Page 53 - A Little Life: A Novel
P. 53

And then, one morning a week later, his mother called: Hemming had
                died. There was nothing he could say. He couldn’t ask why she hadn’t told
                him  how  serious  the  situation  had  been,  because  some  part  of  him  had

                known she wouldn’t. He couldn’t say he wished he had been there, because
                she would have nothing to say in response. He couldn’t ask her how she
                felt, because nothing she said would be enough. He wanted to scream at his
                parents,  to  hit  them,  to  elicit  from  them  something—some  melting  into
                grief, some loss of composure, some recognition that something large had
                happened,  that  in  Hemming’s  death  they  had  lost  something  vital  and
                necessary to their lives. He didn’t care if they really felt that way or not: he

                just  needed  them  to  say  it,  he  needed  to  feel  that  something  lay  beneath
                their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of
                quick,  cool  water,  teeming  with  delicate  lives,  minnows  and  grasses  and
                tiny  white  flowers,  all  tender  and  easily  wounded  and  so  vulnerable  you
                couldn’t see them without aching for them.
                   He didn’t tell his friends, then, about Hemming. They went to Malcolm’s

                house—a beautiful place, the most beautiful place Willem had ever seen,
                much less stayed in—and late at night, when the others were asleep, each in
                his own bed, in his own room with his own bathroom (the house was that
                big), he crept outside and walked the web of roads surrounding the house
                for hours, the moon so large and bright it seemed made of something liquid
                and frozen. On those walks, he tried very hard not to think of anything in
                particular. He concentrated instead on what he saw before him, noticing at

                night what had eluded him by day: how the dirt was so fine it was almost
                sand,  and  puffed  up  into  little  plumes  as  he  stepped  in  it,  how  skinny
                threads of bark-brown snakes whipsawed silently beneath the brush as he
                passed.  He  walked  to  the  ocean  and  above  him  the  moon  disappeared,
                concealed by tattered rags of clouds, and for a few moments he could only
                hear the water, not see it, and the sky was thick and warm with moisture, as

                if the very air here were denser, more significant.
                   Maybe this is what it is to be dead, he thought, and realized it wasn’t so
                bad after all, and felt better.
                   He expected it would be awful to spend his summer around people who
                might remind him of Hemming, but it was actually pleasant, helpful even.
                His  class  had  seven  students,  all  around  eight  years  old,  all  severely
                impaired, none very mobile, and although part of the day was ostensibly

                devoted to trying to teach them colors and shapes, most of the time was
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