The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

Yet in many ways it seemed the only real thing that had happened in Charlotte’s life.

And sometimes, for a moment or two, she believed that Robin was upstairs and it was all a bad dream.

she had sobbed until her ribcage ached—because Robin wasn’t upstairs or any place he’d ever come back from again.

Some child in the neighborhood had a bicycle that sounded exactly like it and every time she heard it in the distance her heart vaulted up for a soaring, incredulous, gorgeously cruel moment.

Had he called for her? To think about his last moments was soul-destroying and yet she could think of nothing else. How long? Had he suffered?

Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin’s part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.

relatable

Frequently she spoke of her dead brother, with a strange, willful obstinacy which implied not only that she had known Robin but that he was still alive.

could not have been further from Harriet’s brooding and her lofty humorlessness,

if He loved everybody as much as He claimed to, why then did anybody ever die at all?

but if indeed He had rolled the stone away and stepped living from the grave why then not her brother,

Allison, in turn, lavished more affection on the cat than on any other living creature, including the members of her own family. She talked to it constantly, fed it pinches of chicken and ham from her own plate, and allowed it to sleep with its stomach draped over her throat at night.

It would never wholly leave her, the vertigo of this moment; it would be with her for the rest of her life,

but his unpredictable humors were not always so amusing in private,

He could whip her all he wanted; never mind. It was the principle of the thing.

When she was the only person awake in the dark, silent house, as she often was, the boredoms that settled over her were so dense, so glassy and confused, that sometimes she was unable to do anything but gape at a window or a wall, as if doped.

Sometimes, when Harriet was prowling the gloomy house late at night, she felt her dead brother draw close to her side, his silence friendly, confidential.

Even though he had come to her house in broad daylight, she was most afraid of the killer at night.

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.

“I only get bored when I’m awake.”

How could you ever be perfectly sure when you were dreaming and when you were awake? In dreams you thought you were awake, though you weren’t. And though it seemed to Allison that she was currently awake, sitting barefoot on her front porch with a coffee-stained library book on the steps beside her, that didn’t mean she wasn’t upstairs in bed, dreaming it all:

Yet (moment by painful moment, breath by painful breath) one got through things.

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.

sweet pea was not the kind of thing that people generally called Harriet.

What would he have looked like, grown up? There was no way of knowing.

Like a nasty hang-over, the vapors of the dream still pressed in on him low and poisonous. Terrible as it was, he could never quite remember the details when he woke up, no people or situations (although there was always at least one other person) but only the astonishment of being sucked into a blind, breathless emptiness: struggles, dark wingbeats, terror.

a dark lacquer of sadness had settled about the room, as it usually did whenever Harriet sat still long enough. When she was little, sometimes she had chanted to herself her address as it would appear to a visitor from outer space. Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, 363 George Street, Alexandria, Mississippi, America, Planet Earth, the Milky Way … and the sense of ringing vastness, of being swallowed by the black maw of the universe—only the tiniest white grain in a sprinkling of white sugar that went on forever—sometimes made her feel as if she were suffocating.

“This noise in my ears. It just goes on and on.”

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

The day she lost Ida would always be about those black wings gliding through cloudless sky, about shadowless pastures and air like dry glass.

Never had she been happy or content, exactly, but she was quite unprepared for the strange darks that lay ahead of her.

Sometimes, especially when the two of them were alone together, she sensed keenly her mother’s disappointment that she was herself and not Robin.

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.

Death, at least, was dignified: an end to dishonor and sorrow.

the tightness in her chest and the suffocating stuffiness of the air, the sensation of breathing an outer-space atmosphere not oxygen, but some empty gas. She had eaten no supper or breakfast; for much of the night, she had lain awake with her face pressed in the pillow and cried;

You can leave here. In your mind. Just go away. What was it Peter Pan said to Wendy? “Just close your eyes and think lovely thoughts.”

Without Ida, time dilated and sank into a vast, shimmering emptiness. Hours and days, and light and darkness, slid into each other unremarked; there was no difference any more between lunch and breakfast, week-end and week-day, dawn or dusk; and it was like living deep in a cave lit by artificial lights.

sometimes it felt uncomfortably as if Libby had been transformed from a person into a sort of sickly omnipresent gas, seeping through keyholes and under the door cracks.

But the unfairness of it made Harriet tremble. Did her mother listen when she wanted to talk?

And this was most excruciating of all when her mother tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

Beyond—through the rift in the sky—all was clarity: cold stars, infinite distance. It was like staring into a clear pool that seemed shallow, inches deep, but you might toss a coin in that glassy water and it would fall and fall, spiraling down forever without ever striking bottom.

“The trick,” he’d said in the movie, “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.

With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers—laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. “That’s Life.” That’s what they all said. “That’s Life, Harriet, that’s just how it is, you’ll see.”

different plans for Eugene, had had them all along—for Eugene was no speaker; he had no education, or gift for tongues, or easy rapport with his fellow man; even the mark on his face rendered him an unlikely messenger,

Danny Ratliff was the only person who’d really looked at her for a long time.

It was like he’d blown the fuse connecting his body with his brain.

It was all as still as a picture. Every blade of grass, every leaf on every tree seemed combed and oiled and slicked into place.

Something in Harriet snapped to, and she found herself in her body again, lying on her side; and it was like returning to a window that she’d walked away from, but to a different pane.

Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this.

Cot. The word had a comforting, nursery sound, like poppet, like cotton, like Harriet’s old baby nickname: Hottentot. She could almost taste it on her tongue, that round, sweet word: smooth and hard, dark like a malted milk ball.

Harriet fought hard to keep her eyes open. Immense skies weighed upon her, clouds rushing in a fabulous darkness. Harriet closed her eyes, and saw tree branches tossing, and before she knew it she was asleep.