Page 610 - A Little Life: A Novel

“Thanks,” he says. “It’s called ‘harlot red.’ ”
“Really?”
Malcolm’s persistent credulity makes him grin. “Yes,” he says. “Ready,

guys?”
As he drives, they talk about how long it’s been since they’ve seen one
another, about how glad Sophie and Malcolm are to be home, about
Malcolm’s disastrous driving lessons, about how perfect the weather is,
how sweet and haylike the air smells. The best summer, he thinks again.
It is a thirty-minute drive back to the house from the station, a little faster
if he hurries, but he doesn’t hurry, because the drive itself is pretty. And

when he crosses the final large intersection, he doesn’t even see the truck
coming toward him, barreling into traffic against the light, and by the time
he feels it, a tremendous crush crumpling the passenger-seat side of the car,
where Sophie is sitting next to him, he is already aloft, being ejected into
the air. “No!” he shouts, or thinks he does, and then, in an instant, he sees a
flash of Jude’s face: just his face, his expression still unresolved, torn from

his body and suspended against a black sky. His ears, his head, fill with the
roar of pleating metal, of exploding glass, of his own useless howls.
But his final thoughts are not of Jude, but of Hemming. He sees the
house he lived in as a child and, sitting in his wheelchair in the center of the
lawn, just before it slopes down toward the stables, Hemming, staring at
him with a steady, constant gaze, the kind he was never able to give him in
life.

He is at the end of their driveway, where the dirt road meets the asphalt,
and seeing Hemming, he is overcome with longing. “Hemming!” he shouts,
and then, nonsensically, “Wait for me!” And he begins to run toward his
brother, so fast that after a while, he can’t even feel his feet strike the
ground beneath him.