Page 53 - A Little Life: A Novel

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