Page 625 - A Little Life: A Novel

them. Sometimes there are call sheets from days when an actor he knew
Willem particularly admired was going to be filming with him: he
remembers how excited Willem had been on The Sycamore Court, how he

had sent him a photo of that day’s call sheet with his name typed directly
beneath Clark Butterfield’s. “Can you believe it?!” his message had read.
I can totally believe it, he’d written back.
He flips through these files, lifting them out at random and carefully
sorting through their contents. The next three drawers are all the same
things: films, plays, other projects.
In the fifth drawer is a file marked “Wyoming,” and in this are mostly

photos, most of which he has seen before: pictures of Hemming; pictures of
Willem with Hemming; pictures of their parents; pictures of the siblings
Willem never knew: Britte and Aksel. There is a separate envelope with a
dozen pictures of just Willem, only Willem: school photos, and Willem in a
Boy Scout uniform, and Willem in a football uniform. He stares at these
pictures, his hands in fists, before placing them back in their envelope.

There are a few other things in the Wyoming file as well: a third-grade
book report, written in Willem’s careful cursive, on The Wizard of Oz that
makes him smile; a hand-drawn birthday card to Hemming that makes him
want to cry. His mother’s death announcement; his father’s. A copy of their
will. A few letters, from him to his parents, from his parents to him, all in
Swedish—these he sets aside to have translated.
He knows Willem had never kept a journal, and yet when he looks

through the “Boston” file, he thinks for some reason he might find
something. But there is nothing. Instead there are more pictures, all of
which he has seen before: of Willem, so shiningly handsome; of Malcolm,
looking suspicious and slightly feral, with the stringy, unsuccessful Afro he
had tried to cultivate throughout college; of JB, looking essentially the same
as he does now, merry and fat-cheeked; of him, looking scared and drowned

and very skinny, in his awful too-big clothes and with his awful too-long
hair, in his braces that imprisoned his legs in their black, foamy embrace.
He stops at a picture of the two of them sitting on the sofa in their suite in
Hood, Willem leaning into him and looking at him, smiling, clearly saying
something, and him, laughing with his hand over his mouth, which he had
learned to do after the counselors at the home told him he had an ugly
smile. They look like two different creatures, not just two different people,

and he has to quickly refile the picture before he tears it in half.