The Little Friend

She sat on the steps, chin in hands. If Weenie hadn’t died he’d be purring beside her, his ears flattened against his skull and his tail curled like a hook around her bare ankle, his eyes slitted across the dark lawn at the restless, echo-ranging world of night creatures that was invisible to her: snail-trails and cobwebs, glassy-winged flies, beetles and field mice and all the little wordless things struggling in squeaks or chirps or silence. Their small world, she felt, was her true home, the secret dark of speechlessness and frantic heartbeats.

Fast ragged clouds blew across a full moon. The black-gum tree tingled in the breeze, the undersides of its leaves ruffling pale in the darkness.

Allison remembered almost nothing from the days after Robin died, but one strange thing she did remember was climbing up the tree as high as she could, and jumping from it again and again. The fall usually knocked the air out of her. As soon as the shock jangled away, she dusted herself off and climbed up and jumped again. Thud. Over and over. She’d had a dream where she did the same thing, except in the dream she didn’t hit the ground. Instead, a warm wind caught her up from the grass and swept her up into the air and she was flying, bare toes brushing the treetops. Falling fast from the sky, like a swallow, skimming the lawn for twenty feet or so and then up again, twirling and soaring into air and giddy space. But she was little then, she hadn’t understood the difference between dreams and life, and this was why she’d kept jumping from the tree. If she jumped enough times, she hoped, maybe the warm wind from her dream would gust beneath her and lift her up into the sky. But of course that never happened. Poised on the high branch, she’d hear Ida Rhew’s wail from the porch, see Ida running towards her, panic-stricken. And Allison would smile and step off anyway, with Ida’s despairing scream shivering delicious in the pit of her stomach as she fell. She’d jumped so many times she’d broken down the arches in her feet; it was a wonder she hadn’t broken her neck.

The night air was warm, and the moth-pale gardenia blossoms by the porch had a rich, warm, boozy smell. Allison yawned. 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.

Repeatedly, during the day, as she drifted around her own house or through the chilly, antiseptic-smelling halls of her high school with her books in her arms, she asked herself: Am I awake or asleep? How did I get here?

Often, when startled all of a sudden to find herself (say) in biology class (insects on pins, red-haired Mr. Peel going on about the interphase of cell division), she could tell if she was dreaming or not by following back the spool of memory. How did I get here? she would think, dazed. What had she eaten for breakfast? Had Edie driven her to school, was there a progression of events which had brought her somehow to these dark-panelled walls, this morning classroom? Or had she been somewhere else a moment before—on a lonely dirt road, in her own yard, with a yellow sky and a white thing like a sheet billowing out against it?

She would think about it, hard, and then decide that she wasn’t dreaming. Because the wall clock said nine-fifteen, which was when her biology class met; and because she was still seated in alphabetical order, with Maggie Dalton in front and Richard Echols behind; and because the styrofoam board with the pinned insects was still hung on the rear wall—powdery luna moth in the center—between a poster of the feline skeleton and another of the central nervous system.

Yet sometimes—at home, mostly—Allison was disturbed to notice tiny flaws and snags in the thread of reality, for which there was no logical explanation. The roses were the wrong color: red not white. The clothesline wasn’t where it was supposed to be, but where it was before the storm blew it down five years ago. The switch of a lamp ever so slightly different, or in the wrong place. In family photographs or familiar paintings, mysterious background figures that she’d never noticed before. Frightening reflections in a parlor mirror behind the sweet family scene. A hand waving from an open window.

Why no, her mother or Ida would say when Allison pointed out these things. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s always been that way

.

What way? She didn’t know. Sleeping or waking, the world was a slippery game: fluid stage sets, drift and echo, reflected light. And all of it sifting like salt between her numbed fingers.

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