Page 618 - A Little Life: A Novel

called him? Had he heard from them? But JB hadn’t. “Don’t worry, Judy,”
he said. “I’m sure they just went for ice cream or something. Or maybe they
all ran off together.”

“Ha,” he said, but he knew something was wrong. “Okay. I’ll call you
later, JB.”
And just as he had hung up with JB, the doorbell chimed, and he stopped,
terrified, because no one ever rang their doorbell. The house was difficult to
find; you had to really look for it, and then you had to walk up from the
main road—a long, long walk—if no one buzzed you in, and he hadn’t
heard the front gate buzzer sound. Oh god, he thought. Oh, no. No. But then

it rang again, and he found himself moving toward the door, and as he
opened it, he registered not so much the policemen’s expressions but that
they were removing their caps, and then he knew.
He lost himself after that. He was conscious only in flashes, and the
people’s faces he saw—Harold’s, JB’s, Richard’s, Andy’s, Julia’s—were the
same faces he remembered from when he had tried to kill himself: the same

people, the same tears. They had cried then, and they cried now, and at
moments he was bewildered; he thought that the past decade—his years
with Willem, the loss of his legs—might have been a dream after all, that he
might still be in the psychiatric ward. He remembers learning things during
those days, but he doesn’t remember how he learned them, because he
doesn’t remember having any conversations. But he must have. He learned
that he had identified Willem’s body, but that they hadn’t let him see

Willem’s face—he had been tossed from the car and had landed, headfirst,
against an elm thirty feet across the road and his face had been destroyed,
its every bone broken. So he had identified him from a birthmark on his left
calf, from a mole on his right shoulder. He learned that Sophie’s body had
been crushed—“obliterated” was the word he remembered someone saying
—and that Malcolm had been declared brain dead and had lived on a

ventilator for four days until his parents had had his organs donated. He
learned that they had all been wearing their seat belts; that the rental car—
that stupid, fucking rental car—had had defective air bags; that the driver of
the truck, a beer company truck, had been wildly drunk and had run through
a red light.
Most of the time, he was drugged. He was drugged when he went to
Sophie’s service, which he couldn’t remember at all, not one detail; he was

drugged when he went to Malcolm’s. From Malcolm’s, he remembers Mr.