Page 190 - A Little Life: A Novel

A few minutes later, his nurse Callie came in. “Hi, Jude,” she said.
“Doctor wants me to get your weight; do you mind stepping on the scale?”
He didn’t want to, but he knew it wasn’t Callie’s fault or decision, and so

he dragged himself off the table, and onto the scale, and didn’t look at the
number as Callie wrote it down in his chart, and thanked him, and left the
room.
“So,” Andy said after he’d come in, studying his chart. “What should we
talk about first, your extreme weight loss or your excessive cutting?”
He didn’t know what to say to that. “Why do you think I’ve been cutting
myself excessively?”

“I can always tell,” Andy said. “You get sort of—sort of bluish under the
eyes. You’re probably not even conscious of it. And you’re wearing your
sweater over the gown. Whenever it’s bad, you do that.”
“Oh,” he said. He hadn’t been aware.
They were quiet, and Andy pulled his stool close to the table and asked,
“When’s the date?”

“February fifteenth.”
“Ah,” said Andy. “Soon.”
“Yes.”
“What’re you worried about?”
“I’m worried—” he began, and then stopped, and tried again. “I’m
worried that if Harold finds out what I really am, he won’t want to—” He
stopped. “And I don’t know which is worse: him finding out before, which

means this definitely won’t happen, or him finding out after, and realizing
I’ve deceived him.” He sighed; he hadn’t been able to articulate this until
now, but having done so, he knew that this was his fear.
“Jude,” Andy said, carefully, “what do you think is so bad about yourself
that he wouldn’t want to adopt you?”
“Andy,” he pled, “don’t make me say it.”

“But I honestly don’t know!”
“The things I’ve done,” he said, “the diseases I have from them.” He
stumbled on, hating himself. “It’s disgusting; I’m disgusting.”
“Jude,” Andy began, and as he spoke, he paused between every few
words, and he could feel Andy picking his way across a mine-pocked lawn,
so deliberately and slowly was he going. “You were a kid, a baby. Those
things were done to you. You have nothing, nothing to blame yourself for,

not ever, not in any universe.”