The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

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: porch, gardenias, everything.

Even if I don’t find out who killed him, she thought, at least I’ll find out how it happened. She also had the name of her first suspect. The very act of writing it down made her realize how easy it would be to forget, how important it would be from now on to put everything, everything, down on paper.

“I don’t understand what is all this business about blondes. Blondes have more fun and all that. I think that’s something people dreamed up on the television. Most natural blondes have weak features and they look washed-out and rabbity unless they take a lot of pains to fix themselves up. Look at this poor girl. Look at that one. She has a face like a sheep.”

For a long time, she studied the picture. She would never know what Robin’s voice had sounded like, but she had loved his face all her life, and had followed its modulations tenderly throughout a fading trail of snapshots: random moments, miracles of ordinary light. What would he have looked like, grown up? There was no way of knowing.

Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn’t take her back—not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days. And that was tough, as Hely would say. Tough: since back was the way she wanted to go, since the past was the only place she wanted to be.

Later, when Harriet remembered that day, it would seem the exact, crystalline, scientific point where her life had swerved into misery. Never had she been happy or content, exactly, but she was quite unprepared for the strange darks that lay ahead of her. For the rest of her life, Harriet would remember with a wince that she hadn’t been brave enough to stay for one last afternoon—the very last one!—to sit at the foot of Ida’s chair with her head on Ida’s knees.

A whole new ugly kind of life was settling about Harriet, there in the dark hallway at the telephone-table; and though it felt new to her then, it would come to seem horribly familiar in the weeks ahead.

She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.

Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she’d wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she’d known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.