Page 156 - A Little Life: A Novel

during particularly raucous debates, he would sit back in his seat, as if
physically leaning out of the ring, and observe all of you, how easily you
challenged me without fear of provoking me, how thoughtlessly you

reached across the table to serve yourselves more potatoes, more zucchini,
more steak, how you asked for what you wanted and received it.
The thing I remember most vividly from that weekend is a small thing.
We were walking, you and he and Julia and I, down that little path lined
with birches that led to the lookout. (Back then it was a narrow throughway,
do you remember that? It was only later that it became dense with trees.) I
was with him, and you and Julia were behind us. You were talking about,

oh, I don’t know—insects? Wildflowers? You two always found something
to discuss, you both loved being outdoors, both loved animals: I loved this
about both of you, even though I couldn’t understand it. And then you
touched his shoulder and moved in front of him and knelt and retied one of
his shoelaces that had come undone, and then fell back in step with Julia. It
was so fluid, a little gesture: a step forward, a fold onto bended knee, a

retreat back toward her side. It was nothing to you, you didn’t even think
about it; you never even paused in your conversation. You were always
watching him (but you all were), you took care of him in a dozen small
ways, I saw all of this over those few days—but I doubt you would
remember this particular incident.
But while you were doing it, he looked at me, and the look on his face—I
still cannot describe it, other than in that moment, I felt something crumble

inside me, like a tower of damp sand built too high: for him, and for you,
and for me as well. And in his face, I knew my own would be echoed. The
impossibility of finding someone to do such a thing for another person, so
unthinkingly, so gracefully! When I looked at him, I understood, for the
first time since Jacob died, what people meant when they said someone was
heartbreaking, that something could break your heart. I had always thought

it mawkish, but in that moment I realized that it might have been mawkish,
but it was also true.
And that, I suppose, was when I knew.

I had never thought I would become a parent, and not because I’d had
bad parents myself. Actually, I had wonderful parents: my mother died
when I was very young, of breast cancer, and for the next five years it was