by Donna Tartt
The doctor stopped, for half a second, and looked at Curtis. Then he snapped: “Epinephrine.” A nurse hastened away. To another nurse, he snapped: “Why hasn’t Mrs. Ratliff been sedated yet?”
And somehow, in the middle of all the confusion—orderlies, a shot in the arm for Curtis (“here, honey, this’ll make you feel better right away”) and a pair of nurses converging on his grandmother—there was the cop again.
“Listen,” he was saying, palms in the air, “you just do what you have to.”
“What?” said Eugene, looking around.
“I’ll be waiting for you out here.” He nodded. “Because I think it’ll speed things up if you come on down to the station with me. Whenever you’re ready.”
Eugene looked around. Things hadn’t sunk in yet; it was like he was seeing everything through a cloud. His grandmother had grown quiet and was being shuffled away down the cold gray hall between a pair of nurses. Curtis was rubbing his arm—but, miraculously, his wheezing and choking had quieted. He showed Eugene the stuffed animal—a rabbit, it looked like.
“Mine!” he said, rubbing his swollen eyes with his fist.
The cop was still looking at Eugene as if expecting him to say something.
“My little brother,” he said, wiping a hand over his face. “He’s retarded. I can’t just leave him here by himself.”
“Well, bring him along,” said the cop. “I’ll bet we can find a candy bar for him.”
“Honey?” said Eugene—and was knocked backwards by Curtis rushing towards him. He threw his arms around Eugene and mashed his damp face in Eugene’s shirt.
“Love,” he said, in a muffled voice.
“Well, Curtis,” said Eugene, patting him awkwardly on the back, “well there, stop it now, I love you too.”
“They’re sweet things, aint they?” said the cop indulgently. “My sister had one of those Down’s syndromes. Didn’t live past his fifteenth birthday, but my Lord we all loved him. That’s the saddest funeral I’ve ever been to.”
Eugene made an indistinct noise. Curtis suffered from numerous illnesses, some of them serious, and this was the last thing he wanted to think about right now. He realized that what he actually needed to do was to ask somebody if he could see Farish’s body, spend a few minutes alone with it, say a little prayer. Farish had never seemed too concerned with his destiny after death (or his destiny on earth, for that matter) but that didn’t mean he hadn’t received grace at the last. After all: God had smiled unexpectedly on Farish before. When he’d shot himself in the head, after the bulldozer incident, and the doctors all said the machines were the only thing keeping him alive, he’d surprised them all by rising up like Lazarus. How many men had woken almost literally from the dead, sitting up suddenly amidst the life-support machines, asking for mashed potatoes? Would God pluck a soul so dramatically from the grave, just to cast it down to damnation? If he could see the body—look upon it with his own eyes—he felt he would know the state in which Farish had passed away.
“I want to see my brother, before they take him away,” he said. “I’m going to find the doctor.”
The cop nodded. Eugene turned to walk away, but Curtis—in a sudden panic—clutched his wrist.
“You can leave him out here with me, if you want,” said the cop. “I’ll look after him.”
“No,” said Eugene, “no, that’s fine, he can come, too.”
The cop looked at Curtis; he shook his head. “When something like this happens, it’s a blessing for them,” he said. “Not understanding, I mean.”
“Don’t none of us understand it,” said Eugene.
————
The medicine they gave Harriet made her sleepy. Presently, there was a knock outside her door: Tatty. “Darling!” she cried, swooping in. “How’s my child?”
Harriet—elated—struggled up in bed and held out her arms. Then, suddenly, it seemed to her that she was dreaming, and that the room was empty. The strangeness so overwhelmed her that she rubbed her eyes and tried to hide her confusion.
But it was Tatty. She kissed Harriet on the cheek. “But she looks well, Edith,” she was crying. “She looks alert.”
“Well, she’s much improved,” said Edie crisply. She set a book on Harriet’s bed table. “Here, I thought you might like this to keep you company.”
