The Little Friend

Harriet could not speak. From the decrepit toolshed: a single weird, dry sob, as if of a choked creature. Harriet’s face constricted: not with disgust, or even embarrassment, but with some foreign, frightening emotion which made Hely step away from her as if she had an infectious disease.

“Uh,” he said, cruelly, looking over her head—clouds, an airplane trailing across the sky—“I think I have to go now.”

He waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t, he sauntered away—not his usual scurrying gait, but self-consciously, swinging his arms.

The gate snapped shut. Harriet stared furiously at the ground. The voices on the porch had risen sharply, and, with a dull pain, Harriet became aware of what they were talking about: Libby’s will. “Where it is?” Odean was saying.

“Don’t worry, that’ll all be taken care of soon enough,” said Edie, taking Odean’s arm as if to guide her inside. “The will’s in her safe-deposit box. On Monday morning I’ll go with the lawyer—”

“I aint trust n’an lawyer,” Odean said fiercely. “Miss Lib made me a promise. She told me, she say, Odean, if anything happen, look there in my cedar chest. There’s an envelope in there for you. You just go on and do it and don’t ast nobody.”

“Odean, we haven’t touched any of her things. On Monday—”

“The Lord knows what went on,” said Odean haughtily. “He knows it, and I know it. Yes, maam, I surely do know what Miss Libby told me.”

“You know Mr. Billy Wentworth, don’t you?” Edie’s voice jocular, as if speaking to a child, but with a hoarseness that edged on something terrifying. “Don’t tell me that you don’t trust Mr. Billy, Odean! That’s in practice with his son-in-law down there on the square?”

“Alls I want is what’s coming to me.”

The garden glider was rusted. Moss swelled velvety between the cracked bricks. Harriet, with a kind of desperate, clenching effort, fixed the whole of her attention upon a battered conch shell lying at the base of a garden urn.

Edie said: “Odean, I’m not disputing that. You’ll get what’s legally yours. As soon as—”

“I don’t know about any legal. Alls I know is what’s right.”

The conch was chalky with age, weathered to a texture like crumbly plaster; its apex had broken off; at the inner lip, it sank into a pearly flush, the delicate silvery-pink of Edie’s old Maiden’s Blush roses. Before Harriet was born, the whole family had vacationed on the Gulf every year; after Robin died, they never went back. Jars of tiny gray bivalves collected on those old trips sat on high shelves in the aunts’ closets, dusty and sad. “They lose their magic when they’ve been out of the water a while,” Libby said: and she’d run the bathroom sink full of water, poured the shells in and pulled over a step-stool for Harriet to stand on (she’d been tiny, around three, and how gigantic and white the sink had seemed!). And how surprised she had been to see that uniform gray washed bright and slick and magical, broken into a thousand tinkling colors: empurpled here, soaked there to mussel-black, fanned into ribs and spiraling into delicate polychrome whorls: silver, marble-blue, coral and pearly green and rose! How cold and clear was the water: her own hands, cut off at the wrist, icy-pink and tender! “Smell!” said Libby, breathing deep. “That’s what the ocean smells like!” And Harriet put her face close to the water and smelled the stiff tang of an ocean she had never seen; the salt smell that Jim Hawkins spoke of in Treasure Island. Crash of the surf; scream of strange birds and the white sails of the Hispaniola—like the white pages of a book—billowing against cloudless hot skies.

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.

But it was a dream of life past, not life to come. Life present: rusty magnolia leaves, lichen-crusted flowerpots, the hum of bees steady in the hot afternoon and the faceless murmurs of the funeral guests. Mud and slimy grass, under the cracked garden brick she’d kicked aside. Harriet studied the ugly spot on the ground with great attention, as if it were the one true thing in the world—which, in a way, it was.

CHAPTER

7

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The Tower