The Little Friend (82 page)

————

In the bath, Harriet drank more water from the cold tap, washed her clothes and washed herself. She drained the tub; she scrubbed it with Comet; she rinsed out the slime and grit and climbed in again to rinse herself. But the dark odor of decay had soaked her through and through, so that even after all the soap and water she still felt pickled and drenched in foulness, discolored, wretched, hanging her head with it, like an oil-soaked penguin she’d seen in a
National Geographic
magazine over at Edie’s house, standing miserably in a wash pail, holding its little greasy flippers out to the side to keep them from touching its befouled body.

Harriet drained the tub again, and scrubbed it; she wrung out her dripping clothes and hung them to dry. She sprayed Lysol; she sprayed herself with a dusty bottle of green cologne that had a flamenco dancer on the label. She was clean and pink now, dizzy with the heat, but just beneath the perfume, the moisture in the steamy bathroom was still heavy with the suggestion of rot, the same ripe flavor that lay heavy on her tongue.

More mouthwash, she thought—and, without warning, another noisome spout of clear vomit came up, pouring out of her mouth in a ridiculous flood.

When it was over, Harriet lay on the cold floor, cheek against sea-green tile. As soon as she was able to stand she dragged herself to the sink and cleaned up with a washrag. Then she wrapped herself in a towel and crept upstairs to her room.

She was so sick, so giddy and tired that—before she’d
realized what she’d done—she’d pulled down the covers and climbed into bed, the bed she hadn’t slept in for weeks. But it felt so heavenly that she didn’t care; and—despite the griping pains in her stomach—she fell into heavy sleep.

————

She was awakened by her mother. It was twilight. Harriet’s stomach ached, and her eyes felt scratchy like when she’d had the pink-eye.

“What?” she said raising herself heavily on her elbows.

“I said, are you sick?”

“I don’t know.”

Harriet’s mother bent close to feel her forehead, then knitted her eyebrows and drew back. “What’s that smell?” When Harriet didn’t answer, she leaned forward and sniffed her neck suspiciously.

“Did you put on some of that green cologne?” she said.

“No, maam.” Lying a habit now: best now, when in doubt, always to say
no
.

“That stuff’s no good.” Harriet’s father had given it to Harriet’s mother for Christmas, the lime-green perfume with the flamenco dancer; it had sat on the shelf, unused, for years, a fixture of Harriet’s childhood. “If you want some perfume, I’ll get you a little bottle of Chanel No. 5 at the drugstore. Or Norell—that’s what Mother wears. I don’t care for Norell myself, it’s a little strong …”

Harriet closed her eyes. Sitting up had made her feel sick to her stomach all over again. Scarcely had she laid her head on the pillow than her mother was back again, this time with a glass of water and an aspirin.

“Maybe you’d better have a can of broth,” she said. “I’ll call Mother and see if she has any.”

While she was gone, Harriet climbed out of bed and—wrapping herself in the scratchy crochet afghan—trailed down the hall to the bathroom. The floor was cold, and so was the toilet seat. Vomit (a little) gave way to diarrhea (a lot). Washing up at the sink afterwards, she was shocked to see in the medicine-cabinet mirror how red her eyes were.

Shivering, she crept back to her bed. Though the covers were heavy on her limbs, they didn’t feel very warm.

Then her mother was shaking down the thermometer. “Here,” she said, “open your mouth,” and she stuck it in.

Harriet lay looking at the ceiling. Her stomach boiled; the swampy taste of the water still haunted her. She fell into a dream where a nurse who looked like Mrs. Dorrier from the health service was explaining to her that she’d been bitten by a poisonous spider, and that a blood transfusion would save her life.

It was me, Harriet said. I killed him.

Mrs. Dorrier and some other people were setting up equipment for the transfusion. Someone said: She’s ready now.

I don’t want it, Harriet said. Leave me alone.

All right, said Mrs. Dorrier and left. Harriet was uneasy. There were some other ladies lingering around, smiling at Harriet and whispering, but none of them offered any help or questioned Harriet about her decision to die, even though she slightly wanted them to.

“Harriet?” said her mother—and with a jolt, she sat up. The bedroom was dark; the thermometer was gone from her mouth.

“Here,” Harriet’s mother was saying. The meaty-smelling steam from the cup was ripe and sickening.

Harriet said, smearing her hand over her face: “I don’t want it.”

“Please, darling!” Fretfully, Harriet’s mother pushed the punch cup at her. It was ruby glass, and Harriet loved it; one afternoon, quite by surprise, Libby had taken it from her china cabinet and wrapped it up in some newspaper and given it to Harriet to take home with her, because she knew that Harriet loved it so. Now, in the dim room it glowed black, with one sinister ruby spark at the heart.

