Page 187 - A Little Life: A Novel

That night, alone, he said the name aloud to himself: Cody Leary. Cody
Leary. Could it be possible that he was entering this house as one person
and then, as if the place were enchanted, transformed into another? Was it

that simple, that fast? Gone would be Jude St. Francis, and with him,
Brother Luke, and Brother Peter, and Father Gabriel, and the monastery and
the counselors at the home and his shame and fears and filth, and in his
place would be Cody Leary, who would have parents, and a room of his
own, and would be able to make himself into whomever he chose.
The rest of the weekend passed uneventfully, so uneventfully that with
each day, with each hour, he could feel pieces of himself awaken, could feel

the clouds that he gathered around himself separate and vanish, could feel
himself seeing into the future, and imagining the place in it he might have.
He tried his hardest to be polite, and hardworking, and it wasn’t difficult: he
got up early in the morning and made breakfast for the Learys (Mrs. Leary
praising him so loudly and extravagantly that he had smiled, embarrassed,
at the floor), and cleaned dishes, and helped Mr. Leary degrease his tools

and rewire a lamp, and although there were events he didn’t care for—the
boring church service they attended on Sunday; the prayers they supervised
before he was allowed to go to bed—they were hardly worse than the things
he didn’t like about the home, they were things he knew he could do
without appearing resentful or ungrateful. The Learys, he could sense,
would not be the sort of people who would behave the way that parents in
books would, the way the parents he yearned for might, but he knew how to

be industrious, he knew how to keep them satisfied. He was still frightened
of Mr. Leary’s large red hands, and when he was left alone with him in the
barn, he was shivery and watchful, but at least there was only Mr. Leary to
fear, not a whole group of Mr. Learys, as there had been before, or there
were at the home.
When Boyd picked him up Sunday evening, he was pleased with how

he’d done, confident, even. “How’d it go?” Boyd asked him, and he was
able to answer, honestly, “Good.”
He was certain, from Mrs. Leary’s last words to him—“I have a feeling
we’ll be seeing much more of you very soon, Cody”—that they would call
on Monday, and that soon, maybe even by Friday, he would be Cody Leary,
and the home would be one more place he’d put behind him. But then
Monday passed, and then Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then it was the

following week, and he wasn’t called to the headmaster’s office, and his