The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

shadows slid across it, and then she lay awake and stared at the

Strong as the Cleves’ revisionist instincts were, there was no plot to be imposed on these fragments, no logic to be inferred, no lesson in hindsight, no moral to this story.

wobbled slightly—a fitful, capricious, breathing child. But this clarity was deceptive, lending treacherous verisimilitude to what was largely a fabular whole, for in other places the story was worn nearly transparent, radiant but oddly featureless, as the lives of saints sometimes are.

and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature

Robin’s part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.

It was true. Harriet had never cried or given anyone a moment of trouble before she had learned how to talk.

Girl same

Like the woodcutter’s child at the beginning of a fairy tale, a mysterious longing had possessed her, a desire to travel far and do great things; and though she could not say exactly what it was she wanted to do, she knew that it was something grand and gloomy and extremely difficult.

were as sweetly oblivious as Edie herself to the exhausted, hollow-eyed guardian angel who hovered with lowered wings above the Oldsmobile, averting fireball collisions at every turn.

snail-trails and cobwebs, glassy-winged flies, beetles and field mice and all the little wordless things struggling in squeaks or chirps or silence. Their small world, she felt, was her true home, the secret dark of speechlessness and frantic heartbeats.

favorite daydream was that he and Harriet lived by themselves like grown-ups in a little shack down by the river. The idea entertained him for hours. Dirty faces and leaves in their hair. Building campfires. Catching frogs and mud turtles. Harriet’s eyes ferocious when they

She did not care for children’s books in which the children grew up, as what “growing up” entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.

Mowgli was a boy; but he was also a wolf. And she was herself—Harriet—but partly something else.

“If it’s miracles everywhere, what’s the point?”

His tiny red eyes were the steady eyes of a god: here were jungles, cruelty, revolts and ceremonies, wisdom. On the back of his spread hood, she knew, was the spectacle mark which the great god Brahm had put on all the cobra’s people when the first cobra rose

up and opened his hood to shelter Brahm as he slept.

“The future must suck, huh?” said Hely.

“It’s awful being a child,” she said, simply, “at the mercy of other people.”

All my life, she thought, I will remember this day, how I feel. Over the hill, out of sight, a farm machine droned monotonously. Above it sailed three buzzards like black paper kites. The day she lost Ida would always be about those black wings gliding through cloudless sky, about shadowless pastures and air like dry glass.

obscenity, right down to the sweat on the hot dogs. Worse: Harriet felt as though one of the gruesome transparencies of “Your Developing Body”—all womb, and tubes, and mammaries—had been projected over her poor dumb body; as if all anybody saw when they looked at her—even with her clothes on—were organs and genitalia and hair in unseemly places.

Amongst all the large white people in their Sunday finery, she looked very small and drab: a lone wren in a flock of starlings.

Death—they all said—was a happy shore. In the old seaside photographs, her family was young again, and Robin stood among them: boats and white handkerchiefs, sea-birds lifting into light. It was a dream where everybody was saved.

its harsh way it calmed her and concentrated her thoughts. By the time this stops hurting, she’d said to herself, by the time it heals, I won’t feel so bad about Libby.

“is not to mind that it hurts.” In the vast and ingenious scheme of suffering, as Harriet was now beginning to understand it, this was a trick well worth learning.

The boat’s sunk, she told herself—imagining herself shipwrecked, adrift in blood-warm immensities. Oddly, it was a comfortable thought. No one’s coming to rescue me.

you’ll see.” Well: Harriet would not see. She was young still, and the chains had not yet grown tight around her ankles.

been so long without sleep that when he closed his eyes, he was in a place with weeds and dark lakes, wrecked skiffs awash in scummy water. There she was, with her moth-white face and her crow-black hair, whispering something in the moist cicada-shrieking gloom, something he almost understood but couldn’t quite.…