Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Allison, at home in bed, lay on her side staring out the window at the moon. She was scarcely conscious of Harriet’s empty bed—stripped nude, vomity sheets piled in a heap on the floor. In her mind, she was singing to herself—not so much a song as an impromptu series of low-pitched notes that repeated, with variations, up and down monotonously and on and on like the song of some mournful, unknown night bird. Whether Harriet was there or not hardly made a difference to her; but presently, encouraged by the stillness on the other side of the room, she began to hum aloud, random tones and phrases that spiraled on in the darkness.

She was having a hard time falling asleep, though she didn’t know why. Sleep was Allison’s refuge; it welcomed her with open arms the moment she lay down. But now, she lay on her side, open-eyed and untroubled, humming to herself in the darkness; and sleep was a shadowy forgetful distance, a curling like smoke in abandoned attics and a singing like the sea in a pearly shell.

Edie, on her cot by Harriet’s bed, was awakened by the light in her face. It was late: 8:15, by her wristwatch, and she had an appointment with the accountant at nine. She got up and went into the bathroom, and her wan, drained reflection in the mirror stopped her for a moment: it was mostly the fluorescent light, but still.

She brushed her teeth, and gamely set to work on her face: pencilling her eyebrows, drawing in her lips. Edie did not trust doctors. In her experience they didn’t listen, preferring instead to strut around pretending that they had all the answers. They jumped to conclusions; they ignored what didn’t fit with their theories. And this doctor was a foreigner, on top of everything. The instant he’d heard the word seizure , this Dr. Dagoo or whatever his name was, the child’s other symptoms faded into insignificance; they were “questionable.” Questionable , thought Edie, exiting the bathroom and examining her sleeping granddaughter (with intent curiosity, as if Harriet were a diseased shrub, or mysteriously sickened house plant) because epilepsy ain’t what’s wrong with her .

With academic interest, she studied Harriet for several moments longer, then went back into the bathroom to dress. Harriet was a hardy child, and Edie was not terribly worried about her except in a generalized sort of way. What did worry her—and what had kept her open-eyed on the hospital cot for much of the night—was the disastrous state of her daughter’s house. Now that Edie thought about it, she had not actually been upstairs since Harriet was just a little thing. Charlotte was a pack rat, and the tendency (Edie knew) had increased since Robin’s death, but the condition of the house had shocked her thoroughly. Squalor: there was no other word. No wonder the child was sick, with garbage and trash all over the place; it was a wonder they weren’t all three in the hospital. Edie—zipping up the back of her dress—bit the inside of her cheek. Dirty dishes; piles of newspaper, towers of it, certain to attract vermin. Worst of all: the smell. All sorts of unpleasant scenarios had threaded through Edie’s mind as she lay awake, turning this way and that way on the lumpy hospital cot. The child might have been poisoned, or contracted hepatitis; she might have been bitten by a rat in her sleep. Edie had been too stunned and ashamed to confide any of these suspicions to a strange doctor—and she still was, even in the cold light of morning. What was one to say? Oh, by the way, Doctor, my daughter keeps a filthy house ?

There would be roaches, and worse. Something had to be done before Grace Fountain or some other nosy neighbor called the Health Department. Confronting Charlotte would only mean excuses and tears. An appeal to the adulterous Dix was risky, because if it came to divorce (and it might) the squalor would only give Dix an edge in court. Why on earth had Charlotte let the colored woman go?

Edie pinned her hair back, swallowed a couple of aspirin with a glass of water (her ribs hurt mightily, after the night on the cot) and stepped out into the room again. All roads lead to the hospital , she thought. Since Libby’s death, she had been returning to the hospital nightly in her dreams—wandering the corridors, riding the elevator up and down, searching for floors and room numbers that didn’t exist—and now it was daytime and here she was again, in a room very like the one Libby had died in.

Harriet was still asleep—which was fine. The doctor had said she’d sleep most of the day. After the accountant, and yet another morning wasted in poring through Judge Cleve’s books (which were written practically in cypher), she had to meet with the lawyer. He was urging her to settle with this awful Mr. Rixey person—which was all well and good, except that the “reasonable compromise” he was suggesting would leave her practically destitute. Lost in thought, (Mr. Rixey had not even accepted the “reasonable compromise”; she would find out today if he had) Edie gave herself one last glance in the mirror, got her purse, and walked out of the room without noticing the preacher loitering at the end of the hall.

The bedsheets felt cool and delicious. Harriet lay in the morning light with her eyes tight shut. She had been dreaming of stone steps in a bright grassy field, steps that led nowhere, steps so crumbled with age that they might have been boulders tumbled and sunken in the buzzing pasture. The needle was a hateful ping in the crook of her elbow, silver and chill, cumbrous apparatus winding away from it up through the ceiling and into the white skies of dream.

For some minutes she hung between sleep and waking. Footsteps knocked across the floor (cold corridors, echoing like palaces) and she lay very still, hoping that some kindly official person would walk over and take notice of her: Harriet small, Harriet pale and ill.

The footsteps neared the bed, and stopped. Harriet sensed a presence leaning over her. Quietly she lay there, eyelids fluttering, allowing herself to be examined. Then she opened her eyes and started back in horror at the preacher, whose face was inches from her own. His scar stood out a bright, turkey-wattle red; beneath the melted tissue of the brow bone, his eye shone wet and fierce.

“Be quite, now,” he said, with a parrot-like cock of his head. His voice was high and singsong, with an eerieness to it. “Ain't no need in making noise, innit?”

Harriet would have liked to make noise—a lot of it. Frozen with fear and confusion, she stared up at him.

“I know who you are.” His mouth moved very little as he spoke. “You was at the Mission that night.”

Harriet cut her eyes over at the empty doorway. Pain flicked through her temples like electricity.

The preacher furrowed his brow at her as he leaned closer. “You was messing with them snakes. I think it was you that let em aloose, wannit?” he said, in his curious high-pitched voice. His hair pomade smelled like lilac. “And you was following my brother Danny, wasn’t you?”

Harriet stared at him. Did he know about the tower?

“How come you run from me in the hall back there?”

He didn’t know. Harriet was careful to sit very still. At school, nobody could beat her in the game where the kids tried to outstare each other. Dim bells clanged in her head. She wasn’t well; she longed to rub her eyes, start the morning over. Something about the position of her own face, as opposed to the preacher’s, didn’t make sense; it was as if he were a reflection she ought to be seeing from a different angle.