Harriet lay back on the pillow and listened to the two of them talking, their familiar voices mingling in a radiant and harmonious nonsense. Then she was somewhere else, in a dark blue gallery with shrouded furniture. Rain fell and fell.
“Tatty?” she said, sitting up in the bright room. It was later in the day. The sunlight on the opposite wall had stretched, and shifted, and slunk down the wall until it spilled in a glazed pool upon the floor.
They were gone. She felt dazed, as if she’d walked from a dark movie matinee out into the startling afternoon. A fat, familiar-looking blue book sat on her bed table: Captain Scott. At the sight of it, her heart lifted; just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, she reached out and put her hand on it, and then—despite her headache and her grogginess—she laboriously sat up in bed and tried to read for a while. But as she read, the silence of the hospital room sank gradually into a glacial and otherworldly stillness, and soon she got the unpleasant sense that the book was speaking to her—Harriet—in a direct and most disturbing way. Every few lines, a phrase would stand out quite sharply and with pointed meaning, as if Captain Scott were addressing her directly, as if he had deliberately encoded a series of personal messages to her in his journals from the Pole. Every few lines, some new significance struck her. She tried to argue herself out of it, but it was no use, and soon she grew so afraid that she was forced to put the book aside.
Dr. Breedlove walked past her open door, and stopped short to see her sitting upright in bed, looking fearful and agitated.
“Why are you awake?” he demanded. He came in and examined the chart, his jowly face expressionless, and clomped off. Within five minutes, a nurse hurried into the room with yet another hypodermic needle.
“Well, go on, roll over,” she said crossly. She seemed angry at Harriet for some reason.
After she left, Harriet kept her face pressed into the pillow. The blankets were soft. Noises stretched out and ran smoothly over her head. Then down she spun quickly, into wide heartsick emptiness, the old weightlessness of first nightmares.
————
“But I didn’t want tea,” said a fretful, familiar voice.
The room was now dark. There were two people in it. A weak light burned in a corona behind their heads. Then, to her dismay, Harriet heard a voice she hadn’t heard in a long time: her father’s.
“Tea’s all they had.” He spoke with an exaggerated politeness that verged on sarcasm. “Except coffee and juice.”
“I told you not to go all the way down to the cafeteria. There’s a Coke machine in the hall.”
“Don’t drink it if you don’t want it.”
Harriet lay very still, with her eyes half-closed. Whenever both of her parents were in the room, the atmosphere grew chilled and uncomfortable, no matter how civil they were to each other. Why are they here? she thought drowsily. I wish it was Tatty and Edie.
Then, with a shock, she realized that she’d heard her father say Danny Ratliff’s name.
“Isn’t that too bad?” he was saying. “They were all talking about it, down in the cafeteria.”
“What?”
“Danny Ratliff. Robin’s little friend, don’t you remember? He used to come up in the yard and play sometimes.”
Friend? thought Harriet.
Fully awake now, her heart pounding so wildly that it was an effort not to tremble, she lay with her eyes closed, and listened. She heard her father take a sip of coffee. Then he continued: “Came by the house. Afterwards. Raggedy little boy, don’t you remember him? Knocked on the door and said he was sorry he wasn’t at the funeral, he didn’t have a ride.”
But that’s not true,
thought Harriet, panicked now. They hated each other. Ida told me so.
“Oh, yes!” Her mother’s voice lively now, with a kind of pain. “Poor little thing. I do remember him. Oh, that’s too bad.”
“It’s strange.” Harriet’s father sighed, heavily. “Seems like yesterday he and Robin were playing around the yard.”
Harriet lay rigid with horror.
“I was so sorry,” said Harriet’s mother, “I was so sorry when I heard he’d started getting into trouble a while ago.”
“It was bound to happen, with a family like that.”
“Well, they’re not all bad. I saw Roy Dial in the hall and he told me that one of the other brothers had dropped in to see about Harriet.”
