Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Go on, go on,” said the cop, still looking away, flinging out a hand, “get back in there and do what you need to.”

Eugene went in at the side door, and stood dazed for a moment. A passing nurse caught his eye, gave him a grave look and a little shake of her head, and all of a sudden he began to run, shoes slapping noisily, past wide-eyed nurses and all the way down to Intensive Care. He heard Gum before he saw her—a dry, small, lonely-sounding wail that made his heart swell with a sharp pain. Curtis—frightened-looking, gasping for breath—sat in a chair in the hall, clutching a large stuffed animal he hadn’t had before. A lady from Patient Services—she’d been kind when they’d arrived at the hospital, ushered them directly back to Intensive Care with no nonsense—was holding his hand and talking to him quietly. She stood when she saw Eugene. “Here he is,” she said to Curtis, “he’s back, sweetie, don’t worry.” Then she glanced at the door of the next room. To Eugene she said: “Your grandmother …”

Eugene—arms outstretched—went to her. She pushed by him and staggered into the hallway, crying out Farish’s name in a strange, thin, high-pitched voice.

The lady from Patient Services caught the sleeve of Dr. Breedlove as he was passing. “Doctor,” she said, nodding at Curtis, who was choking for breath and practically blue in the face, “he’s having some breathing difficulty.”

The doctor stopped, for half a second, and looked at Curtis. Then he snapped: “Epinephrine.” A nurse hastened away. To another nurse, he snapped: “Why hasn’t Mrs. Ratliff been sedated yet?”

And somehow, in the middle of all the confusion—orderlies, a shot in the arm for Curtis (“here, honey, this’ll make you feel better right away”) and a pair of nurses converging on his grandmother—there was the cop again.

“Listen,” he was saying, palms in the air, “you just do what you have to.”

“What?” said Eugene, looking around.

“I’ll be waiting for you out here.” He nodded. “Because I think it’ll speed things up if you come on down to the station with me. Whenever you’re ready.”

Eugene looked around. Things hadn’t sunk in yet; it was like he was seeing everything through a cloud. His grandmother had grown quiet and was being shuffled away down the cold gray hall between a pair of nurses. Curtis was rubbing his arm—but, miraculously, his wheezing and choking had quieted. He showed Eugene the stuffed animal—a rabbit, it looked like.

“Mine!” he said, rubbing his swollen eyes with his fist.

The cop was still looking at Eugene as if expecting him to say something.

“My little brother,” he said, wiping a hand over his face. “He’s retarded. I can’t just leave him here by himself.”

“Well, bring him along,” said the cop. “I’ll bet we can find a candy bar for him.”

“Honey?” said Eugene—and was knocked backwards by Curtis rushing towards him. He threw his arms around Eugene and mashed his damp face in Eugene’s shirt.

“Love,” he said, in a muffled voice.

“Well, Curtis,” said Eugene, patting him awkwardly on the back, “well there, stop it now, I love you too.”

“They’re sweet things, ain’t they?” said the cop indulgently. “My sister had one of those Down’s syndromes. Didn’t live past his fifteenth birthday, but my Lord we all loved him. That’s the saddest funeral I’ve ever been to.”

Eugene made an indistinct noise. Curtis suffered from numerous illnesses, some of them serious, and this was the last thing he wanted to think about right now. He realized that what he actually needed to do was to ask somebody if he could see Farish’s body, spend a few minutes alone with it, say a little prayer. Farish had never seemed too concerned with his destiny after death (or his destiny on earth, for that matter) but that didn’t mean he hadn’t received grace at the last. After all: God had smiled unexpectedly on Farish before. When he’d shot himself in the head, after the bulldozer incident, and the doctors all said the machines were the only thing keeping him alive, he’d surprised them all by rising up like Lazarus. How many men had woken almost literally from the dead, sitting up suddenly amidst the life-support machines, asking for mashed potatoes? Would God pluck a soul so dramatically from the grave, just to cast it down to damnation? If he could see the body—look upon it with his own eyes—he felt he would know the state in which Farish had passed away.

“I want to see my brother, before they take him away,” he said. “I’m going to find the doctor.”

The cop nodded. Eugene turned to walk away, but Curtis—in a sudden panic—clutched his wrist.

“You can leave him out here with me, if you want,” said the cop. “I’ll look after him.”

“No,” said Eugene, “no, that’s fine, he can come, too.”

The cop looked at Curtis; he shook his head. “When something like this happens, it’s a blessing for them,” he said. “Not understanding, I mean.”

“Don’t none of us understand it,” said Eugene.

The medicine they gave Harriet made her sleepy. Presently, there was a knock outside her door: Tatty. “Darling!” she cried, swooping in. “How’s my child?”

Harriet—elated—struggled up in bed and held out her arms. Then, suddenly, it seemed to her that she was dreaming, and that the room was empty. The strangeness so overwhelmed her that she rubbed her eyes and tried to hide her confusion.

But it was Tatty. She kissed Harriet on the cheek. “But she looks well, Edith,” she was crying. “She looks alert.”

“Well, she’s much improved,” said Edie crisply. She set a book on Harriet’s bed table. “Here, I thought you might like this to keep you company.”

Harriet lay back on the pillow and listened to the two of them talking, their familiar voices mingling in a radiant and harmonious nonsense. Then she was somewhere else, in a dark blue gallery with shrouded furniture. Rain fell and fell.

“Tatty?” she said, sitting up in the bright room. It was later in the day. The sunlight on the opposite wall had stretched, and shifted, and slunk down the wall until it spilled in a glazed pool upon the floor.

They were gone. She felt dazed, as if she’d walked from a dark movie matinee out into the startling afternoon. A fat, familiar-looking blue book sat on her bed table: Captain Scott. At the sight of it, her heart lifted; just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, she reached out and put her hand on it, and then—despite her headache and her grogginess—she laboriously sat up in bed and tried to read for a while. But as she read, the silence of the hospital room sank gradually into a glacial and otherworldly stillness, and soon she got the unpleasant sense that the book was speaking to her—Harriet—in a direct and most disturbing way. Every few lines, a phrase would stand out quite sharply and with pointed meaning, as if Captain Scott were addressing her directly, as if he had deliberately encoded a series of personal messages to her in his journals from the Pole. Every few lines, some new significance struck her. She tried to argue herself out of it, but it was no use, and soon she grew so afraid that she was forced to put the book aside.

Dr. Breedlove walked past her open door, and stopped short to see her sitting upright in bed, looking fearful and agitated.

“Why are you awake?” he demanded. He came in and examined the chart, his jowly face expressionless, and clomped off. Within five minutes, a nurse hurried into the room with yet another hypodermic needle.

“Well, go on, roll over,” she said crossly. She seemed angry at Harriet for some reason.