The Little Friend (71 page)

Harriet’s mother glanced at the costume, startled, almost as if she’d forgotten she was holding it. “Oh,” she said, and dabbed at the corner of her eye with a tissue. “Tom French asked Edie if his child could borrow it. The first ball game is
with a team called the Ravens or something and Tom’s wife thought it would be cute if one of the children dressed up like a bird and ran out with the cheerleaders.”

“If you don’t want to lend it to them, you should tell them they can’t have it.”

Harriet’s mother looked a bit surprised. For a long strange moment, the two of them looked at each other.

Harriet’s mother cleared her throat. “What day do you want to drive to Memphis and buy your school clothes?” she said.

“Who’s going to fix them?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Ida always hems my school clothes.”

Harriet’s mother started to say something, then shook her head, as if to clear it of an unpleasant thought. “When are you going to get over this?”

Harriet glared at the carpet.
Never
, she thought.

“Sweetheart … I know you loved Ida and—maybe I didn’t know
how
much.…”

Silence.

“But … honey, Ida wanted to leave.”

“She’d have stayed if you asked her.”

Harriet’s mother cleared her throat. “Honey, I feel as bad about it as you do, but Ida didn’t want to stay. Your father was constantly complaining about her, how little work she did. He and I fought about this all the time over the phone, did you know that?” She looked up at the ceiling. “He thought she didn’t do enough, that for what we paid her—”

“You didn’t pay her anything!”

“Harriet, I don’t think Ida had been happy here for … for a long time. She’ll get a better salary somewhere else.… It’s not like I
need
her any more, like when you and Allison were little.…”

Harriet listened, icily.

“Ida was with us for so many years that I guess I sort of talked myself into thinking I couldn’t do without her, but … we’ve been
fine
, haven’t we?”

Harriet bit her upper lip, stared obstinately into the corner of the room—mess everywhere, the corner table littered
with pens, envelopes, coasters, old handkerchiefs, an overflowing ashtray atop a stack of magazines.

“Haven’t we? Been fine? Ida—” her mother looked around, helplessly—“Ida just rode
rough
shod over me, didn’t you see that?”

There was a long silence during which—out of the corner of her eye—Harriet saw a bullet she’d missed lying on the carpet under the table.

“Don’t get me wrong. When you girls were little, I couldn’t have done without Ida. She helped me
enormously
. Especially with …” Harriet’s mother sighed. “But for the last few years, she hasn’t been pleased with anything that went on around here. I guess she was fine with you all but with me, she was so resentful, just standing there with her arms folded and
judging
me.…”

Harriet stared fixedly at the bullet. A little bored now, listening to her mother’s voice without really hearing it, she kept her eyes on the floor and soon drifted away into a favorite daydream. The time machine was leaving; she was carrying emergency supplies to Scott’s party at the pole; everything depended on her. Packing lists, packing lists, and he’d brought all the wrong things.
Must fight it out to the last biscuit.…
She would save them all, with stores brought from the future: instant cocoa and vitamin C tablets, canned heat, peanut butter, gasoline for the sledges and fresh vegetables from the garden and battery-powered flashlights.…

Suddenly, the different position of her mother’s voice got her attention. Harriet looked up. Her mother was standing in the doorway now.

“I guess I can’t do anything right, can I?” she said.

She turned and left the room. It was not yet ten o’clock. The living room was still shady and cool; beyond, the depressing depths of the hallway. A faint, fruity trace of her mother’s perfume still hung in the dusty air.

Hangers jingled and rasped in the coat closet. Harriet stood where she was, and when, after several minutes, she heard her mother still scratching around out in the hall, she edged over to where the stray bullet lay and kicked it under the sofa. She sat down on the edge of Ida’s chair; she waited.
Finally, after a long time, she ventured out into the hall, and found her mother standing in the open door of the closet, refolding—not very neatly—some linens that she’d pulled down from the top shelf.

As if nothing at all had happened, her mother smiled. With a comical little sigh, she stepped back from the mess and said: “My goodness. Sometimes I think we should just pack up the car and move in with your father.”