“No,” said Harriet, turning her head from the cup continually nudging at her face, “no, no.”

“
Harriet!
” It was the old debutante snap, thin-skinned and tetchy, a petulance that brooked no argument.

There it was again, under her nose. There was nothing for
Harriet to do but sit up and take it. Down she gulped it, the meaty sickening liquid, trying not to gag. When she was done, she wiped her mouth with the paper napkin that her mother offered—and then, without warning, up it came again,
glub
, all over the coverlet, parsley snips and everything.

Harriet’s mother let out a little yelp. Her crossness made her look strangely young, like a sulky babysitter on a bad night.

“I’m sorry,” Harriet said miserably. The slop smelled like swamp water with chicken broth mixed into it.

“Oh, darling, what a mess. No, don’t—” said Charlotte, with a panicky catch in her voice as Harriet—overcome with exhaustion—attempted to lie back down in the mess.

Then something very strange and sudden happened. A strong light from overhead blared in Harriet’s face. It was the cut-glass ceiling fixture in the hall. With amazement, Harriet realized that she wasn’t in her bed, or even in her bedroom, but lying on the floor in the upstairs hall in a narrow passage between some stacked newspapers. Strangest of all, Edie knelt beside her, with a grim, pale set to her face and no lipstick.

Harriet—wholly disoriented—put an arm up and rolled her head from side to side, and as she did it, her mother swooped down, crying loudly. Edie flung out an arm to bar her. “Let her breathe!”

Harriet lay on the hardwood floor, marveling. Besides the wonder of being in a different place, the first thought that struck her was that her head and neck hurt:
really
hurt. The second was that Edie wasn’t supposed to be upstairs. Harriet couldn’t even remember the last time Edie had been inside the house beyond the front hall (which was kept relatively clean, for benefit of visitors).

How did I get here? she asked Edie, but it didn’t come out quite the way it was supposed to (her thoughts were all jumbled and crunched together) and she swallowed and tried again.

Edie shushed her. She helped Harriet to sit up—and Harriet, looking down at her arms and legs, noticed with a strange thrill that she was wearing different clothes.

Why are my clothes different? she tried to ask—but that
didn’t come out right either. Gamely, she chewed over the sentence.

“Hush,” said Edie, putting a finger to Harriet’s lips. To Harriet’s mother (weeping in the background, Allison standing behind, hunted-looking, biting her fingers) she said: “How long did it last?”

“I don’t know,” said Harriet’s mother, clutching her temples.

“Charlotte, it’s
important
, she’s had a
seizure.
”

————

The hospital waiting room was unstable and shimmery like a dream. Everything was too bright—sparkling clean, on the surface—but the chairs were worn and grubby if you looked too close. Allison was reading a raggedy children’s magazine and a pair of official-looking ladies with nametags were trying to talk to a slack-faced old man across the aisle. He was slumped forward heavily in his chair as if drunk, staring at the floor, his hands between his knees and his jaunty, Tyrolean-looking hat tipped down over one eye. “Well, you can’t tell her a thing,” he was saying, shaking his head, “she won’t slow down for the world.”

The ladies looked at each other. One of them sat down beside the old man.

Then it was dark and Harriet was walking alone, in a strange town with tall buildings. She had to take some books back to the library, before it closed, but the streets got narrower and narrower until finally they were only a foot wide and she found herself standing in front of a large pile of stones.
I need to find a telephone
, she thought.

“Harriet?”

It was Edie. She was standing up now. A nurse had emerged from a swinging door in the back, pushing an empty wheelchair before her.

She was a young nurse, plump and pretty, with black mascara and eyeliner drawn in fanciful wings and lots and lots of rouge, ringing the outer edge of her eye socket, a rosy semicircle from cheekbone to browbone—and it made her look (thought Harriet) like pictures of the painted singers in the
Peking opera. Rainy afternoons at Tatty’s house, lying on the floor with
Kabuki Theatre of Japan
and
Illustrated Marco Polo of 1880
. Kublai Khan on a painted palanquin, ah, masks and dragons, gilt pages and tissue paper, all Japan and China in the narrow Mission book-case at the foot of the stair!

Down the bright hall they floated. The tower, the body in the water had already faded into a kind of distant dream, nothing left of it but her stomach ache (which was fierce, spikes of pain that stabbed and receded) and the terrible pain in her head. The water was what had made her sick and she knew that she needed to tell them, they needed to know so they could make her better but
I mustn’t tell
, she thought,
I can’t
.

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.