Page 282 - A Little Life: A Novel

He’d be silent. “It’s going to be okay, JB,” he’d say, but he couldn’t make
the words—I forgive you—leave his mouth. At night, alone, he would say
them again and again: I forgive you, I forgive you. It would be so simple,

he’d admonish himself. It would make JB feel better. Say it, he’d command
himself as JB looked at him, the whites of his eyes smeary and yellowed.
Say it. But he couldn’t. He knew he was making JB feel worse; he knew it
and was still unable to say it. The words were stones, held just under his
tongue. He couldn’t release them, he just couldn’t.
Later, when JB called him nightly from rehab, strident and pedantic, he’d
sat silently through his monologues on what a better person he’d become,

and how he had realized he had no one to depend on but himself, and how
he, Jude, needed to realize that there was more in life than just work, and to
live every day in the moment and learn to love himself. He listened and
breathed and said nothing. And then JB had come home and had had to
readjust, and none of them heard very much from him at all for a few
months. He had lost the lease on his apartment, and had moved back in with

his mother while he reestablished his life.
But then one day he had called. It had been early February, almost seven
months exactly after they had taken him to the hospital, and JB wanted to
see him and talk. He suggested JB meet him at a café called Clementine that
was near Willem’s building, and as he inched his way past the tightly
spaced tables to a seat against the back wall, he realized why he had chosen
this place: because it was too small, and too cramped, for JB to do his

impression of him, and recognizing that, he felt foolish and cowardly.
He hadn’t seen JB in a long time, and JB leaned over the table and
hugged him, lightly, carefully, before sitting down.
“You look great,” he said.
“Thanks,” said JB. “So do you.”
For twenty minutes or so, they discussed JB’s life: he had joined Crystal

Meth Anonymous. He was going to live with his mother for another few
months or so, and then decide what to do next. He was working again, on
the same series he’d been working on before he went away.
“That’s great, JB,” he’d said. “I’m proud of you.”
And then there was a silence, and they both stared at other people. A few
tables away from him was a girl wearing a long gold necklace she kept
winding and unwinding around her fingers. He watched her talk to her