Page 557 - A Little Life: A Novel

another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less
lonely? Wasn’t this house, this beauty, this comfort, this life a miracle? And
so who could blame him for hoping for one more, for hoping that despite

knowing better, that despite biology, and time, and history, that they would
be the exception, that what happened to other people with Jude’s sort of
injury wouldn’t happen to him, that even with all that Jude had overcome,
he might overcome just one more thing?
He is sitting by the pool and talking to Harold and Julia when abruptly,
he feels that strange hollowing in his stomach that he occasionally
experiences even when he and Jude are in the same house: the sensation of

missing him, an odd sharp desire to see him. And although he would never
say it to him, this is the way in which Jude reminds him of Hemming—that
awareness that sometimes touches him, as lightly as wings, that the people
he loves are more temporal, somehow, than others, that he has borrowed
them, and that someday they will be reclaimed from him. “Don’t go,” he
had told Hemming in their phone calls, back when Hemming was dying.

“Don’t leave me, Hemming,” even though the nurses who were holding the
receiver to Hemming’s ear hundreds of miles away had instructed him to
tell Hemming exactly the opposite: that it was all right for him to leave; that
Willem was releasing him. But he couldn’t.
And he hadn’t been able to either when Jude was in the hospital, so
delirious from the drugs that his eyes had skittered back and forth with a
rapidity that had frightened him almost more than anything else. “Let me

go, Willem,” Jude had begged him then, “let me go.”
“I can’t, Jude,” he had cried. “I can’t do that.”
Now he shakes his head to clear the memory. “I’m going to go check on
him,” he tells Harold and Julia, but then he hears the glass door slide open,
and all three of them turn and look up the sloping hill to see Jude holding a
tray of drinks, and all three of them stand to go help him. But there is a

moment before they begin heading uphill and Jude begins walking toward
them in which they all hold their positions, and it reminds him of a set, in
which every scene can be redone, every mistake can be corrected, every
sorrow reshot. And in that moment, they are on one edge of the frame, and
Jude is on the other, but they are all smiling at one another, and the world
seems to hold nothing but sweetness.