“Oh, really?” Her father took another long sip of his coffee. “Do you think he knew who she was?”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. That’s probably why he stopped in.”
Their talk turned to other things as Harriet—seized by fear—lay with her face pressed in the pillow, very still. Never had it occurred to her that she might be wrong in her suspicions about Danny Ratliff—simply wrong. What if he hadn’t killed Robin at all?
She had not bargained for the black horror that fell over her at this thought, as if of a trap clicking shut behind her, and immediately she tried to push the thought from her mind. Danny Ratliff was guilty, she knew it, knew it for a fact; it was the only explanation that made any sense. She knew what he’d done, even if nobody else did.
But all the same, doubt had come down on her suddenly and with great force, and with it the fear that she’d stumbled blindly into something terrible. She tried to calm herself down. Danny Ratliff had killed Robin; she knew it was true, it had to be. And yet when she tried to remind herself exactly how she knew it was true, the reasons were no longer so clear in her mind as they had been and now, when she tried to recall them, she couldn’t.
She bit the inside of her cheek. Why had she been so sure it was him? At one time, she was very sure; the idea had felt right, and that was the important thing. But—like the foul taste in her mouth—a queasy fear now lingered close, and would not leave her. Why had she been so sure? Yes, Ida had told her a lot of things—but all of a sudden those accounts (the quarrels, the stolen bicycle) no longer seemed quite so convincing. Didn’t Ida hate Hely, for absolutely no reason? And when Hely came over to play, didn’t Ida often get outraged on Harriet’s behalf without bothering to find out whose fault the quarrel was?
Maybe she was right. Maybe he had done it. But now, how would she ever know for sure? With a sickening feeling, she remembered the hand clawing up from the green water.
Why didn’t I ask? she thought. He was right there. But no, she was too frightened, all she’d wanted was to get away.
“Oh, look!” said Harriet’s mother suddenly, standing up. “She’s awake!”
Harriet froze. She’d been so caught up in her thoughts, she’d forgotten to keep her eyes shut.
“Look who’s here, Harriet!”
Her father rose, advanced to the bed. Even in the shadowy room, Harriet could tell that he had put on a bit of weight since she had last seen him.
“Haven’t seen old Daddy in a while, have you?” he said. When he was in a jocular mood, he liked to refer to himself as “old Daddy.” “How’s my girl?”
Harriet suffered herself to be kissed on the forehead and cuffed on the cheek—briskly, with a cupped hand. This was her father’s customary endearment, but Harriet disliked it intensely, especially from the hand that sometimes slapped her in anger.
“How you doing?” he was saying. He’d been smoking cigars; she could smell it on him. “You’ve fooled these doctors but good, girl!” He said it as if she’d pulled off some great academic or sports triumph.
Harriet’s mother was hovering anxiously. “She may not feel like talking, Dix.”
Her father said, without turning around: “Well, she doesn’t have to talk if she doesn’t feel like it.”
Looking up into her father’s stout red face, his quick, observant eyes, Harriet had an intense urge to ask him about Danny Ratliff. But she was afraid.
“What?” her father said.
“I didn’t say anything.” Harriet’s voice surprised her, it was so scratchy and feeble.
“No, but you were about to.” Her father regarded her cordially. “What is it?”
“Leave her alone, Dix,” said her mother in a low murmur.
Her father turned his head—quickly, without saying a word—in a manner that Harriet knew very well.
“But she’s tired!”
“I know she’s tired. I’m tired,” said Harriet’s father, in the cold and excessively polite voice. “I drove eight hours in the car to get here. Now I’m not supposed to speak to her?”
————
After they finally left—the visiting hours were over at nine—Harriet was much too afraid to go to sleep, and sat up in bed with her eyes on the door for fear that the preacher would come back. An un-announced visit from her father was in itself occasion for anxiety—especially given the new threat of moving up to Nashville—but now he was the least of her worries; who knew what the preacher might do, with Danny Ratliff dead?
