The Little Friend

EdieEdieEdieEdieEdie! Even her father and her sisters called her Edith, but Edie was the name he’d given her when he was barely old enough to talk, running madcap across the lawn, screaming with delight. Once, when Robin was about four, he had called her, in all seriousness, old girl. “Poor old girl,” he’d said, grave as an owl, patting her forehead with his small, freckled hand. Charlotte would never have dreamed of being so familiar with her sharp, businesslike mother, certainly not when she was lying down in her bedroom with a headache, but the incident amused Edie greatly and now it had become one of her favorite stories. Her hair was gray by the time he was born, but when she was young it had been as bright-penny red as Robin’s own: For Robin Redbreast or My Own Red Robin, she wrote on the tags to his birthday and Christmas gifts. With love from your poor old girl.

EdieEdieEdieEdieEdie! He was nine years old, but it was a family joke now, his traditional greeting, his love song to her; and he sang it out across the yard just as he always did, as she stepped out upon the porch on that last afternoon she ever saw him.

“Come give the old girl a kiss,” she called to him. But though he usually liked having his picture made, sometimes he was skittish about it—came out a red-headed blur, sharp elbows and kneecaps scrambling to get away—and when he saw the camera around Edie’s neck he was off and hiccuping with laughter.

“Come back to me, you scamp!” she called, and then, on impulse, she’d raised the camera and snapped it at him anyway. It was the last picture that they had of him. Out of focus. Flat expanse of green cut at a slight diagonal, with a white rail and the heaving gloss of a gardenia bush sharp in the foreground at the edge of the porch. Murky, storm-damp sky, shifting liquescence of indigo and slate, boiling clouds rayed with spokes of light. In the corner of the frame a blurred shadow of Robin, his back to the viewer, ran out across the hazy lawn to meet his death, which stood waiting for him—almost visible—in the dark place beneath the tupelo tree.

————

Days later, lying in the shuttered room, a thought had flickered across Charlotte’s mind beneath a mist of pills. Whenever Robin was going anywhere—to school, to a friend’s house, to spend the afternoon with Edie—it had always been important to him to say goodbye, in tender and frequently quite prolonged and ceremonious ways. She had a thousand memories of little notes he’d written, kisses blown from windows, his small hand chattering up and down at her from the backseats of departing cars: goodbye! goodbye! When he was a baby, he’d learned bye-bye long before hello; it was his way of greeting people as well as leaving them. It seemed particularly cruel to Charlotte that there had been no goodbye this time. She had been so distracted that she had no very clear recollection of the last words she’d exchanged with Robin, or even of the last time she’d seen him, when what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her—sightless now, stumbling—through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life. Half-mad with pain and sleeplessness, she’d babbled on and on to Libby (it was Aunt Libby who had got her through that time, Libby with her cool cloths and her aspics, Libby who had stayed awake with her all night for nights and nights, Libby who had never left her side, Libby who had saved her); for neither her husband nor anyone else was able to offer her the flimsiest solace; and though her own mother (who to outsiders appeared to be “taking things well”) was unchanged in her habits and her appearance, still going bravely about the business of the day, Edie would never be the same again. Grief had turned her into stone. It was a terrible thing to see. “Get out of that bed, Charlotte!” she would bark, throwing open the shutters; “here, have some coffee, brush your hair, you can’t lie around forever like this”; and even innocent old Libby shuddered sometimes at the brilliant coldness of Edie’s gaze as she turned from the window to regard her daughter lying still in the dark bedroom: ferocious, pitiless as Arcturus.