Page 184 - A Little Life: A Novel

fears. They had a court date for February fifteenth, Harold told him, and
with a little rescheduling, Laurence would be presiding. Now that the date
was so close, he was sharply, inescapably aware that he might ruin it for

himself, and he began, at first unconsciously and then assiduously, avoiding
Harold and Julia, convinced that if they were reminded too much, too
actively of what they were in fact getting that they would change their
minds. And so when they came into town for a play the second week in
January, he pretended he was in Washington on business, and on their
weekly phone calls, he tried to say very little, and to keep the conversations
brief. Every day the improbability of the situation seemed to grow larger

and more vivid in his mind; every time he glimpsed the reflection of his
ugly zombie’s hobble in the side of a building, he would feel sickened:
Who, really, would ever want this? The idea that he could become someone
else’s seemed increasingly ludicrous, and if Harold saw him just once more,
how could he too not come to the same conclusion? He knew it shouldn’t
matter so much to him—he was, after all, an adult; he knew the adoption

was more ceremonial than truly sociologically significant—but he wanted it
with a steady fervor that defied logic, and he couldn’t bear it being taken
away from him now, not when everyone he cared about was so happy for
him, not when he was so close.
He had been close before. The year after he arrived in Montana, when he
was thirteen, the home had participated in a tristate adoption fair. November
was National Adoption Month, and one cold morning, they had been told to

dress neatly and had been hurried onto two school buses and driven two
hours to Missoula, where they were herded off the buses and into the
conference room of a hotel. Theirs had been the last buses to arrive, and the
room was already filled with children, boys on one side, girls on the other.
In the center of the room was a long stripe of tables, and as he walked over
to his side, he saw that they were stacked with labeled binders: Boys,

Babies; Boys, Toddlers; Boys, 4–6; Boys, 7–9; Boys, 10–12; Boys, 13–15;
Boys, 15+. Inside, they had been told, were pieces of paper with their
pictures, and names, and information about themselves: where they were
from, what ethnicity they were, information about how they did in school
and what sports they liked to play and what talents and interests they had.
What, he wondered, did his sheet of paper say about him? What talents
might have been invented for him, what race, what origins?