The Little Friend

So she slept on top of the covers. The nights passed fitfully. Mosquitos bit her legs and whined about her ears. The early mornings were cool, and sometimes Harriet sat up foggily to reach for phantom bedclothes; when her hands closed on air, she fell back on the coverlet, with a plump, and—twitching like a terrier in her sleep—she dreamed. She dreamed of black swamp water with ice in it, and country paths she had to run down again and again with a splinter in her foot from being barefoot; of swimming upward through dark lakes, knocking her head against a sheet of metal that sealed her underwater, away from the surface air; of hiding under the bed at Edie’s house from some creepy presence—unseen—who called out to her in a low voice: “Did you leave something, missy? Did you leave me something?” In the morning she woke late and exhausted, red patterns from the bedspread stamped deep into her cheek. And even before she opened her eyes, she was afraid to move, and lay still in the breathless consciousness that she was waking to something wrong.

And so she was. The house was frighteningly dim and still. When she got out of bed and tiptoed to the window and pushed aside the curtain, it was with a sense of being the sole survivor of a terrible disaster. Monday: clothesline empty. How could it be Monday with no sheets and shirts snapping on the line? The shadow of the empty clothesline jangled across the dry grass. Downstairs she crept, down into the murky hall—for now that Ida was gone, there was no one to open the blinds in the morning (or to make coffee, or call “Good Morning, Baby!” or do any of the comforting little things that Ida did) and the house remained sunk for most of the day in a filtered, underwater gloom.

Underlying the vapid silence—a terrible silence, as if the world had ended and most of the people in it had died—was the painful awareness of Libby’s house shut up and vacant only a few streets away. Lawn unmowed, flower beds browned and sizzling with weeds; inside, the mirrors empty pools without reflection and the sunlight and the moonlight gliding indifferently through the rooms. How well Harriet knew Libby’s house in all its hours and moods and weathers—its winter dullness, when the hall was dim and the gas fire burned low; its stormy nights and days (rain streaming down purple windowpanes, shadows streaming down the opposite wall) and its blazing autumn afternoons, when Harriet sat in Libby’s kitchen tired and disconsolate after school, taking heart in Libby’s small talk, and basking in the glow of her kindly inquiries. All the books Libby had read aloud, a chapter each day after school: Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Ivanhoe. Sometimes the October light that flared up suddenly in the west windows on those afternoons was clinical, terrifying in its radiance, and its brilliance and chill seemed like a promise of something unbearable, like the inhuman glow of old memories recalled on a deathbed, all dreams and lurid farewells. But always, even in the most still, desolate lights (leaden tick of mantel clock, library book face down on the sofa) Libby herself shone pale and bright as she moved through the gloomy rooms, with her white head ruffled like a peony. Sometimes she sang to herself, and her reedy voice quavered sweetly in the high shadows of the tiled kitchen, over the fat hum of the Frigidaire:

The owl and the pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat

They took some honey and plenty of money

Wrapped up in a five-pound note.…