She cut her eyes over at Harriet. “Hmn?” she said, brightly, as if she’d suggested some great treat. “What would you think about that?”

She’ll do what she wants
, Harriet thought, hopelessly.
It doesn’t matter what I say
.

“I don’t know about you,” said her mother, returning to her linens, “but I think it’s time for us to start acting more like a
family.
”

“Why?” said Harriet, after a confused pause. Her mother’s choice of words was alarming. Often, when Harriet’s father was about to issue some unreasonable order, he preceded it with the observation:
we need to start acting more like a family here
.

“Well, it’s just too much,” her mother said dreamily. “Raising two girls on my own.”

Harriet went upstairs and sat on her window seat and looked out her bedroom window. The streets were hot and empty. All day long, the clouds passed by. At four o’clock in the afternoon, she walked over to Edie’s house and sat on the front steps with her chin in her hands until Edie’s car rolled around the corner at five o’clock.

Harriet ran to meet her. Edie rapped on the window and smiled. Her navy suit was a little less sharp now, rumpled from the heat, and as she climbed out of the car her movements were creaky and slow. Harriet galloped along the walk beside her, up the steps and onto the porch, breathlessly explaining that her mother had proposed moving to Nashville—and was shocked when Edie only breathed deeply, and shook her head.

“Well,” she said, “maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

Harriet waited.

“If your mother wants to be married, she’s going to have to make a little effort, I’m afraid.” Edie stood still a moment, sighed—then turned the key in the door. “Things can’t continue like this.”

“But
why?
” wailed Harriet.

Edie stopped, closed her eyes, as if her head hurt. “He’s your father, Harriet.”

“But I don’t
like
him.”

“I don’t care for him either,” snapped Edie. “But if they’re going to stay married I reckon they should live in the same state, don’t you?”

“Dad doesn’t care,” said Harriet, after an appalled little pause. “
He
likes things just the way they are.”

Edie sniffed. “Yes, I suppose he does.”

“Won’t you miss me? If we move?”

“Sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way we think it ought to,” Edie said, as if relating some cheery but little-known fact. “When school starts …”

Where?
thought Harriet.
Here, or Tennessee?

“… you should throw yourself into your studies. That’ll take your mind off things.”

Soon she’ll be dead
, thought Harriet, staring at Edie’s hands, which were swollen at the knuckles, and speckled with chocolate-brown spots like a bird’s egg. Libby’s hands—though similar in shape—had been whiter and more slender, with the veins showing blue on the back.

She glanced up from her reverie, and was a bit shocked at Edie’s cold, speculative eyes observing her closely.

“You ought not to have quit your piano lessons,” she said.

“That was Allison!” Harriet was always horribly taken aback when Edie made mistakes like this. “I never took piano.”

“Well, you ought to start. You don’t have half enough to do, that’s your problem, Harriet. When I was your age,” said Edie, “I rode, and played violin, and made all my own clothes. If you learned how to sew, you might start taking a little more interest in your appearance.”

“Will you take me out to see Tribulation?” Harriet said suddenly.

Edie looked startled. “There’s nothing to see.”

“But will you take me to the place? Please? Where it was?”

Edie didn’t answer. She was gazing over Harriet’s shoulder with a rather blank look on her face. At the roar of a car accelerating in the street, Harriet glanced over her shoulder just in time to see a metallic flash vanish around the corner.

“Wrong house,” said Edie, and sneezed: ka
-choo
. “Thank goodness. No,” she said, blinking, fishing in her pocketbook for a tissue, “there’s not much to see out at Tribulation any more. The fellow that owns the land now is a chicken farmer, and he may not even let us up to look at the place where the house was.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a fat old rascal. Everything out there’s gone to pieces.” She patted Harriet on the back, distractedly. “Now run along home and let Edie get out of these high heels.”

“If they move to Nashville, can I stay here and live with you?”

“Why Harriet!” said Edie, after a shocked little pause. “Don’t you want to be with your mother and Allison?”

“
No
. Maam,” Harriet added, observing Edie closely.

