Page 695 - A Little Life: A Novel

answers only torment. That he died so alone is more than I can think of; that
he died thinking that he owed us an apology is worse; that he died still
stubbornly believing everything he was taught about himself—after you,

after me, after all of us who loved him—makes me think that my life has
been a failure after all, that I have failed at the one thing that counted. It is
then that I talk to you the most, that I go downstairs late at night and stand
before Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, which now hangs above our
dining-room table: “Willem,” I ask you, “do you feel like I do? Do you
think he was happy with me?” Because he deserved happiness. We aren’t
guaranteed it, none of us are, but he deserved it. But you only smile, not at

me but just past me, and you never have an answer. It is also then that I
wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe,
maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we
paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance,
composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to
do is open one’s mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy,

maybe you two are there together, floating through the climate. Or maybe
he is closer still: maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our
neighbor’s house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; maybe he is that
new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor’s leash; maybe he
is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking
with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that
suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago;

maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn’t only that he
died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to
everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.
But back then, back on Lispenard Street, I didn’t know so much of this.
Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and
I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me

pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways
he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the
time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not.
“You jumped off the roof?” I repeated. “Why on earth would you have
done such a thing?”
“It’s a good story,” he said. He even grinned at me. “I’ll tell you.”
“Please,” I said.

And then he did.