Page 594 - A Little Life: A Novel

Rhodes, or Elijah, or India, or Sophie, or Lucien, or whoever was sitting
with Jude for the hour or so that he was distractedly wandering the streets
or working out downstairs or, a few times, trying to lie still through a

massage or sit through lunch with Roman or Miguel), he would tell himself,
This is it. He’s dying. He’s dead, and he would wait a second, another
second, before answering the phone and hearing that the call was only a
status report: That Jude had eaten a meal. That he hadn’t. That he was
sleeping. That he seemed nauseated. Finally he had to tell them: Don’t call
me unless it’s serious. I don’t care if you have questions and calling’s faster;
you have to text me. If you call me, I’ll think the worst. For the first time in

his life, he understood, viscerally, what it meant when people said their
hearts were in their throats, although it wasn’t just his heart he could feel
but all his organs thrusting upward, trying to exit him through his mouth,
his innards scrambled with anxiety.
People always spoke of healing as if it were predictable and progressive,
a decisive diagonal line pointing from the lower left-hand corner of a graph

to the upper right. But Hemming’s healing—which hadn’t ended with his
healing at all—hadn’t been like that, and Jude’s hadn’t either: theirs were a
mountain range of peaks and trenches, and in the middle of October, after
Jude had gone back to work (still scarily thin, still scarily weak), there had
been a night when he had woken with a fever so high that he had started
seizing, and Willem had been certain that this was the moment, that this was
the end. He had realized then that despite his fear, he had never really

prepared himself, that he had never really thought of what it would mean,
and although he wasn’t a bargainer by nature, he bargained now, with
someone or something he didn’t even know he believed in. He promised
more patience, more gratitude, less swearing, less vanity, less sex, less
indulgence, less complaining, less self-absorption, less selfishness, less
fearfulness. When Jude had lived, Willem’s relief had been so total, so

punishing, that he had collapsed, and Andy had prescribed him an
antianxiety pill and sent him up to Garrison for the weekend with JB for
company, leaving Jude in his and Richard’s care. He had always thought
that unlike Jude, he had known how to accept help when it was offered, but
he had forgotten this skill at the most crucial time, and he was glad and
grateful that his friends had made the effort to remind him.
By Thanksgiving, things had become—if not good, then they had at least

stopped being bad, which they accepted as the same thing. But it was only