Page 106 - A Little Life: A Novel

shirts, pants, a gray blanket that resembled the clotty stuffing that vomited
forth from the sofa in the shelter’s lobby—if he was getting the correct
things, the things that might have been on Ana’s list. He couldn’t stop

himself from thinking that there was something else on that list, something
essential that Ana thought he needed that he would now never know. At
nights, he craved that list, sometimes more than he craved her; he could
picture it in his mind, the funny up-and-down capitalizations she inserted
into a single word, the mechanical pencil she always used, the yellow legal
pads, left over from her years as a lawyer, on which she made her notes.
Sometimes the letters solidified into words, and in the dream life he’d feel

triumphant; ah, he’d think, of course! Of course that’s what I need! Of
course Ana would know! But in the mornings, he could never remember
what those things were. In those moments he wished, perversely, that he
had never met her, that it was surely worse to have had her for so brief a
period than to never have had her at all.
They gave him a bus ticket north; Leslie came to the station to see him

off. He had packed his things in a double-layered black garbage bag, and
then inside the backpack he’d bought at the Army Navy Store: everything
he owned in one neat package. On the bus he stared out the window and
thought of nothing. He hoped his back wouldn’t betray him on the ride, and
it didn’t.
He had been the first to arrive in their room, and when the second boy
came in—it had been Malcolm—with his parents and suitcases and books

and speakers and television and phones and computers and refrigerator and
flotillas of digital gadgetry, he had felt the first sensations of sickening fear,
and then anger, directed irrationally at Ana: How could she let him believe
he might be equipped to do this? Who could he say he was? Why had she
never told him exactly how poor, how ugly, what a scrap of bloodied,
muddied cloth, his life really was? Why had she let him believe he might

belong here?
As the months passed, this feeling dampened, but it never disappeared; it
lived on him like a thin scum of mold. But as that knowledge became more
acceptable, another piece became less so: he began to realize that she was
the first and last person to whom he would never have to explain anything.
She knew that he wore his life on his skin, that his biography was written in
his flesh and on his bones. She would never ask him why he wouldn’t wear

short sleeves, even in the steamiest of weather, or why he didn’t like to be