The Little Friend

“Life goes on.” It was one of Edie’s favorite sayings. It was a lie. These were the days when Charlotte still woke in a drugged delirium to get her dead son up for school, when she started from bed five and six times a night calling his name. And sometimes, for a moment or two, she believed that Robin was upstairs and it was all a bad dream. But when her eyes adjusted to the dark, and the hideous despairing litter (tissues, pill bottles, dead flower petals) strewn across the bed table, she began to sob again—though she had sobbed until her ribcage ached—because Robin wasn’t upstairs or any place he’d ever come back from again.

He’d stuck cards in the spokes of his bicycle. Though she hadn’t realized it when he was alive, it was by their rattle that she’d kept track of his comings and goings. Some child in the neighborhood had a bicycle that sounded exactly like it and every time she heard it in the distance her heart vaulted up for a soaring, incredulous, gorgeously cruel moment.

Had he called for her? To think about his last moments was soul-destroying and yet she could think of nothing else. How long? Had he suffered? All day long she stared at the bedroom ceiling until the shadows slid across it, and then she lay awake and stared at the glow of the luminescent clock-dial in the darkness.

“You’re not doing anybody in the world any good lying in the bed crying all day,” said Edie briskly. “You’d feel a lot better if you put on some clothes and went and had your hair fixed.”

In dreams he was evasive and distant, withholding something. She longed for some word from him but he never met her eyes, never spoke. Libby, in the worst days, had murmured something to her over and over again, something that she hadn’t understood. We were never meant to have him, darling. He wasn’t ours to keep. We were lucky he was with us for as long as he was.

And this was the thought that came to Charlotte, through a narcotic fog, that hot morning in the shuttered room. That what Libby had told her was the truth. And that, in some strange way or other, ever since he was just a baby, Robin had been trying to say goodbye to her all his life.

————

Edie was the last person to see him. No one was too clear after that. As her family talked in the living room—longer silences now, everyone glancing around pleasantly, waiting for the call to go to table—Charlotte was on her hands and knees rummaging through the dining-room buffet for her good linen napkins (she’d come in to find the table set with everyday cotton; Ida—typically—claimed never to have heard of the others, said the checked picnic napkins were the only ones she could find). Charlotte had just found the good napkins, and was about to call out to Ida (see? right where I said they were) when she was struck by the conviction that something was wrong.

The baby. It was her first instinct. She jumped up, letting the napkins fall on the rug, and ran out onto the porch.

But Harriet was fine. Still strapped in her swing, she stared at her mother with big grave eyes. Allison sat on the sidewalk, thumb in mouth. She was rocking back and forth, making a wasplike, humming sound—unharmed, apparently, but Charlotte saw that she’d been crying.

What’s the matter? said Charlotte. Did you hurt yourself?

But Allison, thumb still in mouth, shook her head no.

From the corner of her eye, Charlotte saw a flash of movement at the yard’s edge—Robin? But when she looked up, nobody was there.

Are you sure? she said to Allison. Did the kitty scratch you?

Allison shook her head no. Charlotte knelt and checked her over quickly; no bumps, no bruises. The cat had disappeared.

Still uneasy, Charlotte kissed Allison on the forehead and led her into the house (“Why don’t you go see what Ida’s doing in the kitchen, honey?”) and then went back out for the baby. She had felt these dreamlike flashes of panic before, usually in the middle of the night and always when a child was less than six months old, bolting upright from a sound sleep to rush to the crib. But Allison wasn’t hurt, and the baby was fine.… She went into the living room and deposited Harriet with her aunt Adelaide, picked up the napkins on the dining-room rug, and—still half-sleepwalking, she didn’t know why—trailed into the kitchen to get the baby’s jar of apricots.

Her husband, Dix, had said not to wait supper. He was out duck-hunting. That was fine. When Dix wasn’t at the bank, he was usually out hunting or over at his mother’s house. She pushed open the kitchen doors and dragged a stool over to get the baby’s apricots from the cabinet. Ida Rhew was bending low, pulling a pan of rolls from the oven. God, sang a cracking Negro voice from the transistor radio. God don’t never change.