Page 556 - A Little Life: A Novel

eventually one of the people who lived in the apartment might have a very
limited range of motion.
“Oh,” he’d said, and had blinked his eyes, rapidly. “Right. Thanks.

Thanks.”
“Of course,” Vikram had said. “I promise you, Willem, it’s going to feel
like home for both of you.” He had a soft, gentle voice, and Willem had
been unsure whether the sorrow he had felt in that moment was from the
kindness of what Vikram said, or the kindness with which he said it.
He remembers this now, back in New York. It is the end of July; he has
convinced Jude to take a day off, and they have driven to their house

upstate. For weeks, Jude had been tired and unusually weak, but then,
suddenly, he hadn’t been, and it was on days like this—the sky above them
vivid with blue, the air hot and dry, the fields around their house buttery
with clumps of yarrow and cowslip, the stones around the pool cool beneath
his feet, Jude singing to himself in the kitchen as he made lemonade for
Julia and Harold, who had come to stay with them—that Willem found

himself slipping back into his old habit of pretending. On these days, he
succumbed to a sort of enchantment, a state in which his life seemed both
unimprovable and, paradoxically, perfectly fixable: Of course Jude
wouldn’t get worse. Of course he could be repaired. Of course Willem
would be the person to repair him. Of course this was possible; of course
this was probable. Days like this seemed to have no nights, and if there
were no nights, there was no cutting, there was no sadness, there was

nothing to dismay.
“You’re dreaming of miracles, Willem,” Idriss would say if he knew
what he was thinking, and he knew he was. But then again, he would think,
what about his life—and about Jude’s life, too—wasn’t it a miracle? He
should have stayed in Wyoming, he should have been a ranch hand himself.
Jude should have wound up—where? In prison, or in a hospital, or dead, or

worse. But they hadn’t. Wasn’t it a miracle that someone who was basically
unexceptional could live a life in which he made millions pretending to be
other people, that in that life that person would fly from city to city, would
spend his days having his every need fulfilled, working in artificial contexts
in which he was treated like the potentate of a small, corrupt country?
Wasn’t it a miracle to be adopted at thirty, to find people who loved you so
much that they wanted to call you their own? Wasn’t it a miracle to have

survived the unsurvivable? Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of