Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Jeez, Harriet!”

“Hely, I can’t go .” She felt like crying.

“But I’ve got band practice. And we have to stay late today.”

Band practice . Harriet’s heart sank. How was this ever going to work?

“Or,” Hely was saying, “or I could go now . If I hurry. Mom’s dropping me off in half an hour.”

Wanly, Harriet smiled at the nurse who put her head in at the door. What difference was it going to make, either way? Leave her father’s gun on the ground, for the police to find, or let Hely go get it? It would be all over the band hall by noon.

“What am I supposed to do with it?” Hely was saying. “Hide it in your yard?”

“No,” said Harriet, so sharply that the nurse raised her eyebrows. “Throw it—” jeez , she thought, closing her eyes, just go ahead and say it —“Throw it in the …”

“The river?” Hely inquired, helpfully.

“Right,” said Harriet, shifting as the nurse (a big square woman, with stiff gray hair and large hands) reached over to plump her pillow.

“What if it won’t sink?”

It took a moment for this to register. Hely repeated the question as the nurse unhooked Harriet’s chart off the foot of the bed and departed, with a heavy side-swaying gait.

“It’s … metal,” said Harriet.

Hely, she realized with a shock, was talking to somebody on the other end.

Rapidly, he came back on. “All right! Gotta go!”

Click . Harriet sat with the dead phone to her ear, sat stunned until the dial tone came on and, fearfully (for she had never taken her eyes from the doorway, not for a moment), hung up the receiver and settled back on the pillows, looking about the room in apprehension.

The hours dragged, interminable, white on white. Harriet had nothing to read, and though her head ached terribly she was too afraid to go to sleep. Mr. Dial had left a Sunday-school booklet, called “Apron String Devotionals,” with a picture of a rosy baby in an old-fashioned sun bonnet pushing a flower cart, and at last, in desperation, she turned to this. It was designed for the mothers of young children, and it disgusted Harriet in a matter of moments.

As disgusted as she was, she read the whole thing from cover to flimsy cover and then sat. And sat. There was no clock in the room, no pictures to look at and nothing to keep her thoughts and fears from roiling miserably about, nothing except the pain which—intermittently—pitched through her stomach in waves. When it rolled away, she lay beached and gasping, washed clean for the moment, but soon her worries set in gnawing again with renewed energy. Hely hadn’t actually promised anything. Who knew if he’d get the gun or not? And even if he did go get it: would he have the sense to throw it away? Hely in the band hall, showing off her father’s gun. “Hey Dave, look at this!” She winced and pressed her head deep in the pillow. Her father’s gun. Her fingerprints all over it. And Hely, the biggest blabbermouth in the world. Yet who could she have asked to help her but Hely? No one. No one.

After a long while the nurse lumbered in again (her thick-soled shoes all worn down on the outer edge) to give Harriet a shot. Harriet, who was rolling her head around, and talking to herself a bit, struggled to pull away from her worries. With effort, she turned her attention to the nurse. She had a jolly weather-beaten face with wrinkled cheeks, thick ankles and a rolling, off-centered walk. Except for her nurse’s uniform, she might have been the captain of a sailing ship, striding across decks. Her nametag said Gladys Coots.

“Now, I’m going to get this over with as quick as I can,” she was saying.

Harriet—too weak and too worried to put up her customary resistance—rolled on her stomach and grimaced as the needle slid into her hip. She hated shots, and—when younger—had screamed and cried and fought to escape, to such a degree that Edie (who knew how to give injections) had on several occasions impatiently rolled up her sleeves right in the doctor’s office and taken over with the needle.

“Where’s my grandmother?” she asked as she rolled over, rubbing the stung place on her bottom.

“Mercy! Ain't nobody told you?”

“What?” cried Harriet, scrabbling back in the bed like a crab. “What happened? Where is she?”

“Sssh. Calm down!” Energetically, the nurse began to plump up the pillows. “She had to go downtown for a while, is all. Is all ,” she repeated, when Harriet looked at her doubtfully. “Now lie on back and make yourself comfortable.”

Never, never again in her life would Harriet know such a long day. Pain pulsed and spangled merciless in her temples; a parallelogram of sun shimmered motionless on the wall. Nurse Coots, swaying in and out with the bedpan, was a rarity: a white elephant, much heralded, returning every century or so. In the course of the interminable morning she drew blood, administered eye-drops, brought Harriet iced water, ginger ale, a dish of green gelatin which Harriet tasted and pushed aside, cutlery clattering fretful on her bright plastic tray.

Fearfully, she sat upright in bed and listened. The corridor was a sedate net of echoes: talk at the desk, occasional laughter, the tap of canes and the scrape of walkers as gray convalescents from Physical Therapy drifted up and down the hall. Every so often, a woman’s voice came on the intercom, calling out strings of numbers, obscure commands, Carla, step into the hallway, orderly on two, orderly on two ….

As if counting out sums, Harriet worked out what she knew on her fingers, muttering under her breath, not caring if she looked like a crazy person. The preacher didn’t know about the tower. He’d said nothing to indicate he knew Danny was up there (or dead). But all that might change if the doctor figured out that bad water was what had made Harriet sick. The Trans Am was parked far enough from the tower that probably no one had thought to look up there—and if they hadn’t already, who knows, maybe they wouldn’t.

But maybe they would. And then there was her father’s gun. Why hadn’t she picked it up, how could she have forgotten? Of course, she hadn’t actually shot anybody; but the gun had been shot, they’d know that, and the fact that it was at the base of the tower would surely be enough to make somebody go up and look in the tower.

And Hely. All his cheerful questions: had she been arrested, was a policeman on guard. It would be immensely entertaining for Hely if she was arrested: not a consoling thought.

Then a horrible idea occurred to her. What if policemen were watching the Trans Am? Wasn’t the car a crime scene, like on television? Wouldn’t cops and photographers be standing around it, keeping guard? And sure, the car was parked a good bit away from the tower—but would Hely have the sense to avoid a crowd, if he saw it? For that matter—would he be able to get near the tower at all? There were the warehouses, sure, closer to where the car was parked, and probably they’d look there first. But eventually they’d spread out toward the tower, wouldn’t they? She cursed herself for not warning him to be careful. If there were a lot of people, he’d have no choice but to turn around and come home.

Around midmorning, the doctor interrupted these worries. He was Harriet’s regular doctor, who saw her when she had red throat or tonsillitis, but Harriet didn’t like him much. He was young, with a heavy drab face and prematurely heavy jowls; his features were stiff and his manner cold and sarcastic. His name was Dr. Breedlove but—partly because of the steep prices he charged—Edie had given him the nickname (grown popular locally) of “Dr. Greedy.” His unfriendliness, it was said, had kept him from a more desirable post in a better town—but he was so very curt that Harriet didn’t feel she had to keep up a false front of chumminess and smiles as she did with most adults, and for this reason she respected him grudgingly in spite of everything.