But Edie only raised her eyebrows, as if amused. In her infuriating, chipper way, she said: “Oh, I expect you’d change your mind about that after a week or two!”

Tears rose to Harriet’s eyes. “No!” she cried, after a sullen, unsatisfying pause. “Why do you
always
say that? I
know
what I want, I
never
change my—”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we,” said Edie. “Just the other day I read something Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams when he was an old man, that most of the things he’d worried about in his life never came to pass. ‘How much pain have cost us the evils that never happened.’ Or something of the sort.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “If it’s any comfort, I think it’ll take a torpedo to get your mother out of that house, but that’s
my
opinion. Now run along,” she said to Harriet, who stood staring at her balefully, with red eyes.

————

As soon as he swung round the corner, Danny pulled over in front of the Presbyterian church. “Godamighty,” said Farish. He was breathing hard, through the nostrils. “Was that
her?
”

Danny—too high and overcome to speak—nodded his head. He could hear all kinds of small, frightening noises: trees breathing, wires singing, grass crackling as it grew.

Farish turned in his seat to look out the back window. “Damn it, I told you to look for that kid. You’re telling me this is the first time you’ve seen her?”

“Yes,” said Danny sharply. He was shaken by how suddenly the girl had jumped into view, at the uncomfortable tail end of his sight, just like she’d done at the water tower (though he couldn’t tell Farish about the water tower; he wasn’t supposed to
be
at the water tower). And now, on this roundabout circuit, going nowhere (
vary your route
, said Farish,
vary your travel times, keep checking your mirrors
) he’d turned the corner and seen—who but the girl? standing on a porch.

All kinds of echoes. Breathing shining stirring. A thousand mirrors glinted out of the treetops. Who was the old lady? As the car slowed, she’d met Danny’s gaze, had met it dead on for a confused and curious flash, and her eyes were exactly the same as the girl’s.… For a heartbeat, everything had dropped away.

“Go,” Farish had said, slapping the dash; and then, when they were around the corner, Danny had to pull the car over because he felt way too high, because something weird was going on, some whacking multi-level speed telepathy (escalators going up and up, disco balls revolving on every floor); they both sensed it, they didn’t even have to say a word and Danny could hardly even look at Farish because he knew they were both remembering the same exact damn freaky thing that had happened about six o’clock that morning: how (after being up all night) Farish had walked into the living room in undershorts, with a carton of milk, and at the same time a bearded cartoon character in undershorts holding a carton of milk had strode
out across the television set. Farish stopped; the character stopped.

Are you seeing this? said Farish.

Yes, said Danny. He was sweating. His eyes met Farish’s for an instant. When they looked back at the television, the picture had changed to something else.

Together they sat in the hot car, their hearts pounding almost audibly.

“Did you notice,” said Farish, suddenly, “how every single truck we seen on the way here was black?”

“What?”

“They’re moving something. Damn if I know what.”

Danny said nothing. Part of him knew it was bullshit, Farish’s paranoid talk, but another part knew that it meant something. Three times the previous night, an hour apart exactly, the phone had rung; and someone had hung up without talking. Then there was the spent rifle shell Farish had found on the windowsill of the laboratory. What was that about?

And now this: the girl again, the girl. The lush, sprinkled lawn of the Presbyterian church glowed blue-green in the shadows of the ornamental spruce: curvy brick walks, clipped boxwoods, everything as neat and twinkly as a toy train set.

“What I can’t figure out is who the hell she is,” said Farish, scrabbling in his pocket for the crank. “You shouldn’t have let her get away.”

“It was Eugene let her go, not me.” Danny gnawed on the inside of his mouth. No, it wasn’t his imagination: the girl had vanished off the face of the earth in the weeks after Gum’s accident, when he’d driven the town looking for her. But now: think of her, mention her and there she was, glowing at a distance with that black Chinese haircut and those spiteful eyes.

They each had a toot, which steadied them somewhat.

“Somebody,” said Danny, and inhaled, “
some
body has put that kid out to spy on us.” High as he was, he was sorry the instant he’d said it.