the doctor, just as curtly.

“And the other symptoms—”

“Are questionable. As I said. First we’ll give her an antibiotic and start her on some fluids. We should have her electrolytes and her blood count back by tomorrow afternoon.”

Harriet was now following the conversation closely, waiting for her turn to talk. But finally she couldn’t wait any longer, and she blurted: “I have to go.”

Edie and the doctor turned and looked at her. “Well, go ahead, go ,” said the doctor, flicking his hand in what was to Harriet a kingly and exotic gesture, lifting his throat like a maharajah. As she hopped off the table, she heard him call for a nurse.

But there was no nurse outside the curtain, and none came, and Harriet, desperate, struck off down the hall. A different nurse—her eyes as small and twinkly as an elephant’s—lumbered out from behind a desk. “Are you looking for something?” she said. Creakily, sluggishly, she reached for Harriet’s hand.

Harriet, panicked by her slowness, shook her head and darted off. As she skimmed light-headed down the windowless hall, her attention was fully fixed on the door at the end of the corridor that said Ladies and as she hurried past an alcove with some chairs, she didn’t stop to look when she thought she heard a voice calling: “Hat!”

Then suddenly there was Curtis, stepping out in front of her. Behind him, with his hand on Curtis’s shoulder and the mark on his face standing out blood red like a bull’s-eye, stood the preacher ( thunderstorms, rattlesnakes ) all in black.

Harriet stared. Then she turned and ran, down the bright antiseptic hallway. The floor was slick; her feet skidded from under her and forward she pitched, onto her face, rolling onto her back and throwing a hand over her eyes.

Fast footsteps—rubber shoes squeaking on the tile—and the next thing Harriet knew, her original nurse (the young one, with the rings and the colorful make-up) was kneeling beside her. Bonnie Fenton read her name-tag, “Upsy Daisy!” she said in a cheery voice. “Hurt yourself?”

Harriet clung to her arm, stared into the nurse’s brightly painted face with all her concentration. Bonnie Fenton , she repeated to herself, as if the name was a magic formula to keep her safe. Bonnie Fenton, Bonnie Fenton, Bonnie Fenton R.N ….

“This is why we’re not supposed to run in the halls!” said the nurse. She was talking not to Harriet, but stagily, to a third party, and—down the hall—Harriet saw Edie and the doctor emerging from the curtained enclosure. Feeling the eyes of the preacher, burning into her back, Harriet scrambled up and ran to Edie and threw her arms around Edie’s waist.

“Edie,” she cried, “take me home, take me home!”

“Harriet! What’s got into you?”

“If you go home,” said the doctor, “how can we find out what’s wrong with you?” He was trying to be friendly, but his droopy face had a waxen melted look under the eye sockets that was suddenly very frightening. Harriet began to cry.

Abstracted pat on her back: very Edie-like, that pat, brisk and businesslike, and it only made Harriet cry harder.

“She’s out of her head.”

“Usually they’re sleepy, after a seizure. But if she’s fretful we can give her a little something to help her relax.”