The Little Friend

“Why do you want to torture me like this?”

Harriet turned from the chalk portrait to stare back into the same face, much older, in a vaguely unnatural-looking way which suggested that it had been reconstructed after some terrible accident.

“Why?” screamed her mother. “Do you want to drive me crazy?”

A tingle of alarm prickled at Harriet’s scalp. Every so often Harriet’s mother behaved oddly, or got confused and upset, but not like this. It was only seven o’clock; in the summer, Harriet often stayed out playing past ten and her mother didn’t even notice.

Allison was standing at the foot of the stairs, with one hand on the tulip-shaped knob of the newel post.

“Allison?” Harriet asked, rather gruffly. “What’s the matter with Mama?”

Harriet’s mother slapped her. Though it didn’t hurt much, it made a lot of noise. Harriet put a hand to her cheek and stared at her mother, who was breathing fast, in odd little huffs.

“Mama? What did I do?” She was too shocked to cry. “If you were worried, why didn’t you call Hely?”

“I can’t be calling over at the Hulls and rousing the whole house at this hour of the morning!”

Allison, at the foot of the stairs, looked as stunned as Harriet felt. For some reason, Harriet suspected that she was at the bottom of the misunderstanding, whatever it was.

“You did something,” she roared. “What did you tell her?”

But Allison’s eyes—round, incredulous—were fastened on their mother. “Mama?” she said. “What do you mean, ‘morning’?”

Charlotte, a hand on the banister, looked stricken.

“It’s night. Tuesday night,” said Allison.

Charlotte was dead-still for a moment, eyes wide and her mouth slightly parted. Then she ran down the stairs—her heel-less slippers slapping loudly—and looked out the window by the front door.

“Oh, my word,” she said, leaning forward, both hands on the sill. She unsnapped the deadbolt; she stepped onto the front porch in the twilight. Very slowly—like she was dreaming—she walked to a rocking chair and sat down.

“Heavens,” she said. “You’re right. I woke up and the clock said six-thirty and, so help me, I thought it was six in the morning.”

For a while, there was no sound at all except the crickets, and the voices from up the street. The Godfreys had company: an unfamiliar white car stood in the driveway, and a station wagon was pulled along the curb in front. Wisps of smoke from the barbecue grill rose in the yellowy light on their back porch.

Charlotte looked up at Harriet. Her face was sweaty, too white, and the pupils of her eyes so huge and black and swallowing that the irises were shrunk to nothing, blue coronas glowing at the edges of eclipsed moons.

“Harriet, I thought you’d been gone all night.…” She was clammy and gasping, as if half-drowned. “Oh, baby. I thought you were kidnapped or dead. Mama had a bad dream and—oh, dear God. I hit you.” She put her hands over her face and started to cry.

“Come inside, Mama,” said Allison, quietly. “Please.” It wouldn’t do for the Godfreys or Mrs. Fountain to see their mother crying on the front porch in her nightgown.

“Harriet, come here. How can you ever forgive me? Mama’s crazy,” she sobbed, wetly, into Harriet’s hair. “I’m so sorry.…”

Harriet, squashed against her mother’s chest at an uncomfortable angle, tried not to squirm. She felt suffocated. Up above, as if from a distance, her mother wept and coughed with muffled hacking sounds, like a shipwreck victim washed up on a beach. The pink fabric of the nightgown, pressed against Harriet’s cheek, was so magnified that it didn’t even look like cloth, but a technical cross-hatch of coarse, ropy skeins. It was interesting. Harriet shut the eye against her mother’s breast. The pink vanished. Both eyes open: back it popped. She experimented with alternate winks, watching the optical illusion leap back and forth until a fat tear—inordinately huge—dripped onto the cloth and spread in a crimson stain.

Suddenly her mother caught her by the shoulders. Her face was shiny, and smelled of cold-cream; her eyes were inky black, and alien, like the eyes of a nurse shark that Harriet had seen in an aquarium on the Gulf Coast.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.

Once more, Harriet found herself crushed to the front of her mother’s nightgown. Concentrate, she told herself. If she thought hard enough, she could be somewhere else.

A parallelogram of light slanted onto the front porch. The front door stood ajar. “Mama?” she heard Allison say, very faintly. “Please.…”