Page 563 - A Little Life: A Novel

announced themselves. The first arrived shortly after he’d started at Rosen
Pritchard: just a postcard, from someone who claimed he had known him
from the home—someone with the unhelpfully indistinct name of Rob

Wilson, someone he didn’t remember—and for a week, he had panicked,
barely able to sleep, his mind scrolling through scenarios that seemed as
terrifying as they were inevitable. What if this Rob Wilson contacted
Harold, contacted his colleagues at the firm, and told them who he was, told
them about the things he had done? But he made himself not react, not do
what he wanted to do—write a near-hysterical cease-and-desist letter that
would prove nothing but his own existence, and the existence of his past—

and he never heard from Rob Wilson again.
But after a few pictures of him with Willem had appeared in the press, he
received two more letters and an e-mail, all sent to his work. One of the
letters and the e-mail were again from men who claimed they had been at
the home with him, but once again, he hadn’t recognized their names, and
he never responded, and they never contacted him again. But the second

letter had contained a copy of a photograph, black-and-white, of an
undressed boy on a bed, and of such low quality that he couldn’t tell if it
was him or not. And with this letter, he had done what he had been told to
do all those years ago, when he was a child in a hospital bed in
Philadelphia, should any of the clients figure out who he was and try to
establish communication with him: he had put the letter in an envelope and
had sent it to the FBI. They always knew where he was, that office, and

every four or five years an agent would appear at his workplace to show
him pictures, to ask him if he remembered one man or another, men who
were decades later still being uncovered as Dr. Traylor’s, Brother Luke’s,
friends and fellow criminals. He rarely had advance warning before these
visits, and over the years he had learned what he needed to do in the days
afterward in order to neutralize them, how he needed to surround himself

with people, with events, with noise and clamor, with evidence of the life he
now inhabited.
In this period, the one in which he had received and disposed of the letter,
he had felt vividly ashamed and intensely alone—this had been before he
had told Willem about his childhood, and he had never given Andy enough
context so that he would appreciate the terror that he was experiencing—
and after, he had finally made himself hire an investigative agency (though

not the one that Rosen Pritchard used) to uncover everything they could