Then she thought of the gun cabinet, and her heart sank. Her father didn’t check it every time he came home—usually only in hunting season—but it would be just her luck if he did check it. Maybe throwing the gun in the river had been a mistake. If Hely had hidden it in the yard, she could have put it back where it belonged, but it was too late for that now.
Never had she dreamed he’d be home so soon. Of course, she hadn’t actually shot anyone with the gun—for some reason she kept forgetting that—and if Hely was telling the truth, it was at the bottom of the river now. If her father checked the cabinet, and noticed it was missing, he couldn’t connect it to her, could he?
And then there was Hely. She’d told him almost nothing of the real story—and that was good—but she hoped he wouldn’t think too much about the fingerprints. Would he realize eventually that nothing prevented him from telling on her? By the time he understood that it was her word against his—by then, maybe enough time would have passed.
People didn’t pay attention. They didn’t care; they would forget. Soon whatever trail she had left would be quite cold. That was what had happened with Robin, hadn’t it? The trail had got cold. And the ugly thought dawned on Harriet that Robin’s killer—whoever he was—must have at some point sat thinking some of these very same thoughts.
But I didn’t kill anybody, she told herself, staring at the coverlet. He drowned. I couldn’t help it.
“What, hun?” said the nurse who had come in to check her IV bottle. “Need something?”
Harriet sat very still, with her knuckles in her mouth, staring at the white coverlet until the nurse had departed.
No: she hadn’t killed anybody. But it was her fault he was dead. And maybe he had never hurt Robin at all.
Thoughts like these made Harriet feel sick, and she tried—willfully—to think of something else. She had done what she had to; it was silly to start doubting herself and her methods at this stage. She thought of the pirate Israel Hands, floating in the blood-warm waters off the Hispaniola, and there was something nightmarish and gorgeous in those heroic shallows: horror, false skies, vast delirium. The ship was lost; she had tried to recapture it all on her own. She had almost been a hero. But now, she feared, she wasn’t a hero at all, but something else entirely.
At the end—at the very end, as the winds billowed and beat in the walls of the tent, as a single candle flame guttered in a lost continent—Captain Scott had written with numbed fingers in a small notebook of his failure. Yes, he’d struck out bravely for the impossible, reached the dead untraveled center of the world—but for nothing. All the daydreams had failed him. And she realized how sad he must have been out there on the ice fields, in the Antarctic night, with Evans and Titus Oates lost already, under immense snows, and Bi
rdie and Dr. Wilson still and silent in the sleeping bags, drifting away, dreaming of green fields.
Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.
————
Harriet woke late, after a troubled sleep, to a depressing breakfast tray: fruit gelatin, apple juice, and—mysteriously—a small dish of boiled white rice. All night long, she’d had bad dreams about her father standing oppressively around her bed, walking back and forth and scolding her about something she’d broken, something that belonged to him.
Then she realized where she was, and her stomach contracted with fear. Rubbing her eyes in confusion she sat up to take the tray—and saw Edie in the armchair by her bed. She was drinking coffee—not coffee from the hospital cafeteria, but coffee she’d brought from home, in the plaid thermos—and reading the morning newspaper.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” she said. “Your mother is coming out soon.”
Her manner was crisp and perfectly normal. Harriet tried to force her uneasiness out of her mind. Nothing had changed overnight, had it?
“You need to eat your breakfast,” said Edie. “Today is a big day for you, Harriet. After the neurologist checks you out, they may even discharge you this afternoon.”
Harriet made an effort to compose herself. She must try to pretend that everything was all right; she must try to convince the neurologist—even if it meant lying to him—that she was perfectly well. It was vital that she be allowed to go home; she must concentrate all her energies on escaping the hospital before the preacher came back to her room or somebody figured out what was going on. Dr. Breedlove had said something about unwashed lettuce. She must hold on to that, fix it in her mind, bring it up if she was questioned; she must keep them at all costs from making the connection between her illness and the water tower.
