The Little Friend Read Online Free PDF

shadows on the bedroom ceiling and casting her mind back as far as she was able, but searching was useless, there was nothing to find. The sweet dailiness of her early life was always there—front porch, fish pond, kitty-cat, flower-beds, seamless, incandescent, immutable—but if she cast her mind back far enough she invariably reached a strange point where the yard wasempty, the house echoing and abandoned, signs of a recent departure evident (clothes hanging on the line, the dishes from lunch not yet cleared away) but her whole family gone, vanished, she didn’t know where, and Robin’s orange cat—still a kitten then, not yet the languid, heavy-jowled tomcat he would become—gone strange, empty-eyed, wild, skittering across the lawn to dart up a tree, as frightened of her as of a stranger. She wasn’t quite herself in these memories, not when they went this far back. Though she recognized very well the physical setting in which they took place—George Street, number 363, the house she’d lived in all her life—she, Allison, was not recognizable, not even to herself: she was not a toddler nor yet a baby but only a gaze, a pair of eyes that lingered in familiar surroundings and reflected upon them without personality, or body, or age, or past, as if she was remembering things that had happened before she was born.
    Allison thought about none of this consciously except in the most vague and half-formed way. When she was small, it did not occur to her to wonder what these disembodied impressions meant and it occurred to her still less now that she was older. She scarcely thought about the past at all, and in this she differed significantly from her family, who thought of little else.
    No one in her family understood this. They could not have understood even had she tried to tell them. For minds like theirs, besieged constantly by recollection, for whom present and future existed solely as schemes of recurrence, such a view of the world was beyond imagining. Memory—fragile, hazy-bright, miraculous—was to them the spark of life itself, and nearly every sentence of theirs began with some appeal to it: “You remember that green-sprigged batiste, don’t you?” her mother and her aunts would insist. “That pink floribunda? Those lemon teacakes? Remember that beautiful cold Easter, when Harriet was just a little thing, when you hunted eggs in the snow and built a big snow Easter rabbit in Adelaide’s front yard?”
    “Yes, yes,” Allison would lie. “I remember.” In a way, she did. She’d heard the stories so often that she knew them by heart, could repeat them if she wanted, sometimes even dashin a detail or two neglected in the retelling: how (for instance) she and Harriet had used pink blossoms fallen from the frostbitten crabapples for the snow bunny’s nose and ears. The stories were familiar much as stories from her mother’s girlhood were familiar, or stories from books. But none of them seemed connected with her in any fundamental way.
    The truth was—and this was something she had never admitted to anyone—there were an awful lot of things Allison did not remember. She had no clear memories of being in kindergarten, or the first grade, or of anything at all that she could definitely place as happening before she was eight. This was a matter of great shame, and something she tried (successfully for the most part) to conceal. Her baby sister Harriet claimed to recall things that happened before she was a year old.
    Though she’d been less than six months old when Robin died, Harriet said she could remember him; and Allison and the rest of the Cleves believed that this was probably the truth. Every now and then Harriet came out with some obscure but shockingly accurate bit of information—details of weather or dress, menus from birthday parties attended before she was two—that made everyone’s jaw drop.
    But Allison could not remember Robin at all. This was inexcusable. She had been nearly five